[JE] [FAIRY] Bakanishi and the Beast 2/2
Title: Bakanishi and the Beast 2/2
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame
Rating: R, to be safe
Genre: Twisted fairy tale
Word count: 13,000
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit.
Explanation: Following my take on Sleeping Beauty, I said I felt like giving another fairy tale the Akame twist. keight_michelle suggested Beauty and the Beast, and this is the result. Once again, Jin gets to be 'Beauty'. ^_^ Please note that while there is consensual m/m activity taking place in this fic, it occurs when Kame is human. Also, I'm going to ask you to pretend for the duration of the fic that Kame is a natural redhead, as he'd look a bit mismatched otherwise.
Part 2
Everything hurt. His back, his stomach, his head...even his legs hurt. They were being crushed, flattened against the carpet by a Druidic werewolf.
No, that wasn't right. The unusually hirsute man in the hooded robe wasn't a werewolf. It was Kame, and he was crying.
At any rate, that's what Jin thought he was doing. It was hard to make out the sniffles and hushed, sobbing apologies through the thick layer of hair, not to mention the pounding headache Jin had acquired thanks to his run-in with Kame's bedroom furniture.
"Kame," he gasped, causing the once-again hooded figure sprawled across his lower body to jump, "I appreciate that you're sorry but I'd feel a whole lot better about it if you'd just get off me. You're heavier than you used to be."
That earned him a gentle slap on the thigh from the heel of Kame's hand, claws well away from his skin. "You're just a wimp, Akanishi."
His voice didn't sound nearly so strained, Jin noted with pleasure, and the bleak, desperate self-loathing had vanished too. Worry remained. He'd have been happier about it, but as Kame groaned and shifted to lie next to him, he realised why his stomach hurt so much.
The claw that caught his belt had torn through the skin as easily as cloth, leaving a thick line of blood across his belly. Kame had been pressing down on it with his arm, and the sleeve of his robe looked conspicuously wet. Jin couldn't tell how bad the injury was, but it hurt like hell. No intestines were hanging out, though, so he figured it couldn't be that serious.
Kame was still sniffling, wiping his other sleeve across his eyes at intervals, and more to the point, he was still lying on the floor. Jin wondered if Kame had thought he was dead.
"I'm all right," he said softly, because that was as much volume as he could manage. "I'm all right, Kame."
"I know." Kame's voice was muffled by his sleeve. "You're not dead."
Jin had been hoping for something a little less obvious than that. "And neither are you."
"But you should be!" With a groan of effort, Kame raised his head to lock gazes with a baffled Jin, pushing the hood back over his shoulders. "I should've killed you! Do you know how many doctors it used to take to subdue me before we decided to use restraints when the symptoms got worse? And even then, they left covered in cuts and bites."
Bites? "Uh...you're not contagious, are you?" Jin asked. "I mean, I don't think you bit me, but..."
"I didn't. I didn't touch you at all." Kame was still crying, but as far as Jin could tell, the twisted, pained expression on his face was a smile, and an overjoyed one at that. "When you were unconscious, I didn't hurt you. I...protected you. I haven't protected anyone in a long time."
Jin smiled back. He shared Kame's sense of relief. "I knew I was right to come here. But...um...I'm still..." He looked at the line of blood across his stomach, and Kame followed his eyes.
"Sorry. Let's see if I can get up now." He pushed himself up, using the bed for support, and got unsteadily to his feet. "I'm always so exhausted, immediately afterwards," he apologised. "I'll take care of you now, unless you'd rather I called one of the servants to do it."
Jin contemplated his state of undress, lying, as he was, on Kame's bedroom carpet in the remains of a bloodied bathrobe, and thought he'd sooner die. He didn't have to say anything; Kame caught his grimace and nodded, disappearing into the bathroom and returning with a first aid kit and fresh set of gloves.
The gloves didn't do much to help other than keep the hair out of Jin's wound. Kame's claws scraped at the skin no matter how carefully he worked to clean and disinfect the cut, and Jin's trembling didn't help matters. He couldn't stop himself from shaking, though it was less from fear now than shock, and a little from cold. He didn't think Kame was going to hurt him, not anymore, but keeping calm while his newly-furry friend played doctor was more than he could manage.
"Jin!" Kame growled in exasperation as he accidentally stabbed the older man again, making him jump.
"What?" Jin asked meekly.
"Keep still or I'm going to make this much worse! I'm trying to be gentle, but with you shivering like this I keep slicing you up more." He softened his voice as well as he could, though it didn't make him sound any more like his old self. "Jin, I know this is a weird situation and you're probably scared, but you have to relax. I don't want to hurt you, but if you don't calm down that's exactly what's going to happen."
Jin bit back a retort that damnit, he wasn't scared, and exhaled deeply in an effort to make his entire body go limp. Breathing, that was the key. Slow and controlled. Forget that he was being tended to by a guy who wouldn't have been out of place in a horror movie, in a building that creeped him out just as much as the owner. He was safe with Kame, wasn't he? Kame wasn't waiting for him to relax and close his eyes so that he could sink those sharp, wicked-looking fangs into Jin's tender flesh and have himself a late-night snack. Kame wouldn't-
"Jin!"
"Sorry," he muttered.
Eventually, Jin calmed down enough for Kame to clean and dress the cuts on both his stomach and his head, feed him a painkiller and help him into a clean robe. Kame had plenty of them around, as it turned out, because all his clothing was intended to cover him from head to foot, hiding the coppery pelt that masked his own skin. No more the fashionable idol, wearing classic jeans and brand-name shirts.
"You could paint your claws," Jin teased as Kame explained his current wardrobe. "Or we could dye you with turquoise stripes, or something."
"I'm sure I could start a new fashion," Kame said dryly. "Not that anyone would follow it, now."
"You'd be surprised." Jin sprawled out on Kame's bed, finding it much more comfortable than the carpet and happily restraint-free. He tugged the covers up to his chest and felt warm for the first time since he'd left his car.
Kame perched on the other side of the bed and looked down at him, yellow eyes twinkling. "Please, make yourself at home."
"In this house? Not if I can help it." He looked uneasily at the bleeding wall, clear now, with no traces of red to mark the grisly course followed by the blood. "First thing in the morning, we're getting in my car and we're driving back to Tokyo. This place is just too creepy."
Kame sighed. "You weren't listening, were you? This house is fine when I'm not here. It doesn't matter where I am - the building responds to my curse."
"I must have missed that part." Jin snuggled further under the covers. "Ne, Kame-chan, tell me a bed-time story. Tell me *your* story."
If Kame's eyebrows hadn't been hidden by a fringe that even a machete couldn't have trimmed, they would have been raised. Jin could tell.
"You came to visit *me*, remember?" came Kame's half-hearted protest.
"Yeah, but you owe me." Jin patted his stomach gingerly, wincing when he made contact a little more forcefully than he'd intended, and his contented grin melted away into a look of grim determination. "Tell me."
Looking for all the world as though he'd just been sent to the gallows, Kame placed a bolster down the middle of the bed, dividing it into two halves, before settling down on the far side of it. Jin appreciated the effort, the appearance of distance, of a safety barrier between them, as insubstantial as it was.
But there didn't seem to be any danger from Kame now. Subdued, he wrapped his arms around himself, tucking his malformed and now ungloved hands out of sight and making sure his legs stayed completely invisible under the robe. Only his face was on display, and so miserable that Jin had to resist the urge to reach out and stroke the coppery hair, as if comforting a puppy who'd lost his favourite toy.
Kame began his tale, speaking slowly, dreamily, as though recounting events from a lifetime ago. Perhaps, in a sense, for him they had been.
"Do you remember what an arrogant, full-of-himself brat I was? When I thought I was too good for all of you, that the world belonged to me and I could do whatever I wanted with it. I hated everyone then. I was proud of myself and nothing else, not even the rest of KAT-TUN.
"I couldn't stand to be around the rest of you, I didn't want any reminders of what I'd once been. And that's when I was approached by a Junior. Funny, now - I don't even remember his name, anymore, though it seemed to me then that he'd always been there, singing in his high little voice, dancing his way through puberty with a sickening smile. I thought I knew who it was."
Kame wasn't the only one who couldn't recall. "The kid you upset?" Jin asked. "I heard the story, but I don't remember his name either. We were all up in arms about it, though."
"Doesn't matter; it would've been fake. He'd been cast in his first drama, asked me for some advice. I didn't have time to waste talking to him, didn't care about his drama and just wanted him out of my sight. So I told him so, only I was much nastier about it, and I even felt good when he started to cry because it meant he'd leave me alone."
"You never came back to the jimusho after that," Jin reminisced. "We didn't see you again. Or the guy you upset. We just heard he was so distraught that he quit."
"No one saw him again except me," Kame explained, "because he wasn't a Junior. He wasn't even human. He showed up that night, walking through my mirror, and he made me look at myself in it. He showed me what a beast I'd become on the inside...then cursed me so I had an outside to match.
"I hid in my apartment for a week, arranged all of this by phone, and moved here late one night. Called in every doctor I could think of, tried every shaving accessory sold in Japan, and nothing helped. The hair grew back as fast as I removed it, and the rest..." Kame unwound his arms from his chest and looked ruefully down at his hands. "I couldn't even write properly without stabbing myself with the claws. Morinaga had to take dictation, or I used a computer. I had to keep working. It wasn't about the money, not then. If I didn't keep myself busy, I knew I'd go crazy, no matter how terrible I sounded or how ridiculous I looked in the costumes."
Jin wasn't sure if it was the bad light or the awkward angle, but from where he was lying, Kame's claws seemed to have shrunk to less than half their previous length. "Why didn't you tell anyone? We were so worried!"
"Were you, really?" Kame didn't sound convinced.
"Well...I was worried, anyway. And it wasn't just me." Jin didn't elaborate, leaving Kame to work out for himself who else, if anyone, would have had reason to miss him.
"That was nice of you; I wouldn't have missed me. Not after the way I treated you."
Jin pulled himself up a little, sudden surge of dizziness notwithstanding, so he could peek over the bolster. "It's not like you've never ignored me before," he pointed out. "At least you weren't mean to me."
Kame shrugged. "It would've been like kicking a puppy. I prefer to see you with a smile."
Jin obliged him. "Is that why you let me in tonight?"
"I thought that...maybe..."
"Maybe...?"
Kame gently pushed Jin back to his own side of the mattress, since he was slowly creeping across the bolster in an effort to get closer. "The little brat who cursed me was nice enough to dangle a cure in front of me, then tell me that the chances of it happening were less than zero."
"A cure?" Jin batted away Kame's hand and sat up excitedly, then slid back down when the dizziness washed over him like a tidal wave. Kame's bedside cabinet liked to hit hard.
"Yeah. I'd lose the werewolf look and return to normal if..."
"If?" Kame's pauses were starting to drive Jin crazy.
Kame took a deep breath, accidentally sucked in a mouthful of hair, and spat it out with a splutter. "I hate it when that happens!"
The incident eased the tension somewhat, but Jin wouldn't drop the issue. "A cure," he prompted through his giggles.
"Right." Kame pulled the last few strands free from his mouth. "I can be cured if someone can look past the beast without and love the person within. That's what he told me. Then he laughed, said nobody could ever love a monster like me, and vanished through my mirror again. I took one look at myself and agreed with him."
It was hard for Jin to argue with that. Kame's outward appearance was frightening at best, heart attack-inducing at worst, and it was no wonder the doctors who'd seen him were too afraid to talk. Even for people who already knew him, seeing past the animal would be difficult, especially taking into account his beastly behaviour beforehand.
But Kame was changing. Had changed. Those remorseful, achingly lonely song lyrics were proof of that; those, and Jin's presence here, in the heart of Kame's sanctuary, relatively unscathed and within arm's reach.
"You protected me," Jin said slowly, turning the idea over and over in his mind. "You didn't attack me when I was unconscious. Why? And don't start talking about kicked puppies again. I'm an adult too - older than you, in fact - and not some helpless child who needs everyone's protection!"
Kame nodded acknowledgement of this. "I suppose...because you tried to help me? You could've run, could've let me destroy the room in a rampage, but you didn't. You reached for me. I could've killed you, and you tried to help me anyway."
Jin thought this wasn't quite the time to explain that his reaction had been purely instinctive, and if he'd been thinking straight he might've picked a safer option. "You were in pain; I wanted to do something to help. We're still friends, aren't we?"
"We were something more to each other once - or we were trying to be, anyway." Kame inclined his head, catching the light, and Jin gasped.
Kame's eyes were a beautiful, clear brown, no longer flickering with sick, warning yellow.
"Kame! Your eyes!"
Kame blinked, Jin having unexpectedly thrust a finger towards his face. "What about them?"
"They're normal! They're not yellow anymore!"
There was a hand mirror on the cabinet, and Kame held it up to his face, staring intently at his eyes. Jin, for his part, stared at the hand that held the mirror. It hadn't been his imagination earlier - the claws were definitely shorter. In fact, they couldn't really be counted as 'claws' at all. If not for the thick, coppery coat of hair, Kame's hands could be considered...normal.
A thrill ran through Jin as he let himself imagine the rest of Kame's body following suit, the bizarre slowly returning to the familiar, the face that he knew as well as his own emerging from the masses of hair. Slowly, not wanting to be overwhelmed by nausea again, he eased himself up against the pillows till he was sitting alongside Kame with only the width of the bolster between them.
The other man was still gazing into the mirror, but now his free hand roamed through the hair on his head, resting where the lupine ear had peeked through. It was no longer there, and Jin could make out the curves of Kame's normal, slightly flushed, human ear through the reddish strands. He assumed that the other side was the same.
"Jin, can you see them too? My eyes, my ears..."
"Don't forget your nails."
"Oh." Kame looked at his hands, then peered under the robe to examine his feet. "They're normal!"
"You're changing back!"
Jin held up his hand for a high-five, noting, as Kame's palm lightly slapped his, that the hair wasn't nearly as thick as it looked. If anything, Kame's hands were going bald. The idea tickled Jin and he burst out laughing; Kame, caught up in Jin's amusement despite not knowing its origin, joined him, his laughter growing less harsh by the second.
"What's so funny?" Kame demanded to know when he got his breath back.
Jin hadn't managed to recover his own yet. "Not important," he gasped out.
"You really-"
Kame's sentence came to an abrupt halt as he let out a strangled groan and clutched his throat with both hands. Air whistled and wheezed through twisted lips, underscored by a low wail of constant, unimaginable pain. Jin could do nothing but watch in horror as Kame's chest moved under the robe, bones shifting and sliding against each other, lungs expanding and contracting in turn.
One minute seemed like one year, but Kame's agony drew to a close. "It was worse going in the other direction," he confided to Jin in a voice that, while slightly slurred by his misshapen lips, was otherwise normal, and Jin very nearly threw himself over the bolster to hug him.
He successfully fought off the temptation only because he figured such a violent action would result in him passing out, and he didn't want to miss a second of Kame's transformation. It was fascinating to watch, frightening though it was. What would be next to go?
He didn't have to wait long to find out. Kame was in the middle of a sentence when he clamped a hand over his nose and mouth and let out a shriek higher than any note Jin had ever hit. When Jin opened his eyes again and reluctantly uncovered his ears, he discovered Kame's short muzzle had rearranged itself back into human features, complete with the perfect pink lips he'd had far too few opportunities to kiss.
"Kame," Jin began, but the other man suddenly squawked, leapt off the bed and dashed for the bathroom, ignoring him completely.
Typical. Jin always missed the good bits.
Kame emerged a few minutes later, breathing hard and having traded in his dark, heavy robe for a much lighter version of the sort Jin now wore, belted at the waist and short enough to expose everything below the knee. Other than the hair that Kame had always adamantly refused to remove, his legs were shorn clean. His arms, visible now beneath the rolled-up sleeves, were in a similar state.
The only excess hair left, as far as Jin could see, was on Kame's face, throat, and chest, where it sprouted in the gap in the material. Anticipation coursed through him, an adrenaline high no live performance could ever match. So close, now. So short a time left to wait.
Jin carefully manoeuvred himself off the mattress, headache be damned. Kame was showing no signs of coming back to him, so he was going to go to Kame. The younger man backed up a pace as Jin approached, then planted his feet and stood firm, waiting.
The curse-born hair on Kame's face wasn't as coarse as Jin had been expecting, strands slipping like silk through his fingers as he stroked from forehead to shoulder. Under Jin's hands, the hair receded, shrinking and fading away to nothing, until the only hair Kame had left, was his own.
Kame was grinning like he'd just won the universe in a prize draw, but he broke the perfect curve long enough to breathe an overjoyed "Thank you" in Jin's ear.
Jin swayed unsteadily, wondered if the damned cabinet had given him a concussion, and latched onto Kame as the nearest source of stability. He reached out, intending to grab the other man by the upper arms, but Kame beat him to it, wrapping his arms tightly around Jin and pulling him into a comfortable, steadying embrace. Jin sank into it gratefully, resting his head on Kame's shoulder.
"I broke your curse, didn't I?" he said, weariness not quite managing to obscure the smug sentiment.
"You did." Kame ruffled Jin's hair affectionately. "I always knew you were magical."
"If I'm so magical, why can't I make you do what I want?" Jin complained.
"Because you haven't told me," Kame pointed out, sensibly. "I'm not a mindreader. But you cared enough about me to drive all the way out here and risk your own life trying to help me, and that saved me. I'd say I owe you anything you want."
"I want..." Jin closed his eyes and reeled off a list. "I want you to come back to Tokyo with me tomorrow. I want you to sell this horrible place and come back to work. I want you to apologise to everyone so you can all be friends again. Oh, but first I want you to come up with some sort of explanation to account for your behaviour, because I can't think straight right now and I don't think blaming your problems on a drug habit is the answer."
"I don't think so either," Kame agreed in mock-seriousness. "I'll apologise to Ueda and ask him to make something up; he's good at that."
"He's very creative. So, you'll do those things?"
"I think I can go along with that." Kame trailed one hand up Jin's back till he reached the nape of his neck, delicately massaging the flesh under the mound of brown curls. "I want to see my family again. I want to play baseball in the sun and go shopping for accessories. I want to play the Tokyo Dome as KAT-TUN's 'K', one of six."
"Mmm," was as much of Jin's response as could be heard - less an agreement with Kame's wishes, and more a reaction to the fingers playing across his skin.
"I'll interpret that as 'Yes, I want those things too', shall I?"
"Yeah," Jin mumbled, "something like that."
"Is there," Kame's voice dropped to a sultry whisper, "anything else you want me to do?"
Jin wasn't so out of it that he couldn't recognise a line when he was being fed one. "Well," he pretended to consider, "I suppose you could kiss me."
Kame pulled back to give himself enough room, nudging Jin's head off his shoulder with one hand under his chin while the other stayed where it was, holding him round the waist and keeping the injury-induced dizziness at bay. Jin's eyes flew open when Kame kissed him with the pent-up fervour of so many months apart. He was getting what he wanted now, certainly, and when Kame began to walk him back towards the bed, he had no objections.
They broke apart only long enough for Kame to toss the bolster across the room, leaving nothing but air and fabric between them when they slipped under the covers. They began to dispense with the fabric, but Kame frowned and pulled the robe closed again when he saw the dressing he'd applied to Jin's stomach. The older man's bangs largely covered up the matching patch on his temple, but there was no getting away from this one.
"What?" Jin was puzzled. "Why aren't you touching me?"
"Because you're hurt," Kame said gently, "and I don't want to make things worse. You should take it easy."
"I'm fine," Jin protested. "It doesn't even hurt anymore!" This time when Kame raised an eyebrow, Jin could actually see it. "Uh...doesn't hurt *much*," he amended. "You're the one who should be taking it easy - you've just had surgery without any anaesthetic!"
"Then we agree. Good." Kame pretended to turn away.
Jin pouted at being outmanoeuvred and kept it up until Kame turned back towards him with a sly grin.
"Did you really think I was going to leave you like this?" he teased. Jin's response was unrepeatable, but Kame got the message. "I'll be very careful," he promised. "If anything starts bleeding, or you feel dizzy, we're stopping."
"I'm already dizzy. Anyway, even if I pass out, I'm already lying down. I can't possibly hurt myself."
Kame conceded that Jin's logic was sound - for a change - and unfastened his robe, though he didn't remove it. Having grown used to the warmth of the extra layer of hair, the night air on his skin, no matter how feverish the atmosphere, left him chilled. Jin did the same, discarding the belt but retaining the wrap, and Kame's hands made their way underneath to grasp his hips.
"I never did manage to get my hands on these before," Kame said with more than a hint of regret.
"Could it be that Kame has a fetish?" Jin wondered aloud, catching Kame's eye and smirking.
"I have a Jin-fetish," Kame said solemnly, giving the words all the seriousness they deserved.
"That's lucky, because I think I have a Kame-fetish."
"You think?"
Jin jumped as Kame's hands began to work their way across his thighs. "All right, I know. Your hands are cold."
"Yours are warm."
"All the magazine polls say I'm hotter than you."
"Only because nobody's seen the real me for six months. My own servants aren't going to recognise me now."
"Maybe you can sever their contracts by phone," Jin suggested before Kame swooped in and kissed him again.
As long as he was lying down, Jin's dizziness didn't bother him too much, but raising his head made the room spin in ways he didn't even want to contemplate. Between that and the wound on his stomach, he was left lying on his side in order to reach Kame, who was applying lust-tempered logic to the problem of angles.
"I don't want to risk brushing up against your stomach," Kame said, frowning. "It took me long enough to patch you up the first time."
"You had the fingernails from hell the first time."
"True. Still...can you turn round?"
He wouldn't be able to see Kame if he did, but if that was what Kame wanted... Jin braced himself for the land equivalent of seasickness and rolled over so that he was facing the wall.
Kame spooned up behind him, nestling them together like two pieces of a puzzle - a perfect fit - and kissed the nape of Jin's neck. "I can't see your bandages now, so if you start bleeding again, tell me," he warned before reaching round between Jin's legs.
Jin wondered if he'd even notice, lost as he was in the sensation of Kame's hand on his length and the pressure of Kame's own hardness behind him. He moaned, relishing the touch he'd wanted since the first time they'd kissed, so long ago now, and wasn't surprised to feel Kame respond by thrusting against him.
"Sorry," Kame muttered, sounding embarrassed. "I don't have much control over my body right now."
If anyone had a right to be having control issues with their body, it was Kamenashi Kazuya. "It's all right," Jin assured him. "I don't mind."
Kame nuzzled at Jin's neck and tugged the back of his robe aside to remove the last barrier between their bare skin. Jin tensed a little as Kame settled himself in the cleft, but relaxed when it became apparent that his ambitions didn't extend any further. Head injuries on one side and serious bodily trauma on the other didn't add up to it being a good time to take their physical relationship much further than it had ever been before.
"Okay?" Kame whispered.
Jin reached back over his shoulder and squeezed the hand that came to greet him. "Okay."
Time slowed down, after that. Jin writhed under Kame's hand, occasionally pushing back to meet eager hips as Kame pumped him in a rhythm to match his own thrusts, and whenever he thought he couldn't hold out much longer Kame proved him wrong with a few well-placed fingers. He listened to the sound of Kame's voice, no longer raspy and pained but frantic and passionate, and loved every second of it.
Kame's teeth, fully human now, nibbled absently at his exposed upper body in between fevered kisses. When he came, those teeth closed around the skin of Jin's shoulder and bit down, hard enough to mark, though not enough to draw blood. The dual points of sensation, of Kame's teeth on his skin and Kame's seed flowing warmly against him, propelled Jin towards his own climax and a final cry of relief.
"We messed up the sheets," Kame commented as he set to work with a box of tissues. "Morinaga will be scandalised."
Jin would've collapsed if he hadn't already been lying down, and fell heavily on his back once Kame had finished cleaning him up. "Good. Maybe he'll resign of his own accord."
Kame snorted and checked the bandages. "No further bleeding. How's your head?"
"All screwed up - how'd you expect?" He received a gentle swat on the hip for that.
"You know that's not what I'm asking."
Jin sighed. "Let's just say I think I'm going to be breakfasting on painkillers. I hate your house."
"You know what?" Kame planted a kiss on Jin's forehead and snuggled up next to him, pressing a button on the wall behind them to switch off the lamp. "I hate my house too. But you have to admit, it makes a good hiding place. Who comes out here of their own accord?"
"I did."
"Yeah, but you're a special case."
"I'm nothing like Aiba!"
"Not *that* kind of special, Jin..."
Jin lay back in the dark, Kame's breath warm against his skin, and thought about what the morning would bring. A happy ending for them both, or heartbreaks all round? Could everyone else forgive Kame, accept him back into their lives, and agree to forget the past?
He speculated aloud on this last point, but Kame didn't agree with him. "I don't want to forget," he explained. "I don't want it to happen again; I just want to move on."
"I'll remind you so you don't become like that again," Jin promised. "If you start acting like a beast, I'll put a leash on you."
That made them both laugh. "Jin, you know what the press will make of that, don't you?"
"And just think of the gossip! Ryo-chan would never let us live it down."
Kame groaned. "Actually, he's probably the only person I don't need to apologise to. He thought I was following my natural career progression as a diva."
"Don't divas need an entourage?"
Kame reached down to clasp Jin's hand, curling his fingers about the other man's and holding on for dear life. "I've got all the entourage I need right here next to me."
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame
Rating: R, to be safe
Genre: Twisted fairy tale
Word count: 13,000
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit.
Explanation: Following my take on Sleeping Beauty, I said I felt like giving another fairy tale the Akame twist. keight_michelle suggested Beauty and the Beast, and this is the result. Once again, Jin gets to be 'Beauty'. ^_^ Please note that while there is consensual m/m activity taking place in this fic, it occurs when Kame is human. Also, I'm going to ask you to pretend for the duration of the fic that Kame is a natural redhead, as he'd look a bit mismatched otherwise.
Part 2
Everything hurt. His back, his stomach, his head...even his legs hurt. They were being crushed, flattened against the carpet by a Druidic werewolf.
No, that wasn't right. The unusually hirsute man in the hooded robe wasn't a werewolf. It was Kame, and he was crying.
At any rate, that's what Jin thought he was doing. It was hard to make out the sniffles and hushed, sobbing apologies through the thick layer of hair, not to mention the pounding headache Jin had acquired thanks to his run-in with Kame's bedroom furniture.
"Kame," he gasped, causing the once-again hooded figure sprawled across his lower body to jump, "I appreciate that you're sorry but I'd feel a whole lot better about it if you'd just get off me. You're heavier than you used to be."
That earned him a gentle slap on the thigh from the heel of Kame's hand, claws well away from his skin. "You're just a wimp, Akanishi."
His voice didn't sound nearly so strained, Jin noted with pleasure, and the bleak, desperate self-loathing had vanished too. Worry remained. He'd have been happier about it, but as Kame groaned and shifted to lie next to him, he realised why his stomach hurt so much.
The claw that caught his belt had torn through the skin as easily as cloth, leaving a thick line of blood across his belly. Kame had been pressing down on it with his arm, and the sleeve of his robe looked conspicuously wet. Jin couldn't tell how bad the injury was, but it hurt like hell. No intestines were hanging out, though, so he figured it couldn't be that serious.
Kame was still sniffling, wiping his other sleeve across his eyes at intervals, and more to the point, he was still lying on the floor. Jin wondered if Kame had thought he was dead.
"I'm all right," he said softly, because that was as much volume as he could manage. "I'm all right, Kame."
"I know." Kame's voice was muffled by his sleeve. "You're not dead."
Jin had been hoping for something a little less obvious than that. "And neither are you."
"But you should be!" With a groan of effort, Kame raised his head to lock gazes with a baffled Jin, pushing the hood back over his shoulders. "I should've killed you! Do you know how many doctors it used to take to subdue me before we decided to use restraints when the symptoms got worse? And even then, they left covered in cuts and bites."
Bites? "Uh...you're not contagious, are you?" Jin asked. "I mean, I don't think you bit me, but..."
"I didn't. I didn't touch you at all." Kame was still crying, but as far as Jin could tell, the twisted, pained expression on his face was a smile, and an overjoyed one at that. "When you were unconscious, I didn't hurt you. I...protected you. I haven't protected anyone in a long time."
Jin smiled back. He shared Kame's sense of relief. "I knew I was right to come here. But...um...I'm still..." He looked at the line of blood across his stomach, and Kame followed his eyes.
"Sorry. Let's see if I can get up now." He pushed himself up, using the bed for support, and got unsteadily to his feet. "I'm always so exhausted, immediately afterwards," he apologised. "I'll take care of you now, unless you'd rather I called one of the servants to do it."
Jin contemplated his state of undress, lying, as he was, on Kame's bedroom carpet in the remains of a bloodied bathrobe, and thought he'd sooner die. He didn't have to say anything; Kame caught his grimace and nodded, disappearing into the bathroom and returning with a first aid kit and fresh set of gloves.
The gloves didn't do much to help other than keep the hair out of Jin's wound. Kame's claws scraped at the skin no matter how carefully he worked to clean and disinfect the cut, and Jin's trembling didn't help matters. He couldn't stop himself from shaking, though it was less from fear now than shock, and a little from cold. He didn't think Kame was going to hurt him, not anymore, but keeping calm while his newly-furry friend played doctor was more than he could manage.
"Jin!" Kame growled in exasperation as he accidentally stabbed the older man again, making him jump.
"What?" Jin asked meekly.
"Keep still or I'm going to make this much worse! I'm trying to be gentle, but with you shivering like this I keep slicing you up more." He softened his voice as well as he could, though it didn't make him sound any more like his old self. "Jin, I know this is a weird situation and you're probably scared, but you have to relax. I don't want to hurt you, but if you don't calm down that's exactly what's going to happen."
Jin bit back a retort that damnit, he wasn't scared, and exhaled deeply in an effort to make his entire body go limp. Breathing, that was the key. Slow and controlled. Forget that he was being tended to by a guy who wouldn't have been out of place in a horror movie, in a building that creeped him out just as much as the owner. He was safe with Kame, wasn't he? Kame wasn't waiting for him to relax and close his eyes so that he could sink those sharp, wicked-looking fangs into Jin's tender flesh and have himself a late-night snack. Kame wouldn't-
"Jin!"
"Sorry," he muttered.
Eventually, Jin calmed down enough for Kame to clean and dress the cuts on both his stomach and his head, feed him a painkiller and help him into a clean robe. Kame had plenty of them around, as it turned out, because all his clothing was intended to cover him from head to foot, hiding the coppery pelt that masked his own skin. No more the fashionable idol, wearing classic jeans and brand-name shirts.
"You could paint your claws," Jin teased as Kame explained his current wardrobe. "Or we could dye you with turquoise stripes, or something."
"I'm sure I could start a new fashion," Kame said dryly. "Not that anyone would follow it, now."
"You'd be surprised." Jin sprawled out on Kame's bed, finding it much more comfortable than the carpet and happily restraint-free. He tugged the covers up to his chest and felt warm for the first time since he'd left his car.
Kame perched on the other side of the bed and looked down at him, yellow eyes twinkling. "Please, make yourself at home."
"In this house? Not if I can help it." He looked uneasily at the bleeding wall, clear now, with no traces of red to mark the grisly course followed by the blood. "First thing in the morning, we're getting in my car and we're driving back to Tokyo. This place is just too creepy."
Kame sighed. "You weren't listening, were you? This house is fine when I'm not here. It doesn't matter where I am - the building responds to my curse."
"I must have missed that part." Jin snuggled further under the covers. "Ne, Kame-chan, tell me a bed-time story. Tell me *your* story."
If Kame's eyebrows hadn't been hidden by a fringe that even a machete couldn't have trimmed, they would have been raised. Jin could tell.
"You came to visit *me*, remember?" came Kame's half-hearted protest.
"Yeah, but you owe me." Jin patted his stomach gingerly, wincing when he made contact a little more forcefully than he'd intended, and his contented grin melted away into a look of grim determination. "Tell me."
Looking for all the world as though he'd just been sent to the gallows, Kame placed a bolster down the middle of the bed, dividing it into two halves, before settling down on the far side of it. Jin appreciated the effort, the appearance of distance, of a safety barrier between them, as insubstantial as it was.
But there didn't seem to be any danger from Kame now. Subdued, he wrapped his arms around himself, tucking his malformed and now ungloved hands out of sight and making sure his legs stayed completely invisible under the robe. Only his face was on display, and so miserable that Jin had to resist the urge to reach out and stroke the coppery hair, as if comforting a puppy who'd lost his favourite toy.
Kame began his tale, speaking slowly, dreamily, as though recounting events from a lifetime ago. Perhaps, in a sense, for him they had been.
"Do you remember what an arrogant, full-of-himself brat I was? When I thought I was too good for all of you, that the world belonged to me and I could do whatever I wanted with it. I hated everyone then. I was proud of myself and nothing else, not even the rest of KAT-TUN.
"I couldn't stand to be around the rest of you, I didn't want any reminders of what I'd once been. And that's when I was approached by a Junior. Funny, now - I don't even remember his name, anymore, though it seemed to me then that he'd always been there, singing in his high little voice, dancing his way through puberty with a sickening smile. I thought I knew who it was."
Kame wasn't the only one who couldn't recall. "The kid you upset?" Jin asked. "I heard the story, but I don't remember his name either. We were all up in arms about it, though."
"Doesn't matter; it would've been fake. He'd been cast in his first drama, asked me for some advice. I didn't have time to waste talking to him, didn't care about his drama and just wanted him out of my sight. So I told him so, only I was much nastier about it, and I even felt good when he started to cry because it meant he'd leave me alone."
"You never came back to the jimusho after that," Jin reminisced. "We didn't see you again. Or the guy you upset. We just heard he was so distraught that he quit."
"No one saw him again except me," Kame explained, "because he wasn't a Junior. He wasn't even human. He showed up that night, walking through my mirror, and he made me look at myself in it. He showed me what a beast I'd become on the inside...then cursed me so I had an outside to match.
"I hid in my apartment for a week, arranged all of this by phone, and moved here late one night. Called in every doctor I could think of, tried every shaving accessory sold in Japan, and nothing helped. The hair grew back as fast as I removed it, and the rest..." Kame unwound his arms from his chest and looked ruefully down at his hands. "I couldn't even write properly without stabbing myself with the claws. Morinaga had to take dictation, or I used a computer. I had to keep working. It wasn't about the money, not then. If I didn't keep myself busy, I knew I'd go crazy, no matter how terrible I sounded or how ridiculous I looked in the costumes."
Jin wasn't sure if it was the bad light or the awkward angle, but from where he was lying, Kame's claws seemed to have shrunk to less than half their previous length. "Why didn't you tell anyone? We were so worried!"
"Were you, really?" Kame didn't sound convinced.
"Well...I was worried, anyway. And it wasn't just me." Jin didn't elaborate, leaving Kame to work out for himself who else, if anyone, would have had reason to miss him.
"That was nice of you; I wouldn't have missed me. Not after the way I treated you."
Jin pulled himself up a little, sudden surge of dizziness notwithstanding, so he could peek over the bolster. "It's not like you've never ignored me before," he pointed out. "At least you weren't mean to me."
Kame shrugged. "It would've been like kicking a puppy. I prefer to see you with a smile."
Jin obliged him. "Is that why you let me in tonight?"
"I thought that...maybe..."
"Maybe...?"
Kame gently pushed Jin back to his own side of the mattress, since he was slowly creeping across the bolster in an effort to get closer. "The little brat who cursed me was nice enough to dangle a cure in front of me, then tell me that the chances of it happening were less than zero."
"A cure?" Jin batted away Kame's hand and sat up excitedly, then slid back down when the dizziness washed over him like a tidal wave. Kame's bedside cabinet liked to hit hard.
"Yeah. I'd lose the werewolf look and return to normal if..."
"If?" Kame's pauses were starting to drive Jin crazy.
Kame took a deep breath, accidentally sucked in a mouthful of hair, and spat it out with a splutter. "I hate it when that happens!"
The incident eased the tension somewhat, but Jin wouldn't drop the issue. "A cure," he prompted through his giggles.
"Right." Kame pulled the last few strands free from his mouth. "I can be cured if someone can look past the beast without and love the person within. That's what he told me. Then he laughed, said nobody could ever love a monster like me, and vanished through my mirror again. I took one look at myself and agreed with him."
It was hard for Jin to argue with that. Kame's outward appearance was frightening at best, heart attack-inducing at worst, and it was no wonder the doctors who'd seen him were too afraid to talk. Even for people who already knew him, seeing past the animal would be difficult, especially taking into account his beastly behaviour beforehand.
But Kame was changing. Had changed. Those remorseful, achingly lonely song lyrics were proof of that; those, and Jin's presence here, in the heart of Kame's sanctuary, relatively unscathed and within arm's reach.
"You protected me," Jin said slowly, turning the idea over and over in his mind. "You didn't attack me when I was unconscious. Why? And don't start talking about kicked puppies again. I'm an adult too - older than you, in fact - and not some helpless child who needs everyone's protection!"
Kame nodded acknowledgement of this. "I suppose...because you tried to help me? You could've run, could've let me destroy the room in a rampage, but you didn't. You reached for me. I could've killed you, and you tried to help me anyway."
Jin thought this wasn't quite the time to explain that his reaction had been purely instinctive, and if he'd been thinking straight he might've picked a safer option. "You were in pain; I wanted to do something to help. We're still friends, aren't we?"
"We were something more to each other once - or we were trying to be, anyway." Kame inclined his head, catching the light, and Jin gasped.
Kame's eyes were a beautiful, clear brown, no longer flickering with sick, warning yellow.
"Kame! Your eyes!"
Kame blinked, Jin having unexpectedly thrust a finger towards his face. "What about them?"
"They're normal! They're not yellow anymore!"
There was a hand mirror on the cabinet, and Kame held it up to his face, staring intently at his eyes. Jin, for his part, stared at the hand that held the mirror. It hadn't been his imagination earlier - the claws were definitely shorter. In fact, they couldn't really be counted as 'claws' at all. If not for the thick, coppery coat of hair, Kame's hands could be considered...normal.
A thrill ran through Jin as he let himself imagine the rest of Kame's body following suit, the bizarre slowly returning to the familiar, the face that he knew as well as his own emerging from the masses of hair. Slowly, not wanting to be overwhelmed by nausea again, he eased himself up against the pillows till he was sitting alongside Kame with only the width of the bolster between them.
The other man was still gazing into the mirror, but now his free hand roamed through the hair on his head, resting where the lupine ear had peeked through. It was no longer there, and Jin could make out the curves of Kame's normal, slightly flushed, human ear through the reddish strands. He assumed that the other side was the same.
"Jin, can you see them too? My eyes, my ears..."
"Don't forget your nails."
"Oh." Kame looked at his hands, then peered under the robe to examine his feet. "They're normal!"
"You're changing back!"
Jin held up his hand for a high-five, noting, as Kame's palm lightly slapped his, that the hair wasn't nearly as thick as it looked. If anything, Kame's hands were going bald. The idea tickled Jin and he burst out laughing; Kame, caught up in Jin's amusement despite not knowing its origin, joined him, his laughter growing less harsh by the second.
"What's so funny?" Kame demanded to know when he got his breath back.
Jin hadn't managed to recover his own yet. "Not important," he gasped out.
"You really-"
Kame's sentence came to an abrupt halt as he let out a strangled groan and clutched his throat with both hands. Air whistled and wheezed through twisted lips, underscored by a low wail of constant, unimaginable pain. Jin could do nothing but watch in horror as Kame's chest moved under the robe, bones shifting and sliding against each other, lungs expanding and contracting in turn.
One minute seemed like one year, but Kame's agony drew to a close. "It was worse going in the other direction," he confided to Jin in a voice that, while slightly slurred by his misshapen lips, was otherwise normal, and Jin very nearly threw himself over the bolster to hug him.
He successfully fought off the temptation only because he figured such a violent action would result in him passing out, and he didn't want to miss a second of Kame's transformation. It was fascinating to watch, frightening though it was. What would be next to go?
He didn't have to wait long to find out. Kame was in the middle of a sentence when he clamped a hand over his nose and mouth and let out a shriek higher than any note Jin had ever hit. When Jin opened his eyes again and reluctantly uncovered his ears, he discovered Kame's short muzzle had rearranged itself back into human features, complete with the perfect pink lips he'd had far too few opportunities to kiss.
"Kame," Jin began, but the other man suddenly squawked, leapt off the bed and dashed for the bathroom, ignoring him completely.
Typical. Jin always missed the good bits.
Kame emerged a few minutes later, breathing hard and having traded in his dark, heavy robe for a much lighter version of the sort Jin now wore, belted at the waist and short enough to expose everything below the knee. Other than the hair that Kame had always adamantly refused to remove, his legs were shorn clean. His arms, visible now beneath the rolled-up sleeves, were in a similar state.
The only excess hair left, as far as Jin could see, was on Kame's face, throat, and chest, where it sprouted in the gap in the material. Anticipation coursed through him, an adrenaline high no live performance could ever match. So close, now. So short a time left to wait.
Jin carefully manoeuvred himself off the mattress, headache be damned. Kame was showing no signs of coming back to him, so he was going to go to Kame. The younger man backed up a pace as Jin approached, then planted his feet and stood firm, waiting.
The curse-born hair on Kame's face wasn't as coarse as Jin had been expecting, strands slipping like silk through his fingers as he stroked from forehead to shoulder. Under Jin's hands, the hair receded, shrinking and fading away to nothing, until the only hair Kame had left, was his own.
Kame was grinning like he'd just won the universe in a prize draw, but he broke the perfect curve long enough to breathe an overjoyed "Thank you" in Jin's ear.
Jin swayed unsteadily, wondered if the damned cabinet had given him a concussion, and latched onto Kame as the nearest source of stability. He reached out, intending to grab the other man by the upper arms, but Kame beat him to it, wrapping his arms tightly around Jin and pulling him into a comfortable, steadying embrace. Jin sank into it gratefully, resting his head on Kame's shoulder.
"I broke your curse, didn't I?" he said, weariness not quite managing to obscure the smug sentiment.
"You did." Kame ruffled Jin's hair affectionately. "I always knew you were magical."
"If I'm so magical, why can't I make you do what I want?" Jin complained.
"Because you haven't told me," Kame pointed out, sensibly. "I'm not a mindreader. But you cared enough about me to drive all the way out here and risk your own life trying to help me, and that saved me. I'd say I owe you anything you want."
"I want..." Jin closed his eyes and reeled off a list. "I want you to come back to Tokyo with me tomorrow. I want you to sell this horrible place and come back to work. I want you to apologise to everyone so you can all be friends again. Oh, but first I want you to come up with some sort of explanation to account for your behaviour, because I can't think straight right now and I don't think blaming your problems on a drug habit is the answer."
"I don't think so either," Kame agreed in mock-seriousness. "I'll apologise to Ueda and ask him to make something up; he's good at that."
"He's very creative. So, you'll do those things?"
"I think I can go along with that." Kame trailed one hand up Jin's back till he reached the nape of his neck, delicately massaging the flesh under the mound of brown curls. "I want to see my family again. I want to play baseball in the sun and go shopping for accessories. I want to play the Tokyo Dome as KAT-TUN's 'K', one of six."
"Mmm," was as much of Jin's response as could be heard - less an agreement with Kame's wishes, and more a reaction to the fingers playing across his skin.
"I'll interpret that as 'Yes, I want those things too', shall I?"
"Yeah," Jin mumbled, "something like that."
"Is there," Kame's voice dropped to a sultry whisper, "anything else you want me to do?"
Jin wasn't so out of it that he couldn't recognise a line when he was being fed one. "Well," he pretended to consider, "I suppose you could kiss me."
Kame pulled back to give himself enough room, nudging Jin's head off his shoulder with one hand under his chin while the other stayed where it was, holding him round the waist and keeping the injury-induced dizziness at bay. Jin's eyes flew open when Kame kissed him with the pent-up fervour of so many months apart. He was getting what he wanted now, certainly, and when Kame began to walk him back towards the bed, he had no objections.
They broke apart only long enough for Kame to toss the bolster across the room, leaving nothing but air and fabric between them when they slipped under the covers. They began to dispense with the fabric, but Kame frowned and pulled the robe closed again when he saw the dressing he'd applied to Jin's stomach. The older man's bangs largely covered up the matching patch on his temple, but there was no getting away from this one.
"What?" Jin was puzzled. "Why aren't you touching me?"
"Because you're hurt," Kame said gently, "and I don't want to make things worse. You should take it easy."
"I'm fine," Jin protested. "It doesn't even hurt anymore!" This time when Kame raised an eyebrow, Jin could actually see it. "Uh...doesn't hurt *much*," he amended. "You're the one who should be taking it easy - you've just had surgery without any anaesthetic!"
"Then we agree. Good." Kame pretended to turn away.
Jin pouted at being outmanoeuvred and kept it up until Kame turned back towards him with a sly grin.
"Did you really think I was going to leave you like this?" he teased. Jin's response was unrepeatable, but Kame got the message. "I'll be very careful," he promised. "If anything starts bleeding, or you feel dizzy, we're stopping."
"I'm already dizzy. Anyway, even if I pass out, I'm already lying down. I can't possibly hurt myself."
Kame conceded that Jin's logic was sound - for a change - and unfastened his robe, though he didn't remove it. Having grown used to the warmth of the extra layer of hair, the night air on his skin, no matter how feverish the atmosphere, left him chilled. Jin did the same, discarding the belt but retaining the wrap, and Kame's hands made their way underneath to grasp his hips.
"I never did manage to get my hands on these before," Kame said with more than a hint of regret.
"Could it be that Kame has a fetish?" Jin wondered aloud, catching Kame's eye and smirking.
"I have a Jin-fetish," Kame said solemnly, giving the words all the seriousness they deserved.
"That's lucky, because I think I have a Kame-fetish."
"You think?"
Jin jumped as Kame's hands began to work their way across his thighs. "All right, I know. Your hands are cold."
"Yours are warm."
"All the magazine polls say I'm hotter than you."
"Only because nobody's seen the real me for six months. My own servants aren't going to recognise me now."
"Maybe you can sever their contracts by phone," Jin suggested before Kame swooped in and kissed him again.
As long as he was lying down, Jin's dizziness didn't bother him too much, but raising his head made the room spin in ways he didn't even want to contemplate. Between that and the wound on his stomach, he was left lying on his side in order to reach Kame, who was applying lust-tempered logic to the problem of angles.
"I don't want to risk brushing up against your stomach," Kame said, frowning. "It took me long enough to patch you up the first time."
"You had the fingernails from hell the first time."
"True. Still...can you turn round?"
He wouldn't be able to see Kame if he did, but if that was what Kame wanted... Jin braced himself for the land equivalent of seasickness and rolled over so that he was facing the wall.
Kame spooned up behind him, nestling them together like two pieces of a puzzle - a perfect fit - and kissed the nape of Jin's neck. "I can't see your bandages now, so if you start bleeding again, tell me," he warned before reaching round between Jin's legs.
Jin wondered if he'd even notice, lost as he was in the sensation of Kame's hand on his length and the pressure of Kame's own hardness behind him. He moaned, relishing the touch he'd wanted since the first time they'd kissed, so long ago now, and wasn't surprised to feel Kame respond by thrusting against him.
"Sorry," Kame muttered, sounding embarrassed. "I don't have much control over my body right now."
If anyone had a right to be having control issues with their body, it was Kamenashi Kazuya. "It's all right," Jin assured him. "I don't mind."
Kame nuzzled at Jin's neck and tugged the back of his robe aside to remove the last barrier between their bare skin. Jin tensed a little as Kame settled himself in the cleft, but relaxed when it became apparent that his ambitions didn't extend any further. Head injuries on one side and serious bodily trauma on the other didn't add up to it being a good time to take their physical relationship much further than it had ever been before.
"Okay?" Kame whispered.
Jin reached back over his shoulder and squeezed the hand that came to greet him. "Okay."
Time slowed down, after that. Jin writhed under Kame's hand, occasionally pushing back to meet eager hips as Kame pumped him in a rhythm to match his own thrusts, and whenever he thought he couldn't hold out much longer Kame proved him wrong with a few well-placed fingers. He listened to the sound of Kame's voice, no longer raspy and pained but frantic and passionate, and loved every second of it.
Kame's teeth, fully human now, nibbled absently at his exposed upper body in between fevered kisses. When he came, those teeth closed around the skin of Jin's shoulder and bit down, hard enough to mark, though not enough to draw blood. The dual points of sensation, of Kame's teeth on his skin and Kame's seed flowing warmly against him, propelled Jin towards his own climax and a final cry of relief.
"We messed up the sheets," Kame commented as he set to work with a box of tissues. "Morinaga will be scandalised."
Jin would've collapsed if he hadn't already been lying down, and fell heavily on his back once Kame had finished cleaning him up. "Good. Maybe he'll resign of his own accord."
Kame snorted and checked the bandages. "No further bleeding. How's your head?"
"All screwed up - how'd you expect?" He received a gentle swat on the hip for that.
"You know that's not what I'm asking."
Jin sighed. "Let's just say I think I'm going to be breakfasting on painkillers. I hate your house."
"You know what?" Kame planted a kiss on Jin's forehead and snuggled up next to him, pressing a button on the wall behind them to switch off the lamp. "I hate my house too. But you have to admit, it makes a good hiding place. Who comes out here of their own accord?"
"I did."
"Yeah, but you're a special case."
"I'm nothing like Aiba!"
"Not *that* kind of special, Jin..."
Jin lay back in the dark, Kame's breath warm against his skin, and thought about what the morning would bring. A happy ending for them both, or heartbreaks all round? Could everyone else forgive Kame, accept him back into their lives, and agree to forget the past?
He speculated aloud on this last point, but Kame didn't agree with him. "I don't want to forget," he explained. "I don't want it to happen again; I just want to move on."
"I'll remind you so you don't become like that again," Jin promised. "If you start acting like a beast, I'll put a leash on you."
That made them both laugh. "Jin, you know what the press will make of that, don't you?"
"And just think of the gossip! Ryo-chan would never let us live it down."
Kame groaned. "Actually, he's probably the only person I don't need to apologise to. He thought I was following my natural career progression as a diva."
"Don't divas need an entourage?"
Kame reached down to clasp Jin's hand, curling his fingers about the other man's and holding on for dear life. "I've got all the entourage I need right here next to me."