[JE] [JEF #5] Universal Appeal 4/10
Title: JE Fleet V: Universal Appeal 4/10
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame
Rating: R (m/m activity)
Genre: AU, crack, sci-fi
Word count: 35,850
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit.
Summary: The JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN goes AWOL in more ways than one.
A/N: Takes place straight after III, but won't make any sense unless you've read IV, so if you're new to the series, you might want to read them in order.
Chapter 4
"How can it be your fault?" Jin said. "Breaking the universe would be pretty impressive, even for you."
"I don't know exactly. But I know when the first weird thing happened. It didn't make much of an impression on me at the time. Now..."
Jin released Kame's hand and reached for the bag of popcorn he'd picked up on the way in. His argument was that if you were going to discuss such grand issues as setting the universe to rights, you needed sustenance, and the convenience store next to the hotel had reasonable prices. He offered some to Kame.
Food was the farthest thing from Kame's mind - though clearly not from his stomach, as he accepted a handful on autopilot. "I remembered when you mentioned Alpha Centauri. That shopping complex - do you remember when I left you all in that accessory shop for an hour?"
"Vividly. You don't want to know how many necklaces Koki made us look at. I thought you were never coming back from the pet shop."
"I...uh...didn't go to look at puppies," Kame admitted. "I went to the bank."
"Wasn't there an ATM right next door, though? If you needed cash, you could've used that."
"I didn't go for money, Jin." Kame wasn't sure how to explain the next bit. He'd never told anyone, not even his partner, what he'd done with Kizuna. They'd agreed, years ago, that the diamond was Kame's now - he'd paid a higher price for it than any of them. "Remember that job we pulled five years ago, hitting the delegates at Proxima Centauri? Before the convention got started, I took a shuttle to pick up supplies."
Jin had vivid memories of that too. "We were out of coffee. How did we ever manage before we got a ship with a replicator?"
Kame refrained from pointing out that the first ship they'd ever had with replicators was actually the KAT-TUN, which some idiot back on Earth had decided to entrust to Jin, probably in a fit of madness. No doubt they were regretting it now.
"While I was out getting groceries, I stopped at the bank to stash something in a safety deposit box. I wanted...I'm not sure. I think I wanted to keep the Kizuna diamond somewhere safe, far from us so I'd always have something to go back to. Does that make any sense?"
"You left the diamond at the bank?" Jin had occasionally wondered what had become of it; he hadn't seen it much after the six of them had left Lunar City Major together. Kame had kept it in a box, tucked away inside his favourite baseball penant. Jin knew Kame hadn't taken it with him when he ran out on them, but he hadn't realised the diamond had been moved years before that.
"Yeah. I had it with me at the time, and it seemed like a good idea. I used to carry it around, sometimes - almost like taking a pet for a walk, I guess. It was the butterfly wings."
The Kizuna diamond was so named because of a small flaw in the centre, shaped like a pair of entwined rings - a bond; these rings were set at an angle, giving them the appearance of a pair of wings. The overall effect was that of a butterfly trapped in crystal, wings frozen in place for all time.
"I left it there for years," Kame continued. "I didn't go near Alpha Centauri again till our recent trip."
"Did you take it out again?"
"No, just went to see it was still there. I must've been staring at it for ages, because the next thing I knew the security guard was calling down to me and asking if everything was all right."
Jin figured he couldn't mock Kame for losing himself, staring into the heart of the diamond - it wasn't as if hadn't done similar things. Yamapi used to give him Magic Eye pictures just to watch his reaction. But the one and only time Jin had looked - really, truly looked - at Kizuna, he thought he'd seen the rings, wings, whatever they were...thought he'd seen them move. He'd restricted himself to quick glances after that.
"Okay, so what was this weird thing you're talking about? Was something strange about the diamond?"
"Not the diamond." Kame took another handful of popcorn. "The security guard. When he let me in, he was reading a magazine with Captain Kimura on the front."
That didn't surprise Jin in the slightest. Kimura Takuya, one of the most famous (and indeed, infamous) officers of the JE Fleet, had never risen beyond the rank of captain because he had a far more lucrative side career as a holovid star, becoming a favourite all over the universe and sometimes playing himself in dramatisations of his own missions. His picture regularly graced magazine covers.
"Captain Kimura's all over the place," Jin said. "Nothing weird about that."
"It was the May issue of 'Star Studded' and he was in full dress uniform. I know this because the guard insisted on showing me every last picture and describing to me in great detail exactly what he wanted to do with the good captain."
"Charming."
"Isn't it just? On my way out, he was reading the same issue...but Kimura was in a suit."
"Must've been a different magazine."
"Oh, it was definitely the same one. The guard was waving it right in my face and describing his fantasies all over again. Only..."
Kame threw the remaining popcorn in his hand into the bin in the corner. He wasn't sure any of it would make it past the lump in his throat.
"Only?" Jin prompted.
"Only he wasn't calling him 'Captain Kimura' when I came out. It was 'Mr. Kimura'. The cover didn't mention the JE Fleet anymore, either."
Jin clutched his useless comm badge in despair. While he was by no means the most dedicated man in the JE Fleet, the thought of its loss upset him more than he cared to think about. "Do you think it's...gone? The JE Fleet?"
"If it exists, it's doing so without us, Jin."
"What about the rest of the United Solar Navy? I mean, that's just Earth's contribution, there's a lot more to it than that."
"How should I know!" Kame began pacing, repeating those same handful of steps between the back wall and the door over and over again while Jin watched him silently. "Sorry," he said after he'd banged his knee on the bed for the second time, "I didn't mean to yell at you. But don't ask me questions I can't possibly know the answer to, because that really doesn't help."
"Then can I borrow your datapad? We can just look it up." Jin was moving before Kame had even answered. Leaving the datapad plugged in, he quickly ran a search on the USN. All he got was the Universal Sports Network and an advert for the local branch of Ultra Slinky Negligee.
"I didn't know your tastes ran that way," Kame said, peering over Jin's shoulder at the tiny picture of a barely-there bra, "but I'm not sure you've got much to fill one. Yamapi, maybe..."
Yamapi. Jin dropped both the datapad and his jaw; Kame only caught these first of these.
"I was only joking, Jin."
"Yamapi." Jin pulled himself back together. "If there's no USN, there's no JE Fleet. If there's no JE Fleet, Yamapi couldn't have joined. He couldn't have tried to contact us when we went AWOL because we weren't! Aren't, even!"
"This isn't quite where I pictured my career going..."
Just to make sure, Jin checked the local network for maps of the Red Spot Terminal, looking to see what had become of the tiny USN base. "The local USN base looks like a LIPS building now," he told Kame. "And they've got a secondary one round the other side."
"They must have a bigger presence here now, then. Maybe they've taken over protection of the Sol System, who knows?"
"You could join up again," Jin suggested.
If looks could kill, Jin would have been nothing but space dust. "I've had enough of LIPS for one lifetime, thanks," Kame said. "The me in this universe is obviously very happy playing professional baseball, just the way I always wanted."
"And he got that way somewhere between you going into the bank and you coming out of it again. How can looking at a diamond change the universe?" Jin was completely mystified.
Kame, unhappily, wasn't. "When you start talking to it about your childhood dreams of playing baseball and lose all track of time."
"You talk to jewels?"
"You should see what Ueda talks to. It wasn't, like, a conversation or anything; I didn't expect it to talk back. But I had it wrapped in a penant and that made me feel all nostalgic, so..."
"And you think Kizuna did something? Kame, it's a diamond, not a magic genie. You wanting to play baseball doesn't mean you suddenly get to rearrange the universe for your own benefit."
"I didn't do it on purpose but it's the only thing that makes sense. Things started changing from that moment and I don't think it's all one massive coincidence."
"Fine." Jin preferred the straightforward approach anyway. If it was all a coincidence, he didn't think there was anything they could do to fix it. "Then all we have to do is go to back to that bank in Alpha Centauri, you talk to the diamond and ask it to make everything normal again."
"If it's still there." Kame collapsed on the bed again - carefully, because he wasn't sure it would survive otherwise - closed his eyes, and groaned. "The diamond was there in the first place because I put it there - after we stole the Yunaka back from LIPS, after Koki and Nakamaru had stolen the diamond from Earth to start with. If none of that's happened..."
"Not everything changed at once, though. It isn't as if everyone else disappeared the instant you left the ship or they'd have gone weeks ago. The changes must be gradual...and centred around you, I guess."
"Everyone else has changed except..." Kame didn't need to finish his sentence. He knew Jin understood. "Don't leave me," he whispered fiercely. "Ever."
Jin bit back a retort about how Kame was usually the one doing the leaving, and found better things to do with his mouth. The two of them couldn't stay joined at the lips forever but it was comforting to touch, to hold and be held, and forget for a moment that they were very, very far from home and everyone they loved.
"Want to see how much the bed can take?" Kame suggested with a wink.
"No," Jin said firmly. "You told me once that you wanted kids and in this universe, maybe you're supposed to have them. I don't want to wake up tomorrow and find myself pregnant!"
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame
Rating: R (m/m activity)
Genre: AU, crack, sci-fi
Word count: 35,850
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit.
Summary: The JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN goes AWOL in more ways than one.
A/N: Takes place straight after III, but won't make any sense unless you've read IV, so if you're new to the series, you might want to read them in order.
Chapter 4
"How can it be your fault?" Jin said. "Breaking the universe would be pretty impressive, even for you."
"I don't know exactly. But I know when the first weird thing happened. It didn't make much of an impression on me at the time. Now..."
Jin released Kame's hand and reached for the bag of popcorn he'd picked up on the way in. His argument was that if you were going to discuss such grand issues as setting the universe to rights, you needed sustenance, and the convenience store next to the hotel had reasonable prices. He offered some to Kame.
Food was the farthest thing from Kame's mind - though clearly not from his stomach, as he accepted a handful on autopilot. "I remembered when you mentioned Alpha Centauri. That shopping complex - do you remember when I left you all in that accessory shop for an hour?"
"Vividly. You don't want to know how many necklaces Koki made us look at. I thought you were never coming back from the pet shop."
"I...uh...didn't go to look at puppies," Kame admitted. "I went to the bank."
"Wasn't there an ATM right next door, though? If you needed cash, you could've used that."
"I didn't go for money, Jin." Kame wasn't sure how to explain the next bit. He'd never told anyone, not even his partner, what he'd done with Kizuna. They'd agreed, years ago, that the diamond was Kame's now - he'd paid a higher price for it than any of them. "Remember that job we pulled five years ago, hitting the delegates at Proxima Centauri? Before the convention got started, I took a shuttle to pick up supplies."
Jin had vivid memories of that too. "We were out of coffee. How did we ever manage before we got a ship with a replicator?"
Kame refrained from pointing out that the first ship they'd ever had with replicators was actually the KAT-TUN, which some idiot back on Earth had decided to entrust to Jin, probably in a fit of madness. No doubt they were regretting it now.
"While I was out getting groceries, I stopped at the bank to stash something in a safety deposit box. I wanted...I'm not sure. I think I wanted to keep the Kizuna diamond somewhere safe, far from us so I'd always have something to go back to. Does that make any sense?"
"You left the diamond at the bank?" Jin had occasionally wondered what had become of it; he hadn't seen it much after the six of them had left Lunar City Major together. Kame had kept it in a box, tucked away inside his favourite baseball penant. Jin knew Kame hadn't taken it with him when he ran out on them, but he hadn't realised the diamond had been moved years before that.
"Yeah. I had it with me at the time, and it seemed like a good idea. I used to carry it around, sometimes - almost like taking a pet for a walk, I guess. It was the butterfly wings."
The Kizuna diamond was so named because of a small flaw in the centre, shaped like a pair of entwined rings - a bond; these rings were set at an angle, giving them the appearance of a pair of wings. The overall effect was that of a butterfly trapped in crystal, wings frozen in place for all time.
"I left it there for years," Kame continued. "I didn't go near Alpha Centauri again till our recent trip."
"Did you take it out again?"
"No, just went to see it was still there. I must've been staring at it for ages, because the next thing I knew the security guard was calling down to me and asking if everything was all right."
Jin figured he couldn't mock Kame for losing himself, staring into the heart of the diamond - it wasn't as if hadn't done similar things. Yamapi used to give him Magic Eye pictures just to watch his reaction. But the one and only time Jin had looked - really, truly looked - at Kizuna, he thought he'd seen the rings, wings, whatever they were...thought he'd seen them move. He'd restricted himself to quick glances after that.
"Okay, so what was this weird thing you're talking about? Was something strange about the diamond?"
"Not the diamond." Kame took another handful of popcorn. "The security guard. When he let me in, he was reading a magazine with Captain Kimura on the front."
That didn't surprise Jin in the slightest. Kimura Takuya, one of the most famous (and indeed, infamous) officers of the JE Fleet, had never risen beyond the rank of captain because he had a far more lucrative side career as a holovid star, becoming a favourite all over the universe and sometimes playing himself in dramatisations of his own missions. His picture regularly graced magazine covers.
"Captain Kimura's all over the place," Jin said. "Nothing weird about that."
"It was the May issue of 'Star Studded' and he was in full dress uniform. I know this because the guard insisted on showing me every last picture and describing to me in great detail exactly what he wanted to do with the good captain."
"Charming."
"Isn't it just? On my way out, he was reading the same issue...but Kimura was in a suit."
"Must've been a different magazine."
"Oh, it was definitely the same one. The guard was waving it right in my face and describing his fantasies all over again. Only..."
Kame threw the remaining popcorn in his hand into the bin in the corner. He wasn't sure any of it would make it past the lump in his throat.
"Only?" Jin prompted.
"Only he wasn't calling him 'Captain Kimura' when I came out. It was 'Mr. Kimura'. The cover didn't mention the JE Fleet anymore, either."
Jin clutched his useless comm badge in despair. While he was by no means the most dedicated man in the JE Fleet, the thought of its loss upset him more than he cared to think about. "Do you think it's...gone? The JE Fleet?"
"If it exists, it's doing so without us, Jin."
"What about the rest of the United Solar Navy? I mean, that's just Earth's contribution, there's a lot more to it than that."
"How should I know!" Kame began pacing, repeating those same handful of steps between the back wall and the door over and over again while Jin watched him silently. "Sorry," he said after he'd banged his knee on the bed for the second time, "I didn't mean to yell at you. But don't ask me questions I can't possibly know the answer to, because that really doesn't help."
"Then can I borrow your datapad? We can just look it up." Jin was moving before Kame had even answered. Leaving the datapad plugged in, he quickly ran a search on the USN. All he got was the Universal Sports Network and an advert for the local branch of Ultra Slinky Negligee.
"I didn't know your tastes ran that way," Kame said, peering over Jin's shoulder at the tiny picture of a barely-there bra, "but I'm not sure you've got much to fill one. Yamapi, maybe..."
Yamapi. Jin dropped both the datapad and his jaw; Kame only caught these first of these.
"I was only joking, Jin."
"Yamapi." Jin pulled himself back together. "If there's no USN, there's no JE Fleet. If there's no JE Fleet, Yamapi couldn't have joined. He couldn't have tried to contact us when we went AWOL because we weren't! Aren't, even!"
"This isn't quite where I pictured my career going..."
Just to make sure, Jin checked the local network for maps of the Red Spot Terminal, looking to see what had become of the tiny USN base. "The local USN base looks like a LIPS building now," he told Kame. "And they've got a secondary one round the other side."
"They must have a bigger presence here now, then. Maybe they've taken over protection of the Sol System, who knows?"
"You could join up again," Jin suggested.
If looks could kill, Jin would have been nothing but space dust. "I've had enough of LIPS for one lifetime, thanks," Kame said. "The me in this universe is obviously very happy playing professional baseball, just the way I always wanted."
"And he got that way somewhere between you going into the bank and you coming out of it again. How can looking at a diamond change the universe?" Jin was completely mystified.
Kame, unhappily, wasn't. "When you start talking to it about your childhood dreams of playing baseball and lose all track of time."
"You talk to jewels?"
"You should see what Ueda talks to. It wasn't, like, a conversation or anything; I didn't expect it to talk back. But I had it wrapped in a penant and that made me feel all nostalgic, so..."
"And you think Kizuna did something? Kame, it's a diamond, not a magic genie. You wanting to play baseball doesn't mean you suddenly get to rearrange the universe for your own benefit."
"I didn't do it on purpose but it's the only thing that makes sense. Things started changing from that moment and I don't think it's all one massive coincidence."
"Fine." Jin preferred the straightforward approach anyway. If it was all a coincidence, he didn't think there was anything they could do to fix it. "Then all we have to do is go to back to that bank in Alpha Centauri, you talk to the diamond and ask it to make everything normal again."
"If it's still there." Kame collapsed on the bed again - carefully, because he wasn't sure it would survive otherwise - closed his eyes, and groaned. "The diamond was there in the first place because I put it there - after we stole the Yunaka back from LIPS, after Koki and Nakamaru had stolen the diamond from Earth to start with. If none of that's happened..."
"Not everything changed at once, though. It isn't as if everyone else disappeared the instant you left the ship or they'd have gone weeks ago. The changes must be gradual...and centred around you, I guess."
"Everyone else has changed except..." Kame didn't need to finish his sentence. He knew Jin understood. "Don't leave me," he whispered fiercely. "Ever."
Jin bit back a retort about how Kame was usually the one doing the leaving, and found better things to do with his mouth. The two of them couldn't stay joined at the lips forever but it was comforting to touch, to hold and be held, and forget for a moment that they were very, very far from home and everyone they loved.
"Want to see how much the bed can take?" Kame suggested with a wink.
"No," Jin said firmly. "You told me once that you wanted kids and in this universe, maybe you're supposed to have them. I don't want to wake up tomorrow and find myself pregnant!"