[JE] [FAIRY] All the Better (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hoodie) 2/2
Title: All the Better (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hoodie) 2/2
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Rating: G
Genre: Fairytale fluff, pre-slash
Word count: 14,495
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit
All the Better (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hoodie) 2/2
Waking up had never been fun for Jin, who wasn't a morning person at the best of times, but waking up on the floor, badly disoriented and aching all over, made him want to curl up and sleep for another hundred years. Not that he could curl so much as a finger right now.
"Akanishi?"
Jin scanned the room through half-lidded eyes till he found Kame, who'd evidently managed to get the fire going again. "Yeah?" he croaked.
Kame knelt down next to him, relief in his eyes. "I didn't want to move you in case I broke something, sorry. How are you feeling?"
"Like I wouldn't notice if something was broken," Jin said, trying for a tentative finger curl and wincing. "I had no idea my grandmother could weigh twice as much as me."
"Um..." Kame's cheeks turned pink. "You should stop thinking of her as your grandmother. It'll help later."
"Mmm?" Jin tried to turn his head to get a better view of the room. His grandmother didn't appear to be around. "I knew she didn't like me - I just didn't expect her to try to kill me."
"I don't think she was after you - she kept trying to get you out of here."
Hazy memories of Kame being flirted with and pawed surfaced in Jin's mind. "True. Good thing you didn't drink the cider."
He attempted to push himself up from the floor, but only succeeded in discovering exciting new forms of pain. His back felt like one enormous bruise.
"Easy," Kame warned when Jin was done groaning. "You hit the floor pretty hard. Maybe you should keep still for now."
"But it's not safe!"
"It's safe." Kame bowed his head. "I'm sorry, Akanishi...Jin."
And then Jin realised why his grandmother was nowhere to be seen.
"A hunter on Saturdays, huh?" A weak joke, accompanied by a weaker smile.
"Yeah."
Jin didn't ask what Kame had done with his grandmother. He didn't want to know.
"I don't need a license for a modified baseball bat." Kame began to ramble. "If I carried a gun I'd have to have all sorts of paperwork, but nobody cares if you can stun people with a piece of sporting equipment. It's actually really convenient, except when I take the wrong one out by mistake. I fried a couple of balls in practice last week, and-"
"How long was I out?" Jin interrupted.
"Long enough. A couple of hours."
Jin definitely wasn't making it back in time for dinner. "Did you find your friend?"
"Still in one piece. He's with a couple of other guys in the back room, all of them heavily sedated. She must've been dosing them periodically. Makes me very, very glad I didn't touch the cider - or the tomato juice."
"I'm glad your friend's okay." At least something good had come from this journey.
"There's...uh..." Kame licked his lips. "There's a furnace behind the house. For disposing of the remains. I found...well, I think she'd been at this a while."
"You burned her, didn't you?" Jin's voice came out thick and hoarse, but not from sadness. It was hard to be upset for himself, after what had just happened, though he thought his parents might feel otherwise.
"I had to," Kame said quietly. "We're still alive. I can't even begin to guess how many people aren't."
"Oh."
Jin lay silent while Kame searched around in the kitchen and returned with a glass of water and straw. He still couldn't sit up, too stiff to unbend. Kame helped him drink, wiping away the spillage with clean, freshly-scrubbed hands. Jin found himself looking for signs of blood anyway.
At least he hadn't spilled much of his own. His cosy red hoodie was now missing the better part of one shoulder, and the T-shirt beneath it was torn, but his flesh remained almost unbroken. Kame had made certain of that, examining him carefully for injuries. The wolf had caught him in the shoulder with a single tooth, grazing just deep enough to draw blood; a minor wound, now cleaned and disinfected.
"Your bunny's going to be frantic by now," Jin said. He couldn't see his watch, but the curtains were still open and night looked to be well on its way.
"He'll wait; Koki's absolutely loyal." Kame slipped a hand under Jin's back. "If I help, do you think you can get up? You can't spend the night on the floor, it'll just make you feel worse."
"Spend the night?"
"I can't get a signal out here, you're in no shape to walk home, and I can't leave without the sleeping beauties in the back, anyway. We're stuck here till morning."
Stuck with a couple of unconscious would-be snacks and a baseball player who danced with poles and hunted wolves in his spare time. In his dead grandmother's hou- no, in the wolf's den. Jin gave himself a mental shake. There was a wolf, and now it was dead. End of story.
With Kame's help he managed to rise, relieved that nothing appeared to be broken. His back screamed obscenities at him until he stood fully upright. At least his legs seemed to be working okay.
"Is it worth seeing if there's any ice in the house?" Kame asked.
"You are not icing my entire back. I'll freeze to death."
Kame insisted on checking anyway, which is how Jin ended up lying face-down on the couch, with a teatowel full of ice resting on his lower back, which had taken the brunt of the impact and had given him the occasional problem ever since he'd fallen off a swing in his early teens. Unfortunately his front wasn't in much better condition after having the wolf barrel into him.
"Stop squirming or you'll fall off the couch."
"I can't help it," Jin grumbled. "There's no comfortable position." He tried to lie on his side, but that only made the ice pack slip.
"Here." Kame retrieved the ice pack, setting it back in place as he gently nudged Jin flat again. "You're a terrible fidget."
"I always fidget when I'm nervous."
"You're nervous?"
"You're not?"
Kame smirked. "I'm armed, remember? And this isn't out of the ordinary for me."
A very strange sideline for a professional athlete to have, Jin thought. He wasn't even going to touch the pole-dancing. "Why? I mean, isn't this kind of weird for a baseball player?"
"I'm a third son," Kame explained. "Everyone expected me to go off adventuring from the moment I could walk, but the first time I saw a baseball game, I fell in love. I just do this to keep my hand in."
"Ah."
Jin tried to nod sagely but the angle made his neck hurt. The third son always had to make his own way in life, and traditionally found fame and fortune through rescuing wealthy damsels in distress, slaying fearsome beasts, and saving endangered villages - sometimes all three at once. He'd always thought it was a full-time job. Clearly not.
"What about you?" Kame asked.
"I'm a firstborn." Jin took another sip from his glass of water, still using the straw. "I get to inherit a clothes store. But..."
Kame's eyes lit up at the mention of clothes. "But...?"
"I...um...I sing. I'm in a band with a couple of friends, and we do gigs around town, sometimes. That's what I want to do with my life - make music. My little brother can inherit." Jin sighed. "My parents are cool with it, but my grandmother thinks - thought - it wasn't a suitable career. I guess that's why she hated me; for letting the family down or something."
"I'm not so sure about that. Let me show you something I found while you were out cold."
Kame disappeared for a minute, returning with three large, leatherbound books. Photo albums. He held the first one open where Jin could see it but left it up to him to reach over and turn the pages. After the first dozen, Jin stopped, leaving Kame to flip to the end. He didn't want to see the rest.
Each page held two photos, all of them to be found in the albums at Jin's house - only in Jin's house, his face was intact. Not so here, where his grandmother had been liberal with the black marker, and even gone so far as to cut out his face in a few. From the chubby child to awkward teenager, and beyond to the more-mature-but-still-awkward man he'd become, not a year of his life wasn't represented in some way.
The other albums contained more of the same. "I think she might've been the tiniest bit obsessed," Kame said.
Jin slumped forward, not caring that he squashed his nose into the cushion. Whoever - whatever - his grandmother had been, rational wasn't it. Who put that much effort into hating someone they hadn't even seen in five years?
He felt a hand ruffle the hair at the base of his neck. Kame, offering comfort; warm fingers brushing up against bare skin for a moment before vanishing.
After a few minutes Kame returned from the kitchen with Jin's food parcel. "I think it's safe to assume anything in here won't contain a sedative," he said. "Unless your mother has a hidden agenda."
"My mother's cooking's to die for, but not literally."
No wonder the bag had been so heavy - taking out the casserole dish in the bottom lightened it considerably. Kame reheated the casserole and found them some plates and cutlery; by the time the meal was ready, Jin had managed to right himself, sitting with the ice pack carefully wedged between his back and the couch cushions. He didn't feel much like eating but hot food sounded good - he needed the warmth.
Eating took a while because Jin's shoulders hurt when he moved his arms. Kame, doing a bad job of concealing his inner neatfreak, was so impatient to do the dishes before everything congealed that he actually offered to feed Jin himself. Jin politely declined. He felt helpless enough already, moving with all the speed and grace of a centenarian. If it took him an hour to clean his plate, so be it - he'd do it under his own power or collapse in the process.
While he waited, Kame busied himself searching the house for signs of the previous victims. When Jin took a slow walk to the bathroom he discovered Kame on his knees in the bedroom, unrolling a large sheet of parchment on the floor.
"I found this in the wardrobe." Kame grabbed an alarm clock from the nightstand to hold down a corner. "Your name's on it."
Intrigued, Jin tried to peek, then realised if he sat down before reaching the bathroom he might never get there. "I'll be right back."
He wasn't, but by the time he returned, Kame had found weights for the remaining corners and the parchment took up half the floor space.
"Here." Kame pointed to a cluster of names down the end of sheet. "This is you, and I guess that's your brother?"
Jin lowered himself down onto the pillow Kame had helpfully set out for him. "Yeah, that's us. And my parents. That's my...um...that was my grandmother." He pointed her out, just above his dad. "I wonder why she's written in red?"
"So are you. So's your dad." Kame leaned over for a closer look. "If the families are going left to right, all the firstborn children are in red on your father's side. Everyone else is written in black."
The family tree, for that's what it was, spanned twenty-five generations though only restricted branches: direct descendants of the firstborn child of each generation, on Jin's grandmother's side. Other children might have married and reproduced, but if so, the details weren't recorded.
"The firstborn of a firstborn of a firstborn," Kame mused. "I wonder why that makes you special?"
Jin tried to shrug and failed. "My dad's a great guy but I wouldn't say he was anything special, and my grandmother..." he trailed off.
"We know how she was special," Kame said, grimacing. "You don't suppose...?"
"I think I'd have noticed if my dad turned into a wolf, Kame."
"What about this guy?" Kame pointed to a name in red further up the parchment. "Your dad's maternal grandfather. What do you know about him?"
"Not much." Jin's parents had told him stories, of course, but he'd never been good at retaining details. This one had a more memorable ending than most, though. "Uh...he was a farmer...he used to have a cottage out here somewhere...oh, and his wife killed him with a shotgun!"
Kame shuffled a couple of inches back. "Are all your relatives insane?"
"No! She just had bad eyesight, okay? They were having a problem with foxes getting into the henhouse, and when she heard one breaking in one night, she shot it. There wasn't much light. When she went over with a lantern to pick up the corpse, she discovered it hadn't been a fox after all. It's not like she hated him or anything."
"A fox." Kame licked his lips, looking very uncomfortable. "Um, Jin, you probably don't want to hear this, but when your grandmother died, her body became human again. Your great-grandfather might've been a fox."
"Mom always said he was pretty good-looking for an old guy," Jin joked, trying to make light of it. He didn't like where this was going. If his great-grandfather turned into a fox and his grandmother turned into a wolf, what did that mean for his dad? What did that mean...for him?
He didn't realise he'd started shivering until Kame wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. There was no heating in the bedroom; the temperature seemed to have dropped well below freezing in a matter of seconds. His blood had become ice water, slowly forcing its way through his veins until it stopped moving altogether.
"I don't have any proof," Kame said. "I'm only speculating, okay? It doesn't mean anything. Maybe your great-grandmother's eyesight really was that bad."
"And maybe I'm going to turn into a panther or something." Jin hugged himself under the blanket - carefully, because it hurt. "I'd know, wouldn't I?"
"I..I don't know. But I hear the talking animals were originally humans who were cursed into changing form. They kept changing back and forth till eventually they stuck in animal form, and ever since then, their descendants have had the power of speech."
And an appetite for video games, Jin thought, thinking of Junno. "Your talking rabbit, Koki? How did you find him?"
Kame grinned. "He found me. I got into a fight with this pitcher from the Hanshin Tigers and suddenly this tiny bundle of fluff leapt between us and tried to scratch his eyes out. Since then he goes everywhere with me."
"Everywhere except here."
"I didn't want him to get eaten. If he's by himself he'll hide if he sees danger coming."
Jin had trouble picturing the "guard rabbit" hiding from anything, but presumably Kame knew him best. "Must be nice to have a little friend like that. We don't have any in our house.
"Well, there's this toy poodle who lives in the neighbourhood and comes to play sometimes; my mom really likes him. That's the closest I've ever come to having a pet."
"Your mom really likes him?"
"Yeah, she's always playing games with him when he shows up. I think he just goes along with it for her cooking."
"Are your dad and the dog ever around at the same time?"
"Sure they are!" Jin closed his eyes and tried to recall a time when he'd seen the two together. Surely he must've done? Pin was a family pet, of sorts.
But try as he might, no memory came to mind, and he was forced to admit to Kame that no, he didn't remember ever seeing the two of them in the same place at the same time.
"I think that answers the question about your dad," Kame said. "At least a toy poodle's a lot nicer than a wolf? I don't think anyone's likely to try to kill him."
The bottom dropped out of Jin's world, sending him into freefall. His family had always been weird, so he thought, but this was utterly ridiculous. He stared at the family tree, thought about the men and women who'd come before him. People he'd never met, who'd lived and died long before he'd been born. What might they have been? Playful, gentle creatures, or fierce, hungry killers?
Kame let the silence hang for a bit, giving him space. Jin continued to stare, scarcely noticing when Kame rolled up the parchment. It didn't matter that there were no longer any names before his eyes; he fixed on the cracks between the floorboards instead.
When even those began to blur, Kame tapped his knee, bringing everything back into focus. "Hey. You're not your grandmother, or your great-grandfather, or any of the people we have no idea about. You're not even your dad. You're you, whoever that turns out to be."
"Or whatever."
"Either way, I think you need to talk to your parents. Maybe they can tell you something."
"It would've been helpful if they'd told me about my grandmother before sending me here," Jin said tightly. "Less chance of me getting killed."
"I still don't think she was trying to kill you - if she'd succeeded, the line of firstborns would've ended with you. Maybe that's why you're blacked out in all the pictures, because you're off-limits. She couldn't kill you, so she killed a whole bunch of other young men instead."
"If this is supposed to cheer me up, it's not working."
"Sorry. But she could've torn you to pieces. All she did was rip your clothing a little and knock you down."
"It still hurts," Jin pointed out.
"Better than ending up like..." Kame waved his hand in the direction of the furnace, and Jin had to agree.
Kame fixed the blanket more snugly around Jin's shoulders and left to check on Ueda and the others, who were bound to wake up at some point and would no doubt be in quite a state. Jin spent the next ten minutes trying to ease himself back to his feet, using the side of the bed for support. Sitting down on the pillow had been a mistake.
"Still asleep," Kame said when he returned. "Are you comfortable like that?"
Jin had one hand on the edge of the bed, the other halfway down the bedspread, and one knee still on the floor. He glared up at Kame. "Does it look like I'm comfortable?"
"It looks like you're Sadako trying to crawl out of the television."
Horror movies. Jin didn't fare well with those. He stubbornly ignored Kame's offers of help until his other leg gave out and he had to accept a pair of steadying hands pulling him upright.
"It'll be worse in the morning," Kame said. "Better move while you still can."
"It's worse now." Jin patted his left shoulder. "It's throbbing and making everything else feel worse."
"Where you were bleeding? Let me have a look."
The injury was actually small enough to require only a plaster, but when Kame tugged Jin's torn T-shirt aside to remove it, it quickly became obvious that complications had set in. Jin couldn't see much until he looked in a mirror, and then...
"I thought you disinfected it?" he asked Kame.
"I did! I..." Kame touched a fingertip to the plaster, now stuck on a swollen purple patch the size of his fist, so sensitive Jin gasped and pulled away immediately. "Sorry!"
"I'm going to die because I let myself be talked into delivering a stupid food parcel," Jin moaned. His whole body pulsed in time with the wound, his rhythms gradually adapting themselves in a quest to become one thrumming, swollen mass of flesh. He seized Kame's arm for balance, too unsteady to keep his feet unaided.
"Maybe you'd better sit down."
Kame had to help Jin sit on the edge of the bed; once there he doubled over as pain shot up the inside his spine, forcing him not to straighten up but to curl in on himself. Sitting upright proved impossible. Another spasm hit; Jin's feet left the floor. The cramped position made it hard to breathe but he kept trying, drinking in huge gulps of air whenever he could, mostly so he could keep repeating, "I'm going to die".
"You're not going to die," Kame assured him, not sounding terribly convincing. He wore an encouraging smile, to be sure, but it faltered whenever Jin blinked.
"I'm going to die."
"You're not going to die."
"Find my parents and tell them I loved them."
"Tell them yourself." Kame sat down on the bed and stroked a gentle line down Jin's back. "Hey, your spine feels kind of-"
Exactly how his spine felt, Jin never got to hear, because the sound it made as it snapped drowned out Kame's voice.
The next two minutes rushed past in a blur of pain and nausea: bones grinding against each other as they shrank down to near nothing, fur forcing its way through reluctant skin, tiny claws sprouting from the ends of all four limbs. Jin tried to scream but couldn't find the breath in his shrinking lungs. The world grew before his eyes, spinning larger and larger until the dizzying circles stopped, and he realised his feet were so far away from the ground that he might as well have been sitting on the edge of a cliff.
And Kame! Looking down at him with wide, horrified eyes. Down from such a height...
"Jin?" Kame whispered. "Can you still hear me?"
Jin opened his mouth to respond and got the shock of his life when his teeth turned out to be longer - and sharper - than they should've been. He had to speak carefully to avoid lisping. "I can hear you." Why was his voice so high? And so quiet? Why were his clothes lying on the bed?
"Thank goodness." Kame's eyes narrowed a little. "Don't...don't be alarmed. I'm going to get a mirror; just sit tight for a second."
"Sitting", tight or otherwise, was proving to be a little uncomfortable, as Jin must've been on some kind of fluffy cushion that stopped him leaning back. At least he didn't feel so stiff and bruised anymore.
When Kame returned with a small handmirror, he found out why.
"You have a very cute tail?" Kame offered.
"I don't want a cute tail!" Jin turned sideways to get a better look at it. It did curve pretty nicely, he had to admit - a reddish-brown bush arching over his back, matching his fluffy, tufty ears and the bulk of his fur, save the creamy white underbelly and dark, beady eyes. For a creature less than ten inches tall, he cut quite a stylish figure.
But he still didn't want to be a squirrel.
"I hate my family."
"You don't hate your family," Kame said. "You just don't want to be a squirrel."
"Would you want to be a squirrel?"
"Well...no, but there are worse things you could be, right? And I don't think you're going to be stuck like that forever." He ran a finger lightly over the bush of Jin's tail, smiling when Jin squeaked and scampered away. "Your dad obviously doesn't spend all his time as a toy poodle; I think you'd have noticed."
Jin ran across the bedspread and up a pillow, finally climbing up to the top of the headboard so he could talk to Kame without feeling like a midget. Squirrel claws had to be good for something. Kame sat down next to the pillow, managing to keep his hands to himself.
"Pin didn't even start showing up till about ten years ago."
"And you've never turned into a squirrel before, right?" Kame's brows furrowed in thought. "Did anything strange happen to your dad before the dog first appeared?"
"You expect me to be able to think seriously about anything when I'm like this?"
"I appreciate that your brain's just shrunk, but try anyway."
Jin sighed, rubbing his forepaws together as he scrabbled around in his memory for anything that might be relevant. It was really hard to focus when he had a terrible craving for chestnuts. "Um...he won an award for looking good in hats?"
"Perhaps something a little less positive?"
"Um...oh!" This had to be it. Jin couldn't think of anything else. "He used to go hunting sometimes, back when there were still deer in these woods. One day he came back bleeding, said he'd had a run-in with a wolf." He paused, then added, "Come to think of it, that was just before my grandmother moved all the way out here. She used to live a lot closer to us."
"Must've been her," Kame said. "The timing's too perfect."
"She drew blood from my dad, he plays fetch and wags his tail. She drew blood from me, I chitter higher than a chipmunk and would kill for a chestnut."
"So maybe it's always in your genes, and that's what activates it? Being bled by someone else who's got it? And that's why it hasn't happened to you till now."
"I definitely need to talk to my dad." Jin tried to settle his tail more comfortably but overbalanced, tumbling down onto the pillow when he couldn't dig his claws into the headboard in time.
Kame burst out laughing while he lay there in a daze. "This is better than YouTube!"
Jin gave him his best indignant look, which mostly involved angling his whiskers at a suitably disapproving angle. It worried him how naturally the movement came. He wasn't a squirrel, damnit. He was a human being, a young man with hopes and dreams and a battered six-string with which to convey them. He had two legs, not four. He didn't have claws. He didn't have whiskers. He didn't have a big, bushy tail that trailed along behind him like a permanently attached body pillow.
But for the moment, he had all these things. He had a body that moved, swift and light, wherever he wanted it to. He had powerful hind legs that let him leap beyond his reach.
And he had soft, beautiful fur that made people want to stroke it, the way Kame was doing now.
"Sorry," Kame said. "I couldn't resist. I love animals, and you're..."
"Not an animal," Jin said, but he didn't ask him to stop, either. It felt kind of nice to be petted, though he didn't generally like people touching his head as a human. Kame had gentle fingers, clearly used to handling animals; Jin wondered if Koki got petted like this.
"Tell me if I press too hard, okay?"
Content for now, Jin nuzzled the short, strong fingers while their owner recollected all the stories he'd heard about talking animals and their origins. Some were interesting; none were pretty. There was the one about the servant who'd stolen money from his master and had a curse placed upon him, that he might become an animal who could never use the money for himself. Or the one about the witch who'd turned her cheating lover into the pig she thought he resembled, only letting him return to human form on those nights when she had a use for him. The most upbeat of the bunch involved a woman who'd fallen in love with a woodland god and been "blessed" with the ability to shift into one of his creatures.
"I hope the stories aren't true," Jin said. "I don't want to be a squirrel forever. Dad would chase me round the garden."
"There must be a way for you to change back. Maybe if you focus hard on being human?"
Jin scratched his cheek with a forepaw. "I've been trying that since you made me look in the mirror. No luck."
Kame refused to be deterred. "Maybe it's a time-based thing and you have to wait it out. If you're still a squirrel in the morning I'll make sure you get home okay. Your dad should know what to do."
The idea of making his way home through the woods in squirrel form - especially across the rope bridge - terrified Jin. On the other hand, so did showing up at home like this. His brother would never let him live it down.
"I promise," Kame said. "I can carry you home. We'll have to stop for Koki on the way."
That wasn't the only thing they had to stop for. "I need to write an introductory letter for a bear and play games with a fish," Jin said, feeling ridiculous but knowing Kame would understand.
"Then I'd better let you get some rest." Kame gave him one final rub behind the ear and pulled away. "It's pretty late. Let's worry about getting you back in the morning."
He disappeared out the door before Jin could argue. Jin flailed about on the bed for a bit, wondering if he was going to have the place to himself all night and if so, how he was going to switch off the light, when Kame returned and began stripping off his shirt and jeans.
"There's only the one bed." Kame sounded embarrassed. "I mean, it's big enough for two but with you like this..."
"Just don't squish me."
One pillow went on top of the bedspread for Jin, where Kame couldn't accidentally roll on top of him in the night, and Kame slipped beneath, clad in just his underwear - and that, he'd confessed, he was only wearing because he was with company. At home he'd be naked.
Jin didn't care what Kame wore, so long as he didn't roll around the bed in his sleep. Sharing a bed wasn't something he did often; sharing one with a man nearly eight times his height was quite outside the realm of his experience. He curled up on the pillow, forepaws tucked under his chin and his tail snuggled close, and waited to fall asleep.
After an hour of lying in the dark, sleep had yet to find him and rolling around restlessly only carried him off the pillow, down towards Kame. He, at least, seemed to be getting some sleep; his soft, regular breaths provided a soothing alternative to the silence of a dead woman's house. Knowing his grandmother hadn't meant for any of this to happen didn't make it any easier for Jin to be lying in her bed, in a house so full of tragic memories and twisted emotions that it deserved to be burned to the ground.
Jin crept close enough to find the gap between Kame's body and the covers. He tried to be stealthy, but with a tail like his, it was hard to keep from tickling him in his sleep. Fortunately Kame didn't appear to be ticklish. He stirred slightly when Jin settled down beside him; nothing more than a brief sigh. Exhausted by his long day and comfortable sharing Kame's warmth, Jin found sleep much easier to come by now.
-----
Come morning, Jin almost wished he'd stayed on his pillow. He'd still have been embarrassed by waking up naked in the company of a man he'd only met the previous afternoon, but at least he'd have been spared the indignity of waking up naked and spooning with that selfsame man, himself wearing only a pair of briefs.
Perhaps he could extricate himself before Kame woke up. He inched forwards, slowly making his way to the other side of the bed, but Kame's breaths against his shoulder changed in pattern and he knew it would be useless to keep trying.
"'Morning," Jin mumbled, glad Kame couldn't see his face.
"'Morning." Kame threw one arm over Jin's chest and gave him a quick squeeze. So much for escaping. "You're not a squirrel anymore!"
"And I'm not in agony either." Jin had been worried that returning to normal would bring all the pain rushing back, but evidently shapeshifting had some pleasant side-effects. "You won't have to carry me home."
"I couldn't do it now, anyway." Kame laughed, a husky, drink required, first thing in the morning laugh that sang through Jin's skin to the blood and bones beneath. "You're much lighter as a squirrel. Much more fun to pet, too." He smoothed down a handful of Jin's hair to illustrate, caught his fingers in a tangle and gave up. "See?
Jin shook his hair free, then returned to his original plan of putting some distance between himself and Kame. It didn't work very well, largely because Kame followed him across the bed.
"If you were still a squirrel this morning," Kame began, "I was going to sit you on my shoulder while we walked. Like a pirate's parrot, but cuddlier. I always wanted to be a pirate."
"Couldn't fit it into your schedule?"
"Can't be at sea and at practice." Kame stopped just short of slotting himself up against Jin's bare back. "I'm on the road a lot. If I...when I'm next around here, would it be okay if I took you for lunch or something? I kind of feel like I owe you. Not that lunch makes up for it, but-"
"If anything, you owe my dad." Jin had no idea what he was going to tell his parents about his grandmother. "Come back with me and explain to him why his mother's dead."
"I'd planned on it, whether I had to carry you back or not."
"You saved my life," Jin said, pleased that Kame hadn't been intending to leave him by himself to make the awkward explanations. "Probably. So you don't owe me anything."
"Can you turn around so I don't have to talk to your back?"
"My clothes are on the floor. And I mean all my clothes."
"Being in bed with a naked man is not going to bother me, trust me."
Reluctantly, Jin rolled over, holding himself right on the edge of the bed till Kame backed up a little to give him space. "You really don't have to buy me lunch to make up for saving my life, honest."
"Okay; then," Kame's smile was far too bright for someone who'd only just woken up, "can I buy you lunch just because I'd like to spend some time with you that doesn't involve violence, shapeshifting, and demented relatives?"
There was something to be said for the straightforward approach. Jin couldn't help but laugh. "You wait until we're both practically naked in the same bed to ask me out on a date?"
"At least I didn't ask while you were a squirrel," Kame said. "I didn't want you to get any ideas about me."
"You just like me for my tail, don't you?"
"Not just your tail. Your ears are pretty cute too. So soft, and furry, and-"
"This isn't helping me not get ideas about you."
"You can ask Koki for a character reference?"
"I don't think that would help," Jin said. "Your bunny has a very obvious crush on you."
"It's not mutual!" Kame protested, though both of them were far too amused to take the notion seriously.
"In that case..." Jin's laughter faded. He didn't want to turn Kame down flat, and he certainly wasn't opposed to the idea of going out and seeing what happened, but the current situation was less than ideal. He didn't want Kame thinking of him as some weird squirrel guy with crazy relatives. "Come back and see me when I'm playing a gig. You've just seen me about as low as I'm ever going to get. You should see me at my best, too."
"I could take a peek under the bedspread for that," Kame teased, so Jin hit him with a pillow until he agreed. "All right, all right, no peeking. But I'd like to see that sometime. You've seen what I do, so show me what you do."
"I've never seen you play baseball," Jin said. "And you're only a hunter on Saturdays, right? Today's Sunday. What do you do on Sundays?"
"Apparently I play escort to semi-conscious men, play games with fish, make excuses to panicked rabbits, explain myself to parents of prospective boyfriends and hope they don't have me arrested." Kame propped himself up on one elbow and grinned across the bed at Jin. "After breakfast. I'm pretty sure I can find something in your mom's food parcel to feed us all. Any requests?"
Jin's stomach growled at the mention of food. It wasn't in the direction he expected. "I could really go for some nuts..."
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Rating: G
Genre: Fairytale fluff, pre-slash
Word count: 14,495
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit
All the Better (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hoodie) 2/2
Waking up had never been fun for Jin, who wasn't a morning person at the best of times, but waking up on the floor, badly disoriented and aching all over, made him want to curl up and sleep for another hundred years. Not that he could curl so much as a finger right now.
"Akanishi?"
Jin scanned the room through half-lidded eyes till he found Kame, who'd evidently managed to get the fire going again. "Yeah?" he croaked.
Kame knelt down next to him, relief in his eyes. "I didn't want to move you in case I broke something, sorry. How are you feeling?"
"Like I wouldn't notice if something was broken," Jin said, trying for a tentative finger curl and wincing. "I had no idea my grandmother could weigh twice as much as me."
"Um..." Kame's cheeks turned pink. "You should stop thinking of her as your grandmother. It'll help later."
"Mmm?" Jin tried to turn his head to get a better view of the room. His grandmother didn't appear to be around. "I knew she didn't like me - I just didn't expect her to try to kill me."
"I don't think she was after you - she kept trying to get you out of here."
Hazy memories of Kame being flirted with and pawed surfaced in Jin's mind. "True. Good thing you didn't drink the cider."
He attempted to push himself up from the floor, but only succeeded in discovering exciting new forms of pain. His back felt like one enormous bruise.
"Easy," Kame warned when Jin was done groaning. "You hit the floor pretty hard. Maybe you should keep still for now."
"But it's not safe!"
"It's safe." Kame bowed his head. "I'm sorry, Akanishi...Jin."
And then Jin realised why his grandmother was nowhere to be seen.
"A hunter on Saturdays, huh?" A weak joke, accompanied by a weaker smile.
"Yeah."
Jin didn't ask what Kame had done with his grandmother. He didn't want to know.
"I don't need a license for a modified baseball bat." Kame began to ramble. "If I carried a gun I'd have to have all sorts of paperwork, but nobody cares if you can stun people with a piece of sporting equipment. It's actually really convenient, except when I take the wrong one out by mistake. I fried a couple of balls in practice last week, and-"
"How long was I out?" Jin interrupted.
"Long enough. A couple of hours."
Jin definitely wasn't making it back in time for dinner. "Did you find your friend?"
"Still in one piece. He's with a couple of other guys in the back room, all of them heavily sedated. She must've been dosing them periodically. Makes me very, very glad I didn't touch the cider - or the tomato juice."
"I'm glad your friend's okay." At least something good had come from this journey.
"There's...uh..." Kame licked his lips. "There's a furnace behind the house. For disposing of the remains. I found...well, I think she'd been at this a while."
"You burned her, didn't you?" Jin's voice came out thick and hoarse, but not from sadness. It was hard to be upset for himself, after what had just happened, though he thought his parents might feel otherwise.
"I had to," Kame said quietly. "We're still alive. I can't even begin to guess how many people aren't."
"Oh."
Jin lay silent while Kame searched around in the kitchen and returned with a glass of water and straw. He still couldn't sit up, too stiff to unbend. Kame helped him drink, wiping away the spillage with clean, freshly-scrubbed hands. Jin found himself looking for signs of blood anyway.
At least he hadn't spilled much of his own. His cosy red hoodie was now missing the better part of one shoulder, and the T-shirt beneath it was torn, but his flesh remained almost unbroken. Kame had made certain of that, examining him carefully for injuries. The wolf had caught him in the shoulder with a single tooth, grazing just deep enough to draw blood; a minor wound, now cleaned and disinfected.
"Your bunny's going to be frantic by now," Jin said. He couldn't see his watch, but the curtains were still open and night looked to be well on its way.
"He'll wait; Koki's absolutely loyal." Kame slipped a hand under Jin's back. "If I help, do you think you can get up? You can't spend the night on the floor, it'll just make you feel worse."
"Spend the night?"
"I can't get a signal out here, you're in no shape to walk home, and I can't leave without the sleeping beauties in the back, anyway. We're stuck here till morning."
Stuck with a couple of unconscious would-be snacks and a baseball player who danced with poles and hunted wolves in his spare time. In his dead grandmother's hou- no, in the wolf's den. Jin gave himself a mental shake. There was a wolf, and now it was dead. End of story.
With Kame's help he managed to rise, relieved that nothing appeared to be broken. His back screamed obscenities at him until he stood fully upright. At least his legs seemed to be working okay.
"Is it worth seeing if there's any ice in the house?" Kame asked.
"You are not icing my entire back. I'll freeze to death."
Kame insisted on checking anyway, which is how Jin ended up lying face-down on the couch, with a teatowel full of ice resting on his lower back, which had taken the brunt of the impact and had given him the occasional problem ever since he'd fallen off a swing in his early teens. Unfortunately his front wasn't in much better condition after having the wolf barrel into him.
"Stop squirming or you'll fall off the couch."
"I can't help it," Jin grumbled. "There's no comfortable position." He tried to lie on his side, but that only made the ice pack slip.
"Here." Kame retrieved the ice pack, setting it back in place as he gently nudged Jin flat again. "You're a terrible fidget."
"I always fidget when I'm nervous."
"You're nervous?"
"You're not?"
Kame smirked. "I'm armed, remember? And this isn't out of the ordinary for me."
A very strange sideline for a professional athlete to have, Jin thought. He wasn't even going to touch the pole-dancing. "Why? I mean, isn't this kind of weird for a baseball player?"
"I'm a third son," Kame explained. "Everyone expected me to go off adventuring from the moment I could walk, but the first time I saw a baseball game, I fell in love. I just do this to keep my hand in."
"Ah."
Jin tried to nod sagely but the angle made his neck hurt. The third son always had to make his own way in life, and traditionally found fame and fortune through rescuing wealthy damsels in distress, slaying fearsome beasts, and saving endangered villages - sometimes all three at once. He'd always thought it was a full-time job. Clearly not.
"What about you?" Kame asked.
"I'm a firstborn." Jin took another sip from his glass of water, still using the straw. "I get to inherit a clothes store. But..."
Kame's eyes lit up at the mention of clothes. "But...?"
"I...um...I sing. I'm in a band with a couple of friends, and we do gigs around town, sometimes. That's what I want to do with my life - make music. My little brother can inherit." Jin sighed. "My parents are cool with it, but my grandmother thinks - thought - it wasn't a suitable career. I guess that's why she hated me; for letting the family down or something."
"I'm not so sure about that. Let me show you something I found while you were out cold."
Kame disappeared for a minute, returning with three large, leatherbound books. Photo albums. He held the first one open where Jin could see it but left it up to him to reach over and turn the pages. After the first dozen, Jin stopped, leaving Kame to flip to the end. He didn't want to see the rest.
Each page held two photos, all of them to be found in the albums at Jin's house - only in Jin's house, his face was intact. Not so here, where his grandmother had been liberal with the black marker, and even gone so far as to cut out his face in a few. From the chubby child to awkward teenager, and beyond to the more-mature-but-still-awkward man he'd become, not a year of his life wasn't represented in some way.
The other albums contained more of the same. "I think she might've been the tiniest bit obsessed," Kame said.
Jin slumped forward, not caring that he squashed his nose into the cushion. Whoever - whatever - his grandmother had been, rational wasn't it. Who put that much effort into hating someone they hadn't even seen in five years?
He felt a hand ruffle the hair at the base of his neck. Kame, offering comfort; warm fingers brushing up against bare skin for a moment before vanishing.
After a few minutes Kame returned from the kitchen with Jin's food parcel. "I think it's safe to assume anything in here won't contain a sedative," he said. "Unless your mother has a hidden agenda."
"My mother's cooking's to die for, but not literally."
No wonder the bag had been so heavy - taking out the casserole dish in the bottom lightened it considerably. Kame reheated the casserole and found them some plates and cutlery; by the time the meal was ready, Jin had managed to right himself, sitting with the ice pack carefully wedged between his back and the couch cushions. He didn't feel much like eating but hot food sounded good - he needed the warmth.
Eating took a while because Jin's shoulders hurt when he moved his arms. Kame, doing a bad job of concealing his inner neatfreak, was so impatient to do the dishes before everything congealed that he actually offered to feed Jin himself. Jin politely declined. He felt helpless enough already, moving with all the speed and grace of a centenarian. If it took him an hour to clean his plate, so be it - he'd do it under his own power or collapse in the process.
While he waited, Kame busied himself searching the house for signs of the previous victims. When Jin took a slow walk to the bathroom he discovered Kame on his knees in the bedroom, unrolling a large sheet of parchment on the floor.
"I found this in the wardrobe." Kame grabbed an alarm clock from the nightstand to hold down a corner. "Your name's on it."
Intrigued, Jin tried to peek, then realised if he sat down before reaching the bathroom he might never get there. "I'll be right back."
He wasn't, but by the time he returned, Kame had found weights for the remaining corners and the parchment took up half the floor space.
"Here." Kame pointed to a cluster of names down the end of sheet. "This is you, and I guess that's your brother?"
Jin lowered himself down onto the pillow Kame had helpfully set out for him. "Yeah, that's us. And my parents. That's my...um...that was my grandmother." He pointed her out, just above his dad. "I wonder why she's written in red?"
"So are you. So's your dad." Kame leaned over for a closer look. "If the families are going left to right, all the firstborn children are in red on your father's side. Everyone else is written in black."
The family tree, for that's what it was, spanned twenty-five generations though only restricted branches: direct descendants of the firstborn child of each generation, on Jin's grandmother's side. Other children might have married and reproduced, but if so, the details weren't recorded.
"The firstborn of a firstborn of a firstborn," Kame mused. "I wonder why that makes you special?"
Jin tried to shrug and failed. "My dad's a great guy but I wouldn't say he was anything special, and my grandmother..." he trailed off.
"We know how she was special," Kame said, grimacing. "You don't suppose...?"
"I think I'd have noticed if my dad turned into a wolf, Kame."
"What about this guy?" Kame pointed to a name in red further up the parchment. "Your dad's maternal grandfather. What do you know about him?"
"Not much." Jin's parents had told him stories, of course, but he'd never been good at retaining details. This one had a more memorable ending than most, though. "Uh...he was a farmer...he used to have a cottage out here somewhere...oh, and his wife killed him with a shotgun!"
Kame shuffled a couple of inches back. "Are all your relatives insane?"
"No! She just had bad eyesight, okay? They were having a problem with foxes getting into the henhouse, and when she heard one breaking in one night, she shot it. There wasn't much light. When she went over with a lantern to pick up the corpse, she discovered it hadn't been a fox after all. It's not like she hated him or anything."
"A fox." Kame licked his lips, looking very uncomfortable. "Um, Jin, you probably don't want to hear this, but when your grandmother died, her body became human again. Your great-grandfather might've been a fox."
"Mom always said he was pretty good-looking for an old guy," Jin joked, trying to make light of it. He didn't like where this was going. If his great-grandfather turned into a fox and his grandmother turned into a wolf, what did that mean for his dad? What did that mean...for him?
He didn't realise he'd started shivering until Kame wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. There was no heating in the bedroom; the temperature seemed to have dropped well below freezing in a matter of seconds. His blood had become ice water, slowly forcing its way through his veins until it stopped moving altogether.
"I don't have any proof," Kame said. "I'm only speculating, okay? It doesn't mean anything. Maybe your great-grandmother's eyesight really was that bad."
"And maybe I'm going to turn into a panther or something." Jin hugged himself under the blanket - carefully, because it hurt. "I'd know, wouldn't I?"
"I..I don't know. But I hear the talking animals were originally humans who were cursed into changing form. They kept changing back and forth till eventually they stuck in animal form, and ever since then, their descendants have had the power of speech."
And an appetite for video games, Jin thought, thinking of Junno. "Your talking rabbit, Koki? How did you find him?"
Kame grinned. "He found me. I got into a fight with this pitcher from the Hanshin Tigers and suddenly this tiny bundle of fluff leapt between us and tried to scratch his eyes out. Since then he goes everywhere with me."
"Everywhere except here."
"I didn't want him to get eaten. If he's by himself he'll hide if he sees danger coming."
Jin had trouble picturing the "guard rabbit" hiding from anything, but presumably Kame knew him best. "Must be nice to have a little friend like that. We don't have any in our house.
"Well, there's this toy poodle who lives in the neighbourhood and comes to play sometimes; my mom really likes him. That's the closest I've ever come to having a pet."
"Your mom really likes him?"
"Yeah, she's always playing games with him when he shows up. I think he just goes along with it for her cooking."
"Are your dad and the dog ever around at the same time?"
"Sure they are!" Jin closed his eyes and tried to recall a time when he'd seen the two together. Surely he must've done? Pin was a family pet, of sorts.
But try as he might, no memory came to mind, and he was forced to admit to Kame that no, he didn't remember ever seeing the two of them in the same place at the same time.
"I think that answers the question about your dad," Kame said. "At least a toy poodle's a lot nicer than a wolf? I don't think anyone's likely to try to kill him."
The bottom dropped out of Jin's world, sending him into freefall. His family had always been weird, so he thought, but this was utterly ridiculous. He stared at the family tree, thought about the men and women who'd come before him. People he'd never met, who'd lived and died long before he'd been born. What might they have been? Playful, gentle creatures, or fierce, hungry killers?
Kame let the silence hang for a bit, giving him space. Jin continued to stare, scarcely noticing when Kame rolled up the parchment. It didn't matter that there were no longer any names before his eyes; he fixed on the cracks between the floorboards instead.
When even those began to blur, Kame tapped his knee, bringing everything back into focus. "Hey. You're not your grandmother, or your great-grandfather, or any of the people we have no idea about. You're not even your dad. You're you, whoever that turns out to be."
"Or whatever."
"Either way, I think you need to talk to your parents. Maybe they can tell you something."
"It would've been helpful if they'd told me about my grandmother before sending me here," Jin said tightly. "Less chance of me getting killed."
"I still don't think she was trying to kill you - if she'd succeeded, the line of firstborns would've ended with you. Maybe that's why you're blacked out in all the pictures, because you're off-limits. She couldn't kill you, so she killed a whole bunch of other young men instead."
"If this is supposed to cheer me up, it's not working."
"Sorry. But she could've torn you to pieces. All she did was rip your clothing a little and knock you down."
"It still hurts," Jin pointed out.
"Better than ending up like..." Kame waved his hand in the direction of the furnace, and Jin had to agree.
Kame fixed the blanket more snugly around Jin's shoulders and left to check on Ueda and the others, who were bound to wake up at some point and would no doubt be in quite a state. Jin spent the next ten minutes trying to ease himself back to his feet, using the side of the bed for support. Sitting down on the pillow had been a mistake.
"Still asleep," Kame said when he returned. "Are you comfortable like that?"
Jin had one hand on the edge of the bed, the other halfway down the bedspread, and one knee still on the floor. He glared up at Kame. "Does it look like I'm comfortable?"
"It looks like you're Sadako trying to crawl out of the television."
Horror movies. Jin didn't fare well with those. He stubbornly ignored Kame's offers of help until his other leg gave out and he had to accept a pair of steadying hands pulling him upright.
"It'll be worse in the morning," Kame said. "Better move while you still can."
"It's worse now." Jin patted his left shoulder. "It's throbbing and making everything else feel worse."
"Where you were bleeding? Let me have a look."
The injury was actually small enough to require only a plaster, but when Kame tugged Jin's torn T-shirt aside to remove it, it quickly became obvious that complications had set in. Jin couldn't see much until he looked in a mirror, and then...
"I thought you disinfected it?" he asked Kame.
"I did! I..." Kame touched a fingertip to the plaster, now stuck on a swollen purple patch the size of his fist, so sensitive Jin gasped and pulled away immediately. "Sorry!"
"I'm going to die because I let myself be talked into delivering a stupid food parcel," Jin moaned. His whole body pulsed in time with the wound, his rhythms gradually adapting themselves in a quest to become one thrumming, swollen mass of flesh. He seized Kame's arm for balance, too unsteady to keep his feet unaided.
"Maybe you'd better sit down."
Kame had to help Jin sit on the edge of the bed; once there he doubled over as pain shot up the inside his spine, forcing him not to straighten up but to curl in on himself. Sitting upright proved impossible. Another spasm hit; Jin's feet left the floor. The cramped position made it hard to breathe but he kept trying, drinking in huge gulps of air whenever he could, mostly so he could keep repeating, "I'm going to die".
"You're not going to die," Kame assured him, not sounding terribly convincing. He wore an encouraging smile, to be sure, but it faltered whenever Jin blinked.
"I'm going to die."
"You're not going to die."
"Find my parents and tell them I loved them."
"Tell them yourself." Kame sat down on the bed and stroked a gentle line down Jin's back. "Hey, your spine feels kind of-"
Exactly how his spine felt, Jin never got to hear, because the sound it made as it snapped drowned out Kame's voice.
The next two minutes rushed past in a blur of pain and nausea: bones grinding against each other as they shrank down to near nothing, fur forcing its way through reluctant skin, tiny claws sprouting from the ends of all four limbs. Jin tried to scream but couldn't find the breath in his shrinking lungs. The world grew before his eyes, spinning larger and larger until the dizzying circles stopped, and he realised his feet were so far away from the ground that he might as well have been sitting on the edge of a cliff.
And Kame! Looking down at him with wide, horrified eyes. Down from such a height...
"Jin?" Kame whispered. "Can you still hear me?"
Jin opened his mouth to respond and got the shock of his life when his teeth turned out to be longer - and sharper - than they should've been. He had to speak carefully to avoid lisping. "I can hear you." Why was his voice so high? And so quiet? Why were his clothes lying on the bed?
"Thank goodness." Kame's eyes narrowed a little. "Don't...don't be alarmed. I'm going to get a mirror; just sit tight for a second."
"Sitting", tight or otherwise, was proving to be a little uncomfortable, as Jin must've been on some kind of fluffy cushion that stopped him leaning back. At least he didn't feel so stiff and bruised anymore.
When Kame returned with a small handmirror, he found out why.
"You have a very cute tail?" Kame offered.
"I don't want a cute tail!" Jin turned sideways to get a better look at it. It did curve pretty nicely, he had to admit - a reddish-brown bush arching over his back, matching his fluffy, tufty ears and the bulk of his fur, save the creamy white underbelly and dark, beady eyes. For a creature less than ten inches tall, he cut quite a stylish figure.
But he still didn't want to be a squirrel.
"I hate my family."
"You don't hate your family," Kame said. "You just don't want to be a squirrel."
"Would you want to be a squirrel?"
"Well...no, but there are worse things you could be, right? And I don't think you're going to be stuck like that forever." He ran a finger lightly over the bush of Jin's tail, smiling when Jin squeaked and scampered away. "Your dad obviously doesn't spend all his time as a toy poodle; I think you'd have noticed."
Jin ran across the bedspread and up a pillow, finally climbing up to the top of the headboard so he could talk to Kame without feeling like a midget. Squirrel claws had to be good for something. Kame sat down next to the pillow, managing to keep his hands to himself.
"Pin didn't even start showing up till about ten years ago."
"And you've never turned into a squirrel before, right?" Kame's brows furrowed in thought. "Did anything strange happen to your dad before the dog first appeared?"
"You expect me to be able to think seriously about anything when I'm like this?"
"I appreciate that your brain's just shrunk, but try anyway."
Jin sighed, rubbing his forepaws together as he scrabbled around in his memory for anything that might be relevant. It was really hard to focus when he had a terrible craving for chestnuts. "Um...he won an award for looking good in hats?"
"Perhaps something a little less positive?"
"Um...oh!" This had to be it. Jin couldn't think of anything else. "He used to go hunting sometimes, back when there were still deer in these woods. One day he came back bleeding, said he'd had a run-in with a wolf." He paused, then added, "Come to think of it, that was just before my grandmother moved all the way out here. She used to live a lot closer to us."
"Must've been her," Kame said. "The timing's too perfect."
"She drew blood from my dad, he plays fetch and wags his tail. She drew blood from me, I chitter higher than a chipmunk and would kill for a chestnut."
"So maybe it's always in your genes, and that's what activates it? Being bled by someone else who's got it? And that's why it hasn't happened to you till now."
"I definitely need to talk to my dad." Jin tried to settle his tail more comfortably but overbalanced, tumbling down onto the pillow when he couldn't dig his claws into the headboard in time.
Kame burst out laughing while he lay there in a daze. "This is better than YouTube!"
Jin gave him his best indignant look, which mostly involved angling his whiskers at a suitably disapproving angle. It worried him how naturally the movement came. He wasn't a squirrel, damnit. He was a human being, a young man with hopes and dreams and a battered six-string with which to convey them. He had two legs, not four. He didn't have claws. He didn't have whiskers. He didn't have a big, bushy tail that trailed along behind him like a permanently attached body pillow.
But for the moment, he had all these things. He had a body that moved, swift and light, wherever he wanted it to. He had powerful hind legs that let him leap beyond his reach.
And he had soft, beautiful fur that made people want to stroke it, the way Kame was doing now.
"Sorry," Kame said. "I couldn't resist. I love animals, and you're..."
"Not an animal," Jin said, but he didn't ask him to stop, either. It felt kind of nice to be petted, though he didn't generally like people touching his head as a human. Kame had gentle fingers, clearly used to handling animals; Jin wondered if Koki got petted like this.
"Tell me if I press too hard, okay?"
Content for now, Jin nuzzled the short, strong fingers while their owner recollected all the stories he'd heard about talking animals and their origins. Some were interesting; none were pretty. There was the one about the servant who'd stolen money from his master and had a curse placed upon him, that he might become an animal who could never use the money for himself. Or the one about the witch who'd turned her cheating lover into the pig she thought he resembled, only letting him return to human form on those nights when she had a use for him. The most upbeat of the bunch involved a woman who'd fallen in love with a woodland god and been "blessed" with the ability to shift into one of his creatures.
"I hope the stories aren't true," Jin said. "I don't want to be a squirrel forever. Dad would chase me round the garden."
"There must be a way for you to change back. Maybe if you focus hard on being human?"
Jin scratched his cheek with a forepaw. "I've been trying that since you made me look in the mirror. No luck."
Kame refused to be deterred. "Maybe it's a time-based thing and you have to wait it out. If you're still a squirrel in the morning I'll make sure you get home okay. Your dad should know what to do."
The idea of making his way home through the woods in squirrel form - especially across the rope bridge - terrified Jin. On the other hand, so did showing up at home like this. His brother would never let him live it down.
"I promise," Kame said. "I can carry you home. We'll have to stop for Koki on the way."
That wasn't the only thing they had to stop for. "I need to write an introductory letter for a bear and play games with a fish," Jin said, feeling ridiculous but knowing Kame would understand.
"Then I'd better let you get some rest." Kame gave him one final rub behind the ear and pulled away. "It's pretty late. Let's worry about getting you back in the morning."
He disappeared out the door before Jin could argue. Jin flailed about on the bed for a bit, wondering if he was going to have the place to himself all night and if so, how he was going to switch off the light, when Kame returned and began stripping off his shirt and jeans.
"There's only the one bed." Kame sounded embarrassed. "I mean, it's big enough for two but with you like this..."
"Just don't squish me."
One pillow went on top of the bedspread for Jin, where Kame couldn't accidentally roll on top of him in the night, and Kame slipped beneath, clad in just his underwear - and that, he'd confessed, he was only wearing because he was with company. At home he'd be naked.
Jin didn't care what Kame wore, so long as he didn't roll around the bed in his sleep. Sharing a bed wasn't something he did often; sharing one with a man nearly eight times his height was quite outside the realm of his experience. He curled up on the pillow, forepaws tucked under his chin and his tail snuggled close, and waited to fall asleep.
After an hour of lying in the dark, sleep had yet to find him and rolling around restlessly only carried him off the pillow, down towards Kame. He, at least, seemed to be getting some sleep; his soft, regular breaths provided a soothing alternative to the silence of a dead woman's house. Knowing his grandmother hadn't meant for any of this to happen didn't make it any easier for Jin to be lying in her bed, in a house so full of tragic memories and twisted emotions that it deserved to be burned to the ground.
Jin crept close enough to find the gap between Kame's body and the covers. He tried to be stealthy, but with a tail like his, it was hard to keep from tickling him in his sleep. Fortunately Kame didn't appear to be ticklish. He stirred slightly when Jin settled down beside him; nothing more than a brief sigh. Exhausted by his long day and comfortable sharing Kame's warmth, Jin found sleep much easier to come by now.
-----
Come morning, Jin almost wished he'd stayed on his pillow. He'd still have been embarrassed by waking up naked in the company of a man he'd only met the previous afternoon, but at least he'd have been spared the indignity of waking up naked and spooning with that selfsame man, himself wearing only a pair of briefs.
Perhaps he could extricate himself before Kame woke up. He inched forwards, slowly making his way to the other side of the bed, but Kame's breaths against his shoulder changed in pattern and he knew it would be useless to keep trying.
"'Morning," Jin mumbled, glad Kame couldn't see his face.
"'Morning." Kame threw one arm over Jin's chest and gave him a quick squeeze. So much for escaping. "You're not a squirrel anymore!"
"And I'm not in agony either." Jin had been worried that returning to normal would bring all the pain rushing back, but evidently shapeshifting had some pleasant side-effects. "You won't have to carry me home."
"I couldn't do it now, anyway." Kame laughed, a husky, drink required, first thing in the morning laugh that sang through Jin's skin to the blood and bones beneath. "You're much lighter as a squirrel. Much more fun to pet, too." He smoothed down a handful of Jin's hair to illustrate, caught his fingers in a tangle and gave up. "See?
Jin shook his hair free, then returned to his original plan of putting some distance between himself and Kame. It didn't work very well, largely because Kame followed him across the bed.
"If you were still a squirrel this morning," Kame began, "I was going to sit you on my shoulder while we walked. Like a pirate's parrot, but cuddlier. I always wanted to be a pirate."
"Couldn't fit it into your schedule?"
"Can't be at sea and at practice." Kame stopped just short of slotting himself up against Jin's bare back. "I'm on the road a lot. If I...when I'm next around here, would it be okay if I took you for lunch or something? I kind of feel like I owe you. Not that lunch makes up for it, but-"
"If anything, you owe my dad." Jin had no idea what he was going to tell his parents about his grandmother. "Come back with me and explain to him why his mother's dead."
"I'd planned on it, whether I had to carry you back or not."
"You saved my life," Jin said, pleased that Kame hadn't been intending to leave him by himself to make the awkward explanations. "Probably. So you don't owe me anything."
"Can you turn around so I don't have to talk to your back?"
"My clothes are on the floor. And I mean all my clothes."
"Being in bed with a naked man is not going to bother me, trust me."
Reluctantly, Jin rolled over, holding himself right on the edge of the bed till Kame backed up a little to give him space. "You really don't have to buy me lunch to make up for saving my life, honest."
"Okay; then," Kame's smile was far too bright for someone who'd only just woken up, "can I buy you lunch just because I'd like to spend some time with you that doesn't involve violence, shapeshifting, and demented relatives?"
There was something to be said for the straightforward approach. Jin couldn't help but laugh. "You wait until we're both practically naked in the same bed to ask me out on a date?"
"At least I didn't ask while you were a squirrel," Kame said. "I didn't want you to get any ideas about me."
"You just like me for my tail, don't you?"
"Not just your tail. Your ears are pretty cute too. So soft, and furry, and-"
"This isn't helping me not get ideas about you."
"You can ask Koki for a character reference?"
"I don't think that would help," Jin said. "Your bunny has a very obvious crush on you."
"It's not mutual!" Kame protested, though both of them were far too amused to take the notion seriously.
"In that case..." Jin's laughter faded. He didn't want to turn Kame down flat, and he certainly wasn't opposed to the idea of going out and seeing what happened, but the current situation was less than ideal. He didn't want Kame thinking of him as some weird squirrel guy with crazy relatives. "Come back and see me when I'm playing a gig. You've just seen me about as low as I'm ever going to get. You should see me at my best, too."
"I could take a peek under the bedspread for that," Kame teased, so Jin hit him with a pillow until he agreed. "All right, all right, no peeking. But I'd like to see that sometime. You've seen what I do, so show me what you do."
"I've never seen you play baseball," Jin said. "And you're only a hunter on Saturdays, right? Today's Sunday. What do you do on Sundays?"
"Apparently I play escort to semi-conscious men, play games with fish, make excuses to panicked rabbits, explain myself to parents of prospective boyfriends and hope they don't have me arrested." Kame propped himself up on one elbow and grinned across the bed at Jin. "After breakfast. I'm pretty sure I can find something in your mom's food parcel to feed us all. Any requests?"
Jin's stomach growled at the mention of food. It wasn't in the direction he expected. "I could really go for some nuts..."