[JE] [JEF #3] Photographic Memories 8/8
Title: JE Fleet III: Photographic Memories ch. 8/8
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame (though others are mentioned)
Rating: PG-13? Maybe occasionally bordering on R?
Total word count: Approx. 37,550
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack
Disclaimer: Not mine, dammit.
Summary: Mere hours away from Earth, the crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN have their leave cut short as Commodore Yamashita sends Captains Akanishi and Kamenashi on a top secret mission to Venus. But when Kame's past as the tactical advisor for the Fahngarlians catches up with him, the planet of love becomes the planet of war...
Chapter 8
There were very few people standing around the dais who knew the true significance of that photograph - nevertheless, everyone assumed it was something important. Something dangerous, even, given the way they began to retreat, taking shelter in the tent or crowding behind the uniformed Security people.
Kame made a lunge for the picture but Toma danced away, keeping it just out of his reach, and Maki stood fierce between them.
"Stay back!" Toma warned. "You know what this is used for!"
"Yes, and we also know you can't use it here!" Ueda yelled back. "All outgoing transmissions are blocked! Scan it all you like but the codes won't get through!"
"That doesn't mean I can't destroy it!" Toma pulled out a lighter. "The president would lose his remote control over the USN bases on the inner planets...and if he can't keep the rest of the Sol System under control, maybe it's time someone else took over!"
He flicked his fingers and a tongue of bright orange flame licked dangerously near the corner of the picture, which was missing its frame. Taguchi took a step forward, but Toma shook his head.
"Don't move! You can have this back when we all get out of here. The KAT-TUN's docked at the spaceport, right?"
Kame nodded. "It is, but-"
"And you're coming with us, Kamenashi." Toma didn't give him time to argue. "The rest of you stay here."
Jin's heart skipped a beat. Like hell was Toma taking Kame with him. "You can't leave," he pointed out. "Not till Sunday. What are you going to do, Toma? Barricade yourself in the station until the weekend?"
Maki finally spoke up. "We won't have to. Not with one of these talking for us." She pulled a nerve disruptor from beneath her jacket. The weapon was banned everywhere except Ross 128, and for good reason. There was no less dignified a way to die. "Return Hasegawa and Kazama to us. I've got the ship schematics - there's no way anyone will be able to catch up to us once we're on board, and your trainees will fly wherever we tell them to with Kamenashi's life at stake."
"That's not much of a threat when you're trying to kill me anyway."
Toma smirked. "But they don't know that, do they? Or there would be more than six of you in the city."
Kame fell silent. The trainees didn't know, and if one of their officers was in danger, they'd do anything to save him. Including flying a small subsection of a terrorist organisation halfway across the galaxy.
Jin held up his hands to show they were empty, then sidestepped in front of Kame. "You can't. Take me instead. Please! If you really want to make him suffer, kidnapping me will have more effect than just killing him!"
He hoped that, by splitting them up, Kame would be safe. He didn't think Toma would kill him - though he wouldn't put it past Maki to try - and once he was back on board, well, anything could happen. Yamapi would be bound to notice there was something wrong when the KAT-TUN took off without warning, particularly since Koki and Nakamaru were, according to Taguchi, filling him in right now.
A bony elbow caught him in the side as Kame pushed past him, snarling under his breath for Jin to shut up and stop talking himself into dangerous situations.
Toma's composure had been momentarily shaken by Jin's suggestion, but with Kame coming to the fore, he was on more solid ground. "Nice of you to make the offer, Jin, but I can't do that. Kamenashi has to pay for what he did, and fifteen months stuck on board ship with his friends is no kind of punishment for wiping out hundreds of thousands of people! I'm not going to hurt you, but I can't let him live!"
"Killing him isn't going to bring your friends back - or anyone else!" Jin implored. "Kill Kame and you might as well kill me!"
Kame's head whipped round. "Jin!"
"If you're missing, I can find you," Jin whispered. "Even if it takes me the rest of my life. But if you're dead, all I can do is follow you. I can't bring you back."
"Stop trying to sound so cool - you're embarrassing me..." For all that Jin's gesture had flustered him, Kame still found it sweet. Horribly, horribly mistimed, but sweet. "You can't pay my debts for me, Jin." He pressed a cold kiss to Jin's cheek, and turned to face Toma.
"All I can do is tell you how sorry I am," he began, "but I know that's nowhere near enough to make up for what I've done."
"You've got that right," Toma said.
"You don't understand!" Jin did his best to intervene. "He was out of his mind at the time!"
The look Kame gave him would have withered the Tree of Life itself. "You're not helping by trying to convince everyone I was insane, thanks."
"But you-"
Kame pulled his shirt open, wincing as a couple of the buttons popped off and were lost forever. As a tactic for persuading people not to kill him, exposing his bare chest had a hundred percent success rate - but he'd only tried it once, and that had been on Jin. He'd offered to let Jin kill him in retribution, and Jin had turned away.
Toma didn't. "You want to take your punishment now, that's fine." He traded the photograph and lighter to Maki in return for the nerve disruptor, and pointed it at Kame. "I'm sorry, Jin, but I have to do this."
If you'd asked Kame fifteen months ago if he deserved to die, he'd have said yes in a heartbeat. If you'd asked him fifteen minutes ago, he'd probably still have said yes. He hadn't even begun to deal with his part in the war, had hidden away in the safety of the KAT-TUN, with the hull between him and the rest of the universe, and he didn't have to look at what he'd done.
Oh, intellectually he knew he could never make up for his actions. He could spend the rest of his life apologising to the friends and relatives of the people whose deaths he'd contributed to in some way, and even if he did the same for his next twenty lifetimes, it wouldn't be enough.
But now he was out in the universe again, and there were consequences. Real people, people who didn't have to put up with him no matter what, who had every right to want him dead - if only they knew he was guilty. And Toma did. And Maki, and their friends. No one else outside the military, but it didn't matter to Kame. Numbers didn't matter, because even the smallest number felt too big. There was no reason Kame could think of that he deserved to live. His only argument was that killing him wouldn't fix anything...although it might ease the pain. Exactly whose pain, he wasn't sure.
So Kame's life mattered less. Sacrifice one to appease the many, he understood that concept. And up until now, he'd have agreed. Sure, he'd have made a token protest, and if he hadn't had his friends and crew to protect, he might have given up, let himself be turned into fodder for the computing monstrosity.
But there was one single event that had changed his mind. Jin had offered himself in Kame's place, and more-or-less stated outright that Kame's death would mean his own.
If Kame wasn't worthy of existence, had no possibility of redemption...would anyone ever have said that?
Besides, he'd already broken Jin's heart once. He didn't think he'd be forgiven a second time.
Forgiveness was quite clearly the furthest thing from Toma's mind as he took aim with the nerve disruptor at Kame's torso. Though his hand wavered, his expression remained cool, dispassionate. It was to be an execution, then.
Kame closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited.
Three things happened simultaneously. Jin tackled Kame to the ground, covering him with his own body to shield him from a shot that was never fired; Ueda shot the disruptor out of Toma's hand...and Commodore Yamashita Tomohisa appeared in the middle of the dais.
Having had the wind knocked out of him by his partner, Kame couldn't manage anything more than a gasping "What the...?"
Jin drew back into a crouch so Kame could get up, and stared in amazement at his best friend. "Pi, am I hallucinating or did you just teleport into Eros City?"
"Got a presidential order to stop the jamming long enough for the Pin to get a lock on the tracking device in Kame's leg and teleport me here," Yamapi responded. "Good thing he didn't have it removed yet, or I'd never have found you guys. Nakamaru couldn't tell me exactly where you'd gone."
Jin looked from Yamapi to Toma. "Did they tell you about...?"
Yamapi nodded slowly, struggling to hide his uneasiness. "Toma."
For his part, Toma was looking equally nervous. Ueda's bullet, a hard projectile of compressed oxygen, had knocked the nerve disruptor away with such force that the motion had left his hand sore. Taguchi had caught the weapon on the fly and taken the opportunity to make it disappear altogether, pocketing it discreetly to cannibalise for parts at a later date.
The lighter lay forgotten on the ground where Maki had dropped it - the commodore's sudden appearance had been as much a surprise to her as to everyone else, though she'd managed to hang onto the photograph.
Even the governor successfully read the tension in the air. A new player had joined the game, and no one knew whose move it was next.
Yamapi removed a pair of the Pin's teleport bracelets from his pocket: he held one out to Toma, the other to Maki. "We're going to teleport back to my flagship, where the other two are waiting for you, and you're all going to tell me everything about the 4Tops. Everything."
Toma started to respond, but lapsed into silence when Yamapi shook his head. "Toma, I don't know what I want to say to you. I just know I don't want to say it here."
"You all right, Pi?" Jin crept close enough to speak to his best friend without being overheard. "You look like hell."
"They're not supposed to keep me out of the loop," Yamapi muttered back. "They *promised* they wouldn't keep secrets from me, and then they make me send you guys out here to get yourselves killed for nothing, trusting you'd be okay if you were all together."
Though no names were mentioned, it was easy enough for Jin to figure out who'd gotten Yamapi so upset. President Imai Tsubasa and Admiral Takizawa Hideaki. It must have been, Jin thought, one hell of a debriefing.
"What do you mean, for nothing?"
Jin hadn't heard Kame sneak up behind him, and the sudden irate voice in his ear made him jump.
"The photograph," Yamapi said sadly. "No codes."
He said this loud enough for Maki and Toma to hear, and Maki turned the photograph over in her hand, squinting at it in fierce concentration as though she could verify this for herself. "We were set up?" she asked.
The commodore nodded. "All you've got is a nice picture of my CO and his partner at the beach. I don't know where they keep the real codes."
A moment of stunned silence, and the photograph joined the lighter on the ground.
As a pair of burly Eros City Security men cuffed Toma and Maki and jammed the teleport bracelets none-too-gently on their wrists, the crowd began to disperse and Kame surprised himself by volunteering to Yamapi the information that Toma hadn't actually fired the nerve disruptor.
"I'm not sure he was going to, either," he added. "If that counts for anything."
Yamapi considered this a moment. "It counts with me," he said.
-----
At Eros City Spaceport, Docking Bay 94, the command crew of the KAT-TUN were delighted to discover that in their incredibly brief absence, the trainees had a) not blown up the ship and b) managed to repair the jets in the hot tub.
"It's not as nice as the one in our hotel but at least it doesn't make me paranoid!" Jin declared, and Kame was forced to agree.
They were going to be stuck in port another couple of days anyway while Yamapi interrogated his prisoners and tried to figure out what to do with them. It was an uncomfortable time for the poor commodore, caught between his superiors and old friends turned renegade. Kame wasn't interested in pursuing charges against them, and despite his unfortunate experience outside the Heartbreak Club, neither was Jin. Ueda had successfully suppressed his ire at being shot by Kazama upon discovery of the latter's connection to Yamapi, though he did make a point of saying he never wanted to share an orbit again.
In the grand scheme of things, the plan to wreak vengeance on Kamenashi Kazuya was far less important than the overall terrorist activities of the 4Tops. With no clear way to infiltrate the group, Takki and Tsubasa had taken the only option available to them: use Kame as a stalking horse. They'd known Ikuta Toma was part of the organisation - known of his past working for Kitagawa, of his helpless fury as he'd watched the Titan Colony die from afar - and knew that with nothing to lose, he'd never give up his leaders.
So they'd set him up. Having concluded that the 4Tops must have had a spy inside JE Fleet HQ, they'd allowed the knowledge to leak about Kame's role as the tactical consultant for the Fahngarlians, and how much they valued his expertise for covert missions, assuming it would draw Toma out and give him something to focus on. They'd also spread rumours about the self-destruct codes - a tempting treat for any organisation seeking control of the inner planets. The combination had been enough for Toma and his like-minded friends to act on their own, risk exposing themselves for the sake of revenge - and incidentally do their leaders a favour at the same time.
"I don't care," Kame said when the admiral filled him in during a three-way vid-screen conference between the KAT-TUN, the Pin, and JE Fleet HQ. "I don't want to know what you know, or why you did it, or how sorry you are. I just want you to leave me the hell alone."
He switched off the screen, silencing both other parties in the conversation, and stormed off to his cabin.
Everyone else on the bridge turned to look at Jin.
"You have to go after him," Ueda said. "Or we're all going to mutiny."
There were nods of agreement from all sides. Jin crumbled under the weight of their combined stares and trudged after his partner.
Kame hadn't locked himself in, but he didn't make any move to welcome Jin either. He was lying on the bed, arms folded beneath his head, surrounded by the remains of his luggage. (Yamapi had forgotten to bring any teleport bracelets from the KAT-TUN with him, so the crew had had to return to their hotels, grab their bags, and leave Eros City the normal way. Luckily, the presidential permission allowed them to leave early.)
Jin perched gingerly on the edge of the bed and cast a wary glance down at Kame, as though the latter were about to sprout claws and take a swipe down his back.
"How do you deal with it?"
"What?"
"How do you deal with it?" Kame repeated. "You know what I did - and you're one of the few people who know why. How do you live with it?"
Jin shrugged. "I don't think about it. We didn't have much to do with the war until the end, and I didn't know you were involved till then. It's like...I separate things out so I only have to deal with the parts that are relevant to me.
"And it's more important for you to be here with me - and our friends - than for you to be rotting in some jail somewhere. It's hard to find redemption if no one will let you do anything, right?"
Kame sat up, reached for Jin's hand and squeezed his fingers to near-breaking point. "Right." He sighed. "We're on leave again now. Properly. One month."
"Do you want to go back to Earth?" Jin hesitated to ask.
The younger of the two captains shook his head. "Everyone else wants to go: they've been looking forward to it. So have you."
"Yeah, but there's nothing to stop us going away by ourselves, is there?" True, Jin had been anticipating a return to Earth with great pleasure, enjoying the novelty of travelling around with Kame and knowing he didn't have to keep looking over his shoulder. But that could wait until Kame was ready to go back. "We can use one of our shuttles and let Ueda take the ship down to Tokyo Central Spaceport for the month. Or we could get them to drop us off somewhere and we'll just take commercial flights wherever we want to go."
"I don't know where I want to go, Jin." Kame tugged him down till they were both lying flat on the bed. It was hard to believe that only fourteen hours ago, they'd been in the same position in Room 369 of the Cupid's Gate. "It wasn't so bad in Eros City, because we were on a mission and it's not the kind of place where anyone cares who you are or what you've done."
"It's not like people on Earth know what you've done," Jin pointed out. "Not outside the military - and probably members of the 4Tops, who will be getting arrested soon enough anyway."
"It doesn't make any difference whether they know or not. I know. I don't think I'm ready to stare civilians in the face and carry on a normal, everyday conversation with them when in the back of my mind I'll be thinking about how big their coffin would have been."
"This is a really depressing conversation to be having on Valentine's Day, you know?" Jin tried to think of a more cheerful topic, but the only thing that sprang to mind was a conversation he'd been having a week ago with Nakamaru on the rising price of hyperdrive fuel, and he didn't think that was likely to be much help. "Let's just go somewhere far away, then. Leave the Sol System, go to planets the Fahngarlians never even thought about. I hear Gliese 581 d is nice this time of year."
"Long way to go for a vacation."
"So?" Jin wriggled closer to Kame, pressing their hips together. "If we disappear for a while, who's going to care? Our COs owe you one for using you as bait, and I don't really feel like reporting in at JE Fleet HQ right now."
"They've spent a lot of money on this ship," Kame warned. "They're not going to let us just walk away with it."
"Yeah," Jin agreed, "they've spent money. So much that there's nothing else in the entire United Solar Navy that can catch us, never mind the JE Fleet. Besides...none of us are angels."
Kame rolled sideways to catch his partner's eye, and winked. "I have a plan. Yamapi obviously needs cheering up, so we descend on the Pin with a couple of crates of replicated beer and a lot of cake, get him so drunk he'll agree to anything, and get him to sign off on a six-month furlough. We can be gone before he recovers from the hangover."
"Oh, that'll really brighten his day..."
"Tomorrow," Kame decided. "Tonight, I need cheering up too. I still think this is the worst Valentine's Day I've ever had. Waking up to stunner fire, a car chase that would've made a roller coaster look tame, a fake wedding with a poisonous ending...oh, and one noble but really stupid attempt by a certain Captain Bakanishi to throw himself in the line of fire."
Jin turned away, so hurt he forgot to correct the nickname. "You thought it was stupid?"
Kame caught him round the waist and hugged him tightly. "Stupidly romantic, then. But please don't offer to give yourself up for me in the future, because if you'd been killed, Toma might as well have taken us both out with the same shot."
A slow, satisfied grin began to work its way across Jin's face. "Who needs chocolates for Valentine's Day when you have self-sacrifice?"
"Well, it would've been nice to get chocolates again," Kame said wistfully. "The trainees gave us so many last year. I must've received about thirty."
Jin pretended to count tens of chocolates on his fingers. "I think I probably got about forty."
Kame quickly amended his figure, sure that he'd forgotten a few. "Come to think of it, I forgot about all the ones from the guys in Engineering. The real figure must've been about fifty-six."
"Seventy."
"Eighty-three."
"Ninety-two."
"One hundred and six."
"One hundred and eleven."
Kame burst out laughing. "Jin, do we even have that many trainees on board?"
"Uh...maybe? Most of them are very small, they don't take up much space. Especially that Chinen kid."
Kame's mirth increased in volume, resounding throughout the cabin. "You were that tiny once too," he pointed out.
Jin smirked. "Bet I've always been taller than you, though."
"Doesn't matter when we're lying down."
There wasn't a lot Jin could say to that. For one thing, it was true, and for another he couldn't say anything at all when one of Kame's hands left his waist to nestle itself in his curls, the other began to trail under his shirt, up along his ribcage, and Kame's mouth greeted his with a gentle kiss. He barely noticed as Kame's weight shifted from the mattress as he lowered himself slowly over his partner, knees on either side of Jin's legs, heat rising between them as the bubbles had the night before.
Jin moaned before he could catch himself, lips parting under Kame's, the sound stolen by the warmth of Kame's mouth.
"Even if it was a fake wedding, we can still have a honeymoon," Kame gasped out between kisses. "And I've got the certificate in case we ever need to go undercover as a married couple!"
"Oh no," Jin vowed, "that is the last time I agree to any mission that involves us playing detective for the military!"
His stomach churned angrily and he grimaced, made a grab for Kame's wrists to still him.
"What is it?" Worry coloured Kame's voice. "Still feeling bad from the stun? It should've worn off completely by now."
"It's not that." Jin couldn't keep from blushing. "I'm hungry. We ate so well yesterday, and then we didn't have anything today because we missed breakfast and then there was the wedding and-"
"I get your point," Kame assured him, and reached for the replicator remote. "We shouldn't have started talking about chocolate. Late supper for two?"
Jin's stomach growled so loudly that both men stared at it in alarm. "Better make it four," he said. "I think I'm about to fade away from hunger."
Kame resigned himself to spending another frustrating night with his partner. After eating so much that late, Jin would probably drift off to sleep, leaving Kame to clear away the crumbs and make sure neither of them was likely to roll over and end up with rice in their hair or anything. It was a comfortably familiar routine.
Comfortable, because they were safe on their own ship, shielded from the rest of the universe by a thick hull and some good friends, and whatever happened to them there, they were together.
Kame wouldn't have it any other way.
----- The End...for now. -----
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame (though others are mentioned)
Rating: PG-13? Maybe occasionally bordering on R?
Total word count: Approx. 37,550
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack
Disclaimer: Not mine, dammit.
Summary: Mere hours away from Earth, the crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN have their leave cut short as Commodore Yamashita sends Captains Akanishi and Kamenashi on a top secret mission to Venus. But when Kame's past as the tactical advisor for the Fahngarlians catches up with him, the planet of love becomes the planet of war...
Chapter 8
There were very few people standing around the dais who knew the true significance of that photograph - nevertheless, everyone assumed it was something important. Something dangerous, even, given the way they began to retreat, taking shelter in the tent or crowding behind the uniformed Security people.
Kame made a lunge for the picture but Toma danced away, keeping it just out of his reach, and Maki stood fierce between them.
"Stay back!" Toma warned. "You know what this is used for!"
"Yes, and we also know you can't use it here!" Ueda yelled back. "All outgoing transmissions are blocked! Scan it all you like but the codes won't get through!"
"That doesn't mean I can't destroy it!" Toma pulled out a lighter. "The president would lose his remote control over the USN bases on the inner planets...and if he can't keep the rest of the Sol System under control, maybe it's time someone else took over!"
He flicked his fingers and a tongue of bright orange flame licked dangerously near the corner of the picture, which was missing its frame. Taguchi took a step forward, but Toma shook his head.
"Don't move! You can have this back when we all get out of here. The KAT-TUN's docked at the spaceport, right?"
Kame nodded. "It is, but-"
"And you're coming with us, Kamenashi." Toma didn't give him time to argue. "The rest of you stay here."
Jin's heart skipped a beat. Like hell was Toma taking Kame with him. "You can't leave," he pointed out. "Not till Sunday. What are you going to do, Toma? Barricade yourself in the station until the weekend?"
Maki finally spoke up. "We won't have to. Not with one of these talking for us." She pulled a nerve disruptor from beneath her jacket. The weapon was banned everywhere except Ross 128, and for good reason. There was no less dignified a way to die. "Return Hasegawa and Kazama to us. I've got the ship schematics - there's no way anyone will be able to catch up to us once we're on board, and your trainees will fly wherever we tell them to with Kamenashi's life at stake."
"That's not much of a threat when you're trying to kill me anyway."
Toma smirked. "But they don't know that, do they? Or there would be more than six of you in the city."
Kame fell silent. The trainees didn't know, and if one of their officers was in danger, they'd do anything to save him. Including flying a small subsection of a terrorist organisation halfway across the galaxy.
Jin held up his hands to show they were empty, then sidestepped in front of Kame. "You can't. Take me instead. Please! If you really want to make him suffer, kidnapping me will have more effect than just killing him!"
He hoped that, by splitting them up, Kame would be safe. He didn't think Toma would kill him - though he wouldn't put it past Maki to try - and once he was back on board, well, anything could happen. Yamapi would be bound to notice there was something wrong when the KAT-TUN took off without warning, particularly since Koki and Nakamaru were, according to Taguchi, filling him in right now.
A bony elbow caught him in the side as Kame pushed past him, snarling under his breath for Jin to shut up and stop talking himself into dangerous situations.
Toma's composure had been momentarily shaken by Jin's suggestion, but with Kame coming to the fore, he was on more solid ground. "Nice of you to make the offer, Jin, but I can't do that. Kamenashi has to pay for what he did, and fifteen months stuck on board ship with his friends is no kind of punishment for wiping out hundreds of thousands of people! I'm not going to hurt you, but I can't let him live!"
"Killing him isn't going to bring your friends back - or anyone else!" Jin implored. "Kill Kame and you might as well kill me!"
Kame's head whipped round. "Jin!"
"If you're missing, I can find you," Jin whispered. "Even if it takes me the rest of my life. But if you're dead, all I can do is follow you. I can't bring you back."
"Stop trying to sound so cool - you're embarrassing me..." For all that Jin's gesture had flustered him, Kame still found it sweet. Horribly, horribly mistimed, but sweet. "You can't pay my debts for me, Jin." He pressed a cold kiss to Jin's cheek, and turned to face Toma.
"All I can do is tell you how sorry I am," he began, "but I know that's nowhere near enough to make up for what I've done."
"You've got that right," Toma said.
"You don't understand!" Jin did his best to intervene. "He was out of his mind at the time!"
The look Kame gave him would have withered the Tree of Life itself. "You're not helping by trying to convince everyone I was insane, thanks."
"But you-"
Kame pulled his shirt open, wincing as a couple of the buttons popped off and were lost forever. As a tactic for persuading people not to kill him, exposing his bare chest had a hundred percent success rate - but he'd only tried it once, and that had been on Jin. He'd offered to let Jin kill him in retribution, and Jin had turned away.
Toma didn't. "You want to take your punishment now, that's fine." He traded the photograph and lighter to Maki in return for the nerve disruptor, and pointed it at Kame. "I'm sorry, Jin, but I have to do this."
If you'd asked Kame fifteen months ago if he deserved to die, he'd have said yes in a heartbeat. If you'd asked him fifteen minutes ago, he'd probably still have said yes. He hadn't even begun to deal with his part in the war, had hidden away in the safety of the KAT-TUN, with the hull between him and the rest of the universe, and he didn't have to look at what he'd done.
Oh, intellectually he knew he could never make up for his actions. He could spend the rest of his life apologising to the friends and relatives of the people whose deaths he'd contributed to in some way, and even if he did the same for his next twenty lifetimes, it wouldn't be enough.
But now he was out in the universe again, and there were consequences. Real people, people who didn't have to put up with him no matter what, who had every right to want him dead - if only they knew he was guilty. And Toma did. And Maki, and their friends. No one else outside the military, but it didn't matter to Kame. Numbers didn't matter, because even the smallest number felt too big. There was no reason Kame could think of that he deserved to live. His only argument was that killing him wouldn't fix anything...although it might ease the pain. Exactly whose pain, he wasn't sure.
So Kame's life mattered less. Sacrifice one to appease the many, he understood that concept. And up until now, he'd have agreed. Sure, he'd have made a token protest, and if he hadn't had his friends and crew to protect, he might have given up, let himself be turned into fodder for the computing monstrosity.
But there was one single event that had changed his mind. Jin had offered himself in Kame's place, and more-or-less stated outright that Kame's death would mean his own.
If Kame wasn't worthy of existence, had no possibility of redemption...would anyone ever have said that?
Besides, he'd already broken Jin's heart once. He didn't think he'd be forgiven a second time.
Forgiveness was quite clearly the furthest thing from Toma's mind as he took aim with the nerve disruptor at Kame's torso. Though his hand wavered, his expression remained cool, dispassionate. It was to be an execution, then.
Kame closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited.
Three things happened simultaneously. Jin tackled Kame to the ground, covering him with his own body to shield him from a shot that was never fired; Ueda shot the disruptor out of Toma's hand...and Commodore Yamashita Tomohisa appeared in the middle of the dais.
Having had the wind knocked out of him by his partner, Kame couldn't manage anything more than a gasping "What the...?"
Jin drew back into a crouch so Kame could get up, and stared in amazement at his best friend. "Pi, am I hallucinating or did you just teleport into Eros City?"
"Got a presidential order to stop the jamming long enough for the Pin to get a lock on the tracking device in Kame's leg and teleport me here," Yamapi responded. "Good thing he didn't have it removed yet, or I'd never have found you guys. Nakamaru couldn't tell me exactly where you'd gone."
Jin looked from Yamapi to Toma. "Did they tell you about...?"
Yamapi nodded slowly, struggling to hide his uneasiness. "Toma."
For his part, Toma was looking equally nervous. Ueda's bullet, a hard projectile of compressed oxygen, had knocked the nerve disruptor away with such force that the motion had left his hand sore. Taguchi had caught the weapon on the fly and taken the opportunity to make it disappear altogether, pocketing it discreetly to cannibalise for parts at a later date.
The lighter lay forgotten on the ground where Maki had dropped it - the commodore's sudden appearance had been as much a surprise to her as to everyone else, though she'd managed to hang onto the photograph.
Even the governor successfully read the tension in the air. A new player had joined the game, and no one knew whose move it was next.
Yamapi removed a pair of the Pin's teleport bracelets from his pocket: he held one out to Toma, the other to Maki. "We're going to teleport back to my flagship, where the other two are waiting for you, and you're all going to tell me everything about the 4Tops. Everything."
Toma started to respond, but lapsed into silence when Yamapi shook his head. "Toma, I don't know what I want to say to you. I just know I don't want to say it here."
"You all right, Pi?" Jin crept close enough to speak to his best friend without being overheard. "You look like hell."
"They're not supposed to keep me out of the loop," Yamapi muttered back. "They *promised* they wouldn't keep secrets from me, and then they make me send you guys out here to get yourselves killed for nothing, trusting you'd be okay if you were all together."
Though no names were mentioned, it was easy enough for Jin to figure out who'd gotten Yamapi so upset. President Imai Tsubasa and Admiral Takizawa Hideaki. It must have been, Jin thought, one hell of a debriefing.
"What do you mean, for nothing?"
Jin hadn't heard Kame sneak up behind him, and the sudden irate voice in his ear made him jump.
"The photograph," Yamapi said sadly. "No codes."
He said this loud enough for Maki and Toma to hear, and Maki turned the photograph over in her hand, squinting at it in fierce concentration as though she could verify this for herself. "We were set up?" she asked.
The commodore nodded. "All you've got is a nice picture of my CO and his partner at the beach. I don't know where they keep the real codes."
A moment of stunned silence, and the photograph joined the lighter on the ground.
As a pair of burly Eros City Security men cuffed Toma and Maki and jammed the teleport bracelets none-too-gently on their wrists, the crowd began to disperse and Kame surprised himself by volunteering to Yamapi the information that Toma hadn't actually fired the nerve disruptor.
"I'm not sure he was going to, either," he added. "If that counts for anything."
Yamapi considered this a moment. "It counts with me," he said.
-----
At Eros City Spaceport, Docking Bay 94, the command crew of the KAT-TUN were delighted to discover that in their incredibly brief absence, the trainees had a) not blown up the ship and b) managed to repair the jets in the hot tub.
"It's not as nice as the one in our hotel but at least it doesn't make me paranoid!" Jin declared, and Kame was forced to agree.
They were going to be stuck in port another couple of days anyway while Yamapi interrogated his prisoners and tried to figure out what to do with them. It was an uncomfortable time for the poor commodore, caught between his superiors and old friends turned renegade. Kame wasn't interested in pursuing charges against them, and despite his unfortunate experience outside the Heartbreak Club, neither was Jin. Ueda had successfully suppressed his ire at being shot by Kazama upon discovery of the latter's connection to Yamapi, though he did make a point of saying he never wanted to share an orbit again.
In the grand scheme of things, the plan to wreak vengeance on Kamenashi Kazuya was far less important than the overall terrorist activities of the 4Tops. With no clear way to infiltrate the group, Takki and Tsubasa had taken the only option available to them: use Kame as a stalking horse. They'd known Ikuta Toma was part of the organisation - known of his past working for Kitagawa, of his helpless fury as he'd watched the Titan Colony die from afar - and knew that with nothing to lose, he'd never give up his leaders.
So they'd set him up. Having concluded that the 4Tops must have had a spy inside JE Fleet HQ, they'd allowed the knowledge to leak about Kame's role as the tactical consultant for the Fahngarlians, and how much they valued his expertise for covert missions, assuming it would draw Toma out and give him something to focus on. They'd also spread rumours about the self-destruct codes - a tempting treat for any organisation seeking control of the inner planets. The combination had been enough for Toma and his like-minded friends to act on their own, risk exposing themselves for the sake of revenge - and incidentally do their leaders a favour at the same time.
"I don't care," Kame said when the admiral filled him in during a three-way vid-screen conference between the KAT-TUN, the Pin, and JE Fleet HQ. "I don't want to know what you know, or why you did it, or how sorry you are. I just want you to leave me the hell alone."
He switched off the screen, silencing both other parties in the conversation, and stormed off to his cabin.
Everyone else on the bridge turned to look at Jin.
"You have to go after him," Ueda said. "Or we're all going to mutiny."
There were nods of agreement from all sides. Jin crumbled under the weight of their combined stares and trudged after his partner.
Kame hadn't locked himself in, but he didn't make any move to welcome Jin either. He was lying on the bed, arms folded beneath his head, surrounded by the remains of his luggage. (Yamapi had forgotten to bring any teleport bracelets from the KAT-TUN with him, so the crew had had to return to their hotels, grab their bags, and leave Eros City the normal way. Luckily, the presidential permission allowed them to leave early.)
Jin perched gingerly on the edge of the bed and cast a wary glance down at Kame, as though the latter were about to sprout claws and take a swipe down his back.
"How do you deal with it?"
"What?"
"How do you deal with it?" Kame repeated. "You know what I did - and you're one of the few people who know why. How do you live with it?"
Jin shrugged. "I don't think about it. We didn't have much to do with the war until the end, and I didn't know you were involved till then. It's like...I separate things out so I only have to deal with the parts that are relevant to me.
"And it's more important for you to be here with me - and our friends - than for you to be rotting in some jail somewhere. It's hard to find redemption if no one will let you do anything, right?"
Kame sat up, reached for Jin's hand and squeezed his fingers to near-breaking point. "Right." He sighed. "We're on leave again now. Properly. One month."
"Do you want to go back to Earth?" Jin hesitated to ask.
The younger of the two captains shook his head. "Everyone else wants to go: they've been looking forward to it. So have you."
"Yeah, but there's nothing to stop us going away by ourselves, is there?" True, Jin had been anticipating a return to Earth with great pleasure, enjoying the novelty of travelling around with Kame and knowing he didn't have to keep looking over his shoulder. But that could wait until Kame was ready to go back. "We can use one of our shuttles and let Ueda take the ship down to Tokyo Central Spaceport for the month. Or we could get them to drop us off somewhere and we'll just take commercial flights wherever we want to go."
"I don't know where I want to go, Jin." Kame tugged him down till they were both lying flat on the bed. It was hard to believe that only fourteen hours ago, they'd been in the same position in Room 369 of the Cupid's Gate. "It wasn't so bad in Eros City, because we were on a mission and it's not the kind of place where anyone cares who you are or what you've done."
"It's not like people on Earth know what you've done," Jin pointed out. "Not outside the military - and probably members of the 4Tops, who will be getting arrested soon enough anyway."
"It doesn't make any difference whether they know or not. I know. I don't think I'm ready to stare civilians in the face and carry on a normal, everyday conversation with them when in the back of my mind I'll be thinking about how big their coffin would have been."
"This is a really depressing conversation to be having on Valentine's Day, you know?" Jin tried to think of a more cheerful topic, but the only thing that sprang to mind was a conversation he'd been having a week ago with Nakamaru on the rising price of hyperdrive fuel, and he didn't think that was likely to be much help. "Let's just go somewhere far away, then. Leave the Sol System, go to planets the Fahngarlians never even thought about. I hear Gliese 581 d is nice this time of year."
"Long way to go for a vacation."
"So?" Jin wriggled closer to Kame, pressing their hips together. "If we disappear for a while, who's going to care? Our COs owe you one for using you as bait, and I don't really feel like reporting in at JE Fleet HQ right now."
"They've spent a lot of money on this ship," Kame warned. "They're not going to let us just walk away with it."
"Yeah," Jin agreed, "they've spent money. So much that there's nothing else in the entire United Solar Navy that can catch us, never mind the JE Fleet. Besides...none of us are angels."
Kame rolled sideways to catch his partner's eye, and winked. "I have a plan. Yamapi obviously needs cheering up, so we descend on the Pin with a couple of crates of replicated beer and a lot of cake, get him so drunk he'll agree to anything, and get him to sign off on a six-month furlough. We can be gone before he recovers from the hangover."
"Oh, that'll really brighten his day..."
"Tomorrow," Kame decided. "Tonight, I need cheering up too. I still think this is the worst Valentine's Day I've ever had. Waking up to stunner fire, a car chase that would've made a roller coaster look tame, a fake wedding with a poisonous ending...oh, and one noble but really stupid attempt by a certain Captain Bakanishi to throw himself in the line of fire."
Jin turned away, so hurt he forgot to correct the nickname. "You thought it was stupid?"
Kame caught him round the waist and hugged him tightly. "Stupidly romantic, then. But please don't offer to give yourself up for me in the future, because if you'd been killed, Toma might as well have taken us both out with the same shot."
A slow, satisfied grin began to work its way across Jin's face. "Who needs chocolates for Valentine's Day when you have self-sacrifice?"
"Well, it would've been nice to get chocolates again," Kame said wistfully. "The trainees gave us so many last year. I must've received about thirty."
Jin pretended to count tens of chocolates on his fingers. "I think I probably got about forty."
Kame quickly amended his figure, sure that he'd forgotten a few. "Come to think of it, I forgot about all the ones from the guys in Engineering. The real figure must've been about fifty-six."
"Seventy."
"Eighty-three."
"Ninety-two."
"One hundred and six."
"One hundred and eleven."
Kame burst out laughing. "Jin, do we even have that many trainees on board?"
"Uh...maybe? Most of them are very small, they don't take up much space. Especially that Chinen kid."
Kame's mirth increased in volume, resounding throughout the cabin. "You were that tiny once too," he pointed out.
Jin smirked. "Bet I've always been taller than you, though."
"Doesn't matter when we're lying down."
There wasn't a lot Jin could say to that. For one thing, it was true, and for another he couldn't say anything at all when one of Kame's hands left his waist to nestle itself in his curls, the other began to trail under his shirt, up along his ribcage, and Kame's mouth greeted his with a gentle kiss. He barely noticed as Kame's weight shifted from the mattress as he lowered himself slowly over his partner, knees on either side of Jin's legs, heat rising between them as the bubbles had the night before.
Jin moaned before he could catch himself, lips parting under Kame's, the sound stolen by the warmth of Kame's mouth.
"Even if it was a fake wedding, we can still have a honeymoon," Kame gasped out between kisses. "And I've got the certificate in case we ever need to go undercover as a married couple!"
"Oh no," Jin vowed, "that is the last time I agree to any mission that involves us playing detective for the military!"
His stomach churned angrily and he grimaced, made a grab for Kame's wrists to still him.
"What is it?" Worry coloured Kame's voice. "Still feeling bad from the stun? It should've worn off completely by now."
"It's not that." Jin couldn't keep from blushing. "I'm hungry. We ate so well yesterday, and then we didn't have anything today because we missed breakfast and then there was the wedding and-"
"I get your point," Kame assured him, and reached for the replicator remote. "We shouldn't have started talking about chocolate. Late supper for two?"
Jin's stomach growled so loudly that both men stared at it in alarm. "Better make it four," he said. "I think I'm about to fade away from hunger."
Kame resigned himself to spending another frustrating night with his partner. After eating so much that late, Jin would probably drift off to sleep, leaving Kame to clear away the crumbs and make sure neither of them was likely to roll over and end up with rice in their hair or anything. It was a comfortably familiar routine.
Comfortable, because they were safe on their own ship, shielded from the rest of the universe by a thick hull and some good friends, and whatever happened to them there, they were together.
Kame wouldn't have it any other way.
----- The End...for now. -----