FIC: "Seachange" 1/5 (Akame, Rated R, Complete)
Seachange
21,000 words
Disclaimer: This story is very much a work of fiction. I claim no affiliation with Johnny's Entertainment and intend no infringement.
Summary: Kame visits Jin in a little Australian town by the sea; Akame, Jin/OFC, Future fic.
Warnings: ANGST. I hate being spoiled in detail for fics but some people like to know what they're getting into, so you can find a more specific list here.
Thank you to samenashi, without whose constant abuse I would not write a word; font, for trying to make me the best I can be; and darlita, whose passion and faith in Akame inspires me.
Also, samenashi and I joked about making a pretentious soundtrack for this fic. As with all our jokes this became a very elaborate project. I present: Seachange: An Original Soundtrack.
Jin hears from Kame twice a year, on average; a long letter on his birthday, hastily written on the train or in the car, characters slightly bumpy and lopsided from the rolling wheels; usually, a few months later, a phone call. It’s around the same time every year but Jin has never figured out what prompts the call. For whatever reason, Kame finds November lonely.
Sometimes they speak more often, but it’s pretty hard to catch Kame with a spare moment to answer his phone. It’s the same with most of Jin’s old friends, a fact that makes him sullen and sulky whenever he has to leave yet another message on Yamapi’s voicemail, but it makes every reunion ever more joyous. Last year Jin traveled home to Tokyo for his mother’s birthday; had felt drunk on Pi’s presence, and Ryo’s, and Ueda’s, had rambled happily in his native tongue, free of the slight awkwardness he always feels in his new home. He speaks English well enough now, after all these years, but he speaks it slowly, words measured and even to be understood.
He’d seen Kame too, but only for half an hour; they’d arranged to meet at Narita, Jin arriving in Tokyo as Kame departed for France. They’d sat together in the VIP lounge, hunched over their coffees, but it hadn’t been long enough. It would take Jin much longer than half an hour to get even close to figuring out how Kame really was.
Whenever Jin asks, whoever Jin asks, the answer is always the same: Kame is busy, but fine.
When Kame calls out of the blue one day in July and says that he has a little bit of time off, that he’d like to visit, Jin isn’t sure what to make of it.
-
When Jin made the decision at twenty four years old that he was done with Johnny’s Entertainment, Kame hadn’t been able to talk to him for months afterwards, five or six at least. He’d given Jin his blessing in the days before the press conference, had touched his hair and wished him well, but he hadn’t been able to face him honestly and that, along with Koki’s belligerent rage, Ueda’s silence, Nakamaru’s tears and Taguchi’s worry, had made the new world he was stepping into seem bleak and dystopic, an endless wasteland of monsters and ghosts without his trusty friends to back him up. The feeling hadn’t lasted long in the face of the excitement he felt as he roamed from city to city, but those first few months had been terrifying. Sometimes he’d lie in the lumpy, uncomfortable beds at whatever cheap, crappy backpacker’s hostel he was staying in and think about what this would have been like if the others were with him, even just Kame or Pi. With Pi he’d go to bars and chat up girls, full of the bravado of hunting in a pack, and with Kame he wouldn’t have to, because he’d be able to talk Kame back into bed with him and they’d lie in these scratchy sheets together.
In those months, he’d emailed Kame frequently, but the reply was always a variation on a theme: I’m okay, everybody’s okay, I’ll call you soon, but he never did. It wasn’t until Jin had an anxiety attack in Brazil one day that he could even get Kame to answer the phone; whatever the little blue pill Jin’s traveling companion had given him was, it’d made him dial Kame’s number over and over again for hours, sitting on the floor in the ladies’ room at a bar, beneath the sinks. By the time Kame finally answered the phone Jin’s battery was just about dead and he’d spent a couple hundred dollars just on leaving voicemail.
“What’s wrong?” Kame asked in a hurry when he finally answered the call. His voice was threadbare from exhaustion, slightly out of breath; Jin could hear his exhalations puff into the mouthpiece.
“You won’t talk to me,” Jin said, leaning his head against the tile. There was a woman standing at the sink fixing her lipstick. Jin looked at her shoes, the slightly dusty curves and straps of her leather sandals.
There was a long, frustrated silence. “Jin,” Kame gritted out. “I have 85 missed calls from you. When I looked at my phone I thought it must be some hospital god knows where calling to tell me you were dead.”
“You wouldn’t even care if I was,” Jin said childishly, and Kame hung up on him. The next day, Jin called to apologise, carefully omitting the part about the mysterious little pill to avoid a lecture. Kame had bitched and grumbled through the entire conversation, but at least he’d answered the phone.
-
Jin drives into Sydney to pick Kame up from the airport. It’s a warm day, for winter, sun slanting through the overhanging clouds and making the city seem a little brighter and happier than it did the last time Jin visited, when it seemed sad and downcast with rain. He sings along to an old Bon Jovi song as he pulls into the short term parking lot. He’s running late; Kame will probably be annoyed.
When he strolls into the International terminal, Kame is leaning against a thick column near a news stand, eyes obscured by a characteristically huge pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses. He’s always been small, but Jin had never noticed so much in Japan; here, amongst the foreigners with their beer bellies and big meaty legs, he is dwarfed even in his huge fur-lined coat. The sunglasses slide down his nose when Jin calls his name in greeting and hurries forward.
“Hey,” Kame says, just as Jin catches him in an enthusiastically welcoming hug. Kame feels stiff and tiny in his arms, obviously uncomfortable with the public display, but Jin doesn’t mind. He smells like Burberry cologne and the Johnny’s studios, like their childhood. Jin tilts him from side to side and feels Kame tremor a little; his small hand grips Jin’s leather jacket near his hip.
“Welcome to Australia,” Jin says in English when he pulls away, his grin broad and infectious.
“Yoroshiku onegaishimasu,” Kame replies, but doesn’t bow.
-
Kame looks a little doubtful at the sight of Jin’s car; more than twenty years old and cluttered with shopping bags in the backseat, but he makes no comment. “It’s a classic,” Jin says anyway, as they get in. It’s not, but Kame doesn’t know anything about cars and would probably believe him if he insisted the beat up truck he used to drive in Germany was a rare vintage.
“Oh,” Kame says uncertainly. “It’s very nice.”
It’s always like this the first time they see each other after a long absence. Kame is distant and polite, searching Jin for the signals of their former friendship. He always eases up eventually, his formality easing into the bickering they’re both used to. They have known one another for almost twenty years, Jin realises with a lightning bolt of awe.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” Jin says. “I’m so excited.”
“Thank you for having me,” Kame replies, that same mannered, measured tone. “I should have given you more notice, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Stop talking like you’re a stranger to me,” Jin says irritably. “It’s no inconvenience.”
“I’m a stranger to Alice.” Kame leans his head against his window as they pull out of the parking lot, peering at the world outside. Jin remembers that when he first came here, he’d looked for kangaroos and crocodiles everywhere. Kame probably isn’t doing that. Well, he might be, but he’d never admit it out loud. “I feel bad troubling her at such short notice.”
“She’s looking forward to meeting you,” Jin protests. She’d quizzed him all morning about what Kame eats (“Nothing”), what he doesn’t eat (“Everything”), how much English he speaks, if he likes animals, if he likes children, if he likes old people, if he likes the beach, if he likes dogs, if he drinks beer, how he takes his coffee, if he feels the cold, if he’d prefer lavender or vanilla soap in the guest bathroom. She’s only had the chance to meet a few of Jin’s friends from back home, and then only briefly; Pi for less than a day when he came to Sydney to shoot a new photobook, Taguchi once on a stopover on his way to New Zealand (he was visiting Middle Earth) and Nakamaru once, when they all happened to be in Fiji at the same time. This is the first time any of Jin’s friends have come just to stay, and she is enthusiastic at the prospect.
“Does she know about us?” Kame asks bluntly.
Once one of Jin’s old girlfriends had found photos of he and Kame in bed together when she was snooping through Jin’s things; not particularly explicit photos, not even close, but not the jokey fanservice kind from magazines either. Intimate, Jin’s face nuzzled happily into the naked curve of Kame’s neck. She hadn’t known about them, and she’d ended up sobbing in confusion and humiliation on Kame’s doorstep even though Jin tried to explain to her that they hadn’t been together for months before they’d met. Kame hadn’t spoken to him for a week.
“Um,” Jin says. “She knows I’ve been with men.” She’d have to know, when they’d met in Rome two years ago, he’d been following a rich young Frenchman around Italy like a puppy. She’d consoled him when Pierre had left him to go home to his wife, and he’d ended up following her home to Australia just because he had nothing else to do.
“Does she know you’ve been with me?” Kame’s eyebrow is raised in that familiar condescending way.
“I don’t know!” Jin yelps. “Maybe. I’m not sure. She knows I’ve been with men and she knows you’re really special to me, so… maybe?”
“You should tell her,” Kame says with a gentle, awkward smile. “You’re no good at hiding things from the people you love.”
-
It’s a long drive, a little over two and a half hours if Jin drives like a calm and responsible adult, which he attempts with Kame in the car. Not that he’s awake to notice; somewhere in the suburbs of Sydney Kame slumps down in his chair and falls asleep, chin tucked into the great explosion of his fur collar. Jin tries not to stare at him too much, but whenever he looks around to check his blind spots and catches a glimpse of him out of the corner of his eye he feels a fresh burst of delight. Kame’s mouth is pressed in a tense little line and he looks exhausted, like he hasn’t slept in a year, but he’s here and they’re not fighting yet, this great big piece of home sleeping safely in his car.
Jin wakes him up when they’re almost into town so that he can see the endless blue expanse of ocean stretching out from the coast. Kame blinks sleepily and murmurs incoherently under his breath, but he looks suitably impressed and leans forward in his seat to peer closer, squinting up at the seagulls hovering in the afternoon sun.
“Maybe we can get you a board and you can go surfing,” Jin says eagerly. He’s never learned to surf himself, not since the first time Kame and Pi tried to teach him. Jin doesn’t like it when he’s not good at things right away. He’d always liked it when Kame went surfing, though, because he’d always seemed so excited about it, even on the drive home, face and hair streaked with drying sand and salt and shoulders pink from the sun. Jin likes to sit on the beach with a manga and his ipod and a bag of candy and watch, or jump the waves without a board.
Kame just says, “Maybe,” and goes back to sleep.
-
Baxter is asleep on the front deck when Jin pulls into the drive, eyes hidden in the mess of his fur. Alice had been bathing him when Jin left for the airport, but there are already bits of grass tangled in his shaggy hair. He lifts his head as they step out of the car, drags himself to his feet as they struggle to drag Kame’s suitcase from the back seat.
“I didn’t know you had kids,” Kame says.
“What?” Jin asks, dropping the bag with a thump.
Kame nods towards Baxter. “He looks just like you.”
“Hey!” Jin shouts indignantly, even though it’s true, it’s so totally true. Kame laughs his demented little laugh and walks over to the dog, crouching in front of him and ruffling his ears.
“Kawaiiiiiiiiiiiii,” Kame says, in that stupid baby voice he always uses around babies and animals. He looks tiny crouched next to Baxter, or Baxter looks huge, Jin isn’t sure which. The dog’s head is level with Kame’s and when he surges forward to sniff curiously at Kame’s hair, at his gigantic fur collar, Kame wobbles a little on the balls of his feet and laughs loudly.
Alice appears breathlessly in the doorway, stumbling through the screen door with a clumsy little laugh. Kame stands warily and smiles, his polite, nervous smile to her huge, friendly grin.
“Konichiwa, Kamenashi-san,” she says in terribly accented Japanese.
“Hajimemashite,” Kame says with a little bow.
“Um,” she says, and slants her eyes in Jin’s direction.
“She doesn’t actually speak Japanese,” he tells Kame. “She’s just showing off.”
“Ah,” Kame says.
-
Kame has brought them an expensive bottle of Shochu and Jin’s favourite daifuku, from this little store halfway between their childhood homes.
Jin says, “Is this all you brought me?”
“I don’t know if you deserve it.” He rolls his eyes, as if Jin is an obnoxious child who should only expect a lump of coal in his stocking at Christmas. “Hold on a minute.”
He disappears into the guest room and comes back with a Louis Vuitton satchel that looks like it might be a woman’s purse, only it’s gigantic. He starts pulling little brightly coloured sacks out of it just as Alice returns from the kitchen with their coffee, a mismatched ring of mugs on her tray. She puts a mug down in front of Kame that has the logo of a local surf club printed on the side in faded red letters.
“Thank you,” Kame says in English. For a minute the familiar hiss of his th is jarring, like Jin might look out the window and they’ll be back in the studio in Shibuya.
Kame pushes a bright red package towards him. It’s from Pi, just a bunch of photos and a t-shirt and some jewellery from Shirota-san’s new line. There’s stuff from his mother, too, socks and underwear that he can’t believe she made Kame carry halfway across the world, clippings from the local newspaper about a girl he had a crush on in elementary school getting married. She’s been sending him this kind of hint for a few months now. She wants him to find a nice (Japanese) girl and settle down and have (Japanese) babies. In Tokyo.
The package from KAT-TUN looks like it has been sitting around the rehearsal room for months while they all forgot to send it; there’s a letter from Ueda inside dated three months ago and discs with various member’s hastily scrawled writing across the top. There are dvd box sets of Kame and Taguchi’s recent dramas and an advance copy of Ueda’s solo acoustic album. There’s a t-shirt Koki must have designed, bright red roses twining around the strings of a guitar. There’s a stack of photos an inch thick of Koki’s little girl, her big cheesy grin just like her father’s.
“Thanks,” Jin says, and sticks one of the photos of Hanako on his fridge.
-
To Jin’s vast disappointment, Kame retires to bed when it is barely dark, the guest room still and silent through the closed door.
“He’s a party pooper,” Jin whines, sitting on the floor by Alice’s feet, flicking through the channels on the TV with one lazy hand on the remote. There’s a local soap opera about nurses and surfers on. Jin likes it because the nurses go to the beach in bikinis a lot. Alice likes it because of the helpful medical information.
“He probably has jet lag,” Alice scolds. She and Kame had struggled along in stilted conversation made up mostly of gestures and thickly accented nouns. Kame’s English vocabulary is better than Jin remembers it being but he has yet to string together any kind of coherent sentence and has to settle for repeating words and pointing between objects to make connections. Alice’s Japanese is terrible and totally incomprehensible, but she’s really good at charades.
“Mou, there’s barely a time difference at all,” Jin humphs. “I don’t think I’ve seen him sleep more than four hours a night the whole time I’ve known him, why does he have to start now?”
“Well if he works that much he’s probably exhausted,” she laughs, leaning over to hug him from behind. She smells like the basil and lemongrass shampoo she’s been using lately. It always makes Jin hungry for Thai food.
“He slept all the way home in the car! And the whole way in the plane. He’s going to slip into some kind of coma.”
“You’re like a spoiled little kid,” she comments. “Whining because you’re not getting enough attention.”
“When he’s in my house he should pay attention to me,” Jin pouts. If Alice weren’t here he’d probably slip into the guest room and suffocate Kame with the weight of his body, sleep with his nose pressed up against Kame’s heart. He doesn’t wish for that, though, because Alice will stay and Kame won’t. Jin doesn’t like to be alone.
She giggles and tugs on his ears. “You looooooooove him,” she sings. “You want to maaaaaaarrrrrry him.”
“Um,” Jin says, and stops. His silence grows awkward and her fingers drop from his ear.
“Oh,” she says in sudden realisation. “Oh.”
“Ummmm.....” Jin says.
“So... um. You and him?” she asks, her voice rising in pitch but not volume.
“Sort of...” He rubs his bare feet on the carpet, distracting himself with static electricity bursts.
“For... for um, how long?”
“Uh, I don’t know.” Jin says. “On and off...”
“On and off for...”
He tries to come up with a number and fails. They’d fought a lot because Kame could be a vicious little pain in the ass when he was working, which was constantly, and because Jin had been kind of young and wild and adventurous and there were so many pretty girls throwing themselves at him, whereas Kame just wanted to settle down and have three billion children and lead a quiet life, just himself and his family and his millions of fans. Sometimes they wouldn’t speak to each other for months at a time, not really, when Jin was dating a new girl or Kame was working on a new drama. Then one day Jin would call and say, “What are you doing right now?” and everything would be normal again.
“Well... we met when I was fourteen...” He trails off. Her face is carefully blank and he can’t tell if she’s upset or just feeling uncomfortable; usually if she were upset she’d be twisting the locket around her neck and yelling at him by now, but he can’t ever be sure.
“You slept together when you were fourteen,” she says blankly, that slight note of incredulity that lifts her accent into a question at the end.
“NO,” Jin yelps. “NO, GROSS. KAME WAS TWELVE.”
“WELL YOU’RE BEING REALLY EVASIVE,” she yells back, the way she always does when Jin yells. Jin scowls at her. “So the two of you were like, boyfriends?”
They weren’t boyfriends, not ever. Couples break up, Kame had always said. Couples break up for good. They’re not allowed to.
“I don’t know, not really,” Jin says. Kame always belonged to him in a way he can’t explain to her.
This might just be the most awkward conversation Jin has ever had in his life. He’s never really had to explain the thing between he and Kame to anyone before, has never even really tried to explain it to himself. Kame is just Kame, and Jin is just Jin, and they’ve been Akakame since before they even really wanted to be, Akakame since before Jin ever understood why.
“When was the last time you slept with him?” she asks finally, bluntly.
“A long time ago,” Jin lies. “I don’t remember.”
-
A few years ago, Jin and Kame met up in Istanbul, because Jin had practically begged Kame to meet him some place where they could be alone. They’d stayed in a crumbling hotel near the Grand Bazaar, the kind of place that has a toilet in the shower and paint chafing off the walls like the whole building has dermatitis.
“I’m picking up diseases just standing here,” Kame had said when he’d walked through the door, dumping his duffel bag on the bed. They’d gone to the market and bought enough food for three days and then holed up in the room for days, wrapped up in the rough, ugly peach coloured sheets. Sometimes, late at night, they’d gone for walks through the city when no-one else was around. Jin liked that because Kame didn’t mind when he held on tight to his hand, afraid of the criminals that might be lurking in the alleys waiting to violate a pretty young foreigner such as himself.
He likes being strange places with Kame, because it’s okay to be scared without being brave.
-
In the morning, Jin drags himself out of bed to take Baxter for a walk along the beach. The sun is dawning pale yellow against the charcoal sky as day breaks over the coast. The dog runs around him in circles, wind whipping through his fur, barking to Jin and diving at the seagulls that gather along the shore, sending them into white explosions over the waves. Jin whistles a jaunty tune, or tries to. He’s never been very good at whistling. He presses his lips together and blows but sound only comes out about half the time, like he’s a cartoon baby bird still learning to sing. After a few bars he gives up and sings loudly, the half remembered chorus of an old Arashi song, sprawled out boneless and happy on the sand.
-
Kame’s in the kitchen when he gets back to the house, standing at the bench in a huge hooded sweatshirt that hangs almost to his knees and a pair of red flannel pajama pants. Jin can’t see his feet or his hands.
“Hey,” Kame says with a thick morning voice, the same sleepy voice that used to murmur right in Jin’s ear when he was waking up on tour, pressed up close together in their hotel room bed. Sleeping with Kame always made the sheets smell like home.
“Hey,” Jin says, crossing to the fridge. He takes out the milk and the orange juice. “You’re up.”
“Yup.” Kame turns and leans against the bench, facing Jin with one arm crossed across his chest and the other rigid down his side.
“I thought you were going to sleep forever.” Jin says.
Kame smiles faintly. “I would have liked to.”
Jin makes coffee. He takes three teaspoons of sugar and a half a cup of milk like a thirteen year old in his, but Kame screws up his nose and asks for herbal tea.
“Are you serious?” Jin asks.
Kame stares at him blankly. When they were kids Kame drank coffee constantly. He’d come into work every morning with a gigantic cup from Starbucks and be running on that all day. Sometimes, when he hadn’t been sleeping, when he’d been up reading scripts and memorising lines, his movements would be jerky and frantic like his body couldn’t hold all the caffeine inside his bloodstream.
“Too much coffee is bad for you,” Kame says seriously. Jin makes him a peppermint tea from some bags he finds in the back of his pantry. He’s been out of the habit of drinking tea since leaving Japan, and Alice thinks tea is pointless.
“I told Alice about us,” Jin says when he’s finished his coffee and is standing at the sink, rinsing out his mug. “Well, sort of. I mean. It’s kind of hard to really explain.”
“Yeah,” Kame says, hands cupped close around his white china tea cup, staring into the inside like he might try and read the absent tea leaves. His mobile phone vibrates on the bench and he ignores it. “Sometimes I wish I had somebody to explain it to me.”
Sometimes Kame sounds so serious that it makes Jin’s organs feel funny, like someone is holding his kidneys in their hand and rolling them around like Chinese medicine balls.
“I’ll explain it to you,” he ends up saying dumbly, lecherously, clumsily stumbling into the solitude of Kame’s taut silence. When Kame looks at him he pushes his tongue into the corner of his mouth and grins at Kame’s spluttering disbelief.
“Jin,” Kame says, “That was terrible. I feel like I shouldn’t sleep with you ever again just on principle.”
“That totally would have worked on you when you were fifteen,” Jin sighs. “I liked it when you were easy.”
“That’s because you’re lazy.” Kame sips demurely at his tea as if he wasn’t ever fifteen and undignified with lust, as if he’d never dragged Jin into a karaoke booth to make out. Jin laughs and starts to leave the room.
“I’ve got to shower,” he says on his way out. “I’ve got work.”
“Oh,” Kame says. “Hey.” His tone is floating over the top of his voice like he’s trying too hard to sound light. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Will you have time later? I’ll buy you dinner.”
Jin frowns. He doesn’t like the way Kame’s still holding his cup at his lips, liquid paused on the precipice of his tongue. “Is something wrong?” he asks suspiciously.
Kame puts down the cup. “Of course not,” he says. “You’re going to be late for work.”
-
Three days a week Jin teaches music at the local primary school. He uses the simple games and exercises they’d used at the Jimusho, only without the extra lessons on hairstyling and making sexy faces when you sing. He plays guitar for the kids and they all sing together, big bright happy songs like Yellow Submarine and Hail to the Bus Driver. A few nights a week he tends bar at a pub in town, but he doesn’t like that nearly so much.
He has a break after his morning lesson, between the grade 2-3 composite class and the grade fivers. There’s this little shit in his early class that spent the morning banging loudly on the drum he’d misappropriated from Nicole, perfect little Nicole Allen with her friendly smiles and Transformers t-shirt, and now Jin has a headache. He thumps his keyboard irritably when he checks his email.
There’s a note from his mother begging him not to forget his Aunt’s birthday, some obnoxious forwarded chain mail from Taguchi, and the subscription to Asahi that he signed up for to seem adult but never reads. He’s about to delete it when he sees Kame’s name in the subject line. He clicks it before he registers the rest of the headline: Johnny’s Entertainment Idol Kamenashi Kazuya (29) diagnosed with cancer.
Continue...
21,000 words
Disclaimer: This story is very much a work of fiction. I claim no affiliation with Johnny's Entertainment and intend no infringement.
Summary: Kame visits Jin in a little Australian town by the sea; Akame, Jin/OFC, Future fic.
Warnings: ANGST. I hate being spoiled in detail for fics but some people like to know what they're getting into, so you can find a more specific list here.
Thank you to samenashi, without whose constant abuse I would not write a word; font, for trying to make me the best I can be; and darlita, whose passion and faith in Akame inspires me.
Also, samenashi and I joked about making a pretentious soundtrack for this fic. As with all our jokes this became a very elaborate project. I present: Seachange: An Original Soundtrack.
Jin hears from Kame twice a year, on average; a long letter on his birthday, hastily written on the train or in the car, characters slightly bumpy and lopsided from the rolling wheels; usually, a few months later, a phone call. It’s around the same time every year but Jin has never figured out what prompts the call. For whatever reason, Kame finds November lonely.
Sometimes they speak more often, but it’s pretty hard to catch Kame with a spare moment to answer his phone. It’s the same with most of Jin’s old friends, a fact that makes him sullen and sulky whenever he has to leave yet another message on Yamapi’s voicemail, but it makes every reunion ever more joyous. Last year Jin traveled home to Tokyo for his mother’s birthday; had felt drunk on Pi’s presence, and Ryo’s, and Ueda’s, had rambled happily in his native tongue, free of the slight awkwardness he always feels in his new home. He speaks English well enough now, after all these years, but he speaks it slowly, words measured and even to be understood.
He’d seen Kame too, but only for half an hour; they’d arranged to meet at Narita, Jin arriving in Tokyo as Kame departed for France. They’d sat together in the VIP lounge, hunched over their coffees, but it hadn’t been long enough. It would take Jin much longer than half an hour to get even close to figuring out how Kame really was.
Whenever Jin asks, whoever Jin asks, the answer is always the same: Kame is busy, but fine.
When Kame calls out of the blue one day in July and says that he has a little bit of time off, that he’d like to visit, Jin isn’t sure what to make of it.
-
When Jin made the decision at twenty four years old that he was done with Johnny’s Entertainment, Kame hadn’t been able to talk to him for months afterwards, five or six at least. He’d given Jin his blessing in the days before the press conference, had touched his hair and wished him well, but he hadn’t been able to face him honestly and that, along with Koki’s belligerent rage, Ueda’s silence, Nakamaru’s tears and Taguchi’s worry, had made the new world he was stepping into seem bleak and dystopic, an endless wasteland of monsters and ghosts without his trusty friends to back him up. The feeling hadn’t lasted long in the face of the excitement he felt as he roamed from city to city, but those first few months had been terrifying. Sometimes he’d lie in the lumpy, uncomfortable beds at whatever cheap, crappy backpacker’s hostel he was staying in and think about what this would have been like if the others were with him, even just Kame or Pi. With Pi he’d go to bars and chat up girls, full of the bravado of hunting in a pack, and with Kame he wouldn’t have to, because he’d be able to talk Kame back into bed with him and they’d lie in these scratchy sheets together.
In those months, he’d emailed Kame frequently, but the reply was always a variation on a theme: I’m okay, everybody’s okay, I’ll call you soon, but he never did. It wasn’t until Jin had an anxiety attack in Brazil one day that he could even get Kame to answer the phone; whatever the little blue pill Jin’s traveling companion had given him was, it’d made him dial Kame’s number over and over again for hours, sitting on the floor in the ladies’ room at a bar, beneath the sinks. By the time Kame finally answered the phone Jin’s battery was just about dead and he’d spent a couple hundred dollars just on leaving voicemail.
“What’s wrong?” Kame asked in a hurry when he finally answered the call. His voice was threadbare from exhaustion, slightly out of breath; Jin could hear his exhalations puff into the mouthpiece.
“You won’t talk to me,” Jin said, leaning his head against the tile. There was a woman standing at the sink fixing her lipstick. Jin looked at her shoes, the slightly dusty curves and straps of her leather sandals.
There was a long, frustrated silence. “Jin,” Kame gritted out. “I have 85 missed calls from you. When I looked at my phone I thought it must be some hospital god knows where calling to tell me you were dead.”
“You wouldn’t even care if I was,” Jin said childishly, and Kame hung up on him. The next day, Jin called to apologise, carefully omitting the part about the mysterious little pill to avoid a lecture. Kame had bitched and grumbled through the entire conversation, but at least he’d answered the phone.
-
Jin drives into Sydney to pick Kame up from the airport. It’s a warm day, for winter, sun slanting through the overhanging clouds and making the city seem a little brighter and happier than it did the last time Jin visited, when it seemed sad and downcast with rain. He sings along to an old Bon Jovi song as he pulls into the short term parking lot. He’s running late; Kame will probably be annoyed.
When he strolls into the International terminal, Kame is leaning against a thick column near a news stand, eyes obscured by a characteristically huge pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses. He’s always been small, but Jin had never noticed so much in Japan; here, amongst the foreigners with their beer bellies and big meaty legs, he is dwarfed even in his huge fur-lined coat. The sunglasses slide down his nose when Jin calls his name in greeting and hurries forward.
“Hey,” Kame says, just as Jin catches him in an enthusiastically welcoming hug. Kame feels stiff and tiny in his arms, obviously uncomfortable with the public display, but Jin doesn’t mind. He smells like Burberry cologne and the Johnny’s studios, like their childhood. Jin tilts him from side to side and feels Kame tremor a little; his small hand grips Jin’s leather jacket near his hip.
“Welcome to Australia,” Jin says in English when he pulls away, his grin broad and infectious.
“Yoroshiku onegaishimasu,” Kame replies, but doesn’t bow.
-
Kame looks a little doubtful at the sight of Jin’s car; more than twenty years old and cluttered with shopping bags in the backseat, but he makes no comment. “It’s a classic,” Jin says anyway, as they get in. It’s not, but Kame doesn’t know anything about cars and would probably believe him if he insisted the beat up truck he used to drive in Germany was a rare vintage.
“Oh,” Kame says uncertainly. “It’s very nice.”
It’s always like this the first time they see each other after a long absence. Kame is distant and polite, searching Jin for the signals of their former friendship. He always eases up eventually, his formality easing into the bickering they’re both used to. They have known one another for almost twenty years, Jin realises with a lightning bolt of awe.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” Jin says. “I’m so excited.”
“Thank you for having me,” Kame replies, that same mannered, measured tone. “I should have given you more notice, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Stop talking like you’re a stranger to me,” Jin says irritably. “It’s no inconvenience.”
“I’m a stranger to Alice.” Kame leans his head against his window as they pull out of the parking lot, peering at the world outside. Jin remembers that when he first came here, he’d looked for kangaroos and crocodiles everywhere. Kame probably isn’t doing that. Well, he might be, but he’d never admit it out loud. “I feel bad troubling her at such short notice.”
“She’s looking forward to meeting you,” Jin protests. She’d quizzed him all morning about what Kame eats (“Nothing”), what he doesn’t eat (“Everything”), how much English he speaks, if he likes animals, if he likes children, if he likes old people, if he likes the beach, if he likes dogs, if he drinks beer, how he takes his coffee, if he feels the cold, if he’d prefer lavender or vanilla soap in the guest bathroom. She’s only had the chance to meet a few of Jin’s friends from back home, and then only briefly; Pi for less than a day when he came to Sydney to shoot a new photobook, Taguchi once on a stopover on his way to New Zealand (he was visiting Middle Earth) and Nakamaru once, when they all happened to be in Fiji at the same time. This is the first time any of Jin’s friends have come just to stay, and she is enthusiastic at the prospect.
“Does she know about us?” Kame asks bluntly.
Once one of Jin’s old girlfriends had found photos of he and Kame in bed together when she was snooping through Jin’s things; not particularly explicit photos, not even close, but not the jokey fanservice kind from magazines either. Intimate, Jin’s face nuzzled happily into the naked curve of Kame’s neck. She hadn’t known about them, and she’d ended up sobbing in confusion and humiliation on Kame’s doorstep even though Jin tried to explain to her that they hadn’t been together for months before they’d met. Kame hadn’t spoken to him for a week.
“Um,” Jin says. “She knows I’ve been with men.” She’d have to know, when they’d met in Rome two years ago, he’d been following a rich young Frenchman around Italy like a puppy. She’d consoled him when Pierre had left him to go home to his wife, and he’d ended up following her home to Australia just because he had nothing else to do.
“Does she know you’ve been with me?” Kame’s eyebrow is raised in that familiar condescending way.
“I don’t know!” Jin yelps. “Maybe. I’m not sure. She knows I’ve been with men and she knows you’re really special to me, so… maybe?”
“You should tell her,” Kame says with a gentle, awkward smile. “You’re no good at hiding things from the people you love.”
-
It’s a long drive, a little over two and a half hours if Jin drives like a calm and responsible adult, which he attempts with Kame in the car. Not that he’s awake to notice; somewhere in the suburbs of Sydney Kame slumps down in his chair and falls asleep, chin tucked into the great explosion of his fur collar. Jin tries not to stare at him too much, but whenever he looks around to check his blind spots and catches a glimpse of him out of the corner of his eye he feels a fresh burst of delight. Kame’s mouth is pressed in a tense little line and he looks exhausted, like he hasn’t slept in a year, but he’s here and they’re not fighting yet, this great big piece of home sleeping safely in his car.
Jin wakes him up when they’re almost into town so that he can see the endless blue expanse of ocean stretching out from the coast. Kame blinks sleepily and murmurs incoherently under his breath, but he looks suitably impressed and leans forward in his seat to peer closer, squinting up at the seagulls hovering in the afternoon sun.
“Maybe we can get you a board and you can go surfing,” Jin says eagerly. He’s never learned to surf himself, not since the first time Kame and Pi tried to teach him. Jin doesn’t like it when he’s not good at things right away. He’d always liked it when Kame went surfing, though, because he’d always seemed so excited about it, even on the drive home, face and hair streaked with drying sand and salt and shoulders pink from the sun. Jin likes to sit on the beach with a manga and his ipod and a bag of candy and watch, or jump the waves without a board.
Kame just says, “Maybe,” and goes back to sleep.
-
Baxter is asleep on the front deck when Jin pulls into the drive, eyes hidden in the mess of his fur. Alice had been bathing him when Jin left for the airport, but there are already bits of grass tangled in his shaggy hair. He lifts his head as they step out of the car, drags himself to his feet as they struggle to drag Kame’s suitcase from the back seat.
“I didn’t know you had kids,” Kame says.
“What?” Jin asks, dropping the bag with a thump.
Kame nods towards Baxter. “He looks just like you.”
“Hey!” Jin shouts indignantly, even though it’s true, it’s so totally true. Kame laughs his demented little laugh and walks over to the dog, crouching in front of him and ruffling his ears.
“Kawaiiiiiiiiiiiii,” Kame says, in that stupid baby voice he always uses around babies and animals. He looks tiny crouched next to Baxter, or Baxter looks huge, Jin isn’t sure which. The dog’s head is level with Kame’s and when he surges forward to sniff curiously at Kame’s hair, at his gigantic fur collar, Kame wobbles a little on the balls of his feet and laughs loudly.
Alice appears breathlessly in the doorway, stumbling through the screen door with a clumsy little laugh. Kame stands warily and smiles, his polite, nervous smile to her huge, friendly grin.
“Konichiwa, Kamenashi-san,” she says in terribly accented Japanese.
“Hajimemashite,” Kame says with a little bow.
“Um,” she says, and slants her eyes in Jin’s direction.
“She doesn’t actually speak Japanese,” he tells Kame. “She’s just showing off.”
“Ah,” Kame says.
-
Kame has brought them an expensive bottle of Shochu and Jin’s favourite daifuku, from this little store halfway between their childhood homes.
Jin says, “Is this all you brought me?”
“I don’t know if you deserve it.” He rolls his eyes, as if Jin is an obnoxious child who should only expect a lump of coal in his stocking at Christmas. “Hold on a minute.”
He disappears into the guest room and comes back with a Louis Vuitton satchel that looks like it might be a woman’s purse, only it’s gigantic. He starts pulling little brightly coloured sacks out of it just as Alice returns from the kitchen with their coffee, a mismatched ring of mugs on her tray. She puts a mug down in front of Kame that has the logo of a local surf club printed on the side in faded red letters.
“Thank you,” Kame says in English. For a minute the familiar hiss of his th is jarring, like Jin might look out the window and they’ll be back in the studio in Shibuya.
Kame pushes a bright red package towards him. It’s from Pi, just a bunch of photos and a t-shirt and some jewellery from Shirota-san’s new line. There’s stuff from his mother, too, socks and underwear that he can’t believe she made Kame carry halfway across the world, clippings from the local newspaper about a girl he had a crush on in elementary school getting married. She’s been sending him this kind of hint for a few months now. She wants him to find a nice (Japanese) girl and settle down and have (Japanese) babies. In Tokyo.
The package from KAT-TUN looks like it has been sitting around the rehearsal room for months while they all forgot to send it; there’s a letter from Ueda inside dated three months ago and discs with various member’s hastily scrawled writing across the top. There are dvd box sets of Kame and Taguchi’s recent dramas and an advance copy of Ueda’s solo acoustic album. There’s a t-shirt Koki must have designed, bright red roses twining around the strings of a guitar. There’s a stack of photos an inch thick of Koki’s little girl, her big cheesy grin just like her father’s.
“Thanks,” Jin says, and sticks one of the photos of Hanako on his fridge.
-
To Jin’s vast disappointment, Kame retires to bed when it is barely dark, the guest room still and silent through the closed door.
“He’s a party pooper,” Jin whines, sitting on the floor by Alice’s feet, flicking through the channels on the TV with one lazy hand on the remote. There’s a local soap opera about nurses and surfers on. Jin likes it because the nurses go to the beach in bikinis a lot. Alice likes it because of the helpful medical information.
“He probably has jet lag,” Alice scolds. She and Kame had struggled along in stilted conversation made up mostly of gestures and thickly accented nouns. Kame’s English vocabulary is better than Jin remembers it being but he has yet to string together any kind of coherent sentence and has to settle for repeating words and pointing between objects to make connections. Alice’s Japanese is terrible and totally incomprehensible, but she’s really good at charades.
“Mou, there’s barely a time difference at all,” Jin humphs. “I don’t think I’ve seen him sleep more than four hours a night the whole time I’ve known him, why does he have to start now?”
“Well if he works that much he’s probably exhausted,” she laughs, leaning over to hug him from behind. She smells like the basil and lemongrass shampoo she’s been using lately. It always makes Jin hungry for Thai food.
“He slept all the way home in the car! And the whole way in the plane. He’s going to slip into some kind of coma.”
“You’re like a spoiled little kid,” she comments. “Whining because you’re not getting enough attention.”
“When he’s in my house he should pay attention to me,” Jin pouts. If Alice weren’t here he’d probably slip into the guest room and suffocate Kame with the weight of his body, sleep with his nose pressed up against Kame’s heart. He doesn’t wish for that, though, because Alice will stay and Kame won’t. Jin doesn’t like to be alone.
She giggles and tugs on his ears. “You looooooooove him,” she sings. “You want to maaaaaaarrrrrry him.”
“Um,” Jin says, and stops. His silence grows awkward and her fingers drop from his ear.
“Oh,” she says in sudden realisation. “Oh.”
“Ummmm.....” Jin says.
“So... um. You and him?” she asks, her voice rising in pitch but not volume.
“Sort of...” He rubs his bare feet on the carpet, distracting himself with static electricity bursts.
“For... for um, how long?”
“Uh, I don’t know.” Jin says. “On and off...”
“On and off for...”
He tries to come up with a number and fails. They’d fought a lot because Kame could be a vicious little pain in the ass when he was working, which was constantly, and because Jin had been kind of young and wild and adventurous and there were so many pretty girls throwing themselves at him, whereas Kame just wanted to settle down and have three billion children and lead a quiet life, just himself and his family and his millions of fans. Sometimes they wouldn’t speak to each other for months at a time, not really, when Jin was dating a new girl or Kame was working on a new drama. Then one day Jin would call and say, “What are you doing right now?” and everything would be normal again.
“Well... we met when I was fourteen...” He trails off. Her face is carefully blank and he can’t tell if she’s upset or just feeling uncomfortable; usually if she were upset she’d be twisting the locket around her neck and yelling at him by now, but he can’t ever be sure.
“You slept together when you were fourteen,” she says blankly, that slight note of incredulity that lifts her accent into a question at the end.
“NO,” Jin yelps. “NO, GROSS. KAME WAS TWELVE.”
“WELL YOU’RE BEING REALLY EVASIVE,” she yells back, the way she always does when Jin yells. Jin scowls at her. “So the two of you were like, boyfriends?”
They weren’t boyfriends, not ever. Couples break up, Kame had always said. Couples break up for good. They’re not allowed to.
“I don’t know, not really,” Jin says. Kame always belonged to him in a way he can’t explain to her.
This might just be the most awkward conversation Jin has ever had in his life. He’s never really had to explain the thing between he and Kame to anyone before, has never even really tried to explain it to himself. Kame is just Kame, and Jin is just Jin, and they’ve been Akakame since before they even really wanted to be, Akakame since before Jin ever understood why.
“When was the last time you slept with him?” she asks finally, bluntly.
“A long time ago,” Jin lies. “I don’t remember.”
-
A few years ago, Jin and Kame met up in Istanbul, because Jin had practically begged Kame to meet him some place where they could be alone. They’d stayed in a crumbling hotel near the Grand Bazaar, the kind of place that has a toilet in the shower and paint chafing off the walls like the whole building has dermatitis.
“I’m picking up diseases just standing here,” Kame had said when he’d walked through the door, dumping his duffel bag on the bed. They’d gone to the market and bought enough food for three days and then holed up in the room for days, wrapped up in the rough, ugly peach coloured sheets. Sometimes, late at night, they’d gone for walks through the city when no-one else was around. Jin liked that because Kame didn’t mind when he held on tight to his hand, afraid of the criminals that might be lurking in the alleys waiting to violate a pretty young foreigner such as himself.
He likes being strange places with Kame, because it’s okay to be scared without being brave.
-
In the morning, Jin drags himself out of bed to take Baxter for a walk along the beach. The sun is dawning pale yellow against the charcoal sky as day breaks over the coast. The dog runs around him in circles, wind whipping through his fur, barking to Jin and diving at the seagulls that gather along the shore, sending them into white explosions over the waves. Jin whistles a jaunty tune, or tries to. He’s never been very good at whistling. He presses his lips together and blows but sound only comes out about half the time, like he’s a cartoon baby bird still learning to sing. After a few bars he gives up and sings loudly, the half remembered chorus of an old Arashi song, sprawled out boneless and happy on the sand.
-
Kame’s in the kitchen when he gets back to the house, standing at the bench in a huge hooded sweatshirt that hangs almost to his knees and a pair of red flannel pajama pants. Jin can’t see his feet or his hands.
“Hey,” Kame says with a thick morning voice, the same sleepy voice that used to murmur right in Jin’s ear when he was waking up on tour, pressed up close together in their hotel room bed. Sleeping with Kame always made the sheets smell like home.
“Hey,” Jin says, crossing to the fridge. He takes out the milk and the orange juice. “You’re up.”
“Yup.” Kame turns and leans against the bench, facing Jin with one arm crossed across his chest and the other rigid down his side.
“I thought you were going to sleep forever.” Jin says.
Kame smiles faintly. “I would have liked to.”
Jin makes coffee. He takes three teaspoons of sugar and a half a cup of milk like a thirteen year old in his, but Kame screws up his nose and asks for herbal tea.
“Are you serious?” Jin asks.
Kame stares at him blankly. When they were kids Kame drank coffee constantly. He’d come into work every morning with a gigantic cup from Starbucks and be running on that all day. Sometimes, when he hadn’t been sleeping, when he’d been up reading scripts and memorising lines, his movements would be jerky and frantic like his body couldn’t hold all the caffeine inside his bloodstream.
“Too much coffee is bad for you,” Kame says seriously. Jin makes him a peppermint tea from some bags he finds in the back of his pantry. He’s been out of the habit of drinking tea since leaving Japan, and Alice thinks tea is pointless.
“I told Alice about us,” Jin says when he’s finished his coffee and is standing at the sink, rinsing out his mug. “Well, sort of. I mean. It’s kind of hard to really explain.”
“Yeah,” Kame says, hands cupped close around his white china tea cup, staring into the inside like he might try and read the absent tea leaves. His mobile phone vibrates on the bench and he ignores it. “Sometimes I wish I had somebody to explain it to me.”
Sometimes Kame sounds so serious that it makes Jin’s organs feel funny, like someone is holding his kidneys in their hand and rolling them around like Chinese medicine balls.
“I’ll explain it to you,” he ends up saying dumbly, lecherously, clumsily stumbling into the solitude of Kame’s taut silence. When Kame looks at him he pushes his tongue into the corner of his mouth and grins at Kame’s spluttering disbelief.
“Jin,” Kame says, “That was terrible. I feel like I shouldn’t sleep with you ever again just on principle.”
“That totally would have worked on you when you were fifteen,” Jin sighs. “I liked it when you were easy.”
“That’s because you’re lazy.” Kame sips demurely at his tea as if he wasn’t ever fifteen and undignified with lust, as if he’d never dragged Jin into a karaoke booth to make out. Jin laughs and starts to leave the room.
“I’ve got to shower,” he says on his way out. “I’ve got work.”
“Oh,” Kame says. “Hey.” His tone is floating over the top of his voice like he’s trying too hard to sound light. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Will you have time later? I’ll buy you dinner.”
Jin frowns. He doesn’t like the way Kame’s still holding his cup at his lips, liquid paused on the precipice of his tongue. “Is something wrong?” he asks suspiciously.
Kame puts down the cup. “Of course not,” he says. “You’re going to be late for work.”
-
Three days a week Jin teaches music at the local primary school. He uses the simple games and exercises they’d used at the Jimusho, only without the extra lessons on hairstyling and making sexy faces when you sing. He plays guitar for the kids and they all sing together, big bright happy songs like Yellow Submarine and Hail to the Bus Driver. A few nights a week he tends bar at a pub in town, but he doesn’t like that nearly so much.
He has a break after his morning lesson, between the grade 2-3 composite class and the grade fivers. There’s this little shit in his early class that spent the morning banging loudly on the drum he’d misappropriated from Nicole, perfect little Nicole Allen with her friendly smiles and Transformers t-shirt, and now Jin has a headache. He thumps his keyboard irritably when he checks his email.
There’s a note from his mother begging him not to forget his Aunt’s birthday, some obnoxious forwarded chain mail from Taguchi, and the subscription to Asahi that he signed up for to seem adult but never reads. He’s about to delete it when he sees Kame’s name in the subject line. He clicks it before he registers the rest of the headline: Johnny’s Entertainment Idol Kamenashi Kazuya (29) diagnosed with cancer.
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