FIC: "Stargazer: A Sequel to Child Stars" 1/1 (Akame, 4300 words)
Title: Stargazer: A Sequel to Child Stars 1/1
Author: soundczech
Disclaimer: I claim no affiliation with Johnny's Entertainment or any of the characters depicted herein.
Rating: Probably R.
Author's Notes: I am like one of those directors that ruins their original movie by turning it into a shitty franchise. I asked samenashi what fic she wanted for her birthday. "more star babies". Happy Birthday Sam.
Summary: Jin gets clucky.
Jin has his eyes on the stars. Sometimes, when work has slowed enough to allow late mornings curled in his blankets (not 5am starts with angry photographers, trying to make happy faces through the freezing cold), he slips out of bed in the middle of the night. He tucks the sheets tight and cosy around Kame’s shoulders and drives out of the city, into the mountains, where the stars wash an endless sea across the night sky.
He’s waiting for his shooting star.
-
Akio is 7 years old, face gawky and beautiful like his father. He’s inherited the Kamenashi eyebrows, thick blocks of fuzz that wrinkle and crawl like caterpillars when he frowns. He looks like Kame when he’s angry but when he smiles he’s just like Jin; grin breaking the confines of his cheeks, bottom lip askew. His giggles spill high pitched and uncontrollable like squeals.
He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to Jin. He might be the best thing that’s ever happened to the whole world.
-
The first time Jin sees a shooting star, his heart is so full he has to scream his wish aloud, words hollering and broken where they echo amongst the valleys below. He expects a bang or a flash, some sign that the gods have heard him, but there’s nothing, just the quiet, cold night air and the stars that burn bright in the distant pitch black sky.
-
It is 4am when he slipps off his shoes at the door, shuffles in his socks to their bedroom. Kame is asleep on his side, hair pulled into a palm tree over his brow. Jin slides into the bed behind him, hitching the blanket up his chest. He slips his fingers beneath Kame’s t-shirt, wakes him by walking kisses along his neck and shoving his ice-cold feet between Kame’s ankles to get warm.
“Where have you been?” Kame asks muzzily, turning his ear into Jin’s lips. “Wait,” he says when Jin’s fingers start to fumble with the button on his pajama pants. “I haven’t showered.”
“I don’t care,” Jin says, mouth open at the nape of Kame’s neck. His skin is warm from sleep and tastes like avocado; he’s been using one of his crazy homemade conditioning masks again. Jin nuzzles his nose into the tangle of hair behind his ear and breathes deeply, Kame’s name escaping in a sigh.
Kame rolls over, thigh slipping over Jin’s hip. Jin runs his hand happily up the curve of his calf, through the coarse hair on his legs. Kame’s muscle twitches and he squirms as Jin’s hand creeps up his thigh.
“What’s gotten into you?” Kame asks in the air between kisses. “They say when a man comes home all frisky in the middle of the night, he’s probably been out flirting with hostesses.”
Jin laughs. “I don’t need to pay some trashy ho to spend time with me,” he says seriously. “I have my own at home.”
Kame grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks, hard, but doesn’t stop kissing him. His other hand slides up Jin’s arm and down his back, nails going bump bump bump down the curving stairway of his spine.
“Kame,” Jin gasps when his fingers skim inside the waist of his sweats, as they start to creep up the swell of his ass.
“Feel good?” Kame croons, hooking his leg tighter over Jin’s hip.
“Kame,” Jin says, and presses his forehead against Kame’s. He looks at him crosseyed. “We’re going to have a baby.”
Kame’s fingers stop climbing and his calf goes slack against Jin’s thigh. When he speaks, the gentle, sleepy huskiness of moments before has hardened into wide awake confusion. “I don’t have to explain the mechanics of reproduction to you, do I? We don’t exactly meet the requirements.”
Jin scowls. “Not like that,” he says. “Like Akio.”
Kame stares at him.
“I found a shooting star,” Jin says proudly.
Kame makes a noise in his throat, a worried note choked through a swallow.
“What?” Jin asks. He doesn’t like the look in Kame’s eyes; it’s that same gentleness that he sees whenever Kame has to tell him something he doesn’t want to hear. Kame opens his mouth to speak and Jin cuts him off irritably. “You think you’re the only one who can make a star baby?”
Kame’s fingers glide over Jin’s cheeks, thumb pressing flat against the beauty mark by his eye. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” he says carefully. “We don’t even know how it works. We don’t even know where he came from.”
“He’s a miracle!” Jin objects. “And Kami-sama will give us another one.”
“Jin--” Kame says.
“Don’t you believe in miracles?” Jin asks. He feels his hands trembling when he slides his fingers behind Kame’s ears. “After everything?”
Kame’s eyes are still dark and worried, a little wet around the lashes.
“I believe in you,” he says, and opens his mouth against Jin’s lips.
Kame is not the only man Jin has ever been with. When he was younger, he’d been curious about everyone, about everything. He’d fooled around with other boys at parties, warm bodies in strange beds. Mostly they were scrawny, awkward boys just like him, boys whose voices broke and stuttered when he drew his hands down their chests, but sometimes there were men who drove him home from clubs in their fancy, gleaming cars.
Kame’s not the only man that has fucked him, but it always feels different when he does. When those other guys were done with him, Jin had always felt like he’d been on the losing end of a gladiator match; they usually treated him kindly, pressing reverent kisses to his smooth skin and telling how beautiful he was, how special, but he’d always imagined, as he pulled rumpled clothes over his sweaty skin, that he was covering the bruises and scrapes. In the mirror he saw marks of his defeat, gaping wounds in his dignity in the hickeys and whisker burn on his neck.
It could never be like that with Kame.
When Kame takes him, his hands are gentle on Jin’s thighs but his grip is strong and sure. He murmurs to Jin for guidance, watches his face and waits for Jin to lead him home. It’s like when they sing together, their individual voices pulling each other’s notes higher and stronger and clearer. They make each other so much better than they ever were alone.
Being with Kame is like being on the team that’s going to take out the World Cup.
Jin’s always thought it kind of unfair that he and Kame can give each other everything and produce nothing. He could go out to a bar tonight and get drunk and fuck a stranger and nine months later hold a screaming, wriggling angel in his arms, like some people he knows. Not that he’s naming names, Jimmy Mackey.
As far as Jin is concerned, the universe owes him a miracle to make up for its obvious design flaws.
“Shh,” Kame hisses when Jin groans aloud, hand sliding to the small of his back to still the frantic jerking of his hips. “You’re too noisy.”
“You shhh,” Jin replies, voice breaking with the tide of his breath.
When Jin comes, a million stars shoot behind his eyes and makes a wish on every one of them.
-
Jin has been dreaming of her for years. When he sleeps he sees her tiny hands, her tiny feet, toes like a string of pink pearls. He dreams of her childhood, pressing bandages to her skinned knees and kisses to her rosy cheeks. Her voice laughing and screaming when her brother tickles her. Her fat belly at the beach.
Every morning when Jin wakes up and she doesn’t exist, for a minute, it’s like she’s died. His baby girl.
-
Jin wakes to Akio’s knees digging mines in his stomach and his fingers digging trenches in his cheeks. He rumbles a growl in his belly and hooks his arms around Akio’s chest, swinging him around. He makes a giggling, squealing mess of him.
It takes him a second to remember and when he does his head snaps up to see Kame in the doorway, one arm crossed over his chest.
Please, Jin thinks. Please.
Kame just looks at him with quiet eyes and crushes Jin’s dreams with an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
-
Jin keeps trying for another two months, another three. HE sees five shooting stars and begs them, pleads, but there’s nothing. Nothing.
“What kind of man can’t even make a star baby?” he asks Pi pathetically, face buried against Pi’s manly, muscular shoulder. Pi could probably make a star baby on his first try. He could probably make star triplets.
“Maybe Kame has to do it,” Pi suggests. “Because he’s the mother.”
When Jin raises the idea with Kame he seems kind of dubious about it even beyond his objection to Pi’s challenge to his masculinity, but he still lets Jin bundle him, half asleep, into the car one night and drive them out of the city. He stands by Jin’s side all wrapped up in his beanie and endless, fluffy scarf, sleepy eyes blinking in the light of the moon.
Jin slips his hand through Kame’s. He can feel the distant warmth of his fingers through Kame’s thick suede gloves, and he feels hopeful. It has to work this time. Kame has magical powers.
Somewhere around three am a star shoots towards the moon and they both gasp, fingers clenched and eyes wide open. Jin stares at Kame’s face as he watches the star; sees his eyes shine as he swallows.
“Aren’t you going to wish?” Jin asks.
“I did,” Kame says. His skin is washed silver in the moonlight but his cheeks are flushed pink from the cold. Sometimes Jin looks at him and thinks he can’t possibly be real. Other times he thinks Kame is the only thing that really is.
This is a moment of conception, Jin thinks, and turns his eyes back to the sky.
-
There is no baby when Jin wakes. He closes his eyes and tries to hear the distinct sounds of a baby in the house. the tears and giggles, the low, muddled murmur of Kame’s baby voice. The house is quiet. Jin vaguely remembers that Suzuki was taking Akio somewhere. He doesn’t remember where, but he trusts that Kame has fifteen emergency contact numbers and some kind of satellite surveillance system hooked up. He sulks into his pillow.
Kame’s voice precedes the rustling of the covers; moments later Jin feels him pressed against his side, strong fingers slipping behind Jin’s neck and cradling his face to Kame’s chest. Jin sniffles and rubs his nose against Kame’s t-shirt and whines, loudly, “I WANT A BABY.”
“I know,” Kame says. “Me too.”
Jin kicks the mattress full on the flat of his foot. The impact sends a long, slow ache up his ankle. It makes him so mad. “THIS SUCKS,” he shrieks, his hysteria muffled in green cotton jersey. “KAMI-SAMA THINKS WE’RE SHITTY PARENTS.”
“We’re awesome parents,” Kame says. Jin wonders when Kame became the easy one and he became the high strung, trembling basketcase, but he can’t help himself.
“Then why doesn’t he think we deserve another baby?” Jin asks pitifully.
“There’s more than one way to have a baby, baby,” Kame says and smiles widely when Jin lifts his head to glare at him.
“Don’t pun,” Jin says angrily.
Kame laughs but Jin can see his melancholy in his cloudy eyes; it is 11am but the deep bags in Kame’s cheeks tell Jin he didn’t sleep at all.
“I want Akio to be a big brother,” Jin says miserably, closing his eyes and letting Kame pet at his hair, his ears, like a puppy.
“We will,” Kame says. “We’ll find a way.”
“You’re not sleeping with a woman,” Jin hisses suspiciously.
Kame rolls his eyes. “I’ll try to restrain myself.”
“We can’t adopt because we’re both guys,” Jin says. “I checked.”
“There’s always a way,” Kame says. “Ganbatte, ne?”
-
Jin makes Kame play hooky from work with him. They laze in the bath together until Suzuki brings Akio home and the kid runs into the bathroom demanding an explanation for their presence. He’s holding a stuffed shark in his hand and Jin remembers that Suzuki had been promising to take him to the aquarium for ages. Akio had been really excited, before, but now he looks kind of indignant that he could have spent the day with Kame and Jin instead. He doesn’t get them all to himself for the whole day very often. He sits on the bed pouting at Jin while he changes into a pair of sweats and towel dries his hair.
They give Suzuki the afternoon off. He disappears wherever it is he goes when he’s not at Akio’s beck and call. Jin tries not to think about it much. Sometimes Suzuki’s friends come to the house and it’s always the most awkward experience in the world; they’re the kinds of guys who go to work in navy suits with a white shirt and grey tie, who take the train home. Normal guys. They have weird, shapeless faces.
They go back to bed and Akio crawls in with them, little body a comfortable avalanche across their limbs. They’ve been letting him watch the Harry Potter series, fast forwarding through the scary bits because they still kind of give Jin nightmares. Kame falls asleep halfway through a quidditch scene, even though they’re usually his favourite bits. Akio squeals and kicks his feet whenever anyone so much as moves their broom, but Kame doesn’t stir. His feet are crushed under Jin’s calf and his arm is curled protectively around Akio’s shoulder.
Jin watches them instead of the movie. They make him think that no matter what, he still believes in miracles.
-
Jin does what he always does when he’s down to his last resort. He sweet talks Johnny’s assistant into getting him some time on Wednesday afternoon when Kame’s off filming an interview for some new talk show hosted by a man in a rabbit suit. Sitting in the waiting room outside Johnny’s office, Jin feels like he’s fifteen again and he’s being called in for discipline. He sits on his hands and swings his feet.
When he walks in, Johnny’s got headshots spread out across his long black desk. Jin recognises some of the older juniors, but barely; it seems like every time he sees them they’ve grown another foot and lose a little more of their chubby, boyish cheeks.
“Yo, Jin-chan,” Johnny says jovially. It’s been a long time since Jin last saw him in person; five months, maybe six. It makes Jin uneasy to look at his face, skin melting to floppy jowls and liver spots crawling up his arthritic fingers and over bony wrists.
“Long time no see,” Johnny says. On the wall behind him is a row of gold and platinum records, quite of few of them KAT-TUN’s. Kiritani Shuuji’s young face smirks at him out of the cover of Seishun Amigo. It steels his resolve.
“I need a favour,” he says, and tries to stand up straight like a serious adult, so Johnny knows he really means it. He feels himself starting to pull his nervous face, lips bunched, jaw clicking slowly from one side to the other. It takes effort to relax, to make himself carefully, calmly blank like Kame would.
“Really?” Johnny asks curiously. He stands and walks to the sturdy leather armchairs in the corner. He sits in one and invites Jin to the other with an outstretched palm.
“Yes sir,” Jin says, inclining his head respectfully. His hands rest as fists on his knees.
“Sir,” Johnny repeats wryly. “This must be a big favour.”
“Yes, sir,” Jin says. He concentrates on clenching every muscle in his body one by one. Johnny has always kind of scared everybody. Jin doesn’t like the way his voice always sounds the same; it’s light and easy no matter what, jovial through their fury. Kame doesn’t like the way he holds their entire lives in his hands.
“Doesn’t Kazuya usually take care of this sort of thing?” Johnny asks. His assistant brings in two cans of Calpico on a tray. They’re melon, which was Jin’s favourite flavour when he was fifteen years old. Johnny gives it to him every time he comes. “If you’re here about hiring the elephants, he’s already been in to see me.”
Jin has no idea what he’s talking about. “It’s bigger than that,” he says.
“Bigger than elephants?” Johnny cracks open his Calpico and sips at it, smacking his old man lips in satisfaction.
“We want another baby,” Jin says.
Johnny stares at him.
“You want me to get you a baby,” he says eventually. “You always were a demanding kid.”
“I never ask you for anything!” Jin whines.
“Not anymore,” Johnny says. “You used to be in here every other week.”
“This is important,” Jin says.
“And impossible,” Johnny replies. “What makes you think I can even get a baby?”
“You’re Johnny Kitagawa,” Jin says. It should be obvious. “You can get anything.”
The old man sighs and rubs his chin thoughtfully. “How much do you want it?” he asks.
Jin stares at him and thinks of Akio. He thinks of Kame’s spazzy smile and his little girl’s voice in his dreams. He sinks to his knees and pushes his forehead to the tatami. This is the deepest bow of his life.
“Get up,” Johnny says after a moment. “Get up, you don’t look cool.”
Jin laughs a little. His heart is beating wildly and he feels blood rushing dizzy from his head as he straightens his spine. He stays on his knees and looks up at Johnny, remember the weird old janitor from his audition.
“Didn’t you ever want kids?” Jin asks curiously.
“Kids.” Johnny says. He reaches out to ruffle Jin’s hair. He hasn’t done that in ears. “You idiot,” he says. “I had hundreds of them.”
-
Six weeks later, Kame answers a knock on the door. Jin is sitting at the kitchen table “helping” Akio with his homework; his assistance generally consists of reminding Akio every five minutes that if he doesn’t memorise his multiplication tables he’ll never be an astronaut.
“Jin,” Kame calls from the door, his voice tense and wary. “What did you do?”
Jin lifts his head and thinks. There are half a dozen things Kame could be referring to in the last three days alone.
“Nothing?” he tries.
“Come in here,” Kame says.
Jin leaves Akio in the kitchen scribbling aliens in the margins of his work book and walks with some trepidation into the hallway. He’s a bit worried Kame’s going to be there with the obaa-chan whose flowerbed he’d accidentally crushed the other day, but he’s not. He’s standing with his back against the wall, one hand on the Louisville Slugger he keeps in the umbrella stand.
A man stands in the doorway. There is an incomplete dragon tattoo twisting up one forearm, claws outstretched over the prominent veins that bulge from his muscle. His hair is slicked back and the sleeves of his black blazer are rolled to the elbow. He’s chewing a toothpick. At first, Jin thinks he’s an actor on the way home from Koki’s new drama about a Yakuza family that open a hospital, but then jin realises, he’s just a real Yakuza.
“Boss said you’d take care of this,” he says, looking almost embarrassed. He picks up the basket in his hands and holds it gently forward, his care incongruous with his reckless appearance.
Jin peers into the basket. There’s a baby inside, nestled comfortably inside a nest of worn women’s clothes.
“OH MY GOD,” Jin says.
-
She comes with a birth certificate nestled in the outside pocket of her diaper bag. It says that she is three months old. Under ‘father’, it says Jin’s name in steady black kanji. Under ‘mother’, it says Natsukawa Ayako. Kame looks at Jin with dangerously narrowed eyes and he swears that he has never heard that name in his life.
“Doesn’t her mother want her?” Kame asks, lifting her from her nest and cradling her against his neck. Even though he sounds wary, he’s got that glazed, starry eyed look he used to get around Akio when he was small and totally defenseless. If someone tried to pry her from his arms right now they’d end up bloody and bruised in a corner while Kame cooed into her hair and sang her a lullabye.
“She died,” Shunji says. He looks out of place in this apartment, sitting gingerly at their clean, bright western style table. It turns out he’s not just a henchman, he’s a lawyer. His papers are spread out around him in a fan. There’s a surprising amount of paperwork involved in acquiring a black market baby.
“She worked in one of our gentleman’s clubs,” Shinji adds, making crosses on the contract where Jin has to sign. “Sweet kid.”
“The father?” Kame asks, stroking the downy skin behind the baby’s ear.
“No-one that wants to take a whore’s baby into his perfect family,” Shinji says. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he scowls. “He could be anyone.”
Kame bites his lip when Shinji slides the contracts over to Jin. Jin pulls the cap off his pen and looks at Kame.
“Okay?” he says.
The baby gurgles and her little fingers make a fist in Kame’s collar.
“Okay,” Kame says.
Jin scrawls his signature across the dotted line and writes her name in clear, neat strokes at the top: Akanishi Hoshi, three months old.
-
Akio is full of surly resentment at the incursion on his territory. When he finds out that Hoshi is to sleep in a crib in Kame and Jin’s room he throws a fit and insists he be allowed to sleep in there too. He holds out for two nights, curled up between Jin and Kame, elbows in their ribcages, before he can’t stand being woken up by the sudden explosion of Hoshi’s midnight wailing anymore. He trudges back to his room with his stuffed rooster, eyes silent and accusing when they tuck him in and kiss him goodnight.
Kame’s worried about it, but Jin isn’t. “I was like that with Reio,” he says. “Weren’t you jealous of Yuya?”
“No?” Kame says, as if he thinks both Akio and Jin are completely insane. “I was so excited. I had so much I wanted to teach him...”
“You were like three,” Jin says. “You’re abnormal.”
Akio’s hostility lasts until his eight year old second cousin comes over to meet Hoshi. He stands over her crib with wide, impressed eyes.
“She’s so cute!” Takahiro says, holding out his finger. Hoshi lifts her fist and wraps it around his pinky, shaking it and gurgling. “I want a sister.”
Akio wedges himself between them, arms spread, knocking Takahiro’s finger from her grasp. “You can’t have her,” he says angrily. “She’s mine.”
After that, he dotes on her so much it’s almost a pain in the ass.
-
Ryo comes to visit one day. He sits with her on his lap, wrapping his hands around her wrists and waving her arms around while she laughs. “She’s so cute,” he says.
“Of course,” Jin beams.
Ryo smirks at him. “Aren’t you always going to compare her to Akio though?” he asks.
“What?” Jin stares at him blankly.
“One’s your miracle baby, born from the heavens~” Ryo says. “The other is the bastard child of a whore.”
“SHUT UP,” Jin says, snatching Hoshi away. She giggles and latches onto his shoulder. “You don’t deserve to hold my daughter.”
“Jesus, Jin, relax,” Ryo laughs. “I’m just fucking with you.”
“”Language,” Kame says from the doorway. Akio is behind him in his school uniform, bag dangling from his shoulder.
“UNCLE RYO,” Akio yells happily, rushing towards him.
“Hey, buddy,” Ryo grins.
“Akio,” Jin says. “Come here. He’s dead to you now.”
Akio stops dead and looks uncertainly between them.
“Don’t confuse him, Jin,” Kame scolds, taking Hoshi from his arms. He disappears into the kitchen and Jin hears the sounds of the microwave; the slam of the door and the beep of the buttons. He’s preparing her formula.
“It’s alright,” Ryo says to Akio. “Come here.”
Akio looks at him. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” he says, turning his back on Ryo. He throws himself on the couch and curls against Jin’s side.
“Jin, come on,” Ryo says. “I was just kidding.”
“They’re both miracles to me,” Jin says angrily, covering Akio’s ears so he can’t hear.
“I know,” Ryo says.
“If you were anyone else I’d kill you for saying that,” Jin says.
Ryo snorts. “I’m more afraid of Kame.”
Jin nudges Akio in Ryo’s direction. “You should be.”
-
That night, Jin looks down at Hoshi sleeping peacefully in her crib. She’s all wrapped up in a romper suit that used to belong to Akio. It is covered in red trucks and blue helicopters, with yellow snap buttons. Jin remembers that it was one of the first presents he ever bought for Akio, before he really understood who Akio was. What he meant to him.
Hoshi sighs low and wheezy in her sleep, head turning into the fist by her mouth. Jin strokes her hair and rubs her back until she settles again.
“You’ll always be my real daughter,” he promises, and seals his oath with a kiss.
Author: soundczech
Disclaimer: I claim no affiliation with Johnny's Entertainment or any of the characters depicted herein.
Rating: Probably R.
Author's Notes: I am like one of those directors that ruins their original movie by turning it into a shitty franchise. I asked samenashi what fic she wanted for her birthday. "more star babies". Happy Birthday Sam.
Summary: Jin gets clucky.
Jin has his eyes on the stars. Sometimes, when work has slowed enough to allow late mornings curled in his blankets (not 5am starts with angry photographers, trying to make happy faces through the freezing cold), he slips out of bed in the middle of the night. He tucks the sheets tight and cosy around Kame’s shoulders and drives out of the city, into the mountains, where the stars wash an endless sea across the night sky.
He’s waiting for his shooting star.
-
Akio is 7 years old, face gawky and beautiful like his father. He’s inherited the Kamenashi eyebrows, thick blocks of fuzz that wrinkle and crawl like caterpillars when he frowns. He looks like Kame when he’s angry but when he smiles he’s just like Jin; grin breaking the confines of his cheeks, bottom lip askew. His giggles spill high pitched and uncontrollable like squeals.
He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to Jin. He might be the best thing that’s ever happened to the whole world.
-
The first time Jin sees a shooting star, his heart is so full he has to scream his wish aloud, words hollering and broken where they echo amongst the valleys below. He expects a bang or a flash, some sign that the gods have heard him, but there’s nothing, just the quiet, cold night air and the stars that burn bright in the distant pitch black sky.
-
It is 4am when he slipps off his shoes at the door, shuffles in his socks to their bedroom. Kame is asleep on his side, hair pulled into a palm tree over his brow. Jin slides into the bed behind him, hitching the blanket up his chest. He slips his fingers beneath Kame’s t-shirt, wakes him by walking kisses along his neck and shoving his ice-cold feet between Kame’s ankles to get warm.
“Where have you been?” Kame asks muzzily, turning his ear into Jin’s lips. “Wait,” he says when Jin’s fingers start to fumble with the button on his pajama pants. “I haven’t showered.”
“I don’t care,” Jin says, mouth open at the nape of Kame’s neck. His skin is warm from sleep and tastes like avocado; he’s been using one of his crazy homemade conditioning masks again. Jin nuzzles his nose into the tangle of hair behind his ear and breathes deeply, Kame’s name escaping in a sigh.
Kame rolls over, thigh slipping over Jin’s hip. Jin runs his hand happily up the curve of his calf, through the coarse hair on his legs. Kame’s muscle twitches and he squirms as Jin’s hand creeps up his thigh.
“What’s gotten into you?” Kame asks in the air between kisses. “They say when a man comes home all frisky in the middle of the night, he’s probably been out flirting with hostesses.”
Jin laughs. “I don’t need to pay some trashy ho to spend time with me,” he says seriously. “I have my own at home.”
Kame grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks, hard, but doesn’t stop kissing him. His other hand slides up Jin’s arm and down his back, nails going bump bump bump down the curving stairway of his spine.
“Kame,” Jin gasps when his fingers skim inside the waist of his sweats, as they start to creep up the swell of his ass.
“Feel good?” Kame croons, hooking his leg tighter over Jin’s hip.
“Kame,” Jin says, and presses his forehead against Kame’s. He looks at him crosseyed. “We’re going to have a baby.”
Kame’s fingers stop climbing and his calf goes slack against Jin’s thigh. When he speaks, the gentle, sleepy huskiness of moments before has hardened into wide awake confusion. “I don’t have to explain the mechanics of reproduction to you, do I? We don’t exactly meet the requirements.”
Jin scowls. “Not like that,” he says. “Like Akio.”
Kame stares at him.
“I found a shooting star,” Jin says proudly.
Kame makes a noise in his throat, a worried note choked through a swallow.
“What?” Jin asks. He doesn’t like the look in Kame’s eyes; it’s that same gentleness that he sees whenever Kame has to tell him something he doesn’t want to hear. Kame opens his mouth to speak and Jin cuts him off irritably. “You think you’re the only one who can make a star baby?”
Kame’s fingers glide over Jin’s cheeks, thumb pressing flat against the beauty mark by his eye. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” he says carefully. “We don’t even know how it works. We don’t even know where he came from.”
“He’s a miracle!” Jin objects. “And Kami-sama will give us another one.”
“Jin--” Kame says.
“Don’t you believe in miracles?” Jin asks. He feels his hands trembling when he slides his fingers behind Kame’s ears. “After everything?”
Kame’s eyes are still dark and worried, a little wet around the lashes.
“I believe in you,” he says, and opens his mouth against Jin’s lips.
Kame is not the only man Jin has ever been with. When he was younger, he’d been curious about everyone, about everything. He’d fooled around with other boys at parties, warm bodies in strange beds. Mostly they were scrawny, awkward boys just like him, boys whose voices broke and stuttered when he drew his hands down their chests, but sometimes there were men who drove him home from clubs in their fancy, gleaming cars.
Kame’s not the only man that has fucked him, but it always feels different when he does. When those other guys were done with him, Jin had always felt like he’d been on the losing end of a gladiator match; they usually treated him kindly, pressing reverent kisses to his smooth skin and telling how beautiful he was, how special, but he’d always imagined, as he pulled rumpled clothes over his sweaty skin, that he was covering the bruises and scrapes. In the mirror he saw marks of his defeat, gaping wounds in his dignity in the hickeys and whisker burn on his neck.
It could never be like that with Kame.
When Kame takes him, his hands are gentle on Jin’s thighs but his grip is strong and sure. He murmurs to Jin for guidance, watches his face and waits for Jin to lead him home. It’s like when they sing together, their individual voices pulling each other’s notes higher and stronger and clearer. They make each other so much better than they ever were alone.
Being with Kame is like being on the team that’s going to take out the World Cup.
Jin’s always thought it kind of unfair that he and Kame can give each other everything and produce nothing. He could go out to a bar tonight and get drunk and fuck a stranger and nine months later hold a screaming, wriggling angel in his arms, like some people he knows. Not that he’s naming names, Jimmy Mackey.
As far as Jin is concerned, the universe owes him a miracle to make up for its obvious design flaws.
“Shh,” Kame hisses when Jin groans aloud, hand sliding to the small of his back to still the frantic jerking of his hips. “You’re too noisy.”
“You shhh,” Jin replies, voice breaking with the tide of his breath.
When Jin comes, a million stars shoot behind his eyes and makes a wish on every one of them.
-
Jin has been dreaming of her for years. When he sleeps he sees her tiny hands, her tiny feet, toes like a string of pink pearls. He dreams of her childhood, pressing bandages to her skinned knees and kisses to her rosy cheeks. Her voice laughing and screaming when her brother tickles her. Her fat belly at the beach.
Every morning when Jin wakes up and she doesn’t exist, for a minute, it’s like she’s died. His baby girl.
-
Jin wakes to Akio’s knees digging mines in his stomach and his fingers digging trenches in his cheeks. He rumbles a growl in his belly and hooks his arms around Akio’s chest, swinging him around. He makes a giggling, squealing mess of him.
It takes him a second to remember and when he does his head snaps up to see Kame in the doorway, one arm crossed over his chest.
Please, Jin thinks. Please.
Kame just looks at him with quiet eyes and crushes Jin’s dreams with an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
-
Jin keeps trying for another two months, another three. HE sees five shooting stars and begs them, pleads, but there’s nothing. Nothing.
“What kind of man can’t even make a star baby?” he asks Pi pathetically, face buried against Pi’s manly, muscular shoulder. Pi could probably make a star baby on his first try. He could probably make star triplets.
“Maybe Kame has to do it,” Pi suggests. “Because he’s the mother.”
When Jin raises the idea with Kame he seems kind of dubious about it even beyond his objection to Pi’s challenge to his masculinity, but he still lets Jin bundle him, half asleep, into the car one night and drive them out of the city. He stands by Jin’s side all wrapped up in his beanie and endless, fluffy scarf, sleepy eyes blinking in the light of the moon.
Jin slips his hand through Kame’s. He can feel the distant warmth of his fingers through Kame’s thick suede gloves, and he feels hopeful. It has to work this time. Kame has magical powers.
Somewhere around three am a star shoots towards the moon and they both gasp, fingers clenched and eyes wide open. Jin stares at Kame’s face as he watches the star; sees his eyes shine as he swallows.
“Aren’t you going to wish?” Jin asks.
“I did,” Kame says. His skin is washed silver in the moonlight but his cheeks are flushed pink from the cold. Sometimes Jin looks at him and thinks he can’t possibly be real. Other times he thinks Kame is the only thing that really is.
This is a moment of conception, Jin thinks, and turns his eyes back to the sky.
-
There is no baby when Jin wakes. He closes his eyes and tries to hear the distinct sounds of a baby in the house. the tears and giggles, the low, muddled murmur of Kame’s baby voice. The house is quiet. Jin vaguely remembers that Suzuki was taking Akio somewhere. He doesn’t remember where, but he trusts that Kame has fifteen emergency contact numbers and some kind of satellite surveillance system hooked up. He sulks into his pillow.
Kame’s voice precedes the rustling of the covers; moments later Jin feels him pressed against his side, strong fingers slipping behind Jin’s neck and cradling his face to Kame’s chest. Jin sniffles and rubs his nose against Kame’s t-shirt and whines, loudly, “I WANT A BABY.”
“I know,” Kame says. “Me too.”
Jin kicks the mattress full on the flat of his foot. The impact sends a long, slow ache up his ankle. It makes him so mad. “THIS SUCKS,” he shrieks, his hysteria muffled in green cotton jersey. “KAMI-SAMA THINKS WE’RE SHITTY PARENTS.”
“We’re awesome parents,” Kame says. Jin wonders when Kame became the easy one and he became the high strung, trembling basketcase, but he can’t help himself.
“Then why doesn’t he think we deserve another baby?” Jin asks pitifully.
“There’s more than one way to have a baby, baby,” Kame says and smiles widely when Jin lifts his head to glare at him.
“Don’t pun,” Jin says angrily.
Kame laughs but Jin can see his melancholy in his cloudy eyes; it is 11am but the deep bags in Kame’s cheeks tell Jin he didn’t sleep at all.
“I want Akio to be a big brother,” Jin says miserably, closing his eyes and letting Kame pet at his hair, his ears, like a puppy.
“We will,” Kame says. “We’ll find a way.”
“You’re not sleeping with a woman,” Jin hisses suspiciously.
Kame rolls his eyes. “I’ll try to restrain myself.”
“We can’t adopt because we’re both guys,” Jin says. “I checked.”
“There’s always a way,” Kame says. “Ganbatte, ne?”
-
Jin makes Kame play hooky from work with him. They laze in the bath together until Suzuki brings Akio home and the kid runs into the bathroom demanding an explanation for their presence. He’s holding a stuffed shark in his hand and Jin remembers that Suzuki had been promising to take him to the aquarium for ages. Akio had been really excited, before, but now he looks kind of indignant that he could have spent the day with Kame and Jin instead. He doesn’t get them all to himself for the whole day very often. He sits on the bed pouting at Jin while he changes into a pair of sweats and towel dries his hair.
They give Suzuki the afternoon off. He disappears wherever it is he goes when he’s not at Akio’s beck and call. Jin tries not to think about it much. Sometimes Suzuki’s friends come to the house and it’s always the most awkward experience in the world; they’re the kinds of guys who go to work in navy suits with a white shirt and grey tie, who take the train home. Normal guys. They have weird, shapeless faces.
They go back to bed and Akio crawls in with them, little body a comfortable avalanche across their limbs. They’ve been letting him watch the Harry Potter series, fast forwarding through the scary bits because they still kind of give Jin nightmares. Kame falls asleep halfway through a quidditch scene, even though they’re usually his favourite bits. Akio squeals and kicks his feet whenever anyone so much as moves their broom, but Kame doesn’t stir. His feet are crushed under Jin’s calf and his arm is curled protectively around Akio’s shoulder.
Jin watches them instead of the movie. They make him think that no matter what, he still believes in miracles.
-
Jin does what he always does when he’s down to his last resort. He sweet talks Johnny’s assistant into getting him some time on Wednesday afternoon when Kame’s off filming an interview for some new talk show hosted by a man in a rabbit suit. Sitting in the waiting room outside Johnny’s office, Jin feels like he’s fifteen again and he’s being called in for discipline. He sits on his hands and swings his feet.
When he walks in, Johnny’s got headshots spread out across his long black desk. Jin recognises some of the older juniors, but barely; it seems like every time he sees them they’ve grown another foot and lose a little more of their chubby, boyish cheeks.
“Yo, Jin-chan,” Johnny says jovially. It’s been a long time since Jin last saw him in person; five months, maybe six. It makes Jin uneasy to look at his face, skin melting to floppy jowls and liver spots crawling up his arthritic fingers and over bony wrists.
“Long time no see,” Johnny says. On the wall behind him is a row of gold and platinum records, quite of few of them KAT-TUN’s. Kiritani Shuuji’s young face smirks at him out of the cover of Seishun Amigo. It steels his resolve.
“I need a favour,” he says, and tries to stand up straight like a serious adult, so Johnny knows he really means it. He feels himself starting to pull his nervous face, lips bunched, jaw clicking slowly from one side to the other. It takes effort to relax, to make himself carefully, calmly blank like Kame would.
“Really?” Johnny asks curiously. He stands and walks to the sturdy leather armchairs in the corner. He sits in one and invites Jin to the other with an outstretched palm.
“Yes sir,” Jin says, inclining his head respectfully. His hands rest as fists on his knees.
“Sir,” Johnny repeats wryly. “This must be a big favour.”
“Yes, sir,” Jin says. He concentrates on clenching every muscle in his body one by one. Johnny has always kind of scared everybody. Jin doesn’t like the way his voice always sounds the same; it’s light and easy no matter what, jovial through their fury. Kame doesn’t like the way he holds their entire lives in his hands.
“Doesn’t Kazuya usually take care of this sort of thing?” Johnny asks. His assistant brings in two cans of Calpico on a tray. They’re melon, which was Jin’s favourite flavour when he was fifteen years old. Johnny gives it to him every time he comes. “If you’re here about hiring the elephants, he’s already been in to see me.”
Jin has no idea what he’s talking about. “It’s bigger than that,” he says.
“Bigger than elephants?” Johnny cracks open his Calpico and sips at it, smacking his old man lips in satisfaction.
“We want another baby,” Jin says.
Johnny stares at him.
“You want me to get you a baby,” he says eventually. “You always were a demanding kid.”
“I never ask you for anything!” Jin whines.
“Not anymore,” Johnny says. “You used to be in here every other week.”
“This is important,” Jin says.
“And impossible,” Johnny replies. “What makes you think I can even get a baby?”
“You’re Johnny Kitagawa,” Jin says. It should be obvious. “You can get anything.”
The old man sighs and rubs his chin thoughtfully. “How much do you want it?” he asks.
Jin stares at him and thinks of Akio. He thinks of Kame’s spazzy smile and his little girl’s voice in his dreams. He sinks to his knees and pushes his forehead to the tatami. This is the deepest bow of his life.
“Get up,” Johnny says after a moment. “Get up, you don’t look cool.”
Jin laughs a little. His heart is beating wildly and he feels blood rushing dizzy from his head as he straightens his spine. He stays on his knees and looks up at Johnny, remember the weird old janitor from his audition.
“Didn’t you ever want kids?” Jin asks curiously.
“Kids.” Johnny says. He reaches out to ruffle Jin’s hair. He hasn’t done that in ears. “You idiot,” he says. “I had hundreds of them.”
-
Six weeks later, Kame answers a knock on the door. Jin is sitting at the kitchen table “helping” Akio with his homework; his assistance generally consists of reminding Akio every five minutes that if he doesn’t memorise his multiplication tables he’ll never be an astronaut.
“Jin,” Kame calls from the door, his voice tense and wary. “What did you do?”
Jin lifts his head and thinks. There are half a dozen things Kame could be referring to in the last three days alone.
“Nothing?” he tries.
“Come in here,” Kame says.
Jin leaves Akio in the kitchen scribbling aliens in the margins of his work book and walks with some trepidation into the hallway. He’s a bit worried Kame’s going to be there with the obaa-chan whose flowerbed he’d accidentally crushed the other day, but he’s not. He’s standing with his back against the wall, one hand on the Louisville Slugger he keeps in the umbrella stand.
A man stands in the doorway. There is an incomplete dragon tattoo twisting up one forearm, claws outstretched over the prominent veins that bulge from his muscle. His hair is slicked back and the sleeves of his black blazer are rolled to the elbow. He’s chewing a toothpick. At first, Jin thinks he’s an actor on the way home from Koki’s new drama about a Yakuza family that open a hospital, but then jin realises, he’s just a real Yakuza.
“Boss said you’d take care of this,” he says, looking almost embarrassed. He picks up the basket in his hands and holds it gently forward, his care incongruous with his reckless appearance.
Jin peers into the basket. There’s a baby inside, nestled comfortably inside a nest of worn women’s clothes.
“OH MY GOD,” Jin says.
-
She comes with a birth certificate nestled in the outside pocket of her diaper bag. It says that she is three months old. Under ‘father’, it says Jin’s name in steady black kanji. Under ‘mother’, it says Natsukawa Ayako. Kame looks at Jin with dangerously narrowed eyes and he swears that he has never heard that name in his life.
“Doesn’t her mother want her?” Kame asks, lifting her from her nest and cradling her against his neck. Even though he sounds wary, he’s got that glazed, starry eyed look he used to get around Akio when he was small and totally defenseless. If someone tried to pry her from his arms right now they’d end up bloody and bruised in a corner while Kame cooed into her hair and sang her a lullabye.
“She died,” Shunji says. He looks out of place in this apartment, sitting gingerly at their clean, bright western style table. It turns out he’s not just a henchman, he’s a lawyer. His papers are spread out around him in a fan. There’s a surprising amount of paperwork involved in acquiring a black market baby.
“She worked in one of our gentleman’s clubs,” Shinji adds, making crosses on the contract where Jin has to sign. “Sweet kid.”
“The father?” Kame asks, stroking the downy skin behind the baby’s ear.
“No-one that wants to take a whore’s baby into his perfect family,” Shinji says. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he scowls. “He could be anyone.”
Kame bites his lip when Shinji slides the contracts over to Jin. Jin pulls the cap off his pen and looks at Kame.
“Okay?” he says.
The baby gurgles and her little fingers make a fist in Kame’s collar.
“Okay,” Kame says.
Jin scrawls his signature across the dotted line and writes her name in clear, neat strokes at the top: Akanishi Hoshi, three months old.
-
Akio is full of surly resentment at the incursion on his territory. When he finds out that Hoshi is to sleep in a crib in Kame and Jin’s room he throws a fit and insists he be allowed to sleep in there too. He holds out for two nights, curled up between Jin and Kame, elbows in their ribcages, before he can’t stand being woken up by the sudden explosion of Hoshi’s midnight wailing anymore. He trudges back to his room with his stuffed rooster, eyes silent and accusing when they tuck him in and kiss him goodnight.
Kame’s worried about it, but Jin isn’t. “I was like that with Reio,” he says. “Weren’t you jealous of Yuya?”
“No?” Kame says, as if he thinks both Akio and Jin are completely insane. “I was so excited. I had so much I wanted to teach him...”
“You were like three,” Jin says. “You’re abnormal.”
Akio’s hostility lasts until his eight year old second cousin comes over to meet Hoshi. He stands over her crib with wide, impressed eyes.
“She’s so cute!” Takahiro says, holding out his finger. Hoshi lifts her fist and wraps it around his pinky, shaking it and gurgling. “I want a sister.”
Akio wedges himself between them, arms spread, knocking Takahiro’s finger from her grasp. “You can’t have her,” he says angrily. “She’s mine.”
After that, he dotes on her so much it’s almost a pain in the ass.
-
Ryo comes to visit one day. He sits with her on his lap, wrapping his hands around her wrists and waving her arms around while she laughs. “She’s so cute,” he says.
“Of course,” Jin beams.
Ryo smirks at him. “Aren’t you always going to compare her to Akio though?” he asks.
“What?” Jin stares at him blankly.
“One’s your miracle baby, born from the heavens~” Ryo says. “The other is the bastard child of a whore.”
“SHUT UP,” Jin says, snatching Hoshi away. She giggles and latches onto his shoulder. “You don’t deserve to hold my daughter.”
“Jesus, Jin, relax,” Ryo laughs. “I’m just fucking with you.”
“”Language,” Kame says from the doorway. Akio is behind him in his school uniform, bag dangling from his shoulder.
“UNCLE RYO,” Akio yells happily, rushing towards him.
“Hey, buddy,” Ryo grins.
“Akio,” Jin says. “Come here. He’s dead to you now.”
Akio stops dead and looks uncertainly between them.
“Don’t confuse him, Jin,” Kame scolds, taking Hoshi from his arms. He disappears into the kitchen and Jin hears the sounds of the microwave; the slam of the door and the beep of the buttons. He’s preparing her formula.
“It’s alright,” Ryo says to Akio. “Come here.”
Akio looks at him. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” he says, turning his back on Ryo. He throws himself on the couch and curls against Jin’s side.
“Jin, come on,” Ryo says. “I was just kidding.”
“They’re both miracles to me,” Jin says angrily, covering Akio’s ears so he can’t hear.
“I know,” Ryo says.
“If you were anyone else I’d kill you for saying that,” Jin says.
Ryo snorts. “I’m more afraid of Kame.”
Jin nudges Akio in Ryo’s direction. “You should be.”
-
That night, Jin looks down at Hoshi sleeping peacefully in her crib. She’s all wrapped up in a romper suit that used to belong to Akio. It is covered in red trucks and blue helicopters, with yellow snap buttons. Jin remembers that it was one of the first presents he ever bought for Akio, before he really understood who Akio was. What he meant to him.
Hoshi sighs low and wheezy in her sleep, head turning into the fist by her mouth. Jin strokes her hair and rubs her back until she settles again.
“You’ll always be my real daughter,” he promises, and seals his oath with a kiss.