Who Are We? - Chapter 9
Title: Who Are We?
Pairing: Akame
Genre: AU, Romance
Rating: NC-17
Beta:
infynitehexes
Disclaimer: Own nothing but the plot, sadly.
Warnings: I don’t know how to warn you without spoiling the story so just read at your own risk. LOL
Summary: He wakes up naked to find himself in bed with a beautiful young man and without any of his memories. What’s his name again?
A/N: Sorry for the delay. As mentioned in my previous entries, I was extremely busy and then because of all those goings-on I got sick big time. Sucks, right? Anyways, here’s the second to the last chapter. I hope you guys enjoy it and stick around ‘til the finale. This feels like a J-drama series with ten episodes and everything lol.
Chapter 9
Jin is lying in bed, mulling things over as he stares up at the old teal paint. It feels like a lifetime ago when he first opened his eyes and looked up at this very spot on the ceiling, only to realize that he had lost his memories.
He still has not regained any recollection of his life, but from the moment he woke up until today, it has been a rollercoaster ride, and to be honest, Jin would like to get off the ride now. The thrill and amusement are gone, as well as the novelty of it all. Those deceitfully blissful feelings have been replaced by an enduring sense of foreboding; there’s a sick feeling growing in the pits of his stomach that is getting more and more difficult to ignore.
Jin had tried to be optimistic and trusting, but that did not work. Now he has turned cynical, and while having his guard up keeps him from falling prey to whomever might still try to play with his head, this constant state of wariness is proving to be exhausting, too.
Jin closes his eyes, as if his fatigue is manifesting physically. In fact, has remained in bed for the last couple of hours, not knowing what else to do after what he had found out.
It’s his own fault that he lost his memories. He had taken drugs without knowing what they could do to him. Jin had deduced that he was planning to confess to a girl, and the drugs were a means to calm his nerves.
Jin now has no interest in who this Lizzy is, and he clearly cannot remember any feelings he had toward her. That is something he would have to deal with when he gets his memory back. At this point, all Jin would like to find out is Kame’s reason behind pretending to be his lover. Jin wants to know why Kame has been deceiving him.
Kame is supposed to be Jin’s friend - they evidently go a long way back into their childhood. So why has Kame done this to him? The younger man had always been the responsible and reliable one, the person who tried to keep Jin focused when he was losing his way. Jin wonders how Kame’s girlfriend would feel about this -
Jin’s eyes shoot open. He thinks he might have been dreaming already. Or imagining things. But what he saw in his mind just now… where did that come from? It was an image of Kame, smiling, sitting at a table in a fancy-looking restaurant across a girl with short hair, whose face Jin could not remember no matter how much he tried.
Jin lies motionless in his bed, staring up at the teal ceiling, his heart beating furiously against his ribcage. He had just remembered something.
And it’s a vivid fragment of memory: Kamenashi Kazuya is in a relationship with a girl.
oOo
Kame was just starting to think that maybe Koki isn’t going to turn up after all, when suddenly the person in thought comes into view at the entrance to the café. It’s a funny place to be meeting someone at dinner time, and Kame has not left Jin anything for a meal, but this was rather an emergency.
“Kame?” Koki says immediately when he sits down across the other man. “You look like hell.”
“And feel like it,” Kame agrees, feeling free to slump against the small wooden table now that he is not alone and therefore will not anymore attract too much attention to himself by doing so.
Koki would have offered to have Kame come over to his house instead, but in all their years of friendship, he has been to Kame’s house more than Kame’s been to his, which is well and fine with both of them. Koki thinks Kame finds it a bit unsettling that every corner of the Tanaka residence is occupied by some strange, possibly illegal creature he does not know the name of.
“Why? You didn’t even drink much last night,” Koki asks, chuckling.
Kame doesn’t answer, and the other man seems to take that as a hint that Kame is in a severe mood right now. He called Koki over to ‘talk,’ after all, and that’s something Koki rarely gets from this man, even if they’re practically best friends. Kame is the type of person to keep everything to himself until he reaches his limit, at which point he would need someone to pour out to, someone who would listen without prejudice. And Koki has always been good at doing that. And this is one of those times, judging from the frequent worried side-glances and incessant lip-biting the smaller man is displaying right now.
“What’s wrong.”
Koki asks without an inquiring tone, staring straight ahead at Kame with his hands in his pockets. He could already guess what - or who - this is about.
“He already knows -” Kame answers quietly, his voice muffled coming from behind his arms on the coffee table. Koki could hear the younger man struggling to keep his voice steady.
“What do you mean? His memories are back?”
“No, no, I don’t think so.”
“Then what?”
“He left earlier today and… after coming back, he hasn’t come out of his room or - or -”
Kame has no choice but to raise his head and stare, scandalized at the reaction he gets: Koki has started chortling at him.
“Well, check up on him, yeah? For all we know he might have already died in there -”
“That’s not funny,” Kame replies crossly, his thin eyebrows scrunched together.
“Well, what else is different?” Koki eases up, straightening in his seat. “What makes you think he already knows you two aren’t really together?”
“I don’t know… this morning, we…” Kame begins hesitantly. He really didn’t want to go into details. “He said ‘I love you’ to me. And… it was just different -”
Koki looks like he’s fighting back another fit of laughter, so Kame snaps at him:
“Listen, if you think this is all just too gay for you and shit then fine, never mind, I’m sorry I called!”
Kame suits himself to reach across the table and hit a knuckle against Koki’s curly-haired head.
“Fuck you,” he says when Koki starts chuckling again.
“What? He seemed normal to me when I saw him.”
“And isn’t that a bad thing? He isn’t supposed to be normal. He shouldn’t be acting like himself,” Kame hisses, leaning over and sputtering in Koki’s face. Jin and Koki have always been on rather bad terms ever since, never really being able to keep up a civil conversation without a few snide remarks here and there.
Kame’s best friend just shrugs it off, though.
“Didn’t you supposedly fall in love with that Akanishi? The one with those memories and who acts like himself - the douche that he is?” Koki says, raising his eyebrows at Kame. “At any rate, you have to make this work, you know?”
Koki had been against the decisions Kame had made lately, but they’re friends after all. It’s Koki’s ‘job’ to nag him about those stuff. This time, Kame buries his face in his hands as he listens to his best friend, who viciously brings up one more decision Kame had made in keeping with his feelings for Jin.
“I mean, you didn’t break up with Anne for nothing… right?”
oOo
Jin is coming down the wooden staircase when it happens again.
A random thought popping up in his head like a bubble. And just like how he would with such a fragile substance, in his head Jin scrambles to get a hold of it, managing to grasp a few little details but in essence losing a whole lot more.
This time he remembers kissing and touching some blonde girl in a narrow cubicle. He can remember her face alright. And he remembers touching her underwear, one that had an ‘L’ embroidered on it. Jin can’t remember her name just yet, but he’s pretty sure she’s the one Josh has been talking about.
Reaching the foot of the stairs, Jin feels a bit of embarrassment over that memory. He has basically just relived a make out session with some girl he doesn’t even know anymore. He also feels a bit of irk, but he can’t explain why.
These memories should come back all at once if they want to come back at all, Jin thinks, so that everything would just instantly make sense to him, and he wouldn’t have to resort anymore to what he’s about to do.
‘Hanging out with Koki for a bit. Then I’ll go to the airport to pick mom up, she’s flying back in today. Might get home late. - Kame’
There’s a new note on the fridge. The penmanship is way messier, like Kame was in such a hurry when he wrote it. Or his hand was shaking really bad.
Jin hopes it’s the latter.
He doesn’t take the note, leaves it there tacked to the fridge door for when Kame comes back. He’ll see that Jin doesn’t care. Not anymore.
Jin goes to the living room and sits down on the long couch, slouching and making himself comfortable, grabbing the phone by the stand in the process. Funny, he can remember his best friend’s telephone number now, when he doesn’t even know when his anniversary with Kame is.
Oh. Right.
“Hello?”
Yamashita Tomohisa picks up right away.
“Tomo.”
Jin has a faint recollection of him and his best friend playing soccer on a warm afternoon when they were in highschool.
“Jin?”
Jin still doesn’t remember much, but he knows a lot more now.
“I still think you’re my best friend even if you’ve been more of an ally to Kame than to me recently.”
And his best friend will be the first to hear about it.
oOo
Kame all but walked out on Koki when he gets a call from YamaPi. Koki only gets a gist of what the call was about as Kame walks away, but that, too, is expected of a troubled - and somewhat cornered - Kamenashi.
“Jin - ”
Kame halts abruptly when he finds the older man sitting in the living room immobile like some mannequin on display. Jin looks at him vacantly and without a single word, and yet Kame knows right away. It is finally time to have that confrontation.
“Why did you say that to him?” Kame asks when Jin rises from his seat to go back upstairs.
Jin can’t believe that the younger man has the nerve to follow him and ask him at all, as if Jin is the one in the wrong. He wheels around to face Kame when he enters his bedroom without bothering to turn the lights on, and in the dark Kame looks more confused than angry, and his question sounded panicked. He’s looking Jin straight in the eye, though, and that’s something that aggravates Jin even more.
“Stop pretending already!” Jin yells in Kame’s face, and his voice momentarily booms around the small room.
Kame doesn’t look surprised to hear what he just said, however, and the reaction Jin gets is Kame lowering his gaze and slowly walking over to the bed to sink into it, all the while staring at the old wooden flooring. Right now, he looks like, well, how he should exactly look like in Jin’s point of view: cornered and disconcerted. For a while now, this man had been playing him, toying with his feelings and deceiving him by making him believe in stupid lies. With this confrontation, Jin feels lost more than ever. All those days when he felt he had made progress amounted to nothing now.
“Why are you doing this?” Jin now says in a much quieter voice. “Why did you do this to me?”
Jin still can’t remember that night, but he can be sure that he and Kame aren’t together. And the likelihood that something happened between them the night prior to his memory loss is as bleak as his chances of trusting Kame ever again. Jin knows - just knows - that whatever game Kame is playing, it started when Jin regrettably revealed that he couldn’t remember anything.
“Why did you do that, Kame? Why did you pretend that we were together?” Jin asks again, coming nearer the bed with light and careful footsteps.
He isn’t really expecting proper answers. He just wants to say something, vent his emotions little by little, and in his state where, quite hopelessly, his memories are still a puzzle with too many missing pieces, talking is really all that he could do.
“You wanted a good fuck or two? Is that it?”
Kame is back on his feet.
Jin does not mind the slap he receives right on his cheek - he wouldn’t have minded a punch in all his fury. Just that… it’s Kame. Kame, whom he had trusted with everything, had resorted to this.
“Don’t… say that.”
Jin could make out Kame’s slender frame shaking with equal passion, with as much anger as Jin, but in his opinion the younger man had absolutely no fucking right to be angry at all. He deceived Jin. He took advantage of the whole situation. Hell, he deserved that slap he just gave Jin!
“All these days, ever since you lost your memory, do you remember me ever coming at you?” Kame says in the same hushed voice, his dark eyes boring into Jin’s. “I wasn’t the one who suggested we do things. Apparently, even with your memory gone, your hormones -”
“Right,” Jin interrupts, starting to yell again. “It’s my fault that after I lost my memory I wanted to have sex with you BECAUSE I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT WE WERE IN A FUCKING RELATIONSHIP!” Jin ends up bellowing, towering over Kame now.
The smaller man stands his ground, though, and looking into his eyes, Jin thinks he sees some trace of hurt, only to be instantly replaced with a cold glint of self-righteousness.
“It was an obligation to you, then,” Kame concludes, still in a dangerously low tone.
“I - what?”
“I understand why you’re angry,” Kame says, ignoring Jin’s interjection, his voice a forced calm.
Sure you do.
“I know - what I did was wrong. But Jin… you couldn’t remember anything -”
At this point, Jin cannot believe anymore what he’s hearing. It’s cover-up after cover-up falling apart when Kame doesn’t even sound or look sorry for anything and Jin has just had enough.
“Don’t you think - can’t you even trust me with - ”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that, Kame?” Jin challenges disbelievingly. He wants to laugh at what Kame is offering him now. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth right in the beginning?”
Kame sighs and looks up at him with defeated eyes.
That’s it, Jin thinks as he stares down at the other man, Give up and just give me the fucking truth already, dammit.
The more he looks intently at Kame, however, the less he actually wants to hear the truth about them, about him. This is the worst time to be asking himself this, but Jin thinks it’s unfair; why couldn’t that life he woke up to just be the correct version of things? What if he had never found out? What if he had never talked to his friends? Maybe Jin would have been happier. He would have been happy living that perfect lie of a life.
Kame now looks exhausted and close to tears, and Jin suddenly feels like the tables have been turned, somehow, especially with the way the smaller man quietly ambles away from him, making his way out of the room. At the door, Kame stops and looks at Jin.
“I’ll go out for a bit… I know you’re angry and… stuff, but please don’t leave the house, you might end up somewhere you don’t remember and accidentally put yourself in harm’s way.”
Kame turns away but speaks one last time, his voice cracking audibly:
“I’ll be the one to leave so that you can have your space…”
To be continued…
oOo
One chapter to go~ Comments are much appreciated, of course with your feelings and maybe angry outbursts over updates being late or the story going where you didn’t imagine it or something. LOL. Yes, talk to me one last time before it ends, yeah?
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