Vice & Glitter
TITLE: Vice & Glitter
PAIRING: RyoShige
RATING: R
WORD COUNT: 2,117
SUMMARY: A remix of Late Nights in Nameless Suburbs. (Because I'm too lazy to write something actually new.)
There are lights flashing in his eyes. His manager is off to his left talking at him, going over his hectic schedule. His jaw is sore from smiling for so long. The lights make him hot and he can feel the sweat running down his back, and he doesn't feel sexy at all. The jeans he's been forced to wear pinch his waist and the shirt is itchy. The shoes aren't very comfortable either. His stomach growls, and when the photographer says "That's all, Nishikido-kun." in a gruff voice, Ryo feels like he's about to die and nearly falls over.
Immediately, the manager is pulling him away from the set, thrusting an energy drink into his hand and yelling at him to hurry up - he's supposed to be back stage getting ready for The Shounen Club in 15 minutes. The manager doesn't need to say that NHK hall is nearly half an hour away. He sips at his drink as they walk down the hall, manager still following, still yapping, and once he's in the dressing room, Ryo is left in peace to change while the manager goes to get the car. Ryo flops down on the couch, finishes the drink and tosses it towards the garbage can near the door. He misses and the can clinks against the floor before stopping. Ryo stares at it for a long minute, until he turns from it, stands and begins undressing, folding up the sweaty, designers' clothes and putting them in the laundry bag on the counter. He slips into his own jeans - soft and worn at the knees - and pulls on his sweatshirt, forgoing the t-shirt and stuffing it into his bag.
Out front, the manager is waiting - looking stressed - in the car. By some miracle, it only takes 20 minutes to get to NHK hall.
-- -- --
Once the filming is all done, Ryo finds himself, again, sitting in a dressing room, tired, nearly about to pass out from exhaustion and hunger and stress. Most of the juniors have already left, and it's a small moment of peace. Down the hall, Ryo can hear the heels of his manager's shoes clip-clopping against the tile floor and he prepares himself mentally. The manager stops in the doorway, takes a long look at Ryo before saying, "You need to be on the 8:40 Shinkansen back to Osaka." Ryo nods. "We should leave soon so you get to the station in time." Lazily reaching over, Ryo grabs his bag and stands up, yawning, covering his mouth with his hand, and follows the manager out.
-- -- --
He sets his phone to vibrate and sleeps for most of the ride back to Osaka. But some where around Nagoya, he's bombarded by text messages from Yamashita. Asking him about his day, talking about a super-tasty Okonomiyaki place he found in Roppongi and then a minute later, a picture of his dogs sleeping near the heater.
Ryo sighs, leans back in the seat and tries to go back to sleep.
-- -- --
Two weeks later, he's back in Tokyo, having traveled on the Tokaido Shinkansen Line three other times. He left his cell phone charger back in Osaka and is having to be stingy with his battery. Unbeknownst to Ryo, he has about 20 messages from Yamashita in his inbox, a large handful from Akanishi, Yasuda and Maruyama each, and a spattering of messages from other people he knows.
Ryo feels dead on his feet, shuffling from one photoshoot to the next, not even knowing what they're for, but nevertheless, he changes into the required clothes and forces himself to smile or brood as necessary without complaining. When he's finished the one shoot, the manager has left Ryo a Katsudon for dinner on the counter, but some how, Ryo doesn't even have the energy to eat, and pokes at it, nibbling on some rice before somewhat guiltily throwing the rest of it away.
At 8pm, the last of the day's work is done, and the manager drops Ryo off at his Tokyo apartment. "I'll be here at 8 tomorrow morning to pick up you." Ryo waves and walks into the lobby as the doorman greets him. He crashes into bed and immediately falls asleep.
For some reason though, he wakes up an hour later, completely alert and filled with energy. Ryo groans into the pillow and hates himself, because all he really wants to do is sleep for a week. But after 15 minutes of lying in bed, fully clothed, doing nothing, Ryo gets up and decides to go for a drive, hoping that it will calm him down, and he'll be able to sleep afterwards. He sets off without any specific destination in mind. He takes the highway to the north for a little, before turning west and meandering down some little roads, getting himself lost, if not for the in -dash navigation system that happily keeps telling him that the highway is behind him. He passes by a sad-looking, neighborhood train station, and perhaps 50 meters past that, a bar, designated only by the name of the establishment scrawled across the door: "Bar Harvey".
Seeing that sign and this average neighborhood, an urge over takes Ryo and he parks his car. He's about to open the door, and step onto the street, when he stops and thinks long and hard for a moment, before wrapping a scarf around his neck and pulling on a hat that he found stuffed in the glove box. Walking into the bar, a drunk man perks up, but quickly looses interest. Ryo sits at the counter, eyes the scant selection of hard liquor, and orders a beer. The bartender looks a little confused - this is the type of bar that only people in the neighborhood use, so this unknown person is a conundrum. But money is money, and soon, Ryo is nursing the beer, rubbing his fingers through the condensation on the glass.
He doesn't even remember asking for a second beer when it's placed in front of him, and Ryo's mind starts to get fuzzy, flashing back to his audition. The awkward, tiny kid he'd been. But something must have stuck out, because now he lives in two cities, always traveling between them, never home. He likes to think that if he hadn't passed the interview, he would have finished high school with something better than 'acceptable' grades. Maybe he would have gone to college. Studied something cool, like architecture, or journalism. He would have been a good student, not going out and partying constantly. Holed up in his little apartment - he'd want one near a park, or something comparable. That way, even if the apartment was horrible, he'd have a nice view.
The door creaks open and Ryo's shaken from his thoughts some what. A young man sits down a few stools away from him and orders a scotch. The clinking noise of coins completely pulls Ryo back into reality, and he turns to glare, just a little, at his stool neighbor. The styled hair, eye-liner and flashy clothes are unexpected in his part of Tokyo, and Ryo would have to be stupid and blind to not know what that means. He laughs to himself, thinking, maybe, tonight, i'll have some fun.
"What the fuck are you supposed to be? Some kind of idol? That's a joke."
The other man turns his head away and Ryo can see the blush even in the shitty lighting. "I wouldn't presume to be such a thing."
Ryo goads him on, trying to get an amusing response, but it doesn't happen. The drunk man in the booth yells, "He's a whore!" And then the stool is empty and the door falling shut.
Ryo laughs, downs the rest of his beer and pays. It's not hard to find the whore, walking down the street, towards the little station, his anger obvious in his gait. It's not difficult to catch up with him.
He tries again, to get a reaction; he mocks the other, insults his pride as a man, but it produces nothing. Except for wet eyes that Ryo can't tear his vision away from. He steps closer, mesmerized, and grabs at the other's jeans.
"Why don't we play tonight?"
And ironically, that's all it takes, because the whore lashes out, fights back against Ryo, and that's what he'd been looking for. Something different, some excitement in his overly-structured life. Ryo's next to himself as he leads the whore back to his car, not even registering the thought of what a paparazzi picture of this moment could do to his career. There's something he can't deny himself in this moment - both his own gratification and something else he can only figure out enough to know that it intrigues him.
He barely registers the conversation, only lets it last long enough to get price details, and then he's pulling the whore's head down, and they get down to business. His tongue is soft and his hands are in all the right places. Ryo grips the steering wheel his knuckles white, but his other hand is relaxed, petting the whore's head like he's a dog.
But business is business and when the whore sucks long and hard, Ryo groans, hand fisting in the other's hair. The radio is blaring, something with a lot of guitar and drums, but Ryo's pretty sure that he's louder, that this whore is some kind of goddamned cock-sucking genius. Ryo's barely able to choke out an, "I'm-" before it's too late, and he loses it. Absently, he feels the whore swallow around him, and he groans again. The other sits up and licks his lips - just one more erotic gesture to add the list - and looks antsy, but Ryo's appreciating the moment, hand still in the whore's hair. The relaxed atmosphere makes his tongue and mind wander.
"You have a big debt or something like that, right?"
The whore looks away, out the window. "...Yeah."
Ryo glares and tugs on his hair. "Don't lie to me."
"What do you care? And you owe me 4,000 yen."
The two meet eyes in the reflection in the car window. Ryo is a good enough actor to know an emotion when he sees one, and it's obvious that this kid is fucked up, probably in more ways than one. He looks miserable, like his life has no meaning, but at the same time, there's a fire there, like he's fighting and is determined to win.
Ryo doesn't try to hide his own intrigue, thinking to himself that this town has some interesting inhabitants with interesting occupations. He hands over a bill, knowing full well he's over paying by 6,000 yen.
"I don't have change for this."
"I never said I wanted change." Ryo adds you earned all that, but only to himself.
The whore gets out and walks away.
-- -- --
The next day, Ryo goes back to his idol life. Singing, dancing, acting, modeling. Getting paid gobs of money to basically stand around, look handsome and be the central object of wet-dreams for millions of Japanese women. At night, he goes out with his friends, scantily-clad club scene girls falling over him, making sexual innuendos and he drinks to the good life.
One Friday night, he catches himself thinking about going to back to that crappy little bar and finding that whore again. But in the next moment, his friends are calling, talking about a bar crawl, and Ryo doesn't hesitate to agree to go. Some how, at the end of the night, he finds himself locked inside a unisex bathroom, leaning against the wall while some name-less and face-less girl blows him. The only thought Ryo can come up with is, that whore was so much better at this.
But after nearly two weeks, Ryo isn't looking at life the same way. The girls that fawn over him are getting annoying, clingy and are working so hard to get his attention that it just makes them unattractive. His friends notice his lethargy, and Ryo just claims that he's in an artistic slump and it's bringing him down. He cancels on a night out at the clubs and doesn't even think twice about how he's going to spend his night.
An hour later, he's back at that crappy bar, silently hoping that the whore actually does come here for a drink before heading out, and it wasn't a one-time-thing. But when the door clinks open and the bartender reaches for the scotch, Ryo smirks, turns towards the door, and raises his drink in greeting.
PAIRING: RyoShige
RATING: R
WORD COUNT: 2,117
SUMMARY: A remix of Late Nights in Nameless Suburbs. (Because I'm too lazy to write something actually new.)
There are lights flashing in his eyes. His manager is off to his left talking at him, going over his hectic schedule. His jaw is sore from smiling for so long. The lights make him hot and he can feel the sweat running down his back, and he doesn't feel sexy at all. The jeans he's been forced to wear pinch his waist and the shirt is itchy. The shoes aren't very comfortable either. His stomach growls, and when the photographer says "That's all, Nishikido-kun." in a gruff voice, Ryo feels like he's about to die and nearly falls over.
Immediately, the manager is pulling him away from the set, thrusting an energy drink into his hand and yelling at him to hurry up - he's supposed to be back stage getting ready for The Shounen Club in 15 minutes. The manager doesn't need to say that NHK hall is nearly half an hour away. He sips at his drink as they walk down the hall, manager still following, still yapping, and once he's in the dressing room, Ryo is left in peace to change while the manager goes to get the car. Ryo flops down on the couch, finishes the drink and tosses it towards the garbage can near the door. He misses and the can clinks against the floor before stopping. Ryo stares at it for a long minute, until he turns from it, stands and begins undressing, folding up the sweaty, designers' clothes and putting them in the laundry bag on the counter. He slips into his own jeans - soft and worn at the knees - and pulls on his sweatshirt, forgoing the t-shirt and stuffing it into his bag.
Out front, the manager is waiting - looking stressed - in the car. By some miracle, it only takes 20 minutes to get to NHK hall.
-- -- --
Once the filming is all done, Ryo finds himself, again, sitting in a dressing room, tired, nearly about to pass out from exhaustion and hunger and stress. Most of the juniors have already left, and it's a small moment of peace. Down the hall, Ryo can hear the heels of his manager's shoes clip-clopping against the tile floor and he prepares himself mentally. The manager stops in the doorway, takes a long look at Ryo before saying, "You need to be on the 8:40 Shinkansen back to Osaka." Ryo nods. "We should leave soon so you get to the station in time." Lazily reaching over, Ryo grabs his bag and stands up, yawning, covering his mouth with his hand, and follows the manager out.
-- -- --
He sets his phone to vibrate and sleeps for most of the ride back to Osaka. But some where around Nagoya, he's bombarded by text messages from Yamashita. Asking him about his day, talking about a super-tasty Okonomiyaki place he found in Roppongi and then a minute later, a picture of his dogs sleeping near the heater.
Ryo sighs, leans back in the seat and tries to go back to sleep.
-- -- --
Two weeks later, he's back in Tokyo, having traveled on the Tokaido Shinkansen Line three other times. He left his cell phone charger back in Osaka and is having to be stingy with his battery. Unbeknownst to Ryo, he has about 20 messages from Yamashita in his inbox, a large handful from Akanishi, Yasuda and Maruyama each, and a spattering of messages from other people he knows.
Ryo feels dead on his feet, shuffling from one photoshoot to the next, not even knowing what they're for, but nevertheless, he changes into the required clothes and forces himself to smile or brood as necessary without complaining. When he's finished the one shoot, the manager has left Ryo a Katsudon for dinner on the counter, but some how, Ryo doesn't even have the energy to eat, and pokes at it, nibbling on some rice before somewhat guiltily throwing the rest of it away.
At 8pm, the last of the day's work is done, and the manager drops Ryo off at his Tokyo apartment. "I'll be here at 8 tomorrow morning to pick up you." Ryo waves and walks into the lobby as the doorman greets him. He crashes into bed and immediately falls asleep.
For some reason though, he wakes up an hour later, completely alert and filled with energy. Ryo groans into the pillow and hates himself, because all he really wants to do is sleep for a week. But after 15 minutes of lying in bed, fully clothed, doing nothing, Ryo gets up and decides to go for a drive, hoping that it will calm him down, and he'll be able to sleep afterwards. He sets off without any specific destination in mind. He takes the highway to the north for a little, before turning west and meandering down some little roads, getting himself lost, if not for the in -dash navigation system that happily keeps telling him that the highway is behind him. He passes by a sad-looking, neighborhood train station, and perhaps 50 meters past that, a bar, designated only by the name of the establishment scrawled across the door: "Bar Harvey".
Seeing that sign and this average neighborhood, an urge over takes Ryo and he parks his car. He's about to open the door, and step onto the street, when he stops and thinks long and hard for a moment, before wrapping a scarf around his neck and pulling on a hat that he found stuffed in the glove box. Walking into the bar, a drunk man perks up, but quickly looses interest. Ryo sits at the counter, eyes the scant selection of hard liquor, and orders a beer. The bartender looks a little confused - this is the type of bar that only people in the neighborhood use, so this unknown person is a conundrum. But money is money, and soon, Ryo is nursing the beer, rubbing his fingers through the condensation on the glass.
He doesn't even remember asking for a second beer when it's placed in front of him, and Ryo's mind starts to get fuzzy, flashing back to his audition. The awkward, tiny kid he'd been. But something must have stuck out, because now he lives in two cities, always traveling between them, never home. He likes to think that if he hadn't passed the interview, he would have finished high school with something better than 'acceptable' grades. Maybe he would have gone to college. Studied something cool, like architecture, or journalism. He would have been a good student, not going out and partying constantly. Holed up in his little apartment - he'd want one near a park, or something comparable. That way, even if the apartment was horrible, he'd have a nice view.
The door creaks open and Ryo's shaken from his thoughts some what. A young man sits down a few stools away from him and orders a scotch. The clinking noise of coins completely pulls Ryo back into reality, and he turns to glare, just a little, at his stool neighbor. The styled hair, eye-liner and flashy clothes are unexpected in his part of Tokyo, and Ryo would have to be stupid and blind to not know what that means. He laughs to himself, thinking, maybe, tonight, i'll have some fun.
"What the fuck are you supposed to be? Some kind of idol? That's a joke."
The other man turns his head away and Ryo can see the blush even in the shitty lighting. "I wouldn't presume to be such a thing."
Ryo goads him on, trying to get an amusing response, but it doesn't happen. The drunk man in the booth yells, "He's a whore!" And then the stool is empty and the door falling shut.
Ryo laughs, downs the rest of his beer and pays. It's not hard to find the whore, walking down the street, towards the little station, his anger obvious in his gait. It's not difficult to catch up with him.
He tries again, to get a reaction; he mocks the other, insults his pride as a man, but it produces nothing. Except for wet eyes that Ryo can't tear his vision away from. He steps closer, mesmerized, and grabs at the other's jeans.
"Why don't we play tonight?"
And ironically, that's all it takes, because the whore lashes out, fights back against Ryo, and that's what he'd been looking for. Something different, some excitement in his overly-structured life. Ryo's next to himself as he leads the whore back to his car, not even registering the thought of what a paparazzi picture of this moment could do to his career. There's something he can't deny himself in this moment - both his own gratification and something else he can only figure out enough to know that it intrigues him.
He barely registers the conversation, only lets it last long enough to get price details, and then he's pulling the whore's head down, and they get down to business. His tongue is soft and his hands are in all the right places. Ryo grips the steering wheel his knuckles white, but his other hand is relaxed, petting the whore's head like he's a dog.
But business is business and when the whore sucks long and hard, Ryo groans, hand fisting in the other's hair. The radio is blaring, something with a lot of guitar and drums, but Ryo's pretty sure that he's louder, that this whore is some kind of goddamned cock-sucking genius. Ryo's barely able to choke out an, "I'm-" before it's too late, and he loses it. Absently, he feels the whore swallow around him, and he groans again. The other sits up and licks his lips - just one more erotic gesture to add the list - and looks antsy, but Ryo's appreciating the moment, hand still in the whore's hair. The relaxed atmosphere makes his tongue and mind wander.
"You have a big debt or something like that, right?"
The whore looks away, out the window. "...Yeah."
Ryo glares and tugs on his hair. "Don't lie to me."
"What do you care? And you owe me 4,000 yen."
The two meet eyes in the reflection in the car window. Ryo is a good enough actor to know an emotion when he sees one, and it's obvious that this kid is fucked up, probably in more ways than one. He looks miserable, like his life has no meaning, but at the same time, there's a fire there, like he's fighting and is determined to win.
Ryo doesn't try to hide his own intrigue, thinking to himself that this town has some interesting inhabitants with interesting occupations. He hands over a bill, knowing full well he's over paying by 6,000 yen.
"I don't have change for this."
"I never said I wanted change." Ryo adds you earned all that, but only to himself.
The whore gets out and walks away.
-- -- --
The next day, Ryo goes back to his idol life. Singing, dancing, acting, modeling. Getting paid gobs of money to basically stand around, look handsome and be the central object of wet-dreams for millions of Japanese women. At night, he goes out with his friends, scantily-clad club scene girls falling over him, making sexual innuendos and he drinks to the good life.
One Friday night, he catches himself thinking about going to back to that crappy little bar and finding that whore again. But in the next moment, his friends are calling, talking about a bar crawl, and Ryo doesn't hesitate to agree to go. Some how, at the end of the night, he finds himself locked inside a unisex bathroom, leaning against the wall while some name-less and face-less girl blows him. The only thought Ryo can come up with is, that whore was so much better at this.
But after nearly two weeks, Ryo isn't looking at life the same way. The girls that fawn over him are getting annoying, clingy and are working so hard to get his attention that it just makes them unattractive. His friends notice his lethargy, and Ryo just claims that he's in an artistic slump and it's bringing him down. He cancels on a night out at the clubs and doesn't even think twice about how he's going to spend his night.
An hour later, he's back at that crappy bar, silently hoping that the whore actually does come here for a drink before heading out, and it wasn't a one-time-thing. But when the door clinks open and the bartender reaches for the scotch, Ryo smirks, turns towards the door, and raises his drink in greeting.