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zukkokyaThis year I wrote one fic and a pinch hit for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
newsficcon, and I offered a 500~ ficlet to anyone who guessed the two I wrote.
And the ever sparkly![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
epicwaters guessed correctly! ♥
So! I present both NEWS fics and I will begin writing Tsubasa/Subaru today forepicwaters. :D
I DECLARE THIS A FIC-FUL POST.
Title: Diminished
Fandom: JE - NEWS
Pairing/characters: Ryo/Shige
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,000~
Disclaimer: Total fiction.
Summary: The last mail Ryo ever sent to Shige read: It's not funny. Stop trying.
Note:fuyukoi, spurious, and acchikocchi were especially marvelous friends to me during this exchange. I started and abandoned three fics before I decided on one that grew into an Insanely Long Fic that, even now, doesn't look like it'll be ending anytime soon. So they suggested taking one moment from that fic and expanding it into a short fic, and that's what I ended up doing. Thank you, guys, for being lovely and supportive and excellent. ♥
The last mail Ryo ever sent to Shige read: It’s not funny. Stop trying. He sent it while Shige was in class, about twelve minutes before he was crushed between a cab and the fence of a bicycle parking lot.
Shige saw the mail arrive but didn’t open his phone to read it until his lecture had ended. He’d half expected Ryo to send another message after he ignored the first, and Shige planned to send a mail telling him just that when he read the notification stamped over Ryo’s mail. He had two missed calls and a voicemail, all from a number he didn’t recognize.
“Shige-kun!” Kusano called from the back exit of the lecture hall. “Are you coming out with us?”
Shige struggled to push his books into his bag with one hand. “I can’t, sorry,” he called back. “Today’s bad for me.” Ryo was probably home by now and bored and—8:53—about to cook dinner without bothering to get Shige’s input.
Kusano and all of their classmates were gone when Shige looked up to see why no one had responded, so Shige sat back down in his seat and read Ryo’s mail. Why is it only funny when you say it? he sent back, grinning.
Then he checked his voicemail.
“Kato-kun. This is Ryo’s older brother…listen….”
Shige spotted Kusano down the hallway and ran after him. “Kusano-kun!”
He caught Kusano’s arm and pulled hard enough to make him stumble. Kusano turned, his eyebrows high with alarm. “Shige?” His tone brought the rest of his friends to an abrupt halt.
“Please,” Shige stammered, “I—I need—it’s—I mean….”
Kusano glanced over his shoulder. “Go on without me,” he said. “I’ll call later if I’m going.”
Some of his friends made sullen noises, but ultimately they shrugged both Kusano and Shige off and shuffled down the hall.
“What’s wrong, Shige-kun?”
“It’s my…roommate.”
Shige could never tell how many of his classmates had guessed about Ryo. On the one hand, Shige never went out for drinks without him and Ryo’d gotten more and more demonstrative with Shige lately, but on the other hand, nearly anything could be dismissed with the excuse of inebriation, and most people had never even bothered to crow when Ryo leaned close to press his mouth to the corner of Shige’s lips or blow smoke in Shige’s ear.
Shige felt his calves tensing and his eyes getting hotter. He couldn’t explain his relationship with Ryo to Kusano right now. He had to get to the hospital, but he didn’t have enough in his wallet or even his bank account to cover the cab fare, and the train would take so much longer than a car—
In seconds, Kusano’s expression shifted from polite concern to actual concern to understanding and finally to sympathy.
“What do you need from me?” Kusano asked.
“Your car,” Shige blurted. “Please. Not—I don’t want it, I mean, I—he’s in the hospital, and—”
Kusano interrupted with a nod and a quick, “Right, yeah, yeah, I understand,” and pushed Shige toward the doors. “I’ll drive you, come on.”
In the car, Kusano blasted trashy American pop music so loud the car shuddered, and at first Shige wished that he’d asked anyone else, but then the thrumming bass made him forget how much he was shaking and he caught Kusano glancing at him more than once, but Kusano was tactful enough not to ask him anything. He also drove slightly too fast, but Shige could tell that it was controlled speeding and probably for Shige’s benefit. Kusano was a better friend than Shige would have imagined under different circumstances. He made a mental note to do something nice for Kusano in the future.
Kusano knew some side roads that got them around the usual traffic and to the hospital in twenty-three minutes. In that time, Shige reread every one of Ryo’s mails from the past four days, teared up three times, and finally just let his nose block up because the music wasn’t loud enough to cover the noise it would make if Shige tried to clear it.
“Do you want me to stick around?” Kusano asked as Shige fumbled to open the door.
“I’ll be fine,” Shige said automatically. He regretted it immediately, but not enough to take it back. “Thank you, Kusano-kun. Really. Thank you.”
Kusano lifted one shoulder. “It’s fine, Shige-kun. Mail me when you find out something, all right?” He sounded like he meant it, like he was genuinely worried. Shige wondered when Ryo had made enough of an impression on Kusano to warrant a reaction like that.
Shige nodded, said, “I will,” and didn’t realize until Kusano had left that he didn’t actually have Kusano’s phone number or mail address.
Shige drank bottled tea at the hospital for dinner. He sat with Ryo’s brothers in silence while Ryo’s parents alternated between pacing and running after the nurses and doctors who had nothing new to report.
Shige brought one foot up onto the chair and hugged his knee to his chest, remaining in that position long after it cut off his circulation and put both his legs to sleep. He read Ryo’s mails on his phone all the way back to February and didn’t realize until he made some involuntary noise that he was crying. He wiped his face with his sleeve, then put his forehead down on his knee.
Ryo’s oldest brother left the room around two thirty to talk to Ryo’s younger sister who’d just gotten his message about their brother and called back, frantic. Ryo’s mother sat with Shige for a few minutes, then jumped up to rush after a nurse holding a clipboard that bore kanji only resembling Ryo’s last name.
Shige scrolled back to the very first mails he’d ever gotten on his current phone. He and Ryo had already been living together for six months when he bought it, but he was surprised by how awkward their old exchanges sounded compared to the more recent ones.
Shige’s first mail from Ryo was dated October 13th, the same day he got his phone:
I don’t know whether to wait for you or not. Are you in class? I can’t remember your schedule. You should print it and leave it somewhere.
Yes, I’m in class now.
Should I wait for you, then?
I don’t know. Do you want to?
What kind of response is that?
Shige never answered him, according to his phone’s history. Ryo’s next mail was dated five days later.
Are you going to pick up food? I don’t like fish.
I know that. I was there when you threw it up on me.
Hahaha! Are you going to pick up food?
Then, a week later:
I’m bored. Come home.
I’m at the library.
I didn’t ask where you were! I said come home. Come on, I’m really bored.
What do you think I’m going to do to help that?
You’re interesting. Don’t be so hard on yourself.
I am?
Whatever. Stay in the library if you want to be boring.
???!
Shige closed his eyes and kept them shut, even when he heard one of the quieter doctors asking to speak to Ryo’s parents privately.
Shige took the local back to their apartment. He could have changed trains at some point, gotten there faster, but he didn’t feel like being anywhere enough to leave his seat. Anyway, he’d have to stand if he took the rapid, and there was no guarantee from his body that he’d be able to do that for long.
His eyes hurt. One of Ryo’s brothers—he didn’t see who—had put a pair of sunglasses in Shige’s hand before he left the hospital, and Shige had immediately put them on. He left them on until he climbed the stairs to their apartment, opened the door, toed off his shoes, and swallowed back an automatic greeting.
He took off the sunglasses and went straight to his knees on the floor of the hallway.
Ryo’s shoes outnumbered Shige’s. One of the Italian ones, meant to be worn with his nicer suits, was lying sideways, the interior stained black from the dye of Ryo’s socks.
Shige rested his back against the wall and stared at the shoe and tortured himself.
He’ll never wear that again. No one will. Who would want a dead person’s shoe. Even a nice one.
That night, Shige put the shoes into a trash bag.
He’d woken up from a dream in which someone from the hospital had left a message for him. “We’re so very sorry, Kato-san,” the man had said, “we made a clerical error. Nishikido-san just left. He should be home any minute.”
Shige had said, “That’s not true,” and woke up. He’d breathed in with a sharp sound, rolled onto his back to take up more of the bed, and thought, I don’t need so many pillows.
Then he’d gotten out of bed and grabbed six trash bags from a box underneath the sink.
Shige knew to give himself time to work up to the more difficult items—notebooks, sheet music, Ryo’s phone, his guitar—so he started small and filled the first bag with Ryo’s newest clothes, the ones that had never had a chance to change shape to fit Ryo’s body. Only one T-shirt of the twelve newest was old enough to have absorbed the scent of the shampoo they used to share (shampoo from the same bottle that Shige had just poured down the drain). That particular shirt went to the bottom of the bag.
Shige filled three trash bags before he realized how much was still left. Books, clothes, notebooks, DVDs, CDs, razors, cologne…. So he sped up, throwing as much as he could into the bag and packing it all down with shaking hands to make more room. He kept a fast pace going until he tried to cram Ryo’s favorite guitar into a fresh trash bag and almost bit through his tongue from a sensation of pure pain in his head.
He didn’t hear Ryo screaming at him, didn’t see Ryo trying to hold his face, trying to make him look, see what he was doing, the idiot.
“That’s my fucking guitar!”
Ryo’s hands frantically passed through the fret over and over.
“Shige!” he shouted. “Put it down!” He reached out and tried to grip Shige’s hair, something Shige hated, even during sex.
Shige dropped the guitar.
Ryo didn’t notice. “Shige?”
Shige was looking vaguely in Ryo’s direction. Not quite meeting his eyes, but scared and aware of something.
Ryo tried to touch Shige’s face. His mouth, with his thumb. “Shige, look at me. Shige, please.”
Shige rubbed the back of his head, shuddering, and bent over to pick up the guitar. He put it back on its stand, devastatingly gentle with it now, and went into their bedroom.
Ryo followed him.
He sat on the bed while Shige slept and conveniently forgot that he had to leave soon. He’d come back. Every night, if he could. He’d figure out some way to make Shige aware of him again and again, until Shige knew Ryo was watching over him.
In the morning, Shige woke up warm.
Title: Could Be Goodbye
Fandom: JE - NEWS
Pairing/characters: Ryo/Shige
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,700~
Disclaimer: Total fiction.
Summary: When he arrives at Ryo’s apartment, his key doesn’t fit into the lock.
Note:spurious has been doing a lot of beta work for me lately, and she's been a good sport about my texts and emails that basically boil down to "O HAI PLZ TO SKIM THIS FIC FOR NONSENSE???" XD She's a star. Thank you, awesomeface. :)
The gunfire on the street has lessened from continuous to sporadic, but Shige knows to wait until the yelling’s stopped before he leaves the hotel. Miko has his arm firmly gripped in both hands and she won’t let go–she seems to have some bizarre notion that Shige’s eager to be where the action is, but she couldn’t be more wrong about that. He’d be sprinting in the other direction right now if he hadn’t promised himself he’d get her back to the club where she’ll be safe. She obviously hadn’t heard that this hotel was marked as an assassination spot, and he couldn’t ignore her sitting on the floor of the lobby, dazed, while gang members around her discarded their knives for heavier artillery.
“Why are you here?” From her tone, she must have repeated herself more than once. “Aren’t you too low for this kind of thing, Kato-kun?”
Shige condenses the truth from something equalling the length of a term paper to two words: “Nishikido’s missing.”
Shige knows Miko’s been in the sex industry long enough to know all the members of their gang, and judging by her quiet noise of concern, she has a soft spot for the younger ones–-maybe even Ryo specifically.
He’s here because Ryo was supposed to accompany Maihara and Ogawa today for the latest in a series of executions that will almost definitely escalate things between their gang and the Kimoto clan into an all-out gang war, but Ryo never showed up at the meeting spot, so Ogawa called Shige instead. “You’re his kouhai,” Ogawa’d told him with a dangerous edge in his voice. “And ours.” Essentially, Fix his fuck-up or you’ll suffer.
Shige agreed and closed his phone.
Then he called Ryo, who picked up immediately. “Shige, I’m almost at your building,” he said, breathless.
“Ryo, what ha—”
Ryo hung up.
He waited for Ryo by the door and opened it as soon as he heard heavy footfalls on the stairs. Ryo squeezed in through the narrow space and hissed, “Close the door, now, lock it, now!”
Shige shut the door and bolted it. “Who’s following you?” he asked. “Why didn’t you make the meeting?”
Ryo shoved Shige against the wall, both hands in fists around Shige’s upper arms, and kissed him unevenly and too hard. He corrected the angle on the second go, and Shige’s hands wavered at Ryo’s waist for a long, sharp moment before he twisted away.
Ryo panted—from bolting up the stairs, probably, maybe—and turned to put the chain on the door as well. Then he grabbed Shige around the waist and held him, tense and cold and almost shivering. “I went to a company that erases people’s identities,” he whispered, harsh but quiet. Shige’s mind immediately went to the possibility that someone had bugged his apartment and he settled closer against Ryo’s body to hear him better. One of Ryo’s hands moved into his hair and squeezed, and the other tucked what sounded like a piece of paper into Shige’s back pocket. “That’s the company’s name. I’m leaving today, so go to the guy I wrote down and make him tell you where they’re sending me. He doesn’t want to—he says it’s against their company’s policy. But there’s another guy—his name’s there, too—and I think he might help if the first guy gives you problems.”
They’d talked about this several times, usually after the dismemberment of someone they knew well or whenever the police cracked down too close to their area. Shige wasn’t surprised that Ryo’d decided to do it now that they were on the brink of a gang war likely to rival any in the past century.
Shige fought with himself for a long moment over how to react and only when Ryo’s arms began to shift did he clutch the back of Ryo’s suit jacket in his fist and keep him close in an iron grip. He wanted to say, You should have done this sooner, you should have told me before you did it, you should have brought me with you, and he wanted to keep Ryo here because here felt safe, but it obviously wasn’t if Ryo was already tugging away from him, jumpy and anxious.
Shige didn’t let go, though, and as it sunk in that he had no idea when or if he’d be able to find Ryo again, he exhaled in one harsh gust and kissed Ryo without the reserve or caution that usually hindered him.
When he forced himself to stop, he mashed his cheek against Ryo’s and hoarsely asked, “Who’s following you?”
“No one,” Ryo said. “I don’t think anyone was following me. It’s just that—I was panicked when I went to the company and I did the whole process really hastily and, well, badly, so I didn’t think I’d have time to get here before—”
Shige said, “I get it, I understand,” and added, “I’m going in your place.”
Ryo didn’t seem to get it, and then he jolted out of Shige’s arms. His expression was tight. “You fucking idiot.” Then, before Shige could argue against that, he snapped, “Don’t go. Don’t—fuck it, come with me.”
Shige said, “No,” and at the time he thought it was because he had, in a way, given his word that he’d go. But now, huddled in the lobby of a love hotel with a frightened prostitute clutching his arm, he thinks he might have just said it because he was angry.
There’s silence on the street for a long moment, then Maihara shouts, “Where the fuck—Kato! The fuck did you go?”
Shige tells Miko, “It’s okay now,” and leads the way into the aftermath. Their target is dead, blood from his neck and forehead pooling underneath him, and two of his bodyguards are lying prone several feet away in either direction of the body. Miko doesn’t react, which either means she’s in shock or she’s seen this before.
Maihara gives Shige a look of pure contempt. “Where the fuck were you?” he snaps.
Shige dropped his gun when one of the bodyguards punched him in the throat. “Miko-chan was going to get hurt if I didn’t help her,” he says, which is probably true.
“Heroic,” Ogawa says, dry. “Let’s get out of here.”
Pedestrians are inching out of hiding, and there are three distinct sirens in the distance getting louder.
Maihara deals Shige a hard slap to the back of his head that makes his teeth clap together. “Not your day, huh, Kato?” he says with a low chuckle. “You make sure you kick Nishikido’s ass before I find him, ‘cos there won’t be much feeling left in him after I get through with him.”
Shige says, “I will,” and Miko shoots him an unreadable look.
They pack into Ogawa’s car and veer off down side streets until they reach the club. Miko jumps out almost before the car’s stopped, slams the door behind her, and dashes through the alley doors.
“Shame for you, brat,” Maihara says. “Some women don’t know how to pay back a man’s kindness anymore.”
Shige’s mind is half on maintaining a mildly disappointed mask while the other half is on the piece of paper in his pocket. On wherever Ryo is. If they’ve sent him off yet.
Maihara drags Shige off to a different club and shoves two half-wasted girls into his lap. They don’t seem aware that he’s not kissing them back, that he’s not hard—they mouth at his jaw and unbutton his white shirt completely and one girl rakes her nails down his chest so raggedly it hurts. Maihara nags at him for being shy for about thirty seconds until he finds a girl even farther gone than the two with Shige and he disappears into the VIP lounge.
As soon as he’s gone, Shige collects his jacket off the table and runs, only tripping twice, for the exit.
When he arrives at Ryo’s apartment, his key doesn’t fit into the lock. He climbs onto the stairway’s partition and leans over the stairwell to look through the bedroom window. One glance and he knows it’s all empty, not just the bedroom. The floor’s even been waxed. Ryo’s name has been removed from beside the door and his mailbox downstairs, and his spare key on top of the water heater outside his door is gone.
His car’s not in the garage, either.
Yamashita’s is. In Ryo’s parking space.
Yamashita’s standing next to the car, his expression blank. “Hey, Shige.”
Shige walks slower.
Yamashita nods, apparently gauging Shige’s reaction. “Do you know where he is?” he asks.
Shige says, “No,” and stops short several feet away from Yamashita’s car. Belatedly, he adds, “Do you?”
Yamashita purses his lips. “Shige, you know,” he says, sounding petulant.
All at once, the tension between them dissipates.
Shige says, “I really don’t. He didn’t tell me. He just left.”
“Why didn’t he take you?”
Shige blinks. “Um. We’re, uh. Not—”
Yamashita lifts both eyebrows in a clear “yeah, the fuck you’re not” expression.
So Shige just says, “I’m leaving too.”
Yamashita says, “Yeah,” quietly, like he expected that but hoped Shige wouldn’t say it. “Want me to drive you…anywhere? You don’t have a car, right?”
He gives Yamashita the address Ryo wrote down and after a few missed turns and a long stretch of uncomfortable silence, they arrive in a demure parking lot across from a squat gray commercial building.
Yamashita says, “So, um. This company…I might. Uh. I’ve been talking to Jin and Shirota and Toma recently and I think I can get them to do the same thing. So, um. Maybe we’ll see each other on the same dairy farm in Hokkaido, yeah?” He smiles, lopsided, and Shige hears the steering wheel creek under his white fingers.
“Yeah,” Shige says, quietly. “Thanks, Yamashita-kun.”
“Stay safe, Shige.”
Shige goes straight into the office without looking back, even when he hears Yamashita gun the engine and tear out of the parking lot. The first guy Ryo talked about gives Shige a plastic mask of apology and explains their company policy to him.
Shige asks for the second guy, voice thin with anger, and the second guy talks things out with enough emphasis on certain words to get the first guy to cooperate.
“Are you willing to erase yourself entirely?” the guy asks him.
“You fucking idiot. Don’t go. Don’t—fuck it, come with me.”
Shige says, “Yes.”
newsficcon, and I offered a 500~ ficlet to anyone who guessed the two I wrote.And the ever sparkly
epicwaters guessed correctly! ♥So! I present both NEWS fics and I will begin writing Tsubasa/Subaru today for
epicwaters. :DI DECLARE THIS A FIC-FUL POST.
Title: Diminished
Fandom: JE - NEWS
Pairing/characters: Ryo/Shige
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,000~
Disclaimer: Total fiction.
Summary: The last mail Ryo ever sent to Shige read: It's not funny. Stop trying.
Note:
fuyukoi, spurious, and acchikocchi were especially marvelous friends to me during this exchange. I started and abandoned three fics before I decided on one that grew into an Insanely Long Fic that, even now, doesn't look like it'll be ending anytime soon. So they suggested taking one moment from that fic and expanding it into a short fic, and that's what I ended up doing. Thank you, guys, for being lovely and supportive and excellent. ♥The last mail Ryo ever sent to Shige read: It’s not funny. Stop trying. He sent it while Shige was in class, about twelve minutes before he was crushed between a cab and the fence of a bicycle parking lot.
Shige saw the mail arrive but didn’t open his phone to read it until his lecture had ended. He’d half expected Ryo to send another message after he ignored the first, and Shige planned to send a mail telling him just that when he read the notification stamped over Ryo’s mail. He had two missed calls and a voicemail, all from a number he didn’t recognize.
“Shige-kun!” Kusano called from the back exit of the lecture hall. “Are you coming out with us?”
Shige struggled to push his books into his bag with one hand. “I can’t, sorry,” he called back. “Today’s bad for me.” Ryo was probably home by now and bored and—8:53—about to cook dinner without bothering to get Shige’s input.
Kusano and all of their classmates were gone when Shige looked up to see why no one had responded, so Shige sat back down in his seat and read Ryo’s mail. Why is it only funny when you say it? he sent back, grinning.
Then he checked his voicemail.
“Kato-kun. This is Ryo’s older brother…listen….”
Shige spotted Kusano down the hallway and ran after him. “Kusano-kun!”
He caught Kusano’s arm and pulled hard enough to make him stumble. Kusano turned, his eyebrows high with alarm. “Shige?” His tone brought the rest of his friends to an abrupt halt.
“Please,” Shige stammered, “I—I need—it’s—I mean….”
Kusano glanced over his shoulder. “Go on without me,” he said. “I’ll call later if I’m going.”
Some of his friends made sullen noises, but ultimately they shrugged both Kusano and Shige off and shuffled down the hall.
“What’s wrong, Shige-kun?”
“It’s my…roommate.”
Shige could never tell how many of his classmates had guessed about Ryo. On the one hand, Shige never went out for drinks without him and Ryo’d gotten more and more demonstrative with Shige lately, but on the other hand, nearly anything could be dismissed with the excuse of inebriation, and most people had never even bothered to crow when Ryo leaned close to press his mouth to the corner of Shige’s lips or blow smoke in Shige’s ear.
Shige felt his calves tensing and his eyes getting hotter. He couldn’t explain his relationship with Ryo to Kusano right now. He had to get to the hospital, but he didn’t have enough in his wallet or even his bank account to cover the cab fare, and the train would take so much longer than a car—
In seconds, Kusano’s expression shifted from polite concern to actual concern to understanding and finally to sympathy.
“What do you need from me?” Kusano asked.
“Your car,” Shige blurted. “Please. Not—I don’t want it, I mean, I—he’s in the hospital, and—”
Kusano interrupted with a nod and a quick, “Right, yeah, yeah, I understand,” and pushed Shige toward the doors. “I’ll drive you, come on.”
In the car, Kusano blasted trashy American pop music so loud the car shuddered, and at first Shige wished that he’d asked anyone else, but then the thrumming bass made him forget how much he was shaking and he caught Kusano glancing at him more than once, but Kusano was tactful enough not to ask him anything. He also drove slightly too fast, but Shige could tell that it was controlled speeding and probably for Shige’s benefit. Kusano was a better friend than Shige would have imagined under different circumstances. He made a mental note to do something nice for Kusano in the future.
Kusano knew some side roads that got them around the usual traffic and to the hospital in twenty-three minutes. In that time, Shige reread every one of Ryo’s mails from the past four days, teared up three times, and finally just let his nose block up because the music wasn’t loud enough to cover the noise it would make if Shige tried to clear it.
“Do you want me to stick around?” Kusano asked as Shige fumbled to open the door.
“I’ll be fine,” Shige said automatically. He regretted it immediately, but not enough to take it back. “Thank you, Kusano-kun. Really. Thank you.”
Kusano lifted one shoulder. “It’s fine, Shige-kun. Mail me when you find out something, all right?” He sounded like he meant it, like he was genuinely worried. Shige wondered when Ryo had made enough of an impression on Kusano to warrant a reaction like that.
Shige nodded, said, “I will,” and didn’t realize until Kusano had left that he didn’t actually have Kusano’s phone number or mail address.
Shige drank bottled tea at the hospital for dinner. He sat with Ryo’s brothers in silence while Ryo’s parents alternated between pacing and running after the nurses and doctors who had nothing new to report.
Shige brought one foot up onto the chair and hugged his knee to his chest, remaining in that position long after it cut off his circulation and put both his legs to sleep. He read Ryo’s mails on his phone all the way back to February and didn’t realize until he made some involuntary noise that he was crying. He wiped his face with his sleeve, then put his forehead down on his knee.
Ryo’s oldest brother left the room around two thirty to talk to Ryo’s younger sister who’d just gotten his message about their brother and called back, frantic. Ryo’s mother sat with Shige for a few minutes, then jumped up to rush after a nurse holding a clipboard that bore kanji only resembling Ryo’s last name.
Shige scrolled back to the very first mails he’d ever gotten on his current phone. He and Ryo had already been living together for six months when he bought it, but he was surprised by how awkward their old exchanges sounded compared to the more recent ones.
Shige’s first mail from Ryo was dated October 13th, the same day he got his phone:
I don’t know whether to wait for you or not. Are you in class? I can’t remember your schedule. You should print it and leave it somewhere.
Yes, I’m in class now.
Should I wait for you, then?
I don’t know. Do you want to?
What kind of response is that?
Shige never answered him, according to his phone’s history. Ryo’s next mail was dated five days later.
Are you going to pick up food? I don’t like fish.
I know that. I was there when you threw it up on me.
Hahaha! Are you going to pick up food?
Then, a week later:
I’m bored. Come home.
I’m at the library.
I didn’t ask where you were! I said come home. Come on, I’m really bored.
What do you think I’m going to do to help that?
You’re interesting. Don’t be so hard on yourself.
I am?
Whatever. Stay in the library if you want to be boring.
???!
Shige closed his eyes and kept them shut, even when he heard one of the quieter doctors asking to speak to Ryo’s parents privately.
Shige took the local back to their apartment. He could have changed trains at some point, gotten there faster, but he didn’t feel like being anywhere enough to leave his seat. Anyway, he’d have to stand if he took the rapid, and there was no guarantee from his body that he’d be able to do that for long.
His eyes hurt. One of Ryo’s brothers—he didn’t see who—had put a pair of sunglasses in Shige’s hand before he left the hospital, and Shige had immediately put them on. He left them on until he climbed the stairs to their apartment, opened the door, toed off his shoes, and swallowed back an automatic greeting.
He took off the sunglasses and went straight to his knees on the floor of the hallway.
Ryo’s shoes outnumbered Shige’s. One of the Italian ones, meant to be worn with his nicer suits, was lying sideways, the interior stained black from the dye of Ryo’s socks.
Shige rested his back against the wall and stared at the shoe and tortured himself.
He’ll never wear that again. No one will. Who would want a dead person’s shoe. Even a nice one.
That night, Shige put the shoes into a trash bag.
He’d woken up from a dream in which someone from the hospital had left a message for him. “We’re so very sorry, Kato-san,” the man had said, “we made a clerical error. Nishikido-san just left. He should be home any minute.”
Shige had said, “That’s not true,” and woke up. He’d breathed in with a sharp sound, rolled onto his back to take up more of the bed, and thought, I don’t need so many pillows.
Then he’d gotten out of bed and grabbed six trash bags from a box underneath the sink.
Shige knew to give himself time to work up to the more difficult items—notebooks, sheet music, Ryo’s phone, his guitar—so he started small and filled the first bag with Ryo’s newest clothes, the ones that had never had a chance to change shape to fit Ryo’s body. Only one T-shirt of the twelve newest was old enough to have absorbed the scent of the shampoo they used to share (shampoo from the same bottle that Shige had just poured down the drain). That particular shirt went to the bottom of the bag.
Shige filled three trash bags before he realized how much was still left. Books, clothes, notebooks, DVDs, CDs, razors, cologne…. So he sped up, throwing as much as he could into the bag and packing it all down with shaking hands to make more room. He kept a fast pace going until he tried to cram Ryo’s favorite guitar into a fresh trash bag and almost bit through his tongue from a sensation of pure pain in his head.
He didn’t hear Ryo screaming at him, didn’t see Ryo trying to hold his face, trying to make him look, see what he was doing, the idiot.
“That’s my fucking guitar!”
Ryo’s hands frantically passed through the fret over and over.
“Shige!” he shouted. “Put it down!” He reached out and tried to grip Shige’s hair, something Shige hated, even during sex.
Shige dropped the guitar.
Ryo didn’t notice. “Shige?”
Shige was looking vaguely in Ryo’s direction. Not quite meeting his eyes, but scared and aware of something.
Ryo tried to touch Shige’s face. His mouth, with his thumb. “Shige, look at me. Shige, please.”
Shige rubbed the back of his head, shuddering, and bent over to pick up the guitar. He put it back on its stand, devastatingly gentle with it now, and went into their bedroom.
Ryo followed him.
He sat on the bed while Shige slept and conveniently forgot that he had to leave soon. He’d come back. Every night, if he could. He’d figure out some way to make Shige aware of him again and again, until Shige knew Ryo was watching over him.
In the morning, Shige woke up warm.
Title: Could Be Goodbye
Fandom: JE - NEWS
Pairing/characters: Ryo/Shige
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,700~
Disclaimer: Total fiction.
Summary: When he arrives at Ryo’s apartment, his key doesn’t fit into the lock.
Note:
spurious has been doing a lot of beta work for me lately, and she's been a good sport about my texts and emails that basically boil down to "O HAI PLZ TO SKIM THIS FIC FOR NONSENSE???" XD She's a star. Thank you, awesomeface. :)The gunfire on the street has lessened from continuous to sporadic, but Shige knows to wait until the yelling’s stopped before he leaves the hotel. Miko has his arm firmly gripped in both hands and she won’t let go–she seems to have some bizarre notion that Shige’s eager to be where the action is, but she couldn’t be more wrong about that. He’d be sprinting in the other direction right now if he hadn’t promised himself he’d get her back to the club where she’ll be safe. She obviously hadn’t heard that this hotel was marked as an assassination spot, and he couldn’t ignore her sitting on the floor of the lobby, dazed, while gang members around her discarded their knives for heavier artillery.
“Why are you here?” From her tone, she must have repeated herself more than once. “Aren’t you too low for this kind of thing, Kato-kun?”
Shige condenses the truth from something equalling the length of a term paper to two words: “Nishikido’s missing.”
Shige knows Miko’s been in the sex industry long enough to know all the members of their gang, and judging by her quiet noise of concern, she has a soft spot for the younger ones–-maybe even Ryo specifically.
He’s here because Ryo was supposed to accompany Maihara and Ogawa today for the latest in a series of executions that will almost definitely escalate things between their gang and the Kimoto clan into an all-out gang war, but Ryo never showed up at the meeting spot, so Ogawa called Shige instead. “You’re his kouhai,” Ogawa’d told him with a dangerous edge in his voice. “And ours.” Essentially, Fix his fuck-up or you’ll suffer.
Shige agreed and closed his phone.
Then he called Ryo, who picked up immediately. “Shige, I’m almost at your building,” he said, breathless.
“Ryo, what ha—”
Ryo hung up.
He waited for Ryo by the door and opened it as soon as he heard heavy footfalls on the stairs. Ryo squeezed in through the narrow space and hissed, “Close the door, now, lock it, now!”
Shige shut the door and bolted it. “Who’s following you?” he asked. “Why didn’t you make the meeting?”
Ryo shoved Shige against the wall, both hands in fists around Shige’s upper arms, and kissed him unevenly and too hard. He corrected the angle on the second go, and Shige’s hands wavered at Ryo’s waist for a long, sharp moment before he twisted away.
Ryo panted—from bolting up the stairs, probably, maybe—and turned to put the chain on the door as well. Then he grabbed Shige around the waist and held him, tense and cold and almost shivering. “I went to a company that erases people’s identities,” he whispered, harsh but quiet. Shige’s mind immediately went to the possibility that someone had bugged his apartment and he settled closer against Ryo’s body to hear him better. One of Ryo’s hands moved into his hair and squeezed, and the other tucked what sounded like a piece of paper into Shige’s back pocket. “That’s the company’s name. I’m leaving today, so go to the guy I wrote down and make him tell you where they’re sending me. He doesn’t want to—he says it’s against their company’s policy. But there’s another guy—his name’s there, too—and I think he might help if the first guy gives you problems.”
They’d talked about this several times, usually after the dismemberment of someone they knew well or whenever the police cracked down too close to their area. Shige wasn’t surprised that Ryo’d decided to do it now that they were on the brink of a gang war likely to rival any in the past century.
Shige fought with himself for a long moment over how to react and only when Ryo’s arms began to shift did he clutch the back of Ryo’s suit jacket in his fist and keep him close in an iron grip. He wanted to say, You should have done this sooner, you should have told me before you did it, you should have brought me with you, and he wanted to keep Ryo here because here felt safe, but it obviously wasn’t if Ryo was already tugging away from him, jumpy and anxious.
Shige didn’t let go, though, and as it sunk in that he had no idea when or if he’d be able to find Ryo again, he exhaled in one harsh gust and kissed Ryo without the reserve or caution that usually hindered him.
When he forced himself to stop, he mashed his cheek against Ryo’s and hoarsely asked, “Who’s following you?”
“No one,” Ryo said. “I don’t think anyone was following me. It’s just that—I was panicked when I went to the company and I did the whole process really hastily and, well, badly, so I didn’t think I’d have time to get here before—”
Shige said, “I get it, I understand,” and added, “I’m going in your place.”
Ryo didn’t seem to get it, and then he jolted out of Shige’s arms. His expression was tight. “You fucking idiot.” Then, before Shige could argue against that, he snapped, “Don’t go. Don’t—fuck it, come with me.”
Shige said, “No,” and at the time he thought it was because he had, in a way, given his word that he’d go. But now, huddled in the lobby of a love hotel with a frightened prostitute clutching his arm, he thinks he might have just said it because he was angry.
There’s silence on the street for a long moment, then Maihara shouts, “Where the fuck—Kato! The fuck did you go?”
Shige tells Miko, “It’s okay now,” and leads the way into the aftermath. Their target is dead, blood from his neck and forehead pooling underneath him, and two of his bodyguards are lying prone several feet away in either direction of the body. Miko doesn’t react, which either means she’s in shock or she’s seen this before.
Maihara gives Shige a look of pure contempt. “Where the fuck were you?” he snaps.
Shige dropped his gun when one of the bodyguards punched him in the throat. “Miko-chan was going to get hurt if I didn’t help her,” he says, which is probably true.
“Heroic,” Ogawa says, dry. “Let’s get out of here.”
Pedestrians are inching out of hiding, and there are three distinct sirens in the distance getting louder.
Maihara deals Shige a hard slap to the back of his head that makes his teeth clap together. “Not your day, huh, Kato?” he says with a low chuckle. “You make sure you kick Nishikido’s ass before I find him, ‘cos there won’t be much feeling left in him after I get through with him.”
Shige says, “I will,” and Miko shoots him an unreadable look.
They pack into Ogawa’s car and veer off down side streets until they reach the club. Miko jumps out almost before the car’s stopped, slams the door behind her, and dashes through the alley doors.
“Shame for you, brat,” Maihara says. “Some women don’t know how to pay back a man’s kindness anymore.”
Shige’s mind is half on maintaining a mildly disappointed mask while the other half is on the piece of paper in his pocket. On wherever Ryo is. If they’ve sent him off yet.
Maihara drags Shige off to a different club and shoves two half-wasted girls into his lap. They don’t seem aware that he’s not kissing them back, that he’s not hard—they mouth at his jaw and unbutton his white shirt completely and one girl rakes her nails down his chest so raggedly it hurts. Maihara nags at him for being shy for about thirty seconds until he finds a girl even farther gone than the two with Shige and he disappears into the VIP lounge.
As soon as he’s gone, Shige collects his jacket off the table and runs, only tripping twice, for the exit.
When he arrives at Ryo’s apartment, his key doesn’t fit into the lock. He climbs onto the stairway’s partition and leans over the stairwell to look through the bedroom window. One glance and he knows it’s all empty, not just the bedroom. The floor’s even been waxed. Ryo’s name has been removed from beside the door and his mailbox downstairs, and his spare key on top of the water heater outside his door is gone.
His car’s not in the garage, either.
Yamashita’s is. In Ryo’s parking space.
Yamashita’s standing next to the car, his expression blank. “Hey, Shige.”
Shige walks slower.
Yamashita nods, apparently gauging Shige’s reaction. “Do you know where he is?” he asks.
Shige says, “No,” and stops short several feet away from Yamashita’s car. Belatedly, he adds, “Do you?”
Yamashita purses his lips. “Shige, you know,” he says, sounding petulant.
All at once, the tension between them dissipates.
Shige says, “I really don’t. He didn’t tell me. He just left.”
“Why didn’t he take you?”
Shige blinks. “Um. We’re, uh. Not—”
Yamashita lifts both eyebrows in a clear “yeah, the fuck you’re not” expression.
So Shige just says, “I’m leaving too.”
Yamashita says, “Yeah,” quietly, like he expected that but hoped Shige wouldn’t say it. “Want me to drive you…anywhere? You don’t have a car, right?”
He gives Yamashita the address Ryo wrote down and after a few missed turns and a long stretch of uncomfortable silence, they arrive in a demure parking lot across from a squat gray commercial building.
Yamashita says, “So, um. This company…I might. Uh. I’ve been talking to Jin and Shirota and Toma recently and I think I can get them to do the same thing. So, um. Maybe we’ll see each other on the same dairy farm in Hokkaido, yeah?” He smiles, lopsided, and Shige hears the steering wheel creek under his white fingers.
“Yeah,” Shige says, quietly. “Thanks, Yamashita-kun.”
“Stay safe, Shige.”
Shige goes straight into the office without looking back, even when he hears Yamashita gun the engine and tear out of the parking lot. The first guy Ryo talked about gives Shige a plastic mask of apology and explains their company policy to him.
Shige asks for the second guy, voice thin with anger, and the second guy talks things out with enough emphasis on certain words to get the first guy to cooperate.
“Are you willing to erase yourself entirely?” the guy asks him.
“You fucking idiot. Don’t go. Don’t—fuck it, come with me.”
Shige says, “Yes.”
