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jewelledhourstitle: When the cat's around, the mice will play
characters: Yamapi, Wagahai, NEWS
author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
misticloud
rating: G
words: 2,307
summary: Wagahai shows Yamapi how to change members into friends.
note: forhtenywg, who doesn't celebrate birthdays but whom I insist on writing this for anyway.
The first time Yamapi meets Wagahai, he is changing his clothes in the backstage of Tokyo Dome where Johnny's Entertainment is holding its Countdown Concert 2006-2007.
Yamapi jumps a little and wonders if somebody had the daring to bring his pet to work, or whether the cat had just sneaked in from the outside all on its own (though how it managed to make its way through the numerous security guards posted outside and the staff posted inside is a difficulty that is, for the moment, ignored).
He doesn't have much to do with cats, after all his only two pets are two dogs, and the most contact he has with cats is assuring frightened girlfriends in parks that the stray cats won't bite them no matter how close they come (and surreptitiously dropping scrapings of food at the same time for those poor thin-looking things). He doesn’t know how to treat cats, nor even whether they're happy to be stroked in the way P-chan and Hime are, so he just stares at the cat and the cat stares back.
Yamapi clears his throat. "Hello," he says to the cat. "How do you do?"
Which would be silly enough, considering where he is and who he's talking to, but what makes it even sillier is that after the cat rubs its head thoughtfully, looking at him out of gleaming eyes, it replies in human tongue. "Hello, Yamashita-san."
Yamapi blinks his eyes, but the next moment a bunch of Johnnies clatter in and the cat disappears among glittery legs.
He wonders if he drank too much the night before. Then again, even if he did, why would he be hallucinating cats?
… …
After the concert, he swears he sees the cat standing on Shige's shoulders.
It rubs his head against Shige's hair and vanishes when Koyama grabs Shige into a hug.
Yamapi figures the cat's smart enough not to let itself get in the way of Koyama-squash.
… …
Three months later, the cat gives him the rudest wake-up call when it lands on his legs in the middle of morning.
"Wake up," it hollers. "You're already late for the meeting, leader."
Yamapi opens his eyes. "How did you get in here?"
"Shige asked me to see what you were up to. I thought you'd at least be brushing your teeth, but look what I found, Yamashita-san still stretched out in bed sleeping while everyone else is in the lobby waiting." The cat scowls very effectively (how does a cat scowl? It doesn't have eyebrows) and Yamapi finds himself scrambling out of bed.
"Who are you?" he asks next when the cat wanders into the bathroom to supervise his dental hygiene.
The cat gives him a pitiful look. "You don't know?"
Yamapi blinks, wondering if the world's best kept secret is that everyone has a personal talking cat. "Am I supposed to?"
"Yes," the cat retorts, and jumps out of the bathroom when Yamapi gestures towards the shower.
… …
Evenings later, Koyama makes conversation about Shige's jweb, and since he has nothing better to do, Yamapi listens in idly. It seems that the jweb might be making a return soon, and Yamapi's debating whether he should check its updates (after all, Shige has a talent for writing and it shouldn't be as boring as his own) when Koyama says, "Does the cat seem willing to write again?"
"He's gathering material," Shige says. "Apparently he enjoys peeking in on you guys and storing up exposé tales."
"An invisible catty voyeur!" Koyama exclaims, shivering realistically. "That sounds so scary!"
Yamapi wakes up. "What cat?"
Both Shige and Koyama stare at him, and Yamapi has the feeling that from across the room, Tegoshi and Ryo are staring at him too. By now he's pretty sure that his hypothesis of personal talking cats is proving positive.
"Shige's jweb, Yamapi," says Koyama, all solemnly as though he has committed a felony. "It's written by his imaginary cat, Wagahai."
Yamapi laughs, and the rest just continue staring at him.
"So that's what it was," he says.
… …
Except that Wagahai's a 'him', not an 'it', and the cat himself reminds Yamapi of it when Yamapi's in his bedroom contemplating the expensive set of underwear that Koyama and Shige bought him for his birthday.
"That's good stuff, you know. I would wear it myself if I could."
"Do you follow them into underwear shops, even?" Yamapi asks with fascination.
Wagahai shrugs. "They were buying you a gift, so I tagged along. You should have seen them trying to decide which pattern you would like best."
"It's…" Yamapi stares at the packet again. "Plain."
"Yeah well, they couldn't decide, so they bought plain." Wagahai yawns. "Be a little grateful, will you? I had to walk all over the shopping district with them for two whole hours listening to them argue back and forth about what you'd like."
"They didn't say it," Yamapi says, thinking of how Koyama and Shige had handed him his present – a bundle tucked carelessly into his duffel bag with a few words scribbled on notepad paper Happy birthday. Hope you like it! Koyama and Shige.
Wagahai sighs. "What were you expecting, a military band?" He hops off the desk and ambles to the window. "I'm off to steal some food from Masuda. Bye."
After a couple of months, the underwear becomes Yamapi's favourite. Koyama and Shige have good taste. He decides to bring Shige out for drinks when his 20th birthday rolls around in July. Be the first one to man him up. It's only suitable thanks for such a thoughtful gift, after all.
… …
In September, Wagahai tracks muddy footprints all over Yamapi's bedroom floor. "It's not my fault that it rained. I'm with Shige all the time, and you know how he practically summons rain."
"You could at least have mopped your feet on my doormat first," Yamapi moans.
Wagahai plops down on the floor and examines his feet with distaste. "I'm glad to see you're finally getting along with Koyama and Shige."
"They're cool," Yamapi acknowledges, attempting to scrub the floor with some tissue paper. "They seem to like having each other around all the time, don't they? Whenever I ask Shige out, halfway through he'll call Koyama to come join us."
"They're best friends," Wagahai says. "And Shige doesn't feel entirely comfortable being alone with you."
Yamapi looks offended. "I don't bite!"
"No, but you're Yamashita Tomohisa, which makes it more scary than if you were the biting type. You know…" Wagahai scratches his head. "Tegoshi and Shige spend hours rehearsing dances on their own so that you and Nishikido won't be pissed off with them for not getting it right."
"But I won't be," Yamapi objects. "It's not like I'm fast in picking up the dances either."
"They don't know that," says Wagahai.
Yamapi stares for a long moment at the cat, which stares back at him unblinkingly. Then Yamapi blinks.
Wagahai stands up. "Anyway, I'm off. Just came to clean my feet."
"You should go over to Ryo-chan's instead if you want to do that," Yamapi says, thinking gleefully of fastidiously clean Ryo finding muddy cat prints on his floor, but Wagahai's already gone.
… …
The next time NEWS meets up, Yamapi arrives with fried chicken for everyone. It's still warm and crispy enough, and Massu has to restrain himself from stealing half of Koyama's share. Tegoshi smiles happily at Yamapi and says "Thank you, leader!" and Yamapi makes believe that he's already full so that the others will have a little more to eat.
… …
He's not in a very happy mood the next time Wagahai visits him, materialising in his closet sniffing incredulously at a garish lime green T-shirt decorated with huge purple dots and yellow English words that say 'I AM GREEN BOY'.
"Dude, this shirt could be nominated for worst fashion crime of the decade," Wagahai complains.
Yamapi reaches in, grabs hold of the little cat and places him very firmly on the floor outside the cabinet. "Don't get cat hair over my clothes."
"Imaginary cats like me don't leave cat hair behind," Wagahai informs him. "What are you doing with a shirt like that?"
"I didn't buy it, Massu did. Birthday present from…two years ago or something."
"Oh, right." Wagahai looks enlightened. "He called Shige to ask which colours you like. Shige didn't know. Typical."
"Well, I can tell you for sure, I do not like lime green," says Yamapi irritably. "You can pass that message on to Massu. Maybe for once in his life he'll listen."
Wagahai sits down at his feet and, neutral as his feelings are towards the cat, Yamapi finds it rather cute to have that furry orange head bobbing at his calves. "Masuda comes up with some pretty fantastic ideas for a concert, doesn't he?"
"Too fantastic," Yamapi explodes. "There's no use talking to him. He's too damn stubborn to listen to anyone who doesn't like what he's suggesting."
"Masuda wants what he wants."
"Don’t go defending him," Yamapi snaps. "His ideas are shit and you know it."
Wagahai contemplates that for a long moment, then looks up with a smirk. "Next time, throw water at him."
… …
Perhaps it's a coincidence, but Yamapi does throw water at Massu the next day when Massu gets increasingly aggravating.
The water is cold and there isn't a lot of it, just one quarter of a small paper cup, but it leaves the members stunned for a full minute.
Massu drips in that minute, gaping.
Yamapi's about to apologise for his rudeness when suddenly Massu blinks and laughs. "Was I really that irritating?"
"You don't know the half of it," Shige says quickly. "I was considering throwing my Coke at you."
"And I was thinking of throwing my green tea," Tegoshi joins in. "Massu would have been a funny mixture of beverages, ne?"
"Maybe we could have created a concoction that would've tasted real good," Koyama says. "Shall we do it after all?"
They launch into a huge discussion of marketing potentially delicious drinks and in the midst of the laughter and silly jokes, Yamapi leans over to Massu and says, "I'm sorry. I lost control of myself."
Massu smiles at him. "It's okay, Yamashita-kun. I guess I didn't know how stubborn I was being."
Yamapi relaxes for the first time in a week; Massu's genuine smiles are even nicer than the ones he puts on for the camera. When Ryo finally decides that there's been enough unrelated talk and calls the discussion back on track, they settle on their shortlisted ideas in an hour's time with playful dispute.
"I'm beginning to love them," Yamapi says to Wagahai that night. "As friends, I mean, cause I already love them as members. I'm beginning to love them as friends."
"Gee, you really warm up to people quickly, don't you?" is Wagahai's only response.
… …
Over half of 2008 goes by without much Wagahai-involvement. Yamapi checks the jweb if it's up, and thinks that the cat has a particular talent for writing and making fun of Shige. Just to complement Wagahai's efforts, he enthusiastically joins in the campaign of Making Shige Flustered. Shige grumbles ceaselessly about being used as the group's bonding material, but Yamapi simply laughs at him and schemes with Tegoshi and Koyama to write an obnoxious song that has Shige's name appearing in every line.
Somehow, he and Koyama get into the habit of composing tunes and sending them to each other for evaluation. Koyama's still green around the ears where composing songs is concerned, but Yamapi thinks that some of the stuff he comes up with sound better than a lot of the songs played to them on demo tapes.
When Wagahai prods him awake at three in the morning to tell him that Koyama really really wants to work on a duet with him, Yamapi's so interested in the idea that he almost forgets to scold the cat for having no sense of time.
"I'm imaginary," Wagahai says. "I appear when I'm being imagined."
"Do me a favour." Yamapi lies back down in bed and pulls the blanket securely around himself. "Tell Shige to stop imagining."
… …
One afternoon, they meet up for a short interview by The Television Weekly for their new single, 'Happy Birthday'. They go through a couple of ridiculous questions about what they do in the bath (don't they just soak like everyone else? Yamapi exchanges grimaces with Shige) and 'Happy Birthday' being a love song (Massu totally rolls his eyes and Yamapi kicks him under the table) before the interviewer says, "NEWS will be welcoming the 5th year of their formation this autumn. So what is NEWS?"
Koyama babbles something about NEWS being white, Massu makes a non-witty remark, Shige calls him out on it, and Yamapi's watching them bluff their way through the question before he suddenly says, "It feels more natural for all of us to be together. When I go back to NEWS after working elsewhere, it really feels like home."
They laugh at it later on, saying that he's being too sentimental and it's a little yucky, but they part smiling anyway.
… …
"That was yucky," Wagahai says, appearing on his passenger seat.
Yamapi keeps his eyes on the road. "Admit it, you cried."
"Cats don’t cry," says Wagahai, very much on his dignity, "but if it keeps you happy, I did feel a little touched."
A few streets later, they stop at a red light. Cars pass by before them and Yamapi thinks of the many more years he'll have with NEWS. He hopes they'll be together until they're old and grey and Massu has gotten sick of gyoza.
Absently, he starts stroking the cat's head.
end
* Translation of The Television Weekly interview was taken fromtowa_no_imi here.
* NEWS' timeline was not strictly adhered to, so please forgive any inconsistencies.
* Happy birthday,htenywg! It's rather early but I decided I'd post it before I don't want to.
characters: Yamapi, Wagahai, NEWS
author:
misticloudrating: G
words: 2,307
summary: Wagahai shows Yamapi how to change members into friends.
note: for
htenywg, who doesn't celebrate birthdays but whom I insist on writing this for anyway.The first time Yamapi meets Wagahai, he is changing his clothes in the backstage of Tokyo Dome where Johnny's Entertainment is holding its Countdown Concert 2006-2007.
Yamapi jumps a little and wonders if somebody had the daring to bring his pet to work, or whether the cat had just sneaked in from the outside all on its own (though how it managed to make its way through the numerous security guards posted outside and the staff posted inside is a difficulty that is, for the moment, ignored).
He doesn't have much to do with cats, after all his only two pets are two dogs, and the most contact he has with cats is assuring frightened girlfriends in parks that the stray cats won't bite them no matter how close they come (and surreptitiously dropping scrapings of food at the same time for those poor thin-looking things). He doesn’t know how to treat cats, nor even whether they're happy to be stroked in the way P-chan and Hime are, so he just stares at the cat and the cat stares back.
Yamapi clears his throat. "Hello," he says to the cat. "How do you do?"
Which would be silly enough, considering where he is and who he's talking to, but what makes it even sillier is that after the cat rubs its head thoughtfully, looking at him out of gleaming eyes, it replies in human tongue. "Hello, Yamashita-san."
Yamapi blinks his eyes, but the next moment a bunch of Johnnies clatter in and the cat disappears among glittery legs.
He wonders if he drank too much the night before. Then again, even if he did, why would he be hallucinating cats?
… …
After the concert, he swears he sees the cat standing on Shige's shoulders.
It rubs his head against Shige's hair and vanishes when Koyama grabs Shige into a hug.
Yamapi figures the cat's smart enough not to let itself get in the way of Koyama-squash.
… …
Three months later, the cat gives him the rudest wake-up call when it lands on his legs in the middle of morning.
"Wake up," it hollers. "You're already late for the meeting, leader."
Yamapi opens his eyes. "How did you get in here?"
"Shige asked me to see what you were up to. I thought you'd at least be brushing your teeth, but look what I found, Yamashita-san still stretched out in bed sleeping while everyone else is in the lobby waiting." The cat scowls very effectively (how does a cat scowl? It doesn't have eyebrows) and Yamapi finds himself scrambling out of bed.
"Who are you?" he asks next when the cat wanders into the bathroom to supervise his dental hygiene.
The cat gives him a pitiful look. "You don't know?"
Yamapi blinks, wondering if the world's best kept secret is that everyone has a personal talking cat. "Am I supposed to?"
"Yes," the cat retorts, and jumps out of the bathroom when Yamapi gestures towards the shower.
… …
Evenings later, Koyama makes conversation about Shige's jweb, and since he has nothing better to do, Yamapi listens in idly. It seems that the jweb might be making a return soon, and Yamapi's debating whether he should check its updates (after all, Shige has a talent for writing and it shouldn't be as boring as his own) when Koyama says, "Does the cat seem willing to write again?"
"He's gathering material," Shige says. "Apparently he enjoys peeking in on you guys and storing up exposé tales."
"An invisible catty voyeur!" Koyama exclaims, shivering realistically. "That sounds so scary!"
Yamapi wakes up. "What cat?"
Both Shige and Koyama stare at him, and Yamapi has the feeling that from across the room, Tegoshi and Ryo are staring at him too. By now he's pretty sure that his hypothesis of personal talking cats is proving positive.
"Shige's jweb, Yamapi," says Koyama, all solemnly as though he has committed a felony. "It's written by his imaginary cat, Wagahai."
Yamapi laughs, and the rest just continue staring at him.
"So that's what it was," he says.
… …
Except that Wagahai's a 'him', not an 'it', and the cat himself reminds Yamapi of it when Yamapi's in his bedroom contemplating the expensive set of underwear that Koyama and Shige bought him for his birthday.
"That's good stuff, you know. I would wear it myself if I could."
"Do you follow them into underwear shops, even?" Yamapi asks with fascination.
Wagahai shrugs. "They were buying you a gift, so I tagged along. You should have seen them trying to decide which pattern you would like best."
"It's…" Yamapi stares at the packet again. "Plain."
"Yeah well, they couldn't decide, so they bought plain." Wagahai yawns. "Be a little grateful, will you? I had to walk all over the shopping district with them for two whole hours listening to them argue back and forth about what you'd like."
"They didn't say it," Yamapi says, thinking of how Koyama and Shige had handed him his present – a bundle tucked carelessly into his duffel bag with a few words scribbled on notepad paper Happy birthday. Hope you like it! Koyama and Shige.
Wagahai sighs. "What were you expecting, a military band?" He hops off the desk and ambles to the window. "I'm off to steal some food from Masuda. Bye."
After a couple of months, the underwear becomes Yamapi's favourite. Koyama and Shige have good taste. He decides to bring Shige out for drinks when his 20th birthday rolls around in July. Be the first one to man him up. It's only suitable thanks for such a thoughtful gift, after all.
… …
In September, Wagahai tracks muddy footprints all over Yamapi's bedroom floor. "It's not my fault that it rained. I'm with Shige all the time, and you know how he practically summons rain."
"You could at least have mopped your feet on my doormat first," Yamapi moans.
Wagahai plops down on the floor and examines his feet with distaste. "I'm glad to see you're finally getting along with Koyama and Shige."
"They're cool," Yamapi acknowledges, attempting to scrub the floor with some tissue paper. "They seem to like having each other around all the time, don't they? Whenever I ask Shige out, halfway through he'll call Koyama to come join us."
"They're best friends," Wagahai says. "And Shige doesn't feel entirely comfortable being alone with you."
Yamapi looks offended. "I don't bite!"
"No, but you're Yamashita Tomohisa, which makes it more scary than if you were the biting type. You know…" Wagahai scratches his head. "Tegoshi and Shige spend hours rehearsing dances on their own so that you and Nishikido won't be pissed off with them for not getting it right."
"But I won't be," Yamapi objects. "It's not like I'm fast in picking up the dances either."
"They don't know that," says Wagahai.
Yamapi stares for a long moment at the cat, which stares back at him unblinkingly. Then Yamapi blinks.
Wagahai stands up. "Anyway, I'm off. Just came to clean my feet."
"You should go over to Ryo-chan's instead if you want to do that," Yamapi says, thinking gleefully of fastidiously clean Ryo finding muddy cat prints on his floor, but Wagahai's already gone.
… …
The next time NEWS meets up, Yamapi arrives with fried chicken for everyone. It's still warm and crispy enough, and Massu has to restrain himself from stealing half of Koyama's share. Tegoshi smiles happily at Yamapi and says "Thank you, leader!" and Yamapi makes believe that he's already full so that the others will have a little more to eat.
… …
He's not in a very happy mood the next time Wagahai visits him, materialising in his closet sniffing incredulously at a garish lime green T-shirt decorated with huge purple dots and yellow English words that say 'I AM GREEN BOY'.
"Dude, this shirt could be nominated for worst fashion crime of the decade," Wagahai complains.
Yamapi reaches in, grabs hold of the little cat and places him very firmly on the floor outside the cabinet. "Don't get cat hair over my clothes."
"Imaginary cats like me don't leave cat hair behind," Wagahai informs him. "What are you doing with a shirt like that?"
"I didn't buy it, Massu did. Birthday present from…two years ago or something."
"Oh, right." Wagahai looks enlightened. "He called Shige to ask which colours you like. Shige didn't know. Typical."
"Well, I can tell you for sure, I do not like lime green," says Yamapi irritably. "You can pass that message on to Massu. Maybe for once in his life he'll listen."
Wagahai sits down at his feet and, neutral as his feelings are towards the cat, Yamapi finds it rather cute to have that furry orange head bobbing at his calves. "Masuda comes up with some pretty fantastic ideas for a concert, doesn't he?"
"Too fantastic," Yamapi explodes. "There's no use talking to him. He's too damn stubborn to listen to anyone who doesn't like what he's suggesting."
"Masuda wants what he wants."
"Don’t go defending him," Yamapi snaps. "His ideas are shit and you know it."
Wagahai contemplates that for a long moment, then looks up with a smirk. "Next time, throw water at him."
… …
Perhaps it's a coincidence, but Yamapi does throw water at Massu the next day when Massu gets increasingly aggravating.
The water is cold and there isn't a lot of it, just one quarter of a small paper cup, but it leaves the members stunned for a full minute.
Massu drips in that minute, gaping.
Yamapi's about to apologise for his rudeness when suddenly Massu blinks and laughs. "Was I really that irritating?"
"You don't know the half of it," Shige says quickly. "I was considering throwing my Coke at you."
"And I was thinking of throwing my green tea," Tegoshi joins in. "Massu would have been a funny mixture of beverages, ne?"
"Maybe we could have created a concoction that would've tasted real good," Koyama says. "Shall we do it after all?"
They launch into a huge discussion of marketing potentially delicious drinks and in the midst of the laughter and silly jokes, Yamapi leans over to Massu and says, "I'm sorry. I lost control of myself."
Massu smiles at him. "It's okay, Yamashita-kun. I guess I didn't know how stubborn I was being."
Yamapi relaxes for the first time in a week; Massu's genuine smiles are even nicer than the ones he puts on for the camera. When Ryo finally decides that there's been enough unrelated talk and calls the discussion back on track, they settle on their shortlisted ideas in an hour's time with playful dispute.
"I'm beginning to love them," Yamapi says to Wagahai that night. "As friends, I mean, cause I already love them as members. I'm beginning to love them as friends."
"Gee, you really warm up to people quickly, don't you?" is Wagahai's only response.
… …
Over half of 2008 goes by without much Wagahai-involvement. Yamapi checks the jweb if it's up, and thinks that the cat has a particular talent for writing and making fun of Shige. Just to complement Wagahai's efforts, he enthusiastically joins in the campaign of Making Shige Flustered. Shige grumbles ceaselessly about being used as the group's bonding material, but Yamapi simply laughs at him and schemes with Tegoshi and Koyama to write an obnoxious song that has Shige's name appearing in every line.
Somehow, he and Koyama get into the habit of composing tunes and sending them to each other for evaluation. Koyama's still green around the ears where composing songs is concerned, but Yamapi thinks that some of the stuff he comes up with sound better than a lot of the songs played to them on demo tapes.
When Wagahai prods him awake at three in the morning to tell him that Koyama really really wants to work on a duet with him, Yamapi's so interested in the idea that he almost forgets to scold the cat for having no sense of time.
"I'm imaginary," Wagahai says. "I appear when I'm being imagined."
"Do me a favour." Yamapi lies back down in bed and pulls the blanket securely around himself. "Tell Shige to stop imagining."
… …
One afternoon, they meet up for a short interview by The Television Weekly for their new single, 'Happy Birthday'. They go through a couple of ridiculous questions about what they do in the bath (don't they just soak like everyone else? Yamapi exchanges grimaces with Shige) and 'Happy Birthday' being a love song (Massu totally rolls his eyes and Yamapi kicks him under the table) before the interviewer says, "NEWS will be welcoming the 5th year of their formation this autumn. So what is NEWS?"
Koyama babbles something about NEWS being white, Massu makes a non-witty remark, Shige calls him out on it, and Yamapi's watching them bluff their way through the question before he suddenly says, "It feels more natural for all of us to be together. When I go back to NEWS after working elsewhere, it really feels like home."
They laugh at it later on, saying that he's being too sentimental and it's a little yucky, but they part smiling anyway.
… …
"That was yucky," Wagahai says, appearing on his passenger seat.
Yamapi keeps his eyes on the road. "Admit it, you cried."
"Cats don’t cry," says Wagahai, very much on his dignity, "but if it keeps you happy, I did feel a little touched."
A few streets later, they stop at a red light. Cars pass by before them and Yamapi thinks of the many more years he'll have with NEWS. He hopes they'll be together until they're old and grey and Massu has gotten sick of gyoza.
Absently, he starts stroking the cat's head.
end
* Translation of The Television Weekly interview was taken from
towa_no_imi here.* NEWS' timeline was not strictly adhered to, so please forgive any inconsistencies.
* Happy birthday,
htenywg! It's rather early but I decided I'd post it before I don't want to.
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