Roll With the Punches (Pin, R)
May. 2nd, 2011 01:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Pin (Yamashita Tomohisa/ Akanishi Jin)
Rating: R, maaaaaybe NC-17
Genre: Romance, Bromance(JinxKame are really good friends), KAT-TUN love, and a little bit of angst
Summary: Jin accidentally outs himself on a live national broadcast. The consequences are more than anyone ever expected.
Thanks to: All the people who made me feel like maybe I could have a home in this fandom, too :D (9000+ words)
Part 3
KAT-TUN’s meeting with Johnny went better than Jin had expected. Although the media was having a field day, Johnny was Johnny, and he saw a way to profit in even the most tense of situations. Putting KAT-TUN on hiatus, to Johnny, would be like admitting defeat. But KAT-TUN wasn’t going on hiatus. Jin was going to do a huge press conference, and Kame, Ueda, Koki, Nakamaru and Taguchi were going to express support for him, and Jin was going to basically use his sexuality to corner a whole new market for Johnny. Jin was miserably sure that he’d rather die than make a boys’ love drama, but if that’s what it took to make everyone happy after he’d fucked up so bad (“Dude, this is worse than the time you admitted to doing a line off of Shirota Yuu’s forearm!” Koki said as they waited in Johnny’s waiting room. Taguchi giggled. “You’re stupid, but for some reason, we love you anyway,” Kame said wryly) then Jin was going to grit his teeth and bear it.
The group exited the jimusho together, the other five forming a wall around Jin as cameras flashed and questions were shouted. Jin felt himself hyperventilating again, but he focused on the brush of Nakamaru’s arm against his own and remembered that the people who mattered were surrounding him.
If only Yamapi…Jin gulped. He had to go home now, home to an apartment he shared with his best friend of 10 years, who he’d kept in the dark about his sexual orientation for as long as they’d known each other. Home to an apartment where his mother, oh god his mother, had probably left 40 voicemails demanding answers.
Jin got into his car and sat behind the wheel for a moment to collect himself. ("Are you sure you can drive yourself home?” Kame had asked. “Yeah…Just…Yeah," Jin had replied, and Kame had understood, as he always did, that Jin just needed that time to think.) Then he drove home.
When he opened the door the lights were all on, and he could smell chicken cooking in the kitchen. “I’m home,” he said, as he closed the door behind him a took off his shoes. He slipped into his bunny slippers (He had bunnies, and Yamapi had chickens. “I think the chicken looks like how you look when you wake up in the morning,” Jin had teased when he picked out the chickens for Pi. “Well,” Pi said, “That’s fine. Also, did you know,” he picked up a pink pair of bunny slippers for Jin,, “that rabbits are some of the stupidest animals on this earth?” Jin punched him in the arm and smiled. “I’m so glad I chose you to live with. Everyday will be a battle for self esteem.” Whatever, your ego is Fuji sized. You need me to prick holes in your inflated sense of self.” They had bickered all the way to the register.) and walked bravely toward the kitchen.
Jin paused in the doorway to admire Yamapi’s back. He was wearing old Adidas track pants, with a hole in the knee on the left leg, and an ugly grayish lavender t-shirt that was worn then where it stretched over the muscles In Yamapi’s back. Even so, his best friend was gorgeous, from his chicken slippers to his head banded bleached hair.
“Your mom’s called 6 times. You should probably call her first.” Yamapi turned then, facing Jin with an unreadable expression. And then we’ll talk was left unsaid, but Jin heard it loud and clear anyway. He gulped. He had never seen Yamapi’s face so closed to him, not since before they were even friends and Yamapi was this stiff, hesitating prospective idol with a fear of being close to anyone. Jin had spent years wearing away that guard, and to see it now brought him back to sitting in the bathroom earlier that day, rocking back and forth alone behind a closed door. Kame wasn’t here now to hold his hand, and Jin had to face this firing squad all on his own. “You’ve got about 15 minutes before dinner is ready.” He turned back to the stove.
Jin’s phone call with his mother took 30 minutes, 23 minutes of which were his mother screaming at him for lying to her and for making her find out his dirty laundry on national television. Jin, who had been steadily sobbing as she berated him, choking out insufficient apologies and trying to explain why he hadn’t said anything, spent 2 minutes striving for coherency, and the last 5 minutes were his mother soothingly telling him that it was going to be okay. (“I still love you, baby, and no matter what you’ll always be my son. I love you, I love you honey, don’t cry, we all love you.”)
Jin dragged himself, a sobbing shivering wreck, out of his bedroom, not bothering to wipe his face or blow his nose or do anything other than get ready to take more screaming.
Dinner was on the table, chicken and rice and hard fried eggs and vegetables stir fried, and Yamapi sat stone-faced in his usual seat across from Jin’s at the small kitchen table they had found at Ryo’s grandmother’s house. (“I can’t believe you guys are shacking up,” Ryo said disgustingly. “As if everything you two do together isn’t gay enough. But yeah, you can have the table.” Yamapi protested. “I am a straight male who wants a second hand table." Jin nodded in agreement. “I also want a second hand table.”)
“Aren’t you going to yell at me?” Jin asked thickly, after 2 minutes of silence. “Tell me that I lied to you, that you want to move out, that you can’t believe I never told you?” Jin was shaking so hard the table shook too. Yamapi’s eyes narrowed.
“Who knew?” Yamapi asked, his voice quiet and solemn.
“No one,” Jin whispered. “Not a single person in the whole world. I figured people would just figure it out when I turned 50 and hadn’t settled down, and if someone had asked me I would have told them and that would be after the pop-star days, you know, so it wouldn’t really matter…” He realized he was babbling, and that he was still crying, so he crushed his lips together to stop the flow of words.
Yamapi nodded. “Alright.” He stood up and walked over behind Jin. He stood behind Jin’s chair, and leaned forward, draping his arms over Jin’s shoulders and resting his chin on Jin’s shoulder. “I’ll forgive you this one time, since you didn’t tell anyone. But this,” suddenly, Jin was smacked in the back of the head by the flat of Yamapi’s palm “is for thinking I was going to move out. And this,” he dropped a kiss on the crown of Jin’s head, “is for coming home to talk to me about it as soon as you could.”
Jin couldn’t stop the hiccupping sob that escaped him as he stood up and wrapped his arm around Yamapi’s waist. He knew he was getting the younger man’s shirt all wet with his tears, but he knew Yamapi wouldn’t care and there was no place he wanted to be more right that moment than in Yamapi’s arms. Yamapi could sense it, as he always did, and wrapped his arms tightly around Jin, as if to keep Jin from shaking himself to pieces.
When Jin’s sobs had quieted, Yamapi whispered into his hair. “But don’t think all this sobbing is going to get you out of telling me the whole story. I want to know twice as much as you told Kamenashi,” he said jealously, and Jin mustered a weak smile.
“I’ll tell you three times as much,” he said loyally, and Yamapi kissed the crown of his head again. “That’s my buddy.”
***
The press conference is as awful as Jin expected it to be, and it is only his band mates that give Jin the strength to answer the borderline inappropriate slurs and unnecessarily invasive questions the reporters ask of him. Jin was completely professional, and completely focused. He had to get this right, or other people would pay the consequences.
It’s surprisingly easy to be honest for the first time in his life about his sexual orientation. Jin answered every question with only enough information to prevent it from being rephrased and asked again.
When it’s over, Jin feels wrung out like a sponge, and all he wants to do I go home and lay down on Yamapi and watch cooking shows.
So that’s what he does. Yamapi would ask him a question about the press conference every ten minutes or so. “So I’ve been thinking back, you know, and it’s true. You never once talked about women in a way that could be construed as you being sexually attracted to them,” Yamapi said. “And you never once said you were straight when Ryo teased us about being gay together.”
Jin flushed. “Well, yeah, I didn’t lie about it. I just didn’t talk about it at all. Plus Ryo’s jokes don’t mean anything. You’re straight, and he knows that.”
“Yes, that’s true. And it’s not like you find me attractive that way. We’re like brothers, right?”
Jin laughed. “No way. I know you too well to think of anything except how you look like a chicken in the mornings.”
Jin hated the uncomfortable feeling in his stomach whenever he talked about Yamapi being straight. He hated that he always hoped.
“I don’t look like a chicken! Chicken’s are totally ugly.” He played with Jin’s hair, like he always did. “So this is okay, right? We can keep living together, just like this? Nothing needs to change.” Yamapi looked decisive. “And you’ll stop comparing me to ugly chickens.”
Jin thought chickens were very cute, misunderstood creatures. He made a personal vow to take up vegetarianism soon.
Part 4