todokanu

title: the price of freedom
rating: PG-13 (for language)
wordcount: ~2000
notes: to

aokiyai ♥ Remix of aokiyai's the colourless words.
written: August 2009

the price of freedom ;

Standing in a crowded room as camera flashes go off, Jin, for the briefest moment, begins to second guess himself. Someone asks a question. “I just know that this is the best thing to do, right now,” he answers – he wonders when he got so confident.

On the plane – and God he hates the plane it's the absolute worst – Jin tries to sleep. Instead, he shuffles cards and plays with his iPod, and tries to remember a time before becoming KAT-TUN's Akanishi Jin or Johnny's Akanishi Jin, a time when he was just Akanishi Jin, a somewhat good looking boy with nice parents and a younger brother and enough friends and –

He wonders what it'd be like to be just Akanishi Jin.

He walks into his first class with a sinking feeling in his stomach. He's nervous, isn't he? He could be a million things, and any one of them would make more sense, but as he finds a seat, he realises that nothing – and nothing – not even the debut concert or the first appearance as KAT-TUN or the first time he held a microphone was as nerve-wracking as this sort of nervous.

Because he's so nervous that he, for a moment, pauses when he says his name.

“Jin,” he says. “Aka...Jin Akanishi.”

Even here, he can't be just Akanishi Jin.

The fading light from the setting sun plays across the clouds like golden silk threads laid over a orange-grey quilt, and Jin sits on one of those cheap folding chairs from the local store, toes curled in the sand, a light sweater draped over his shoulders, a drink tucked in the cup holder conveniently located in the armrest.

His phone sits heavy on his lap.

He lifts the can to his lips, and drinks.

Freedom tastes like sugar. Funny. He looks at the phone in his lap.

Takes another sip.

He is so gonna get fat.

“Sorry 'bout last time,” Yamapi says when he calls. He sounds apologetic.

Jin settles the phone between his shoulder and ear, and leans back against the backboard. Yamapi has the afternoon off and it's barely ten where he is. “Nah, you're busy,” Jin says. “Guess who's not,” he adds, teasing. He can almost hear Yamapi's frown from over the line.

“Don't you have homework?”

“I'll do it later,” he says and shrugs – realizing after that Yamapi can't see anyways. “This totally hot chick joined the class today,” he tells him, because Yamapi sounds tired and now that Jin's not tired, he can hear 'tired' all the more clearly. “You should've seen her curves. And she's got these nice blond waves and she says they're totally natural.”

A pause, and laughter. “I forget sometimes that you're there to study.”

“Yeah, whatever. You're just jealous you won't be going to get ice cream with her tomorrow.”

Another pause. No laughter. “Maybe I am.”

“Sorry.”

“Nah, enjoy your vacation, Jin.”

“Don't work too hard.”

“Sure, later.”

As they hang up, Jin thinks that Yamapi only sounds more tired.

One day, after an especially long phone call which will probably lead to a particularly unpleasant phone bill, Jin wonders what it'd be like if he weren't KAT-TUN's Akanishi Jin. Here, he's Jin Akanishi and he walks around in nice pants and with nice hair and looking nice in general without obnoxious sunglasses – and that's all he is, Jin Akanishi who no one gives a shit about.

What if – and he pauses because it's such a strange what if – he were NEWS's Akanishi Jin? Or even Arashi's Akanishi Jin – but that's too damn weird to even think about because if he had that many sparkles...KAT-TUN's sparkles are bad enough.

But what if he were in NEWS and in a group where they didn't fight – had never really fought – and sort of got along. Where someone fussed over the entire group, where everyone was sort of...nice? Even when they weren't NEWS, Yamapi still talked about them and said how he sort of missed them and how once Tegomass had called in from Sweden and—

If this is freedom, Jin isn't sure he likes it.

So he calls them.

First he calls Kame. Kame sounds busy. So he calls Ueda.

“I don't think Kame can really talk to you right now,” he tells Jin.

Jin doesn't know what to say. So he says nothing.

“And,” Ueda says after the moment where Jin should've said something, “to be honest, neither can I.”

The next thing Jin remembers hearing is the dial tone, and a bitter, bitter laugh. His laugh. He's in L.A., in a not so bad room, a pretty good bed, with nothing but himself, and a dial tone.

They're probably recording a single without him.

The thought strikes him suddenly – and after an unanswered phone call to Yamapi – he has never felt so fucking lonely in his life.

There it was. He was lonely.

Somehow, and he had no idea how, he was lonely.

And now that he knew he was lonely – the bed seemed a lot emptier with him in it.

The guy in his class who he sort of talks to sometimes suggests sleeping pills. They come with a cute note wishing him good luck on his exams. It makes him feel a little bad because any exams he takes now don't count.

Because even across a hundred different time zones and in a different world altogether, Jin thinks he's so useless that he can't even stop thinking about being KAT-TUN's Akanishi Jin and just focus on being a goddamned student.

Some days, he's not even sure if he's still KAT-TUN's Akanishi Jin. They seem to be getting along fine without their vowel. And everyone knows that a vowel is the most important part of a word. You can have all the consonants in the world, but you can't have a word without a vowel.

Right?

“Having fun?” Yamapi asks when Jin calls that night – morning, really, but he hasn't slept yet so it's still night even though it's 6 in the morning.

“Yeah,” Jin laughs. “Definitely. How's things going?”

“Good,” Yamapi says, “it's good.”

And Jin listens as Yamapi talks about all the things he's not there to see.

Christmas rolls around and Jin thinks about calling up a girl he met at a club one night. Or maybe go to the club and just get really fucking hammered. It's Christmas. There's no reason why he shouldn't have some fun. He's getting to know people, ever since he realised his English was good enough that he wouldn't embarrass himself too badly and there'll probably be someone there that he knows well enough to get drunk out of their minds with. They're guys. It's what they do. No one gives a damn.

Instead, Yamapi calls. “Merry Christmas,” he says, and they talk for a good couple hours. “It's a little lonely,” Yamapi admits before they hang up.

Jin worries about sounding lame, so he laughs, says bye, see ya later, and hangs up. What he really wants to say is—

—first he calls up Junno and Koki and Nakamaru and then Ueda and finally Kame – and they wish each other Merry Christmas – and then he goes to the club and calls up the girl and they spend the night at his apartment and when they wake up next to each other in the morning—

Fuck I miss you too.

Junno sends him emails almost every day. They pile up in his mailbox in neat little rows that begin to span entire pages. This is how Jin knows about the newest beta release of some puzzle game and every ridiculously bad pun that Junno comes up with.

Koki emails him a couple times a week and tells him about Nakamaru walking into the recording studio with a hideously bright blue sweater vest. Jin reads it and laughs when Nakamaru's email indignantly denying truth in anything Koki says pops up in his inbox, followed by a second email with a one word explanation of “Massu”.

Sometimes Ueda emails him little messages that don't really say anything, but it's better than the no messages of the first month.

To date, Kame has emailed him once.

Jin guesses that they don't miss him very much.

The late night trains are strewn with empty seats and discarded newspapers. A stained coffee cup rolls past his foot and the old lady halfway down the car stands slowly and moves towards the door as it slides open. There are two other people that he can see and they're sitting next to each other with their backs to him and their faces buried in a little world that only the two of them are part of. An open milk carton sits on the back of their seats.

His head feels a bit light as he steps off the train. The friend who had invited him and a bunch of other guys over had offered to call him a taxi or something but he'd laughed the few drinks he'd had off and took the public transit instead. If he went back, he wouldn't be able to take public transit. People stared.

“I wonder if I should even come back,” Jin says aloud.

“Come back.” Kame's voice is so soft that Jin wonders if he'd imagined it and he's about to ask Kame to say whatever he just said again only the little “call ended” icon blinks on the screen.

He pauses in the lobby of the apartment building and calls Yamapi like he always does when he's ready to sulk. “Kame said to come back – I think he said to come back and...Pi, what should I do?”

There's a soft pause and then Yamapi calls him Bakanishi and says, “I think it'd be nice if you were here.”

Jin smiles and finds himself in front of his apartment door.

He wakes up with a really bad hangover and calls in sick. As he catches up on old homework and hot coffee, Jin tries to remember what words fit into the blanks from last night.

“Pi,” he says very seriously into his phone that evening, “what did we talk about yesterday?”

A groaning noise comes through the speakers. “Can this wait?” Yamapi asks. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Eight PM,” Jin answers after checking his watch.

“For you, you dolt. It's four in the morning here and I was sleeping.”

“Yeah but this is important. Because I think you said something important and apparently I called Kame too so maybe it was something really important—”

“I told you to come back.”

“Oh. You did?”

“Yes. Kame did too.”

“Kame did?”

“Yes.” A sigh. “I”m going back to sleep.”

“Wait don't hang up yet Piiiiiii!”

But the connection's done and over with and the moment of silence is followed by the constant busy tone. Jin frowns at his phone. “Why am I here again?” he asks it, and stares at the screen as if the answer will magically appear.

No answer does.

Two hours later, he's still staring at his phone when a text comes.

And he wonders if these six months (of freedom) have been worth it.

A month later, he's walking down the streets and as a cellphone sneaks a picture with no flash, he's everybody's Akanishi Jin.

And maybe, as he texts his friends while watching dumb movies with Yamapi and almost falling asleep because he's really really tired, it's not so bad after all. Being everybody's Akanishi Jin—

even if it's still a little lonely.