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FIC: Going Steady, Part 6 (Epilogue)
Title: Going Steady, Part 6 (Epilogue)
Rating: NC-17 overall
Fandom: Haru wo Daiteita (Embracing Love)
Pairing: Kikuchi/Onozuka
Word count: ~2,045
Disclaimer: No money is being made off this story; consider it a little wish fulfillment on my part.
Sequel to: Unexpected Opportunities, Comeback (Part 1 and Part 2), Forgiveness, Firsts, and First Date (Part 1 and Part 2).
Summary: Kikuchi reflects on the past.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
***
Kikuchi thought to himself that he ought to get up and turn off the lights, but he waited until Onozuka was soundly asleep before carefully easing himself out of his lover's embrace, so as not to wake him. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at Onozuka and smiled. God, the kid was a handful! The scratches on his back still stung, providing a pleasant reminder of how enthusiastic a lover the young actor had turned out to be.
Their lovemaking had been intense, even more so than Kikuchi had expected, with the weeks of deliberate teasing and delayed gratification. And being able to call Onozuka by his given name in bed had further heightened the experience and given him a deep satisfaction, since it was a privilege that even Miyasaka and Katou apparently hadn't been granted. He had told Onozuka that he had grown used to being more casual with names in the U.S., which was true, but the real reason that he had wanted to switch to a first-name basis in bed was mostly because of Toshi.
Though it was silly to be jealous of the heterosexual and happily married Toshi-chan, Kikuchi had envied his closeness to "Yuu-chan," and he also envied the importance that Miyasaka, Katou, and Iwaki seemed to hold in Onozuka's life. He didn't think that Onozuka realized how constantly he talked about the three of them, even Iwaki, whom he claimed to dislike, even when he was in bed (or on the couch) with Kikuchi. He was obsessed with the three of them, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say, obsessed with (and jealous of) Miyasaka and Katou's obsession with Iwaki, and Kikuchi wanted a little of that obsession to transfer over to himself. He thought that he had succeeded tonight in making Onozuka forget about them, at least for a little while.
In sleep, with his features relaxed and his golden hair spilling across his face in messy strands, the devious Onozuka looked surprisingly young and innocent. Or was it that the deviousness hid an underlying innocence beneath the surface? Kikuchi gently brushed Onozuka's hair back from his face, and his smile faded as his gaze fell on the gold bracelet on his wrist.
He hadn't lied about it being a good-luck charm, but he hadn't told Onozuka the whole truth, either. As Onozuka suspected, it had been a gift from a previous lover, Kawaguchi Kenji, a young forensic pathologist who had served as a consultant on a detective drama that Kikuchi had been starring in.
Up until then, Kikuchi had satisfied his needs with one-night-stands--usually with married men or closeted salarymen that he met at discreet, exclusive bars and clubs, because they were the least likely to reveal the affair to the media, having as much to lose as he did. He avoided groupies like the plague, no matter how pretty the boys were, because there was too much chance of them bragging about their conquests, especially a big star like Kikuchi. He also avoided sleeping with other actors, for the most part, because many of them had a tendency to gossip, even though being outed would probably hurt their career as well as his.
So his life had been neat and ordered, his secret safely hidden, and it might have stayed that way if he hadn't met Kenji. But they had hit it off on the set and started carrying on a discreet affair, which was the first serious relationship that Kikuchi had permitted himself since he had begun achieving success as an actor.
On the day of the awards show, while Kikuchi had been getting dressed for the ceremony at home, Kenji had clasped the bracelet around his wrist, saying with a wistful smile, "Please wear this, so that you know I'll be there rooting for you in spirit, even if I can't be there physically."
"Thank you," Kikuchi had said, kissing him. "I wish I could take you as my date, but..." He had smiled apologetically, allowing his voice to trail off, since they both knew the reason why he couldn't. He usually found a pretty young actress to grace his arm at events like these, someone who would be grateful enough to have a brief moment in the limelight as Kikuchi's date without expecting anything more in return. However, since the idea of even a fake date seemed to upset Kenji, Kikuchi had elected to bring his mother to that year's awards show.
"This will be my good-luck charm," Kikuchi had said with a grin, tucking the bracelet out of sight beneath the sleeve of his shirt and jacket. The sad smile on Kenji's face should have warned him that this was the beginning of the end, but Kikuchi had been too preoccupied with his own thoughts to really notice, since he had been nervous and excited about being nominated for Best Actor that year.
He had won the award, and continued wearing the bracelet as his good-luck charm, but his luck had gone downhill from there. Kenji had grown increasingly distant, and Kikuchi's distraction with his personal problems had led to him growing careless with the paparazzi, and he hadn't noticed when he was followed one night to the love hotel where he had arranged a rendezvous with Kenji.
Instead of a night of lovemaking, Kenji had greeted him with a solemn look and the words, "It's over. I can't do this anymore, Katsuya. I'm tired of being your dirty little secret, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life hiding and skulking around like a married man's mistress. Hell, even married men are more open about their mistresses than you are with me!"
"Well, what do you want me to do?!" Kikuchi had shouted. "Do you expect me to give up my career for you?!"
"I don't expect anything from you," Kenji had said quietly, and walked out of the room. Kikuchi had chased after him, forgetting to be careful, forgetting about the paparazzi, and their ensuing--and very loud--argument had spilled out onto the street as Kenji had left the hotel and tried to walk away from him.
That alone might have been enough to end his career, but Kikuchi had sealed his fate when he grabbed Kenji and kissed him, right as the flashbulb of a camera went off in their faces. That photo had been spread across the pages of every tabloid and even the mainstream newspapers the following morning.
He had wrecked his own career, and very nearly wrecked Kenji's as well, since he had been forced to take a leave of absence from his job due to the hordes of reporters descending upon the university where he worked. But Kenji had used the time to take a sabbatical and do some research, and was eventually able to return to his old position after Kikuchi moved to America and all the fuss died down.
Their relationship, however, was finished even though the reason for their estrangement had been removed. There had been no point any longer in continuing to hide in the closet, but Kenji had refused to take Kikuchi back, saying, "I don't want you if you're only here because you've been forcibly outed and you're thinking that you might as well stay with me now that the damage is already done."
Kikuchi hadn't been able to honestly deny it, and the break-up had probably been for the best, anyway. Every time he looked at Kenji, he would have been reminded of the fact that their relationship was the reason his career was ruined, and his bitterness would probably have poisoned any remaining feelings of affection they'd had for each other.
He had spent weeks holed up in his apartment or his parents' house, since he was hounded by reporters every time he set foot outside. And he had been dropped from the commercials and TV shows he had already been signed up for, and offers still in the negotiating phases were quickly rescinded. "Sorry, but we can't afford to offend the sponsors," was the phrase repeated most often to him, in varying degrees of politeness. He had actually begun to prefer the people who would tell him to his face, "We don't want a faggot on our show," because at least they were being honest.
And then a godsend had arrived, in the form of an offer from the United States. A famous American director, who happened to be a foreign film aficionado, had wanted Kikuchi to play a supporting role in his latest movie. It had been a small role, but still a prestigious one, and Kikuchi had fled to America and remained there for a decade, until being called back to Japan for the ill-fated role in Katou's movie.
Kikuchi had continued wearing Kenji's bracelet, not so much out of sentimental feelings for his ex-lover, but as a reminder that by trying to hide his true self, he had lost everything that he had been trying so hard to protect: his reputation, his career, and his lover. He had resolved then that he would never again hide what he was, although the paparazzi had helped that resolution along by making it a moot point. Still, he had avoided any attempts to salvage his reputation by claiming that he wasn't really gay, it had just been a one-time experiment, or that he normally liked women but Kenji was special, or whatever excuse his publicist could think up. He was gay, and that was that; he no longer tried to deny it.
That was why he had despised Iwaki and Katou so much, because he had thought that they had been playing at being gay for publicity while giving themselves an out by claiming that they weren't really gay, they were in love with each other for who they were, not for their gender--no doubt it all sounded very romantic and noble and pure-minded to the public. However, he'd finally had to admit that their love seemed to be genuine, although it didn't really make him like them any better.
Kikuchi stared down at Onozuka, and for the first time, wondered if he was really being fair to the young actor. True, the public had grown a little more open-minded, whether that was due to changing mores, or just infatuation with Iwaki and Katou's idealized romance. But the public was fickle, and just because they had accepted one same-sex couple didn't necessarily mean that they would accept another. Kikuchi would never forget the humiliation of being the most sought-after actor in Japan one day, and then being unable to get any work the next. He would never forget the way that so-called friends had turned against him and looked at him with disgust, as if he were something dirty. He was already out, so no further damage could be done to his career by being linked with another man in the press, but he didn't want Onozuka to suffer the way he had.
He gently stroked Onozuka's hair, wondering if he had been selfish by indulging in this affair without really considering the possible consequences. But it wasn't only his choice, he reminded himself. Onozuka was a clever young man who seemed well aware of the risks, and he was the one had started pursuing Kikuchi in the first place. Besides, selfish though it might be, he didn't want to give up Onozuka now.
He bent down to kiss his sleeping lover, and Onozuka stirred, his eyelids fluttering half-open as he sleepily inquired, "Kikuchi-san?"
"Katsuya," Kikuchi reminded him.
"Ka...tsu...ya," Onozuka murmured, drawing his name out slowly in a sensual voice. "What're you doing up? Come back to bed."
"I'm just turning off the lights," Kikuchi replied, and quickly did just that, then crawled back into bed and Onozuka's embrace. The future could wait for another day. Perhaps tomorrow, he would discuss taking certain precautions with Onozuka, but for tonight, he was just going to savor the moment and enjoy sleeping in the arms of his beautiful young lover.
THE END.
Next story in the series: Audition, Part 1
***
Afterword: As usual, lots of long-winded story meta; feel free to skip.
The Kurosawa movie poster on Kikuchi's bedroom wall of course refers to the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, director of The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and many other films. I couldn't make up my mind which specific movie to pick, so I left it vague.
Kikuchi's "battle scar" from the samurai movie was inspired by the making-of featurette on the Azumi 2 dvd. The movie is about a young female assassin named Azumi, set during the early days of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The actress who plays Azumi tells a story in the featurette of how she was injured during a stunt gone wrong: she was sitting on the ground, leaning against a fence, where another character is supposed to try to stab her from behind through the fence. Azumi is supposed to dodge the blow, but the cape she was wearing got snagged on the fence, and she wasn't able to dodge in time, and the actress suffered a minor cut--nothing serious, and she was able to laugh about it in the featurette, but it was a reminder of how even prop swords can cause injuries (as Ninagawa-kantoku scolded Katou in my Hamlet story), and I thought it made a good story, so I borrowed the idea for my fic.
The fictional movie title, "Avatar of Bishamonten," refers to the famous daimyo (feudal lord) Uesugi Kenshin, who was such a great warrior and strategist that he was believed by some to be the avatar of Bishamonten, the god of war. Kenshin was a major supporting character in the 2007 NHK taiga drama "Furin Kazan," in which he was played by the androgynously beautiful rock singer Gackt. One scene that really stood out in my mind was the one where Kenshin (then still known by his original name of Nagao Kagetora) rallies his troops before going off to battle by raising his sword in the air and shouting, "I am Bishamonten!" Well, maybe you had to be there, but it was a very dramatic scene, and I could see Kikuchi playing such a zealous character, though his version of Kenshin would probably be more masculine than Gackt's, maybe closer to Abe Hiroshi's portrayal in this year's taiga drama "Tenchijin," although so far I've only seen preview clips and haven't actually watched any episodes yet.
Anyway, I wanted Kikuchi to have some souvenirs from his movie work to sort of flesh out his apartment, so that was why I created the fictional movie for him.
I mentioned in the Part 2 afterword that there was a reason why Onozuka's maternal grandparents were from Okinawa, and that's because the majority of the U.S. military bases in Japan are located there--an unfairly disproportionate amount, many of the residents feel. So it would be the most likely place for Onozuka-obaasan (grandmother) to meet an American soldier. I haven't decided yet whether Grandma still lives there, or if she moved to Kanazawa after her husband's death to be closer to her daughter.
I was watching the "Embracing Love: Cherished Spring" anime dvd (the US subtitled version), the second episode of which features the story about Kikuchi from Book 2. It has some small but interesting differences from the manga. One, which isn't related to this fic, is that Katou is alone with the young lady he is photographed with, whereas in the manga he protests to Iwaki that they were out in a group and the photographer cropped the other people out to make it look like they were out on a date. So it's not clear in the anime whether Katou was cheating or not; he asks Iwaki to believe in him, but never explicitly states his innocence or offers a reasonable explanation as to why he was with the woman. This could possibly be playing off the theme presented by the orgy party revealed later in the manga, where Katou went through a brief period of infidelity when he was confused about his relationship with Iwaki.
The other changes are related to Kikuchi. First, in the anime, he is shown snuggling up with a boy-toy in his hotel room when he watches Iwaki and Katou make up on TV, showing us right from the start that he's gay, while in the manga, he was alone. Iwaki is fanboyishly cute and excited when he meets Kikuchi for the first time at the party; he's portrayed this way in the manga, too, but it's a bit more overt in the anime, or maybe it just seems that way when you can see and hear the character move and speak instead of just reading it on the page.
Then, in the restaurant, Kikuchi has some extra lines of dialogue that don't appear in the manga: he tells Iwaki that after the scandal, he "was dropped from show after show," and that people he had thought were his friends "looked at me like I was something dirty". Of course we already had an idea of what he must have gone through after the scandal, but to hear him talk about how his own friends turned against him made me feel a lot more sympathetic towards him, and helped me better understand why he was so bitter towards Iwaki and Katou, and I used some of that for the end of fic, where he's thinking about the past while he watches Onozuka sleep.
And finally, in the anime, Iwaki tells Katou that Kikuchi deliberately let him go instead of raping him; in the manga, or at least the BeBeautiful translation of it, he says only that they didn't "go all the way," and it wasn't clear whether Kikuchi let him go or if Iwaki managed to escape on his own, although I believe it's implied that Kikuchi didn't really intend to rape him. Anyway, the anime makes it clear that rape wasn't his intent, which makes him seem a bit less of a bad guy, although of course that still doesn't excuse his attacking Iwaki in the first place. But I did feel vindicated, because that was the way that I had seen Kikuchi even before watching the anime.
So thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the story. There will be more about the auditions and the "Love Reborn" movie in a sequel, and eventually I'll write more about Onozuka's and Kikuchi's families. I'm sort of debating about whether to change the narration now that the two of them are on a first-name basis. I don't know whether to start referring to them as "Katsuya" and "Yuu," when the readers are used to thinking of them as "Kikuchi" and "Onozuka". Plus, I figure that they're used to thinking of themselves by their last names, particularly Onozuka. So maybe it should be "Onozuka" when I'm writing from Onozuka's POV, and "Yuu" when I'm writing from Kikuchi's, but then maybe it gets a little confusing to be calling the same character by two different names. Well, they're still getting used to the first-name thing, so they probably still think of each other by their last names, although they're making an effort to be more casual, so I think it will be easier to stick with "Kikuchi" and "Onozuka" for now.
Of course, with a Haru/WMLM crossover like the one
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snapelike
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Thanks...
Re: Thanks...
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So does that mean Iwaki and Katou will know their relationship in the upcoming sequel?
ivy
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Thanks for reading!
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THAT WAS GREAT!!
OMG I love Coldplay!! And the imagery of "Viva la Vida" is beautiful, it totally describes Kikuchi's entire life XD
Aaaaand Kurosawa reference: OH YEAH!
I really hope you'll write more XDno subject
Thanks again for reading, and I definitely will write more! ^_^
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I don't much care for devious people IRL, but they're great fun in fiction. It'll be interesting to see how Onozuka's and Kikuchi's relationship develops. And I love your story meta. It makes my own author's notes, about which someone once complained, seem short.
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Indeed, I'm not sure I'd want to be Onozuka's friend in RL, but it is great fun writing this devious duo! And it's nice to know that someone is enjoying the long-winded story meta! ^_^ I like reading about how other writers come up with their ideas and such, so I figured I'd throw it out there in case anyone's interested. I know some people don't like long author's notes, but I figure if I put at the end, it's easy enough to skip over.
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If you like long-winded story meta, take a look at a story I just posted at
I'm doing the 30_kisses themes with Eiri Yuki and Shuichi Shindou as the pairing. A story that was already near completion when I got approval covered one of the themes, so I posted it today. It's inspired by a monkey park that is an actual tourist attraction near Kyoto. When I found out about it, I said to myself I had to get the guys there. Monkey park + Eiri Yuki and Shuichi Shindou = hilarity.
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http://community.livejournal.com/30_kisses/2615897.html
I'm not sure if it's friends-locked or something? The two on a date at a monkey park does sound like a cute idea!
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thanks to your factoids, i was totally taken aback to read that the US still has military presence in Japan!! i didn't have a clue about this, thinking that was around war times maybe until 1950. shows how minuscule my knowledge is about this beautiful country. as Kikuchi said: "Sushi, sayonara, karaoke, and arigato don't count".. you make yaoi fanfiction instructive ^^ so actually showing the original meaning of Y.A.O.I. -> for yama-nashi (without climax), ochi-nashi (without a conclusion) and imi-nashi (without content) - doesn't apply to your fics!! *bow*
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I live in an area with a large Japanese-American population, so maybe the local newspapers here tend to feature more articles about Japan-related news than other parts of the country. Plus, I watch a lot of Japanese dramas and travelogue shows, and every now and then the US military presence will come up. Anyway, glad you found the story and notes informative! ^_^
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i just recently got interested in this country, and the cultural treasure, the history and all amounts to a lot of information, and war facts isn't really a hobby of mine, so i'd first check on tradition, food etc.. that's why i like your notes, they're easier to digest than a bulk mass of info from a website, slowly, nicely dripping in..^^
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I've got a friend who always thinks of Snaco when hearing that song, and there's a nice Snape gen vid on YT to it too, but now will probably think K every time I hear it!
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Heh heh, the song originally make me think of Snape, too, but now I associate it more with Kikuchi. ~_^
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