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Shirota arrived at Jin's apartment at 11 AM, which was quite obviously well before Jin's wake-up time. Jin was confused as to why Shirota was giving him so many weird looks as he opened the door, but it might have had something to do with the fact that he'd rung the doorbell five times, knocked for two minutes straight, and left at least three annoyed, bitching voicemails on Jin's phone before Jin had gotten up to let him in. While wearing just his Superman boxers.
"Put some damn clothes on," Shirota said, brushing past Jin's shoulder into his apartment. If Jin had known he was going to be expecting guests, he would have cleaned up a bit. Maybe.
"Why are you even here?" Jin asked. "We don't have a gig this weekend." He paused, and mentally tried to picture his calendar. "Actually, it's not even the weekend. It's Wednesday. Why are you here?"
Shirota started rummaging through the dirty clothes on Jin's floor, trying to find something that looked clean enough. He found a pair of jeans and tossed them in Jin's direction with an impressive amount of force.
"We're going to go and visit my grandpa," he said. "He says his suitemate at Mayfill Manor is stealing from him, and he wants us to show up to get him back in line."
"Um, your grandpa is old," Jin pointed out.
"Yeah, most grandparents usually are, genius," Shirota snapped. A t-shirt hit Jin in the face, but the sniff test showed that it was mostly clean. Jin probably hadn't spilled anything on it.
Jin tugged the shirt on over his head and got an arm stuck in the neck hole. Obviously, his coordination hadn't quite woken up with the rest of him yet. "But I mean really old. He lives in an old folk’s home-"
"It's a retirement community," Shirota interrupted.
"The fuck?" Jin asked, finally getting the shirt on correctly.
Shirota kind of rolled his eyes, digging for a matching pair of shoes. "Look, just make sure you call it that when we visit him, okay? He'll take my head off otherwise. He thinks he's still healthy enough to be invading Normandy again or something."
Jin fell over trying to get his jeans on.
"Why do I have to go?" he whined, holding himself upright against the wall with one hand. "Make everyone else go, too."
"Because you have nothing else in your life," Shirota told him.
"That's not even true!" Jin cried.
Shirota tossed his pair of blue Chuck Taylors at him and headed for the door again. "Watching porn doesn't count as having a life, Jin. And everyone else is coming once they are done with their real obligations. So stop complaining and get your lazy ass in the RV, dick."
Jin opened his mouth to say something else, and was stopped when Shirota shoved a finger in his face.
"I ask for very little from you," Shirota said, getting all close and scary-eyed. "And you will do this for me because I keep your asses together and am the only person who isn't mildly brain dead in some form."
"Kame isn't mildly brain dead," Jin replied, on impulse.
Shirota whacked him across the head. "He likes you, which actually makes him completely brain dead. You have two minutes to get in the RV before I start dismantling everything you hold dear, starting with the segway."
Two minutes later, Jin was sitting in the back of the RV pouting with one shoe untied and no brush to get the knots out of his hair.
--
"I took a half day for this," Pi said, climbing into the back of the RV with Jin.
"And I take whole days for you morons every week," Shirota replied. He sounded a bit cross. Pi leaned over Jin in a somewhat uncomfortable fashion- because his crotch was sort of near Jin's face, and despite Pi's awesome moobs, Jin really didn't feel that way about him- and pushed his head through the open window to the cab.
"I'm just kidding, Shirota," Pi told him, ruffling his hair. "You know I don't mind doing this for you."
Shirota grumbled something in response that Jin couldn't entirely make out, but that might have been something along the lines of yeah, yeah, you're still a douchebag, and at least he seemed happier after that. Jin assumed he was happier because the RV was no longer hitting every single pothole in the road, even when they were a foot to the side and needed to be swerved towards in order to make contact.
"Where the hell is Kame?" Jin asked, as Pi settled himself in to the seat beside him and took out what appeared to be his leftovers from the night before.
"He had some meeting," Pi replied, through entirely too-large bites of burrito.
It took a few moments for the answer to settle in. "What? Wait, we didn't have any meetings today," Jin said.
Pi shrugged. "I think it was with that Kimura guy."
"WHAT," Jin cried in response.
"Don't ask me," Pi mumbled, rice falling out of his mouth. "That's just what I know."
"But-- he--" Jin started, and found himself unable to finish.
He spent the next half hour of the drive staring at his shoes, which he still hadn't tied, wondering why he felt like he was going to throw up once the idea had wormed into his head that Kame was on a date. With Kimura. Kimura and his beautiful hair and his stupidly perfect smile and his credit card that probably didn't have any limits at all.
--
Mayfill Manor smelled like old people.
Jin really didn't like the smell of old people. Walking through the halls after the nurse on duty made him feel like he was on his way to a morgue, or at least sitting in the lobby just waiting to die while hooked up to a ventilator and eating checkers pieces because he thought they were Oreos or something. The whole thing kind of wigged him out, and he tried not to look in the rooms they were passing, especially ones where the old people were lying in bed and moaning in weird fashions.
Grandpa Shirota's room was in the corner, at the end of the first hallway. He was sitting up in bed when they entered, watching the television mounted on the wall.
"Hey, Grandpa," Shirota said.
"It's about damn time you got here," Grandpa Shirota replied. "That idiot Pete has been stealing my stuff for months now. What the hell have you been doing?"
Shirota looked back at them and shrugged. "Grandpa, these are my band mates Jin and Tomo. We're going to make sure Pete doesn't steal any more of your stuff, okay?"
"Heehee, Tomo," Jin sniggered behind his hand. Pi whacked him in the ass with the heel of his shoe.
"Look like a bunch of pansies," Grandpa Shirota said. He narrowed his eyes at Jin, and then motioned for him to get closer. "Let me look at you."
"Er," Jin said. He shuffled closer until Grandpa Shirota could whip a hand out and close gnarled fingers around Jin's wrist.
The old man looked him up and down with his brow furrowed. "The hell is wrong with your hair, son?"
"Well I didn't have time to brush it this morning..." Jin tried, and then Grandpa Shirota tugged a strand of it extremely un-gently, causing Jin to yelp in surprised pain.
"Get this cut! This is an abomination!" the man exclaimed. "You look like a god damn hippie!"
Luckily, Shirota cut in then, pulling Grandpa Shirota's hand away from Jin's arm. Jin staggered back near Pi in the doorway, holding the sides of his head to make the throbbing in his scalp go away.
"Ow," he moaned weakly.
"It does kind of look like shit today," Pi told him.
Jin glared at him. "You're always so nice and helpful, thank you, Pi."
"Now, Grandpa," Shirota started, "what exactly is Pete stealing?"
"Everything!" Grandpa Shirota roared. He hit the quilt on his bed with one balled hand. "My war medals, my clothes, my food! Everything!"
There was a long moment in which Jin didn't quite know what to say, and neither, it seemed, did the others. Finally, Grandpa Shirota looked at them again with his unimpressed gaze and said, "Did you say these were your band mates?"
"Yes, I did," Shirota replied, looking happy to be on less uncomfortable ground again.
"You should give us a show, then," Grandpa Shirota said. His voice left very little room for argument, and when Shirota crossed the room to stand next to Jin and Pi again, he was already lost in thought, eyes focused on towards the top of the doorframe.
"We don't have any of our stuff here," Pi pointed out.
Shirota waved a hand in front of him. "I know, I know. But I bet we could get some buckets or something from the staff that I could use as drums... or bongos or something. And somebody here has to have a guitar that you can play."
It sounded like the worst gig of all time, and Jin was even including the time he sang for his elementary school talent show and Billy Gessup had had an epileptic fit in the middle of their duet.
"I don't really think this is-" he started, and then Pi interrupted him with, "Alright, I'll go and find a guitar. Maybe one of the old people is sleeping and I can steal one."
"Wait!" Jin cried, but it was too late. It appeared he was going to be singing in front of the depends parade whether he liked it or not.
Shirota left to hunt down some buckets, leaving Jin to sit beside Grandpa Shirota's bed as the old man watched reruns of Wheel of Fortune on TV.
"I was a war hero, you know," Grandpa Shirota said. "Shook hands with Churchill and everything."
"Okay," Jin replied.
--
The staff set them up in the living room and wheeled in a whole bunch of other old people that lived there. The buckets kind of sounded horrible, but Shirota got all into it, making up rhythms like he was playing African drums in a tribal mating dance. Pi was fumbling through chords on the guitar and kept claiming it was because it was "completely different from his bass". And Jin didn't even have a microphone, so he sort of just had to belt out the lyrics as well as he could without having anything to do with his hands to keep them occupied.
He ended up making up some dances just to avoid standing in one spot the whole time.
He was pretty sure the old people kind of liked it, at least the ones that weren't asleep and drooling on their shirts. The staff clapped and a few of the old folks did, too, but then one guy shouted that he hadn't understood a word that "the pretty young lady singing" had said, and Jin hid in the bathroom for ten minutes in complete humiliation.
--
Kame arrived after their make-shift gig. Pi kept trying to call the rest of it "covert operations for Grandpa Shirota", but it sounded super lame and not at all like something ninjas would be a part of, so Jin ignored him. And Kame came in with a new bag that looked really fancy, hair slightly askew.
"Sorry I'm late," he said, breezing in like he owned the place. Like Kame would ever own an old folks home.
"What is that?" Jin asked. He glared at the traitorous new bag strap gleaming on Kame's shoulder.
Kame looked at Jin in confusion, followed Jin's line of sight to the object in question, and then raised his eyes again. He looked somewhat incredulous. "It's a bag, Jin."
"Is that a murse?" Pi asked, cackling. "It is, isn't it?"
"I thought you were meeting with Kimura today," Jin said. He sounded very rational and casual, which he thought was pretty good considering that Kame was doing deviant and horrifying things behind the rest of the band's back with a guy who probably posed for the covers of bodice-ripping romance novels.
"He took me to Panera in the mall," Kame explained. "And then we went shopping. What are you getting at?"
Jin's eye was twitching. Maybe he should get that looked at. "You went shopping?"
"Did Kimura buy you that murse?" Pi laughed, and then, after Kame shot him a murderous glance, he began laughing harder, clutching his stomach and kicking his feet up in the air off the side of Grandpa Shirota's bed. "Oh my god, he did! He bought you a murse!"
"Kame," Jin said, with infinite patience.
"God dammit!" Grandpa Shirota cried from the bed, throwing the television remote across the room. "They changed Jeopardy! It's on during bingo now! Those communist bastards!"
Shirota pushed past both Jin and Kame roughly to get to Grandpa Shirota's side. "Now, I'm sure we can get a VCR in here to record it-"
"Record it?!" Grandpa Shirota said. "When the hell am I going to have time to watch it later? I've got chess matches at night after dinner!"
Shirota looked at them like he expected them to be doing something more than just standing around and gaping at each other- or in Jin's case, glaring in Kame's direction- but Jin wasn't entirely sure what he should do. He started fluffing Grandpa Shirota's pillows for lack of any other ideas.
"Ugh, Jin, just go out in the hall and try to find someone who can get us a VCR, okay?" Shirota suggested, pushing Jin roughly towards the hallway that smelled like formaldehyde. "Kame, be useful and go and help him, please."
"I DON'T NEED HIS HELP," Jin tried to protest, but Shirota just threw a wadded towel at Jin's face, which was super gross because maybe Grandpa Shirota had wet the bed and they'd used the towel to clean it up or something. Jin made a few elaborate flailing motions and left the towel on the floor where it fell in the doorway.
He started stalking down the hall, Kame on his heels, ignoring all of Kame's pleas for him to wait.
"Jin, seriously, slow down," Kame said. He managed to catch up enough to grab at Jin's sleeve, pulling at the fabric. "The hell are you-"
"What is wrong with you?!" Jin exclaimed, emotion bursting forth rather suddenly. He turned around so fast that Kame took a few steps backwards and nearly ran into an old lady in a wheelchair.
Kame's eyes were wide. "What are you talking about?"
"You let him buy you things?!" Jin shouted. "Seriously, he bought you things?"
"He's being nice!" Kame cried.
Jin couldn't believe Kame was so naive. And stupid. And blind. Kame didn't seem to be happy when Jin told him all of this, because his eyebrows got all furrowed and angry-looking, and he did the thing where his hands clench up at his sides, all tense and edgy.
"You know, I'm not going to push away someone who is actually nice to me," he snapped.
"He's being nice to you because he wants to shove his tongue down your throat!" Jin said.
Kame blinked, jaw dropping a little. "He- what?! Jin, are you crazy? Are you even listening to yourself? I'm not going to make out with him-"
"Good!" Jin interrupted.
"-and even if I was," Kame continued, steam-rolling on like he hadn't even heard Jin, "it wouldn't matter because it's still none of your business."
"It is my business!" Jin fumed.
He wanted to push Kame for being so stupid, but the old woman was still behind him. Kame ended up beating Jin to it, reaching out to shove Jin's shoulder roughly. "No, it's not!"
"You can't make out with Kimura!" Jin exclaimed. "And it's my business because you're supposed to be making out with me!"
There was about one second after the words left his mouth before he realized what he'd said. Kame's eyes went really wide, and Jin couldn't tell if the expression on his face was bad or good. He panicked, all at once, throat constricting and chest tightening, and did the first thing he could think of to do that would possibly solve the horrible, awkward conclusion he just knew was waiting for him.
He reached forward, grabbed Kame's face, and kissed him.
He probably should have tried aiming first, because he was a little off, and managed to knock their noses together. And Kame's mouth was already sort of open, which made it both easier and more difficult, especially after he sort of did this little half-gasp, half-hiss thing that was almost absurdly hot. Jin closed his eyes and just- felt. Felt everything; felt the cords in Kame's neck under his fingers, felt the soft curls of Kame's hair against his forehead. For a heart-wrenchingly long moment, Kame didn't move, and then all at once it was like everything snapped together. He kissed Jin back, which felt good and right and nice and like he'd be really, really good at using his mouth in other ways.
Then his hands pushed against Jin's shoulders to shove him away.
"What the hell?!" Kame gasped.
"Um," Jin said. He wasn't sure why Kame was all mad, when he'd been kissing back and hadn't he wanted Jin to do that for a long time? Just as Jin began to think that he'd misread every single sign ever, Kame sort of flapped his arms to either side, unable to make eye-contact anymore.
"This is it?" he asked. His cheeks were pink. "This is the place you choose to do this?"
It wasn't what Jin had been expecting. "Well, it sort of just felt like the right time," he started.
"Jin," Kame hissed, and the flush on his cheeks was ridiculously attractive, "there is a woman with an oxygen tank behind me."
Jin sort of craned his head to see around Kame's still-flailing form. The woman was bent over in her wheelchair and her eyes were closed, so she was either sleeping or in a coma or dead, but she probably hadn't been watching the show happening in front of her.
"Look, she's not even awake," he pointed out. It didn't seem to make Kame feel any better.
"This isn't romantic at all!" Kame squeaked.
It was possible that he had a point there. "Well, we could go out for dinner after this?" Jin tried.
"We don't have any money, where are we going to go?" Kame asked.
"I saw a Waffle House down the street!" Jin said, brightening. "Kame, I'll take you out for dinner at Waffle House!"
Kame stared at him, opened and closed his mouth a few times, and then stared some more. "You cannot be serious."
"But you love waffles!" Jin said. Kame turned on his heel and started to walk away. "Kame! Kame, what the fuck, come back here!"
He didn't stop. He rounded the corner and disappeared and Jin threw his hands to either side, grumbling aloud. When he looked up again, the woman in the wheelchair was staring at him with an odd, vacant grin on her face.
"Your girlfriend seems very nice," she said. "Do you have a bedpan nearby?"
"Okay," Jin said. "Maybe he was right."
--
Grandpa Shirota insisted they stay for dinner because it was fried chicken night. He also insisted that they all go up and get extra helpings that he wrapped in napkins and took back to his room with him, for later.
"Pete will find them," he hissed, even though his suitemate wasn't near the room at all. "We have to hide them in the drawers."
"But Grandpa, then your clothes will smell like chicken," Shirota said.
Grandpa Shirota flung a box of napkins at him. "Just do it before Pete gets back!"
Shirota huffed and sighed and started stashing napkin-wrapped chicken wings around the room in various places, and Pi tried smothering his giggles behind the lumpy pillows. Kame wouldn't even look at Jin at all, no matter how many times that Jin tried to catch his gaze, and Jin couldn't tell if the other man was mad or embarrassed or a combination of both.
It was late when they finally got out of Mayfill Manor, and the sky was streaked with dark colors behind thin clouds.
"Someone shoot me before I ever get that old, okay?" Shirota said, climbing into the RV and slamming the door with impressive force.
"Shirota, this is a promise we can most certainly keep," Pi replied. He hopped into the passenger seat in the cab.
Jin climbed over the table and smacked his knee and sat down, hoping Kame was going to slide in next to him. Instead, Kame took the seat near the cab, so he wasn't near Jin at all, and put his headphones on loud enough that Jin could hear the music across the vehicle.
He spent a little while sulking until inspiration flashed outside the RV's small, round windows (that really needed to be washed).
"STOP," he yelled, rather suddenly, standing up with so much force that he banged his head on the ceiling.
"What on earth are you shouting about?" Shirota asked.
Jin just waved frantically towards the RV's door. "Pull in here, pull in here!"
Shirota did, but not without a lot of swearing and comments under his breath about how much he wanted to drive off and leave Jin there without a ride. Jin hopped out before the RV had even completely parked, and wasn't really surprised when none of the others followed him. The kid behind the counter was covered in pimples and looked like he'd rather be anywhere else, handing Jin's change back with grimy, slightly sticky hands.
It didn't take too long before Jin was pushing his way back into the RV with his hands full of the ice cream bowl, that the kid had filled too full. There were tiny tracks melting down the sides as Jin slid into the seat next to Kame and rapped his knuckles against the window to the cab.
"You can go now," he said, and Shirota gave him the finger before starting off again.
Kame stared at the ice cream Jin was holding out in front of him for a long moment, tugging his ear buds out of his ears. "What is this?"
"Chocolate with caramel and mochi," Jin said. "Your favorite."
"You bought me ice cream so I wouldn't be mad?"
Jin frowned and licked his thumb, where the ice cream had started to run. "No. I bought you ice cream because I wanted to. And because you make the best faces when you are eating something you really like. And because you didn't like the food at dinner and kept picking around things and I thought maybe you might be hungry."
Kame's cheeks got all pink again, color spreading all the way up towards the tips of his ears. He reached forward for the plastic spoon shoved into the mound of dessert and licked the ice cream off of it.
"Thanks, Jin," he said, kind of quietly.
Jin let him eat for awhile. Finally, Kame noticed him watching and offered the spoon out- the ice cream was pretty good, even if Jin thought it was a weird combination of flavors.
"Kame?" he asked.
"Mm?"
Jin swallowed. The sun was nearly set, and the whole inside of the RV was sort of glowing with the last of the day's light that filtered in through the windows. Kame's hair was curling at the bottom from the humidity, waving out and away from his face in the way that he hated and kept trying to straighten.
Jin thought it looked awesome.
"Can I kiss you again now?" he asked.
Kame just grinned and tugged at Jin's collar to pull him in. His lips were cold from the ice cream and tasted like chocolate, and when Jin's tongue made shy contact with the corner of Kame's mouth, he got a burst of residual caramel. Jin thought maybe Kame sighed, but it was hard to tell with how loud Jin's heart was hammering against his ears.
There was a sharp rap against the glass, and it startled them apart.
"GROSS," Pi was laughing from the cab. "It's about fucking time, you morons."
"Your face looks like butt!" Jin replied. His face felt hot, and he knew he had to be blushing like a complete idiot. He'd sort of forgotten that Shirota and Pi were right on the other side of the window.
Kame just ducked his head, scooping out another spoonful of ice cream.
"It's okay if you want me to hold your hand, sometimes, too," Jin told him, settling back against the seat. "I'll be manly and protect you and shit."
He wasn't really expecting the rest of the ice cream to end up smashed against his face, but Kame was laughing, so maybe it wasn't all bad. Plus, he could lick some of it off, and it was sweet and melting and reminded him of kissing Kame.
"Think he showed you," Pi cackled.
Jin wasn't going to give anyone the satisfaction of agreeing.