A/N: Well…after feeling like I would never finish "Inspire Me", here I am writing a sequel :) This one I plan to write more of in advance before publishing it, so that (hopefully) you will have sections of a more complete story and I won't take like three years to release little trickles at a time. Anyway, this is more of a "teaser" segment dealing with some of the fallout from the last story, and I hope you like it :)

A big thanks to my readers who asked for this, and for new readers, as this is a continuation of an AU story (Inspire Me) I have written, I would suggest you read that one first

I've also been told many times that my spelling of the character names are "wrong"—sorry, but the way I spell them here are the way I translated them over from Japanese years before the English manga and official translations came out, so right or not this is the way I've been spelling them in my AU. Besides, since it is AU I can spell it however I want anyway :P

FYI: 50,000 yen is about 500 bucks :)

(Disclaimer: Gravitation is of course owned by the fabulous Maki Murakami not me, and no one is paying me to write this 3 to Murakami-sensei for her wonderful characters that I get to play with.)

ooo

Prologue: Tokyo Snap!

Watanabe Daiichi was in a foul mood. He had cancelled his morning meeting to stay back at his office at Tokyo Snap! Times when a call came in about an "urgent" tip relating to his current story—only to find that the moron who was supposed to meet him, a Kurozawa something-or-other, was now fully twenty minutes late. As if he had nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon but sit around in his office waiting for some punk! Sure, he'd been relegated to the entertainment section of what was admittedly a paper known less for its journalistic integrity and more for its outrageous gossip, but that didn't mean his work and time weren't still important!

The middle-aged reporter sat back in his desk chair, ran one hand over his balding head, and loosened his tie. Reaching for a pack of cigarettes, he looked down on his desk and at the big, blown-up photo of Shindou Shuichi which graced the front page of last week's entertainment section. In it, the singer was pictured fleeing his first major concert in a car driven by an unknown companion, completely blowing off his encore and dodging the press in one fell swoop. The photo had run the next morning with the trite caption which had made Watanabe wince: "The Rage Beat hits the street."

He lit up a smoke and, for the thousandth time, squinted his eyes and tried to figure out who the driver of the car was, and why the singer had run offstage yelling something indiscernible, which, incidentally, was the follow-up story he had been assigned to this week, much to his chagrin. No one who was connected to the band had anything to say beyond "no comment," a phrase which irked the reporter to the core. Didn't they know saying "no comment" was, in itself, a comment? They might as well just say "yes, there is a big, fat juicy secret we know, and we aren't going to tell you! So there." To be honest, it seemed to Watanabe that it was simply a cleverly planned publicity stunt arranged by the band's managers, to get the singer out of the cameras as quickly as possible after the show and to make sure that the audience was left wanting more, plan and simple. The week of rumors that had been circulating about the event seemed less like overkill and more like a complete massacre of any sort of worthwhile news. Watanabe butted out his cigarette and, in disgust, crumpled up the issue of Tokyo Snap! on his desk and tossed it into the trash bin, where, he reasoned, it was amongst good company.

At three o'clock, forty minutes late, the door to the reporter's office opened, and a tall, muscular young man entered, without so much as an apology for his tardiness.

"Kurozawa, I presume?" Watanabe asked, butting out his sixth cigarette of the afternoon and gesturing the chair in front of him.

"Yeah, that's me, Kurozawa Junichiro" the young man answered. He sat down, and, before Watanabe could open his mouth further, asked, "So it's 50,000 yen right? That's what the woman on the phone told me. I give you the dirt, you give me the cash?"

Watanabe chuckled, and shook his head. "While we do pay for sources of reliable information, I wouldn't say that we are interested in 'dirt', Kurozawa-san," the reporter replied, sitting back in his chair, knowing full well that that statement was bullshit. His section of the paper was nothing but dirt, no matter how much they tried to dress it up as respectable entertainment news. "But," Watanabe continued, "since you came all the way down here, you might as well tell me what you've got. You've signed the confidentiality and exclusivity agreement with Aiko out front?"

Nodding, Kurozawa reached into his pocket and pulled out the familar torn-out image from the very issue of the paper that Watanabe had trashed moments earlier. He placed it on the reporter's desk, and pointed to the "mystery driver" in the car next to the unmistakable figure of Shindou Shuichi.

"Can you see the head, here, how it's kinda blond?" he asked, a vengeful glint in his eye.

"So?" Watanabe asked, his patience wearing thinner. He had received no less than fifty tips by phone this week as to the identity of the driver, and was less than thrilled that he had to now deal with yet another wild claim in person. Eager to get this over with, Watanabe replied impatiently, "There are a lot of gaijin in Tokyo, and in case you haven't noticed, hair dye has become increasingly popular. Could be anyone."

"Well it could be anyone, but I know who it is. And that's what you are going to pay me for," Kurozawa replied calmly, unphazed by the reporter's attitude. "Shindou Shuichi and Nagano Hiiroshi were my classmates in high school, and a man named Uesugi Eiri was our literature teacher for a short time."

"Fascinating," the older man replied, resisting the urge to light up cigarette number seven.

"He was fired after he was caught having sex with Shindou. I think Shindou was a minor at the time, and the scandal led him to drop out of high school." Kurozawa finished triumphantly, leaning back in his chair with a cocky smile on his face. He had embellished his story, and he knew it, but as far as h was concerned anything he could do to get back at the asshole of a Japanese teacher he had last year was well worth it, and lying was not out of the question. Hell, for all he knew it could be the truth—he remembered as well as anyone else Shindou's crazy ravings in the school hall that day, even if there was no proof anything had happened, and even if he and many other students had been counseled to keep such things quiet in the best interests of the school.

Watanabe licked his lips and leaned forward, and replied, "And you are saying that this Uesugi is the guy who picked up Shindou after his concert?"

"No," Kurozawa said, folding up the photo and sticking it back into his pocket. "I'm saying that the guy who picked up Shindou was Yuki Eiri, the name Uesugi now goes by."

"Yuki Eiri the author?" Watanabe laughed, slapping his hand down on the wood of his desk. "Look kid, I've heard some tall ones in my day but you don't honestly expect me to believe that Yuki Eiri, the guy my wife and every other woman in this country moons incessantly over, used to be a teacher and was fired for banging some high school kid? A boy, at that?" Watanabe chuckled some more and shook his head. "Do you have any proof at all of this?" he asked, fully expecting the other man to leave the meeting right at that moment.

Kurozawa's cheeks reddened slightly, but he did not rise from his char. Instead, he leaned over and said fiercely, "Look, either Uesugi Eiri and Yuki Eiri are twins, or that writer is trying to pretend that what happened with Shindou Shuichi never happened. I might be some idiot to you but I never forgot that asshole's face."

The smile fell from Watanabe's face as he registered the possibility that Kurozawa just might be telling the truth. He exhaled slowly and reached into his desk drawer, counting out only 20,000 yen. He gut told him that Kurozawa actually believed what he was saying, and wasn't just out to make a quick buck by making up nonsense. And something about the man's story did make some sense. There was very little known about Yuki Eiri's past, and it was known that Shindou hadn't graduated from high school, quitting to sign a deal with NG. There was also the fact that the head in the car next to Shindou's was blond, and some of the fans at the concert swore they heard the singer scream "Yuki!" before he had fled the stage.

But really, without any proof…there was little Watanabe could do. He couldn't try to sink the careers of two of the most popular rising celebrities in the country on the say so of some guy who had just walked in off the street without a shred of evidence.

"Get out of here, kid" Watanabe said at last, thrusting the bills into Kurozawa's outstretched hands.

"Hey! You guys said 50,000," Kurozawa protested, rising from his chair.

"Kid, you're lucky you got that much for this cock-and-bull story. 50,000 is only for something I can actually print," Watanabe replied, shooing his interviewee out the door, making a mental list of who he would need to call first. If it was evidence he needed…well, he was out to find it.

ooo

"So he was fired?" the reporter asked, making notes in his notepad. The older man across from him, principal of the high school Shindou had attended, moved uncomfortably in his chair. It was now Thursday, less than twenty-four hours since Kurozawa had waltzed into his office with his crazy accusations, and in that time Watanabe had tried to dig up everything he could about Yuki Eiri, and, at every turn, had come up empty handed. Now, he was at Shindou's former high school, and he wasn't leaving until he could verify something of Kurozawa's story. So far, all he had gotten out of the principal was that there had been a teacher by the name of Uesugi Eiri, and that there had been some sort of incident with a male student. It was more evidence than he'd had this morning, and he was still sure that there was more here than Tanaka-sensei was letting on.

"No," Tanaka said, conceding the point. "Uesugi resigned quietly after I pointed out to him that it would be a better option than seeing his career stripped from him publicly."

"But the boy involved wasn't a minor? He was over eighteen at the time?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"And it was Shindou Shuichi? The boy at the centre of this scandal?"

"Scandal is a bit harsh of a word, Watanabe-san," Tanaka replied, smiling a fake smile. "After all, no wind of this was ever made at all public until now. The few students who might have suspected something at the time have either moved away and forgotten this or wisely decided it would be in no-one's best interests to bring this knowledge to public attention. Uesugi left the school, as did Shindou."

"So it was Shindou?" the reporter asked, making more notes.

Tanaka flushed, realizing he had let slip more than he planned. When he had been contacted by the reporter earlier that morning, he had decided that there really was nothing to do but meet with the man and attempt to do some fast damage control. But now that the interview was underway, conflicting instincts raged through him. He wanted to protect his school, and his own career; he had been the one to hire the teacher in the first place; how would it look if it were revealed that he had brought on staff someone who was tantamount to a pedophile? On the other hand, the image of Uesugi Eiri, now who he knew to be Yuki Eiri, so cocky and stuck up, brought to his knees by a media circus brought the principal a twisted sort of pleasure.

"So let me get this straight, Tanaka-san," Watanabe said, clearing his throat. "You are claiming that you had in your employ for a grand total of about two weeks a teacher by the name of Uesugi Eiri, who was, by your telling, an affront to the education system and who resigned after you threatened him with some sort of scandal. You don't have an employee photo on file from him due to his brief tenure here, and you also have absolutely no proof that this man is in any way connected to the author Yuki Eiri, other than your statement that he 'maybe looks like' him. Is that about it?"

Tanaka squirmed, hating the feeling of being the one being dressed down. After a long moment, the pleasing image of Yuki Eiri being turned into mush by the media overwhelmed his better judgment, and he cleared his throat and reached into the filing cabinet behind his desk.

"I told you that I did not have an employee photo of him on file," Tanaka began, slowly. "But I did not say I had no photographs at all. These are of the boy and Uesugi planning a meeting at the man's apartment. And, as you can see, the boy went. I think you can connect the dots on your own." He withdrew a manila envelope, identical to the one he had handed to Eiri on his last day as a teacher. Tanaka had, of course, kept it on file. Better safe than sorry. He spread the pictures out on the desk in front of the reporter, and watched the other man's reaction carefully. There, a bit younger-looking, and dressed in a school uniform instead of his trademark wild idol outfits, but yet…it was unmistakably Shindou Shuichi. And, pictured with him, beyond any shadow of a doubt, Yuki Eiri.

Watanabe sucked in his breath and then issued a small whistle. After a moment of examining each photo and making mental notes, he put the pictures back in the envelope and placed it back on the principle's desk.

"I don't suppose you'd like to tell me where these came from, Tanaka-san?" Watanabe asked, knowing full well that Tanaka had been obviously mounting a blackmail case against the teacher, for whatever purpose. He also knew that the photos were, on their own, rather innocent and open to interpretation. Yes, Shindou and Uesugi were leaning together in one shot of them together in the school hallway, but it wasn't really in any sort of suggestive way. Was Shindou simply a troubled student who his literature sensei was trying to help? Was the nighttime photo of the boy entering the apartment building a completely innocent coincidence? Hell, what proof was there yet that Uesugi had even lived in that building?

On the other hand, Watanabe knew that such logical explanations would mean nothing when the public got wind of the fact that Yuki Eiri, the popular new romance novelist who had made no details of his personal life public, could be connected to Shindou Shuichi. The fact that they were once teacher and pupil was gossip-worthy on its own, but the photos of them together and the implication of a nighttime rendezvous at Uesugi's home would be enough to fuel the fire, and combined with the mysterious blond in the driver seat of Shindou's concert getaway car…well, the story just oozed sleaze. Kurozawa had claimed that the pair had been caught having sex, and while that was completely unproven, he also knew that the public would come to that conclusion on their own.

In the end, it was simple to Watanabe: sleaze sold papers, and writers who sold papers got promoted off the gossip rags.

"If you honestly believed that this teacher was going at this kid, why did you just let him walk away from it all? Why didn't you have him brought up on charges?" Watanabe asked, his curiosity piqued.

"To protect this institution, of course," Tanaka replied simply. "The man left, as did the student. The students who witnessed the public outburst were counseled. No other victims were identified amongst the students; there was no need to alarm parents and spread a panic."

"So…about how much will you let these photos go for?" Watanabe asked, bracing himself for whatever sky-high price the principal would no doubt demand. "Of course, I will need the negatives as well."

"Of course," the principal replied, a satisfied glint in his eyes.

ooo

Watanabe left the school building, his excitement mounting. He had pictures, and he had witnesses, and he could place Yuki Eiri—no, Uesugi Eiri—at the same school as Shindou Shuichi. He was positive when he did some digging with the author's former name, he would uncover that the teacher had lived at the building Shindou was pictured entering. It was just a matter of time…

As he made his way to a telephone booth, the reporter was suddenly struck with yet another realization. The dedication of Yuki's book! Of course…how could he not have seen it earlier? "Bubblegum hair and purple eyes, eh?" Watanabe muttered, smiling as he began to whistle and picked up his pace. "Who would we ever know who would fit that description?" The reporter ducked into the first payphone he found and fed in his phone card, quickly punching in his editor's number.

"Midorigawa-san, its Watanabe here," he said, lighting up yet another cigarette. "I've been on the trail of our golden boy, Yuki Eiri. You know, the man without a past? Well, I just found it. And it's muddy as hell." Watanabe took in a puff of smoke and listened to his boss, and replied, "How muddy? Hell, muddy enough to get me off the gossip pages and into the real news."

ooo