A/N: This story is exceptionally spoilerrific for everything up to and including the July 2010 chapter. This story represents a few firsts for me: it's my first piece for Skip Beat!; it's the first time I've written anything that so closely follows the loose ends in current manga canon (this takes place right after the events of the most recent chapter as of beginning August 2010); it's the first oneshot for a large and ambitious iPod shuffle project I've just opened (50 songs spread across 5 fandoms, whoa!). There will be 10 songfic oneshots for Skip Beat! I promise, not all of them will be this long and... heavy. This song is based on Pearl Jam's Present Tense, pairing is RenxKyoko, rating is T for language.

Regarding the naming conventions - While Kyoko refers to him as "Tsuruga-san" even in her thoughts, I've got Ren referring to Kyoko in his head as simply "Mogami." He seems to reserve the name "Kyoko" for when he's deliriously reminiscing about their briefly shared childhood. I decided to drop the honorific from her last name because I like the idea that he can't keep her that distanced from himself in his own head (and because I can't remember what anime!Ren calls her in his inner monologues - if anybody knows, please tell me!)

Anyway, thank you for reading! Oh, also? I own nothing.

do you see the way that tree bends?
does it inspire?
leaning out to catch the sun's rays
a lesson to be applied
are you getting something out of this all encompassing trip?
you can spend your time alone, redigesting past regrets, oh
or you can come to terms and realize
you're the only one who can't forgive yourself

Tsuruga Ren dropped his head into his hands and sighed heavily. He felt distinctly like an ass. Barely two weeks into this mission of theirs, and he'd already messed up twice. Not like Mogami noticed. She still had this phenomenally disheartening hero-worship thing going on. No matter what he did, how childishly or contrarily or poorly he acted, she assumed it was all tied up in some web of genius that she was too novice to comprehend. It made him want to yell at her, take it all out on her. I'm just a man, dammit! Don't burden me with your idiot expectations! Don't force your perfectionism on me! Except that Tsuruga Ren never yelled. In fact, even the person he had been before Tsuruga Ren wasn't really a yeller. And high expectations were what he thrived on. He lived for perfectionism – for the recognition afforded him by himself and others when he did a truly excellent job. He didn't know why she was so frustrating to him, couldn't explain half his reactions to her, couldn't fathom the intensity of any of them, didn't feel like he had the energy to try.

I'm just a man, dammit, he wanted to yell at her, right now. As if it were her fault. As if anything at all were her fault. Hell, she was the only thing holding him together. First, with the fight outside of Jeanne D'Arc, when she'd imposed herself like a wall between the man he'd become and the violence of his past. Now, when she inadvertently forgave him for crimes she didn't even know he had committed.

Filming so far had been riddled with problems in much the way that a rusted Ford parked on the wrong side of the Los Angeles tracks is riddled with bullet holes. The script itself was hard enough. The sets, the emotions, the director's aversion to CGI (requiring all the gory realism to be depicted in all its realistic gore by the actors themselves). The characters were each equally painful to portray; Ren was sure he wasn't the only one grappling with personal demons for the sake of this project. The final complication was, of course, that all the actors were playing double – playing a character, and playing a player. It was the nature of the beast, really, and the director's patience (and perverse, unrestrained affability) intimated that he had perhaps expected such issues.

Perhaps. Perhaps he had expected clashes of personality, or dangerous prima donnas, or maybe even an overenthusiastic injury or two. But Ren felt certain, quite guiltily certain, that the director had not expected a display such as he had just witnessed.

Cain Heel was an intimidating personage to the rest of the cast, not only for his unnervingly effortless portrayal of the murderous BJ. Cain was a huge man, with an alchemic temper – apathetic in general, transmuted into icy antipathy when either his sister (the trollop, the sleaze, the incorrigibly incestuous) Setsuka or his own brain-child of a character came under attack. The main female lead approved of neither.

The woman in question was of predictable Japanese-celebrity stature: small about the waist, better endowed above than below, thin legs tapering into well-turned ankles, a fine, small-featured face sporting large eyes of dubious genetic provenance. Ren had a feeling he knew who she was, but refused to search for her name in his mind. It was an act of actor's loyalty. An act the girl didn't seem eager to reciprocate. Either that or she was suffering from a serious case of character bleed. Ren was willing to believe either.

They had wrapped shooting on one of the bloodier scenes. Ren/Cain/BJ was ruthless. He OK'd on the first take, and was not patient with his opposite's repeated NG's. He loaded, cocked, and aimed, but it was she who pulled the trigger.

"Personally, I think the director OK'd you out of pure fear."

Cain's eyes narrow, his muscles tighten about his frame. The actress looks wicked, because she can see that he's taken the bait.

"Pure fear, you know. Pure fear of what you'd do if he let you shoot it again."

Narrower, tighter; wickeder.

"That wasn't even an act, was it? That was just you. Just Cain Heel."

Cain's blood turns to both ice and fire and he does not feel his hand tightening around a nearby prop – a crow bar.

"Must be easy to basically portray yourself, huh? That look in your eyes isn't acting. Nobody can act a killing like that. You're just living out your life here, aren't you?"

Crowbar raises; wicked eyes flicker at it; wicked lips part to grin; she's enjoying this.

"You're not playing a murderer. You are a murderer." Pause. "Cain."

Crowbar smashes, backswept, into a piling; metals buckle; high rigging quivers; ropes, wrenches, spare things fall. Wicked eyes acquire a nervous hysteria; she's loving this. Ren feels Cain give, although whether to BJ or to himself he isn't sure. His shoulders hunch, muscles coiling, and he advances a step. A dare.

She advances two. Double dog.

Double awareness of the surrounding atmosphere – the raw fear, the unrepentant voyeurism. Split reactions – she loves it, he feels his morals cave against old rebellions.

Then Setsuka materializes, in the other actress's face, staring down (her heels make her taller). Places a hand intrusively on the other's womb.

"My brother doesn't like you very much," she says, and somebody in the studio audience whispers an inquiry about whether somebody else is getting this. The whispers are lost to Ren/Cain/BJ, but he hears Setsuka's voice slowly, very slowly, and too clear.

"Which means I don't like you very much either." Her voice has dropped, but in the quaking silence her words resound. Her hand his slid up to the other girl's sternum, three slim leather-clad fingers between small leather-clad breasts. She leans forward.

"If you don't back off," she leans out again, "you'll get to see how scary I am." She smiles a long, thin smile, her chin cocked up and right, her eyes still down, straight down, piercing, and her lip ring catches the harsh studio light, reflects it menacingly.

Ren, at some point, has put the crowbar down.

Setsuka draws her hand back, turns sinuously with her hips, not her heels, short skirt hitching about torn stockings, metal things on her belly-baring vest -shirt clinking softly together.

She walks out, past Cain, trusting him to follow. She is not betrayed.

Ren sighed again, face in hands. The kicker, he thought, is that she didn't even deny it. That girl, expert at doing all manner of painful things with his heart, defeated (saved) him again, by the simple act of omission. She didn't shout, "My brother is not a murderer!" because, apparently, she didn't care. Setsuka loved him anyway. Setsuka, he repeated to himself. Setsuka. Not Mogami. She thought he was in character. She responded in character. She was perfect. Her loyalty and her trust, her dedication to the act. And he wanted to yell at her? It made him feel filthy.

The director was probably livid, and probably, as accused, afraid. A characteristic shared by Ren and Cain (although not by BJ), was an inconvenient habit of forgetting his own size and power. It bothered Ren that he had done so much damage to the set (he had overhead the gaffer estimating repair time – it was not an inconsequential number), especially because he hadn't realized it at the time. It confirmed his own suspicions. BJ was calculating in his violence. Ren, or the boy he had been (less so now, as a man, a character version of himself), was reckless and abandoned. It was his greatest sin, that abandon, that irresponsibility.

"Fool," he whispered, and the word was acrid on his tongue.

He sighed again, turned his head to face the line of trees visible from his perch, the fire-escape stairs down to the studio back lot. They were on location. He clasped his hands, rested his temple on his knuckles, closed his eyes, sighed again. Miserably.

-II-

Mogami Kyoko watched Tsuruga-san's folded form from a crack in the door to the stairs. She was worried, brows furrowed, utterly out of character with one hand balled and clutched against her heart. When Cain had gotten in that fight with the other actress, Kyoko recognized something: an air, an aura, that reminded of her of the near-fiasco at Jeanne D'Arc. Setsuka's beloved brother Cain wouldn't let such petty barbs get to him, but Kyoko had a nagging sort of inkling that the Cain Setsuka knew, the BJ the director new, and the Tsuruga-san she knew, where not the only people operating out of that singular body that she had to deal with.

It was the watch that had started her thinking. The stopped watch, the one that Tsuruga-san always wore, that she had never before realized was stopped. She wouldn't ask him about it, of course. Why would Setsuka need to ask? She probably knew already. So it rolled about in her mind, germinated, gestated. Kept her up at night. She began to understand why the President had called her a protective charm, and why hers was a "dangerous mission." It made her grimace, and fear.

When she had stepped into the argument, Setsuka was confident. She knew she could diffuse the situation, and that Brother wouldn't do anything violent while she was in the way. She knew the other actress didn't like her, that she had been pushing her buttons on purpose, and she was glad for the opportunity to shove back a little bit. She would have thanked Brother if she didn't need to give him a severe scolding about making a scene. That was, in fact, why she had hunted him down, up to the top of the back lot fire escape.

Stopped at the door, however, Kyoko was a nervous wreck. She would have bet her entire collection of cursed wax candles that the man on the stairs was Tsuruga-san, not Brother, and not the Tsuruga-san she'd grown used to dealing with since she joined LME. This was the same Tsuruga-san who wore his own personal watch into this act, maybe even the same one who stared in horror at nothing after almost smashing that seaweed-hair-guy's head in. What was she supposed to say to him? How could she possibly help him? Why should she think she could? Why would he open up to her? Dozens of little Kyokos wailed inside her head.

Then he turned his head to the trees and sighed again, eyes closed, and she thought, Look, everybody needs somebody to talk to sometimes. He talked to Bo, right? He might bully me, but if that relieves his stress, then I don't mind. Go, Kyoko! Go!

She creaked the door open, padded (graceful despite her ridiculous heels) down two steps to sit behind him. If he heard her, he offered no sign.

She followed the direction of his close-eyed gaze to the trees spreading upward to reach the sun, and thought of how happy they looked. She thought of the fairies (she couldn't help herself) that lived in their branches, thought of them as magic charms, thought of what they must have seen as they protected their tree homes (typhoons, earthquakes, the thousand slings and arrows of outrageous little boys). Thought of something so breathtakingly true that it had be said out loud.

She looked at his back, and made a gamble. When she spoke, there was an ethereal quality to her voice, because she was only halfway speaking out loud to him; halfway, she was speaking in her heart, to herself.

"You know, lots of bad things happen. Bad things happen to people or people do bad things to other people all the time. But, you know, bad things ends, and once they're over, that's it. They're over. I think that's how it should be. Over. I think people should be able to move on." And then, another thought, equally amazing, and it tumbled out of her mouth like the flickering iridescence off blue-purple stone: "Like Corn."

Tsuruga Ren lifted his head.

R&R is love! Also, there are some odd little references included in here. Hugs if anybody finds one :) Double hugs if it happens to be obscure :))