Chapter 2: Bad Reputation
warnings: angry men who use bad language, horny men who use their hands
Aizawa Tachi sank back down into his bad with a grateful sigh. In the room's doorway, Maa waited for his friend's nurses to finish fussing over him, helping to straighten out his legs and arrange the light cover over his lower body. ASK's former vocalist had a small private room in the physical therapy wing of the hospital, complete with a small window over looking the facility's garden. The view of the departing nurses wasn't bad either, and Maa gave an appreciative whistle as the last one left his sight.
"Man Taki, what do I need to do to get back in here?"
The younger of the two gave his friend a faint, weary smile and wiped the sweat off of his forehead with his sleeve. "Get run over by a car," he said simply.
Maa winced. "Right. Sorry."
There was an awkward silence between them. Such moments seemed to come more often lately, although they seemed to have begun back when Bad Luck was first on the rise. Maa hated those uncomfortable silences and suspected (although not without a degree of shame) that they were probably the primary reason he didn't visit his friend as often as he should. He shuffled self-consciously to the awaiting visitor's chair alongside of the window and sat down, but it was Taki who broke the silence.
The brunet's gaze wandered over to the window before settling on his friend. "Heard you're in competition for top host at your club."
"Yeah." Maa managed a smile of his own and gave his bleached locks a toss. "The competition's toast; they just don't know it yet. Their number one client has been looking bored and I think she's itching for someone with a bit more bite." He snapped his teeth and gave Taki a wink. The other man laughed in response.
"Good to know some things haven't changed." Chuckling some more, he leaned back in his bed. Soon after he became subdued again, eyes wandering back to his room's solitary window and falling back into silence.
The blond tried to play it cool, but he couldn't help the bit of concern that bled into his voice. "Hey man, you don't even have to work for it and you've got the hotties fawning over you. I'd hit that nurse of yours in a second!" When the only response out of the other man was a noncommittal grunt, he changed tactics. "Besides, Ken says you're set to be out of here soon."
That roused Taki some. "As soon as I get steadier walking with the cane yeah. My endurance has been improving pretty quickly, so the doc is optimistic. Another week or two he says is all."
"Hell, that's something, ain't it?"
Taki laughed again, but it was obviously not out of good humor this time. Instead there was a bitter edge to the sound that grated on both of their ears. "Something? Yeah it's fucking something; fucking pile of shit is what it is." The blond tried to interrupt, stunned at his friend's vehemence, but Taki continued on without allowing him to get a word in. "You wanna tell me what I've got to look forward to when I get out of here? Can't charm women with a cane and a limp and I don't have a daddy with his own store to run back to. What am I supposed to do, crawl back to my parents as some embarrassing lump? Try and get back into college? Damn it, Maa…" He put his hand to his forehead, another hysterical laugh winning free. "Seguchi did a pretty good job of screwing me over. Wrecking my career, my legs, breaking apart my band…"
That last part did it. Maa couldn't believe his ears, but that was probably due to the steam that had started to pour out of them.
" Your band? Your fucking band?" His voice rose sharply as he stood up. "Excuse me, but who was the one who got us together in the first place? Who had to convince you guys that we could pull it off? Who was it who worked on sweet-talking bar owners into giving us a chance to play their venues and when that wasn't enough pulled a night of bar-work for free in exchange for stage-time? You think it was easy convincing the art club to design flyers for us? I still don't know how I managed not to flunk every single one of my finals, but we all know it didn't really matter because after that I got to explain to my parents that I wasn't going to be going back to college after freshman year because finally - final-fucking-ly - me and my friends had a chance to make it!
"I did that whole sweat, blood, and tears shit Taki! I poured my fucking life into managing ASK because I believed in us. It was OUR goddamn band – yours, mine, and Ken's – that was the whole fucking point!"
"Sir! Sir!" The nurse whose backside the blond had been admiring earlier had run back into the room when the volume had risen to the point that it could be heard all the way down at her station. Fuming, Maa barely even noticed her until she tugged on his arm. "Please calm down! If you don't, we'll have to have you escorted off the premises."
The blond's hazel eyes sparked again, but Taki coughed, interrupting whatever the older man had been about to say. "I'm sorry."
That was all he said but there was something about his tone that caused Maa's shoulders to slump and his tension to fade.
The nurse breathed out a sigh of relief and backed away warily. "I'll leave you, but please do recall that this is a hospital and you're surrounded by people doing their best to recover." She paused by the door, wondering if she should remind them that visiting hours were almost over, but then thought the better of it and exited without further comment. Maa sank back into his chair, wearily covering his eyes with his hand. Taki swallowed.
"No, I mean it. I'm sorry Maa-kun. I just…" Frustration rose in his voice. "I'm tired and aching and frustrated, and none of those are any excuse for discounting you and Ken-chan like I did. So, I'm sorry." He looked down at his hands. When he heard a loud sigh and the scratching of a cheap plastic chair being moved closer, he looked up, meeting his friend's gaze.
"Taki… Just forget about it, all right?" The corners of the blond's lips had turned up. "I should know better than to snipe at you right after a therapy session anyways."
The other man returned the grin and silence stretched between them again for a few moments, but this time it was a companionable one. Maa reveled in it before speaking once more. He wondered if he should even bring it up, but if he didn't Ken would and besides, the mood in the room had relaxed, reminding him of their "good old days."
"You'll never guess who I ran into the other day."
Taki groaned out loud in a way that indicated he both knew what was coming and was more entertained than upset by it. "Which one of them was it?"
Maa's grin grew. "The guitarist. Of course." He rolled his eyes at that. He supposed it had been pretty appropriate that he had run into his own former counterpart that night. "Ken-chan ran off with his date and, from what I hear, they're having dinner together tonight."
That won a chuckle out of Taki. "What, Ken and Nakano-san?" he joked.
This time it was Maa's turn to groan and he looked around for something to throw at his friend. He ended up settling on the TV Guide, tossing it lightly at the brunet's chest. "No. Idiot." Snorting, he then leaned back in the chair and kicked one foot up onto the bed. "Actually, I've got a bit of a date with the redhead tonight."
"You ha – hol –wai – say what?" Taki had to hold up his hands and shake his head, brought somewhere beyond confusion by the blond's words. "Date?"
Maa laughed. "Nah, he's just meeting me at Benny's. Some girls were making a fuss over a stupid Bad Luck photo shot that morning and it pissed me off… I figured I could arrange a little trick for him tonight." At Taki's apprehensive look, he clarified his statement. "Nothing bad! Just embarrass him somehow. Get him drunk and in bed with some ugly chick or something like that." He shook his head. "Oh hell, I don't know what I was thinking. Seemed like a good idea at the time."
Taki rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "You were probably drunk yourself. Still… he actually agreed?"
"Yeah. No clue why." Maa shrugged. "Bored or curious maybe? His date was hot but he was completely zoned out on her. Hell, maybe he's on something?"
A slow grin was creeping over Taki's face. Maa frowned at it. It reminded him of some American cartoon character that played on the mall's television around Christmas time; a leisurely upturning of the lips accompanied by a light in the eyes that boded no good for anyone concerned.
"He your type?"
If Maa had been drinking right then he would have choked on it and the nurse with the nice rear-end would have had to been called back in to administer mouth-to-mouth. "What?!"
"Oh come on." Taki made a dismissive gesture. "Not like you've ever been shy about any of your preferences… or conquests. Remember that photographer from our Okayama shoot? Or the techie from our winter concert in Nagano? Or the interviewer from Rolling Stone? Or…"
Maa butted in before he could continue. "Okay, okay, you got me." Despite the abrupt interruption, the blond now wore a wide grin of his own, stretching from ear-to-ear. He obviously didn't particularly mind his friend listing off his previous dalliances. "So what makes you think i he'd /i be interested?"
Taki made a face. "He agreed to go, didn't he? Besides, the way Nakano was always attached at the hip to that brat vocalist of his when they first came out–" Maa noted idly his friend still couldn't bring himself to say Shindou's name – "I wouldn't be surprised if he had been halfway in love with him."
"Seriously, Taki? Seducing someone for revenge? It's the cliché to end all clichés. Anyone who's so much as seen a trailer for a chick flick would spot it coming from a continent away."
"By which you mean you can't do it."
"Hell no! I can do it! I'm just saying…" Maa ran his hand through his hair, realizing that Taki had just neatly tricked him into agreeing. "Damn."
"So you'll do it then." Taki was beaming like a little girl who had just gotten the pony she had always wanted for Christmas. Maa sighed, giving in.
"Yeah. I'll do it. No promises that I can break his heart and serve it to you on a platter, but I can at least mess with him a little."
Taki smirked. "Do your best."
Back in his apartment, Maa flopped down onto his bed, stretching out on his back and propping the pillow under his shoulders so that he could more easily flip through the magazine he had picked up. It was the same one he had taken from the schoolgirls and ripped into pieces just a few short days before. This time however he had purchased it himself as "research" material. He flipped the book open to the centerfold and studied it carefully. He had never paid too much attention to any of the band's looks before, so he had never noticed just how… striking his former rival really was. Comparing them, he decided with some satisfaction that the redhead was by far the prettiest one of the three.
Shindou was cute of course – wouldn't have quite so many fangirls if he wasn't. Fujisaki, too – he'd clearly inherited the Seguchi looks. But the vocalist and the keyboardist both held similar appeal: big eyes, rounded faces and button noses, and slender, almost girlish bodies. Nakano Hiroshi was different. His features were elegant and refined, framed by that wild, dark red hair that was even longer than his own. In Hiro's case, it wasn't the size of his eyes that dominated his face but their graceful shape and the calm intensity that seemed to lurk within them.
Maa touched his own locks idly as he allowed his eyes to drift closed, imaging how the redhead would look in the throws of passion. Those deep blue eyes would darken, that hair would be damp with sweat and clinging to his skin. He wondered how those long legs would look with the tight pants pulled off of them and then spread wide.
A faint groan slipped from the blond's lip; a surprise, but one he decided to roll with. He could see Nakano in his mind, spread out under him on his bed, and he was hard from the thought. Maa's eyes peeked open for another glance at the centerfold, focusing again on the guitarist as his hand crept down and stole inside his pants. The shirt in the picture was buttoned low, revealing an almost delicate looking collarbone. He squeezed his erection, keeping his strokes firm and even as his eyes closed again. God… The imaginary lips were parted slightly, the guitarist's voice no longer relegated to back-up vocals but instead letting out low pleas in his warm tenor.
It didn't take long for Maa to come, spurting into hand. He breathed out and withdrew his hand, wiping it on the magazine. As he settled back against the bed, a self-satisfied smirk crept over his face. It seemed like this dare would be even more enjoyable than he had expected. He shoved the dirtied publication off the bed, vaguely registering the dull thud of it flopping onto the floor. It could be thrown in the trash. Soon enough, he'd have the real thing and he'd take his pleasure from that before disposing of it similarly. It felt good to have a challenge again.
It felt really good.
Notes: Bad Reputation is performed by Joan Jett. My thanks to HawkClowd for her awesome beta skills. For those reading this, Hiro will return to the scene in chapter three.