AU Yeah! August 10: Secret Agent

School idol Yazawa Nico is already overwhelmed and underprepared

for her demanding high school life. And that's before she met that _

creepy girl in Akihabara who wouldn't leave her alone. Is having a _

normal life as the top idol in the universe really so much to ask? _ _

(AN At end of chapter)

Stop thinking about it.

Of course, you had to think about it to think about not thinking about it.

This was her stop. Too much brooding made her have to scuttle off. It was a hot day in Akihabara, but pretty soon, as she got closer to Nishikino Hospital, it would be shady.

Don't they get what we're achieving here?

Stop thinking about it! And no. Or they do but they don't want to use up all their free time making you a top idol.

It would do no good now, but she checked, and yes, she had Cotarou's dessert and Cocoro's old phone for him to play games on.

But it's so fun!

She had always thought there was some kind of feeling of a university research hospital about this place. But it had been good to their family over the years. They all trusted it now, unlike when her father had died here.

It was fun until you started having a show a week. Then it became an ordeal.

She had to wait for a couple in front of her, so she jotted a note in her pad.

"Takamatsu Fabrics is 7 pm today, right?" she asked herself, not loudly, of course.

Fifteen is a little young to be doing that.

"Yazawa Coutarou's Room, please" she heard herself saying. She was automatically showing her identification card.

Wow. My brooding's starting to put me on autopilot here.

It couldn't be helped. The more success their group had, the more the other two wanted out. What could be more frustrating?

I won't even say stop thinking about it, you're a lost cause.

It was touching how much Cotarou had missed her. He was being very brave, so Nico had to keep her composure, too. He was so happy to see Nico's rice pudding and the phone he could play games on, too.

They visited for a half hour, but Cotarou started to get sleepy. Nico pondered how she, Cocoro and their mother could take turns helping him convalesce as his broken leg healed. It would be hard. She'd have to cut and sew at home on her personal machine, which wasn't as good or fast. And drag it in to the main room to keep him company.

It beat being all by herself in the club room, she supposed.

Bam! Well, good for you making it 40 minutes. Perhaps there's a ray of hope.

Does everybody have self-accusatory voices that are this clear?

On the way out she noticed, as she often did, that the spare elevator was still out of service. Even though she'd never seen it be in service, it didn't look old or neglected.

She had asked the receptionist about it once as a child and her memory of that was somewhat jumbled. The receptionist had said there was no spare elevator, and when Nico had looked, it had been gone. Obviously, she was misremembering, but somehow she'd never got her courage up to ask again.

She put her pass in again as she got off at the stop for the shopping area Takamatsu's was in. The intersection here was a big one, and you had to watch it carefully.

Somehow, across the intersection, she picked out an unusual figure. A red-headed girl was staring at her. She didn't know why, but she was sure.

And you're staring at her. So go ahead, call her creepy, weird, crazy. It's only fair. She's thinking the same about you unless you can STOP STARING AT HER, IDIOT!

It was hard not to, given that same girl suddenly pulled out a device — it looked like a meter of some sort but was probably a camera — and pointed it at her. Nico had started crossing, so she was able to see a creepy smile on the girl's face.

I'm not creepy, she's creepy! Look what she's doing!

Look where you're going!

Nico concentrated on crossing. She only had to go right once to see the familiar doors of Takamatsu's ahead. Albeit under glass, every fabric they had was on display on the front of the shop. Nico had sometimes watched them changing out the fabric. Everything was attached to the backing board, so they could power-wash all the dust off at once. She saw a middle schooler going in that she thought she'd recognized, a girl who bleached her hair a kind of blonde-grey and seemed to be as in love with fabrics as Nico was. She wished she had real friends, and especially friends who she could talk about things like fabric with.

*Sniff*, *sniff*. Well, this is probably better than staring at strange girls.

Uh, she was staring at me. All I was doing was staring back to figure out why.

She was just speculating on where the girl could be when she grabbed Nico's arm and tugged her towards a spot under the stairs.

"Yazawa Nico."

Okay. Weird weird weird weird.

"I know about your current problems. Would you like to stop worrying about them?"

Weird weird weird weird.

Creepy and ethereal though she was, she was also almost perfectly beautiful. This whole encounter felt unreal.

"I am pretty. And if you kiss me, right now, you'll be lucky. If you don't, you won't."

Weird weird weird weird. That one was like she read my mind.

Or your, you know, stare.

"Ageha. Mimi. Rin. Yuzu. Names you recognize. You've been promising them something extraordinary. Sometimes, you even almost deliver."

She's more than weird, she's scary.

"Kiss me, Yazawa Nico, then see how it goes. I think the next time we meet you'll have a much nicer opinion of me than that"

She was beautiful, but Nico had never kissed anyone. It was such an outrageous request.

"Kissy, Kissy, Nico! What do you have to lose? Your current house of cards? Your hand's shaking, too,"

She's right, sadly.

She is right.

Nico shrugged. "You're right," she said. She leaned forward, resigned.

The girl didn't move to meet her, but spread her arms for an embrace and beckoned her forward with her fingers.

Their kiss struck Nico like a thunderclap. Her legs trembled so much she was almost leaning on the girl, who gripped her tightly. She licked Nico's lips and bit her lower lip, and then her tongue went in Nico's mouth. She pushed their bodies together, even lowering her hand to grab Nico's butt and pull her into her more tightly. When they finally broke, Nico was gasping for air.

"You've made the right choice, Nico," the girl said. She caressed the side of Nico's face and kissed her again, then turned around and walked away without looking back.

I'm proud of you.

I'm ... proud of myself now?

Yeah. Best first kiss ever.

Maki didnt think she had to put up with Kouanchousa-chou people, aggressively shadowing the Nishikino heir, this particular morning. Because, luckily, there must be something going on now that Naichou was involved in. She marched over in the direction of the typically well-dressed Naichou man reading the paper. The Nishikinos were old-fashioned, so Maki always kept some mail on her person that wasn't time-sensitive to mail when she needed a pretext. It probably wasn't by accident that he was sitting not all that far from the only public mailbox around.

The Kouanchousa pair probably had no wish to have Naichou complain about them. They'd just been bullying Maki, anyway, so they sheared off. Sure, the government would give a lot to know about Nishikino Hospital, but it wasn't like Maki was a Yakuza or something. And they had a track record of recruiting people for Naichou that had helped turn them into something foreign intelligence agencies respected and worked alongside.

She was grateful to Naichou because she wouldn't have to screw around all morning avoiding going to the hospital now.

"Takamatsu Fabrics is 7 pm, isn't it?" she heard a short, cute girl ahead of her muttering to herself. It was almost background noise. Her stance and expressions didn't signal any threat.

Yesterday, Maki had felt a strong pull, but the meter showed only a weak target. It turned out to be a boy with a broken leg.

"Yazawa Cotarou?" she heard.

Yeah, actually, that was him. Wait, that meant the person ahead of her ... but her meter wasn't working inside when she surreptitiously pulled it out. They were probably sweeping the hospital for intrusions again. But they couldn't disable her pull, so Maki closed her eyes. The pull was really strong. Thinking about it, she had a lead for a place and a time. She didn't even wait to talk to the receptionist, just turned and left. That woman would understand.

Maki pre-ordered ramen at her favorite shop, which was near the fabric store. While she waited, she pulled up the medical records for the girl and her family on her phone, then all her school records. The girl's blog about her idol group, too. One of the comments posted on the entry for their last show was that they seemed to be very tense with each other. A racehorse pulling with two mules wasn't a recipe for harmony, she decided, looking at videos of their performances.

She finished her ramen quickly after she felt the first stirring of a pull. In a way, she left a tip like a Westerner would. The owner ran the largest Paranormal Society in Japan, and she would chat him up for tidbits she could pass on to the government's Paranormal Division to give them a feel for what the amateurs were involved in. In return, she wrote her own tidbits from the Division to give the Society a leg up on competing groups. Everyone, including herself, was amused by her tips being actual tips.

She saw the girl get off at the regular stop and head towards her. From her stance and expressions, she would say she didn't have a boyfriend. In fact, she might not even have any friends. It wasn't just her training and abilities that made Maki recognize loneliness when she saw it. She also saw fatigue, stress, desperation, and a little fear. Maki smiled.

After the girl crossed, Maki pulled her aside. Might as well start with as much of the truth as she could handle. The lies could start somewhere down the line.

When, for the first time, she did what she had been, face it, born to do, it was the greatest feeling on Earth. She had to remember to give the girl a chance to breathe. Unfortunately, any more physical involvement would be for her pleasure, and that wasn't her job. Not here, and not now, anyway.

Nico wondered, idly, what being "lucky" would involve. At this point, maybe just keeping it together enough for one more live? The worst part of that would be they wouldn't go out with a bang, but a whimper. A mediocre performance for people to remember them by, and hard feelings all around.

This is probably how Icarus felt.

Icarus would have made a crap idol.

She deliberately took the feeling she had had kissing Miss Creepy But Oh So Hot and projected it out when she arrived and they began practicing. She wasn't going to look for things to get upset over, but the opposite. She was full of sincere compliments, and she felt like she had made a breakthrough in her ability to make fine observations of the other two.

It paid off, too. Not only did they all have fun for the first time in weeks, but when they looked at themselves on video afterwards - well, they'd been perfect. Synchronizing like they were reading each other's minds, pushing the envelope of their abilities on every move. Never falling out of rhythm by even a split second. Nico hugged both of them and smiled - a real, genuine smile they hadn't seen in ages, especially when they weren't even on stage.

"Listen, Mimi, Ageha. I told you I would probably cancel the one that would make it hard for Ageha because of the timing with her trip, right? But I also cancelled two others. So we have weeks to prepare before each of the two that are left, and we can schedule to fit you in. Lucky I did that, because the next day Cotarou broke his leg. I hope that makes up for the way I've been pushing you. I know it's been a lot more than you signed up for, and that's my fault. Are we all okay?"

Still mesmerized by the video, they assured her that they were. It wasn't just the feeling, almost like telepathy, as they coordinated their movements. It wasn't the way the music had gripped them and moved them physically where they needed to be. It wasn't just that they'd been perfect. It was that Nico had been more than perfect. It was like watching a wood spirit dance in a fairy tale. Just being part of it felt downright magical. And Nico hadn't been this kind since their first two weeks together. They didn't have to ask each other if they were shelving their plans to quit.

"The big deal here is, did we want five so-so shows, and then we disappear and no one ever thinks of us again, or do we wow them with two unforgettable shows, and everyone says, what are they doing now?"

As Nico asked that, she spontaneously hugged them both again.

"Nico-chan, do you have a boyfriend or something? You seem really up today," Mimi asked, puzzled.

Nico laughed and assured them she had no such thing. Ageha, who was more intuitive, took a risk and said, "Well, Nico-chan, that does leave another possibility nowadays. Is it possible you've acquired a girlfriend instead?"

What?

Nothing's wrong with your hearing, is it?

She looked at Ageha, thinking of the girl at the shopping center. "God, I hope not!" she said.

It was Maki's first report, so she approached it carefully and thoroughly.

Their top priority had to be defending the target, since right now, any criminal or agent could simply kill Nico and stop everything in its tracks and set them back years until they found someone as good. Her parents had decided that in the near term, Maki would be Nico's love interest and her trainer, and her bodyguard until she could fend for herself. To that effect, they had changed Maki's listed age to fifteen, and were moving her into Nico's high school as a transfer student from a fictitious cut-out school in Kyuushuu.

Holding back secrets caused vulnerabilities. She noted in the report that she was setting out to enjoy herself the whole way.

The target was several standard deviations out over their minimal requirements. Nico's profile had gotten her on a short list already. The performer types, the narcissists, the hysterics - actors, singers, idols - usually made the best agents. The line between their everyday mental architecture and a system of multiple personalities was usually a thin one. When you combined it with the kind of "extra" potential Yazawa Nico had, not even the sky was the limit. And there was no point forgetting that Maki herself had been planned years before she was born to be the perfect complement to someone off-the-charts like Nico.

She recommended Nico be allowed to keep the other four girls. The idol firm that was Naichou's toehold in the entertainment industry could try to recruit them, but that wasn't a matter for the hospital to concern itself with, she added. She just wanted Nico kept relatively sane as long as they could.

Nico, she thought to herself, You are definitely going to be the #1 something in this particular universe.

As Nico was passing by the home room for one of the other first-year classes, she heard a voice she recognized, but couldn't place, saying "Greetings!". She paused long enough to hear "Transfer student Nishikino Maki. I like to play piano and sing. I help out at my parents' hospital and -" As Nico heard that, the red-haired girl at the front of the class stared pointedly at the almost closed door where Nico was peering in - "I really like the other girls at Otonokizaka already. Please take care of me!" and bowed.

Shudder.

Shudder.

AN

Kouanchousa-chou:

Japanese equivalent of FBI

Naichou:

Japanese equivalent of CIA