Things really got interesting about a year ago, when ASK was picked back up by a recording label. Not NG, of course, that was completely out of the question at this point, but by one of their rivals. Even Tohma Seguchi can't control everyone in the media, after all, and it seemed as though there were one or two companies whose presidents held grudges against the man.

It was their original recording company that took us in under their wing. Nittle Grasper hadn't left Suchu Recordings amicably; in fact, their president told us that they'd had a lengthy court battle over the terms of the contract. It was revenge on their part, and I was just peachy with that.

The president liked our sound, and with Tohma Seguchi blacklisting us, he'd decided that ASK needed to be given a way back into the industry. For the sake of our fans, of course-- we all understood that the company wasn't investing in us, just our fans. Well, that was how companies worked, after all, follow the money.

I was very glad that we had become successful before I tried my stunt with the novelist. I think Ma and Ken might never have spoken to me again if we'd been tossed out of music for good. Of course, it was partly Ma's fault, too, ratting me out like that.

I don't blame him though, not really. He'd only been trying to protect me from myself. He even told me not to do it, but good advice never rings true. If I'd managed to shoot the author, I think being run over by a car would have been the least of my worries. Seguchi was harder to deal with than a cop.

Smarter than one, too.

But none of that mattered. I was going to get him. I was going to be a big star again, and ASK was going to show that stupid little upstart group Bad Luck what music really meant. ASK was going to show Tohma Seguchi that he'd made a big mistake in choosing them over us.

Everyone knew why it happened, even if no one was brave enough to say it aloud: Bad Luck was chosen because Shindou Shuichi was sleeping with Eiri Yuki. Stupid, right? I mean, what kind of person bases their business decisions on who's sleeping with whom?

It wasn't fair, and everyone knew it, but everyone was too scared of Mr. high-and-mighty Seguchi to say anything about it.

At any rate, we were pretty quick to start on our new record. It was like all that time off really stimulated our creativity. Ma and Ken acted like the whole thing was a dream come true, but for me... well, I felt as though there was something missing. Something off about the whole thing. Not that Suchu was a bad company, by any means! No, Suchu gave us all the support and care that NG never bothered to give us.

No, it was-- press conferences by Bad Luck, Seguchi standing right behind them, like he used to do for us. Was I jealous? Maybe, I don't know. What I do know is that I couldn't stand the sight of him standing there, all powerful supreme lord of the music industry, backing a bunch of losers like Bad Luck.

I couldn't stand it! Not when he'd pushed me into traffic. He shouldn't have had power any more. Shouldn't someone have taken it away?

I didn't have high hopes for the cops, of course. The police have always been incompetent, and people like Seguchi have always managed to squirm out of any charges the police actually manage to lay by paying off the legal system. It doesn't matter if it's legal, getting a high priced top lawyer is a little different from getting some run of the mill guy off the queue from a big chain of lawyers.

No, even were I to report the incident, I had no doubt Seguchi would be left unpunished for his crimes. So what was I to do? I did the only thing I could do.

I planned for my revenge.

It wasn't perfect, no, but it was a step in the right direction. All I needed to do was get into that apartment, and I could plant my little device that would tell me when they were both out so I could come for the followup visit. Hell, I could probably do it while they were... otherwise occupied, except that I did want to put them in every room.

I wanted them both out of the house for enough time to do my thing.

I knocked on the door, perhaps a little more loudly than I should have. Not entirely in character. It didn't get any results, so I tried again, and again a moment later. Just as I was about to try the fourth time, the door swung open.

"Surprised anyone still knocks..." he muttered. I filed the information away while his eyes narrowed. Suddenly, I remembered why I was afraid of this guy. "Taki Aizawa." It was that same self-satisfied sneering tone he'd used when he'd come to get the film out of my hands. I half-wondered whether or not looking at those pictures made him hot and bothered, before deciding that I really didn't care. "Shu isn't here," he said with a hostile little smile.

I took a deep breath, and looked along the open air hallway to see if anyone was there, then went down on my knees and bowed to the bastard, forehead to the ground. "I apologize," I said formally, respectfully.

The silence lasted for over a minute, only the sounds of breathing showing that either of us were there at all. I didn't dare move, lest I disturb his thoughts and make him reject me out of hand. Finally, I risked a glance up. "Get up and tell me why," he said as soon as I had.

I stood a little uncertainly. "What do you mean, why?" I asked. "You want me to give you excuses?"

"No." He took out a cigarette and lit it, taking a deep drag. "Why are you apologizing?"

Ah. A flaw in my plan, I hadn't expected anyone to ask that question. But I could think on my feet. "I felt it was time; I'm starting a new career, and I thought I'd make a fresh start. Apologize to the people I hurt the last time around..."

He took another deep breath of his cigarette and blew it at me. "No..." He leaned against the door. "He won't sleep with you," he said. "Ma, that is." I swallowed. He laughed. "Come in, Aizawa."

I walked in, feeling successful and nervous at the same time.

"Sit down, Aizawa." He was playing with me, I would have heard it in his voice even if I'd been blind to the humourless smile on his face. It kept me on my guard, but I sat down and tried to put on a face that showed him I wasn't intimidated by him. Well. Not very intimidated.

"Tea?" he asked, that self-satisfied smile still on his face.

I squirmed. His grin widened and he padded off to the kitchen.

Now was my chance. I slipped a hand into my pocket and put the bug on the underside of an end table. "So," I said, "I had to apologize. I did some very bad things in the past, made some very poor judgments, and I--"

"Shut up." He bought the tea over to me. "Drink."

I took a sip. What the hell was he doing?

"I wonder," he said, eyeing me with those killer's eyes, "how sorry you actually are."

"Ah... very sorry. Extremely sorry."

"You want me to call Tohma Seguchi and ask him about your band?"

I blinked. "What?"

"Everyone wants something. You and Ma want your band back, right?"

"No, that's not why--"

"You should try to be more convincing." He sat down and picked up his phone, dialing a number without hesitation. "It's me," he said after a moment. "You busy?" He smiled at me again, one of those ruthless smiles. "Aizawa's here. I think he wants to start his band back up." His smile turned into a smirk and he tossed the phone to me. "He wants to talk to you, Tacchi," he said, his voice lilting like the sea.

I put the phone to my ear, rather worried. I hadn't intended to talk to Seguchi, at least not yet. I gave a little unconscious bow as I began to speak. "Ah... I only came to apologize to Mr. Yuki. Please forgive this phone call, he must have misunderstood my intentions..."

There was utter silence on the other end of the phone. I waited in horror for a whole minute. If he thought he needed to, Seguchi could still manage to screw my band up just by making sure we couldn't get on any stage in Japan.

"Hello?" I asked, when the waiting got too bad.

Still, nothing was said from the other side of the phone. Yuki stood up and snatched the phone out of my hand and hung it up. "Looks like my brother-in-law didn't want to talk to you after all, Tacchi. Neither do I. There's no forgiveness for what you did to my Shu." His smile disappeared, as he apparently remembered what exactly I'd done. He stood and walked to the door, opening it and motioning for me to leave. "Good bye, Aizawa. Go and don't come back."

He hadn't called Seguchi at all, I realized.

I stood, hiding my smile. He wouldn't be telling the head of NG about my visit. That was fine with me. It made things much easier. I walked out, ignoring his beast's eyes. I turned at the door to face him, intending to give him a final apologetic bow, but he slammed the door in my face.

Good enough.

With that, I headed off to the studio. I had a recording to make with Ma and Ken. Stifling Secrets. A story in song of revenge, hatred, destruction. I figured it was going to be a hit.

It was a hit. Even Tohma Seguchi couldn't take that from us.

What he could take, unfortunately, was every single live venue we wanted. We ended up singing in a bunch of tiny Tokyo nightclubs for almost a month, fans packing the places until they were fire hazards. He filled what should have been our concerts with Bad Luck and Nittle Grasper and other little nothing bands that, had they gone up against ASK back when we were at NG, would have never managed to get a single live presentation. Such was his hatred for us.

It hardened my resolve.

There weren't that many ways to get through to Seguchi, to really hurt him. One was through Nittle Grasper, another was through business, and the last one was through Eiri Yuki. Nittle Grasper was a tough egg to crack, with the lead singer being crazy-- if the people of Japan didn't mind him crazy, how could I do anything that would make him less popular there? NG Records, well, ASK's comeback would be revenge enough there. But ASK's rising popularity wasn't enough, and I knew that.

So when my first opportunity came up, I picked the lock on Yuki's apartment and put up the cameras. I hid them quite well, if I might offer my own opinion on the matter. I put them everywhere: one in the overhead light in the bathroom, another lined up with their bedroom, one in the little office with the computer in it-- oh, and I was tempted to take the computer, but I settled for an image of his personal files on the hard drive copied onto a memory stick.

The kitchen was an interesting surprise. Someone kept their medication here. Pantoprazole, Moclobermide... I took out a notepad and jotted the unrecognizable names down, along with the proscribing doctor's information on the bottles of pills and bags of powders. Sadly, none of the stuff looked illegal. I wasn't averse to dropping some drugs in the apartment, but putting them in jail for trivial reasons seemed like something Seguchi could help them with.

I closed the cabinets and set up my last camera, then looked around and made sure that I hadn't knocked anything out of place. When everything looked as it should, I left. I set everything up to broadcast itself to a private network that I'd set up through an internet account in Hong Kong. They could trace it to me if they tried, but I'd know they were trying, and I'd cut it off and deny everything.

Every night for a week, I'd go home and study the videos that had been made in fast forward. They were never interesting. Yuki would invariably say something to Shindou that caused the singer to cry. The singer would go off and sulk, and when he returned, which he always did, they'd have passionate make-up sex. Seguchi came over once. I played the video at a normal speed when that happened, and found myself getting insight into the man.

The conversation touched on the medications I had yet to research, leading me to believe this was a chronic condition of some sort. Seguchi looked so very worried about his brother in law. "Eiri, I don't think you're thinking this through. A tour can be very stressful. You can't just hide in hotel rooms. It's constant traveling, and--"

"Are you going to forbid me?" asked Yuki, taking a long drag from the cigarette that only seemed to fall out of his mouth when he was in bed.

Seguchi looked extremely uncomfortable, even through the cloudy camera picture. "I don't think anyone can force you into anything, Eiri," he said uneasily. "All the same, even Shuichi would agree that you should not put your health on the line to accompany him on a tour."

I decided then and there that I was going to fuck with his medicine. I hoped he had something terminal that the medicines were keeping at bay. That's just the kind of man I am.

"I'm not letting him go off on his own for a month. Idiot would get himself trashed every night and call me to complain about his hangnails." He took another puff of the smoke. "And I can't just ignore his calls either, because then he'd do something really stupid."

I have to say, the man was a smart one. Shindou'd never be able to handle himself on a real tour of Japan. I wondered why Seguchi hadn't given us that chance, because I knew that we'd have done better, then decided again that it was another example of family connections being more important than talent.

"Mr. K wouldn't let him--"

"K is just a manager. He can't be responsible for a brat like Shuichi."

Seguchi shook his head. "When a band is on tour, a manager is more than a manager. Mr. K will take care of him." Yuki leaned forward and tapped the ashes off his cigarette, raised it, then appeared to think better of it and put it out. "Mr. K has guns if he tries something stupid."

"I suppose."

Seguchi nodded. "I'll drop by again later," he said, standing. "Please take care of yourself, Eiri."

The man in question raised a hand in a dismissive wave and lit another cigarette. I hoped he had lung cancer.

When Shindou came home that evening, their makeup sex was worse than ever, all that pounding and kissing and sex. I took a copy of it for my records before I wiped everything clean for the next week of recordings.

It wasn't until Shindou was gone that I got the chance. I went in with sugar pills and bitter powder and I switched his medications with placebos. It took all of ten minutes, and when I was done, I bugged the phones for good measure. I probably shouldn't have bothered: Yuki was amazingly accurate about the nature of Shindou's calls while on tour.

The brat managed to behave while on his tour, mostly. Only one night of over the top drinking. I guessed his manager must have put a stop to that, given the way he complained about this Mr. K to a bored Yuki. And every day, Eiri Yuki took his medicines and looked a little less well.

One day, my surveillance tapes showed him going out for some groceries... and he didn't come back.

I was so very disappointed to hear of my rival's misfortunate cancelled tour, I said to the cameras when they obnoxiously brought up the subject. I understood his reasoning, but I, of course, would never disappoint my fans and leave them just for my own selfish needs.

After that, I learned very little for a while. You can't just get into a hospital room and plant a bug, after all, and I had a high profile. It wasn't like the lead vocalist of ASK could just go charm the nurses like I'd done as a teenager.

So I hired someone. A former cop, working as a chef in a 280 bar for his day job (though really, it was a night job), one Mr. Yasu. I didn't quite know why he'd quit the police force, and I didn't much care. Hell, I didn't even want to know any more about him than his family name. In retrospect, I suppose this was a mistake of some sort, but I wouldn't know that for quite some time.

Hindsight is 20/20, or something to that effect. I read it in the make-believe and fancy talk that Eiri Yuki publishes. Cool, I think it was. Pity the only things Seguchi publishes are foolish love songs and dry financial statements.

Know your enemy. That's in Sun Tzu.

At any rate, I had Yasu check out the hospital, to find out if Yuki was dying or just sick. Turned out all I'd done was aggravate his ulcers. The doctors were running tests to check out the possibility of a malignant cancer, since he'd been on medication when he'd started getting sick again, but I doubted I'd be so lucky.

Yasu did find out that pretty much everyone was angry with Shindou for postponing the tour. Yuki was giving him the same kind of harsh words as usual, except that he was forced to stay in hospital so there was no make up sex. I didn't quite know how to use the fact that they were mad at my singing rival, or at least, I didn't at first.

By the time I figured out that I could have used it to break my rivals apart, it was too late, and they were back out on tour.

The worst part of it was that Tohma Seguchi had decided to do a thorough inspection of the Yuki/Shindou apartment. He most definitely was not pleased to find that the medicine had been swapped-- I knew I should have gone in and switched it back when the man had fallen ill, but I just hadn't had any time. He found my cameras, too. No great loss, of course, I just went off and did the fallback, making sure the Hong Kong company removed my name for a very high fee (working for a band isn't necessarily lucrative, and it cost me almost all of my free cash.)

All this meant that suddenly there was security around Yuki, and heavy security at that.

There would be no more surveillance videos, that was for damned sure.