Title: Another Day at the Office
Fandom: JE/Hana Kimi
Pairing: Oguri Shun/Ikuta Toma
Author's Notes: Episode 2 of HanaKimi, plus that glorious little bit of information on Toma's Wiki-page - He and Shun Oguri had to kiss 12 times for the drama, Hanazakari No Kimitachi E. Oguri said that Toma's lips were very soft and it was actually the first time he encountered such lips - equals this fic. I've been trying to finish it for days and kind of just smashed out an ending to it tonight, so I'm going to leave this f-locked until I look over it properly in the morning. Then I'll decide if I'm brave enough to send it to the comms. But for the time being, I just want it posted and out of my life. If anyone on this journal's f-list reads this and has some sort of constructive criticism/comments/whatever to say, I'd greatly appreciate it.



If you were to ask any of the crew about it, they would say (some with exasperation, some with wry amusement) that it took them twelve takes to get the kiss scene in episode two right.

"It’s almost as if they were doing it deliberately," one murmurs absent-mindedly afterwards when recounting the day to his wife.

The first take, they don't even manage to touch lips. Shun bends in slowly, as Toma eases under him with wide eyes. Then, just millimetres away from contact, Toma pouts his lips like a fish and begins to make loud, smacking noises as he waves his hands next to his face like fish fins.

"CUT!" the director yells as half the film crew snickers loudly and Shun collapses on Toma laughing. Someone throws a paper cup at both of them.

The second and third takes are just a matter of bad timing and positioning. For the second, Toma eases a little too quickly to the left and Shun’s kiss lands on the corner of his mouth and skids off onto his cheek. The third, Toma is a little too far up, and even though he strains, Shun only manages to drop a kiss on Toma’s jaw.

"Cut! Ikuta-kun, could you please move a little closer to Oguri-kun before you both start to move…ah, a little closer...closer again, what are you afraid of? Yes, ok, that’s good, places people, 3, 2, 1...action!"

The fourth take goes beautifully - so well, in fact, it would have been the last of them, if Toma hadn’t landed on top of Maki and began to suffocate her.

Shun’s mouth lands square on Toma’s, and Toma manages to remember to keep his eyes open and his expression shocked as Shun’s mouth begans to move slowly and nicely against his own, which probably isn‘t in the script, but it feels pretty nice anyway. The moment is ruined when someone punches him in the centre of his back and he yelps in pain and jolts upwards, effectively ruining the take.

Maki looks up at him sheepishly, face flushed and hair awry. "Sorry!" she gasps, "but you were squishing me!" She’s promptly fussed over by approximately thirty boys wanting to know if she’s ok and four makeup artists trying to fix her hair.

Meanwhile, Toma turns to Shun and shrugs. "Sorry!"

"Mm, don’t worry." Shun is staring at him kind of strangely. "You know, you have really soft lips."

"Alright, let’s get ready to go again!" the director bellows before Toma can work out how he should reply to that.

The fifth take is, to put it mildly, awkward. Toma’s got ‘soft lips’ running through his head over and over again. Shun’s leaning in again, closer, closer, about to touch-

Softlipssoftlipssoftlipslipssoftsoftsoft-

All the air seems to freeze in Toma’s lungs and he flinches away from Shun. Shun, to his credit, keeps bending in, and Toma keeps flinching away until Shun finally, barely, manages to brush against his lips, so light it tickles.

The director has fallen back into his chair and is shaking his head, and Shun is frowning at him. "Cut, cut, cut, Ikuta-kun! Not the emotion we’re going for at all, we’ve discussed this! You look like you’re being sent to the gallows, not being kissed! Again!"

Take six. They shift back into positions. Toma pushes Maki aside. Shun leans in. He kisses Toma. Toma panics and pushes him off, so hard he falls into the table and four cups fall over.

"Um." Toma looks around at the film crew and his fellow cast members who are all staring at him. Shun‘s wincing and rubbing his back where he smashed into a corner of the table. "I’m. Can I have a break please? Just a minute or two?"

The director looks like he wants to cry. "Five minutes everyone."

He leaves the building. He starts to light up a cigarette, but stubs it out a second later when he realises it’ll make his mouth taste gross. Instead he crouches down against the wall and sighs, scrubbing at his face wearily.

"Are you ok?"

Toma looks up. From this low on the ground, Shun looks even taller than usual. “Um. Yes?”

Shun crouches beside him and begins playing with a pebble. “It’s not such a big deal, ok? It’s just fan service. You’re in Johnny’s, you should be a natural when it comes to that sort of thing,” and Toma can’t help but laugh at that. Shun flicks the pebble at him, mysterious little smile on his face.

He‘s trying to work up the nerve to ask Shun about the lips thing, when, "excuse me," they both look up as Maki sticks her head out around the door, "Toma-kun? Are you alright?" Her face is as serious as always, but her eyes are worried.

Toma smiles at her and stretches as he stands up. "Mmm, just fine Horikitty, sorry. I’m ready now."

They walk back to the set together and get back into position. "And- action!"

Take seven is where it starts to get a bit embarrassing. And take eight. And take nine. Actually, they’re all embarrassing, but seven is when it starts. Toma pushes Maki out of the way, gets himself into position, it’s just fan service, it’s just fan service-

But when Shun kisses him, instead of holding a look of shock and horror on his face, Toma closes his eyes. Shun’s a good kisser - maybe a really good kisser, he starts to think, begins to pull his co-worker and friend male friend, on set, male friend, on set in closer, then oh shit.

He breaks the kiss. "Um," he clears his throat. There’s silence on set. "So sorry. Won’t happen again."

Except it does happen again, in take eight and nine. By the time the director calls cut, some of the female staff are starting to snigger behind their hands, and even Shun looks like he’s fighting a smile. Someone throws another paper cup at him, then someone else, and then he’s buried under a hail of paper cups.

"Just in case you hadn’t realised Toma," Mizushima Hiro calls from across the set, "Sano is actually destined to wind up with Mizuki in the script. Not Nakatsu." There’s more sniggering, "What do they teach you Johnnies anyway?" The laughter following that is uproarious, and Toma is wondering if now would be a good time to try and laugh it all off, or spontaneously drop dead.

Shun leans in to whisper in his ear, "Next time, you could try kissing me back."

Death is probably the better option.

Take ten. Shun leans in. Toma thinks he’s probably going to dream about Shun leaning into him, over and over again. On some level he’s surprised that he’s not more distressed at the thought. He manages to keep his eyes open.

Shun slips him some tongue.

Toma is so shocked he bites it.

The director has to be taken outside for a cigarette and some comforting words from the producer.

Someone has put some ice in little bag for Shun, and he’s holding it against his mouth. Maki’s wandered off to run over her script for the next day. Toma sort of wants to cry. He imagines word of this whole day getting back to management, the agency firing him. Or worse, Matsumoto Jun tracking him down and killing him for mutilating his friend‘s mouth. He‘ll never, ever debut. "I’m so, so sorry."

"Aw’n’t ‘ee," Shun says, removes the bag of ice, "Um, that is, don’t be. I probably shouldn’t have done that."

"No, it’s ok," Toma’s fiddling with a hole in his jeans. "It was just a joke, right? I don’t know why I bit you."

Shun laughs. "I stuck my tongue in your mouth. If someone had done that to me without warning, I probably would have bit them too."

The director comes back in, looking significantly calmer than he did twenty minutes ago. "Okay. Okay. I think we might be ready to go again." He takes a deep breath. "Places everyone!" Maki magically reappears on set as everyone shuffles into position and smiles at them. Shun leans back and says to Toma with serious eyes, "I’m really going to kiss you this time, so please don’t bite me again."

Toma opens his mouth to protest (what happened to 'just fanservice'?!) -

"Action!"

It’s take eleven, and he runs through his lines almost automatically at this point, mind racing a million times a minute. Oh look, Nara pickles, Shun said he’d kiss me, was he joking, is he really drunk, push Maki out of the way, line up -

Shun kisses him, really kisses him, crushes their lips together and slips his tongue into Toma’s mouth again, licks at the roof of his mouth a little. He remembers not to bite it. Shun’s mouth is moving just the slightest bit against his, almost as if questioning him, and Toma finds himself beginning to respond just a little, then more enthusiastically. He’s got an arm around Shun’s shoulders already, so he just uses that to pull him in a little closer. For the first few seconds his shocked expression was perfect, but Toma’s sort of forgotten at this point that he’s supposed to keep his eyes open. They’re also supposed to lie half on top of Maki, but somehow they’ve fallen to the side without noticing, Sano on top of Nakatsu, Shun on top of Toma.

"Get a room, guys," and Maki smacks Shun over the back of the head. He breaks the kiss, then has the audacity to grin at Toma.

There’s silence, then one of the makeup girls wolf whistles. Most of the men, on set and off, look vaguely traumatised. The director stands up, sits down, stands up again. Clears his throat. "Look. I don’t know what’s going on with you two today, but it’s taken eleven takes so far for five seconds of footage. Please. Please. I beg of you. Do this for me. Let twelve be the one. Then you can go do whatever you want when we’re finished for the night, just so long as you don’t ever tell me about it."

They get back into position. Toma can’t stop shooting embarrassed little half-smiles at Shun (who looks as calm and unflappable as ever except the corners of his mouth are quirking up just a little) and feels like a bit of a dork. It’s not such a bad feeling.

Take twelve, they get it right for the cameras. Shun even sneaks a little grope in as he curls up beside Toma afterwards. They’d both probably agree that the previous takes were more fun though.

~

Ok, this next bit, I wrote first, then didn't want it anymore when I finished. But I didn't want to completely get rid of it either. I suppose you can think of it as an epilogue of sorts? Or a bonus feature? Or even just ignore it? I don't know.

~

The crew would be able to tell you about the twelve takes it took to capture one kiss. They wouldn’t be able to tell you about the thirteenth attempt, outside after filming had finished for the night.

Toma waves goodbye to the staff (some of whom clap and cheer, and he doesn’t think it’s because he did a particularly good job today). He’s leaving the studio through the back door when Shun catches up to him and grabs him by the wrist. "Wait," he says, then kisses Toma again, but chastely this time.

It feels like something just dropped into his stomach and he moves away. Shun looks calm, but his eyes are darting around nervously. "Was that a bad thing to do? I didn’t mean to embarrass you today or anything, and for a while you kind of seemed into it-"

"I don’t understand," Toma blurts out, cutting him off. It’s not the first time he’s kissed someone, and certainly not the first time he’s kissed a guy, but it’s weird anyway, because it’s the first time he’s been really kissed by a friend, and on camera. "But I thought this was ‘just fan service’. So I'm sort of confused."

"It’s just," and Shun has the decency to look a bit weirded out too, "you have the softest lips I’ve ever felt."

He imagines himself falling over like a character in an anime. He stands there like a lump. "What?"

Shun grins crookedly. "Your lips are amazing. But the rest of you is pretty alright too."

Toma wonders if he should laugh it all off or wish for spontaneous death. Neither option is particularly attractive if Shun is offering what Toma thinks he’s offering. "I’m going for coffee now," he says, slowly and casually, "want to come?" and Shun grins at him widely.

"And maybe we can practise some more? Just in case we need to reshoot the scene of course," he offers back, just as casually, and Toma struggles to hide a smile.

They stop counting after thirteen.