Spotlight

Author's Note:
Skip Beat! and its characters belong to the creator Nakamura Yoshiki.

Skip Beat! is serialised in 'Hana to Yume' magazine (Hakusensha) and licensed in English by 'Shojo Beat' (VIZ Media, LLC).

The work below is written in the spirit of fan appreciation.
UK English has been used throughout.

This one-shot story was written for the Kyouko/Ren week held on Tumblr.

Kyouko didn't react to the hubbub at the back of the studio. The camera was still rolling on the last scene of the day and Natsu was in the middle of delivering a particularly nasty speech to her friends about her new plan of attack. She stalked out of the 'classroom' at the end of her speech and into the unfinished fake school corridor not visible to the camera. As soon as she was out of the spotlight, she sagged. Natsu was wearing on her a little that day. The amount of vitriol that she had to dig up from within her to embody Natsu looked great on camera, but these days, now that Kyouko herself had begun to settle and no longer ran on a constant supply of grudge energy, she found the expenditure of malice to be rather draining.

As soon as the director called 'Cut', Sudo-san followed her out of the set.

"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!" she whispered.

"What is it? Is something wrong?" asked Kyouko.

"It's Tsuruga Ren! He's visiting the set. Oh my God, why is he here? Do you think he's going to do a guest appearance? I haven't heard anything about it!"

Kyouko figured that if he had been hired to appear on Box-R, he would have told her. "I don't think that's it."

"Then why is he here?"

That's what Kyouko wanted to know. As far as she was aware, he would have only returned to Japan from his second trip to Guam a few hours before. Why would he come here first instead of LME? Oh no, did I do something wrong in my portrayal of Setsuka Heel the other week? Did I cause him trouble? Is he here to tell me off?

Kyouko took a few deep breaths to steady herself. Sudo-san seemed to be doing the same thing. Oh. She's one of his fans, she thought.

Sudo-san rushed back out into the main set. Kyouko squared her shoulders and followed the other girl. She wouldn't jump to conclusions. There was no indication yet that Tsuruga-san was there to tell her off, or that he was there to see her at all.

Tsuruga-san had affected the cast and crew, particularly the girls and women, like a super-magnet in a cutlery showroom. He stood in the middle of the crowd with his polite smile on, nodding and giving short answers to questions. All the while he looked over the heads of the people surrounding him, searching for someone in particular.

Then their eyes met. Kyouko's stomach flipped as he stopped scanning the set and continued looking at her. She barely even noticed that he pushed through the crowd and began walking her way.

She was painfully conscious of every pair of eyes in the vicinity turning to her. She stood straight as she could and then began to bow to him, intending to give him a polite "Gokurou-sama deshita" for his work in Guam.

"Wait," he said as he threw up a hand to stop her. "Don't drop character. I've been curious about Natsu for a while. So long as no one else minds." He looked around at the cast and crew to a murmur of assents, and a sea of smiles and nods.

Kyouko froze. It took her a few moments to change gears. She had to use her last-resort character change gesture — reaching up to 'grab' the Natsu spirit out of the air and then tap it into her chest. Then she shifted her stance into one of the model poses he had taught her. "Hm, is that so?" she said languidly.

A light flared in his eyes. For some reason, Kyouko thought of a fighter issuing a challenge. He stepped up into the classroom stage under the bright stage lights, which hadn't yet been turned off, and pulled a chair out from one of the desks. He swung a leg over and sat on the chair backwards. "Yeah, give me a demo."

Challenge accepted.

She walked slowly across the stage, eyeing him from top to toe with Natsu's piercing gaze. She allowed her eyes to linger on places she usually never dared to look when his attention was on her. Natsu wouldn't care if she was caught eyeing up a man. Inside, she was spinning in place, trying to get traction. She hadn't yet had a chance to play Natsu off an older, but not that old, man. In the drama, she only interacted with school students and teachers. How would Natsu react to a man like Tsuruga Ren?

"You're pretty bold, just stepping on into the classroom here," she said. "Are you lost? Trying to make your way to a parent / teacher meeting?"

"Do I look old enough to be a parent of a high school student?"

He eyed her up too. She couldn't believe it. He was actually looking at her legs as he spoke. What kind of character had he created? Because she was sure now that he hadn't stepped onto the set as Tsuruga Ren. In those few moments between when he'd issued the challenge and she'd accepted he'd thrown together a character. But who was he?

"Someone's older sibling, then. Who are you looking for? Let me know." She sat sidewards on the desk in front of him, crossing her legs in a way that was superficially demure but which displayed a large swathe of thigh to him. "Maybe I could ... help."

I can't help but play it this way! thought Kyouko. Natsu doesn't back down from challenges, and she'd interpret a hot guy objectifying her as a challenge!

"I'm looking for Kitagawa Natsu. Are you her?"

She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket out of his view and flicked it to silent mode. "Who's asking?"

"That doesn't matter. Are you Kitagawa? The girl who thinks she's judge, jury and executioner in this class?"

Kyouko pursed her lips. "You're someone's boyfriend, right? Your girlfriend has been telling tall tales about me to justify her own feelings of inadequacy, and you've run here in White Knight mode to protect her." She smiled, not letting the smile reach her eyes. "You've heard a one-sided story." She pulled Natsu's lip gloss and mirror out of her skirt pocket and reapplied the makeup. Still looking at herself in the mirror, not him, she said, "Are you quite sure you're happy being with a girl so juvenile she'd sic you like an attack dog on a classmate she had a little disagreement with?" She looked at him out the corner of her eye. "Are you sure you're not just here because you'd do anything, no matter how silly, to avoid being alone?"

She put the lip gloss and mirror away while she watched his hands tighten on the back of the chair. She shifted her thighs as she did so, bringing his attention to her legs again. This is what Natsu did: she was a keen observer of human nature, but she used that power for evil rather than good. She figured out what made people tick and then used it against them. But Kyouko didn't know this character of Tsuruga-san's well enough to do that.

She did know Tsuruga-san, though.

"Or maybe you're thinking that if you do enough things that will please her, she won't notice that you're damaged goods; just another rage-filled, broken, petty man."

Colour drained out of his face. He jumped up out of the chair. "What's wrong with you? I ought to—"

"Uh, uh, uh," she said. "You do anything at all to me, or say anything at all about our encounter, then I'll just have to make sure your girlfriend sees this." She held out her cell phone to him, showing him the photo she had taken. She was quite impressed with what she'd managed to capture, even though she had been hiding the cell phone from him (but not the watching cast and crew): him, clearly ogling her legs. "How happy would she be to know that you came here and eyed me up?"

He grabbed for the cell phone, but she slipped off the desk and danced out of his reach. She tut-tutted. "You shouldn't bully girls. Besides, I have my camera set to automatically backup to the internet. Even if you delete this copy, I'll still have it."

"You don't even know who to send that to."

"Hm. I guess I'll just have to send it to everyone then. While asking if anyone knows the creep who was lurking in our classroom perving at young girls."

He gritted his teeth.

Kyouko gave him a sweet smile. "Buh-bye, mister!" She waved.

Tsuruga-san stalked off the set into the dark back area that represented the hallway.

The applause of the watching cast and crew brought Kyouko back to reality. She figured the scene was over now and she could drop character. She bowed to everyone, but something niggled at her as she did so. Tsuruga-san had walked towards the back of the set and hadn't yet emerged. Kyouko ran the lines she'd ad-libbed through her mind. Oh no! she thought. "Sorry, excuse me," she said to no one in particular. Then she ran after Tsuruga-san.

He was sitting on the floor in the furthest dark corner with his knees up and head in his hands. Kyouko approached him slowly and knelt on the ground before him.

"Tsuruga-san?" When he didn't reply, she folded over into a dogeza, resting her forehead on the ground between his feet. "I'm so sorry. Please forgive me."

He didn't say anything at first. After a long moment she heard him move, then he pushed her by her shoulders into a sitting position. His eyes looked a little watery, but it was hard to see in the gloom.

"Don't apologise," he said. The tears he was fighting made themselves known in his voice.

"But I just hurt you, didn't I? Very badly, it looks like. I didn't mean to do that. It's just—"

"It's OK, Mogami-san. You know your character well. You said what she would have said. You did what she would have done."

"But I used her techniques on you, not your character." Tears pricked at her eyes. "I used the things I learned about you during the Heel sibling act to hurt you."

He sighed and hung his head. "Come here," he said.

"I'm already here." She was kneeling between his feet. How much closer could she get?

He reached out and pulled her into his arms. She wasn't expecting it, so she face-planted into his chest with her butt in the air. She shifted her lower body to the side to sit on her hip between his legs with her upper body leaning against his chest and her head on his shoulder. She was still totally off-balance and would need his help to extricate herself from his embrace. Her heart thudded and heat suffused her face. Was it her imagination, or did his heart beat similarly fast?

"I missed you," he whispered into her ear. "I was worried about you. You had that meeting with your mother, and then soon after I had to go back to Guam and I couldn't help anymore. Are you OK?"

"Y-yeah. I'm OK. Are you? Was Guam OK?"

"Yeah, we got everything finished. I'm good."

"That's good."

Kyouko's heart thudded even harder when their brief conversation ended and Tsuruga-san showed no signs of letting her go.

"U-um," said Kyouko.

"Shhh." He rubbed a hand down and up her back, similar to how he'd held her the night she had cried all over him, but this time he seemed to be soothing himself with the gesture.

"But the others ..."

As if on cue, Sudo-san walked into the backstage area, followed by the director.

"Hello?" called Sudo-san.

"Kyouko-san, Tsuruga-san," called the director. "Are you still here? Oh!"

"Oh my God!" cried Sudo-san. Her jaw literally dropped.

Kyouko jumped and tried unsuccessfully to push herself away from Tsuruga-san. "It's not what it looks like!"

"I'm sorry, you probably want to close up the set," said Tsuruga-san as he pushed against the wall with one hand and held her around the waist with the other, hoisting them both upright. "We'll get going now. Do you want a ride, Mogami-san? I'm free for the rest of the evening."

"Um, uh, um." Kyouko stepped away from him and bowed. "If it's no problem, I would be most grateful, sempai, if you deigned to drop your lowly kouhai off at home." Then she bowed to the director and the still-frozen Sudo-san. "Osakini shitsurei shimasu!"

"Gokurou-sama deshita," said the director. He wore a knowing grin. No doubt his imagination was running wild!

With that, Kyouko ran off the set towards her dressing room, her face still aflame.

Mogami Kyouko, 17, caught in an intimate embrace with a man on set. How was she ever going to live this down?

Osakini shitsurei shimasu — what you say when you leave work before others.
Gokurou-sama deshita — what you say to someone who is leaving work, or who has finished a task.