ONE

"Because I said so!" Ohno said, crossing his arms and looking very much in charge.

It only lasted a minute, because there was no way he could keep the grin off his face when Jun actually reached for his belt and his pants slid to the floor in a whoosh of improbable fabric, and even Aiba looked up from the bed in interest.

TWO

"One secret about each of them?" Ohno asked, face lighting up, and the host, a pretty girl who looked like she might be twice Ohno's age underneath all the makeup and lace, nodded enthusiastically.

"You are the leader after all, aren't you?" she cooed, fingers with their deadly pink tips curling tightly around the mic as though she were a snake strangling her prey. "You must know quite interesting things about, hmm, shall we start with Ninomiya-kun?"

Ohno turned to look at Nino, whose face was frozen in its fake interview smile, but whose eyes were promising terrible and creative things to Ohno if he so much as breathed a word of anything he was thinking about at that moment.

"It's only right," Ohno smiled back, a real smile that made his eyes crinkle, and he heard Nino hiss a threatening breath, "since the last time we were interviewed, Nino-kun did share the secret about my phone calls…"

"You have no idea what I'm going to do to you," Nino whispered in Ohno's ear while the host, and the rest of the band, and the audience, and probably all of Japan, were busy howling with laughter at the story about Nino and the frozen banana.

Ohno just grinned wider and shivered and imagined it for the whole rest of the interview.

THREE

"Blue!" Ohno blurted quickly when the girl asked them if they had a color preference for the first batch of costumes for the Taipei show.

Aiba, who had been opening his mouth to say the same thing, closed it, looking a little hurt. Ohno felt a little bad, because Aiba actually did like blue, whereas Ohno almost never cared. But this time around, Ohno had snuck a glimpse at the preliminary sketches the girl was carrying around on her clipboard when she was distracted trying to measure Jun's hips and he seemed to have forgotten how to keep them still.

They hadn't been colored, but the one marked "BLUE" had clean lines and big stars and a swoop to it that Ohno couldn't describe exactly, but knew in some visceral JE-trained part of his lower brain that he would look absolutely killer in it.

"It's okay, right?" Ohno said, giving his voice just a little extra pathos, and it wasn't fair because he knew that Aiba would fold like Sho on strip poker night. He blinked slowly, putting the final nail in the coffin.

"Since you're captain and all," Aiba sighed, and Ohno grinned extra wide and hugged him, because nothing mollified Aiba as quickly as somebody being thoroughly pleased with him, especially his captain.

"Hey," Ohno added after a second's thought, whispering in Aiba's ear like it was a secret, "pick yellow," and when Aiba tilted his head in confusion, Ohno bumped his hip and said, "Don’t you trust your captain?"

A week later when they had the initial fitting for the costumes, Ohno knew he'd made the right choice, not only because his own costume stretched the whole line of his body in a cool blue swoop that had made Nino's eyes go wide, but because Aiba was staring down at his costume, momentarily stunned.

He reached up to run fingertips from his collarbone to his navel, the smooth skin completely unimpeded by the fabric all the way down to his perfectly low-slung green pants.

"Ohno-sacho," he breathed, and when he looked up, his smile made Ohno's heart skip even faster than Aiba's fingers drawing an idle circle around his navel. "How did you know?"

"He's the captain, isn't he?" Jun's voice said in Ohno's ear, and an arm wrapped around his chest from behind that Ohno didn't have to look down to know was some horrific shade of electric purple.

Aiba beamed at them, and Ohno shrugged. He was indeed.

FOUR

When Ohno's cell phone rang (the theme to Kimi wa Petto and Ohno had told Jun not to mess with his phone), Ohno fished it out of one of the pockets of his pants, which took a minute since the pants had roughly fifty pockets to check, and grinned when he saw Nino's name on the screen.

Which is why he was so puzzled when it was Sho's voice on the other end of the line after he'd answered.

"Yo," Sho said, voice a lazy drawl, "as captain, I have a question for you."

There was a sort of scuffling noise in the background and Ohno wrinkled his brow. "Okay?"

"If a certain person were to borrow a cd from his best friend," Sho said, "say, for instance, their brand new limited edition 'Naihi Shinsho,' what would you say would be that certain person's responsibility in terms of care of that item?"

"Well, Sho-kun," Ohno scratched his chest idly, wondering how badly this was going to end, "of course it's that person's responsibility to return the item in the same condition as when they borrowed it."

"And what if," Sho continued, "that item came back with stripes of orange and purple nail polish radiating across the bottom of the cd, which may or may not glow in the dark?"

"I TOLD YOU JUN DID IT ON PURPOSE!" came Nino's voice from somewhere farther away from the phone than Sho.

"Um," said Ohno.

"Would you say, Leader, that proper recompense involved tying that certain person to a kitchen chair?"

Aha, so that's what that noise had been. Ohno looked around for his own chair, because he would probably want to be sitting down for the rest of this conversation

"Possibly." Ohno opted for the couch, as it was closest and likely to be the most comfortable eventually. "If you took his pants first."

"Done and done," Sho informed him. "I was hoping you might have some suggestions about what came next so that all involved parties turned out satisfied."

Ohno grinned as Nino let out an indignant howl that ended up as a moan. "I think I can help you out there, Sho-kun."

FIVE

"There's pastries," Jun said, sliding onto the bed to sit next to Ohno. Ohno cracked an eye and snorfled into his pillow, then grinned when Jun dropped a napkin filled with something flaky and cheesy onto Ohno's chest.

He sat up halfway, rescuing the pastry just before it slid off him into the sheets, and took a bite. Next to him, Nino was out cold, drooling on his pillow, eyes darting behind his eyelids with his dream.

"Aiba and Sho are still sleeping," Jun shrugged when Ohno asked. "And good luck with waking them up, they were up half the night practicing that new routine that Sho just can't get right."

"I'll do it!" Ohno popped the rest of his pastry in his mouth and shoved off the blankets; Nino didn't stir. "You deal with Nino."

Jun shrugged again and reached down to pinch Nino's nose shut.

Shuffling through the door that connected the set of rooms, Ohno scratched his bare chest and hitched up his pajama pants with his other hand. Sho and Aiba looked just as dead as Nino, worn down from two solid days of the PV shooting that had gone well into the night both times. Today was the last day, though, the day when, in Ohno's experience, it would all just pull together, like magic, like destiny.

Ohno reached down to shake Sho's shoulder, then Aiba's. "Shoooo-kun! Aiiiiiiba-chan! It's morning!"

"Oh my god, I want you to die," Sho mumbled, slapping at Ohno's hand. Aiba merely groaned and rolled over.

"Come on," Ohno coaxed, leaning a little farther over them, "it's our last day of shooting!" That got no further response, so Ohno continued. "It's going to be over soon, and you two are wasting our last day in bed! If you stay in bed, you won't get to have pastries for breakfast or ride to the set together or do the last couple scenes!"

"So what?" Sho said, voice dark as his glare, and Ohno frowned.

"It's not Arashi if it isn't all of us," he said, frowning sadly.

Aiba rolled back over, brown eyes blinking sleep away slowly, and regarded Ohno. "Captain, don't worry like that." Aiba cleared his throat, voice a little rough. "Arashi is Arashi."

"That's so," Ohno agreed, smile returning.

"We've got a little time, don't we?" Aiba asked, patting the space in between him and Sho, and he looked so hopeful and bed-headed that Ohno really had no choice but to crawl in between the two of them, snuggling up against their sleep-warm bodies.

In the end they were so late that Jun and Nino had to come get them, and the only pastry that the others ended up with were the crumbs stuck to the corners of Ohno's mouth.

"Mm, Captain," Aiba purred later on, when they were finished shooting and watching the raws in their hotel room, Aiba sprawled out over the couch with his head pillowed against Ohno's thigh and feet thrown over Sho's lap, "Arashi is Arashi, right?"

Ohno scrunched Aiba's hair and squeezed Nino with the arm that was slung around his waist where he was straddling the arm of the couch. Jun called him a half-witted sap, then slid off the other couch arm to drape himself over Aiba's back, butting his head under Ohno's hair-scrunching hand.

"That's so," Ohno said.