#yuunaa

If the press interviews a resident, they’ll swear up and down that they’ve never felt safer anywhere else. But more than once has a tourist revealed that they’ve been told by locals scuttling about to either stay on the nearby streets north and west of Akihabara train station after dark, or else not go wandering about at all.

The Akihabara sect of the 48 Gangs themselves are full of conflicting information too.

Sometimes, when the residents manage to acknowledge that they exist, one may hear them whisper in hushed tones about how they’re vigilantes, heroes who do the right thing when the police can’t or won’t. But in the same breath they’d tell you to stay away from one particular café in the Hanaokacho district, and the theatre near Taito station. The members of the AKB sect themselves would laugh themselves sick at the term, all the while shooting a defenceless man in the head without batting an eye, because they’re not heroes. They have their own goals, their own plans, most of which revolve around protecting their own, their members, their family, and if some things extend towards heroism, than that’s just a coincidence, and if some things stretch closer to the other side, well, that’s fine too.

Word on the street says it starts during the days when multiple factions ran rampant all over Tokyo. When kids were recruited right out of high school (and some still in it) into the Project gangs and prostitution rings. Some say a man rose up to create a force that could clean up the streets and keep the gang violence where it belongs – between gangs and not involving civilians.

Aki-P they called him, the man who swept up the capitol’s underbelly.

People say also he’s the same man who created the Sakamichi Syndicate and started the bloodiest turf war Tokyo has ever seen. Some say he did it because he gave up on the AKB sect, when they started losing their way and becoming more dangerous than the gangs they rose up against. Others say he did it after losing control of the 48 Gangs, that he was ousted from the inner circle and so created a rival faction as vengeance.

No matter how different the stories get, they all have one similarity. The 48 Gangs are dangerous, the sect in Akihabara doubly so, and anyone who gets in their way, or harms anyone in their sphere, or dares to challenge their grip over Tokyo, take heed and be on the lookout.

They’ll come for you.

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Okada Nana is fifteen when she boards a train from Kanagawa to Tokyo and doesn’t look back.

Kojima Mako and Nishino Miki are similar ages, and in similar situations when they run into each other, having decided to pickpocket the same mark, and the three of them decide to run together. The streets are a little less intimidating with two sets of eyes to watch your back, and two bodies to keep you warm at night.

Mako’s the devious one, with her heart-melting gummy smiles and disarming laugh, she’s able to charm any passer-by and con them out of their hard earned money.

“Sorry sir, I’ve lost my parents, can I please borrow three hundred yen for the train fare?”

It works more often than not, there’s never a shortage of businessmen willing to play hero and help out a stranded school girl. And if she steals the rest of their wallet when they’re not looking, well they usually don’t notice until it’s too late.

Miki is bolder. She takes items right off of shelves when she walks by, and isn’t afraid to go after other street kids who wander into the space they’ve claimed as their own.

Sometimes she’s a little too bold, “Let’s get lunch from there.”

And that’s where Nana comes in. She’s the cautious one, the voice of reason, the brains behind the operations as small and simple as it is.

“We can’t go in there,” Nana hisses, grabbing the other two by the backs of their collars before they do something stupid.

“Why not? The foods cheaper in there than anywhere else in the city,” Miki points out, not unreasonably.

But Nana is adamant, “Yeah for good reason. That café belongs to AKB.”

The innocuous street side café about a minute’s walk from Akihabara station is something of a local legend in the area. Anyone above thirty avoids it like the plague because of the rumours of it being owned by the 48 Gangs, or perhaps it simply just serves the members of AKB. The little number 48 carved into the brickwork above the café doors is a symbol of that.

However, it is popular amongst the youth of the city for that very reason. With many hanging out there to bask in the rebellious feeling of danger, or on adventurous dares from friends. Whispers fly about AKB recruiting from the youth who flock there. A few yankees even claim to be initiates recruited from there. They’re all bald faced liars. No prospective recruit would be stupid enough to loiter in a known gang-owned establishment.  

A few have, however, been known to have been recruited around the station. Our little trio of street rats like to linger around the area, pickpocketing the stupid school kids, the otakus heading to the Gundam café across the street, and the rich folk visiting the golf club on the other side of the block.

They do that for months before they’re approached by a member of AKB.  

Okada Nana is sixteen when Minegishi Minami approaches her and her friends with an offer they can’t refuse.

Her first job is with Mako and two other recruits. They’re tasked with the simple job of delivering a package and Nana has to wonder what’s so important that there needs to be four of them for this. Or maybe it’s not so important, considering there are four barely trained, fresh faced initiates on the job.

They scuttle about the train line, Mako skipping along merrily, Hikari following behind quietly, with Nana and Ayana bickering the whole way. They deliver the package without any issues worth mentioning to one Itano Tomomi at an upscale bar in the heart of the city. It turns out to be cold hard cash, and Nana goes white at the thought of possibly losing that much money. Or rather, what the gang would do to them if they lost that much money.

The next few jobs follow in a similar manner. Nana gets to know the names and quirks of her fellow runners. Innocent, seemingly useless things like:

Iwatate Saho is stronger than she looks.

“Oh god he’s unconscious…are you planning on joining Team K?”

“No, too dangerous. I’m thinking Team B. You know, manning the cafes and the casinos and stuff.”

Mogi Shinobu doesn’t do so well under pressure.

“What the-!? Mogi-san why didn’t you just shoot him?”

“I panicked!”

“I can’t believe you want to join Team A, you’ll die in a week.”

Murayama Yuiri is stupidly pretty.

“Yuiri-chan…We’re half an hour in the wrong direction. You had the map upside down.”

“Sorry! I’m sorry, usually Naa-chan corrects me when I do this, I mean, I’m not blaming Naa-chan! It’s just she…Naa-chan what are you looking at?”

“Err nothing. Nothing, I got distracted.”

Takashima Yurina has somewhat of a crush on her.

“Naa-chan I bought drinks.”

“Where’s one for the rest of us?”

Uchiyama Natsuki knows a ridiculous amount about the law.

“Article 13: every individual has the liberty of protecting his or her own personal information from being disclosed to a third party or made public without good reason.”

“Somehow I doubt beating him up would fly as ‘taking the liberty to protect our property’.”

Apparently they do a somewhat of a good job, because Nana finds herself selected as part of a joint project between all the 48 Gangs. She, Mako and Miki are the representatives of the Akihabara sect and Nana wonders how the hell the upper echelons decided on that.  

“So, what are your specialties?” somehow it falls to Nana to lead this ragtag group.

The Namba sect representative Shibuya Nagisa is actually the oldest (by a few months) but she’s no more experienced than they are – Nana finds out later, the reason why all of the sects sent their freshest recruits. It’s all internal politics, and a mission too important to turn down, but not important enough to ensure successful. In short, they’re expendable and they weren’t even expected to make it home.

The job is in Tokyo, so Nana takes the reigns by default.

She finds that leadership suits her.

It feels like a natural extension of what she was already doing when they were just three idiots on the street, planning operations meticulously so that they come back in one piece, and utilising the skills of her teammates in the most efficient way possible. There are three more idiots to account for now, but she is familiarised with them soon enough.

Nagisa is the strongest in hand-to-hand combat amongst the seven of them, Sakae’s Ryoha the most accurate shot, Hakata’s Meru joins Miki in being the loud charismatic distraction, while Mako and Hakata’s Mio are swift and sneaky with their hands. It’s the perfect team for covert operations. Which makes sense, considering they’re being sent south of the Kanda river, into Sakamichi territory to gather intel on the new gang that’s popped up by the Roppongi hills.

It seems like a simple mission.

Get in, look around for suspicious activity, get out. There isn’t supposed to be confrontation or combat involved.

But no plan survives contact with the enemy, and no one cares about supposed to be’s when there are guns pointed at their heads.

When she’s desperately wrestling with a knife that wants nothing more than to dig into her flesh, when she’s slammed against the wall, breath knocked out of her, when a pair of hands wrap around her throat and squeeze, and her lungs scream as her legs thrash uselessly underneath, her vision blurs, and the terrifying realisation that she won’t actually get out of this situation alive sets in – oh god is that Miki screaming she hears in the background? – the air is rushing out her lungs and –

“Naa-chan. Naa-chan! Snap out of it, you’re not there anymore.”

Nana eyes fly open, as she dashes up, heart still thudding in her chest. She has to make sure everyone’s okay, what happened to Miki, and oh god Mio was stabbed, and where the hell is Mako, and they lost contact with Ryoha half an hour in, and Nagisa is unconscious, and no matter how deep a breath she takes, it doesn’t seem to be enough. Her chest burns, she can’t breathe and – a hand lands on her shoulder, the accompanying scent of hinoki pine only just barely manages to stamp down the instinct to lash out.

Yuiri’s concerned face drags her back to reality, “It’s okay. You’re home. You’re not there, you’re safe now,” to the little hole in the wall apartment she has (firmly on the AKB side of the Kanda river), to the bed she’s sharing with the pretty distraction on her team. Though, perhaps that would be unkind to say, even if she refuses to think of what they’re doing as anything more than just stress relief, blowing off steam.  

Belatedly Nana realises that she has a death grip on Yuiri’s upper arm, she loosens her grip but doesn’t let go, “S-sorry,” her hands are shaking, she’s trembling and she can’t get it to stop, and Yuiri’s murmuring nonsense things in her ear.

“Why are you sorry? I’m sorry, I’m such an idiot,” Yuiri apologises with a grimace. They’ve established early on that Nana does not like hands anywhere near her neck, that one horrendous mission spoiled that forever, but sometimes Yuiri forgets, and the resulting post-traumatic flashbacks are the most mood-killing thing possible in the bedroom, or sometimes out of it too.

The first time it happens is in a street by the AKB theatre of all places. It’s after a job with just the two of them, when they’re both high on adrenaline, breaths heavy, eyes glazed, still in the heat of violence, fresh from a near-death scuffle. Nana’s not sure who jumps whom first, but suddenly they’re in each other’s space, hands tangled in hair, and tongue against teeth. Yuiri tastes like citrus that night, some kind of lemon mixed, and the deeper she kisses her the more she can taste the metallic tang of blood and the salt of sweat mixed in.

Nana closes her eyes tightly, a low, throaty moan of approval rumbles deep in her throat as her back hits the wall with a light thud, the moan turning markedly louder as the elder girl’s fingers slip inside the waistband of her shorts and shoves them down over her hips. Strong, forceful fingers dig into her and pull her in even tighter as her mouth is once again claimed in a desperate, hungry kiss.

“Yuu-chan,” she moans, gasping at the feel of the other girl’s tongue against her throat.

“Yes?” Yuiri’s lips curls into a smile against Nana’s, she groans low and deep as Yuiri’s hips grinds into her own.

“Don’t stop.”

It’s easier with Yuiri, they understand each other in ways her other teammates simply don’t. Maybe it’s because the most of the others are like what Nana was at first, just street kids and lowly thieves dragged in way over their heads. When Nana and Mako come back from that FUBAR recon mission with their hands soaked in blood, the others look at them different. With wariness in their eyes, with guarded stances, with hints of fear in their faces.

Mako’s stupid grin thaws their hesitance soon enough. But Nana has never been that kind of charismatic. Not in the way that makes other at ease. She’s always been harder, more serious, and that only makes her look much more intimidating now.

“You’re still here?” Nana raises an eyebrow when she realises that Yuiri is still lingering about. These days, most of her team disappear faster than a blink of an eye the moment the job is done, not wanting to be around for longer than necessary.

But Yuiri only looks at Nana like she’s the one being unreasonable, “Don’t we usually go for kakigori after a job?”

“You want to have desserts with me? What, not afraid I’ll snap and kill you?” Nana asks, sadly only half sarcastically, because with the way the rest of the team treat her, it seems that’s exactly what they’re thinking.  

The other girl snorts and actually has the audacity to chuckle, “You’re going to have do a lot more than be traumatised to scare me. I’m sure I’ve killed more people than you.”

Yuiri wasn’t some street kid when she got recruited. She was born into this world, her family neck-deep in the underbelly of Japan, and she’s no stranger to violence. There’s only one other like that on their team, Nana would’ve overlooked Mion entirely if Yuiri hadn’t pointed her out.

“You can always tell when someone’s killed before,” Yuiri says, “It’s in the eyes.”

The months blur into years, and before Nana knows it most of her team have the same eyes, the ones who are still alive anyway. The ones who are left split off into the different teams of AKB eventually. Mako, Ayana, Mogi and Komiharu are sent to Team K, with their dangerous combat orientated jobs and Nana just hopes they keep coming home. Saho and Saki are off in the relatively safer B, the front jobs, manning the café and the casinos and the above-board stations. Yukari and Mion end up in A, and Nana hopes beyond hope that they don’t lose themselves in there.

Nana and Yuri themselves never leave 4. They’re the ones chosen to train up the newbies, and she has no idea who thought that is a good idea. She never actually does anything too important in the gang – up until the moment she accidentally founds an entirely new sect.

She’d been in Fukuoka visiting Mio and Meru, and it’s in Hiroshima, on her way back to Tokyo that Nana manages to get herself recognised and chased. She hated cults with a passion. Why did they have a problem with her anyway? It’s not like the 48 Gangs had territory claimed in Hiroshima –

Ow.

She falls off the fence the she’s attempting to climb over and lands on her back with a dull thud. The grass is soft at least. She spends a few moments just staring up at the night sky, it’s actually quite breathtaking when you’re far away enough from the city lights to appr—

“Are you okay?”

Oh, there’s a kid in pink and purple. A teenager really. Nana can’t tell ages anymore.

“…m’fine. Sorry didn’t mean to land in your backyard,” she says. An apartment complex’s backyard anyway, she realises when she sits up. It’s a rundown building that’s clearly not in official use. It appears there are kids squatting in it.

It’s difficult to tell in the dark, but when Nana squints she can make out maybe two more teens peeking out from behind a window.

“Wanna come inside?” the girl asks, and Nana really really shouldn’t.

A gunshot sounds in the air though, and Nana quickly scrambles to follow the kid inside. Being noble is all well and good, but it definitely doesn’t beat being alive.

When Nana awakens the next morning, she hears furious whisperings back and forth between the teens – and there’s clearly more of them this morning than there was last night.

“—it’s dangerous, she’s clearly a member of the 48 Gangs! You saw that tattoo!” an unknown voice hisses, and Nana wonders when and how they saw the little 48 tattoo on the back of her neck. That’s not usually visible and she’s usually a light enough sleeper to wake up if they touch her.

“Yeah, that means she can help us!” that’s Chiho, one of the girls she remembers half-heartedly greeting the night before. The one with the bruises on her face.

“We can’t trust a gang member!”

“So what else are we going to do? They took Yumirin, we’ll never get her back ourselves!”

Nana’s always had a soft spot for stupid kids. It’s probably why they never took her off Team 4, and how she finds herself hopping all over the setouchi region, rescuing girls from a fox worshipping cult.

Girls who somehow end up forming the Setouchi sect of the 48 Gangs – Sashihara-san comes down from Fukuoka to make it official and everything.

Mogi never lets her forget it.

“Hey Naa-chan, remember the time you went to visit Mio and Meru and ended up playing prince charming and rescuing ten damsels in distress?”  

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