(one-shot) dreams come true [3/3]
The song is untitled, just a bunch of scrawled writing and handwritten notes across almost five pages. I took out the lyrics, it says in what he assumes to be Yamashita’s handwriting, To make it less cluttered for you. Thanks again.
He’s back in the little practice room, door shut against the world and duffel bag stuffed into the far corner. His right hand trembles on the keys, left hand spreading the pages of the handwritten music composition out across the stand. Five pages fit just barely, the corners of the first and last hanging off the edge, and he lets go cautiously. When the papers stay put, he allows himself a small smile, lips quirking uncertainly as he places his hands on the keys.
One line at a time, he tells himself, and peers at the first page. Preparing himself against the pain, he grits his teeth, focuses in on the scribbled notes, and begins to play.
It’s so familiar, the feel of the keys pressing down beneath his fingertips, the bump of the black keys rising between the white. He slips fingers up and over, slowly, carefully, blocks out the protests of his body against the sharp ache that zips through his fingers. The melody is beautiful, a string of clear, simple notes that contrasts with the continuous arpeggiation in the left hand, brings Kame back to times of rolling around in the grass, of warm bodies tackling each other and soft, whispered dreams, of a raw singing voice in his ears, of melodies just like this one coming alive beneath his fingertips.
Before he realizes, the song has finished, finishing with a rolled chord and an added seventh at the end - so that it has a lingering, unfinished feeling, something that faintly leads on but stops, a story that ends but never really does. Hands dropping into his lap, Kame nurses his hurting finger absently, eyes never leaving the brilliance of the notes scattered across the pages, in utter disbelief that an idol, even an idol like Yamashita, could ever come up with something like this. It has a heart, this music - a pulse that radiates through him when he plays, molding into images that flip like a film roll through his mind, colored with emotion and lovely, unexpected, heart-wrenching dips in the tune.
By the time he leaves the piano store, it is already well past midnight, into the early hours of the morning. His hand is physically screaming in pain, and he can barely move his finger without wincing, but the keyboard is once again home to him, to his hands, flitting across without a worry, without second thoughts. He can almost hear the singing again, hear it if he tries hard enough, without having to endure the heartache that accompanies it. He can hear his dreams again, the ones he threw away, the ones that never came true.
---
He goes to sleep feeling warm inside.
The piano is at his fingertips, the velvet covering that he rubs between them, the gorgeous strike of hammers against string, the opened lid of a baby grand, fingers running across a smooth expanse of wood and satin polish. There are fingers entwining with fingers, a voice entangling with his own, loud in laughter, soft in love.
He wakes up with a smile buried into the crook of his elbow.
It’s the most genuine smile he’s worn in ten years.
---
He can’t focus the entire day. He nearly trips on his own two feet on his way out to lunch break, mutters some sort of flustered apology when Koki eyes him warily, eyebrows arching into perfect question marks. He doesn’t have time to explain. He needs to find Yamashita, now.
Disappointment settles into the pit of his stomach when he finds no trace of the other in the cafeteria, only a few broken groups of random idols which he pass in greeting, polite smile still turned up high. Only when he reaches the pasta counter does he find Jin, back turned and scooping large helpings of tomato sauce onto his plate. Hiding a grimace, Kame reaches for the garlic bread; he is stopped short when Jin greets him casually.
“Hey.”
Guarding his expression, Kame sets his voice at an appropriately polite level. “Hello,” he replies, turns away from the unwanted memories clawing at his mind, the warmth of the sunshine in his dreams last night, the warmth of somebody there, arms wrapped around him. “Have you seen Yamashita today?”
Something falls in Jin’s expression, making Kame look away. “Yamapi? Why?”
Stepping in the opposite direction, Kame shrugs. “Nothing, really.”
Hesitating, Jin sets the large spoon down, stares pensively at his plate of pasta. Kame almost wants to leave him there, and is just about to when the question stops him. “Did you play that song?”
“You know about it?”
There’s a certain, irreplaceable light in Jin’s eyes, a tender sort of something that makes Kame furrow his eyebrows, try to forget the dreams he used to paint inside that gaze, hopes he’d confided into that voice (he broke his promise, he tells himself - broke his promise to you, Kazuya).
“Yes,” Jin clears his throat, suddenly awkward, and Kame glances up, glances back down. Tries not to think about it, the dreams that never came true - “Well. I’ll see you,” Jin is saying, is walking away, and Kame swallows down the wait that begins to form on his tongue, his eyes fluttering closed with the effort.
“Kame, your lunch is getting cold,” Koki’s voice has him opening his eyes again, feet steadying, grounding himself back to reality. “Let’s get a table?”
Nodding mutely, Kame trails behind his assistant to a table nearest the window, outlined by brilliant sunshine and changing shadows of the trees outside, the rush of cars through the thick press of glass. He pulls out his smile, adorns it carefully above the uncertainty churning inside him, and somehow, it’s not as hard as it used to be.
---
The rehearsal time is set for nine, just after Kame gets off from work. At least, that’s what Jin informed him, a message apparently from Yamashita that came late in the afternoon, in between Jin’s filming for a music video and commercial. “He didn’t have work today, so he decided not to come,” Jin had affirmed before walking away quickly, almost nervously.
By the time nine ticks around, though, Kame is the one who’s nervous. The more he looks at the pages in his hands, the more it seems unfathomable, an unreachable feat for him, with his crooked finger and shooting pain and broken heart of memories. He can’t do it justice, not a song like this, not something that should be, would be, could be, so much more than a person with unhealed emotions, with a shattered heart, with a smile broken and cracked in all the wrong places.
So when he reaches the destined room, he is ready to refuse Yamashita’s offer, to explain himself. He raps on the door with his knuckles, careful to avoid the potential pain if his fourth finger were to collide with the hard wood of the door. Nobody answers, and Kame frowns, raps harder.
This time, the door opens, seemingly of its own accord. Taking a breath, Kame steps inside, holding the pages close to his chest as he shuts it. He pads across the ground with cautious footsteps, peeking into the room - and there, on a raised platform-like structure, is a large, satin polished baby grand piano, flipped open and inviting. Forehead creasing, Kame fights back the immediate urge to go up to it, to touch his fingers across the shine of the keyboard, to hear the no doubt rich quality of its notes, the smell of freshly cut wood.
Before he knows it, he is standing beside the piano, doing exactly that. The bench is cushioned with a worn, thin velvet pillow; the keys are blindingly white, the action hard, the sound mellow, perfect. The melody on the pages echoes into the room, and a smile tugs at Kame’s lips, his eyes closing as he absorbs the notes, the wonderful acoustic of the room, the piano, just the piano and him (the dreams, dreams that never came true).
There’s a voice, a startlingly familiar voice that jars him out of his reverie, makes him screech to a stop, but the voice is undeterred. It persists, singing even in his surprised silence, and it takes him only a second to realize it is singing the melody on the page, the lyrics that were never written in. He offers another smile, follows the melody line and picks up the piano accompaniment, ignores the dull ache that still settles heavily in his fingers. It’s so close that he can taste it, his dream that never was, and even against the pain, against the sear of memory - this is what he wants, what he loves, and the voice. That voice.
That voice, which belongs to the figure that is now crossing the room, microphone in hand. Kame almost laughs, laughs with tears in his eyes, because Jin is sitting at his feet, just like he used to when they were small and held hands, bridged the gap between them with crushing hugs and starry gazes. “I’m sorry,” Jin sings, voice choked, and the microphone drops from his hands with a noisy clatter, rolls off the platform onto the carpeted ground.
Kame lets the tears fall from his own eyes, the droplets that stain the keys, and he is smiling, smiling so hard that his face might break and open but it’s okay, it’s okay. He falls to the ground on his knees, wraps his arms around Jin tightly, pulls the older man to his chest and holds him there, the heaving sobs and murmurs of sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry, Kazuya.
Warm, broad hands curl around his, fingers skittering across the painful ache in his palms from playing, the sharp, crooked form of his fourth finger, never recovered. There’s something resembling laughter from Jin, a shaky, shallow sound that has Kame smiling again, pieces pasted together to form something genuine, something real, a small, tiny, real smile.
---
Kame walks into the studio the next day smiling, still smiling, and Koki just grins at him. “Look,” he gestures, waving towards the mirror with a casual motion. “Decided it wouldn’t hurt, anyway.”
Kame looks up to see the old, stupid green wire of cheap, colored Christmas lights draped over the tops of his make-up mirrors, a bright rainbow strung over Takizawa’s gemmed, sparkly stickers. He laughs, a short, warm laugh, and places his duffel bag on the counter. “It looks terrible,” he remarks, shoots Koki a grin.
“I know,” Koki moves forward, claps a hand on his back, looking back towards the decorations in admiration. “But it emphasizes the holiday spirit, eh?”
The smile on Kame’s face is inevitable, and he throws the duffel bag into Koki’s arms without unzipping it. The confused look on his assistant’s face makes his smile widen. “You do everything today,” he says, and continues to beam at the slow, joyful transformation in Koki’s eyes. “That’s your punishment for making me deal with ugly Christmas lights.”
“Yes, sir!” Koki mock salutes with his free hand, duffel bag hugged close to his chest. “I’ll do my best.”
“You better,” Kame chuckles, looking back up at the colored lights as Koki scampers off to uncover the treasures inside the bag. He smiles to himself, thinks of dreams that may or may never come true, shakes his head with folded arms across his chest. “Holiday spirit, indeed.”
He’s back in the little practice room, door shut against the world and duffel bag stuffed into the far corner. His right hand trembles on the keys, left hand spreading the pages of the handwritten music composition out across the stand. Five pages fit just barely, the corners of the first and last hanging off the edge, and he lets go cautiously. When the papers stay put, he allows himself a small smile, lips quirking uncertainly as he places his hands on the keys.
One line at a time, he tells himself, and peers at the first page. Preparing himself against the pain, he grits his teeth, focuses in on the scribbled notes, and begins to play.
It’s so familiar, the feel of the keys pressing down beneath his fingertips, the bump of the black keys rising between the white. He slips fingers up and over, slowly, carefully, blocks out the protests of his body against the sharp ache that zips through his fingers. The melody is beautiful, a string of clear, simple notes that contrasts with the continuous arpeggiation in the left hand, brings Kame back to times of rolling around in the grass, of warm bodies tackling each other and soft, whispered dreams, of a raw singing voice in his ears, of melodies just like this one coming alive beneath his fingertips.
Before he realizes, the song has finished, finishing with a rolled chord and an added seventh at the end - so that it has a lingering, unfinished feeling, something that faintly leads on but stops, a story that ends but never really does. Hands dropping into his lap, Kame nurses his hurting finger absently, eyes never leaving the brilliance of the notes scattered across the pages, in utter disbelief that an idol, even an idol like Yamashita, could ever come up with something like this. It has a heart, this music - a pulse that radiates through him when he plays, molding into images that flip like a film roll through his mind, colored with emotion and lovely, unexpected, heart-wrenching dips in the tune.
By the time he leaves the piano store, it is already well past midnight, into the early hours of the morning. His hand is physically screaming in pain, and he can barely move his finger without wincing, but the keyboard is once again home to him, to his hands, flitting across without a worry, without second thoughts. He can almost hear the singing again, hear it if he tries hard enough, without having to endure the heartache that accompanies it. He can hear his dreams again, the ones he threw away, the ones that never came true.
---
He goes to sleep feeling warm inside.
The piano is at his fingertips, the velvet covering that he rubs between them, the gorgeous strike of hammers against string, the opened lid of a baby grand, fingers running across a smooth expanse of wood and satin polish. There are fingers entwining with fingers, a voice entangling with his own, loud in laughter, soft in love.
He wakes up with a smile buried into the crook of his elbow.
It’s the most genuine smile he’s worn in ten years.
---
He can’t focus the entire day. He nearly trips on his own two feet on his way out to lunch break, mutters some sort of flustered apology when Koki eyes him warily, eyebrows arching into perfect question marks. He doesn’t have time to explain. He needs to find Yamashita, now.
Disappointment settles into the pit of his stomach when he finds no trace of the other in the cafeteria, only a few broken groups of random idols which he pass in greeting, polite smile still turned up high. Only when he reaches the pasta counter does he find Jin, back turned and scooping large helpings of tomato sauce onto his plate. Hiding a grimace, Kame reaches for the garlic bread; he is stopped short when Jin greets him casually.
“Hey.”
Guarding his expression, Kame sets his voice at an appropriately polite level. “Hello,” he replies, turns away from the unwanted memories clawing at his mind, the warmth of the sunshine in his dreams last night, the warmth of somebody there, arms wrapped around him. “Have you seen Yamashita today?”
Something falls in Jin’s expression, making Kame look away. “Yamapi? Why?”
Stepping in the opposite direction, Kame shrugs. “Nothing, really.”
Hesitating, Jin sets the large spoon down, stares pensively at his plate of pasta. Kame almost wants to leave him there, and is just about to when the question stops him. “Did you play that song?”
“You know about it?”
There’s a certain, irreplaceable light in Jin’s eyes, a tender sort of something that makes Kame furrow his eyebrows, try to forget the dreams he used to paint inside that gaze, hopes he’d confided into that voice (he broke his promise, he tells himself - broke his promise to you, Kazuya).
“Yes,” Jin clears his throat, suddenly awkward, and Kame glances up, glances back down. Tries not to think about it, the dreams that never came true - “Well. I’ll see you,” Jin is saying, is walking away, and Kame swallows down the wait that begins to form on his tongue, his eyes fluttering closed with the effort.
“Kame, your lunch is getting cold,” Koki’s voice has him opening his eyes again, feet steadying, grounding himself back to reality. “Let’s get a table?”
Nodding mutely, Kame trails behind his assistant to a table nearest the window, outlined by brilliant sunshine and changing shadows of the trees outside, the rush of cars through the thick press of glass. He pulls out his smile, adorns it carefully above the uncertainty churning inside him, and somehow, it’s not as hard as it used to be.
---
The rehearsal time is set for nine, just after Kame gets off from work. At least, that’s what Jin informed him, a message apparently from Yamashita that came late in the afternoon, in between Jin’s filming for a music video and commercial. “He didn’t have work today, so he decided not to come,” Jin had affirmed before walking away quickly, almost nervously.
By the time nine ticks around, though, Kame is the one who’s nervous. The more he looks at the pages in his hands, the more it seems unfathomable, an unreachable feat for him, with his crooked finger and shooting pain and broken heart of memories. He can’t do it justice, not a song like this, not something that should be, would be, could be, so much more than a person with unhealed emotions, with a shattered heart, with a smile broken and cracked in all the wrong places.
So when he reaches the destined room, he is ready to refuse Yamashita’s offer, to explain himself. He raps on the door with his knuckles, careful to avoid the potential pain if his fourth finger were to collide with the hard wood of the door. Nobody answers, and Kame frowns, raps harder.
This time, the door opens, seemingly of its own accord. Taking a breath, Kame steps inside, holding the pages close to his chest as he shuts it. He pads across the ground with cautious footsteps, peeking into the room - and there, on a raised platform-like structure, is a large, satin polished baby grand piano, flipped open and inviting. Forehead creasing, Kame fights back the immediate urge to go up to it, to touch his fingers across the shine of the keyboard, to hear the no doubt rich quality of its notes, the smell of freshly cut wood.
Before he knows it, he is standing beside the piano, doing exactly that. The bench is cushioned with a worn, thin velvet pillow; the keys are blindingly white, the action hard, the sound mellow, perfect. The melody on the pages echoes into the room, and a smile tugs at Kame’s lips, his eyes closing as he absorbs the notes, the wonderful acoustic of the room, the piano, just the piano and him (the dreams, dreams that never came true).
There’s a voice, a startlingly familiar voice that jars him out of his reverie, makes him screech to a stop, but the voice is undeterred. It persists, singing even in his surprised silence, and it takes him only a second to realize it is singing the melody on the page, the lyrics that were never written in. He offers another smile, follows the melody line and picks up the piano accompaniment, ignores the dull ache that still settles heavily in his fingers. It’s so close that he can taste it, his dream that never was, and even against the pain, against the sear of memory - this is what he wants, what he loves, and the voice. That voice.
That voice, which belongs to the figure that is now crossing the room, microphone in hand. Kame almost laughs, laughs with tears in his eyes, because Jin is sitting at his feet, just like he used to when they were small and held hands, bridged the gap between them with crushing hugs and starry gazes. “I’m sorry,” Jin sings, voice choked, and the microphone drops from his hands with a noisy clatter, rolls off the platform onto the carpeted ground.
Kame lets the tears fall from his own eyes, the droplets that stain the keys, and he is smiling, smiling so hard that his face might break and open but it’s okay, it’s okay. He falls to the ground on his knees, wraps his arms around Jin tightly, pulls the older man to his chest and holds him there, the heaving sobs and murmurs of sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry, Kazuya.
Warm, broad hands curl around his, fingers skittering across the painful ache in his palms from playing, the sharp, crooked form of his fourth finger, never recovered. There’s something resembling laughter from Jin, a shaky, shallow sound that has Kame smiling again, pieces pasted together to form something genuine, something real, a small, tiny, real smile.
---
Kame walks into the studio the next day smiling, still smiling, and Koki just grins at him. “Look,” he gestures, waving towards the mirror with a casual motion. “Decided it wouldn’t hurt, anyway.”
Kame looks up to see the old, stupid green wire of cheap, colored Christmas lights draped over the tops of his make-up mirrors, a bright rainbow strung over Takizawa’s gemmed, sparkly stickers. He laughs, a short, warm laugh, and places his duffel bag on the counter. “It looks terrible,” he remarks, shoots Koki a grin.
“I know,” Koki moves forward, claps a hand on his back, looking back towards the decorations in admiration. “But it emphasizes the holiday spirit, eh?”
The smile on Kame’s face is inevitable, and he throws the duffel bag into Koki’s arms without unzipping it. The confused look on his assistant’s face makes his smile widen. “You do everything today,” he says, and continues to beam at the slow, joyful transformation in Koki’s eyes. “That’s your punishment for making me deal with ugly Christmas lights.”
“Yes, sir!” Koki mock salutes with his free hand, duffel bag hugged close to his chest. “I’ll do my best.”
“You better,” Kame chuckles, looking back up at the colored lights as Koki scampers off to uncover the treasures inside the bag. He smiles to himself, thinks of dreams that may or may never come true, shakes his head with folded arms across his chest. “Holiday spirit, indeed.”