Team Future, Prompt 5: I can't help to say it would be pink and gray
Title: this is me, you’re everything else
Pairing/Group: Kame/Ueda (KAT-TUN)
Rating: G
Warnings: Vagueness, nonlinear timeline, futurefic
Summary: Kame comes to Ueda with a proposal.
Notes: This is kind of messed up, because I don’t really know how to make it chronologically sound and still make the impact I intended-to be honest, I had a hard time with the prompt until I heard this song, which I listened to while writing this.
Thanks to the mods for organising this, difficult or not, the process was lovely. Also, a million thanks to my beloved beta-sama who helped me so much. I think I owe her my life.
*
The smell of French toast woke Ueda up.
It’s still early; the sun’s only beginning to rise and the cicadas are still chirping faintly. He tosses to the right and closes his eyes, making a fresh attempt to fall asleep.
A few minutes later, he hears the twisting sound of the door knob; Kame has just left his apartment.
He falls asleep and wakes up a few hours later to find that Kame has left him a note under the plate of toast.
“I’m done with our song, will you make a demo of it?”
*
Ten years after Ueda first uttered that he can see fairies, Kame says it to him.
“That’s sudden, what’s wrong?” he asks.
“Hallucination. You see, when the candlelight flickers, things around it start to look like they move,” Kame explains, referring to the candles on the TV cabinet.
It’s dark everywhere in the house because Kame has decided to have a solemn Christmas celebration, just them, the candles, the falling snow, and the distant sound of chorals from the streets.
Kame inches closer, lays his head on Ueda’s shoulder.
“Merry Christmas,” he whispers.
*
The day after KAT-TUN’s 10th Anniversary Concert is confirmed, Kame comes to Ueda with a rather impossible, though not surprising, proposal.
“How do you feel about making a song, just the two of us?”
Ueda thinks that Kame’s quite possibly the worst musical match for him; he can’t think of any song that he has ever written that could possibly fit Kame.
“You compose the melody, I fill in the lyrics, and we sing it together,” Kame continues, grinning slightly.
Ueda doesn’t think he can ever write a song that Kame and he could sing together, and that’s why he agrees.
“Deal, as long as I don’t have to dance.”
*
Ueda has a grand piano in his apartment that he doesn’t use for composing purposes. It used to belong to his grandmother, who generously gave it to him as a house-warming gift when he bought that apartment for his 30th birthday. There’s something about the handsome grand piano that made his apartment extraordinarily posh, and Ueda loves having it even if he hardly uses it to play his songs (he has another keyboard he uses more frequently).
He has a habit of brushing the piano cover before lifting it up, though it’s not dusty. Kame once remarked how the gesture seemed unrealistic, like it was a scene from a movie, but to Ueda it’s like an initiation ritual.
“You know, there actually exists a dimension of creativity around it, like the realm of the genius and somehow I just feel like it’s only right to prepare before entering that kind of world,” he once told Kame.
The first note, C flat, resounds, and he closes his eyes and lets everything flash in front of him, then his fingers move in an unstoppable delirium.
All ten fingers hit the last note and Ueda heaves a long, deep breath.
*
There are things about Kame that Ueda would rather forget: the way Kame gives away parts of himself as he kisses, the way Kame sometimes looks at him like he’s the only one that exists, the way Kame scratches his shoulder and Ueda can’t help but notice how beautiful he is, and the way Kame seems to glow in the dark.
*
Fairies were a lie Ueda told in his youth.
Miracle is the new cabinet behind his grand piano, filled with a ridiculously organised archive of all his compositions.
*
“Do you always have it messy like this,” Kame says as he sorts through Ueda’s pile of compositions, “because I can hardly understand anything from here.”
“Isn’t that because you don’t really know how to read music?” Ueda says, holding back the annoyance he has been bottling since Kame came and decided that the best way to start on their collaboration is by figuring out if their musical tastes intersect.
Kame wipes his glasses with his shirt and hands Ueda a few pieces of paper.
“Play this,” he says.
*
On the way back to his car, Ueda sees Kame chatting happily with Nakamaru and it suddenly dawns upon him that Kame probably works best with people who seem to be the opposite of him.
*
The lyrics that Kame just wrote for “their” song are surprisingly mellow, especially for Kame’s standard. It talks about the circle of life, the process of growing old and wondering if growing old is a journey towards regret, if it’s a reflection of bad decisions.
A shade of clarity over hot-bloodedness of youth, a sliver of wisdom over the bleakness of melancholy; it fits the title they have chosen for the song.
Ueda loves it.
*
Kame takes Ueda and Nakamaru for a drive after he breaks up with his girlfriend, a fashion consultant about 5 years his senior. Ueda knows Ayame, though not very closely, and it didn’t surprise him when Kame told the rest of KAT-TUN that he was dating Ayame, but it certainly surprised him that they broke up 3 months after that.
“It’s nothing,” Kame says, face flushing with intoxication. “I mean, I feel sad and all, but I had a hunch that she wasn’t the one.”
Kame rambles on into the night, recalling the finer qualities in Ayame: how she was almost the one he was looking for, how pretty she looks without makeup, how she didn’t mind that he had to leave when they were just getting into the “mood”. Nakamaru encourages Kame-quite frankly a pretty Nakamaru thing to do, to ask someone to talk their problems away. The only thing Ueda gets from Kame’s endless ramble is how upset he really is about the whole thing, breaking up again and realising that it was just another mistake he had made.
(Of course Kame would never admit that it was a mistake, but Ueda doesn’t need Kame’s confession.)
That’s probably why the first thing Ueda does when he gets home is to brush his grand piano, open its cover, and play the music written in his mind.
*
The cabinet’s really colourful.
Kame has apparently committed most of his favourite compositions into his memory and coded them with colours according to his (Kame’s) perceived intensity. Kame’s favourite pieces are coded in red, and predictably enough, the “red” folder consists of mostly jazz pieces, though there are also some ballads and acoustic.
(“Red’s for passion, something I have in ample amount,” he can almost hear Kame grinning while explaining.)
The cheerful, upbeat ones are filed into “orange”, the heart-wrenching ballads in “blue” and most interestingly, there’s a folder named “black” and it apparently has everything Kame can’t sort.
*
“I think I have feelings for you,” Kame tells Ueda, and he stops playing the keyboard immediately.
Kame wraps his arms around Ueda’s neck, chest against Ueda’s back and lips beside his ear.
“It’s true.”
*
Five days into sorting and Ueda decides that working with Kame is the worst decision he has ever made.
“You don’t understand music, don’t pretend you do, and what you are actually doing right now is telling me you can compose better than me,” Ueda rants, “don’t you have better things to do anyway?”
Kame’s face contorts with fury. “What the hell are you saying? I thought it would be good for us to do this, because we never really had projects together and now you’re saying that I got in the way of your creative muses?”
If this happened ten years ago, Ueda would have thrown a punch to Kame’s face, hoping that he could at least dislocate the jaw somehow, and walked away as though the he had won, but right now Ueda doesn’t want to win.
“I’m leaving for today,” Kame says.
It’s funny how the older they get, the less they say to each other, and the less direct they are with each other.
*
Junno announces that his girlfriend has accepted his proposal.
“I, Taguchi Junnosuke, at the age of 30, can finally draw a stop on my bachelorhood in the near future!”
Koki doesn’t really look pleased. “You know, we weren’t really worried that you would never get married, considering how long you have had her.”
Nakamaru’s not very pleased either, but only because he had once said that he would definitely find a steady girlfriend before Junno got married.
Kame immediately plans a party.
Ueda sulks. “Ah, the pain of growing old,” he says.
*
“This is me,” Kame says, dumping the “red” folder on the coffee table in Ueda’s living room.
“What about me?” Ueda asks.
Kame points to the almost human-sized pile stacked against the grand piano’s leg. “You’re everything else.”
*
There are things about Kame that Ueda never seems to be able to forget: the tears from his eyes when he feels a pain that goes beyond agony, the shadow on his head when he shoulders a weight beyond mere burden, the flesh that gradually slips away from his body when he promises to achieve anything beyond humanly possible.
*
The final note of the song fades and descends into soundlessness.
“I like it,” Kame says. “I really, really, really like it.”
Ueda rises up from his seat and stretches, but Kame catches him almost immediately.
“I knew you thought we, this thing, this project, wouldn’t work out,” he whispers and pulls his neck close and their noses touch. “But now we are untouchable.”
Their lips clash almost carelessly and Ueda suddenly has his heart in his throat, suddenly feels a shiver running down his spine so paralysing that he feels like he has just lost all limbs, but he pushes into the kiss anyway, slightly startling Kame, and Kame tightens his arm around his neck and he allows Ueda to wrap his arms around his waist and lets him kiss his neck and then he groans so deeply, Ueda jumps away.
Kame furrows his brow; he looks hurt.
“Why?” he asks and tugs at Ueda’s shirt, pulling him back, but Ueda gently pushes his hand away and walks into his bedroom.
*
Their management team approves of their song.
Ueda wants Kame to name the song, but Kame says that Ueda should do it, because Ueda did most of the composing anyway.
“Pink and Gray, just like we decided,” Ueda says.
Kame smiles. “Sounds good.”
*
There are things Ueda does to Kame that he hopes Kame would never know: the way Ueda softly plants a kiss on Kame forehead when he’s drunk, the way he glances at Kame as he bops his head listening to the demo of the songs they are working on, the way he studies his habits and burns them into his mind.
*
Kame left Ueda a bento box on his dressing table with a note beside it that says, “I’m sorry, can we start over? I don’t want to give up yet.”
Ueda doesn’t want to give up either, so he eats up to the last drop of rice and puts the empty bento box somewhere near Kame’s backpack in the locker.
*
Ueda expected Kame to leave after he pushed him away, but Kame followed him to his bedroom, clinging to him.
“I’m sorry,” he says, each and every syllable weighed down by sorrow. “I’m sorry, I really am,” he repeats and Ueda holds him like he’s a wounded tiger.
“No, I’m sorry,” Ueda tells him as he pats his back. “I’m sorry I pushed you away, I shouldn’t have kissed you.”
“Tat-chan,” Kame asks, “let me stay here tonight.”
Ueda nods and he lets go of Kame, but pulls him back for a kiss, not quite finishing from where they left, but starting over, touching him with apologies, and Kame reciprocates, only not really because Kame still wants something, still wants Ueda that way, still wishes that Ueda could find it in himself to tell him that he has feelings for him too.
*
There are things that Ueda would like to tell Kame someday: sometimes you drive me crazy, sometimes you drive me literally crazy, sometimes I feel like you’re much more than what you seem to be, sometimes I wish that you were less than what you are, sometimes I think I like you.
Sometimes I feel like I like those feelings I have for you, the ones that make me want to write music.
*
“Pick one from each pile,” Ueda instructs as he dumps two folders, one “red”, one “black”, in front of Kame, “or two, if you like.”
Kame flips through the folders and hands him a few pieces.
Ueda throws them all to the ground, much to Kame’s dismay, and proceeds to mess them more as he kneels to the ground and throws the papers in the air.
“What are you doing?”
Ueda gathers the papers together.
“Ueda Tatsuya’s version of ‘remixing’,” he says and Kame laughs out loud.
“That’s smart of you, but what are you going to do with the title of the song?”
“The same, combine them.”
“Red and Black? Black and Red? Red Black?”
“No, Pink and Gray,” Ueda suggests playfully, but then they both look at each other and Ueda knows that they have just found a title for their song.
Poll Team Future Prompt 5
Pairing/Group: Kame/Ueda (KAT-TUN)
Rating: G
Warnings: Vagueness, nonlinear timeline, futurefic
Summary: Kame comes to Ueda with a proposal.
Notes: This is kind of messed up, because I don’t really know how to make it chronologically sound and still make the impact I intended-to be honest, I had a hard time with the prompt until I heard this song, which I listened to while writing this.
Thanks to the mods for organising this, difficult or not, the process was lovely. Also, a million thanks to my beloved beta-sama who helped me so much. I think I owe her my life.
*
The smell of French toast woke Ueda up.
It’s still early; the sun’s only beginning to rise and the cicadas are still chirping faintly. He tosses to the right and closes his eyes, making a fresh attempt to fall asleep.
A few minutes later, he hears the twisting sound of the door knob; Kame has just left his apartment.
He falls asleep and wakes up a few hours later to find that Kame has left him a note under the plate of toast.
“I’m done with our song, will you make a demo of it?”
*
Ten years after Ueda first uttered that he can see fairies, Kame says it to him.
“That’s sudden, what’s wrong?” he asks.
“Hallucination. You see, when the candlelight flickers, things around it start to look like they move,” Kame explains, referring to the candles on the TV cabinet.
It’s dark everywhere in the house because Kame has decided to have a solemn Christmas celebration, just them, the candles, the falling snow, and the distant sound of chorals from the streets.
Kame inches closer, lays his head on Ueda’s shoulder.
“Merry Christmas,” he whispers.
*
The day after KAT-TUN’s 10th Anniversary Concert is confirmed, Kame comes to Ueda with a rather impossible, though not surprising, proposal.
“How do you feel about making a song, just the two of us?”
Ueda thinks that Kame’s quite possibly the worst musical match for him; he can’t think of any song that he has ever written that could possibly fit Kame.
“You compose the melody, I fill in the lyrics, and we sing it together,” Kame continues, grinning slightly.
Ueda doesn’t think he can ever write a song that Kame and he could sing together, and that’s why he agrees.
“Deal, as long as I don’t have to dance.”
*
Ueda has a grand piano in his apartment that he doesn’t use for composing purposes. It used to belong to his grandmother, who generously gave it to him as a house-warming gift when he bought that apartment for his 30th birthday. There’s something about the handsome grand piano that made his apartment extraordinarily posh, and Ueda loves having it even if he hardly uses it to play his songs (he has another keyboard he uses more frequently).
He has a habit of brushing the piano cover before lifting it up, though it’s not dusty. Kame once remarked how the gesture seemed unrealistic, like it was a scene from a movie, but to Ueda it’s like an initiation ritual.
“You know, there actually exists a dimension of creativity around it, like the realm of the genius and somehow I just feel like it’s only right to prepare before entering that kind of world,” he once told Kame.
The first note, C flat, resounds, and he closes his eyes and lets everything flash in front of him, then his fingers move in an unstoppable delirium.
All ten fingers hit the last note and Ueda heaves a long, deep breath.
*
There are things about Kame that Ueda would rather forget: the way Kame gives away parts of himself as he kisses, the way Kame sometimes looks at him like he’s the only one that exists, the way Kame scratches his shoulder and Ueda can’t help but notice how beautiful he is, and the way Kame seems to glow in the dark.
*
Fairies were a lie Ueda told in his youth.
Miracle is the new cabinet behind his grand piano, filled with a ridiculously organised archive of all his compositions.
*
“Do you always have it messy like this,” Kame says as he sorts through Ueda’s pile of compositions, “because I can hardly understand anything from here.”
“Isn’t that because you don’t really know how to read music?” Ueda says, holding back the annoyance he has been bottling since Kame came and decided that the best way to start on their collaboration is by figuring out if their musical tastes intersect.
Kame wipes his glasses with his shirt and hands Ueda a few pieces of paper.
“Play this,” he says.
*
On the way back to his car, Ueda sees Kame chatting happily with Nakamaru and it suddenly dawns upon him that Kame probably works best with people who seem to be the opposite of him.
*
The lyrics that Kame just wrote for “their” song are surprisingly mellow, especially for Kame’s standard. It talks about the circle of life, the process of growing old and wondering if growing old is a journey towards regret, if it’s a reflection of bad decisions.
A shade of clarity over hot-bloodedness of youth, a sliver of wisdom over the bleakness of melancholy; it fits the title they have chosen for the song.
Ueda loves it.
*
Kame takes Ueda and Nakamaru for a drive after he breaks up with his girlfriend, a fashion consultant about 5 years his senior. Ueda knows Ayame, though not very closely, and it didn’t surprise him when Kame told the rest of KAT-TUN that he was dating Ayame, but it certainly surprised him that they broke up 3 months after that.
“It’s nothing,” Kame says, face flushing with intoxication. “I mean, I feel sad and all, but I had a hunch that she wasn’t the one.”
Kame rambles on into the night, recalling the finer qualities in Ayame: how she was almost the one he was looking for, how pretty she looks without makeup, how she didn’t mind that he had to leave when they were just getting into the “mood”. Nakamaru encourages Kame-quite frankly a pretty Nakamaru thing to do, to ask someone to talk their problems away. The only thing Ueda gets from Kame’s endless ramble is how upset he really is about the whole thing, breaking up again and realising that it was just another mistake he had made.
(Of course Kame would never admit that it was a mistake, but Ueda doesn’t need Kame’s confession.)
That’s probably why the first thing Ueda does when he gets home is to brush his grand piano, open its cover, and play the music written in his mind.
*
The cabinet’s really colourful.
Kame has apparently committed most of his favourite compositions into his memory and coded them with colours according to his (Kame’s) perceived intensity. Kame’s favourite pieces are coded in red, and predictably enough, the “red” folder consists of mostly jazz pieces, though there are also some ballads and acoustic.
(“Red’s for passion, something I have in ample amount,” he can almost hear Kame grinning while explaining.)
The cheerful, upbeat ones are filed into “orange”, the heart-wrenching ballads in “blue” and most interestingly, there’s a folder named “black” and it apparently has everything Kame can’t sort.
*
“I think I have feelings for you,” Kame tells Ueda, and he stops playing the keyboard immediately.
Kame wraps his arms around Ueda’s neck, chest against Ueda’s back and lips beside his ear.
“It’s true.”
*
Five days into sorting and Ueda decides that working with Kame is the worst decision he has ever made.
“You don’t understand music, don’t pretend you do, and what you are actually doing right now is telling me you can compose better than me,” Ueda rants, “don’t you have better things to do anyway?”
Kame’s face contorts with fury. “What the hell are you saying? I thought it would be good for us to do this, because we never really had projects together and now you’re saying that I got in the way of your creative muses?”
If this happened ten years ago, Ueda would have thrown a punch to Kame’s face, hoping that he could at least dislocate the jaw somehow, and walked away as though the he had won, but right now Ueda doesn’t want to win.
“I’m leaving for today,” Kame says.
It’s funny how the older they get, the less they say to each other, and the less direct they are with each other.
*
Junno announces that his girlfriend has accepted his proposal.
“I, Taguchi Junnosuke, at the age of 30, can finally draw a stop on my bachelorhood in the near future!”
Koki doesn’t really look pleased. “You know, we weren’t really worried that you would never get married, considering how long you have had her.”
Nakamaru’s not very pleased either, but only because he had once said that he would definitely find a steady girlfriend before Junno got married.
Kame immediately plans a party.
Ueda sulks. “Ah, the pain of growing old,” he says.
*
“This is me,” Kame says, dumping the “red” folder on the coffee table in Ueda’s living room.
“What about me?” Ueda asks.
Kame points to the almost human-sized pile stacked against the grand piano’s leg. “You’re everything else.”
*
There are things about Kame that Ueda never seems to be able to forget: the tears from his eyes when he feels a pain that goes beyond agony, the shadow on his head when he shoulders a weight beyond mere burden, the flesh that gradually slips away from his body when he promises to achieve anything beyond humanly possible.
*
The final note of the song fades and descends into soundlessness.
“I like it,” Kame says. “I really, really, really like it.”
Ueda rises up from his seat and stretches, but Kame catches him almost immediately.
“I knew you thought we, this thing, this project, wouldn’t work out,” he whispers and pulls his neck close and their noses touch. “But now we are untouchable.”
Their lips clash almost carelessly and Ueda suddenly has his heart in his throat, suddenly feels a shiver running down his spine so paralysing that he feels like he has just lost all limbs, but he pushes into the kiss anyway, slightly startling Kame, and Kame tightens his arm around his neck and he allows Ueda to wrap his arms around his waist and lets him kiss his neck and then he groans so deeply, Ueda jumps away.
Kame furrows his brow; he looks hurt.
“Why?” he asks and tugs at Ueda’s shirt, pulling him back, but Ueda gently pushes his hand away and walks into his bedroom.
*
Their management team approves of their song.
Ueda wants Kame to name the song, but Kame says that Ueda should do it, because Ueda did most of the composing anyway.
“Pink and Gray, just like we decided,” Ueda says.
Kame smiles. “Sounds good.”
*
There are things Ueda does to Kame that he hopes Kame would never know: the way Ueda softly plants a kiss on Kame forehead when he’s drunk, the way he glances at Kame as he bops his head listening to the demo of the songs they are working on, the way he studies his habits and burns them into his mind.
*
Kame left Ueda a bento box on his dressing table with a note beside it that says, “I’m sorry, can we start over? I don’t want to give up yet.”
Ueda doesn’t want to give up either, so he eats up to the last drop of rice and puts the empty bento box somewhere near Kame’s backpack in the locker.
*
Ueda expected Kame to leave after he pushed him away, but Kame followed him to his bedroom, clinging to him.
“I’m sorry,” he says, each and every syllable weighed down by sorrow. “I’m sorry, I really am,” he repeats and Ueda holds him like he’s a wounded tiger.
“No, I’m sorry,” Ueda tells him as he pats his back. “I’m sorry I pushed you away, I shouldn’t have kissed you.”
“Tat-chan,” Kame asks, “let me stay here tonight.”
Ueda nods and he lets go of Kame, but pulls him back for a kiss, not quite finishing from where they left, but starting over, touching him with apologies, and Kame reciprocates, only not really because Kame still wants something, still wants Ueda that way, still wishes that Ueda could find it in himself to tell him that he has feelings for him too.
*
There are things that Ueda would like to tell Kame someday: sometimes you drive me crazy, sometimes you drive me literally crazy, sometimes I feel like you’re much more than what you seem to be, sometimes I wish that you were less than what you are, sometimes I think I like you.
Sometimes I feel like I like those feelings I have for you, the ones that make me want to write music.
*
“Pick one from each pile,” Ueda instructs as he dumps two folders, one “red”, one “black”, in front of Kame, “or two, if you like.”
Kame flips through the folders and hands him a few pieces.
Ueda throws them all to the ground, much to Kame’s dismay, and proceeds to mess them more as he kneels to the ground and throws the papers in the air.
“What are you doing?”
Ueda gathers the papers together.
“Ueda Tatsuya’s version of ‘remixing’,” he says and Kame laughs out loud.
“That’s smart of you, but what are you going to do with the title of the song?”
“The same, combine them.”
“Red and Black? Black and Red? Red Black?”
“No, Pink and Gray,” Ueda suggests playfully, but then they both look at each other and Ueda knows that they have just found a title for their song.
Poll Team Future Prompt 5