going to watch buzzcocks now
I had a meeting with my dissertation supervisor today, so he could look over 2000 words of my first draft. I was kind of dreading this, because though I'm usually pretty good at accepting criticism I was expecting quite a lot of it. And he had none! :D Instead he just had loads of really glowing praise that I'm not totally sure I deserve but am happy to accept anyway. He wants me to do a PhD actually, which I don't really have the time, the money or any real incentive (what I mean by that is there aren't really any jobs in the field of English I'm interested in) for but it's nice to be encouraged anyway. ...I was tempted a bit when I realised that if I did do a PhD I could actually call myself Dr.
HAVE SOME FIC.
Guitar Hero
Fandom: Samurai Sentai Shinkenger
Rating: PG
Chapter: 1/?
Pairing(s): one-sided Ryunosuke/Takeru, maybe? but pretty much gen currently
Notes: AU: in which the Shinkengers (sans Ryunosuke) are a rock band. There's about 1000 extra words added to the snippet I posted about a week ago? Just a heads up here.
“You’ve got to stop crowd surfing during my solos,” Takeru said after Chiaki finally left the stage. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded. Chiaki walked straight past him. “Chiaki. Do you even realise what the song’s about?”
“You know what, I don’t,” Chiaki replied, snorting. “Your lyrics make no sense, man.”
Takeru took a step towards him. “It’s about the death of a family member. And you were crowd surfing during it.”
Chiaki managed to stop himself from gulping, but it was a close thing. Takeru’s eyes had that hard, unshifting quality they took on when he knew he was right, boring into his. He forced himself to shrug. “Your solo was kind of boring, I was just livening it up.”
Takeru said nothing. Chiaki picked up Takeru’s guitar every other week, inexpertly tried to strum it and succeeded only in making Mako or their manager Jii tell him to put it down. That was usually the point where he made some remark about how guitars were stupid instruments anyway.
“Guitars are stupid,” he would say, setting Takeru’s down with a bang that made everyone else in the tour bus flinch. “The fact is people would rather listen to just me singing than to just Takeru playing. His fans are just... louder, that’s all.”
It was certainly true that Takeru’s fans were loud. Chiaki could still hear them, the sound of their chants drifting backstage. Takeru’s number one fan - as he called himself, and Chiaki saw no reason to disagree - was leading the chants, waving one his many meticulously homemade banners.
“Are you going to go back out there?” Chiaki said, trying not to sound as grumpy as he felt.
Takeru glanced over his shoulder. “I’d rather not,” he said flatly, brushing past Chiaki to his dressing room.
Chiaki watched Takeru retreat, then peeked back out at the stage, at Takeru’s number one fan eagerly calling his name and waving his banner. Chiaki had an extra backstage pass. He usually handed it out to the prettiest groupie he could find, invited her to his dressing room to look at his Arbok, but this time he nudged a member of security standing next to the stage.
“You see that guy in blue in the audience? The one with the really big banner? Give this to him.”
They could have had a separate dressing room each but Kotoha was adamant that she should share one with Mako: after all, Mako was the one who reapplied the plasters on her back after she fell over her own drum kit, and Mako was the one who reassured her that yes, she was hitting the drums hard enough.
“Actually, you hit those drums surprisingly hard,” Mako said as they sat down at their dressing table. “I thought that when you first auditioned for the band.”
Kotoha had been the last to join, after Genta had decided being a drummer wasn’t for him.
“I need to be at the front, grooving to the music!” he had said, to sighs from the rest of the band.
After a long day of replies to the advert Mako had put in the local paper from people who either couldn’t drum or could drum but were what Chiaki called “too ugly for our band” (to their faces, before Takeru made the wise decision to gag him) Kotoha had appeared, small and quiet and shuffling. Mako remembered the doubtful look she had exchanged with Takeru - and that was when Kotoha had begun to pound the drums with a power that made Takeru’s eyebrows disappear under his hair.
Kotoha looked up from her phone only to smile gratefully at Mako.
“Something wrong?” Mako said. Kotoha was eyeballing her phone as if there was something growing out of it.
“Chiaki says we should go and look in the corridor, because something really funny is happening,” Kotoha mumbled, passing her phone to Mako. Sure enough, there in Chiaki’s typically indecipherable text speak Mako was able to make out the message Kotoha had read. There were at least five exclamation marks ending the message.
Kotoha had already got out of her chair, was crossing the room to peek outside. Mako followed her.
Finally, Ryunosuke thought, clasping his hands together. A chance to actually meet the man who occupied his dreams every night! He gazed down at the backstage pass dangling from his wrist. His idol must have noticed him in the crowd, noticed the banner he’d spent an entire week lovingly perfecting!
He’d been a fan from the very start, when he’d noticed the Shinkengers performing their first single on television. The singer was off-key and kept hitching his shirt up, obviously delighted by the screams it elicited from the audience and Ryunosuke almost turned the channel off in disgust - but the camera panned to the guitarist, thoughtful and intense, engrossed in the music. Dashing really, Ryunosuke had thought at the time, eyes glued to the screen. He’d watched until the end of the song, then rushed to his computer and spent the rest of the day researching this mysterious guitarist.
There could be nobody who knew as much about Takeru Shiba as Ryunosuke did, he was quite confident of that. How impressed Takeru would be when Ryunosuke was able to recite Takeru’s answer to question four in the band’s January interview with Shoxx! He would-
That was Takeru ahead, Ryunosuke was sure of it. He stopped dead, biting his lip. He ran his fingers through his hair, making sure it was perfect. He straightened his clothes. He almost practised his bow but the guy Takeru was talking to - Chiaki Tani, the singer, looking as scruffy and unkempt as he always looked on television - was glancing at Ryunosuke with undisguised amusement. Ryunosuke took a deep breath, stepped forward, and spoke:
“Excuse me? Shiba-sama?”
And then Takeru was turning to look at him and every bit of breath in Ryunosuke’s body left him, floated up into the atmosphere. If he wasn’t mistaken, that surely was recognition on Takeru’s face! He took another step forward.
“I-I just wanted to say I think you’re amazing!”
Takeru blinked slowly at him, then nodded slowly. Behind him, Chiaki was smirking, but Ryunosuke wasn’t put off! Because he knew how shy Takeru was, he remembered from an interview last year with Cure! It was one of his favourite interviews simply for the segment where the other band members were asked to describe Takeru! Mako, the bassist - Ryunosuke had always liked her, had thought she would be his favourite if not for Takeru - had laughingly described how quiet Takeru became around people he didn’t know, and the interviewer had described Takeru as nudging her nervously.
“Not just at guitar playing!” Ryunosuke added eagerly, drinking in every blink, every forehead crease. “Although I think you are amazing at guitar playing! You should do it professionally!”
“He does do it professionally,” Chiaki snorted from behind Takeru.
Ryunosuke managed to stop himself from glaring at Chiaki. “T-that was what I meant,” he said quickly.
Finally, a hint of a smile danced on Takeru’s lips. It would have been unnoticeable to anyone else, but Ryunosuke was so well-versed in the quirks of Takeru’s expressions that he recognised it immediately. He beamed back.
“Thank you,” Takeru said, and Ryunosuke felt like he might faint.
“Is that all?” Chiaki said, prodding Takeru sharply in the side. “This guy comes to like, every concert and all you’re going to say to him is ‘thank you’?” Ryunosuke wasn’t sure whether he should be grateful or angry with Chiaki for questioning his idol. Being both, he realised, was more than a little confusing. “You should show him your dressing room or something, have a proper conversation.”
Ryunosuke looked from Chiaki to Takeru, his eyes bright.
“I don’t think so,” Takeru said. “I’m busy.” He pushed past Chiaki and without another look at Ryunosuke he was gone, hands in his pockets as he walked away. Ryunosuke blinked.
And blinked again.
“Did I do something wrong?” he said, more to himself than to Chiaki.
Chiaki replied anyway. “Nah, that’s just how Takeru is. You know, he’s not a very nice guy when it comes down to it. He’s like a reptile, he’s totally incapable of love. You know what you should do, you should write into a magazine or something. Yeah, ‘Shinkengers guitarist snubbed me backstage, singer was surprisingly nice’, something like that. But that’s just a suggestion, you could-“
“I should apologise to him,” Ryunosuke said, biting his nails, staring after Takeru’s back. Chiaki opened his mouth to tell him that wasn’t necessary, to repeat the point about how Takeru was a reptile, but Ryunosuke took off at a run after Takeru, calling out to him desperately.
Chiaki sighed, caught the eye of Kotoha and Mako (peeping out from their dressing room, their heads similarly cocked curiously) and shrugged. It had been fun while it lasted but he was beginning to regret wasting his backstage pass on that crazy fanboy. Unless Genta was free (and Genta was never free, constantly surrounded by throngs of fans desperate to party with him) and willing to waste the evening playing Dead or Alive it was shaping up to be a pretty lonely night for Chiaki.
“He’s not coming in here,” Mako said to Kotoha, decisively closing the door on a dejected Chiaki. “He’ll keep us up all night talking about Final Fantasy or trying to get us into a threesome again and we need to be in bed early so we’re fresh for that interview tomorrow. He’s going to have dark circles under his eyes tomorrow.”
Kotoha had almost forgotten about the interview. She wilted; she never felt comfortable under the scrutiny of a journalist, never felt at ease being peppered with questions that she felt she couldn’t give a good answer to. Mako clapped a hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently.
“It’ll be fine,” she said soothingly. “It won’t even take that long anyway; it’s just going to be a short piece. “
When Chiaki knocked on their door, whining through the keyhole that he was bored, Mako made a point of ignoring him, raising her eyebrows at a concerned looking Kotoha. After a few minutes an indignant “fine” indicated he’d given up.
Genta, meanwhile, had no plans to get any beauty sleep. A group of fans had followed him to the nearest bar and there they had been for an hour, giggling into their drinks. Genta told them about the time the band’s manager, Hikoma, had tried to spank Chiaki after he’d forgotten the words to one of the band’s songs.
“Enough about him,” someone said, beer sloshing on to the table as he set his drink down heavily. “Tell us about the drummer, what’s she like?”
“My brother’s in love with her,” someone else said, rolling her eyes. “He has pictures of her all over his wall. Hey,” she turned to Genta, “could you get me an autograph? He’d die if I got an autograph for him.”
“Why not!” Genta replied, slinging an arm around her. “If it’s just an autograph,” he added as an afterthought, because for some reason Kotoha had an unfortunate habit of collecting fans Chiaki referred to as “creepers”.
“There’s nothing wrong with my fans,” Kotoha would say whenever Chiaki gave his opinion of them. “That old man’s belt was just loose, that’s all. He was as embarrassed as anyone.”
“If you give me your brother’s name then I can get Kotoha-chan to personalise it for you,” Genta said, beaming. “I could-“ but he trailed off, because standing in the doorway of the bar was a tall figure he recognised. Genta’s group went silent as they followed his gaze.
There in the doorway was the lead singer, Doukoku (Chiaki insisted every time he heard that name that it had to be a stage name), of the Gedoshu, a heavy metal band who had made it their personal mission to, as the singer had put it in one interview, “obliterate” Genta and the other Shinkengers after Takeru had snubbed him backstage at an awards show when the Shinkengers were just starting out.
A hush descended over Genta’s group - over the entire bar, in fact, as patrons glanced up and realised who had entered. Genta bit his lip.
Doukoku’s eyes fell on him. He glared. Genta bit his lip harder. The girl next to him shied away, in an attempt to escape Doukoku’s glare.
Doukoku took a step forward, the buckles on his heavy boots clinking. He began to move towards Genta.
HAVE SOME FIC.
Guitar Hero
Fandom: Samurai Sentai Shinkenger
Rating: PG
Chapter: 1/?
Pairing(s): one-sided Ryunosuke/Takeru, maybe? but pretty much gen currently
Notes: AU: in which the Shinkengers (sans Ryunosuke) are a rock band. There's about 1000 extra words added to the snippet I posted about a week ago? Just a heads up here.
“You’ve got to stop crowd surfing during my solos,” Takeru said after Chiaki finally left the stage. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded. Chiaki walked straight past him. “Chiaki. Do you even realise what the song’s about?”
“You know what, I don’t,” Chiaki replied, snorting. “Your lyrics make no sense, man.”
Takeru took a step towards him. “It’s about the death of a family member. And you were crowd surfing during it.”
Chiaki managed to stop himself from gulping, but it was a close thing. Takeru’s eyes had that hard, unshifting quality they took on when he knew he was right, boring into his. He forced himself to shrug. “Your solo was kind of boring, I was just livening it up.”
Takeru said nothing. Chiaki picked up Takeru’s guitar every other week, inexpertly tried to strum it and succeeded only in making Mako or their manager Jii tell him to put it down. That was usually the point where he made some remark about how guitars were stupid instruments anyway.
“Guitars are stupid,” he would say, setting Takeru’s down with a bang that made everyone else in the tour bus flinch. “The fact is people would rather listen to just me singing than to just Takeru playing. His fans are just... louder, that’s all.”
It was certainly true that Takeru’s fans were loud. Chiaki could still hear them, the sound of their chants drifting backstage. Takeru’s number one fan - as he called himself, and Chiaki saw no reason to disagree - was leading the chants, waving one his many meticulously homemade banners.
“Are you going to go back out there?” Chiaki said, trying not to sound as grumpy as he felt.
Takeru glanced over his shoulder. “I’d rather not,” he said flatly, brushing past Chiaki to his dressing room.
Chiaki watched Takeru retreat, then peeked back out at the stage, at Takeru’s number one fan eagerly calling his name and waving his banner. Chiaki had an extra backstage pass. He usually handed it out to the prettiest groupie he could find, invited her to his dressing room to look at his Arbok, but this time he nudged a member of security standing next to the stage.
“You see that guy in blue in the audience? The one with the really big banner? Give this to him.”
They could have had a separate dressing room each but Kotoha was adamant that she should share one with Mako: after all, Mako was the one who reapplied the plasters on her back after she fell over her own drum kit, and Mako was the one who reassured her that yes, she was hitting the drums hard enough.
“Actually, you hit those drums surprisingly hard,” Mako said as they sat down at their dressing table. “I thought that when you first auditioned for the band.”
Kotoha had been the last to join, after Genta had decided being a drummer wasn’t for him.
“I need to be at the front, grooving to the music!” he had said, to sighs from the rest of the band.
After a long day of replies to the advert Mako had put in the local paper from people who either couldn’t drum or could drum but were what Chiaki called “too ugly for our band” (to their faces, before Takeru made the wise decision to gag him) Kotoha had appeared, small and quiet and shuffling. Mako remembered the doubtful look she had exchanged with Takeru - and that was when Kotoha had begun to pound the drums with a power that made Takeru’s eyebrows disappear under his hair.
Kotoha looked up from her phone only to smile gratefully at Mako.
“Something wrong?” Mako said. Kotoha was eyeballing her phone as if there was something growing out of it.
“Chiaki says we should go and look in the corridor, because something really funny is happening,” Kotoha mumbled, passing her phone to Mako. Sure enough, there in Chiaki’s typically indecipherable text speak Mako was able to make out the message Kotoha had read. There were at least five exclamation marks ending the message.
Kotoha had already got out of her chair, was crossing the room to peek outside. Mako followed her.
Finally, Ryunosuke thought, clasping his hands together. A chance to actually meet the man who occupied his dreams every night! He gazed down at the backstage pass dangling from his wrist. His idol must have noticed him in the crowd, noticed the banner he’d spent an entire week lovingly perfecting!
He’d been a fan from the very start, when he’d noticed the Shinkengers performing their first single on television. The singer was off-key and kept hitching his shirt up, obviously delighted by the screams it elicited from the audience and Ryunosuke almost turned the channel off in disgust - but the camera panned to the guitarist, thoughtful and intense, engrossed in the music. Dashing really, Ryunosuke had thought at the time, eyes glued to the screen. He’d watched until the end of the song, then rushed to his computer and spent the rest of the day researching this mysterious guitarist.
There could be nobody who knew as much about Takeru Shiba as Ryunosuke did, he was quite confident of that. How impressed Takeru would be when Ryunosuke was able to recite Takeru’s answer to question four in the band’s January interview with Shoxx! He would-
That was Takeru ahead, Ryunosuke was sure of it. He stopped dead, biting his lip. He ran his fingers through his hair, making sure it was perfect. He straightened his clothes. He almost practised his bow but the guy Takeru was talking to - Chiaki Tani, the singer, looking as scruffy and unkempt as he always looked on television - was glancing at Ryunosuke with undisguised amusement. Ryunosuke took a deep breath, stepped forward, and spoke:
“Excuse me? Shiba-sama?”
And then Takeru was turning to look at him and every bit of breath in Ryunosuke’s body left him, floated up into the atmosphere. If he wasn’t mistaken, that surely was recognition on Takeru’s face! He took another step forward.
“I-I just wanted to say I think you’re amazing!”
Takeru blinked slowly at him, then nodded slowly. Behind him, Chiaki was smirking, but Ryunosuke wasn’t put off! Because he knew how shy Takeru was, he remembered from an interview last year with Cure! It was one of his favourite interviews simply for the segment where the other band members were asked to describe Takeru! Mako, the bassist - Ryunosuke had always liked her, had thought she would be his favourite if not for Takeru - had laughingly described how quiet Takeru became around people he didn’t know, and the interviewer had described Takeru as nudging her nervously.
“Not just at guitar playing!” Ryunosuke added eagerly, drinking in every blink, every forehead crease. “Although I think you are amazing at guitar playing! You should do it professionally!”
“He does do it professionally,” Chiaki snorted from behind Takeru.
Ryunosuke managed to stop himself from glaring at Chiaki. “T-that was what I meant,” he said quickly.
Finally, a hint of a smile danced on Takeru’s lips. It would have been unnoticeable to anyone else, but Ryunosuke was so well-versed in the quirks of Takeru’s expressions that he recognised it immediately. He beamed back.
“Thank you,” Takeru said, and Ryunosuke felt like he might faint.
“Is that all?” Chiaki said, prodding Takeru sharply in the side. “This guy comes to like, every concert and all you’re going to say to him is ‘thank you’?” Ryunosuke wasn’t sure whether he should be grateful or angry with Chiaki for questioning his idol. Being both, he realised, was more than a little confusing. “You should show him your dressing room or something, have a proper conversation.”
Ryunosuke looked from Chiaki to Takeru, his eyes bright.
“I don’t think so,” Takeru said. “I’m busy.” He pushed past Chiaki and without another look at Ryunosuke he was gone, hands in his pockets as he walked away. Ryunosuke blinked.
And blinked again.
“Did I do something wrong?” he said, more to himself than to Chiaki.
Chiaki replied anyway. “Nah, that’s just how Takeru is. You know, he’s not a very nice guy when it comes down to it. He’s like a reptile, he’s totally incapable of love. You know what you should do, you should write into a magazine or something. Yeah, ‘Shinkengers guitarist snubbed me backstage, singer was surprisingly nice’, something like that. But that’s just a suggestion, you could-“
“I should apologise to him,” Ryunosuke said, biting his nails, staring after Takeru’s back. Chiaki opened his mouth to tell him that wasn’t necessary, to repeat the point about how Takeru was a reptile, but Ryunosuke took off at a run after Takeru, calling out to him desperately.
Chiaki sighed, caught the eye of Kotoha and Mako (peeping out from their dressing room, their heads similarly cocked curiously) and shrugged. It had been fun while it lasted but he was beginning to regret wasting his backstage pass on that crazy fanboy. Unless Genta was free (and Genta was never free, constantly surrounded by throngs of fans desperate to party with him) and willing to waste the evening playing Dead or Alive it was shaping up to be a pretty lonely night for Chiaki.
“He’s not coming in here,” Mako said to Kotoha, decisively closing the door on a dejected Chiaki. “He’ll keep us up all night talking about Final Fantasy or trying to get us into a threesome again and we need to be in bed early so we’re fresh for that interview tomorrow. He’s going to have dark circles under his eyes tomorrow.”
Kotoha had almost forgotten about the interview. She wilted; she never felt comfortable under the scrutiny of a journalist, never felt at ease being peppered with questions that she felt she couldn’t give a good answer to. Mako clapped a hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently.
“It’ll be fine,” she said soothingly. “It won’t even take that long anyway; it’s just going to be a short piece. “
When Chiaki knocked on their door, whining through the keyhole that he was bored, Mako made a point of ignoring him, raising her eyebrows at a concerned looking Kotoha. After a few minutes an indignant “fine” indicated he’d given up.
Genta, meanwhile, had no plans to get any beauty sleep. A group of fans had followed him to the nearest bar and there they had been for an hour, giggling into their drinks. Genta told them about the time the band’s manager, Hikoma, had tried to spank Chiaki after he’d forgotten the words to one of the band’s songs.
“Enough about him,” someone said, beer sloshing on to the table as he set his drink down heavily. “Tell us about the drummer, what’s she like?”
“My brother’s in love with her,” someone else said, rolling her eyes. “He has pictures of her all over his wall. Hey,” she turned to Genta, “could you get me an autograph? He’d die if I got an autograph for him.”
“Why not!” Genta replied, slinging an arm around her. “If it’s just an autograph,” he added as an afterthought, because for some reason Kotoha had an unfortunate habit of collecting fans Chiaki referred to as “creepers”.
“There’s nothing wrong with my fans,” Kotoha would say whenever Chiaki gave his opinion of them. “That old man’s belt was just loose, that’s all. He was as embarrassed as anyone.”
“If you give me your brother’s name then I can get Kotoha-chan to personalise it for you,” Genta said, beaming. “I could-“ but he trailed off, because standing in the doorway of the bar was a tall figure he recognised. Genta’s group went silent as they followed his gaze.
There in the doorway was the lead singer, Doukoku (Chiaki insisted every time he heard that name that it had to be a stage name), of the Gedoshu, a heavy metal band who had made it their personal mission to, as the singer had put it in one interview, “obliterate” Genta and the other Shinkengers after Takeru had snubbed him backstage at an awards show when the Shinkengers were just starting out.
A hush descended over Genta’s group - over the entire bar, in fact, as patrons glanced up and realised who had entered. Genta bit his lip.
Doukoku’s eyes fell on him. He glared. Genta bit his lip harder. The girl next to him shied away, in an attempt to escape Doukoku’s glare.
Doukoku took a step forward, the buckles on his heavy boots clinking. He began to move towards Genta.