lights outside here
1/1
uruha/kai
g - 1444w
The thing about being the last to arrive is that you always miss the first part of the joke.
december 6th of the uruai winter challenge.
assigned theme: post kai gazette beginnings
assigned prompt:
Describe your band in one word: family, brothers, progressive, wild, notorious, cute, radical, a pin-the-tail on the adjective, except each one is correct because at some point, someone has said so. Kai focuses on the interview writers who strategize their questions, who are interested in what comes out of their mouths for maximum readership and exposure.
At age twenty two, Kai still hasn't had his fair share of interviews, but he knows what they're looking for anyway. The problem is, so do the others. The thing about being the last to arrive is that you always miss the first part of the joke.
Kai sits on the folding chair, picking at the foam cushioning while Ruki tells a story about Kanagawa. Kai has never been there. He watches the progress of Uruha's and Reita's understanding, their smiles when they figure out Ruki's gag line.
He remembers the promise he made to himself before the train doors closed on his home town: regret nothing.
Reita has a birthmark close to his shoulder, a short horizontal stroke. It had gone unnoticed to Kai until their first month in, when they were stripping their former practice room and moving everything to the new label's building.
(How they landed themselves in this situation hadn't been made truly clarified to Kai, even though he as newly appointed leader had made the first move. There were promises of success, more than the pea-sized exposure they were already getting. Kai had barely begun to buy into it when there were contracts at their desk and pens pressed into their hands.
To him, each signature was a chance to cop out, stay, make it big through the original plan. Kai looked up at Uruha, watching the resignation on his face as he signed the papers and pushed them away. "I don't care how we do this," he said. "I just want to do it.")
Kai was distracting himself with the flex of Reita's loaded arms when he noticed it, black and curiously straight. It looked more like a scar than anything. He'd been impressed and stored it away as a conversation starter, but when it was finally used, Reita just grunted into his game boy, fingers moving in an ant-squashing rapid fire.
The next time he enquires about it, Ruki's reaction makes Kai wonder if Reita really hadn't heard him the first time. He snorts, looking up at to make sure he isn't wasting his breath, before saying, "That's a tattoo."
So here they are. If there was a tally of weird shit each member has done, Ruki would be on top of the list. He was the visionary, insisted it even as he tried to act like it wasn't pretentious. Still, there were things Reita had done in the past that Kai had side-eyed. Mostly though, it reminded him of how little effort he'd spent getting to know these boys. There was the time Reita picked baker as his alternate job, the time he assaulted the crowd with his hips, and maybe if Kai wasn't such a cheap drunk he would be privy to a lot more than that. This time, though, "Wait. What?"
Uruha's phone clatters onto the coffee table, but his face is calm when he walks out. Kai startles. He stares after him, then back to Ruki, except-
Ruki's expression shutters and he sinks lower in his seat, turning his attention back to his phone.
"What."
Ruki sighs. "It's stupid," he insists.
Kai thinks he's hearing things when Aoi mutters from beside him, "Yeah, if you consider Kouyou's name stupid."
The room flips itself upside down. He waits for the punchline. Which, surprisingly, comes.
"We were drunk."
Of course. There was something Kai was thinking about before, about- ah, right. How little he knew about them.
Kai doesn't know her name. She looks new, young. Probably a fan whose intentions weren't entirely career oriented when she applied for this job. He only has to cross his arms and watch her for a minute to figure it out:
"Uruha-san looks so cool." Ah.
They're the first words she's ever said to him. Armed with a blow-drier and their standard tour shirt, Kai thinks she doesn't stand a chance.
"He looks okay," he says.
Uruha is sitting serenely at the vanity and Kai tries to find the appeal in a man wearing eight hair clips and ten grams of make-up. He doesn't really see it. Then again he doesn't feel like he's seen much past blind survival since he got here.
On the bad days, Kai is a skinny tangle of regrets which always root themselves back to Ruki. Ruki and his fucking offer to join their last attempt at a band. Kai sometimes wakes up at six am and finds himself in the studio, and he doesn't see the city rise with him because the place has no windows. He wants to punch Aoi and punch Uruha when they walk in, wearing sunglasses and smelling like cigarettes. Nobody here makes music without acting like they own the world, and Kai needs someone to blame other than himself.
Later, when Kai greets Uruha with "I think the new roadie has a crush on you," he doesn't get a response. That doesn't surprise him. What does though, is Uruha pushing out Reita's chair and telling him to sit down.
Kai wonders if he can count the number of times they've spoken on both hands; the little he knows about Uruha didn't come from friendly chumming, after all. There's a reason Kai talks to Reita the most.
He sits and spends the next five minutes having a conversation with himself until Uruha asks him, "What are you doing here?"
Kai almost loses it.
Instead, he gambles and says, "Same as you."
Good enough, Uruha's expression says.
As self sacrificing leader, Kai is assigned to waking Uruha up in the morning, during the more rigorous days of tour where even he forgets what city they're in. Each venue is just as tiny as the last. Sometimes they don't even make stopovers, instead sleeping in the bus' inbuilt six-by-three beds. The mornings after aren't the happiest they've had.
The light blinks green as Kai takes out the card key and steps into Uruha's room, largely untouched except for for the cigarette buds on the ashtray and vitamin water by the bed. It's as close to home as they get these days.
He's about to reach out when Uruha opens his eyes. They're clear, as though he'd already been awake and was just waiting for Kai to come closer so he could prove it. "Oh, morning." He pauses with his hand still in front of him, getting the feeling that he'd just intruded on something. Uruha makes him feel like that, sometimes.
"We're leaving in a bit. Breakfast's on the road," is all he says. Kai is starting to move away when Uruha's voice stops him, still husky with sleep.
"What did he tell you?" He says. It sounds different, different from the on-stage rallying where they just scream if not for the fans then to hear their own voices fill the house.
"Who?"
"Ruki. About the tattoo." He clears his throat, looking into Kai's eyes.
Kai weighs up the chances of Uruha finishing Ruki's story. "Nothing," before he adds as an afterthought, "just that you were drunk."
Uruha is silent for so long then that Kai thinks he isn't going to reply. He speaks eventually, but not before Kai squirms in his shoes. "He'd never been good with pain, you know."
"Oh." Kai knows it's an unfair reply. But then he remembers they haven't been too fair on him, either.
Uruha unfurls himself, and it's probably the collarbones that puts Kai in danger of distraction. "I'm sorry about Ruki. He likes knowing things other people don't."
It takes Kai aback, because that was probably last in the choice of words he was expecting. Kai wonders if Uruha feels like they owe Kai something. Not an apology. A thank you, maybe.
"It's fine," he says. He doesn't know who he's assuring.
Uruha looks at him for a few moments longer, face pressed into his pillow. Kai isn't sure if he smiles because he turns around a second later, staring at the wall opposite him. Kai takes that as his cue to leave, and while he's walking out he thinks of the bumpy mornings where he stumbles past Uruha's bunk and catches him off guard, staring at Reita's bed. Maybe he'd known--
"Kai," Uruha says when he's at the door. Kai pauses, and then Uruha shakes his head. "Nevermind."
-- where this was going all along.
uruha/kai
g - 1444w
The thing about being the last to arrive is that you always miss the first part of the joke.
december 6th of the uruai winter challenge.
assigned theme: post kai gazette beginnings
assigned prompt:
Describe your band in one word: family, brothers, progressive, wild, notorious, cute, radical, a pin-the-tail on the adjective, except each one is correct because at some point, someone has said so. Kai focuses on the interview writers who strategize their questions, who are interested in what comes out of their mouths for maximum readership and exposure.
At age twenty two, Kai still hasn't had his fair share of interviews, but he knows what they're looking for anyway. The problem is, so do the others. The thing about being the last to arrive is that you always miss the first part of the joke.
Kai sits on the folding chair, picking at the foam cushioning while Ruki tells a story about Kanagawa. Kai has never been there. He watches the progress of Uruha's and Reita's understanding, their smiles when they figure out Ruki's gag line.
He remembers the promise he made to himself before the train doors closed on his home town: regret nothing.
Reita has a birthmark close to his shoulder, a short horizontal stroke. It had gone unnoticed to Kai until their first month in, when they were stripping their former practice room and moving everything to the new label's building.
(How they landed themselves in this situation hadn't been made truly clarified to Kai, even though he as newly appointed leader had made the first move. There were promises of success, more than the pea-sized exposure they were already getting. Kai had barely begun to buy into it when there were contracts at their desk and pens pressed into their hands.
To him, each signature was a chance to cop out, stay, make it big through the original plan. Kai looked up at Uruha, watching the resignation on his face as he signed the papers and pushed them away. "I don't care how we do this," he said. "I just want to do it.")
Kai was distracting himself with the flex of Reita's loaded arms when he noticed it, black and curiously straight. It looked more like a scar than anything. He'd been impressed and stored it away as a conversation starter, but when it was finally used, Reita just grunted into his game boy, fingers moving in an ant-squashing rapid fire.
The next time he enquires about it, Ruki's reaction makes Kai wonder if Reita really hadn't heard him the first time. He snorts, looking up at to make sure he isn't wasting his breath, before saying, "That's a tattoo."
So here they are. If there was a tally of weird shit each member has done, Ruki would be on top of the list. He was the visionary, insisted it even as he tried to act like it wasn't pretentious. Still, there were things Reita had done in the past that Kai had side-eyed. Mostly though, it reminded him of how little effort he'd spent getting to know these boys. There was the time Reita picked baker as his alternate job, the time he assaulted the crowd with his hips, and maybe if Kai wasn't such a cheap drunk he would be privy to a lot more than that. This time, though, "Wait. What?"
Uruha's phone clatters onto the coffee table, but his face is calm when he walks out. Kai startles. He stares after him, then back to Ruki, except-
Ruki's expression shutters and he sinks lower in his seat, turning his attention back to his phone.
"What."
Ruki sighs. "It's stupid," he insists.
Kai thinks he's hearing things when Aoi mutters from beside him, "Yeah, if you consider Kouyou's name stupid."
The room flips itself upside down. He waits for the punchline. Which, surprisingly, comes.
"We were drunk."
Of course. There was something Kai was thinking about before, about- ah, right. How little he knew about them.
Kai doesn't know her name. She looks new, young. Probably a fan whose intentions weren't entirely career oriented when she applied for this job. He only has to cross his arms and watch her for a minute to figure it out:
"Uruha-san looks so cool." Ah.
They're the first words she's ever said to him. Armed with a blow-drier and their standard tour shirt, Kai thinks she doesn't stand a chance.
"He looks okay," he says.
Uruha is sitting serenely at the vanity and Kai tries to find the appeal in a man wearing eight hair clips and ten grams of make-up. He doesn't really see it. Then again he doesn't feel like he's seen much past blind survival since he got here.
On the bad days, Kai is a skinny tangle of regrets which always root themselves back to Ruki. Ruki and his fucking offer to join their last attempt at a band. Kai sometimes wakes up at six am and finds himself in the studio, and he doesn't see the city rise with him because the place has no windows. He wants to punch Aoi and punch Uruha when they walk in, wearing sunglasses and smelling like cigarettes. Nobody here makes music without acting like they own the world, and Kai needs someone to blame other than himself.
Later, when Kai greets Uruha with "I think the new roadie has a crush on you," he doesn't get a response. That doesn't surprise him. What does though, is Uruha pushing out Reita's chair and telling him to sit down.
Kai wonders if he can count the number of times they've spoken on both hands; the little he knows about Uruha didn't come from friendly chumming, after all. There's a reason Kai talks to Reita the most.
He sits and spends the next five minutes having a conversation with himself until Uruha asks him, "What are you doing here?"
Kai almost loses it.
Instead, he gambles and says, "Same as you."
Good enough, Uruha's expression says.
As self sacrificing leader, Kai is assigned to waking Uruha up in the morning, during the more rigorous days of tour where even he forgets what city they're in. Each venue is just as tiny as the last. Sometimes they don't even make stopovers, instead sleeping in the bus' inbuilt six-by-three beds. The mornings after aren't the happiest they've had.
The light blinks green as Kai takes out the card key and steps into Uruha's room, largely untouched except for for the cigarette buds on the ashtray and vitamin water by the bed. It's as close to home as they get these days.
He's about to reach out when Uruha opens his eyes. They're clear, as though he'd already been awake and was just waiting for Kai to come closer so he could prove it. "Oh, morning." He pauses with his hand still in front of him, getting the feeling that he'd just intruded on something. Uruha makes him feel like that, sometimes.
"We're leaving in a bit. Breakfast's on the road," is all he says. Kai is starting to move away when Uruha's voice stops him, still husky with sleep.
"What did he tell you?" He says. It sounds different, different from the on-stage rallying where they just scream if not for the fans then to hear their own voices fill the house.
"Who?"
"Ruki. About the tattoo." He clears his throat, looking into Kai's eyes.
Kai weighs up the chances of Uruha finishing Ruki's story. "Nothing," before he adds as an afterthought, "just that you were drunk."
Uruha is silent for so long then that Kai thinks he isn't going to reply. He speaks eventually, but not before Kai squirms in his shoes. "He'd never been good with pain, you know."
"Oh." Kai knows it's an unfair reply. But then he remembers they haven't been too fair on him, either.
Uruha unfurls himself, and it's probably the collarbones that puts Kai in danger of distraction. "I'm sorry about Ruki. He likes knowing things other people don't."
It takes Kai aback, because that was probably last in the choice of words he was expecting. Kai wonders if Uruha feels like they owe Kai something. Not an apology. A thank you, maybe.
"It's fine," he says. He doesn't know who he's assuring.
Uruha looks at him for a few moments longer, face pressed into his pillow. Kai isn't sure if he smiles because he turns around a second later, staring at the wall opposite him. Kai takes that as his cue to leave, and while he's walking out he thinks of the bumpy mornings where he stumbles past Uruha's bunk and catches him off guard, staring at Reita's bed. Maybe he'd known--
"Kai," Uruha says when he's at the door. Kai pauses, and then Uruha shakes his head. "Nevermind."
-- where this was going all along.