Vacation of a Lifetime - 1/2 - AoiXRuki
Title: Vacation of a Lifetime
Chapter: 1/2
Author: akichuu
Fandom: the GazettE
Pairings: AoiXRuki
Theme: 34. Paranoia - Pierrot @ 50stories
Rating: PG-13
Genre: fluff, (attempt of) horror and humor
Warnings: None. Unbeta-ed mistakes.
Disclaimers: Oh… they're certainly mine, ALL mine. Yep. But then again, you know I have the tendency to be delirious.
Summary: The band went to a cottage at the beach together in one of their rare weekends. It's going to be a fun summer vacation, and everyone's going to love it... or at least that's what Reita thought before they departed.
Comments: I had to laugh at myself because I kept jumping from one theme to another. Good God. Isn’t it frustrating when you have so many ideas to write, yet you have such a minimum retention of focus on anything? What? It’s only me? Ah well…
Anyhow, the idea came from the Reita’s RADIO JACK show, the August 22nd one (I’d like to thank the people who had uploaded the radio airing and the translations... *bows*). If you guys have read it you’d know a very interesting fact about Aoi. But, just instead you haven't, well let me warn you: never show the poor guy anything scary! You might get a bump on your head because he throws something at you...
PS: Oh right! Before you get confused, this is all Reita's POV. Oh don't worry! Just because he's the narrator for this story, doesn't mean we have our couple forgotten, nee...
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Vacation of a Lifetime
Part 1
I believe we should all thank Uruha for his brilliant idea and he came up with it just in time when we had been so close to spending yet another summer weekend coped up in our sad little apartments, doing nothing else but letting our brains grow mold. Well, Kai would’ve been excluded from this brain-degenerating activity because he said he wanted to visit his mother and spend the whole weekend there. After he told us about his plans, I honestly thought about going back home myself-home as in sweet old Kanagawa, I meant; it would be really nice to see some old faces, have some nostalgic chit-chat, plus my mother probably thought her son had forgotten about her… But before I had the chance to plan my journey back, Uruha said something that changed everyone’s minds in like an instant.
“Why not we all go to my aunt’s place?” he spoke up, cheerfully and his face was decorated with that idiotic grin we all knew only Uruha had. “It’s down south,” he continued, “It might be really hot there at this time of the year, but she owns this little cottage by the beach and it’s just really, really beautiful there. There won’t be many people to disturb us because the cottage is really secluded. She’s been asking me to pay her a visit since I could remember, but you know we had the tour at hand and everything…”
Kai, whose mind had been pretty much set about visiting his mother, was suddenly beaming with a whole lot of a different light. “A weekend at the beach, eh? The five of us?” he asked, practically bouncing his ass on that sofa he was sitting on, “A secluded place, you said?”
Uruha nodded, showing no less of an enthusiasm as Kai. “Yes! Oh wait-“ he pulled out his cell phone, pressing some buttons and then, grinning as wide as ear to ear, handed the phone to Kai. “There!” he said, pointing at the phone, “Pictures of the place. I took those a couple of years ago when I last visited it.”
“It’s gorgeous!!” Kai squealed, and I saw Ruki, who was sitting right next to Kai, pressing the side his head onto Kai’s as if he was trying to glue them together. The little vocalist looked quite fascinated and I must say I began to feel curious too. It’s true that I and Uruha grew up in the same hometown, but I had never really heard that Uruha had an aunt who lived down south and owned a cottage by the beach. Back in high school, I’d never known Uruha as someone who enjoyed having sunburn, spending time under the scorching sunlight by the beach, but I guess I didn’t know everything about everyone.
While Ruki was pulling at Aoi’s hair to make him look at the pictures too, drawing the guitarist’s attention from the acoustic guitar he’d been focusing on for the last hour or so, Kai was already busy making plans about our departure to this place down south with Uruha. I suppose, since I was left a bit forgotten and honestly very intrigued, I finally got up from my seat, kicking Kai off the sofa and snatching the phone from Ruki to see what the fuss was all about.
Ignoring Ruki’s effort of trying to punch a whole on my arm and the death glare Aoi was giving me, I admitted I was more than awed with what I saw. Seriously, it was a nice place, and I thought at that time, if it looked that wonderful in the pictures, it should be way more amazing in reality.
That, briefly, was the beginning of it all. Thursday became such a chaotic day in which Kai ushered everyone to pack so many things I seriously thought I had emptied my closet and stuffed everything into my travel bag. Friday morning I had barely survived the traffic with Kai screaming at my ear so I finally hung up on him and actually arrived at Kai’s place 5 minutes earlier from the time we agreed on. I don’t know why but it just seemed that Kai could never get over the thought that I would be tardy like always-but you know Kai. He exaggerates everything.
So then, from Kai’s place, I drove while struggling to do my best to hold myself from knocking Kai unconscious to stop him from bouncing and twittering so much-it seriously was unnerving and I couldn’t help fearing that Kai might’ve been high on sugar. What did he drink earlier that morning, I wonder? Heavens helped me and we arrived at Uruha’s place right on time without either of us getting injured-me from getting in an accident or Kai from getting my fist on his face.
As we had approved on the prior day, we would be transporting in two cars: mine and Aoi’s. Sometimes I thought it would’ve been great if one of us owned a van and when an occasion like this came up, we wouldn’t have been confused as to who would hitch on whose car. But then it didn’t matter because I’d seen Ruki become so excited about the car arrangements all of a sudden and volunteered to go with Aoi before anyone else could say anything. He had also made Uruha and Kai agree to ride with me, and it was reasonable, I thought, and perfectly fine, since the three of us lived pretty close to each other. And also, to think of Aoi and Ruki’s tendency to constantly feel the need to look glamorous, I could just see the logics in the arrangements Ruki had pressed on. Just thinking about the amount of luggage those two would be carrying gave me the shivers…
They and only they would possibly take vinyl pants to where we were going. And no, I was not exaggerating.
And then we got to Aoi’s place and I recalled it was about 9 a.m., and to my surprise, Ruki was already there. I found it weird because, if I hadn’t remembered it wrong, the plan was for Aoi to wait for us to arrive at his place and then for all four of us to go and pick up Ruki. But I guessed those two must have thought that it would be much practical and would save a whole lot of time (and gasoline) if Ruki slept over at Aoi’s instead. Which was true, otherwise we would have to cross the city, risking ourselves to get stuck in the morning traffic, and I feared, with how Kai was behaving, he was going to blow a fuse in his head before we even got to Ruki’s.
At 9.15, trying not to pay too much attention on how Uruha was teasing Ruki about his mismatched buttons, I helped Aoi with his and Ruki’s luggage (and just as I had suspected, they carried so much they might as well just put tires on their closets and drag them behind Aoi’s car!). Seriously, I thought I had carried a lot, but it seemed Aoi and Ruki took packing to a whole new stage. The ridiculous pile of bags miraculously could fit in Aoi’s sedan but I worried it might be overweighed, so I nicely offered some of the bags to be transferred to my car instead. I tried not to ask what the things they carried were, and just sat back quietly on my car’s driver’s seat, waiting for the rest of the pack to be ready to go.
With Ruki finally losing his patience and kicking Uruha’s butt for being so nosy (he kept saying something about Ruki wearing Aoi’s socks but I wouldn’t know anything about it; after all, who was I to pay attention to people’s socks?), everyone got in to their appointed cars and I started my engine. I drove ahead of Aoi because Uruha was in my car, and he was the one who knew the way.
All in all, it was a comfortable, quick journey, and the traffic that I had worried about disappeared right after we left the big city. Uruha came up with the stupidest game ever to shout every time we passed by a pink car, and Kai, needing some kind of way to channel his excessive energy I suspected, joined the game. When they argued on how pink the color pink should be, I couldn’t help but to think they might have lost their brains somewhere along the road. Uruha’s pink was brighter, flashier, while Kai’s was darker, more towards purple if I could say so myself-but it’s not like I cared about things like that.
But the game continued anyhow, settling on the pink Uruha had insisted on and they went on shouting and slapping each other’s head every time a pink car was seen through the window. When they got bored, though (finally realizing that they’re acting mental, I supposed), Uruha pulled out his ipod and Kai got busy with his cell phone, and suddenly it became a nice, peaceful journey (save for the frequent giggle Kai let out once every minute or so; I hated to ask what he was doing with his cell phone…). Then, I couldn’t remember where it was exactly, but at one traffic light, while I was waiting for the light to turn green, Kai-who was sitting at the back, squished between one of Ruki’s bags and his own-suddenly gasped. Both I and Uruha turned our heads to see what had made our drummer so silent.
“Kai, what’s the matter?” I asked, noticing that he had his eyes bulging out of their sockets, and his neck was twisting so far to his left I thought he was close to breaking it. I followed his gaze and found out that Aoi’s car was diagonally behind us. For a second I didn’t get what was so weird about the sight that could possibly shock Kai to the point where he could stop being so hyper (which would have been something extraordinarily bizarre, like a UFO that landed right behind us and the aliens that stepped off of it, were wearing yellow, glittering outfits), but then I squinted, and I saw it.
I saw them, more precisely.
A little bit obscured by the corner of Kai’s bag, but even so I could not have been mistaken. I saw them-Aoi and Ruki-clearer than I was comfortable with… and they were kissing. Yes, that’s right. Ruki was leaning onto Aoi and their mouths were linked with one another and despite the situation and location, they looked like they were enjoying the kiss quite immensely. I’m sure I stared and probably Uruha and Kai too, and the next thing I knew there were like a hundred horns blowing at once, deafening me and I snapped to a realization that the traffic light had turned green. Stepping on the gas, trying to focus on the road ahead of me, I noticed how everyone in the car-even Kai-became so eerily quiet…
Until Uruha coughed at one point and turned on the radio, which I thought was a very wise thing to do. At least the noises of one screwed up metal-band wannabe could distract my mind from the memories of what I previously saw.
It was a struggle of a lifetime to take off the mental images from my mind, but then it was one stop at the gas station in the middle of nowhere that I had the chance to momentarily stop thinking about Aoi and/or Ruki and the things they did (or had done, or would, or might… oh God, no, stop me!) when we suddenly had to deal with a land-sick Kai. Weird, wasn’t it? How could anyone, at the era of modern technology and vehicles that moved auto-piloted, be land-sick? But Kai was. And I’d like to blame it on the horrible road condition that we had been driving over for the last hour, with the twists and turns and the bumps and the holes… I would never have the heart to scold Kai for almost throwing up on my back seat.
I took the liberty to fill up my tank while Uruha escorted Kai to the toilet; God only knows how much I hated seeing and smelling someone throwing up in front of me. Aoi’s car stopped right behind me, and both its passengers stepped down. I personally thought I was seeing things, but it’s just that Ruki had the happiest smile there could ever be on his face, and Aoi was practically beaming with delight. I was brought back to thoughts I would prefer to leave behind but I guess it was inevitable, when you had the cause of your trauma standing in front of you, starting a conversation with you.
“What’s wrong with Kai?” Aoi asked, and I explained the situation briefly. Aoi laughed, saying that it was silly and he muttered an idea that I should’ve thought earlier before we left. “It wouldn’t have cost us so much if we had brought some medicine.”
Ruki said something about tranquilizers but I’m not sure it would be humane to use some on Kai.
Yeah, people have made pills for this sort of sickness, but it had never occurred to me that Kai was going to be sick-what about those trips we made all across Japan, and even abroad? But then again, Kai might have taken some precautions without me knowing it. Now that I thought about it, during one of our long journeys I would normally find Kai sound asleep. Maybe that was all because of the drugs doing their work on him…
Kai and Uruha came back with Kai looking so pale and so pitiful I actually relented and gave him a hug, despite the faint smell of puke that I could sense coming from him. That poor thing, he looked shaky when all he was trying to do was stand on his own two feet… His breakfast had gone all down the drain, as Uruha had kindly informed me, and so I came up with the idea for all of us to have a break at a nearby restaurant. It was 1 p.m. after all, and I myself was getting very hungry.
Quite appropriately, we saw that right next to the gas station was a diner-its franchised brand written on a big billboard was stark against the bright blue sky, and I thought right then and there someone had just shown me heaven. So all five of us went into the restaurant and I automatically thanked God that it wasn’t crowded in there, although, still, I couldn’t let my guard down. If the magazines that had our pictures were distributed in this town too, we could still risk having a crowd of manic fans popping out of nowhere and literally eating us alive. There were two sides of a coin and I guess this was the side effect of being famous; we really had no other choice but to live with it.
But nothing looked suspicious inside the restaurant, except maybe that old man that was sitting at a table on a corner who was reading a newspaper and kept muttering curses with such a hateful look on his face-I’m afraid someone was planning a murder of a parliament member, but unfortunately I was too terrified to ask the old man’s name. Plus he could’ve been hiding a gun under the table and I sure as hell didn’t need to risk getting my head blown to pieces just because of some stupid reason. The girl who served us from behind the counter actually did twitch and freeze for a couple of seconds, and for a minute I was seriously worried that she was going to go hysterical and announce to the entire place that the GazettE was in the restaurant and then we were going to get mauled and so on, but fortunately no. She just smiled and gave us our orders and moved on to the next customer behind us.
She might’ve doubted that it was the GazettE because I hadn’t been wearing my noseband. Yep, just as Ruki said once, the GazettE’s mascot is me, Reita, and my lovely noseband. We wouldn’t be recognized otherwise.
Anyhow, the five of us found a table and sat down; Kai slouched between me and Uruha, while Ruki and Aoi sat across us. Uruha repeatedly warned Kai to eat all the food and drink the warm tea he had ordered, looking just like a babysitter who was trying to force a stubborn kid to eat. At one point I was almost convinced that Uruha was going to shove a whole big chunk of food onto Kai’s face, careless at how unwilling Kai obviously was; if I hadn’t been there, sitting between Kai and his way to freedom, he would’ve bolted to the exit already. Despite the pity I felt for Kai, though, I knew he needed to get some food down his digestion system otherwise he’d get even sicker than he would’ve been able to handle.
Uruha was in the middle of getting Kai-who looked as if he was seconds away from crying-to open his mouth in a way that was nearly sadistic, when I finally looked away and spotted our other band members instead. I would’ve considered it rude had I realized what I was doing, but I stared at those two like I would a poodle doing a Latin dance in front of me. Well it might not be so bizarre, what I currently saw in front of me, but then again it was closely as weird, since these were my two band mates that I saw… feeding each other.
Odd as it may have sounded, but that’s exactly what I saw. My jaw loosened when I watched Aoi putting a piece of cheese from his double cheese burger between Ruki’s lips. And then Ruki-eyes batting and cheeks blushing and all-took the food in to his mouth with his tongue, and without a minute worth of doubt, I knew that that tongue didn’t just stroke Aoi’s finger oh so accidentally. I was still staring when Ruki chewed on that cheese he had just been fed with, slowly, and not once he took his sight away from Aoi-who, just as well, was looking back at him. I wish I couldn’t feel the creepy tension those two were emitting, but it was pretty darn obvious I didn’t even have to bother to ask why Aoi’s gaze seemed so hungry when he wasn’t even staring at some kind of food.
Fortunately enough, I was distracted from the sight when Kai made a choking sound and, wasting not a single second, I jumped in to the rescue when I realized Uruha was forcing a fork-a sharp, pointy fork, that is-into Kai’s mouth. Uruha probably meant to be feeding Kai but, the longer it went, it was looking more and more like a murder attempt to me.
It was a good half an hour later that Kai looked quite healthier and he could even laugh again at some joke I threw; the five of us, having finished eating our lunch, lingered in the restaurant to listen to Uruha talking about the cottage we were heading to.
“The back porch leads right towards the beach,” he said, “The sand is clean and white, but the waves won’t be as high as you would want them to be, Aoi-kun, but we can still swim and even try to drown Kai-no, Kai, I’m kidding. Stop looking so freaked out, would you?”
“It doesn’t matter, because I left my surfing board back at Mie,” Aoi said with a shrug.
“Too bad, really,” I replied, “From all the old pictures I’ve seen, you looked pretty good at it… surfing, that is. I’m curious since I’ve never seen you do it in real life.”
We talked about Aoi’s past hobby and I couldn’t help but noticing how dreamy Ruki’s face was when he was staring at the guitarist, listening to every word Aoi was saying and I bet that he was imagining in his mind how Aoi would look like when he was surfing through the waves. Aoi said he sort of missed it, and most of all, he missed his hometown, so then he invited us-in case we were lucky enough to get another free weekend this summer-to come along with him when he drove back to Mie. The sea was the best during summer, so he said, and he would love to have those rusting muscles to use again above his board. Not that I knew what muscles he was talking about, and Aoi, as far as I know, isn’t a man of rusted muscles at all and I think we’ve seen the proofs when he bent his back further than a pro gymnast could do, but I took his offer anyhow, thinking that Mie was a nice place and it’s been a while since I last visited it.
I didn’t know how but the conversation swerved into some sort of a scary story contest when Uruha lowered his voice and started telling us some stuffs his aunt had told him. Adding the dramatic effect to the situation, he pulled out his cell phone and showed us more pictures, this time they were of some kind of a forest. As far as I could see (before Ruki snatched the phone from my hand-he planned that payback, I knew it) it was dark and pretty dense, but more than that I couldn’t make out anything else. It was rather the poorly lighted place or Uruha was just not meant to be a professional photographer.
“This is the forest that we have to go around to get to the cottage” he began, “I’m sorry if the pictures are blurry; I took them in a rush when I wasn’t really allowed to. You see… it is a haunted forest…”
I heard something shuffling under our table but I didn’t look down to check whose legs those were.
“There was a story that my aunt told me once,” Uruha continued, “And the event that happened in that story, according to her, took place in this very forest. Somewhere deep in the forest, somewhere even I have never gone to, there is a small shrine. It’s nothing abnormal to build a shrine within a forest, I know, but there was a specific reason why this shrine was built, and it wasn’t a normal reason at all. It was four hundred years ago, so the legend said, when there were still fishermen living in the area. They built small houses along the shores, but unfortunately after that horrific event took place, they all but moved out of the area.
“One of those days, a noble family made a journey to that area, and the youngest daughter of that family was so enchanted of that place that she decided to stay behind while the rest of the family continued their journey. She was given permission and took half a dozen guards and several maids with her, promising her parents that she would catch up with them the morning after.
“Making her way along the shore, leaving her companions behind, she adored the white sands and the clear blue water and everything that looked so beautiful under the bright sunlight. Fate decided that, right then and there, she met a fisherman who was fixing the net he was going to carry fishing that night. Shortly, they fell in love at the first sight, but to know how different the worlds they each came from made them feel terribly sad. They could never be together because she was a daughter of a noble family who was supposed to wed someone who also came from a noble family, and he was nothing but a simple and poor fisherman.”
Someone mumbled, “How classic…” but I wasn’t sure who.
“Well then, since the princess hadn’t come back while the sun was starting to set, the guards and the maids were worried. They decided to go after her, trailing the path that she had taken. Again, it was fate, I suppose, that the group came upon the sight of the princess and the fisherman together. The guards quickly felt alarmed and set out their weapons-swords and arrows-and yelled for the fisherman-whom they thought was a villain trying to harm the princess-to let the princess go. One of the guards pulled the princess away from the fisherman, and the others chased the fisherman as he ran into the forest nearby.
“It all went so fast and when the guards came back with blood in their hands and clothes, the princess went hysterical. She slipped away from the guard’s hold and ran right into the forest, trying to find her lover’s body… Ah but poor, poor princess…”
Uruha sighed while Kai-I felt him shifting beside me-whispered, “What happened? What happened?”
“She never found him,” Uruha answered with a solemn voice, “She couldn’t find anything; there were only traces of blood, but the body of the fisherman was nowhere to be found. She searched and searched, of course, even until the sun set and the moon rose up to the sky, her clothes were torn and her skin were bleeding from being scratched and bumped against the trees, but still… she couldn’t find him.
“The guards and maids chased her into the forest, but just like the princess who was unable to find her lover, they couldn’t find her as well. They tried to follow the princess’ voice, the painful cry she let out as she kept calling out the fisherman’s name, over and over again, but when they felt they had gotten close, they met nothing.”
Uruha fell silent and put up one of the most impressive expressions I’ve ever seen on his face, and had me thinking that he could be quite a story teller if he wanted to act as one.
“The sun rose again in the next day, and the guards and maids were so exhausted from the search they hardly could move anymore. It was a useless search; they found nothing, not the princess, not the body of the fisherman that they themselves had murdered. Fear overcame the maids as they came to a realization that the gods must’ve been angry at them for separating two people in love, and now the gods hid the princess and the fisherman so that they couldn’t find them.
“After the incident, the people who lived in the area decided they should build a shrine to appease the restless spirits of the princess and the fisherman, and the gods that hid them. And so they did… But…” Uruha took a deep breath, “It doesn’t seem like the princess was ever at peace. Even until this very day, even after so many years, one can still hear her screaming, crying and calling out her lover’s name… yes, if one dares to enter that forest and disturb the calm, they will surely hear her, and some unlucky ones…” Uruha leaned forward and lowered his voice a bit further, “… might disappear too.”
My attention was drawn away from Uruha when I heard someone gasp and something clattered above the table, and when I checked I surely felt puzzled to see a small bottle of pepper rolling over with its lid uncapped, its content spreading all over the surface of the table. Nearby was Aoi’s elbow that was pulled tightly against his body, and when I looked at his face, I seriously thought he had food poisoning because he looked so pale and so unhealthy-even worse than Kai had been in his worst state of sickness which I had seen an hour ago. At first I didn’t understand what was wrong and I was just about to ask the man himself if he needed some help, but then I heard Ruki say something.
“It’s okay, Baby,” he murmured while rubbing Aoi’s arm like one would do an upset little child, “It’s just a story. You don’t need to worry…”
Going past the confusion over why Ruki would call Aoi ‘Baby’ and treated him the way he did, I was immediately reminded about a small but quite significant fact about Aoi that I had almost forgotten. For all this time I really thought he had gotten over his weakness, but obviously, he hadn’t. And when I shared glances with Uruha I knew it right then and there that it was the birth of the most catastrophic weekend we would ever have… and probably the worst and scariest one Aoi would ever have.
Uruha was grinning a bit too suspiciously when we were leaving the restaurant, and looking at him, I was silently praying that, by the end of our vacation, no one was going home crippled for life.
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Extra notes: I had to divide it into two parts because, when I realized about it, it had become so long and I knew it wouldn't fit in one post. And since the whole thing is already finished, you don't have to worry that I'd take forever to post the second part (like I normally would XD).
My 50stories AoiXRuki project list --> here
My other fanfics list --> here
Chapter: 1/2
Author: akichuu
Fandom: the GazettE
Pairings: AoiXRuki
Theme: 34. Paranoia - Pierrot @ 50stories
Rating: PG-13
Genre: fluff, (attempt of) horror and humor
Warnings: None. Unbeta-ed mistakes.
Disclaimers: Oh… they're certainly mine, ALL mine. Yep. But then again, you know I have the tendency to be delirious.
Summary: The band went to a cottage at the beach together in one of their rare weekends. It's going to be a fun summer vacation, and everyone's going to love it... or at least that's what Reita thought before they departed.
Comments: I had to laugh at myself because I kept jumping from one theme to another. Good God. Isn’t it frustrating when you have so many ideas to write, yet you have such a minimum retention of focus on anything? What? It’s only me? Ah well…
Anyhow, the idea came from the Reita’s RADIO JACK show, the August 22nd one (I’d like to thank the people who had uploaded the radio airing and the translations... *bows*). If you guys have read it you’d know a very interesting fact about Aoi. But, just instead you haven't, well let me warn you: never show the poor guy anything scary! You might get a bump on your head because he throws something at you...
PS: Oh right! Before you get confused, this is all Reita's POV. Oh don't worry! Just because he's the narrator for this story, doesn't mean we have our couple forgotten, nee...
=====
Vacation of a Lifetime
Part 1
I believe we should all thank Uruha for his brilliant idea and he came up with it just in time when we had been so close to spending yet another summer weekend coped up in our sad little apartments, doing nothing else but letting our brains grow mold. Well, Kai would’ve been excluded from this brain-degenerating activity because he said he wanted to visit his mother and spend the whole weekend there. After he told us about his plans, I honestly thought about going back home myself-home as in sweet old Kanagawa, I meant; it would be really nice to see some old faces, have some nostalgic chit-chat, plus my mother probably thought her son had forgotten about her… But before I had the chance to plan my journey back, Uruha said something that changed everyone’s minds in like an instant.
“Why not we all go to my aunt’s place?” he spoke up, cheerfully and his face was decorated with that idiotic grin we all knew only Uruha had. “It’s down south,” he continued, “It might be really hot there at this time of the year, but she owns this little cottage by the beach and it’s just really, really beautiful there. There won’t be many people to disturb us because the cottage is really secluded. She’s been asking me to pay her a visit since I could remember, but you know we had the tour at hand and everything…”
Kai, whose mind had been pretty much set about visiting his mother, was suddenly beaming with a whole lot of a different light. “A weekend at the beach, eh? The five of us?” he asked, practically bouncing his ass on that sofa he was sitting on, “A secluded place, you said?”
Uruha nodded, showing no less of an enthusiasm as Kai. “Yes! Oh wait-“ he pulled out his cell phone, pressing some buttons and then, grinning as wide as ear to ear, handed the phone to Kai. “There!” he said, pointing at the phone, “Pictures of the place. I took those a couple of years ago when I last visited it.”
“It’s gorgeous!!” Kai squealed, and I saw Ruki, who was sitting right next to Kai, pressing the side his head onto Kai’s as if he was trying to glue them together. The little vocalist looked quite fascinated and I must say I began to feel curious too. It’s true that I and Uruha grew up in the same hometown, but I had never really heard that Uruha had an aunt who lived down south and owned a cottage by the beach. Back in high school, I’d never known Uruha as someone who enjoyed having sunburn, spending time under the scorching sunlight by the beach, but I guess I didn’t know everything about everyone.
While Ruki was pulling at Aoi’s hair to make him look at the pictures too, drawing the guitarist’s attention from the acoustic guitar he’d been focusing on for the last hour or so, Kai was already busy making plans about our departure to this place down south with Uruha. I suppose, since I was left a bit forgotten and honestly very intrigued, I finally got up from my seat, kicking Kai off the sofa and snatching the phone from Ruki to see what the fuss was all about.
Ignoring Ruki’s effort of trying to punch a whole on my arm and the death glare Aoi was giving me, I admitted I was more than awed with what I saw. Seriously, it was a nice place, and I thought at that time, if it looked that wonderful in the pictures, it should be way more amazing in reality.
That, briefly, was the beginning of it all. Thursday became such a chaotic day in which Kai ushered everyone to pack so many things I seriously thought I had emptied my closet and stuffed everything into my travel bag. Friday morning I had barely survived the traffic with Kai screaming at my ear so I finally hung up on him and actually arrived at Kai’s place 5 minutes earlier from the time we agreed on. I don’t know why but it just seemed that Kai could never get over the thought that I would be tardy like always-but you know Kai. He exaggerates everything.
So then, from Kai’s place, I drove while struggling to do my best to hold myself from knocking Kai unconscious to stop him from bouncing and twittering so much-it seriously was unnerving and I couldn’t help fearing that Kai might’ve been high on sugar. What did he drink earlier that morning, I wonder? Heavens helped me and we arrived at Uruha’s place right on time without either of us getting injured-me from getting in an accident or Kai from getting my fist on his face.
As we had approved on the prior day, we would be transporting in two cars: mine and Aoi’s. Sometimes I thought it would’ve been great if one of us owned a van and when an occasion like this came up, we wouldn’t have been confused as to who would hitch on whose car. But then it didn’t matter because I’d seen Ruki become so excited about the car arrangements all of a sudden and volunteered to go with Aoi before anyone else could say anything. He had also made Uruha and Kai agree to ride with me, and it was reasonable, I thought, and perfectly fine, since the three of us lived pretty close to each other. And also, to think of Aoi and Ruki’s tendency to constantly feel the need to look glamorous, I could just see the logics in the arrangements Ruki had pressed on. Just thinking about the amount of luggage those two would be carrying gave me the shivers…
They and only they would possibly take vinyl pants to where we were going. And no, I was not exaggerating.
And then we got to Aoi’s place and I recalled it was about 9 a.m., and to my surprise, Ruki was already there. I found it weird because, if I hadn’t remembered it wrong, the plan was for Aoi to wait for us to arrive at his place and then for all four of us to go and pick up Ruki. But I guessed those two must have thought that it would be much practical and would save a whole lot of time (and gasoline) if Ruki slept over at Aoi’s instead. Which was true, otherwise we would have to cross the city, risking ourselves to get stuck in the morning traffic, and I feared, with how Kai was behaving, he was going to blow a fuse in his head before we even got to Ruki’s.
At 9.15, trying not to pay too much attention on how Uruha was teasing Ruki about his mismatched buttons, I helped Aoi with his and Ruki’s luggage (and just as I had suspected, they carried so much they might as well just put tires on their closets and drag them behind Aoi’s car!). Seriously, I thought I had carried a lot, but it seemed Aoi and Ruki took packing to a whole new stage. The ridiculous pile of bags miraculously could fit in Aoi’s sedan but I worried it might be overweighed, so I nicely offered some of the bags to be transferred to my car instead. I tried not to ask what the things they carried were, and just sat back quietly on my car’s driver’s seat, waiting for the rest of the pack to be ready to go.
With Ruki finally losing his patience and kicking Uruha’s butt for being so nosy (he kept saying something about Ruki wearing Aoi’s socks but I wouldn’t know anything about it; after all, who was I to pay attention to people’s socks?), everyone got in to their appointed cars and I started my engine. I drove ahead of Aoi because Uruha was in my car, and he was the one who knew the way.
All in all, it was a comfortable, quick journey, and the traffic that I had worried about disappeared right after we left the big city. Uruha came up with the stupidest game ever to shout every time we passed by a pink car, and Kai, needing some kind of way to channel his excessive energy I suspected, joined the game. When they argued on how pink the color pink should be, I couldn’t help but to think they might have lost their brains somewhere along the road. Uruha’s pink was brighter, flashier, while Kai’s was darker, more towards purple if I could say so myself-but it’s not like I cared about things like that.
But the game continued anyhow, settling on the pink Uruha had insisted on and they went on shouting and slapping each other’s head every time a pink car was seen through the window. When they got bored, though (finally realizing that they’re acting mental, I supposed), Uruha pulled out his ipod and Kai got busy with his cell phone, and suddenly it became a nice, peaceful journey (save for the frequent giggle Kai let out once every minute or so; I hated to ask what he was doing with his cell phone…). Then, I couldn’t remember where it was exactly, but at one traffic light, while I was waiting for the light to turn green, Kai-who was sitting at the back, squished between one of Ruki’s bags and his own-suddenly gasped. Both I and Uruha turned our heads to see what had made our drummer so silent.
“Kai, what’s the matter?” I asked, noticing that he had his eyes bulging out of their sockets, and his neck was twisting so far to his left I thought he was close to breaking it. I followed his gaze and found out that Aoi’s car was diagonally behind us. For a second I didn’t get what was so weird about the sight that could possibly shock Kai to the point where he could stop being so hyper (which would have been something extraordinarily bizarre, like a UFO that landed right behind us and the aliens that stepped off of it, were wearing yellow, glittering outfits), but then I squinted, and I saw it.
I saw them, more precisely.
A little bit obscured by the corner of Kai’s bag, but even so I could not have been mistaken. I saw them-Aoi and Ruki-clearer than I was comfortable with… and they were kissing. Yes, that’s right. Ruki was leaning onto Aoi and their mouths were linked with one another and despite the situation and location, they looked like they were enjoying the kiss quite immensely. I’m sure I stared and probably Uruha and Kai too, and the next thing I knew there were like a hundred horns blowing at once, deafening me and I snapped to a realization that the traffic light had turned green. Stepping on the gas, trying to focus on the road ahead of me, I noticed how everyone in the car-even Kai-became so eerily quiet…
Until Uruha coughed at one point and turned on the radio, which I thought was a very wise thing to do. At least the noises of one screwed up metal-band wannabe could distract my mind from the memories of what I previously saw.
It was a struggle of a lifetime to take off the mental images from my mind, but then it was one stop at the gas station in the middle of nowhere that I had the chance to momentarily stop thinking about Aoi and/or Ruki and the things they did (or had done, or would, or might… oh God, no, stop me!) when we suddenly had to deal with a land-sick Kai. Weird, wasn’t it? How could anyone, at the era of modern technology and vehicles that moved auto-piloted, be land-sick? But Kai was. And I’d like to blame it on the horrible road condition that we had been driving over for the last hour, with the twists and turns and the bumps and the holes… I would never have the heart to scold Kai for almost throwing up on my back seat.
I took the liberty to fill up my tank while Uruha escorted Kai to the toilet; God only knows how much I hated seeing and smelling someone throwing up in front of me. Aoi’s car stopped right behind me, and both its passengers stepped down. I personally thought I was seeing things, but it’s just that Ruki had the happiest smile there could ever be on his face, and Aoi was practically beaming with delight. I was brought back to thoughts I would prefer to leave behind but I guess it was inevitable, when you had the cause of your trauma standing in front of you, starting a conversation with you.
“What’s wrong with Kai?” Aoi asked, and I explained the situation briefly. Aoi laughed, saying that it was silly and he muttered an idea that I should’ve thought earlier before we left. “It wouldn’t have cost us so much if we had brought some medicine.”
Ruki said something about tranquilizers but I’m not sure it would be humane to use some on Kai.
Yeah, people have made pills for this sort of sickness, but it had never occurred to me that Kai was going to be sick-what about those trips we made all across Japan, and even abroad? But then again, Kai might have taken some precautions without me knowing it. Now that I thought about it, during one of our long journeys I would normally find Kai sound asleep. Maybe that was all because of the drugs doing their work on him…
Kai and Uruha came back with Kai looking so pale and so pitiful I actually relented and gave him a hug, despite the faint smell of puke that I could sense coming from him. That poor thing, he looked shaky when all he was trying to do was stand on his own two feet… His breakfast had gone all down the drain, as Uruha had kindly informed me, and so I came up with the idea for all of us to have a break at a nearby restaurant. It was 1 p.m. after all, and I myself was getting very hungry.
Quite appropriately, we saw that right next to the gas station was a diner-its franchised brand written on a big billboard was stark against the bright blue sky, and I thought right then and there someone had just shown me heaven. So all five of us went into the restaurant and I automatically thanked God that it wasn’t crowded in there, although, still, I couldn’t let my guard down. If the magazines that had our pictures were distributed in this town too, we could still risk having a crowd of manic fans popping out of nowhere and literally eating us alive. There were two sides of a coin and I guess this was the side effect of being famous; we really had no other choice but to live with it.
But nothing looked suspicious inside the restaurant, except maybe that old man that was sitting at a table on a corner who was reading a newspaper and kept muttering curses with such a hateful look on his face-I’m afraid someone was planning a murder of a parliament member, but unfortunately I was too terrified to ask the old man’s name. Plus he could’ve been hiding a gun under the table and I sure as hell didn’t need to risk getting my head blown to pieces just because of some stupid reason. The girl who served us from behind the counter actually did twitch and freeze for a couple of seconds, and for a minute I was seriously worried that she was going to go hysterical and announce to the entire place that the GazettE was in the restaurant and then we were going to get mauled and so on, but fortunately no. She just smiled and gave us our orders and moved on to the next customer behind us.
She might’ve doubted that it was the GazettE because I hadn’t been wearing my noseband. Yep, just as Ruki said once, the GazettE’s mascot is me, Reita, and my lovely noseband. We wouldn’t be recognized otherwise.
Anyhow, the five of us found a table and sat down; Kai slouched between me and Uruha, while Ruki and Aoi sat across us. Uruha repeatedly warned Kai to eat all the food and drink the warm tea he had ordered, looking just like a babysitter who was trying to force a stubborn kid to eat. At one point I was almost convinced that Uruha was going to shove a whole big chunk of food onto Kai’s face, careless at how unwilling Kai obviously was; if I hadn’t been there, sitting between Kai and his way to freedom, he would’ve bolted to the exit already. Despite the pity I felt for Kai, though, I knew he needed to get some food down his digestion system otherwise he’d get even sicker than he would’ve been able to handle.
Uruha was in the middle of getting Kai-who looked as if he was seconds away from crying-to open his mouth in a way that was nearly sadistic, when I finally looked away and spotted our other band members instead. I would’ve considered it rude had I realized what I was doing, but I stared at those two like I would a poodle doing a Latin dance in front of me. Well it might not be so bizarre, what I currently saw in front of me, but then again it was closely as weird, since these were my two band mates that I saw… feeding each other.
Odd as it may have sounded, but that’s exactly what I saw. My jaw loosened when I watched Aoi putting a piece of cheese from his double cheese burger between Ruki’s lips. And then Ruki-eyes batting and cheeks blushing and all-took the food in to his mouth with his tongue, and without a minute worth of doubt, I knew that that tongue didn’t just stroke Aoi’s finger oh so accidentally. I was still staring when Ruki chewed on that cheese he had just been fed with, slowly, and not once he took his sight away from Aoi-who, just as well, was looking back at him. I wish I couldn’t feel the creepy tension those two were emitting, but it was pretty darn obvious I didn’t even have to bother to ask why Aoi’s gaze seemed so hungry when he wasn’t even staring at some kind of food.
Fortunately enough, I was distracted from the sight when Kai made a choking sound and, wasting not a single second, I jumped in to the rescue when I realized Uruha was forcing a fork-a sharp, pointy fork, that is-into Kai’s mouth. Uruha probably meant to be feeding Kai but, the longer it went, it was looking more and more like a murder attempt to me.
It was a good half an hour later that Kai looked quite healthier and he could even laugh again at some joke I threw; the five of us, having finished eating our lunch, lingered in the restaurant to listen to Uruha talking about the cottage we were heading to.
“The back porch leads right towards the beach,” he said, “The sand is clean and white, but the waves won’t be as high as you would want them to be, Aoi-kun, but we can still swim and even try to drown Kai-no, Kai, I’m kidding. Stop looking so freaked out, would you?”
“It doesn’t matter, because I left my surfing board back at Mie,” Aoi said with a shrug.
“Too bad, really,” I replied, “From all the old pictures I’ve seen, you looked pretty good at it… surfing, that is. I’m curious since I’ve never seen you do it in real life.”
We talked about Aoi’s past hobby and I couldn’t help but noticing how dreamy Ruki’s face was when he was staring at the guitarist, listening to every word Aoi was saying and I bet that he was imagining in his mind how Aoi would look like when he was surfing through the waves. Aoi said he sort of missed it, and most of all, he missed his hometown, so then he invited us-in case we were lucky enough to get another free weekend this summer-to come along with him when he drove back to Mie. The sea was the best during summer, so he said, and he would love to have those rusting muscles to use again above his board. Not that I knew what muscles he was talking about, and Aoi, as far as I know, isn’t a man of rusted muscles at all and I think we’ve seen the proofs when he bent his back further than a pro gymnast could do, but I took his offer anyhow, thinking that Mie was a nice place and it’s been a while since I last visited it.
I didn’t know how but the conversation swerved into some sort of a scary story contest when Uruha lowered his voice and started telling us some stuffs his aunt had told him. Adding the dramatic effect to the situation, he pulled out his cell phone and showed us more pictures, this time they were of some kind of a forest. As far as I could see (before Ruki snatched the phone from my hand-he planned that payback, I knew it) it was dark and pretty dense, but more than that I couldn’t make out anything else. It was rather the poorly lighted place or Uruha was just not meant to be a professional photographer.
“This is the forest that we have to go around to get to the cottage” he began, “I’m sorry if the pictures are blurry; I took them in a rush when I wasn’t really allowed to. You see… it is a haunted forest…”
I heard something shuffling under our table but I didn’t look down to check whose legs those were.
“There was a story that my aunt told me once,” Uruha continued, “And the event that happened in that story, according to her, took place in this very forest. Somewhere deep in the forest, somewhere even I have never gone to, there is a small shrine. It’s nothing abnormal to build a shrine within a forest, I know, but there was a specific reason why this shrine was built, and it wasn’t a normal reason at all. It was four hundred years ago, so the legend said, when there were still fishermen living in the area. They built small houses along the shores, but unfortunately after that horrific event took place, they all but moved out of the area.
“One of those days, a noble family made a journey to that area, and the youngest daughter of that family was so enchanted of that place that she decided to stay behind while the rest of the family continued their journey. She was given permission and took half a dozen guards and several maids with her, promising her parents that she would catch up with them the morning after.
“Making her way along the shore, leaving her companions behind, she adored the white sands and the clear blue water and everything that looked so beautiful under the bright sunlight. Fate decided that, right then and there, she met a fisherman who was fixing the net he was going to carry fishing that night. Shortly, they fell in love at the first sight, but to know how different the worlds they each came from made them feel terribly sad. They could never be together because she was a daughter of a noble family who was supposed to wed someone who also came from a noble family, and he was nothing but a simple and poor fisherman.”
Someone mumbled, “How classic…” but I wasn’t sure who.
“Well then, since the princess hadn’t come back while the sun was starting to set, the guards and the maids were worried. They decided to go after her, trailing the path that she had taken. Again, it was fate, I suppose, that the group came upon the sight of the princess and the fisherman together. The guards quickly felt alarmed and set out their weapons-swords and arrows-and yelled for the fisherman-whom they thought was a villain trying to harm the princess-to let the princess go. One of the guards pulled the princess away from the fisherman, and the others chased the fisherman as he ran into the forest nearby.
“It all went so fast and when the guards came back with blood in their hands and clothes, the princess went hysterical. She slipped away from the guard’s hold and ran right into the forest, trying to find her lover’s body… Ah but poor, poor princess…”
Uruha sighed while Kai-I felt him shifting beside me-whispered, “What happened? What happened?”
“She never found him,” Uruha answered with a solemn voice, “She couldn’t find anything; there were only traces of blood, but the body of the fisherman was nowhere to be found. She searched and searched, of course, even until the sun set and the moon rose up to the sky, her clothes were torn and her skin were bleeding from being scratched and bumped against the trees, but still… she couldn’t find him.
“The guards and maids chased her into the forest, but just like the princess who was unable to find her lover, they couldn’t find her as well. They tried to follow the princess’ voice, the painful cry she let out as she kept calling out the fisherman’s name, over and over again, but when they felt they had gotten close, they met nothing.”
Uruha fell silent and put up one of the most impressive expressions I’ve ever seen on his face, and had me thinking that he could be quite a story teller if he wanted to act as one.
“The sun rose again in the next day, and the guards and maids were so exhausted from the search they hardly could move anymore. It was a useless search; they found nothing, not the princess, not the body of the fisherman that they themselves had murdered. Fear overcame the maids as they came to a realization that the gods must’ve been angry at them for separating two people in love, and now the gods hid the princess and the fisherman so that they couldn’t find them.
“After the incident, the people who lived in the area decided they should build a shrine to appease the restless spirits of the princess and the fisherman, and the gods that hid them. And so they did… But…” Uruha took a deep breath, “It doesn’t seem like the princess was ever at peace. Even until this very day, even after so many years, one can still hear her screaming, crying and calling out her lover’s name… yes, if one dares to enter that forest and disturb the calm, they will surely hear her, and some unlucky ones…” Uruha leaned forward and lowered his voice a bit further, “… might disappear too.”
My attention was drawn away from Uruha when I heard someone gasp and something clattered above the table, and when I checked I surely felt puzzled to see a small bottle of pepper rolling over with its lid uncapped, its content spreading all over the surface of the table. Nearby was Aoi’s elbow that was pulled tightly against his body, and when I looked at his face, I seriously thought he had food poisoning because he looked so pale and so unhealthy-even worse than Kai had been in his worst state of sickness which I had seen an hour ago. At first I didn’t understand what was wrong and I was just about to ask the man himself if he needed some help, but then I heard Ruki say something.
“It’s okay, Baby,” he murmured while rubbing Aoi’s arm like one would do an upset little child, “It’s just a story. You don’t need to worry…”
Going past the confusion over why Ruki would call Aoi ‘Baby’ and treated him the way he did, I was immediately reminded about a small but quite significant fact about Aoi that I had almost forgotten. For all this time I really thought he had gotten over his weakness, but obviously, he hadn’t. And when I shared glances with Uruha I knew it right then and there that it was the birth of the most catastrophic weekend we would ever have… and probably the worst and scariest one Aoi would ever have.
Uruha was grinning a bit too suspiciously when we were leaving the restaurant, and looking at him, I was silently praying that, by the end of our vacation, no one was going home crippled for life.
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Extra notes: I had to divide it into two parts because, when I realized about it, it had become so long and I knew it wouldn't fit in one post. And since the whole thing is already finished, you don't have to worry that I'd take forever to post the second part (like I normally would XD).
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