Chapter Text
Summer draws its curtain with a mellow rainfall. In the descent of every millesimal drop he sees mirrored what he has, in earlier seasons of gloom, dubbed a shattered heart. (Forlorn puppy love: as in chocolate swirling into strawberry, moisture gripping his palms, salty tears on a Friday night). Fragile like china and exposed to the posters of historic faces who once sang on the behalf of lovesick teens. Repairing it was like wishing a congenital disease away.
His inherited Frankie Valli record spins against the caress of the needle, repeating what he feels and will feel for so many months to come. The kindle in his gut, honey down his throat… For a bit, he’ll rest his head between his knees, let older souls provoke emotions clumsy in the dance of expression, and maybe sleep…
Autumn, with its brisk abruptness, heralds handmade mittens and another opportunity.
-
Popular belief ran that a band’s biggest requirement was its image.
(Tsunami considers. Fudou pierces an ear thrice and welcomes jewelry inside his mouth, not tallying his ‘I-have-an-asshole-under-my-nose’ expression and streaked mohawk. Tobitaka already has it, and Someoka freaks out in the tattoo parlor.)
After-school, they loiter the halls projecting an effected ability to coax girls and boys into bed with a guitar strum. They gather some groupies by this time (where most stay for the image they’ve made). But fame doesn’t roll in so easily at seventeen, and their performances are limited to small audiences contained within Someoka’s garage, where dust festoons the turquoise walls and grandma distributes her punch.
“I dedicate this jam to anyone who ever stayed up ‘til five thinking ‘bout how they wanted to sell their soul to a guitar, recalling Page and Hendrix, and all those fuckin’ badasses who gave us our foundations.” Fudou pipes, highlighting his all too exploited smirk in the umbra of the moment. Where the band members solemnly agree in a procession of nods, the crowd sees not the flicker of their passion, but the outline of their bodies slung over the instruments. “So, here’s Rock and Roll!”
1-2-3-4 – the strength of the drums creates ripples in the punch and, for a second, every teenager sweating into the atmosphere of the room clings to the rhythm, forgetting their next essay, so-and-so shagging so-and-so, and every other hormone-related preoccupation. Nothing survives the ferocious slamming of the beat except for its raw energy. Only that room, fixed against adolescent egoism, remains.
Precisely after the opening song Tachimukai walks in, covered in dust and a perpetual flush at the sight of his heart’s local delinquent.
-
“Uh, I heard you’d be here, so I came to bring back your record. “
Tachimukai’s words draw out haltingly under the pressure of eyes, all muscles tensed upright like a lamppost erect in the winter. Clutched in his hands hangs the relic, cutting a nostalgic square against his black tee. He leans toward the presence, heart a clamor, noting Fudou’s cheeks dappled in pink and wondering if his own are a coral reflection.
Three beads of sweat trickle down Fudou’s neck before he answers.
“Ah- You came! Hold up, we’re playing more songs… Stay?” His body stands welcoming, provoking the slightest brush of Tachimukai’s arm.
“W-well, alright! How long do you think…?”
“Hey, Fudou! The Aristocrat’s here–”
“–Holy fucking shit. Tachi, I’ll look for you when I’m done.” The other sticks out his thumb toward the set.
Hauling a budding heartache under the cheap light-bulbs, his glance follows the retreating head as it sifts through the crowd, watches it make a sharp turn and topple against a crown of blue.
They merge. Tachimukai excuses himself to the bathroom.
-
“Of course it’s temporary, and you’re not. You practically live by each other anyway and he’s like- like, halfway across the world- the city. He’s a brat.”
Tachimukai likes describing Tsunami as an eternal ebb and flow, the very elixir of the ocean poured into a body, so indifferent but reassuring in the promise of tomorrow. It stings even when the words hold other intentions.
The entry for September 22nd (chicken scratch, with the blue ballpoint pen he borrowed from Fudou) will read just that:
Tsunami, the eponymous wave that knocks him down with honesty and forces him up relentlessly… and Fudou, a strike of lightning, or a draft of February air, or the temptation of a bakery in a coin-less afternoon.
He watches Tsunami tousle his bangs in front of the mirror, wondering how his teeth are so white. “Get out there and do your thing. You’re cute, Tachi, and he’s told me so.”
-
(Mouth to mouth,
and skin to skin.
Wretched soul pressed to wretched soul. Reciprocally notched and calloused, measured to fit by a metric of tragedies.
Fudou consumes the ticking minutes of piss break to waltz in limbo with him. His mother could never afford lessons, but somewhere along the journey he learned to dodge bullets and stabs, and these instinctual movements are enough to guide Sakuma closer. Their mouths join to different tastes.
Kisses of this habit feel like patches of oxygen when one is always drowning.)
In five he’s whizzing out the door, fixing his mop of hair back as he scrambles on stage, readies for the real performance he’s gotta give these gits who, with all due contempt, would find no better entertainment anywhere else.
-
“We better get out there; the band has a house to ROCK!” They’ve been gossiping in the bathroom for ten minutes, a lapse spent vomiting a heart and choking on the residue of adolescent angst. By the time Tsunami remembers the gig, he washes his hands a fifth time with a last claim of water’s talisman upon him. He leaves Tachimukai as bait for the accumulating bathroom line. Outside, he stammers out apologies before retiring to the bigger crowd, and it leers like a multi-colored viper dressed in sequins and glitter.
He brushes past coarse fabric and flamboyant perfumes, a sea lion in a region of sharks. Regrets absolutely everything, wonders vaguely what genre of music Fudou’s band even plays – was it – rock? Punk? Maybe it was black metal, and he’d be chosen as a sacrifice to Satan. Tachimukai knows Fudou likes Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, but at worst and just as well, Misfits and The Exploited. He shivers now. Did Tsunami enjoy them, too?
What a sap. He wanted back to his pop, to his orchestral compilations, but the problem was they all spoke to him of Fudou.