Chapter Text
Rose wakes up with a guitar riff in his head. It’s a little melancholy, a little bittersweet, and mostly wistful. He lies there and hums the beginning of it, fingers dancing lightly in the air. The shape of the song is almost there, but he can’t quite hear it yet. It’ll come to him as he thinks — it usually does.
He hears Shinji’s alarm go off in the room above his, and the swearing that follows as the man smacks his clock to the ground.
Sitting on the floor outside one of their three bathrooms, he waits for Lisa to finish up in there while he writes down the riff on a loose piece of sheet music. She emerges in a cloud of fragrant steam, towelling her hair dry. “Writing again?” she asks. He makes a noise of agreement, and she hums in response, walking away and leaving wet footprints in her wake.
He notes down the sound of her footsteps, ker-plunk, ker-plunk, as the foundation for the drum-beat of his song.
*
At breakfast, Love is flipping through the classifieds in the newspaper. “How ‘bout we go to Antartica? Research some penguins and birds and shit?” he says.
It’s a little game they play, the ‘what would we do if we were anywhere but here’ game.
“Too cold,” Shinji complains, picking at his scrambled eggs. In all the years that Rose has known him, the man has never been a morning person.
“We could still start a band,” Rose says hopefully. He’s been trying to teach the others instruments, but while they’ve reached some level of competency, it’s not really the spark that he’s been hoping for.
“Mortician?” Love asks. “This place is lookin’ for an assistant.”
“And be annoyed by all the damn souls lurkin’ around their bodies? No thanks,” Shinji replies.
“A music bar?” Rose suggests.
“No money in that,” Love sighs.
He writes the cadence of their voices into a back-and-forth duet amongst the rhythm section, the staccato lilt of familiarity against a lazy drawl.
*
It’s his and Hiyori’s turn to make lunch. He thinks that Hiyori is probably the best cook out of all of them — given her history with Hikifune, it makes sense. He mostly lets her tell him what to do and stays out of her way. It’s impressive, the way that she uses Kubikiri Orochi to slice and cleave through everything, from the thickest cuts of meat to the slenderest shoots. Her sword sings through the air, and he concocts a harmony from it, layered over the white-noise of the wok and flames she handles so expertly. “Stop daydreamin’!” she tells him when she thinks he’s not paying enough attention. “When yer in the kitchen, ya focus, got it?” He puts the thoughts of his song away for a while before he’s the subject of her cleaving.
*
After lunch, he goes to his shift at the local music store. He helps kids pick out their first guitars, and sifts through orders for music books when customers come to pick them up. In-between visitors, he strums his guitar, building the song up little by little, recreating textures and sounds. He doesn’t notice that it’s gotten so late until someone knocks a little rhythm on the window. It’s Hachi, stopping by after his job at the flowershop down the road, to pick him up from work. They chat about their days on the way home, Hachi’s hands stained with green and him smelling like flowers. Rose still remembers the rap on the window. It will make the perfect transition into the second verse, he thinks.
*
Kensei and Mashiro are making dinner — or rather, Kensei is making dinner and Mashiro is making a nuisance of herself. The sounds of their bickering drift through the living room.
“Stop eatin’ shit before I get the chance to cook it!”
“You’re mean, Kensei.”
“And you’re just bein’ annoyin’ so ya can get out of cookin’ duty.”
“Well… you’re not wrong about that.”
Rose can hear Mashiro drumming out something on a bucket in the kitchen, and he adds that to the song — deep vocals and breathy backing singers, floating above the instrumentals he’s concocted beneath. The song is almost there. It was hiding in their lives all along.
*
They gather around the TV after dinner, mostly busy with their own things. Rose plugs his guitar in, and his headphones into his amp, then plucks away. One by one, the others head up to bed. The TV is switched off. He stays there in the dark, immortalising the sounds of the day.