small mercy
aomine/momoi, pg
3025 words
the story of a boy who wanted to play guitar and the girl he dragged along. band AU.
By the time they split the band up and went their separate ways, they had five albums, thirteen music videos, one acoustic collection, and two live concert DVDs between them. It wasn’t a bad record for a band that had been playing for nearly eight years, but Satsuki had fallen out of love with the entire gig, and besides, Daiki was far too talented to stay in one place and with one person for such a long period of time. At least, that was what Satsuki told herself - the real reason was a combination of the above, that the sanctity of their relationship outlived the longevity of the band, that she wanted out, and Daiki let her.
They started playing together when they were seventeen. It was prime time for picking a college, but Daiki basically stuck it to convention and said he’d sent demos to several scouts. He said some of them were already interested.
“You know the basics of drumming, right? I mean, I taught you last summer, and you learn things kinda fast,” he suggested slyly, lying on his bed and sucking lazily on a popsicle. “If it’s you, I don’t think my mom will have anything to complain about.”
“Mine will,” she argued. Two weeks later, she was sitting in an office in Shinjuku, signing a contract after several auditions with him. Her mother had agreed readily, saying, “If it’s Dai-chan, I don’t mind,” and said that it was good to do such things when they were both still young. Satsuki felt like she was a victim of their mutual, misplaced trust.
So began their career together as a couple of (supposed) modern alt rock wunderkind, despite the fact that she knew really next to nothing about being in a band or writing music or performing it. All of it was Daiki, really. The first couple of years were characterised by a steep, almost dangerous learning curve, whereby she followed Daiki everywhere he went and did everything he did; until one day down the line she could finally, successfully convince herself that she was familiar enough with his environment, the studios, the empty, rented apartments, new and old, the garage full of equipment and all the instruments which used to be strange and foreign, familiar enough to continue living and navigating through his life and still be an anchor in the midst of all that musical tunnel vision and reckless illogic.
*
At the cover shoot for their second EP, one of the hairdressers expressed regret that Satsuki wasn’t taking more advantage of her own good looks.
“You look like a celeb,” she lamented, brushing Satsuki’s hair forlornly, “it’s such a waste.”
“A celeb? You blind?” Daiki said incredulously from the chair next to hers. “Anyway, you’ve never thought of becoming one, have you? Why bother?”
“Maybe I do want to be one,” Satsuki huffed, taking a good, hard look at her own face in the mirror.
It wasn’t just her hairdresser who’d noticed it. A couple months ago one of their managers had received an offer from some magazine (“Is it a men’s mag?” her mother asked, “if it’s not a men’s mag, you can do it.”) inviting her to turn up for a shoot featuring “cuuuuu~te girls in music” for their annual rock and pop issue. Other more conventional critics used it to their advantage in pointing out that while the band produced highly listenable tunes, which were at times even thought-provoking, she was the weak link when placed next to Daiki, who was technically proficient - “It’s a shame,” wrote one, “that Momoi doesn’t quite have much skill or musical maturity with the drums, even though she may have improved just that slightly since their debut effort, to match the savvy, sexual appeal that she exudes.” She’d have to reason out those backhanded compliments whenever she saw one - she had never attended a lesson, she was two years fresh into playing the instrument, she thought she was actually decent for a rookie with no musical background, and if they wanted someone to blame, then it was Daiki’s blame to take, because he was the one who taught her everything she knew. And a final emotional appeal - if it was good enough for Daiki to continue writing whatever he wanted to write, then it was good enough for her.
In any case, Daiki’s reaction to any media exposure Satsuki received was lukewarm at best. “Alert me again when they put you in a spread with Horikita Mai,” he’d deadpan.
They were doing reasonably well then, two and a half years into debut - not completely famous, but well-known enough to have a niche fanbase (within which Satsuki had her own niche fanbase of smitten teenage boys). The company that handled their PR never clarified the true nature of their relationship, so neither did they, simply because it wasn’t something worth clarifying in the first place, but every time a nosy reporter tried to overstep their boundaries and asked if they were dating or sleeping together, Daiki would snarl, “Watch what you’re saying, asshole, want me to knock your teeth out?” For that reason he wasn’t immensely popular with the media, because he refused to play their games, but that earned him points with a lot of their fans. Nonetheless there was still a lot of speculation; they were a male-female duo, a heterogenic duo in an industry full of homogeneous bands, pure strains of all-male hard rockers and all-female, saccharine-sweet pop-rock alleles of the same. It was a combination which made people guess, because one man and one woman could never do anything together without being at least five percent romantically involved with each other, or siblings.
Maybe they were at least five percent romantically involved with each other. They’d known each other since they were four years old, when Daiki moved into the neighbourhood, and then they went to the same elementary school, and the same middle school, and the same high school. When she was ten she legitimately thought that she was going to marry him when they grew up, because their parents treated each of them like their own, and with a warped, twisted neighbourship like that you were bound to think that you were going to end up with each other for life.
The truth was that she couldn’t let him alone. They were far too much like family for her to truly let him throw caution to the wind in all his endeavours (and that he did a lot), and sometimes she thought it would be better for her own sake if she didn’t feel that almost sisterly or motherly responsibility for all his actions, like a parent looking out for a wayward child.
Well, that, and Daiki was too busy being interested in making music to be interested in her, or in anybody else, for that matter. He never really wrote love songs.
*
The real magic almost always happened when they played live. That was because Daiki was almost virtuosic in his handling of the instruments he played - no two things he played were ever the same, and neither did he want anything he played to sound rehearsed. With him, it was fifty percent variation and fifty percent freestyling. Satsuki would be sitting metres behind him during a show, concentrating on just the drums and hitting the right thing at the right time with the right amount of vigour, but the arena wouldn’t pay any attention to her, because their eyes were glued to him. Electric guitars, Satsuki thought, really did serve their purpose when he played them - to electrify.
But outside of that the magic also occurred, sometimes, when he was in the recording studio by himself. Often she’d be the only one sitting in on it; occasionally the guys who did the mastering or the mixing would be there too, but most of the time she’d be the only one in the room there with him, hardly daring to make a sound or to even cough or sneeze while he was strumming away on his custom Gibson lest it got picked up by the sound system. If it got boring, or if she was tired enough, she’d leave him to experiment all by himself, but other times it also felt nice, in a strangely lucid way, to be the only audience member to which he was performing, while looking far too absorbed in whatever he was doing for his own good. Years had passed and she still couldn’t believe that this boy, with whom she’d grown up and who was overwhelmingly ordinary with overwhelmingly ordinary tastes in food and clothes and women and everything else, could make music that sounded like it came from a livewire.
*
Once, she broke down in Sapporo, when they were on the road for five months or so with no permanent accommodation for more than two weeks at a time, and cried, “I wanna go home,” refusing to come out of her hotel room. That was a few months before their final year together, and after so many projects, she supposed she couldn’t really see where they were going, or rather, where she was going. When they started out, it was with a view that they wouldn’t last more than a year, that Daiki would get bored with them and with her and her inadequate drumming skills and uninspiring lack of musical talent, and that he would find other ideas to be obsessed with. Then one year turned into two and into three, Daiki still wasn’t bored, and one day she ended up celebrating her twenty-third birthday in the basement of a club, tearing up when the two other bands they were travelling with surprised her with a birthday cake. She said she was overjoyed, of course, but the truth was that she missed home, she missed her parents, her friends; Tetsu-kun, on whom she had a crush in eighth grade, had texted her to ask how she was doing; and most of all, she was thinking, while blowing out the candles on the cake, about how she could be doing anything else right now, how she could be in school, how she could be already working, saving up for trips to places where she always wanted to go, places like Hong Kong or Paris or the Caribbean, with Micchan and Acchan. Anywhere but here, in the company of strangers, doing something she didn’t even remotely picture herself doing when she was a kid.
She put up with that train of thought for weeks, until, of course, it culminated in her outburst. Daiki’s first knee-jerk, livid response when he finally got her to open the door to her room was, “Did that jerk Wakamatsu try to get fresh with you?” and Satsuki thought of harmless, if occasionally brash, Wakamatsu-kun, who was rooming a few floors above with his own bandmates (guests for this leg of their concerts), and replied, “No, it’s got nothing to do with him.” She said nothing else, burying her face in the sheets and refusing to look at Daiki, who was standing in the doorway, confused and not knowing what exactly to do with a crying grown woman.
“I wanna go home,” she repeated when he did nothing, desperate to get the point across. He quickly said, “Okay, okay, I got it, you wanna go home,” and to her surprise, gave a light shove over and started to lie down next to her on the bed, which was only slightly larger than a regular single.
“What the hell are you doing, you pervert,” she cried, momentarily alarmed, but he just rolled his eyes and said, “God, you look so ugly right now, just move over.” He was ridiculously heavy, so the mattress sagged in his direction, but Satsuki was too tired from sobbing for half an hour to complain about anything. Now also feeling a little self-conscious about her tantrum, she tried to lull herself into sleep, obstinately facing the side of the room which didn’t have Daiki in it. The last thing she heard before she fell asleep, exhausted, was, “Sorry about that, I didn’t know.”
*
In retrospect, that was the beginning of the end. That ended up being their final tour, out of three. They gave some thought to the idea of putting the band on hiatus, but in the end they figured that it would be better for everyone to just finish things up cleanly. Neither of them wanted to give the fans any false hope that they might reunite one day, and besides, who knew what other kinds of commitments they were both going to enter into when this was all over? Who knew when the next right time would be? Besides, a reunion would sound better than “we’re officially off hiatus”, if it was ever going to happen.
At their very last show they gave an encore at the end, which they usually never did. Perhaps the audience could sense that something was off, because they were quieter than they were during the main show, unless they were simply puzzled by the unprecedented. It was just them and one main stage light, turned on halfway bright, nothing fancy, no guitars, no drums, no keyboard, amplifiers, nothing. Daiki’s only accompaniment was the tambourine that Satsuki was holding, which, on hindsight, was a good choice, because she didn’t have it in her anymore to manage a full drum kit. As usual Daiki was out of tune, and he sang one of their shorter B-sides. It was something he’d written in their earlier years, so the choice of words and melodic structure were both unfailingly simple, perhaps to the point of unsophistication. For two minutes and thirty-seven seconds it made Satsuki feel a smidgen of regret that the entire affair was going to end.
Later they sat together in the dressing room, the sounds of the backstage crew clearing up the venue floating in through the slightly open door. “Sorry, Dai-chan,” she said finally, close to tears again for the umpteenth time in the last half a year, and she meant what she said, not for ending the entire affair, but for letting him assume that she could commit. “And thank you,” she continued.
“Yeah,” he said, “quit while you’re ahead, ever heard of that? That’s us.” The way he let her hold his hands, fingers snug in the square of his palms, suggested that he was probably also thankful as hell for everything she’d done, even though he’d never said it out loud. A week later, they announced their disbandment, and she went back home to Tokyo, where everything had started.
*
The last time he phoned her, he was in Kanagawa, recording something with some of his old classmates from high school who’d also gone into making music. He sounded happier and more energetic than when he was with her, but to tell the truth, she was never really that into the stuff that they did or the music that they made, so it made sense that he’d enjoy it more being around people who were really passionate about it, who thought about making music all day long, every minute and second of their waking lives.
“You should be here,” he said, “this guy that Kise knows is such a fucking good cook, you could stand to learn a thing or two from him.”
“You call me after months and this is the first thing you say to me,” she pouted, so he replied, “Okay, fine, I wanted to ask you for a favour, if you’re not busy.”
He’d send her samples and mixtapes in the mail, with personally handwritten notes in his dirt-poor, untidy scrawl, “What do you think of this batch? Might final [sic] it in weeks. One of Kise’s friends wants your autograph, I said no.” That was the way he did things, the old-fashioned, physical way, just the way he liked it, even though he could have sent those files over the Internet. She popped the CD into her sound system (with speakers he fixed up all by himself when he was fifteen, now sitting in her living room like an ancient relic), fished out an old magazine with them on the cover, signed it, and wrote another note, separately, “Don’t be mean, I definitely don’t mind. Did you sample one of our old songs on #5? I liked that, it was a nice touch. #7 is great.”
She would get the occasional piece of fan mail in her mailbox from time to time - how people managed to get hold of her new address, she would never know, and she was still surprised that people bothered enough to find out, but she was glad she never received anything too crazy, like some other stories she heard. Most of them were harmless, if very enthusiastic letters from their fans, most of them male, some of them girls, all expressing how they wish Daiki and Satsuki were still together and still making records, but that, in typically polite, gracious fashion, she was doing well and that they would support her whatever she wanted to do. There was a wall in her bedroom which she decorated with these fan letters - photographs which other people took of them, at events, at concerts, from up close and from metres away - like a constant reminder of the craziest, most tiring adventure of her life yet. But that was what being around Daiki was like, tiring and exciting in equal parts; the excitement was the return and the fatigue the price. Now that they were truly, physically apart for the first, long time in their lives, she had the time and the energy to think about what she’d accomplished with him. Occasionally she’d miss the heft of holding a drumstick in her hand, or being up at 3 a.m. in the morning, listening to him sound out the lyrics of a new song with a mug of lukewarm coffee in hand. His “You should be here” was still ringing in her ears as she sealed away her reply to what he sent her.
3025 words
the story of a boy who wanted to play guitar and the girl he dragged along. band AU.
By the time they split the band up and went their separate ways, they had five albums, thirteen music videos, one acoustic collection, and two live concert DVDs between them. It wasn’t a bad record for a band that had been playing for nearly eight years, but Satsuki had fallen out of love with the entire gig, and besides, Daiki was far too talented to stay in one place and with one person for such a long period of time. At least, that was what Satsuki told herself - the real reason was a combination of the above, that the sanctity of their relationship outlived the longevity of the band, that she wanted out, and Daiki let her.
They started playing together when they were seventeen. It was prime time for picking a college, but Daiki basically stuck it to convention and said he’d sent demos to several scouts. He said some of them were already interested.
“You know the basics of drumming, right? I mean, I taught you last summer, and you learn things kinda fast,” he suggested slyly, lying on his bed and sucking lazily on a popsicle. “If it’s you, I don’t think my mom will have anything to complain about.”
“Mine will,” she argued. Two weeks later, she was sitting in an office in Shinjuku, signing a contract after several auditions with him. Her mother had agreed readily, saying, “If it’s Dai-chan, I don’t mind,” and said that it was good to do such things when they were both still young. Satsuki felt like she was a victim of their mutual, misplaced trust.
So began their career together as a couple of (supposed) modern alt rock wunderkind, despite the fact that she knew really next to nothing about being in a band or writing music or performing it. All of it was Daiki, really. The first couple of years were characterised by a steep, almost dangerous learning curve, whereby she followed Daiki everywhere he went and did everything he did; until one day down the line she could finally, successfully convince herself that she was familiar enough with his environment, the studios, the empty, rented apartments, new and old, the garage full of equipment and all the instruments which used to be strange and foreign, familiar enough to continue living and navigating through his life and still be an anchor in the midst of all that musical tunnel vision and reckless illogic.
*
At the cover shoot for their second EP, one of the hairdressers expressed regret that Satsuki wasn’t taking more advantage of her own good looks.
“You look like a celeb,” she lamented, brushing Satsuki’s hair forlornly, “it’s such a waste.”
“A celeb? You blind?” Daiki said incredulously from the chair next to hers. “Anyway, you’ve never thought of becoming one, have you? Why bother?”
“Maybe I do want to be one,” Satsuki huffed, taking a good, hard look at her own face in the mirror.
It wasn’t just her hairdresser who’d noticed it. A couple months ago one of their managers had received an offer from some magazine (“Is it a men’s mag?” her mother asked, “if it’s not a men’s mag, you can do it.”) inviting her to turn up for a shoot featuring “cuuuuu~te girls in music” for their annual rock and pop issue. Other more conventional critics used it to their advantage in pointing out that while the band produced highly listenable tunes, which were at times even thought-provoking, she was the weak link when placed next to Daiki, who was technically proficient - “It’s a shame,” wrote one, “that Momoi doesn’t quite have much skill or musical maturity with the drums, even though she may have improved just that slightly since their debut effort, to match the savvy, sexual appeal that she exudes.” She’d have to reason out those backhanded compliments whenever she saw one - she had never attended a lesson, she was two years fresh into playing the instrument, she thought she was actually decent for a rookie with no musical background, and if they wanted someone to blame, then it was Daiki’s blame to take, because he was the one who taught her everything she knew. And a final emotional appeal - if it was good enough for Daiki to continue writing whatever he wanted to write, then it was good enough for her.
In any case, Daiki’s reaction to any media exposure Satsuki received was lukewarm at best. “Alert me again when they put you in a spread with Horikita Mai,” he’d deadpan.
They were doing reasonably well then, two and a half years into debut - not completely famous, but well-known enough to have a niche fanbase (within which Satsuki had her own niche fanbase of smitten teenage boys). The company that handled their PR never clarified the true nature of their relationship, so neither did they, simply because it wasn’t something worth clarifying in the first place, but every time a nosy reporter tried to overstep their boundaries and asked if they were dating or sleeping together, Daiki would snarl, “Watch what you’re saying, asshole, want me to knock your teeth out?” For that reason he wasn’t immensely popular with the media, because he refused to play their games, but that earned him points with a lot of their fans. Nonetheless there was still a lot of speculation; they were a male-female duo, a heterogenic duo in an industry full of homogeneous bands, pure strains of all-male hard rockers and all-female, saccharine-sweet pop-rock alleles of the same. It was a combination which made people guess, because one man and one woman could never do anything together without being at least five percent romantically involved with each other, or siblings.
Maybe they were at least five percent romantically involved with each other. They’d known each other since they were four years old, when Daiki moved into the neighbourhood, and then they went to the same elementary school, and the same middle school, and the same high school. When she was ten she legitimately thought that she was going to marry him when they grew up, because their parents treated each of them like their own, and with a warped, twisted neighbourship like that you were bound to think that you were going to end up with each other for life.
The truth was that she couldn’t let him alone. They were far too much like family for her to truly let him throw caution to the wind in all his endeavours (and that he did a lot), and sometimes she thought it would be better for her own sake if she didn’t feel that almost sisterly or motherly responsibility for all his actions, like a parent looking out for a wayward child.
Well, that, and Daiki was too busy being interested in making music to be interested in her, or in anybody else, for that matter. He never really wrote love songs.
*
The real magic almost always happened when they played live. That was because Daiki was almost virtuosic in his handling of the instruments he played - no two things he played were ever the same, and neither did he want anything he played to sound rehearsed. With him, it was fifty percent variation and fifty percent freestyling. Satsuki would be sitting metres behind him during a show, concentrating on just the drums and hitting the right thing at the right time with the right amount of vigour, but the arena wouldn’t pay any attention to her, because their eyes were glued to him. Electric guitars, Satsuki thought, really did serve their purpose when he played them - to electrify.
But outside of that the magic also occurred, sometimes, when he was in the recording studio by himself. Often she’d be the only one sitting in on it; occasionally the guys who did the mastering or the mixing would be there too, but most of the time she’d be the only one in the room there with him, hardly daring to make a sound or to even cough or sneeze while he was strumming away on his custom Gibson lest it got picked up by the sound system. If it got boring, or if she was tired enough, she’d leave him to experiment all by himself, but other times it also felt nice, in a strangely lucid way, to be the only audience member to which he was performing, while looking far too absorbed in whatever he was doing for his own good. Years had passed and she still couldn’t believe that this boy, with whom she’d grown up and who was overwhelmingly ordinary with overwhelmingly ordinary tastes in food and clothes and women and everything else, could make music that sounded like it came from a livewire.
*
Once, she broke down in Sapporo, when they were on the road for five months or so with no permanent accommodation for more than two weeks at a time, and cried, “I wanna go home,” refusing to come out of her hotel room. That was a few months before their final year together, and after so many projects, she supposed she couldn’t really see where they were going, or rather, where she was going. When they started out, it was with a view that they wouldn’t last more than a year, that Daiki would get bored with them and with her and her inadequate drumming skills and uninspiring lack of musical talent, and that he would find other ideas to be obsessed with. Then one year turned into two and into three, Daiki still wasn’t bored, and one day she ended up celebrating her twenty-third birthday in the basement of a club, tearing up when the two other bands they were travelling with surprised her with a birthday cake. She said she was overjoyed, of course, but the truth was that she missed home, she missed her parents, her friends; Tetsu-kun, on whom she had a crush in eighth grade, had texted her to ask how she was doing; and most of all, she was thinking, while blowing out the candles on the cake, about how she could be doing anything else right now, how she could be in school, how she could be already working, saving up for trips to places where she always wanted to go, places like Hong Kong or Paris or the Caribbean, with Micchan and Acchan. Anywhere but here, in the company of strangers, doing something she didn’t even remotely picture herself doing when she was a kid.
She put up with that train of thought for weeks, until, of course, it culminated in her outburst. Daiki’s first knee-jerk, livid response when he finally got her to open the door to her room was, “Did that jerk Wakamatsu try to get fresh with you?” and Satsuki thought of harmless, if occasionally brash, Wakamatsu-kun, who was rooming a few floors above with his own bandmates (guests for this leg of their concerts), and replied, “No, it’s got nothing to do with him.” She said nothing else, burying her face in the sheets and refusing to look at Daiki, who was standing in the doorway, confused and not knowing what exactly to do with a crying grown woman.
“I wanna go home,” she repeated when he did nothing, desperate to get the point across. He quickly said, “Okay, okay, I got it, you wanna go home,” and to her surprise, gave a light shove over and started to lie down next to her on the bed, which was only slightly larger than a regular single.
“What the hell are you doing, you pervert,” she cried, momentarily alarmed, but he just rolled his eyes and said, “God, you look so ugly right now, just move over.” He was ridiculously heavy, so the mattress sagged in his direction, but Satsuki was too tired from sobbing for half an hour to complain about anything. Now also feeling a little self-conscious about her tantrum, she tried to lull herself into sleep, obstinately facing the side of the room which didn’t have Daiki in it. The last thing she heard before she fell asleep, exhausted, was, “Sorry about that, I didn’t know.”
*
In retrospect, that was the beginning of the end. That ended up being their final tour, out of three. They gave some thought to the idea of putting the band on hiatus, but in the end they figured that it would be better for everyone to just finish things up cleanly. Neither of them wanted to give the fans any false hope that they might reunite one day, and besides, who knew what other kinds of commitments they were both going to enter into when this was all over? Who knew when the next right time would be? Besides, a reunion would sound better than “we’re officially off hiatus”, if it was ever going to happen.
At their very last show they gave an encore at the end, which they usually never did. Perhaps the audience could sense that something was off, because they were quieter than they were during the main show, unless they were simply puzzled by the unprecedented. It was just them and one main stage light, turned on halfway bright, nothing fancy, no guitars, no drums, no keyboard, amplifiers, nothing. Daiki’s only accompaniment was the tambourine that Satsuki was holding, which, on hindsight, was a good choice, because she didn’t have it in her anymore to manage a full drum kit. As usual Daiki was out of tune, and he sang one of their shorter B-sides. It was something he’d written in their earlier years, so the choice of words and melodic structure were both unfailingly simple, perhaps to the point of unsophistication. For two minutes and thirty-seven seconds it made Satsuki feel a smidgen of regret that the entire affair was going to end.
Later they sat together in the dressing room, the sounds of the backstage crew clearing up the venue floating in through the slightly open door. “Sorry, Dai-chan,” she said finally, close to tears again for the umpteenth time in the last half a year, and she meant what she said, not for ending the entire affair, but for letting him assume that she could commit. “And thank you,” she continued.
“Yeah,” he said, “quit while you’re ahead, ever heard of that? That’s us.” The way he let her hold his hands, fingers snug in the square of his palms, suggested that he was probably also thankful as hell for everything she’d done, even though he’d never said it out loud. A week later, they announced their disbandment, and she went back home to Tokyo, where everything had started.
*
The last time he phoned her, he was in Kanagawa, recording something with some of his old classmates from high school who’d also gone into making music. He sounded happier and more energetic than when he was with her, but to tell the truth, she was never really that into the stuff that they did or the music that they made, so it made sense that he’d enjoy it more being around people who were really passionate about it, who thought about making music all day long, every minute and second of their waking lives.
“You should be here,” he said, “this guy that Kise knows is such a fucking good cook, you could stand to learn a thing or two from him.”
“You call me after months and this is the first thing you say to me,” she pouted, so he replied, “Okay, fine, I wanted to ask you for a favour, if you’re not busy.”
He’d send her samples and mixtapes in the mail, with personally handwritten notes in his dirt-poor, untidy scrawl, “What do you think of this batch? Might final [sic] it in weeks. One of Kise’s friends wants your autograph, I said no.” That was the way he did things, the old-fashioned, physical way, just the way he liked it, even though he could have sent those files over the Internet. She popped the CD into her sound system (with speakers he fixed up all by himself when he was fifteen, now sitting in her living room like an ancient relic), fished out an old magazine with them on the cover, signed it, and wrote another note, separately, “Don’t be mean, I definitely don’t mind. Did you sample one of our old songs on #5? I liked that, it was a nice touch. #7 is great.”
She would get the occasional piece of fan mail in her mailbox from time to time - how people managed to get hold of her new address, she would never know, and she was still surprised that people bothered enough to find out, but she was glad she never received anything too crazy, like some other stories she heard. Most of them were harmless, if very enthusiastic letters from their fans, most of them male, some of them girls, all expressing how they wish Daiki and Satsuki were still together and still making records, but that, in typically polite, gracious fashion, she was doing well and that they would support her whatever she wanted to do. There was a wall in her bedroom which she decorated with these fan letters - photographs which other people took of them, at events, at concerts, from up close and from metres away - like a constant reminder of the craziest, most tiring adventure of her life yet. But that was what being around Daiki was like, tiring and exciting in equal parts; the excitement was the return and the fatigue the price. Now that they were truly, physically apart for the first, long time in their lives, she had the time and the energy to think about what she’d accomplished with him. Occasionally she’d miss the heft of holding a drumstick in her hand, or being up at 3 a.m. in the morning, listening to him sound out the lyrics of a new song with a mug of lukewarm coffee in hand. His “You should be here” was still ringing in her ears as she sealed away her reply to what he sent her.