Chapter Text
“You’re on stage in 3…2…1!”
Flashing lights gleam into his eyes and there's an essence of glitter in the air and it’s definitely all over him. His hair is pinned up and there’s definitely way too many bobby pins in there that he’s going to have to take out later. The heels of his boots are clicking on the floor as he runs up on the stage, the lights are dim now and his head is faced down, and he can hear the ticking of a much too familiar song in the mic attached to his ear, and now the lights are flashing again and his head rises up with a smug expression on his face.
After those seconds of awareness, everything blurs, he’s singing and moving across the stage and smiling and his hair has slowly been undone, and he has definitely had a costume change once and he doesn’t remember how or when it happened. And now it’s all over and the last song is fading out, and he’s huffing, completely out of breath, the stars are moving in an unnatural way and the stage is shaking when he knows it’s not, and he hears cheering somewhere far far away but it’s over taken by the ringing in his ear, and now he hears yelling from backstage, and that’s his queue to let his heels tap away from the stage.
His face is planted into a pillow on the couch of his dressing room and he swears he blacked out for a second because now he hears banging on his dressing room door and he jumps up. His hair is a wreck and his makeup is everywhere but his face, but he couldn’t care less. Performances were always exhausting, you never get used to the exhaustion.
“Mitsuba! Mitsuba Sousuke! Mi-tsu-ba!!”
“What. Do. You. Want?” Mitsuba groans in mimicked pointed words from his couch he is unable to get up from.
“You’ve been in there for over 40 minutes. We thought you were dead, get out of there!”
“I was just taking a nap, Jesus! I just performed a 2 and a half hour show and I can’t even sleep, I’m going to report this record label for abuse of employees!” Mitsuba yelled, still laying on his couch.
“Shut up, and get off that damn couch before I take it out of your dressing room,”
“I’m recording this to report to HR!”
“Mitsuba!”
“Ugh! Fine, I can’t even nap in this environment,” Mitsuba complains, but gets up from his couch to open the door.
He looks like a wreck, which would be a problem if anyone else had been on the other side of the door, but it was Natsuhiko, so he couldn’t care less. Natsuhiko has seen him in a state a hundred times worse, and if he didn’t care then, he definitely doesn’t care now. At least he’s a cute wreck.
“What was so urgent that you had to interrupt my nap?” Mitsuba dead pans.
“There’s a chocolate fountain in the commons, you should check it out,” Natsuhiko smiles.
Mitsuba slams the door in his face and plops back on the couch blacking out for another hour.
The next time he is awoken he is in a slightly better mood, but still very tired. He groans, Natsuhiko, most likely on the other side of the door.
He manages to push his hair back into a ponytail which had originally been all over his face.
Uncharacteristically of Natsuhiko he had knocked once and had refrained from yelling anything ridiculous, but Mitsuba was much too tired to care about Natsuhiko’s random lack of annoyance. He swings the door open not caring for the fact that he still looks like a mess aside from his somewhat neat hair.
“I’ll head to the tour bus now Natsuhi-”
He looks at the person standing in front of the door, and it is in fact not Natsuhiko.
Without hesitation, the dressing room door is closed right into the stranger's face. Mitsuba decides that he will leave his dressing room when the mystery boy leaves.
As much as he adores his fans, he has exhausted his last extroverted bone in his body and can not be bothered to fake a smile. Getting into a scandal for being rude to a fan is not what he needs at the moment, so no risks were going to be taken today.
Unfortunately, whoever was on the opposite side of the door could not take a hint because he knocked again in a rhythmic toon, Mitsuba smiled to himself when he realized it was one of his songs.
Even with the endearing action his mood had not completely altered however. Just because the action got a laugh out of him, that doesn’t mean he’s going to immediately like this mystery boy and be nice to him, he knows too well how thin his patience is. But even so, he opens the door with a quiet exasperated sigh that he tries to cover as a cough- he really can not be put through a scandal at this vital time in his career.
“Hi!” he began in a sickly sweet tone that would be vomit inducing if he weren’t so used to it. As he completely opens the door, unlike last time where he had got a glimpse of unfamiliarity and immediately slammed the door, he actually gets a good look at the boy at his door. At this good look, his eyes widened in realization, “Hold on, are you that one model from the latest issue of Vogue? Or no…you look like him, but just a lot younger,” Mitsuba squinted his eyes, trying to understand why the boy looked so familiar.
“Haha, yeah no that was my older brother, Teru. I’m Kou Minamoto, his younger brother- I was on that issue too you know! Just not the cover,” the mystery boy or Kou Minamoto, explained, he had a sheepish smile plastered on his face and his hand had shot up to rub the back of his neck.
“Right…that’s great and all, nice to meet you or whatever, but umm what are you doing here? This interaction would make a lot more sense at like a photoshoot or something not after one of my concerts,” Mitsuba asks, an eyebrow raised in slight confusion.
Don’t get him wrong, he isn’t against meeting up with models and doing photoshoots with them, although he prefers to have the spotlight all to himself, if he has no option, he’ll cooperate and share, but at this current moment there was no photoshoot to be sharing the spotlight with. He’s hoping his question doesn’t come off as rude, not because he cares what the model boy thinks, he just can’t have him putting out a bad word about him to the public.
“Mitsuba! Minamoto! I see you guys have already begun to get acquainted, that’s perfect!” Natsuhiko had come back looking like he had just murdered a man made of chocolate. He walks over his hands wide open as if he were about to hug the two.
“Absolutely not,” Mitsuba maneuvers out of the attempted hug, Minamoto following less obnoxiously, “You are not getting your nasty chocolate stains all over my performance clothes, you're funding this shit. Seriously, did you go swimming in the chocolate fountain? How did it get on your shoes? You know what, forget I even asked. What’s more important is why this model boy is at my door after a concert, is this some kind of plan for an impromptu photoshoot or something?” Mitsuba scolds while dodging all of Natsuhiko’s attempts at hugging and kissing him.
“Nope, no photoshoot just yet! Broadcast Records and Minamoto Modeling Corp have decided to collaborate for higher profit! Seeing as you and Kou here are both up and coming it-boys of the same age, our companies decided it would be an exponential gain for you two to work together on different projects.
I thought it would be better for you two to begin getting to know each other as soon as possible, so I got Teru’s permission to have Kou on board for the remainder of your tour. Now, I’ve got places to be and things to run, so you two have fun and get along, see you!” Natsuhiko finished with a confident smile, lightly shoving Kou into Mitsuba’s dressing room before he went off to finish up that chocolate fountain.
Mitsuba knows Natsuhiko too well to know he isn’t going to get any real work done until Sakura, Mitsuba’s marketing and financial manager, pushes him to do so.
Mitsuba sighs an exasperated but also somewhat fond sigh while massaging his head from stress. Natsuhiko was going to give him wrinkles at such a young age, he should know better than to damage an idol's beauty, but nonetheless Mitsuba moves on looking up at his new…collab partner? Coworker? He wasn’t quite sure, but he’d figure it out eventually.
“You can close the door behind you, lame earring, unless you're some kind of pervert who’s planning on having his way with me, then keep the door open for my own safety,” Mitsuba says before falling back onto his couch.
“Trust, I’m not a pervert, and saying something like that wouldn’t stop a pervert either way, but whatever- Hey! What do you mean, lame earring?” Kou responds before realizing the other insult hidden in Mitsuba’s words.
“What do you mean ‘what do you mean?’ I called you lame earring because you have a hella lame traffic safety earring. Seriously, for a model you have no fashion sense,” Mitsuba scoffs with an eye roll, turning to look away from Kou and opting to scroll through his phone instead.
“You are not at all like your public persona I see,” Kou walks over to sit on the opposite side of Mitsuba’s couch, it bothers Mitsuba for a second, being as possessive as he is, but he thinks for a second more and realizes he actually does not care that much.
“Yeah, well who is? I doubt your brother is all smiles and charm in real life either, he seems like an asshole, no offense.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t go as far as to say he’s an asshole, but he definitely isn’t ‘smiles and charm’ he’s more like a cynic, but that’s to everyone but his family. He’s really loving and genuine to me and my sister, and even his boyfriend, although he doesn’t really act like it.”
“That’s inherent bias, of course he’s nice to his family and boyfriend, that’s how everyone is. I’m nice to my mom, that doesn’t make me a good person. Kindness to those you care about is something all people have, that doesn’t make them good, if anything it makes them more cynical,” Mitsuba counters, still busy scrolling through his phone as he speaks.
“Wow, you’re really pessimistic. I guess I can see where you’re coming from, but I like to think that we all care about other people until we have a good reason not to. Like I’m sure you would go out of your way to help someone if their life was in danger even if you didn’t know them because humans care for other humans, you know? Unless the person has wronged you before, what reason do we have not to help and care,” the cadence in which Kou speaks with is one of hesitation, almost like he’s insecure about his own opinions. And yet, even with this insecurity, the genuinity of his words make them seem so convincing.
Of course, even with the compelling argument, Mitsuba is stubborn and holds true to his own opinion, though he doesn’t argue his point further, opting to sit in comfortable silence instead.
Mitsuba acknowledges how odd it is that the two had just shared such a deep and introspective conversation after only moments of meeting each other. The progression of their conversation itself was normal, but the way it melted into a different song all together by the end was almost uncanny for two strangers who had no interest in getting to know each other. Even so, he chooses not to dwell on the thought for long because he really has no reason to in the first place.
It seems that the comfort of the silence was one-sided though because after a few moments of only noise being the loud shuffling and chatting coming from outside the dressing room, Kou spoke up again.
“So… how long are we going to be here? Like when do we head to the tour bus?” he asks, tapping his knee with one finger, that same flashy smile still plastered on his face.
“Hm? Oh, probably in like an hour, they’re just emptying out the venue and getting all the other back up dancers and singers undressed, after that we all head to our transportation for the next city. We’ll know when we leave when Natsuhiko comes banging on the door again. You know what, I’m sleepy, I’m going to take another nap, you can do whatever, just like don’t be a creep and watch me in my sleep or something, since I bet you get off to that sort of stuff,” Mitsuba sighs putting his phone down and laying horizontally on the couch, his last few words come out as a mumble, but he knows Kou heard him seeing the way his face contorts into some concoction of scandalized and bewilderment. The sight gets a small huff of laughter out of Mitsuba.
He misses being able to just be his usual crude self around others, sure he can pull that sort of thing around Natsuhiko, but Natsuhiko is ten times as crude as he is, and in most instances he’s the one being scandalized within their conversations. He refuses to talk like this around Sakura due to the immense amount of respect he has for her, and he is too busy being scared of Tsukasa to even show signs of his usual personality.
Having a new ‘coworker’ who he can mess with and not have any consequences around is a new melody to him. Immediately he was able to tell that the model boy was too kind of a person to ever speak the truth about Mitsuba’s real personality, so he already was safe when it came to scandals, and he was innocent and easily provoked deeming him an amusing target of Mitsuba’s teasing.
With these thoughts wavering around in his mind like notes on a music sheet, his eyelids began to feel heavy as they drooped off into slumber, his mind fogging into a mix of melodies incoherent to anyone but him.
While his breath began to even out, there sat Kou Minamoto on the opposite side of the couch. Jagged posture and saucer like eyes, practically leaning onto the edge of the couch, in an attempt to keep as far away from Mitsuba as possible.
The action wasn’t out of disgust, more so out of fear of what the other would do if he awoke with Kou even remotely close to him. He feared the words he would be called, even while knowing they were untrue. Almost panicking at what he should do for the next hour with the strange new boy sleeping beside him, he coincidentally feels his own self falling into an even breathing pattern.
And now Kou Minamoto is sleeping with his head resting on the couch arm and legs brought up in a fetal position, opposite to Mitsuba who laid on his back, his hands covering his eyes.
Two quiet, silent snoring boys sleeping in the light of a dressing room.