Chapter Text
Fate is a funny thing. Indiscriminate, unrelenting, always a little chaotic. Fate can grab you by the balls and turns your world counter-clockwise for better or worse. Never fazed whether it is leading you to love or triumph or a puddle of blood at your feet. It doesn’t care if you want it or not. Fate isn’t food at a restaurant; you can’t send it back if you’re dissatisfied. You can’t fight it either—though some people damn-well try.
Jirou Kyoka believed in fate, always had. It wasn’t the kind of blind faith people had in other formless systems in the universe, however. It was the type with definite science, grounded evidence; undeniable.
This was fate: being born thirty-three days and two doors apart from Kaminari Denki, whose late mother had loved him so dearly, that in the very last moments of his birth, she had filled him with all the energy she could muster and then some, before flickering out completely.
As a result, a young Denki became both motherless and excessive. An untamable force of fervor and whit. Whose brain moved fast and mouth moved faster. Something Kyoka’s mother called character and a doctor once called Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. They all just call him Denki.
He’d also become too much for a hardworking, but reasonably grieving Kaminari Nobutoshi to handle and so Kyoka’s own mother had stepped forward, raising the two of them side-by-side. Naturally they had become inseparable.
“Kyo! Heads up!”
Kyoka’s head goes up. There’s an aluminum projectile in transit towards her face and if the warning had been even a few seconds spare, said face could’ve been the scene of a massacre. Instead, Kyoka catches the can in a pitcher’s grip, cold assaulting her palm. A welcomed bite in the persistent warmth of the evening. She cracks it and takes a swig; bitter but refreshing.
“Solid catch.” Denki steps into view, the convenience store doors slipping shut in his wake.
He’s hard to miss, Denki, with hair the colour of lamplight and unemployment. The sort of blond you bought in a bottle from Daiso that made salon owners cry. Sometimes it made Kyoka a little weepy as well, but not tonight. Tonight, she’d take Denki fried-to-the-nines, roots and all, strands an inch from disintegration. It was too nice of a night for hair politics.
“So, here’s what I’m thinking. Fade in from black. Fog machines. Lasers—or lightening, or laser-lightening. Can they do that? Or is lightening more of a pyrotechnics thing?” Kyoka was certain pyrotechnics were beyond Denki’s scope of understanding, but it sounded flashy, so he’d suggested it anyway.
“We aren’t allowed pyrotechnics.”
“Laser-lightening it is then.”
Kyoka laughed.
They were making their way down a familiar street in the familiar locale of Roppongi. A city that was not theirs, but they frequent it enough that sometimes it felt like it could be. It was their friend Sero Hanta’s city after all, so it might as well be home as much as anywhere else was.
“We need to think about these things you know.” Denki continued. “For our epic re—re—re—”
Ah, yes. Because their band was on the cusp of rebirth, after the sudden departure of their shameless and wholly unmissed ex-bassist. Their ex-bassist who, late the year before, had left them up shit-creek and without a hope in punk rock hell. Disappearing into the night like a phantom, or a vampire, or a self-obsessed, drug-addled asshole.
A hiatus had followed. But their eight-month grace period was up. They’d gotten a call. Their manager would pull the funeral shrouds off herself if she had to, least she drops their asses completely. The label had no patience for adolescent drama from overripe twenty-somethings that should have been better than that, even if it meant scraping the pieces of their broken-hearted drummer off the stage by force.
They wouldn’t need to. Electric Moment would do it for them, and if not them, they had a pastel haired secret weapon that could deal the final blow.
‘’—awakening? Revitalization? Reestablishment?” Kyoka suggested.
Denki whined impudently, “You know I don’t know big words.”
“Funny, you think you could fit a lot of them in that big head of yours.”
Kyoka sidestepped an attack, kicking off the sidewalk just fast enough to dodge Denki, but not quite fast enough to avoid the startled rage of a taxi’s horn as it blared her back to Denki’s side. She showed the driver her middle finger. Denki beamed.
Their band.
It felt like a lifetime since they’d talked about the band so casually.
Their band: Electric Moment. Named for the very feeling of the band itself. A childish name, really, but they were children when they had come up with it and there was no turning back now.
Electric Moment. They were fate. Then they were but a persistent and aching memory. They say time heals all wounds, but it hadn’t healed this. They would have to attend to themselves, with careful attention and a loving hand, with music that changed everything.
Reestablishment. Revitalization. Reawakening.
Kyoka looked up at Denki, streetlight glaring off his upturned beer, eyebrow saluting the sky in character accurate curiosity.
She certainly felt awake.
“Let’s go, the others are waiting.”