Prompt: 76 ~ Crash                                                                                                                                                                    May 2011©
Fandom: The GazettE
Focus: Reita x Kitty
Word Count: 1,430

            Every time it happened, it caught everyone off guard, completely by surprise.             It was by no means an inexplicable event, it was simply startling.

            The onset speed with which it occurred seemed to defy all logic.

            When Kitty crashed, it really was like a truck rammed through the GazettE’s ranks without any sort of forewarning to brace them for it.

            Kitty’s crashes weren't entirely unpredictable. For the most part, they were the results of the post-concert high sliding out of her system. At just after four in the morning, it was easy to be tired, expected of the average person. By then the exhaustion of the performances had sunck deep into the bones of all the GazettE’s members and affiliates and the adrenaline of being onstage would have begun to wear off.

            Kitty almost always made it backstage before she collapsed into her usual black out. Sometimes she only made it a few feet back stage, but she almost always made it there. In such cases, there was always someone around to catch her, to look after her limp form until the staff had gotten things under control enough to take her off the members’ hands.

            The post-concert crashes were predictable. They had scared the pants off the GazettE members the first few times they’d witnessed them, but under profuse assurances from Kitty’s staff that this was totally normal for her, they’d learned to accept the crashes as a part of her. Once they’d gotten used to the fact that Kitty blacked out the moment she stepped off the stage, they’d been able to adjust to it. The only warning of her collapses was a slight stumble before complete blackout, but the GazettE had been able to manage with that.

            It was Kitty’s other crashes that caught them off guard: Kitty’s sugar-crashes.

            They were a rather rare event, two or three a month at most. They were the result of Kitty over-working herself without noticing. If there was a pause in her sugar intake for some inexplicable reason, and it happened to coincide with a week she’d gotten less sleep than an antsy infant, she crashed hard and fast as her continuous sugar high came crashing back to earth.

            When she’d first joined the GazettE’s touring troupe, Kitty’s sporadic bouts of rapid-onset unconsciousness had made the members sick with worry. They’d learned to manage her post-concert crashes, but the sugar-crashes were things that they couldn’t develop any sense of control in regards to. She’d brushed it off as nothing, just her own forgetfulness coming back to bite her. Kai, Ruki, and even Aoi however, maintained an agreement between themselves that she was not to be left alone for even a minute in case something happened that made a crash dangerous.

            Unfortunately for the easily distracted and very busy musicians, Kitty managed to wander off alone even more than they did.

            They couldn’t find any way to make certain that her crashes wouldn’t result in her falling off a building, or drowning in the hotel pool, or something else that would lead to a dramatic, horrific and untimely end. At least they couldn’t until they noticed Reita.

            Long before anyone guessed that the constant bickering and arguing between them became anything half so serious as to hint at a deeper connection between the pair that was destined to be a couple, Reita began to catch Kitty as she crashed. It had to be something more than fantastic reflexes, because Reita didn’t exactly have fantastic reflexes. Besides, reflexes couldn’t account to the overwhelming regularity with which Reita was able to successfully predict Kitty’s sugar crashes with enough foresight to be able to catch her as she collapsed.

            Sure, even in the early days Kitty’s attachment to the GazettE she and Reita were almost constantly in each other’s presence, arguing over the stupidest of things. And sure, Kitty was constantly climbing all over the tauntingly tall bassist more often than not as Reita held things above her reach. And sure, it was possible that it may have just been coincidental that Reita managed to catch Kitty as she crashed, but it didn’t seem like it.

            Kitty had never crashed while she was climbing on Reita, not that anyone had ever seen. And when she did crash, Reita already had his arm out to catch her before she’d even begun to drop. He arranged himself so that he could catch Kitty with zero effort, and that sort of ability only came in conjunction with the ability to predict her crashes, to sense them in advance somehow.

            It wouldn’t have been too strange if Kitty had given any warning before she dropped. With a bit of wooziness to tip them off, the rest of the GazettE’s members would have been able to catch her too. The thing was that Kitty didn’t give warning, not that anyone could pick up on at least.

            Anyone but Reita.

            “How?”

            Ruki’s question only managed to get a response from Reita because Kitty had fallen unconscious out of their argument and Reita was bored after having carried her to the couch and then found himself with nothing to do. She’d already been out for an hour when Ruki had stopped staring at them like a peeping tom lurking about in the closet and had finally asked the question burning in his mind.

            “How what?” Reita asked as he let the television settle on some sports thing or other because he didn’t feel like going around the channel circuit again.

            “How do you manage to catch her?” Ruki clarified, his brow creasing in confusion over Reita’s super-power and in petulance at Reita’s stupidity that hadn’t made his question abundantly clear the first time he’d asked it.

            “It’s easy. She falls, I catch,” Reita replied, vaguely amused that Ruki didn’t understand such a simple concept.

            Ruki grumbled, “But how? You don’t have good enough reflexes to just catch her! How do you know she’s going to fall before she actually does?”

            “It’s pretty obvious”

            “Like hell, it is.”

            Reita gave him a look. “You’re kidding me.” When Ruki’s serious expression didn’t change in any way other than his scowl deepening, Reita laughed. “I guess you are dumber than you look.”

            Shoving the bassist sharply with his foot, Ruki huffed, “Bastard.”

            “Eh? If you can’t see little Neko-chibi’s fainting things coming from a mile out, you are definitely beyond thick.”

            “I can’t see them coming because there’s nothing to see!” Ruki whined, huffing again. He kicked Reita again and added, “It’s not like she gives any kind of warning.”

            “She gives plenty of warning!” Reita protested with a snort of incredulity, “She gives more warning about a collapse than Uruha does about one of his diva fits.”

            “Uruha announces his diva fits,” Ruki said flatly.

            At Reita’s shrug, he added, “Kitty just falls.”

            Reita shrugged again. “She doesn’t just fall.”

            “She does.”

            Glancing over at her on the couch, where she lay prone and still like a cotton-candy-colored corpse, Reita replied, “You’re just thick.”

            Ruki just devolved into a stubborn pout that announced his opinion that Reita had some sort of super-power he wasn’t telling the others about as Reita's eyes caught the slow and shallow rise and fall of Kitty’s chest that announced her to be alive, despite her stillness.

            To Reita’s eyes, Kitty’s smallest movements were easy to spot.

            She gave him plenty of warning before she crashed.

            There was the way her R’s softened a bit, and how her A’s elongated just a fraction, how her syllables sharpened. Even more obvious as the crash began to settle into her was how she started using her left hand to mess with her hair instead of her right, or how her random gestures narrowed their field of influence to the space directly in front of her and above her head instead of the full sphere of chaos she usually invoked. And right before she fell, her head would tip far to the right instead of the way it normally tilted at the slightest slant when she was confused or being adorable.

            It was always painfully obvious when Kitty was about to crash.

            At least it was to Reita.

            He wasn’t quite as attuned to her every movement as he would come to be months later when he found himself almost annoyed that the others had begun to pick up on her little crash-alert-quirks. Even so, even without knowing all of her little ticks, Reita knew enough to know without thinking that she was about to crash.

            And even before he came to truly care about her, he cared enough to catch her when she crashed.


                                                  ♡♥Finite♥♡