Prompt: 097 ~ Festival                                                                                                                                                                    May 2011©
Fandom: Alice Nine
Focus: Hiroto x Chisa
Word Count: 1,655

            The younger guitarist of Alice Nine was wearing a pouting scowl that his fans wouldn’t be very familiar with. It wasn’t the dark sexy expression he normally wore for photoshoots, and yet for behind the scenes he would have normally been wearing a bright smile. He was the most hyper member of Alice Nine, and everyone knew it. He was always bouncy during lives and the main reason he scowled during photoshoots was that if he didn’t, there was next to no hope of keeping himself serious and focused on the task at hand.

            There were no fans here, no cameras or anything that Hiroto wanted to smile at, and there wasn’t anything fun going on to prompt him to smile on his own. Without the fans to make dizzy or his bandmates to goof off with, Hiroto’s high energy was a shadow of itself, funneled into being sullen and generally antagonistic at the world. When he didn’t have his bandmates or his guitar, Hiroto was gloomy. When his unpleasant circumstance was the fault of one of his bandmates, he was downright moody.

            As much as Hiroto looked up to Saga, the bassist could be a real prick when he felt like it.

            Today for example.

            Today he’d signed Hiroto up to babysit.

            He’d been planning to take Yuuki on a double date with her friend to a cherry blossom festival. The actress he was supposedly not really dating had run into a problem when her friend’s boyfriend suddenly wasn’t her boyfriend. The break-up hadn’t bothered Chisa at all, but it had worried Yuuki.

            She didn’t think that it would be good for Chisa to stay home alone after having been so abruptly broken up with, but she also would have felt horribly guilty doing either, canceling on Saga, or pulling Chisa along as a third wheel. She’d confessed it to Saga, and Saga had ‘found’ a solution.

            Blackmailed more like.

            As Hiroto was the only person in Alice Nine that didn’t have any pre-standing obligations, he’d been quite literally dragged along. If he didn’t play nice, Saga swore he would post pictures on the Club Alice website of that one night they’d all been drunk and Shou had worn a skirt and the Dream Team fanservice had been taken to new levels.

            Hiroto vowed to kill him at the next opportunity.

            And Shou. The vocalist clearly had to go too. This was partly his fault after all, but he’d been busy helping Erika move into her new dorm or something today.

            Erika was a nice girl, so in his killing spree, Hiroto probably wouldn’t kill her too. But Yuuki was definitely on the list. And Chisa. Yuuki for being all protective of the little crazy thing that was Chisa, and Chisa for being Chisa. Not only did he have to babysit the girl at the festival he did not want to go to, she was making him wait. Repeatedly.

            It wasn’t just once at the door when she wasn’t quite finished getting ready or something. No, she’d met them there with Yuuki perfectly on time. Chisa was making Hiroto wait at every corner they turned in the maze of tents and shops. Every time something sparkly caught her eye, Hiroto had to put up with at least five minutes of cooing. She was tapping around in those geta she was wearing, and twirling around that stupid parasol, and pausing to coo at every other vendor.

            Saga and Yuuki had accidently left their friends behind because of it. Chisa had seemed supremely satisfied by that development as she’d been flitting around in her scarlet Yukata, looking less out of place than Hiroto had hoped she would.

            But what was really bothering him wasn’t just that Chisa stopped to look at the tables full of sparkles. What bothered him was that she almost always bought one of the items she was cooing over, and then promptly re-did her hair to suit it. Every ten minutes she was taking one sparkly thing out of her hair and tossing it into her bag before doing her hair up all over again with a brand new trinket.

            It was all so pointless and annoying to Hiroto.

            Going for so long without his guitar was hard enough, but having to spend that wasted time with Chisa made things all the worse.

            “Buck up, Hiroto-kun! This is a festival,” Chisa announced with an infuriating smile.

            Hiroto merely grumbled. He didn’t see the point in being nice to a girl that was so clearly unbothered by the fact that she was making him wait. Hiroto could see why her boyfriend had broken up with her. Sure she was pretty, gorgeous even, but that wasn’t worth the rest of it.

            Chisa’s smile didn’t fade. “Nee, Hiroto-kun,” she said, twirling around the parasol to set it neatly on her shoulder like a baseball bat. “Do you know why I keep changing my hair?”

            Because she was a crazy bitch? Hiroto didn’t justify her question with an answer, though effectively, his silence did answer her.

            “It’s because people like it. The people selling things like that like it when I buy something from them and use it right away. It makes them feel like they did well making it, like I actually like it,” Chisa explained. “They aren’t that expensive, and I only buy them from nice people. Besides, a thing in its proper place is always something to be admired. The people who made them didn’t make them so that they could sparkle on a stand, they’re meant to be in someone’s hair. And mine just so happens to show them off well.”

            Hiroto just grumbled and tried to move on to the next stand. Chisa linked arms with him, giggling to his utmost annoyance. As he tried to pull away, she said, “We have to get you off your stand, Hiroto-kun, get you to be where you belong.”

            “I know where I belong,” Hiroto retorted, a knee-jerk reaction to being teased so plainly. “I belong on stage.” It was the truest truth he’d ever told, and of all people he’d told Chisa. But in all honesty, with his guitar in his hand, his boys at his side, and a crowd at his feet, Hiroto was truly one with the universe, a truly transcendent being.

            “You silly-head,” Chisa commented. “The whole world’s a stage, even if some audiences are smaller than others. No matter the turn out, or where all the musicians are at any given moment, the show will go on, and you should really play to it better than this.”

            Her words didn’t sink in as Hiroto was dragged along; their poignancy went floating aimlessly away as Chisa led him through the festival. “Listen to the music,” she said softly.

            “What music?”

            Chisa laughed. “Nao-san would be ashamed. Listen, find the beat. There’s a pulse to life, a beat as strong as any you play to.” She sat him down at a carnival shooting game. It was a simple little thing, stupid really. “I’m not taking another step until you win me a unicorn stuffie.”

           Hiroto pushed himself to his feet and decided he’d had enough. He was leaving. And then he got a text message. ~Now what would Saga-san say if I told Yuuki-chan that you abandoned me?~

            He turned around to see her smiling sweetly at him.

            “How did you get this number?”

            “Yuuki-chan.”

            Yuuki was definitely on the list.

            Heavily, Hiroto made his way back to the game, sitting down with a grumble to rival any petulant five year old. Chisa was still smiling at him. “Now, Hiroto-kun, can I have a unicorn?”

            He sighed and set to work. The game was simple enough, but the water gun had been calibrated by a drunk monkey. All he had to do was shoot down five little demon figures, but the sheer unpredictability of the gun made it more of a game of chance than a game of skill.

            It took a lot of focus to improve the odds of that chance. Hiroto lost the first game. And the second. He almost won the third time, and by then winning was personal. He needed to beat this stupid game, it was mocking him.

            In the midst of his fourth round Chisa began to sing. Normally he’d have been able to push the sound entirely out of his mind, but she was singing one of the songs he’d only written recently and it was hard not to notice that buzzing about his ears. But he could listen to it without breaking his focus, so it didn’t particularly matter.

            When the adrenalin of triumph flooded through him as he finally won the game, he heard it. Suddenly, the underlying beat of things that Chisa had mentioned was pounding in his head in time to her singing. He could hear it plain as day when he had a hint of the focus and endorphins he was so familiar with for concerts.

            Chisa’s smile was almost as triumphant as Hiroto’s was as the shopkeeper handed over the mint green plush unicorn that Chisa pointed out to him. She hugged it to her like a giddy grade school girl, but looking surprisingly like a princess with the way her hair had been all twisted up.

            “Come on,” she said, offering Hiroto her hand, “Let’s go enjoy the festival! I want something to eat, what about you?”

            It was just as he sighed and submitted that he realized how strongly his distaste for the situation had been affecting Chisa. She’d been having little more fun than he had before now. “Food sounds good,” he murmured. “And, Chisa-chan? Gomen ne. Warui desu.”

            Chisa’s grin only broadened as she leaned in close to whisper conspiratorially, “Nee, Hiroto-kun, don’t look now, but I think you’re smiling.”

            Hiroto laughed suddenly, feeling lighter than he had all day. “If you tell Saga, I’m taking back the unicorn.”

                                                                        ♡♥Finite♥♡