Prompt: 069 ~ Tease                                                                                                                                                        May 2011©
Fandom: The GazettE
Focus: Reita x Kitty
Word Count: 1,739

            The fans knew it long before the members of the GazettE.

            The fangirls were always eager to squeal over a pairing, be it genuine fanservice or a complete construct of their imaginations. The GazettE’s members didn’t give any of the fans’ assertions much credit; fanservice, and the assumptions that came with it, was a way of life for them. The ReiKitty pair had initially been created for fanservice so no one questioned the onstage antics. And even when the teasing transitioned backstage, only the fans made a clamor in regards to the change. For the band, it was business as usual.

            Kitty was the new addition, the pseudo-member as fans called her until long after her attachment to the band was made officially permanent, and as such she had been kept from seeing Reita’s nose. She retaliated by calling the band that covered it a nose sock. It had become the Gaze standard to see them arguing over it.

            When she was on stage, but not preoccupied by some crazy antic with Ruki, Kitty made frequent grabs at the offending bit of fabric. She always missed, but it was not for lack of genuine effort. She was at Reita’s side during his solos, her soprano adding an elegant effect to the intros and extros of his bass. Reita’s crazy spins and abrupt movements had her dodging out of his way almost as often as she had him dodging from her attacks on his noseband. Their exchanges never failed to make both the cast and crew of the shows, and their audience alike, grin.

            Kitty’s place with the GazettE was more permanent than the fans knew even before she became emotionally tied to them all. She was designated to be the GazettE’s sex appeal to their male fans. Most bands didn’t get popular enough to appeal as universally to both genders, but the GazettE had now reached a point of acquiring a large enough male following to desire to cater more than merely musically to them. Visually, their image was keyed into a rather narrow sect of the male population; adding Kitty in, initially as something of a stage prop, opened up that visual appeal dramatically.

            The cute little bits of teasing were expanded on stage to address the issue of pleasing the straight, male contingent of GazeRock followers. On stage, Kitty teased all of the GazettE’s members in rather more NC-17 ways than merely bickering over a noseband. It was the fans that noticed, long before the GazettE’s other members, that Kitty reserved a special sort of game for Reita.

            Her games with Ruki and Uruha had been almost singularly responsible for the abrupt shift they underwent from tight spandex pants to ones that breathed a little better. The playfully seductive and suggestive glint in Kitty’s eyes was routinely picked up by the cameras, and it was the fans that noticed it was a look almost always directed towards her right on the stage. When Kitty wrapped a leg around Ruki as she sang with him from his mic; when she licked Uruha’s guitar, and moved on to licking Uruha’s neck; when she sat on Kai’s lap and showed off her long legs as she lifted them over his drum set; and when she leaned over Aoi’s guitar from inside the strap as he slid his hands along her neck and the leg she lifted for balance; every time she’d give a smirk in Reita’s general direction. The cameras caught him in a voyeuristic angle for each of Kitty’s stunts by what could have been happenstance, but the fans called desire. With him directly, Kitty’s displays were rather tame. She would lean over his back or sit on his knees; just light comfortable things that almost always ended with a grab at his noseband. Her real teasing of him was in her actions of teasing the others.

            And it was the fans that noticed.

            It wasn’t until their fanservice began to move back stage that eyebrows among the bandmates began to rise. When Kitty began climbing all over Reita as a matter of course rather than a special display for the fans, because he would hold something over her head and she would use him as a ladder to get it, or something equally ridiculous, the fans’ accusations of something deeper began to make a dent in the GazettE’s disbelief. Snapshots of backstage caught Kitty with her legs firmly around Reita’s waist much more often than not, and almost never caught them entirely out of physical contact. It became a standard means of transportation for Kitty to simply jump on Reita’s back for a ride rather than deal with the tricky issue of maneuvering in Lolita heels. Kitty was skilled enough at walking in them to have managed on her own, but it was so much easier, and required so much less concentration to have a piggy back ride rather than staying independently upright. From Reita’s back, she could daydream and chat casually with the GazettE and crew without a care in the world.

            Except of course for Reita dropping her.

            Which he did rather often.

            Fans noted that he was always very careful to drop her onto something soft enough to catch her entirely unharmed, and that such an inglorious dismount usually resulted from Kitty’s close attentions to another GazettE member, such as good-luck kisses.

            The band members only began chiming in with their two cents about it when Ruki’s rambles landed on how they were developing an ‘order’ to stand in at promotionals. It was a system that had been developed de-facto, designed to keep Reita from tearing their heads off for standing too close to Kitty. He’d come to regard her in the same possessive manner as his instruments; Uruha could be tolerated near her and Kai on the odd occasion, but she was off limits to everyone else. Not that Kitty paid any attention to his possessiveness.

            She went on jumping into chatter with the bandmates, frequently hanging all over them as her tactile nature demanded, even when they began teasing the ReiKitty pair about their ‘fanservice’ relationship. Reita ignored the teasing; Kitty teased them right back.

            Reita would glower, proving their point, and Kitty would call them out for being scared of a big softie of a bassist. Reita would growl and kick at whatever Kitty was sitting on, knocking her off with a show of non-concern. She would steal a box of pocky from Aoi and chuck it at the bassist’s head as she nonchalantly got to her feet.

            Despite it all, the fans’ assertions and the teasing of the band, Reita and Kitty believed themselves firmly rooted in opposite ends of the field, as friends and rivals, for a very long time. It wasn’t until a rare private moment came up between them, without the band or crew to interfere, that they noticed something had changed for them.

            It was after a concert, nearly five in the morning by the time they made it back to the hotel, and an exhausted Kitty was being carried to her room by Reita. She was only half awake, but it didn’t put a stop to their constant banter. Kitty was chastising Reita for speaking in such a deep rumble, his words tickled her as he talked, making falling asleep difficult for her. He accused her of being too sensitive.

            Kitty responded with a threat of taking his noseband off. She reached up as she normally would have, expecting in the back of her mind to be promptly dropped to the floor. But while she was so defenseless and sleepy, the bassist didn’t have the heart to send her crashing down; not while she was snuggled so securely in his arms.

            Surprised when her fingers managed to latch on to the fabric of the noseband, Kitty almost didn’t do anything about her success. Reita had to laugh at the puzzled expression that crossed her face when she managed something she had never expected to. For a moment Kitty contemplated letting go, taking the moral high ground as it were; but Reita’s smirk quickly convinced her otherwise and she yanked it of abruptly.

            To her confusion, Reita’s nose was just a nose. It hadn’t even been flattened by the years it’d been constrained by the noseband. The stupid sock hadn’t been hiding anything. Reita chuckled at her perplexed pout, the deep rumble rousing Kitty from her momentary daze.

            Sighing, she mentioned that she’d hoped it had looked something more like the slits Voldemort had used to breathe in the movies, or at least was something more worth hiding. At least now she had better material to work with when teasing him about wearing the thing, since his nose wasn’t worth hiding, it made covering it up even more ridiculous.

            Grumbling so deeply that Kitty almost couldn’t understand him, Reita declared that it was not a nose-sock, and that of course he would keep wearing it. Besides, it was his thing now, part of his iconic image; the noseband was cool.

            With a soft smile, Kitty leaned up to kiss the tip of his nose before replacing the noseband, saying that it was whatever he thought it was, but she would still call it a nose-sock. Then she curled up a bit more tightly in his arms and finally fell completely asleep just as the bassist reached the door of her room. It took a lot of skillful maneuvering, but Reita managed to get inside without waking Kitty. She was a fairly heavy sleeper once she actually fell entirely asleep, her occasional sugar-crashes had proved that much.

            Tucking her under the covers, Reita found himself compelled to lean down and kiss her as the little singer had stretched up too kiss him only moments ago. It was just a soft press of lips to her forehead, but it was enough to make Kitty smile in her sleep.

            The smug smile Reita was wearing when he walked into the room he was sharing with Ruki for the night would prompt a round of teasing that would have to be dealt with more straight-forwardly than merely pushing it off, but that could wait until morning. For now the only wonder was why had Reita bothered with coming all the way back to his room when he clearly could have just stayed with Kitty, and that was a question he couldn’t answer.

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