Chapter Text
“Nice to meet you.”
Kami thought that he knew bandmen. He had seen and met quite a few of them while in the scene. He had friends who were active in other cities.
But none of them looked, talked or felt like their new vocalist.
For the first time in a while, the band had been called together for a meeting. Everyone showed up on foot as usual, walking from the nearest station or, in Kami’s case, bus stop. The new guy however, arrived in a bright red sports car. When Kami made a comment about it, he just said:
“I’m not very fond of trains.”
As if owning a sports car at the age of 22 was the most normal thing in the world. The drummer thought that the way the other completely missed his point was kind of charming.
He went by Gackt Camui or just Gackt, and the first time they talked in private over drinks, the origin of that name came up.
“So… is your real name Gakuto?” Kami guessed.
Gackt put down his glass and pursed his mouth with a low hum, as if he was considering his answer.
“You can call me Gaku.”
“Gaku… how do you write it?”
He watched Gackt reach in his bag and lay down a notebook and a pen on the bar counter. Opening a blank page, he tucked a lock of hair behind his ear and wrote down a single character:
楽
Kami chuckled. “I don’t know if that’s incredibly poignant or incredibly cliché. Your parents were on to something.”
Gackt smiled sheepishly. “… They both really like music.”
“Cool. My parents named me Yukihiro,” he made a funny face when he said his given name.
The other tilted his head in question. “You don’t like it?”
“It’s basic and boring. I used to mostly go by Ukyo,” he borrowed the pen to write down his alias.
Gackt eyed the two characters and for a moment looked like he was going to say something, but remained silent. Kami waved his hand. “Don’t worry, you can call me Kami if you want to. Nobody really uses their real name here.”
Following a long period of in-activeness and uncertainty about whether the band would ever play again, working side jobs to survive, it was thrilling to be touring again. They were also writing new music, and adding Gackt to their mix turned out to be a creative boon. Only two months after he had joined, they released a single.
From that point on, every gig they played in the major cities would sell out. A full album followed six months later.
The two of them got along well from the start, and Kami was glad to have found a new friend as things between him and the others had changed after that long pause.
The thing that they really bonded over was their mutual love for drumming. As they started working together more closely, Kami found out that Gackt knew his way around with many instruments, but he never would have suspected the vocalist to have started out as a drummer. They had released a single with an instrumental track composed by Gackt on the piano as its B-side, and started talking about incorporating drums for a live version.
To prepare for that, they would spend a lot of time in the studio together. Just them - and more often than not, rather than figuring out the arrangement and practicing, they would be taking turns on the drums to play their favorites. Or try crazy things, such as drumming together, holding one stick each. Their thighs touching as either had a foot on the double bass.
It was during those sessions, when they sat close together and worked and talked until the wee hours, that Kami started to become aware of his attraction to the vocalist. More and more his eyes found him, stealing glances in the car and in rooms full of people. On the stage. Backstage, when they changed in front of each other.
He was convinced that he hid it successfully from Gackt as well as the others as the months rolled by and in the spring of 1997, the band received an offer to go major.
They performed their last live as an indies band in front of 2000 fans at a sold out Shibuya Public Hall, and then flew to France for shooting on location of their first ever video. While Gackt practiced and put into use French pick-up lines, Kami played with the idea of making a move many times. On several nights, he would lay awake in bed listening to the sound of another bed creaking down the hallway after Gackt had snuck in with one of the locals.
But Kami didn’t even know how to express his feelings in his own language.
He whisked the vocalist away whenever he could. Watched him read a book while struggling to drink bitter black coffee in a cafe on the small town’s square. Rented a car and drove them through the countryside on their day off. They had the time of their lives.
But then they returned to Japan and nothing could have prepared him for the schedule that awaited them there. They embarked on a tour with a new concept and new material, and every single gig sold out on the first day of ticket sales. Their single appeared in the Oricon weekly chart.
Seemingly overnight, they had become a famous band. And he and Gackt stopped seeing each other in private almost completely because there was simply no time.
It wasn’t until September, when things had finally settled down a bit, that Gackt approached him with the question:
“Are you free this weekend? Do you want to go fishing?”