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ghostmartyr · 4 years

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how a life can move from the darkness [5/?]

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Summary: Two drug addicts (Eren and Historia) meet in group and decide to be roommates to make their living situation slightly less weird. From there we do the slow burn found family dance mixed in with the struggles and agonies of recovery. Heavy on friendship feels, especially EMA. Eventual yumikuri.

Eren had lunch plans for the weekend. An appointment. Specific time and everything. It took a lot of debate, stress, one meeting and several more confirmations from Historia that it was fine, but there was a plan, and Mikasa and Armin had agreed to it. Sunday lunch. Dinner reminded Eren too much of his mother watching every twitch of his hands at the table. Lunch’s only association was with forgetting it.

He couldn’t forget this one.

Of course! the happy letters from Armin’s latest text spelled out. Mikasa had been more formal, which was easier. He could tell she didn’t really believe the offer either. He should have felt like crap over that, but it was too nice being back on the same wavelength.

He was going to see his friends again. And try like hell not to screw it all up this time.

Petra had said, many times, that one of the best things they could do to aid their recovery was keeping their minds engaged in something besides sitting around wanting drugs. It was important to keep life going instead of hiding in its cracks.

The first time she’d said it to him, directly, had been when he’d gone off on a rant about Zeke’s damn baseball games. He couldn’t even remember why it came up, except that Petra thought maybe going to a few would be good for him, and he’d still been in the yelling stage of everything.

Now locked in the stage where he took people’s advice and did something with it, he was doing what he could to distract himself. Benjamin was accepting food that wasn’t wriggling now. His tank still needed regular checks and cleaning. Several bouldering groups were lined up for the week.

He’d mentioned it to Reiner, since Reiner knew more about keeping busy than anyone he knew.

What he got was a copy of one of Ymir’s books.

“This one’s not about the porn,” Reiner had assured him, like that was a mark of quality.

Ymir had rolled her eyes loudly when he said it, snagging Eren’s toast off his plate. “Great review, Reiner. You should be my new marketing team.”

Eren was fifty pages in, and except for the very disconcerting moments spent realizing that Ymir’s insights about human emotion could translate to something painfully earnest when they had nothing to do with an actual person, it was okay. Mostly.

The two characters who were the focus of the romance were starting to spend a lot of time together. On purpose, instead of being forced into it. The narrator kept denying that part, but the narrator was also starting to spend an uncomfortable number of paragraphs being distracted by the other character’s physical appearance.

It was a lot of hunger. Wanting. Not being allowed to have.

“Historia?” Eren called out, flipping a few pages ahead. He’d forced her to the couch with her homework by stealing her usual spot under Benjamin’s tank.

“Yes?”

“You’ve been in love, right?”

The vibrations of a very heavy textbook hitting the floor were followed by a hiss of pain. Eren’s head swiveled around to catch Historia sucking a paper cut. Her face was an uncomfortable red.

“I—why?” she asked.

He brandished the book into the air. “One of Reiner’s friends is a romance novelist, and he gave me this to read.” Historia knew one or two things about Reiner thanks to awkward questions about whether or not it was okay to mention his roommate was a drug addict to other addicts. “And I was wondering if it’s normal for it to all sound like…”

Historia picked up her textbook, continuing to look at him with the kind of paralyzed horror he would have reserved for one of their talks about dead people. Eren cut to the chase.

“Is it supposed to sound like addiction?” he asked. “Is that what it feels like?”

Because every single page was taking him further and further away from the kind of want he knew Ymir had been intending and tossing him back into the hazy memory of needing a fix so badly that he talked to the man behind Zeke’s batting cage and staggered into Armin’s granddad’s bathroom and—

He didn’t know how Reiner had gotten through the full book. Eren didn’t think he could.

Petra read romance novels. She enjoyed them. Was it just him?

“No.” Historia stopped rubbing at her finger. “It—they’re not the same. Whatever I…” Her eyebrows knitted together. Carefully, with a precision that was at odds with the panic that had somehow been unleashed, she placed her book on the other side of the couch. “I don’t know if it was love, but it was nothing like… that.” She looked at the offending manuscript like it was one of Petra’s cookies. “Why are you still reading it?”

Eren shrugged, flipping through more pages. “Trying to keep busy.”

Trying not to think of what Ymir would say if she found out he couldn’t stomach the tamest book from her shelf. He could picture it pretty easily. He had no interest in living it out.

Hell, though. Did this character ever bother doing anything about all the wanting? Fifty more pages, and the obvious conclusion was that this was the only one Ymir wrote that wasn’t pornographic because she’d picked out a main character who couldn’t figure out how to communicate her feelings to her love interest, so there was nothing to be explicit about. No wonder the project had stuck out to Reiner. Someone like Ymir writing someone with a sense of embarrassment or insecurity was jarring.

“’Crystal Wick’?”

Historia had left the couch, and was investigating the book’s cover. She looked halfway alive, which was about as good as Eren had come to hope for lately. The shadows under her eyes had stopped darkening each morning.

“It’s a penname,” he said. “Bertolt says she mostly writes porn.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Reiner gave you porn to read?”

“He specifically said this one wasn’t.”

She peered closer at the cover, reading the quotes on the back. “Reiner gave you a romance novel that ‘Speaks to the truest soul of melancholic love’?”

Eren turned it over. “It says that?”

“Yes,” Historia said. “Crystal’s a ‘genius.’”

It did say that. Eren looked at the innocuous bits of text with a growing nausea the came from the book’s content, but felt appropriate for the glowing praise Ymir of all people had somehow earned. “If you ever meet her, you can’t say things like that,” he said. “Her head’s big enough already.”

Reading her reviews had probably paved the way on that. Ymir seemed like she came by most of it naturally, though. The reviews probably just confirmed what she already thought about herself.

“You don’t think she lives up to her accolades?” Historia asked. “She isn’t the—Eren your thumb’s blocking that one.”

Eren rolled his eyes and opened the book back up, pretending to read more about addictive, repressed lust with more of a smile than he’d managed all day. “Do you want to trade books?”

Historia stepped over his feet and grabbed the hardback Frieda had left on Benjamin’s table, pausing to give their fish a moment to say hello to her. She dangled his namesake’s volume over Eren’s head. He took it before he ended up with another black eye, handing over Ymir’s paperback.

“Frieda screens everything she reads around me,” she said. “She’s—protective.” Concernedly so, if it were over anyone besides Historia, but Historia didn’t need Eren voicing that. “You’ll probably have better luck with one of hers. It’s longer, too.”

Along with heavier. Eren rolled onto his stomach. “Thanks.”

Historia shrugged, returning to her couch vigil. Eren cracked open his Frieda-approved reading. Sci-fi, based on the cover. Armin had probably read it. He liked going through the bestseller’s lists. He liked sci-fi. They’d have something to talk about at lunch.

“It’s going to be fine, Eren,” Historia said, a minute into the author’s foreword.

“Yeah,” he said.

----

Not sleeping was marginally better than nightmares. He was supposed to look at the positives of his life, not focus on the negatives. Tossing back and forth between walls before settling for a few minutes at a time on the ceiling meant he wasn’t waking up in a cold sweat.

Frieda would be around soon, if she was having a sleepless night. He could make himself useful and start the hot chocolate early.

Mikasa and Armin would be showing up in a few hours. Their first time in an apartment he hadn’t shared with either of them.

Rivaille was coming with Mikasa. A neighbor hadn’t been watching their dog, Rivaille had no tolerance for non-human mammals breathing in his presence, and Mikasa didn’t trust him not to tear off his bandage if she left him alone. Armin and Mikasa had coordinated letting Eren know. They didn’t say that outright, but Armin had told Eren Rivaille was coming instead of Mikasa asking. They hadn’t wanted to give him the option of taking back his invitation.

He could see that conversation happening. It played out in his head until his worry about how things would go was smothered by how much he missed being there for those conversations.

He wouldn’t have taken back the invitation. He wondered how weird starting out with that point would be.

Eren swapped over to his side again. The streetlights several stories down barely winked at him through the blinds. He pulled the edge of his pillow up to block it out. He lowered it.

He snatched the blanket by his feet and swung off the bed. He’d make hot chocolate and keep a sleeping Benjamin company. If Frieda showed up, he’d keep her company too. That was better than lying awake all night wondering how he was going to screw everything up again.

He stepped out into the hallway, blanket over his shoulder, and there was no sign of anything but him being wrong.

He was thinking about hot chocolate and kitchen pans.

Down the hall, a thump sounded from Historia’s room.

Eren used to beat up his mother’s walls. And people. He’d heard worse.

It was just a noise. It was just a dark apartment.

It was just the sound of something hitting the floor in his suicidal friend’s room in the middle of the night where no one would be around to—

Eren’s blanket dropped to the floor, and Historia’s door appeared in front of him with a snap of motion he knew best from Armin’s toy magnets he’d got for his seventh birthday. The juxtaposition didn’t do anything to settle his nerves.

“Historia?” he asked the door. His voice came out loud and distant. One of his fists found the wood and knocked. “Is everything okay?”

Several more heartbeats of silence confirmed that to be the stupid question it was. Eren cleared his throat and tried to think of something besides how Frieda, who didn’t even have the full story, couldn’t sleep some nights until she saw her little sister breathing.

That was supposed to be weird. Kind of creepy.

“Historia, I’m opening the door,” he said.

He pushed it open more roughly than intended, and there wasn’t really a noise that came with it, but the door’s swing had some definite resistance that put his head in all the wrong places, and the random thought hit that he’d never been in her room before, and he was three steps in before his eyes even tried to pick anything out of the shadows, and for an insane moment he was so sure that this was the start of another nightmare, just in time to break Armin and Mikasa’s hearts all over again, and Historia was on the floor next to her bed.

Eren’s hand snapped out and hit the light switch.

The searing brightness hurt, but relief made up for it when it illuminated Historia’s tearstained face.

Eren almost fell to the floor. “You’re okay,” he said.

Historia, in a state of much less alarm over the last thirty seconds, stared at him with tears still actively falling, listless shock and a force that threw tennis balls taking in Eren’s presence under the spotlight that lit up her room.

“I don’t think so.”

Eren shook his head. “I meant you aren’t dead,” was the only thing he could think to say. He slid down into a more comfortable position on the hard floor. “What was that noise?”

Historia continued staring at him. She was in her pajamas, holding her flannel top tightly around her nightshirt. Like she’d tried to hide herself in it, and realized somewhere in the middle that there wasn’t enough room, so just left her hands frozen stiff.

One moved. Rigidly. She pointed at the floor behind him.

Somewhat wedged between the door and the floor was a book.

Ymir’s.

So he wasn’t the only one.

The comprehension wasn’t the gentlest place to land, but it was tinged with enough relief to pass.

“Too real?”

Historia nodded.

Eren smiled. Shooting for comforting. “Yeah, it didn’t work for me either.” There was a review to take back to Ymir. ‘Two out of three drug addicts agree your main character reads like a junkie.’ Maybe Reiner just read enough of her stuff to be inoculated.

But Historia was shaking her head. Not in a definitive motion, just back and forth. She whispered something Eren didn’t catch.

“Sorry?”

Historia swallowed. Visibly. “She left.”

Eren’s eyes drifted back to the book. It was the only thing on the floor. The only spot of color in the entire room, really. The furniture was all bare, left staged and sterile. One book, hurled at the door, was the only indication that someone lived in the space. The romance novel Historia should have had more of an interest in anyway, that the words on the back cover and that he’d skimmed near the end dubbed a tragedy.

“She doesn’t say anything,” Historia said. “She spends—she spends half the book wanting this girl, loving her so much it sounds like—” one of her sleeves pulled up, and the scars popped. “She spends all that time, but then she never says it. She leaves and never says it.” A new fount of tears started, and Historia whipped them away with the back of her hand.

Her voice broke. “If she doesn’t say it, how’s she supposed to know?”

Eren moved to the bed, sitting next to Historia on the floor. After a moment’s hesitation, he carefully put his arm around her shoulders. She curled inward, but not away.

“If she doesn’t know, she won’t know to…” The sleeve pulled further up, drawn by Historia’s hand raking through her hair. “She left,” she repeated. “She loves her, and she leaves anyway, over some stupid, idiotic, self-righteous—”

More tears. Eren had never been great with them. When Armin cried, it was usually after someone had hit him. Eren’s job was to go hit them back so Armin wouldn’t have to anymore. Mikasa had been better at that. She’d also been better at making Armin feel better. She was better at just about everything.

Eren wished Historia had one of the better ones in her corner. But she was stuck with him.

“I left too,” he said, the truth of many, many hours of guilt and hatred clawing its way into words that sounded halfway human, and like maybe forgiveness was okay to want. “People don’t always—”

“But you’re getting them back!”

The shout was hoarse and broken, and much louder than the rest of the conversation.

Historia continued on, savagely tearing through the words. “You never reached out, and never said anything, and you needed them. More than anything.” Her voice caught. “I… She was so… I always thought she didn’t need anyone. Even…”

Eren was five and Armin was the coolest kid on the playground. He mouthed off to everyone he disagreed with, even after he took a beating, because it was right.

Eren was seventeen and hearing for the first time how little Armin had thought of himself back then.

Eren was ten and Mikasa was winning all the fights he started.

Eren was nine and Mikasa would not let go of his hand.

“She left,” Historia said, “and all this time… but I’m the one who…” She stopped, and Eren could see the cords in her wrist tighten before she started again.

When she did, the words were slow and agonized. “I’m not like Armin and Mikasa,” she said. “I didn’t wait. I didn’t keep trying. I took it for granted that she didn’t want me and gave up. She left. I never chased her. I want her but I never—”

Eren was probably holding her shoulder too tightly. He knew his jaw was too tight. He could hear Armin tutting at him, flicking a spilled cheerio from the kitchen counter at his forehead. “You were stuck in juvie,” Eren said. “You’d have to be an idiot to expect someone to chase you from there.”

“She is!” Historia shouted at the floor.

Eren kept the half-hug stable through the laugh that choked out a sob. He thought he heard the click of their front door unlocking. Hot chocolate felt very far away. Historia was shivering. She could use some.

He hoped her girlfriend felt half as bad about everything as he had when he’d flamed out and abandoned everyone who loved him. Whatever had happened, there was no way this didn’t earn her at least that.

“I don’t know what went on between you two,” he said, not adding that he didn’t think Historia did, either, “but I never wanted Armin and Mikasa to stick this through. I’m—” hell “glad they did, but I was a jerk. They deserved better. I wouldn’t have blamed them if they never talked to me again.”

“But you would have wanted them to.”

And hated himself all the way through his bedroom wall for it. “Yeah.”

“Because you love them.”

“…Yeah.”

Those were definitely footsteps. Eren didn’t want to listen for the moment they spotted the extra light in the hallway, or his blanket on the floor. Historia’s eyes were peeking out from behind her hair again. They were trained on Ymir’s book.

“I don’t even know if she loved me back,” she said.

Eren couldn’t give an answer to that. All he really knew about Historia’s girlfriend was that all the flashbacks in the world wouldn’t be reason enough to shrug off a chance to punch her in the face, and if that needed to happen, Historia had first claim.

The footsteps stopped. Eren winced when they started again, slapping the floor, and he caught the second when Historia’s confusion at the noise turned into horror.

Frieda appeared as a breathless shadow in the doorway, and Eren didn’t even have a chance to spot the panic her body was screaming on her face before she swooped in. A blur of older sister dove on both of them, and shock and a welcoming thud of a heartbeat stole the breath from Eren’s lungs. Frieda’s fingers caught his head and pulled him over her shoulder while Historia was simply dragged bodily into her side with a surprised croak.

“You’re both okay?” Frieda asked, squeezing more air out of them. She sounded faint. Fear bled through her grip, and Historia had gone suspiciously still.

Eren had wanted her around for these late-night encounters, once. Right now it felt cruel to both of them.

“I’m good,” Eren said.

Frieda nodded, and Eren felt her pull away just enough to look down properly at her sister, who was still clutched to her like a limpet.

“Historia?”

Both of her sleeves had rolled up. Her fingernails were digging matching imprints into her scars, and every person in the hug could feel the flinch Frieda tried to hide. Historia buried herself closer. Shaking like it was her first night off the hard stuff.

“I—” she started through a new sob. “I’m sorry.”

Eren disentangled himself before Frieda’s hand decapitated him on its way to hold her sister more tightly, soft words and reassurances brushing by his ears as Frieda told Historia not to apologize, she had nothing to apologize for, and Historia dissolved further into tears.

“I’m going to go get started on the hot chocolate,” he said.

Frieda’s gaze shot over him, and Eren almost stopped in the middle of standing at the unadulterated terror dampening her eyes, but she only mouthed her thanks, pulling Historia fully into her arms in the midst of another litany of sorrys, one after another.

The one thing Historia had never wanted was for Frieda to know how bad things were. Eren doubted any of them wanted to think about how long she had guessed at it.

“Does it ever help? Talking?”

Eren patted Historia firmly on the head on his way out.

He also grabbed the book off the floor.

----

Eren was cleaning the apartment, which was stupid. They had maid service. They did a superhuman job of cleaning. Short of making a deal with the devil, Eren wasn’t going to be able to match their work. He was leaving streaks on the counter. It didn’t matter how many times he dragged the washcloth over the spots. The streaks just moved.

Armin had shared an apartment with him. He knew how Eren lived.

Right, and his last memory of what that was like was forever linked to digging through Eren’s bedroom and finding all of his drugs.

The streak moved from the edge of the counter to the center. Eren was chasing it around the way Benjamin swam after their hands when they were over his tank. With about as much success.

Lunch was takeout. Takeout plus a few mangled apples.

Historia had been nice enough not to say anything. Her face had handled that.

A night of no sleep and hysterics had peeled off some of the darkness in her eyes. She looked almost human again. By their standards, but their standards had improved lately. She’d stopped Eren’s jittery hands from costing him a finger and spun her phone over the marble at him, several restaurant tabs already opened.

Eren had texted Armin and Mikasa. Everyone had ordered. It was all fine. They had enough chairs. Frieda had double-checked before she left. She’d spent the night.

“You don’t want to stay?” Eren and Historia had asked in perfect, frantic unison when she announced her departure over breakfast. A breakfast she’d cooked for them, smiling through her yawns the whole time.

For a moment he’d thought Frieda might cave, with both of them asking. Instead, she’d given them both a perfunctory pat on the head. “You two are all grown up. You don’t need me to supervise your play dates.”

Frieda was the only one with that confidence. Historia had come back from feeding Benjamin dripping dread, and Eren was left wondering if sleep deprivation and drug addiction looked anything alike and how much it would worry Mikasa and Armin that he could barely walk in a straight line.

“Sorry,” Historia said, joining him with a washcloth of her own. She didn’t leave streaks.

“Stop saying that,” Eren said. He wiped down a dried spot of water he’d left earlier. “I was only up because I couldn’t sleep.”

“Still.”

Eren yawned into his hand. “If you’re sorry about that, I’m sorry for giving you the book.”

Historia’s mouth thinned.

They worked in silence for several minutes, contributing very little to the overall cleanliness of the apartment. Eren could hear a clock ticking. None of the ones either of them owned ticked.

“What are they like?” Historia asked in a blurt.

“Huh?”

“Armin and Mikasa.”

Eren stopped scrubbing. “They’re… Armin and Mikasa.”

“Your friends,” Historia said. She made the term sound alien.

Eren glanced at her. She was frowning at her rag. Tiny, blond, and maybe looking for the words instead of being too stubborn to share them, but the blast of nostalgia wasn’t pulling its punches. Eren slowly renewed his swipes at the counter.

His friends. The two people who made him get it a little when clients chattered on about their other halves. The foundation of everything he was that he’d bombed halfway to hell when everything he was turned out to be pain.

Armin and Mikasa.

“Mikasa’s good at everything,” Eren started. He remembered jogging to one of Zeke’s baseball practices, skipping over the cracks in the sidewalk and trying to keep up, whining those same words because his big brother would never tell anyone. “She’s strong. I—not just in things like sports, or fighting. I could never win against her when we sparred, and she has better times than I do on all the mountains nearby, but that’s not it.” His reflection blinked emptily from the shining counter. “She’s reliable. The responsible one. Always there, even when you don’t want her to be, because she knows more about when you need her than you do.

“It’s annoying,” he didn’t say. It used to be. It would have his head full of steam and his feet stomping cross the sidewalk. It had leaked into the things he’d said when withdrawal hit and he hated everyone.

“Armin’s… an optimist. He doesn’t think he is, because he’s always thinking about the most depressing stuff, but it’s always about… ways to make them better. To fix them. He doesn’t lose it when it’s hard or looks too difficult. He just does it. Like it’s nothing. He’s tough. The toughest person I know. And the smartest. He—I don’t know how many things he’s tutoring by now, but he picked up as many jobs as he could to pay for every college course he could stay awake for.” And then some. Eren had seven different alarms set for each day of the week to go and collect Armin for his classes. There were days he ended up carrying Armin to class. That was what finally got him to change up his schedule. “He’d be an expert in all of them after a semester. Sometimes less. He got a free ride to several places, but—he stayed behind. He cared more about staying with us.

“He lied about that,” Eren added. “He’s not usually good at it, but he was then. We wouldn’t have let him lose out on something like that. We both tried to get him to go when it all came out, but he wouldn’t. He—we kept trying, but he just wouldn’t. He staged—” The flash of the kitchen lights flashed against the counter, hiding the reflection he knew was smiling. “He staged an intervention for us. A whole PowerPoint on why we had to stop, because the only one who knew what was best for his education was him.”

Historia walked over to the sink, squeezing her rag dry. “Did it work?”

“Of course it worked,” Eren said, grabbing a fresh towel. “You can’t argue with the smartest person you know.” That was why people always tried beating him up; that was the only thing they could come up with.

For a while, that was the only thing Eren could come up with for dealing with himself. Mikasa would have thrown him over her shoulder and told him to stop hitting things. Armin would have devised his own twelve-step program, devoted to all facts about Eren he’d picked up throughout their years of friendship, and handed him a copy.

Historia took the paper towel roll off the counter, watching him with the subterfuge of someone who’d maybe read a summary of the concept in a book.

Eren balled up his washcloth and landed it in the sink, giving up the pretense for a moment. “What do you think I should say?”

Historia’s gaze took a small detour to Benjamin’s tank. “You’re the one who knows them.”

“You’re the one here who knows what it’s like to be screwed over.”

The storm cloud darkening her countenance was very specifically aimed at him, but it cleared fast. Historia sent her rag into the sink after his, frowning. She waited on the words for a few moments. “They still love you,” she said, “so… love them back?”

It sounded like a nicer version of what Ymir said, and he was about to say so when it struck him that comparisons to Crystal Wick were the last thing that would be helpful today. Or any other time.

“Would that be enough for you?” he asked.

Laughter barked out of Historia, surprising both of them. She shook her head and leaned against the island. “Eren, seeing her again would be enough for me.” She reached out and tapped his shoulder in an odd, noncommittal pat. “Just be you.”

Eren watched Benjamin’s lazy circles. “I’m not sure he’s around.”

“Oh,” Historia said.

“Oh,” Eren echoed.

Historia turned around to lean bodily over the sparkly clean marble, nudging Eren’s elbows with hers. Benjamin reacted to the extra viewership with a flourish as he rounded the rock he had decided was this week’s favorite.

“…You could try smiling more?”

Eren looked over at Historia’s unsmiling face. “You think?”

“Maybe?”

It was the sleep deprivation, maybe, that made him smile.

They both still sucked at this.

----

When Eren was little, there were few things in his life he enjoyed as much as sci-fi B movies. Zeke would let him and Armin watch the worst, implausible action adventures, all about mutated sharks that were part dinosaur and sludge beasts that lived in the Arctic. Horror movies were bundled in, but Armin wasn’t allowed to watch those because he’d keep his parents up with existential life questions about good and evil that they hadn’t wanted to discuss with their seven-year-old.

Eren didn’t have that problem with his parents. He would sit in Zeke’s lap while they went out wherever, chattering loudly about all the things the monster’s victims were doing wrong, and how he’d do it better. He’d be a good monster slayer, he told Zeke. He wouldn’t die first.

Zeke had always said if the scientists hadn’t been so careless, and the other humans hadn’t bothered the monster so much, none of them would have had to die.

He was the worst person to watch movies with. He’d also been the only babysitter Eren had who would let him watch those ones.

Some of Eren’s chief complaints about the screaming people in the movies had been how they handled doorways. They’d run into places and open doors without a second thought about where it would land them.

There was a knock on the door.

Eren dropped the plate he was fussing with and almost tripped over Historia bolting for the doorknob. He threw it open before any sort of sense had a chance of reestablishing itself, and met the alarmed eyes of the delivery girl with heavy breathing and

Historia pulled him back by his shirt. He stumbled back into the apartment, socks sliding on the wood.

“Sorry,” Historia said, plastered, rigid fake smile in place. “We’re expecting—”

Mikasa.

Armin.

Sound fell away to only Eren’s heartbeat. Historia pulling out her wallet and overpaying the delivery girl was barely a blip.

They were standing in the hallway. Behind the bright uniform. Standing there. Outside the door, like they’d never been anywhere else. Like he’d never left. Like Armin had forgotten his key when he brought Mikasa over for game night.

Ten steps away. Nine. Five.

“Ah,” Historia said, loud and echoey, “you must be Mikasa and Armin?”

A hiss came from the space below Mikasa’s elbow.

“And Rivaille,” Historia said. “Hello.”

No one said hello back. The cat’s perturbed mreow could have counted in another life full of hallucinogens. This one had Mikasa and Armin, standing in a doorway as the heavy apartment door heaved itself shut in their faces. Historia hurriedly blocked it with her foot, attention darting between the human statues she was surrounded by.

Eren wasn’t even sure which one he was staring at. Armin, caution and hope bursting like a newborn star all over his face. Mikasa. Mikasa. Somehow still standing and still there despite every horrible thing he’d thought and shouted and thrown.

“Mreow,” Rivaille said again.

Historia, having abandoned the bags carrying their lunch to the floor, pushed the door open more properly. “I could—take him, if you would like?”

Mikasa’s eyes snapped to Historia with such mechanic efficiency that Eren’s blink missed it. Her iron stare added one more statue to the scene as Rivaille continued to prowl about his enclosure. For an eternity, she and Armin were both staring at Historia. Slowly, that stare turned, very directly, back to Eren. Eren felt halfway to blitzed. Being all the way there might have been the only thing that could help to decipher the new looks they were giving them.

“Thank you,” Mikasa said at last. Talking like a Mikasa who hadn’t lived through the last year. She handed Rivaille’s carrier off to Historia. “He’s very well behaved. It should be safe to let him out. As long as you watch him around—Benjamin?”

Eren nodded. His head felt like it was on a string.

She nodded back, and addressed Historia. “I don’t know how he is around fish. He also shouldn’t be jumping, but I can… I will take care of supervising him.”

Historia held the carrier gingerly, and miraculously, Rivaille wasn’t screaming at the loss of his stable pedestal that was Mikasa’s arms of steel. “He hurt his paw?”

Armin interrupted before the storm cloud on Mikasa’s face could start thundering. “The neighbor’s dog did,” he said.

“Right.”

“Rivaille prefers his space.”

“Okay.”

Mikasa and Armin still hadn’t stepped inside. Their food was going to get cold if they left it on the floor. Rivaille was only a moment’s distraction as long as he was in his carrier. Eren felt like he was in the center ring of that circus Armin’s parents had taken them to when they were small enough to need to climb up on their shoulders to see anything.

He didn’t have a script or any pies to throw in his face. Just him and whatever that meant.

He was reminded, and he didn’t want to be, of another family meal. Back when his father had been alive, and there was a family. Mikasa, Armin, and Eren, all sitting around the table with his parents, candles lit, fancy tablecloth set out.

Someone had knocked on the door.

Zeke. Uninvited, unaware that anything was going on, and wondering if Eren would like to go see a movie.

Eren found himself echoing their father.

“Do you—want to come in, maybe?”

He hoped he sounded more like he wanted his guests to say yes.

Mikasa and Armin both relaxed their shoulders so much, for a moment, it looked like they were melting. Armin’s instant smile was so heartfelt and earnest that Eren wanted to scream, and he didn’t know how he was going to exist with Mikasa one step closer when all he could think was how many apologies he owed and how many they’d never let him finish because his friends were too damn kind and too damn perfect and he had missed them so much.

They hadn’t been here five minutes and he already felt like crying. He was fucking this up right out of the gate.

But everyone else knew that, too, so they were going to keep talking around him. Door collapsing shut, closing off the one path of retreat, Mikasa briefly stopped dissecting him with her eyes and turned her focus squarely on Historia. “You are Eren’s new roommate.”

Not really new, anymore. Just not Armin. Eren reached to the floor and picked up the food bags. At the same moment Armin stepped forward to reach for one. Their hands bumped and snapped apart.

“Yes,” Historia said. “Hi. I’m Historia Reiss.”

There was a pregnant pause of evaluation and judgment before Historia seemed to think to stick out her hand. It shot out from its place on Rivaille’s carrier like one of Zeke’s pitches.

Mikasa took it. “How is it you two know each other?”

Fussing with the food was suddenly a really convenient way to not be looking at any of them, but Armin had never been great about hiding his sharp draws of breath when he thought one of them was throwing a first punch. “Mikasa, that might not be the—”

“NA,” Historia blurted. “I’m a heroin addict.”

Eren didn’t know why he looked at Armin, but Armin was already looking back, dismayed panic as clear in his face as all his emotions always were. No one really wanted the door to drug-addled pasts thrown open. Not today, not now, not ever until they were all sure they were sticking around and not running off again to live with strangers.

“…You have a lovely apartment,” Mikasa said.

Historia was nodding in his peripheral. “Inheritance. From murdering my father. Self-defense,” she clarified in a hurry. “Maybe. I’m not—I am a murderer, but it was only that one time. I’m not going to do it again.”

Frieda should not have left the apartment.

Eren froze in the middle of setting the boxes out on plates. Armin, gathering the bags and folding them into a neat pile, mimicked him, and they both silently waited for the next thundering shoe to drop.

“I moved in because we had that in common,” would have been an honest response, and saved them all some of the silence, and it was at the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t want to start that. He didn’t want the shock or the tears, or the long argument that would all be kicked off with, “You didn’t kill Dr. Yeager.”

Maybe. Like Historia had maybe killed her dad in self-defense. Eren had still felt his heart stop. Eren’s hands had helped that along, and no one ever wanted to hear it.

Mikasa saved the moment. Calmly, like a modern day superhero whose qualities were eternally called out to balance Eren’s failures. “I have a cousin who went through something similar,” she said. Smiling. With her eyes, but that was where her best smiles were. “He’s less reluctant about repeat offenses.”

Armin coughed a chuckle, catching Eren’s eye. Another knot in his chest loosened.

“We should eat before it gets cold,” he said.

“We should,” Armin agreed, handing Eren one of the napkins set out.

Eren took it quickly and gratefully, swiping away his tears before anyone else could see.

----

“He’s gorgeous, Eren,” Armin said softly, peering so closely at the aquarium that with his old haircut, he would have already been drenched. Benjamin wasn’t swimming as close as he did with Historia, and not used to people saying hello from up above unless they had food, but he wasn’t hiding away in one of his caves, either. “Have you thought about adding to the tank at all?”

“Some. There are a few eels that might be a good fit, but he should have some more time to settle and grow before we give that a try. The tank could also use a sturdier hood first.”

“I’ve read they can be escape artists.”

“Yeah. I told Historia nothing that can get out and crawl around, but—” he wasn’t going to relapse, and Armin didn’t need to hear about how recently he’d doubted that—“it’s a big tank. Benjamin could use some company.”

“A predator tank suits you,” Armin said. He floated his fingers above the water, clearly tempted to give petting Benjamin a shot.

Eren shrugged, leaning his hip on Benjamin’s table. “If you say so. I can’t handle the live feeding. Too squeamish. I’ve got tank duty on the chore wheel while Historia does the heavy lifting.”

Armin was quiet. A thinking sort of quiet where he was about to say something that made more boring people want to hit him. He glanced at the kitchen counter. Mikasa was sitting on a stool. Historia, with Rivaille’s prompting, had been encouraged to sit on top of the counter.

The cat hadn’t left her lap.

He’d hissed when Eren had tried to say hello.

With Historia, he nuzzled her cheek and purred like a chainsaw. Only less literally than what Eren had seen from those claws. Even Mikasa was taken aback by how gently Rivaille was behaving.

They were getting along. They’d all survived lunch past Eren asking who had won Levi’s MMA tournament this year (Annie, and Armin had immediately switched the topic to movies while Mikasa stabbed the floor with her eyes), Eren had a few lines on his hands from where he’d grabbed his knife and fork too hard, but none of him or the silverware was broken.

“Moving out helped after all, didn’t it?”

Eren’s hands gripped the edge of the table. “Armin…”

“I’m happy,” Armin interrupted. “I’m really glad, Eren.”

“Don’t.”

The low hum of conversation from the kitchen stopped. Rivaille’s warning meow was quickly stifled by Mikasa getting up from her stool. Historia grabbed her arm before she could take a full step. It was a surprise to everyone that Mikasa let that be enough, but Eren couldn’t think about that right now.

He wanted Armin to be hurt. Betrayed. Upset.

Not relieved that the person who caused all of that was better. Not putting some piece of disloyal garbage over—

“Don’t act like it’s all okay now,” Eren growled. Speaking to the floor because the floor did the right thing when he fell on it and gave him a damn bruise. “I—” he wasn’t supposed to do this Petra had told him to take it easy it didn’t need to come out all at once to be progress—“You can’t just be happy I’m not breaking everything I touch anymore and act like that’s the end of it.”

Armin was the weak one, in kindergarten. That’s what everyone thought. Lied to about themselves so they didn’t have to think about why this one kid made them all want to beat him silly instead of listening to him.

He was the bravest person Eren had ever met. “Well, why not?”

“Why—what?”

Armin pulled away from Benjamin’s tank. He patted his hands with the towel Historia had started leaving out. “If you think you messed up that badly,” he said with a forced, careful steadiness, “why do you think it’s up to you to say how we feel about it? Isn’t it more important for us to get a say?”

Eren had fallen back into looking at him. Armin looked back earnestly, months upon months of frown lines meeting his words and promising that this wasn’t someone who said things he didn’t mean. Someone who didn’t think for hours on end before he worked up the nerve to blow everyone’s mind with his confidence.

He’d had months of Eren not being ready to be his audience.

“Eren I don’t think—” Armin shook his head, his shorter hair not flurrying the way it used to when he did that. “I don’t think anyone here would say things went well. It was awful.” Understatement. “As happy I am that you’re doing better, I think I’m even happier none of us are back in that place.” Nothing gave Armin the right to say things Eren agreed with even when he was so angry he could barely see straight. “But if you’re going to be angry over us wanting you back—you should understand, shouldn’t you? How painful it is that you don’t blame us for missing everything you went through?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Eren said. “Those are still my mistakes, Armin. You can’t take on the blame for that.”

Armin kept shaking his head. “You’re my—you’re our best friend, Eren. That should mean you never have to go through anything alone, but you did,” he said softly. “We were right there. We saw you every day. And we missed… everything.”

He smiled his crooked, unhinged smile that their middle school D&D club had voted to ban. “You’re so busy being angry at us for being happy we didn’t ruin you that you’re letting us get away with being really selfish. Of course we want things to be fixed. We’re the ones who let them break.”

Eren could feel more tears waiting and burning under the pressure of his own heartbeat building up behind his skull. He’d heard that kind of blame in his head, once. Right before he screamed it at Mikasa. Hateful and full of everything he never wanted to be while he threw up his organs.

They were crap. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

“We wanted to do more right,” Armin said. “Didn’t you?”

“You can’t argue with the smartest person you know.”

Hell. Oh hell.

Historia had said just seeing that girl of hers would be enough. Even after she broke her heart. She still thought about her all the time. They couldn’t have known each other that long if they met in juvie. Not anywhere near as long as Eren had known Armin and Mikasa. They had years of friendship backing up one really, really inexcusably awful year.

They wanted him back.

He’d known that. That was why he was so pissed. They deserved so much better.

Armin was standing right in front of him, earnest, brilliant eyes telling him that all over again. Staring at his idiot friend who’d ruined their lives and hoping, more than anything, the idiot would take him back.

He had known that’s how they felt, right?

This whole time?

Eren didn’t want to start sobbing in front of Mikasa. Not again. He thought that every single time it happened. It was maybe the one thing about him that none of this had changed.

Armin, his first friend, the guy who’d taught him all about why dinosaurs were the best and how to stick to a study plan, took pity on him, and moved in to grab him before the crying could really start, catching his shoulders and head in his hands and not feeling, or not caring, that this was closer than they’d dared to be for over a year.

And Eren hated crying, hated that he spent so much of his life now doing it, but Armin’s tears rolling down his neck felt too much like home to hate anything properly. He grabbed Armin right back and held him as tightly as he’d never let himself after the funeral.

He had missed him too. So much.

----

Lunch had technically been over for hours by the time Mikasa and Armin left.

None of them wanted it to be. That was why Armin had finally said they should get going.

“It won’t change just because we head out the door,” he said. “We’re doing better than that, now.”

None of them wanted to talk about how that was still a hope, not a fact, either. Eren felt more clingy than he ever had in his life. For maybe the first time, he fully understood why Mikasa had to be talked down from looking after him all the time. Some hurts didn’t ever let you think things could go back to being okay.

Armin was still the smart one.

Historia was helping to coax Rivaille back in his cage. Eren didn’t make the repeated mistake of trying to be friendly with the cat. His hand still hurt from earlier. Armin was standing out in the hall. Ready to go.

Mikasa was lingering in the threshold. Halfway between helping Historia with her cat and not leaving Eren.

Eren had only had half the talk that needed to happen so far today. Drilling Armin on his studies and Mikasa on her judo students and Historia on anything that wasn’t her family or drug habit had soaked up the time. Maybe too much. Armin and Mikasa’s questions about school had sounded very sincere and gentle, but Eren wouldn’t be surprised if Armin already had another PowerPoint project playing out in his head about what they now knew about Eren’s new friend.

Armin caught his eye as Historia finally, without a mark on her, convinced the devil cat that he wanted to be back in a box.

Eren couldn’t help one last scowl at the golden eyes leering at him. Rivaille returned the expression with interest. “He’s never done that for me.”

“You’re too rough with him,” Mikasa said.

“You used to pick me up like that all the time.”

“You are not a cat, Eren.”

Armin laughed and even the appearance of a grudge had to fall away. Mikasa smiled softly at him. Eren doubted his expression looked much different. “We should take him back downstairs while he’s still settled. Historia, would you like to carry him?”

Eren did his best to roll his eyes at Armin. The attempt wasn’t great. Ymir or Annie would have laughed themselves silly at him. …Ymir would have. Annie probably would have kicked him and told him to work on it.

Historia followed the leading question and flicked her eyes between Eren and Mikasa, catching on way too fast. “Of course,” she said. “I’ll… follow you down, then.”

To her credit, she raised her eyebrows questioningly at Eren before she actually followed Armin. Eren shrugged a shoulder, which she took to be good enough reason to abandon him to be an adult on his own. Petra would probably hug both of them if she ever got the full story out about today.

He and Mikasa watched their friends trot off.

The renewed silence wasn’t that awkward, but Eren was starting to feel it. Armin was the talker of the three of them. He took all of the twists and turns of Eren’s temper and made sense of it.

Mikasa didn’t talk as much.

They’d had a long time of not talking. Even the old kind didn’t feel right. He wanted to say something. Anything. As long as it included an apology.

“She’s very pretty.”

Eren’s readied words stopped short. “Huh?”

Mikasa had her scarf pulled up over her mouth. It didn’t quite cover the red in her cheeks. She wasn’t looking at him. Her gaze was still on the now empty hallway.

Comprehension, hitting Eren over the head like a loud, embarrassed gong, rang out in his mind. The expected start would have been bad enough.This was different. This was Mikasa confiding in him, and he’d had too many talks about his and other people’s feelings to miss a cue like that. It wasn’t a year ago where he could be confused and move on with his life while Armin came back home five hours later and told him that his people skills needed work.

They did still need work. But Mikasa was his friend, and deserved the effort.

“I could get you her number,” he said hesitantly, “but she’s pretty hung up on this girl she knows.”

Mikasa’s face went so red that he knew for a fact that they both wanted anything else to be happening.

“I—see.”

He had to try. For Mikasa, he could do that much. “You two got along really well.” Or Historia got on well with her cat, which was like the same thing. No wonder Mikasa was asking. “I don’t know—she’s not… she’s really not available, but you could probably be good friends. Or hang out at Zeke’s games; he conned her into subbing for a few, and she could use someone besides me to practice with.”

He couldn’t tell if he was helping. He and Mikasa didn’t do this, and the unfamiliarity alone would probably be enough to make her face that color, because she knew as much as he did that this was not how they were them.

“Zeke stopped asking for my help,” Mikasa said, picking the closest side of normal to engage with.

Normal wasn’t safe. Pins and needles ran all up Eren’s spine before he went for it and took the damn plunge. “He was trying to be considerate, I guess. His version,” Eren added, more than aware what Mikasa thought about Zeke’s considerations. They were about what he thought, after all. “I… I’ll tell him he doesn’t need to do that anymore. It’s… better with you around.”

“…Thank you.”

The oppressive quiet came back. Eren’s fingernails were fighting to dig into his palms. The door was propped open by his back. He could imagine hearing Benjamin’s water filter if he just gave himself a second.

He didn’t want to put something this important off for any more seconds.

“Mikasa,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

Mikasa didn’t move. “I know.”

“The things I said…”

“Eren.”

“No one should ever talk to you that way,” Eren said. “I shouldn’t have—” He stopped short. His problems could stay with a different step. One that mattered less than his friends. Only one piece of it all really belonged here, and he said it again.

“I’m sorry.”

Mikasa had one hand buried in her scarf. Her blush had faded, as well as the gentle smile Armin had won out of her. There were tired lines in her forehead that only Eren could claim complete responsibility for.

“You wanted Armin to be angry at you,” she said.

Then cried all over him for sparing him that. “Yeah.”

Mikasa adjusted her scarf, pulling it tighter, but lowering it from keeping her mouth hidden. “It hurt,” she said. “You never say things you don’t mean, even if you only mean them for a moment.”

His mom had yelled at him for that. Many, many times.

He’d yelled back that moments were important.

That was another thing he and Mikasa agreed on.

“None of it was your fault,” Eren said.

“But you were right. We didn’t see it.”

“You were trying to give me space.”

“We didn’t.”

Mikasa had moved in for several weeks under the guise of helping Eren since his leg was broken.

“Your version of space.”

Another life would have seen that as a very strong complaint. Silent hovering was annoying and if Eren had been on a lower dose of painkillers or been less insane, it would have driven him nuts. But it stayed at silence. It stayed at a quiet hand helping him through the day and never asking how he was feeling because how he was feeling was so obvious.

“That still should have put us close enough to notice,” Mikasa said.

How she was feeling during all of that was pretty obvious, too. Even through the drugs. Eren just hadn’t been able to care. “My dad died,” Eren said, like it really was the accident Mikasa had never had any trouble seeing it for. “You knew something was wrong. You didn’t know I was making it worse.”

Mikasa wasn’t looking at him.

That should have made it easier than facing Armin, but he’d had too many years of getting annoyed over Mikasa always looking at him to finish the comparison just inside his head.

“It hurt,” she repeated, softly. “But what hurt most was thinking you might stay that way, and there was nothing I could do to help. Armin was right. We wanted to do more.” She frowned, a touch of irritation through the melancholy. “Zeke did more for you than we ever could.”

“Zeke didn’t stick around long enough for me to shout at him to leave,” Eren couldn’t help pointing out.

It almost got her to smile. The shadow of it faded too fast.

She did look up, and extensive cardio training as a way of life kept him breathing.

“No matter what happened, what matters to me now is that you’re okay. As long as that’s true, the rest is easy to forgive.” She closed her eyes and pulled her scarf tight. When she opened them again, they were the same eyes he’d seen when he woke up in the hospital.

“Are you okay, Eren?” she asked.

“Are you really?”

He’d gotten sick of that question long before he’d been anything close to the angry yes he kept snapping at his family. His mom had kept asking. Petra had always known better than to ask, but only because she’d been there. She had almost bit her lip through when he and Historia showed up with his black eye.

Who wanted okay, anyway? What kind of life was an okay one? Why would that be worth anything? He’d always been just okay. Armin was brilliant, Mikasa was perfect, and Eren was okay enough to lag behind them.

Until Eren wasn’t.

Until he couldn’t remember what okay or being a person even felt like, and someone had decided that the worst thing about him made him the best choice for a roommate. For a friend.

Armin had hugged him today.

Eren looked Mikasa straight in the eye, the weight of all their baggage nothing next to her being a few steps away and still caring. “I’m getting there,” he said.

She did smile, then. One of her real ones, with too much warmth to be anything but embarrassing when they were young. The step between them almost vanished, all of her starting to move forward before she remembered how many times Eren had actually called her embarrassing.

Armin had moved first with him. Fair was fair.

Eren took the step and wrapped Mikasa in the best hug he knew how. His chin bumped her forehead and their shoes snagged together, but he tried to hug her like he was never going to let her go again, and she hugged him back so tightly that his ribs creaked.

“I’m glad,” she whispered into his shoulder. “That you aren’t alone.”

He was not going to cry again. He squeezed her tightly. “Me too.”

----

Hours later, Eren was on the couch. Breathing into a cushion. Not on purpose, that was just where his face had landed after everything wound down.

“Thanks,” Historia said at some point.

“What for?”

“Letting me meet your family.”

Eren flopped his cheek against the side of the pillow. Historia had done her collapse under Benjamin’s tank. She looked as exhausted as he felt, drooped against the table. Benjamin blubbed away over her head.

Frieda had offered to drop some of her dinner off on them. She said she made too much for just her, and she had no room in her fridge. They’d have to help with the leftovers. One last visitor for the day.

“Yeah,” he said. “No problem.”

[next]

#drug au #fic #mine #long post

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sword-dad-fukuzawa · 4 years

Note

Oh! I think it'd be really cool if you did a sort of 'what's in an op analysis' if you'd like too. Also, Scarlet Sky is from the dark era episodes, while Dear Prince is from dead apple! And they're both already in english :) Hope this helps!

Namae Wo Yobu Yo

I am so sorry this took so long to finish. I ended up doing an analysis a while ago but I’m a chronic dumbass, which means I ended up accidentally deleting it all. The utter despair that came from losing my un-backed-up work caused the delay.

So! I’ll start with Namae Wo Yobu Yo, because that was the one you were originally interested in, right? I may have gotten that wrong. Crap. Anyway! I’m using the english translation from the wiki. Let’s break down this song. Buckle up, it’s a long one, y’all.

The first thing I noticed from the song is that it’s in first person, and it’s being sung to someone, not about someone. The actual imagery of the ED is pretty straightforward with a focus on establishing a dichotomy between Atsushi and Akutagawa. Most of it shows Atsushi and how Dazai’s there to support and guide him, while Akutagawa’s left to suffer alone. There’s a particular ouch of a scene where Atsushi’s drowning and Dazai’s there to pull him out, but Akutagawa just sinks deeper into the water as the ghost of Dazai’s hand fades.

Knowing that this ED caps off the episodes where we see the majority of Atsushi’s character development, I’m of the opinion that this song is being sung by him.

I was searching for the reason I'm able to remain as myself. If there's a version of me that exists within your heart, Then even amid the darkness on this long, hilly road, I feel I can become a new me, able to make my way through!

Initially, I thought this was about Atsushi singing to Dazai. The first verse establishes a conflict--the narrator is trying to stay true to himself, but he’s finding it difficult. He feels as though the person he’s singing to knows him better than he knows himself, and that as long as this person holds him in their heart, he can persevere through any difficulty.

So that each of us, walking our individual moments, can keep on smiling... So that we can keep moving forward, exploring the meaning of life together... I'll call out a name: your name, So that you can remain who you are.

Here’s what made me question this, though. It’s not the person being sung to who is calling out a name--it’s the narrator. He’s calling out the other person’s name, to make sure this person doesn’t lose themselves and keep living. I found the significance of naming this person especially beautiful.

A name, after all, is unique to a person. In a lot of fairy mythology in particular, names are important and hold power. To know someone’s true name is to know them utterly, and that gives the wielder a degree of control and even ownership. To name someone is to know them, and to hold them to who they are.

Whenever you're darkened by sadness and your tears overflow... Whenever your heart floods with loneliness and begins to waste away... I'll call out a name: your name, Just as you once called out mine.

It’s like Atsushi’s reassuring this person. When they’re in their darkest hour and they feel alone, when they’re losing themselves, Atsushi will name them. And by naming them, he holds them to their truest self. When they’re drowning, he will pull them back out of the water. Does Atsushi do this for Dazai?

Taking in a deep breath, I drink it down, then release it to the sky. Am I allowed to believe that everyone can find happiness? Even me?

This next part makes it clear that Atsushi’s the one singing. A lot of his personal conflict during the show is about learning he’s worthy of living and of happiness. He’s always struggling with his own perceived naiveté. “Even me?” he asks, with that childlike uncertainty.

Even if the future awaiting me is so bright that it's blinding, If I'm to face it alone, there's no real meaning in it. I'll shout out a name: my name. I'm still right here; can you hear me?

Atsushi also struggles a lot with loneliness. Even in the manga, he’s struggling with feeling alone and with doing things alone. What he wants, more than anything, is the warmth of companionship and camaraderie. That’s what he’s talking about when he says he doesn’t care how great his future is, not if he’s alone to see it. And then he names himself. He’s grown by this point in the song, to the point where he doesn’t need someone else to name him. He’s secure in who he is, and he knows himself.

"I guess no one would notice if I were gone," I whispered, as I looked up to the sky, alone. Then amid the wind, I heard, from somewhere far off: my name, a gift that allowed me to remain who I am.

So, this part is interesting. When Atsushi was at his lowest, feeling as if nobody cared about him at all, someone named him. Someone saw him for what he was. It kept him from falling apart entirely and losing himself. The question is, who named him? Was it Dazai?

I’m skipping the last two verses because they repeat, but the song ends with the lines “I’ll call out a name. Your name.” Who is Atsushi naming?

If I were to go off how this song caps off episodes 1 to 12, I’d definitely say this song is about Atsushi and Dazai. It’s Dazai who gives Atsushi a chance at something better, and it’s Dazai who is the first person to truly believe in him. The emphasis, with this context, is on how Dazai named him first--and how that was a gift.

But the beauty of this song is that it can apply to many of the other characters, and it’s relatable to people who are listening. If this were the ED for the later episodes, I’d say it’s Atsushi singing to Akutagawa. After all, the two of them come to know each other in a way nobody else seems to understand. And they are, in a more literal sense, always yelling out each other’s names. But they hold each other true to themselves, especially during the cannibalism arc. This places the emphasis on how Atsushi names the other person, rather than being named himself.

The argument could also be made that it’s a younger Dazai singing this song to Oda. Then the emphasis (at least for me) shifts that one part about wondering if he, too, deserves happiness like other people do. I love Namae Wo Yobu Yo because every time you recontextualize it to be about a different relationship, there’s all sorts of new, varied nuance that crops up.

Anyway, I’m so sorry this took so long, and I hope it was helpful!

#namae wo yobu yo #song analysis #bungou stray dogs #bsd #bungo stray dogs #luck life #music #manga #anime #dazai osamu #atsushi nakajima #akutagawa ryuunosuke

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lilaclily00 · 5 years

Text

The Party That Went From Haunted to Worse: A Summerween Tale

Danny hates his life sometimes. And ghost portals. And his little sister. It’s a mistake going anywhere with her.

-_-_-_

I thought this was going to just... never see the light of day like most of my WIPs, but AU!Ghost August (Day 11: Crossover) gave me the drive to actually continue, finish, and post this monstrosity. Thanks for the excuse to put this out to the world!

This is the original post for the OC, and here’s the link to this story on AO3.

There's some Zalgo Text in here, so at the end I’ll have the... translations? Is that the right word? It looks better in AO3, though. :(

Thank you for helping me with this, @goinggoblin!!!

LET’S GOOO

-_-_-_ (I don’t think there’s horizontal lines anymore? Yikes)

Dani—known as Ellie around here—handed over the last of the fake spider-webbing. “There you go, Mabel.”

Mabel cheerfully thanked her from the ladder rungs, then turned back to stick it to the wall. “Now time for the paper stuff!”

“Are you sure it's okay to just...” Danny gestured around at the incomplete decorations strung around the designated party room.

Mabel waved him off over her shoulder, tacking up a cutesy paper skeleton onto the wall with her other hand, then a sheet ghost next to it. “Of course! We invited you!”

Ellie nudged Danny—well, it was much too hard of an elbowing to be classified as a nudge by most people, but not for them. “Lighten up, bro. It's not very often you get to go to parties, right?”

“Yeah. I know.” He knew she didn't mean his popularity—the fact it didn't exist—but that he just didn't have the time or energy for it most of the time. He wouldn't have gone to anything like this if she hadn't dragged him along as an excuse to take a break from ghost hunting.

Back in junior year, she’d sent him letters and photos from one of her longest stops in her travels, a dinky town called Gravity Falls, Oregon. She became good friends with a pair of twins around her age there, and they all stayed in touch afterwards. The twins invited her to hang out plenty since then, but this was the first time she told Danny to come along.

He had a complicated relationship with Halloween, considering the Fright Knight incident and all the kids and even adults that had started dressing up as Phantom (to varying levels of success and cringe). However, he had to admit he was intrigued with the idea of Summerween, especially when it was so far from Amity Park that its ghosts and fanbase would be very unlikely to interfere.

Even just thinking that, though, made him wonder if he just jinxed himself.

“Mabel,” they heard her twin call from the residential part of the Mystery Shack, “there's something wrong with the wig!”

Mabel shook her spiky, blue-haired head, hands on her red-uniformed hips. “No, there isn't! I would know!” She wagged her finger towards the visiting pair. “I'll go help him, so don't go anywhere!” She ran off, nearly tripping over her own costume.

“They really like to play up the twin thing, huh?” Danny asked his little sister in the silence. Someone had to acknowledge that the party's hosts were dressing up as Thing 1 and Thing 2. (He wasn’t sure what kinds of friends he suspected Ellie would make, but these two were a surprise.)

“At least they don't feel the need to be a walking pun at every opportunity,” she retorted, flipping back her Batman cape dramatically.

“I always am a walking pun. This is my truest self!” Danny gestured to his own costume, a classic zombie attire with green skin and fake blood everywhere.

“Har har.”

He looked over at the little pile of “spooky” images waiting on the top of the ladder, and took his pick of a large paper spider. He glanced back to the doorway where the twins disappeared off to, and quickly floated up to tape it to the ceiling with a grin.

“How are you going to explain how you got that there?” she giggled as he hovered back at her side.

“I won’t,” he replied smugly, touching ground. Just in time, too, as both Dipper and Mabel reappeared, now with their outfits and hair matching.

Mabel chirped, “If you guys help me with these last touches, this place will be perfect just in time for the party!”

Dipper fiddled with his sleeves, giving her a crooked smile. “At your orders, Mabes.”

-_-_-_

Danny was surprised by how many people actually showed up to what he expected to be a relatively small affair. Dipper had informed him that he and his sister lived in California for most of the year; despite that, it seemed the pair were very popular in their second home, Gravity Falls. Mabel introduced him to several of her friends, shouting over the loud pop music booming out the speakers, and he didn’t remember a single name.

Da—Ellie, he kept forgetting to call her that—was familiar with quite a few people, too. She stuck close to her big brother, though, until he ordered her to hang out with her friends instead. He appreciated the sentiment, but he could handle being by himself at a party.

Right?

He tried to dance for a few songs, but it wasn’t feeling natural. He then went to the refreshment tables for a jack-o-lantern cupcake. Maybe he needed to try to socialize after all. Hm, that one redheaded girl Mabel introduced to him seemed cool. He scanned the area for her face—

Wait.

His eyes narrowed, studying the long white hair halfway across the room. It wasn’t as glowy as usual, but he’d know that hair anywhere. He pocketed the cupcake wrapper and pushed his way through the crowd. Finally, his ghost sense said something as he crossed the dance floor.

"Hey, ghost girl!" he shouted over the music. Her head turned 180 like an owl, pigtails following slightly slower than physics demanded, then she calmly turned the rest of her body to him. Her ever-present blank, wide-eyed stare bored into him, and never strayed, as she easily swerved around the dancing kids toward him. He noticed that she made an effort of walking on the ground rather than floating.

"Hi, zombie," she replied, the slightest smile on her face showing she knew exactly who she was talking to. She was never really scared of him or angry at him. If anything, she seemed to like talking to him. He supposed it was because he was among the closest to her physical age in the Ghost Zone.

He was not going to be friendly, though, and showed it by crossing his arms at her. "What are you doing here?"

She clasped her hands behind her back. "I’d like to ask you that. You hardly ever leave your lair.”

Danny scrunched his eyebrows, then glanced around in case anyone heard her. “Do you mean Amity Park?”

“Yeah.”

He frowned warily. Considering their past interactions, it seemed like a genuinely curious question. She wasn’t the type to use his absence as a chance to cause chaos back home. (If only the other ghosts were the same way.) “I got invited to hang out here for the weekend. And I don’t think it counts as my lair.”

“I think it does,” she replied with the barest of shrugs, still staring at him, unblinking. “I’m here ‘cause a door opened up in the woods right by here," she added. "There was a flyer for this party taped up on a tree. It said there was gonna be cookies."

He scrunched his eyebrows. "You can't even eat human cookies." She finally blinked as that registered, and her gaze broke to look at the ground as she wilted under the weight of her disappointment. Drama queen. "And I know you're planning to scare the kids here, if you haven't already started. C'mon, let's go."

"What?" She flicked her eyes back up to him, igniting a small light in her irises, disrupting her otherwise unglowy appearance. Her entire face slowly, ever so slowly, began to twist clockwise on her head. "It's Summerween!"

He held up a hand; he knew exactly what she was going to argue. "I know it's like Halloween, but it's still the wrong date. We agreed on no mass hauntings outside of October 31st."

Her eyebrows just so slightly scrunched, about the closest she could get to looking angry. "This isn't a very big party."

He had to give her that; it was bigger than he expected, but still only a few dozen, which potentially wasn't enough to count as a mass of people. And everyone here was around their age, which was less worrying than her chasing down little kids just for a laugh.

Her big, empty eyes were unsettling, yet they nearly pleaded with him. He couldn't stand when she did that. He rubbed the side of his face in defeat, forgetting for a second about his zombie makeup. "Oh, fine! Only in this party. And nothing too scary. Otherwise, you go right into the thermos."

"Sounds good to me," she chirped, mouth curled into a small smile by her ear instead of her chin.

"Oh, do you guys know each other?" Danny glanced over to see the hosts themselves come from behind him. He turned back, tapping his cheek at the ghost. She knew the signal, and covered her face to recover its natural orientation.

"Kind of," he told Dipper.

The ghost girl uncovered her face, and smiled shyly at the twins. "I'm Lily. Nice to meet you." Danny raised his eyebrows at her; this whole time, she had an actual name?

"I'm Mabel! Lily, I love your costume!" Mabel squealed, hands smushing her own face. "You're so cute and creepy and ah!"

"Yeah, you did a great job," Dipper added, quiet admiration on his face as he quickly studied her appearance. Danny guessed he was wondering why the wig and body paint looked so realistic. Mabel did a fantastic job with their own costumes, but it was hard to make poofy, blue wigs not look like wigs. "I'm Dipper, by the way."

"You should totally enter the costume contest!" Mabel added, hands hovering, as if itching to reach out and inspect Lily's dress. "It’s later tonight!"

"Oh, maybe I will," she said, eyes flickering between the twins. They fixed onto Dipper when he had looked back up to her face. After a few seconds of an impromptu staring contest, Dipper turned his eyes away, blinking and glancing at Danny, unsure of himself.

Mabel seemed to not have noticed, as she continued rambling to Lily, who patiently listened, empty eyes directed back to Mabel and small smile held up.

"She takes Halloween——er, and Summerween costumes very seriously," Danny told Dipper. "Pretty sure she'll try to creep the crap out of everybody here."

"Well, seems like she's actually good at it," the boy admitted with an awkward chuckle. "But hey, that's what this holiday is for, right?"

-_-_-_

Lily was right there, right in plain sight, swaying to the music by herself, but Danny knew she wasn’t as innocent as she looked. Even now, she was beginning her haunting.

It was just little stuff. There were a few small spiders on the fake webs, real ones. The door opened automatically for newcomers. The jack-o-lantern cupcakes, once all smiling, now had one smiling evilly in the center of the platter while the rest wore a fearful frown. She was staring blankly at Dipper at every opportunity.

Danny had fetched his thermos soon after their conversation and clipped it to his belt. He tried to distract himself by talking to people, like the girl that turned out to be named Wendy, and bopping his head to the background beat. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but keep his eye on her and her effects. Why did his problems from home have to follow him everywhere? Why did he have to jinx himself?

He felt his sister ram into his back. "Danny, I sensed a ghost!"

"Yeah, so did I. It’s the white-haired girl. I worked out a deal with her," he immediately replied, sigh heavy and beyond his years.

Da—Ellie slowly shifted into a suspicious frown. "Wait, what? What kind of deal?"

"She gets to haunt the party for the night, and will peacefully return to the Ghost Zone after." Danny wilted under her glare. "Look, sh-she's even less harmless than the Box Ghost. She's all about the scare factor, doesn't try to hurt anyone—well, maybe makes them lose their sleep if they can't handle horror movies, but still. If I don't compromise here, she'll go for much bigger plans later to spite me. I promise I know what I'm doing!"

"Since when have you known what you're doing?" She shook her head, surely knowing how very offended he was by her comment. "This just doesn't sound like you, bro."

He shrugged exaggeratedly. "She doesn't operate the same way as most ghosts."

“So that made it okay to let loose a prankster ghost on these people?”

“Well, geez, it sounds terrible if you put it like that.”

She shook her head at him again before turning away with a dramatic cape twirl. He suddenly realized she does that at him a lot.

-_-_-_

Something was off.

Dipper had made all the necessary precautions for a Summerween party he could think of. He had left anti-magic wards hidden around the house—not unicorn hair strong, but still effective against most of what could possibly threaten a gathering like this. He’d cleared out the trash cans so the gnomes would have no reason to stick around. He locked up Gompers in the attic (he never proved to be dangerous, but that goat was terrifying).

But then when he went to take a break by a cobwebbed corner, he found real spiders on it. A lot of real spiders. The party lights, which were supposed to change color every few seconds, got stuck on red when he passed by them. The doors creaked open ominously when anyone came near them. He went to pour out some fruit punch, and the dispenser screamed when he pressed on it.

Every time he noticed one of these things, he glanced around him and immediately found that ghost girl staring straight at him.

Dipper ran to check the nearest ward, but it was still intact. However, there was something written next to it on the wall, in red.

You think you can keep me out?

Well, that wasn’t good.

The only suspect so far was the girl—Lily, right? Perhaps she wasn’t just dressed up as a ghost after all. But she looked too solid to be a ghost, though he hadn’t seen anyone actually try to touch her yet, and these things that were happening just didn’t have the same MO as the ghosts described in the Journals or those he faced in the past. But what other kinds of supernatural creatures could do things like this? Which ones would?

Mabel poked his shoulder, startling him enough that he bumped against the wall. She didn’t laugh, however, her attention focused on his wig. Eyes narrowed, she slowly said, “Dipper, is there blood in your hair?”

He ripped the wig off his head. Red liquid seeped out of its roots, matting down the poofed hair. He hesitantly touched a finger to it and sniffed. It smelled like copper.

Mabel pulled her own off, and found the same result. Face scrunched up in disgust, she tossed it to him and ran off to the bathroom. He could hear the door creak much louder than normal even from here.

Lily was staring at him, a blank smile on her face.

A part of him chastised himself for coming to conclusions too fast, but what other conclusion was there? And performing an exorcism, if it came to that, wouldn’t hurt something that wasn’t a ghost, right?

Clearly, what he needed to do next was talk to this girl, find out her motives before her little act became big. Just in case, though, he’d need to pull out that new silver mirror first.

-_-_-_

Amity Park and Gravity Falls were not very similar, but Danny realized there was something in common between their townsfolk: they were somewhat clueless. Not that he eavesdropped that much into the different conversations on the edges of the dance floor, but it seemed hardly anyone had noticed the odd tension in the air, the invisible slimy feeling on their skin of the supernatural hiding in their midst. Something coming.

Or, well, that that paper spider he stuck to the ceiling had grown several times its original size and crawled over one of the ceiling lights.

Ellie was consoling Mabel, who stood by the refreshments without her wig on. She glanced over to him a couple times just to glare.

He was trying to not keep his focus on Lily too much for his own sanity, but his eyes didn’t listen to his brain. They kept roaming the crowd to keep track of her. She looked like she wasn’t doing anything, but…

The eyes of the various wall decorations followed him wherever he went. Distant screaming could barely be heard over the music, if he tried to listen, but it came from nowhere. More spiders poured out of abandoned plastic cups. (She really liked that aesthetic, apparently.)

He only caught her in the act once at the refreshments table: she studied one of the Halloween-colored M&M cookies in her hand and threw it into her mouth. After a second, she pulled it back out, staring at it like it was the cause of all her problems. She disintegrated the cookie she couldn’t eat. When she turned away, all the other cookies had turned into oatmeal raisin.

How evil.

“Hey, Danny?”

He blinked and turned to see Wendy. She quirked her eyebrow at him. “What’s got you making that constipated face?”

He blinked at her even harder and she laughed. He huffed, scratching at his hair. “There’s just weird stuff going on.”

“Oh, yeah,” she agreed, “this party’s totally haunted.”

“Actually—” He had enhanced hearing, and he still wasn’t sure he heard that right. “Yeah, it is. You noticed?”

“Well, it was kinda hard to ignore.” She nodded to herself. “I thought I heard creepy laughing coming from the bathroom and there was nobody there. ‘I’m here’ was written on the mirror in blood, though. Once I came back out, more stuff just kept popping up. There’s definitely a ghost.”

Danny frowned. “And… why aren’t you freaked out?”

“Well, same reason you aren’t. Dipper’s gonna take care of it.”

Alarm bells rang in his head, drowning out that distant screaming. “What do you mean ‘take care of it’?”

She tilted her head quizzically. “Don’t you already know him? This is totally Dipper’s thing, knowing about the supernatural and saving people from it. He already took down ghosts before. He’s probably getting everything ready for an exorcism or something right now.”

Exorcism. Exorcism. His skin crawled at that word. Ellie was friends with a kid that performed exorcisms in his spare time?

He remembered that Lily had been pulling that constant-stare thing on Dipper before. She had stopped at some point, which meant Dipper was out of sight, which meant maybe he really was planning something to get rid of her. Permanently.

Wendy said, “Hey, man, you okay?” just loud enough to bring him back out of his thoughts.

“Yeah, uh, just need to find Dipper,” he muttered, turning away and quickly searching the room for his face. Where was that kid, where was he, where was he—?

He hadn’t noticed that the music had slowly quieted down until Mabel was shouting by the DJ table. “Hey, everybody! We’re gonna start the costume contest in five minutes! Come over here if you wanna be in it!” The lights flickered for a couple seconds. “Oh, that’s new! We’ll get Soos to fix ‘em!”

Okay, there’s Mabel. Where there’s Mabel, there’s likely a Dipper. Or maybe an Ellie. He figured he should probably talk to her, too, even if she’ll give him that look again, wondering how she shared the exact same DNA with his doofus self.

-_-_-_

Mabel watched as the chatter grew louder with her hands on her hips. “There you go, Dipdop, I moved up the contest. The sacrifices I make to my carefully planned schedules for you!” She turned back to the playlist and rose the volume. The song sounded strangely distorted and screechy and demented, causing everyone to cover their ears. She quickly stopped the music. “But I guess you’re right that things are getting out of hand.”

Yes, he was. The freaky little instances seemed to have gotten worse in the few minutes he had spent grabbing the mirror and Journal 3 upstairs. The fastest way to find the ghost: have her come to him.

Grenda and Candy came running up in their matching “party animals” costumes, along with a couple other kids they barely knew. Danny rushed to the table, eyes wide and much more awake than any zombie had the right to be. Dipper opened his mouth, about to turn that into an actual joke, but Danny beat him.

“Do you know anything about ghosts?” The words practically tumbled out of Danny’s mouth.

Dipper raised his eyebrows. “Well, yeah.”

“And how to defeat them?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s your plan?”

Dipper considered Danny’s strangely serious face. Then, he said, “Make her come out, find out her motives and if there’s something we can do to make her leave. Trap her away if she doesn’t want to, and exorcise her as a last resort.”

Danny set his frown grimmer and grimmer as he spoke. The lights flickered. “I think you need to reconsider the severity of this haunting. I can’t let you—”

Click.

The lights all went out, and the room was an inkier black than it should’ve been on a warm summer Oregon night. Large objects screeched as they dragged across the floor, bumping into people. Dipper felt something crawl over his feet, heard the table in front of him slide away. Just over the random yelps and screams of the attendees, a dark laughter rang.

They flicked back on. The tables, speakers, and party lights were all randomly located throughout the room. The attendees were stunned to silence, taking some seconds before their chatter began anew as they inspected their new surroundings.

A girl with a white wig (it had to be her real hair) and painted blue skin (she didn’t have skin) slipped through the crowd, glancing between the three with that little smile gracing her face. “Can I join the costume contest?”

Dipper couldn’t stop himself from setting a glare on her, gripping tighter the silver mirror behind his back. Mabel, who had more tact, plastered a grin on and said, “Of course! I invited you to do it, didn’t I?”

Lily nodded and quietly took her place by Candy, who was not the only contestant staring at her warily. She ignored them all, eyes unfocused as she fiddled with one of her pigtails.

Dipper glanced back over to Danny from the corner of his eye. “I think you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told him quietly. “Just let me do my job.”

“Your job?” Danny hissed in return, far more offended than Dipper expected him to be. “Just let me talk to her—”

“What, do I look like I haven’t done this before?”

Danny tugged at his hair. “Listen to me! You need to change your plan!”

All the paper decorations promptly dropped from the walls, fluttering to the floor, except for the cutesy ghosts.

Mabel shouted over their quiet arguing, “Last call if you want to be in the contest!”

Ellie strode up, determination in her footsteps as she lined up beside Lily.

-_-_-_

Now that the music wasn’t playing, Danny could see people inspecting their surroundings a little more. Now that she wasn’t hidden among the crowd, Danny could see a few of those people second-guess Lily, watching her rock back and forth on her feet with a calculating eye. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. If there was anyone else here like Dipper...

He had to give up on talking sense into the kid because the contest was starting. Mabel was doing it by applause, and he couldn’t hear anything else over it.

Mabel wrote down on a notepad (though he had no clue what she’d be writing down), nodding thoughtfully to herself. “Looks like it’s between Count Dracula,” she shouted, gesturing with her pen to a kid in an elaborate vampire costume then to Lily, “and the ghost! One more vote decides the winner!”

The other contestants moved aside, but not too far. Ellie glanced over to Danny as she stepped back a couple feet. She was planning something, he knew it. With how mad she was at him, he had the distinct feeling he should be running for what remained of his life.

Dipper pulled Danny’s arm back as the applause rang again. When it stopped, he spoke in a dangerously low voice. “You said you knew her. You said she would try to scare everyone.”

Danny bit his lip for a second. “I did say something like that, huh?”

Quiet fury grew in Dipper’s eyes. “Well, fine. If you’re not going to do anything—” The rest was drowned out by the applause roaring up again, startled shouts mixed in as the lights flickered again, but Danny could guess, and his heart dropped to his stomach as Dipper turned away without giving him a chance to reply.

“Dracula wins!” Mabel announced, and a cheer rose up once again. “But the rest of you were great, too!”

Ellie stepped back up to Lily when the claps died back down. “Sorry you lost,” she said.

“Oh, it’s okay,” she replied amicably. “It wouldn’t really be fair if I won, anyway. I’m not a̙͈ ͖̩̠̬c̯͔̼t͚̮̗̙u̟͖͕a̻͙ ̼ll͙̙͎y̹ ̬͔̣̻̣w̠e̞̤ͅ ̪̖̦̤͍ͅ ̥ar͙͈i͈̳̰̜n̪̼̮ ͈ ̟̫͍̰͍ͅg̱ͅ ̟ ̦͇͓̻̹͇̼ ̝̯̦ ̹̬̟̱ ̭͈̠͇̟͖ ̗̤̯̮̭ a̬̯̰̦̞̪ͅ ̣̜͖ͅ ̬͚̪̫͎̰ c̫̗ ̜͕͕͇̤ ̤o ̥̮̺s̹̜͕͇t̬̘̮̼ ̗̞̥̣̖̼ ͇ ̣͓̹ u̹͖̙͙͇̠ ̼͉͓̰͙ ̝̯͍͙͍͓ ̭ ̤ ̖̠̠̙͖̮͕ ̜͔͔̮ ̖ ͚̤ͅ ̤ ̪̤̖͓̘͉ͅ ̭̳̜m̦̼̲̫ ̲̫͔̳̮͎ ̖̩̝̙̦͇ ̲̯̠͙̬ ̝ ̠͔̼͈͖ ̰̹ ̘͎̺̗ ̳̠̫̳̻̥ ̥͚̙͈̠͙ ̪̖͎̳̻ ͔͉̰͈̳ ̠ ͇̺̫ ͚̲̻̥͚͎̣ ̖̫̖̭ͅͅ ̩ ̩e͙͍͎̙̺̜.͇͍̩”

Lily’s hair and dress floated, revealing blobs of ectoplasm instead of legs. The lights went out, then returned in a dim, red hue. She was already up in the air, eyes glowing, face twisting. She raised her arms, and objects began to float at her command. Attendees screamed, almost loud enough to not hear the unsettling laughter coming from all sides. A couple of them tried to leave, but the door wouldn’t budge.

“Hey!” Dipper shouted as he ran to her. He was holding a… small mirror? “What do you want, ghost?”

She abruptly turned her head to him, face upside-down. Her voice had a demonic overtone as she replied, “T͍̝o̗͙ͅ ̥m͈a͕̲k̶̼͙̻e̼̟̼ ̳̱y̨o҉͎̹u͔͇̬͟ ̼s̹̙cr͉̦͇̮̭͇͡e̺͓͖̱̤̗a̪͙͓̩̮͟m͢.͎̮̳̱̬̯”

“Come on, there has to be something else,” he insisted, hand gripping the mirror harder. Danny inched his way; that mirror had to be a trap of some kind, and he wasn’t going to let Dipper use it—not when Danny didn’t know if he could get her back out of it.

“I know what you don’t want,” Ellie shouted, holding out a Fenton Thermos. Wait—Danny felt for the thermos on his belt. It was gone. She stole his thermos. How did he not notice until now?!

Lily stared her down, but she didn’t look scared. “Y̘o̺͎͖̱u̖̜̳̭̺ ̸̣̭̥̦͉̙̭s̝͢h̨o͙̞u̠͓̰̙͉l̡͉̠̗̣̥̗d̯̩̮̦̯͎̗’̨v̰̘̹͞e̙͉̘̦̱ ̶̙us̻̩̪͎̝̯e̯̱̜̬̮̝̫d͕͢ ì̟t̗̻̬̯͕̪͘ ̝͉w̹̤̫h̞̼̫̹̘̲͍͢e̖ņ̦̹̬̣̫̱ ̗̟̺y̵̬̤͖͓̖o̰̯̪̟̼̥u̟̩̰̙͢ ̝̖͕̗́h̪̰͝a̖͍̲͉͡d͕̹ ͙͖̬͉͟t̻̗̠͈̝h͚͚̜̖͎̕ͅe̼̰͍ ̰̲̪̥c͏̟̞̝͓̫h̗̤͚̲͔̼a̯͎̳͇͙̝͈n̦̥̜̹͘ͅc̳̭ȩ,” she answered, holding her hand out at Ellie. She began to float off the ground, yelping as she flailed her arms and legs in the air. She lost her grip on the thermos as she suddenly began to spasm, as if fighting off a—no, she couldn’t be.

She stilled, eyes closed, then opened them. They were glowing ecto-green. She was dull and slack-jawed, staring off at nothing.

Danny couldn’t help the dread trickling into his chest. She wasn’t really...?

He stepped towards her, and she... glanced down at him? Oh, she didn’t.

She winked.

She did.

Danny felt a thrill of anger run through him—how could his own clone decide to act possessed and make all of this worse? (When did those two even get to plan this?!) It was clearly working, with how all the partygoers stared at her in horror, looking like they were about to pass out.

“A̛̫̙̮n͏y̗͇o̩̝͇̫n͖̜̬͇͖͖e̳ ̣̱̙̭͓e̤͚͉͉̮l̢̞̦̟s͎̱͍͍̩e̪̭͘ ͈͡w͖͚̩̹͉͢a͇͔̘ņ͎̟̣̫n͈͉̕a̷̟̝̯̬͚ ̭̱͉̟͔͘p̷̙̬̮̫̲͈̞̼͇̜͇̎̐͊ͨͅ l̜͖̲̀̇̚ ̼ ̤̄ a͙̻̲̰͂̋ͦ̎͌̏ ̬̘͍ͯ͝ ̙͎͚̊̆̆ͨ̚ ̝̟̎͑͐ͬ́ỵ̶͉͉̳ͨͥ̌͋̓ͅ ̖͉͓̙ͮ͌̑ͤ̽?̡͎̦̭̩̙̰͎”

Danny was about to dive for the thermos and suck both of them in (Ellie absolutely deserved it too, now), but he saw Dipper holding up the mirror and beginning a chant from a thick book. He had to take care of that first. He tackled the boy to the ground. The mirror slid away, unbroken, and both of them scrambled to get up and grab it first. Danny won, barely, and Dipper tackled him in return.

“Give me that!” Dipper growled, furiously trying to pull the mirror out of Danny’s hands.

Danny elbowed him away. “No, we need to use the thermos!”

“Why?!”

“Because—” he grunted as Dipper kicked him surprisingly hard— “it’ll work better!”

“And why should I believe you? You don’t care about stopping her!”

“I never said I didn’t!” Dipper paused his fighting. “I said to change your plan because she doesn’t deserve to be killed or trapped forever, and I already know that!” Danny pushed the other boy off of him and stood up, brushing himself off. “The longer we argue, the more she’ll make everyone pee their pants.”

“Okay, fine, we’ll use your thermos thing,” Dipper grumbled as he pushed himself back to standing. He sobered as he saw food flying around and Ellie still floating there, gawking into space. “You better be right.”

“Of course I am.”

Danny sprinted for the thermos. He turned it on the second his hand touched it. Lily and Ellie apparently heard its mechanical whine, as they both glanced at him, Lily wide-eyed in a different way than usual.

“I̙̻̺’̩͍m͇͔͢ ͅṋ̰̮̦͎͡ͅo̞̤t̩̯̰̖̱͖͖ ͞f͚̜̙͢ǐ̭͉͓͈̅͗ͥͅn̝̯̻͎̣̰̱̅i̮̹͔̲ͨͥ̋̆̕s̓̽ͤ͑̋҉̜͈̱̪h̤͉̫̭͍̒͆̉̈̊̐e̵͈̣͖dͧ͏͎͍̻ ̖͙́̇̒͛ẅ̘̠̤̤̭̒̾͟ḭ̩͈̥̬̅ͪt̰͇̟̹͖͂ͪͪ͋͟ḩ̝̯̖̤͉ͬ́͌—”

He gave her an apologetic look as he pulled the lid off. She let out a chilling, unnatural scream as she was sucked in, the finale to her entire performance.

Everything that had been floating crashed down, the lights flicked back to their usual white, and the laughing died off. Ellie fell to the floor, rubbing at her head and looking around as if dazed (that little liar).

“Are you okay?” Mabel cried as she ran to Ellie’s side, just as Dipper came up to him and asked, “Are you sure she can’t get out?”

“Yeah,” Danny replied, knocking his knuckles against it. “I’ll let her out in the Ghost Zone.”

“The Ghost Zone?”

He found himself explaining it halfmindedly, the rest of him focused on inspecting the party. It looked like everything really was back to normal, minus the rearranged room and food that fell to the floor.

“That’s amazing!” Dipper’s eyes sparkled, and Danny could finally see what Wendy meant about him wanting to know the supernatural, too. “I have so many questions!”

Danny suddenly suspected he’d be here a long time if those questions started now. “How about you write them down and I’ll tell you about it when the party’s over?”

He was surprised that Dipper agreed so easily, running off to grab Mabel’s pen. With that, he snuck out of the party, thermos in hand.

-_-_-_

Danny took the lid off again, watching as Lily reformed. She stretched her arms over her head with a sigh. He rubbed at his neck. “Sorry about trapping you, I didn’t really have a better choice.”

"That was still really fun!" She giggled, with the biggest smile Danny had ever witnessed her pulling. Her coloring shifted back to how she usually looked in the Ghost Zone, with purple hair, gray-black skin, and her dress bleached from black to bright white. She was officially out of her “scare-mode”, it seemed.

He huffed. "If you tone it down next time, and not include my sister in your schemes, I might not have to resort to it again.” He glanced around. “Well, time for you to go home. Is that portal still open?"

"Perhaps." Lily floated into the forest, and Danny warily followed.

Only a few minutes passed before they came across a long rip in the air, carved out in front of one of the many trees, shining ecto green like a bleeding wound. One of its neighbor trees wore a sparkly Summerween party flyer.

"See you later, Phantom!” Lily chirped. “Oh, and let Mabel know her cookies were good!" She paused to wave, her grin lingering on her face turned counterclockwise, then flew through.

Danny watched the portal until it closed; luckily, it only took a minute or two to stitch the fabric of reality back together, leaving no trace. Well, except for his nerves being fried for the night.

He was not looking forward to Ellie’s smug grin.

It’s a mistake going anywhere with her.

-_-_-_

Zalgo Text:

"I'm not actually wearing a costume."

"To make you scream."

"You should've used it when you had the chance."

"Anyone else wanna play?"

"I'm not finished with—"

#Danny Phantom #DP #ghostsona #AU!Ghost August #aughost #Lily? Lily.#Lily? Lily. Fic.#Gravity Falls #GF #DPxGF crossover #crossover #DP headcanons awaaaaay #and yay spooky times #Dani and Danny call each other siblings but otherwise this is basically post-canon (minus PP maybe?)

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bethygauw · 7 years

Text

Enstars: PASH! April 2017

Released in March 2017.

Thank you Nhi for the scans!! She translates Enstars stories on Dreamwidth. Check it out!

Special interview with Saori Kodama and Youhei Matsui, lyricists of Enstars unit song second series. The second half of this post includes more detailed comments on all songs they were in charge of.

They were in charge of: Saori Kodama: 2wink, Ra*bits, Switch, fine Youhei Matsui: Knights, Castle Upon Sand, Trickstar. Previously, he also wrote Enstars opening song.

Credit of lyric translations quoted in this post, references: - 2wink by PatriciaSelina - Love Ra*bits Party!! by Keru - Knights by Mike - Castle Upon Sand on wiki

Q: Both of you took part in the making of many Enstars unit songs as lyricists. What kind of impressions do you have on the game itself?

Matsui: In the beginning, the complexity of the story surprised me. The characters are divided not only by units, but also by year groups and classes. Each character has a lot of different interactions with various characters, which is something I don’t see often. I remember I got nervous thinking if I’ll be able to understand it (laugh).

Kodama: They have clubs too.

Matsui: Depending on the club, the senior-junior interactions also differ.

Kodama: There were a lot of things I couldn’t tell just from reading the main story, so when I read the event stories I got surprised by the relationship between some characters. It was worth reading.

Q: What were your impressions on the units you were in charge of?

Matsui: The units I was in charge of were Knights, Valkyrie, and Trickstar. Knights have a solid philosophy, which is “chivalry”, so they were the easiest to understand. As for Valkyrie… Say, Kodama-san, when writing lyrics, how do you read the original story?

Kodama: In my case, I’d firstly read from the point of view of all characters.

Matsui: I see! For me, I’d intentionally skim through the stories or read them from one character’s point of view, so that I can focus on that particular character who’s singing. But for Valkyrie, I properly and carefully read all the stories. They’re poor guys, I thought. If something goes wrong during my performance, I would firstly go, “Oh, come on…” (laugh) When it comes to how resolute Mika was when he started singing all by himself in that kind of situation…

Kodama: Mika had great resolve and determination, didn’t he? What about Trickstar?

Matsui: Trickstar is a unit that’s the truest to themselves. If I can say this, there’s no way they would’ve won against fine in the first place. But they did, so what’s going on there? I thought about things like that. For example, in sports, you can’t win if there’s a considerable difference between your abilities. But when it comes to idols, you can have a chance to win. When I was thinking about why that is, I thought maybe it was because of “the power of support”. I thought about the kind of people who would make me want to support them, who make me want to push their backs. So the feel I have for Trickstar is that they are important friends whom I’d root for. I could also consider about “who writes the lyrics”. For Trickstar’s songs, it seems that the lyrics would have been written by all of them. And that doesn’t mean that one member writes his own part, but it feels like a member’s part is written by the other members. I can imagine an exchange like, “Hokke, sing this part!” They are able to write others’ parts because they understand each other. I think those four are like that.

Q: What about you, Kodama-san?

Kodama: I’ll start from 2wink. From the stories, I could see that they are twins who are shouldering a heavy burden, so I figured I couldn’t write songs that only sound cute. Ra*bits also seemed easy to understand and there is truly a variety of characters in this group. I had all the intention to read the story from a character’s perspective, but Mitsuru-kun would jump in out of nowhere and go, “I’m gonna dash dash!” (laugh) I think Ra*bits gives off the feeling, “We are working hard even if we have things we worry about. This is a declaration of our determination.” I wrote the lyrics based on a collection of phrases they would want to sing.

Matsui: It’s like they asked you to write it.

Kodama: That’s truly how it felt like. For Switch, the unit wasn’t even announced yet when I got the offer. They weren’t in the main story, so I suppose I got to know them gradually at the same time as everyone else. Then, for fine… Firstly, I didn’t know what to do with Hibiki-san (laugh).

Matsui: I like Hibiki-san the most.

Kodama: Because you guys are silk hat buddies*, right? (laugh) I think it must be hard work to continue being rulers.

[*Note from PASH: The silk hat is Matsui-san’s trademark. TL’s note: yes, there are pictures if you search 松井洋平.]

Matsui: Being perfect is hard, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be a great pressure to them? I had the opportunity to write fine’s song for Enstage, but I thought a perfect unit must have perfect lyrics. But I’m not perfect, so how do I create perfection? It was something I worried about, and at the end I gave the song title “Perfect World”! (laugh) It’s like, I just have to say it myself, don’t I! (laugh)

Kodama: That’s a good way of thinking! (laugh) But if you put it that way, there’s also a genius in Knights. Didn’t that become pressure as well?

Matsui: Indeed, Knights has Leo. I don’t know who writes the lyrics in Knights’ songs, but I bet Knights’ songs are what were born within them.

Q: Is there anything that makes you think, “Now that’s what makes it Enstars”?

Matsui: If I can say this being prepared that it may cause misunderstandings: they’re not pro yet. I think their real work starts after graduation. That amateur feel is very much like Enstars, I thought. That naivety connects to “the feel of wanting to root for them”, and that feeling is the strongest for Trickstar to me. But fine doesn’t have that kind of naivety (laugh).

Kodama: I think I can understand that. I think after I’ve understood the units or characters in my own way, choosing the words that I’m going to give them is important. Even if a character’s way of thinking doesn’t match the meaning behind the lyrics, I would wonder about how the meaning would become. Does this sound difficult? (laugh)

Matsui: No, no! I listened while thinking you’re amazing. That happens, doesn’t it? In Knights for example, there’s this line, “Just being friendly will not hone this bond.” They don’t seem to be the type to say “bond” so thoughtlessly, right? But accordingly, it seems to hold a special meaning, different from what it would mean to other units. So if they’re going to sing these words, I would start asking, how would they say it? Why would they say it?

Kodama: That’s it. For Sora-kun from Switch, he’s using slightly difficult words that he wouldn’t use normally. But I think it’s because it is Sora-kun there’s a meaning behind giving him those words. Careful examination of every character perhaps, as a result, connects to “what makes it Enstars”.

Q: What do you think about the songs you didn’t work on?

Matsui: It’s amazing how fine and Trickstar became “the end” and “the beginning” unintentionally. In the lyrics, to fine’s “Finale”, Trickstar answered with “Raise the curtain!”*

[*Neo Sanctuary’s bridge: Bokura no Finale ni fusawashii maku o orosu / We shall bring down a fitting curtain to our finale; HEART→BEATER!!!!’s beginning: Maku o hirake]

Kodama: Yes! We didn’t even discuss over it.

Matsui: It’s purely coincidental. This is truly the power of the story, I thought.

Kodama: Others like “recollection*”, a word that both of us used, is a vocabulary in Enstars that holds a powerful meaning, so it comes out naturally.

[*Recollection/memories = tsuioku = 追憶, which is in Neo Sanctuary (Kodama) and Castle Upon Sand (Matsui) for example]

Matsui: Yeah, that’s right! That kind of thing really happens, doesn’t it.

Q: Then lastly, please leave a message to PASH! readers.

Matsui: These unit songs may be performed at Dreamfes or listened by other characters. For example, what kind of feeling would Wataru Hibiki have when he listens to Silent Oath? I think you can find many ways to listen to and approach every unit song. For that reason, please listen to all of them! (laugh)

Kodama: As of current, there isn’t a lot of voiced content in the game. But when you listen to the songs, you can see that each unit is singing. I think that’s amazing.

Matsui: It’s the power of the voice actors. Like really, you can see Yumenosaki is just over there. I realized unit songs have a role to make Yumenosaki closer to us. I’m looking forward to its world expanding further from now on too.

More detailed comments on each song

2wink (Kodama)

Heart Prism Symmetry: The theme is the twins having different views. When I read the story of the event Snowflake＊Street Performance of the Falling Stars, there’s a dialogue line, “It’s hard to maintain a self-image in front of a cracked mirror.”* The way one can treat someone like a mirror and see themselves in them left an impression in me, so I implemented that phrase. In the chorus where they sing together, I intentionally made the persona all mixed up, such as with “my soul” and “Just be yourself”. I think each of them can see the other as both “your soul” and “my soul”, so by mixing up the subject both of them can blend into one. That’s the image I’m trying to depict.

[*Paraphrased; the original article didn’t quote the story dialogue exactly either. Dialogue line is from Star Chart 4, TL by Rain]

2winkle Star Beat☆: The theme is, “when these two stop feeling reserved with each other and combine together, they become the strongest!” When they sing believing they can be free, well, they’re just sparkling all over and no one can hold a candle against them. That’s what I thought, so I added lots and lots of sparkles (laugh). Moreover, Souma Saito-san sang each part perfectly, so it was truly wonderful!

Ra*bits (Kodama)

Hoppin’ Season♪: Shortly after their unit formation, it may have been a fortunate thing as well, but a strength typical of a young man is sprouting within them. That’s the image I have. I would also think about how they may have requested someone to write the lyrics to this song. Perhaps, they brainstormed the phrases themselves and showed it to them, “Right now, we are this kind of people!” It can make you feel like they surely want to write the lyrics themselves one day. This song is exactly this developing phase of theirs. I also hope you can feel the increasing intensity from “Spring days” to “and now”, and “and now” in the last chorus. I’m sure all of you players know what happened to them in spring. Works that have an original story has strength, where it provides information that we can share just like this. It adds depth to the words.

Love Ra*bits Party!!: The theme is having a slightly grown-up party, so the lyrics are bold, just a little bit. But even if there’s a line, “Escorting you”, when Ra*bits sing it, you can really tell that they must be the ones who are getting nervous instead. I think that’s Ra*bits’ charm. But the last line, “Your heart is unprepared / because we’ll put you in a trance” may give your heart a big thump. I think it works that way because of the way the voice actors express it.

Knights (Matsui)

Silent Oath: For Knights, I was asked to treat their worldview with great care. “With story-telling style, a world of fantasy,” they said. It’s a story of a knight and the person they swore their loyalty to. This song probably has a stronger knight feel rather than idol feel. Knights is a unit that is accommodating with their fanservice, so I think they also show kindness not to destroy the worldview their fans are asking for. I thought of bringing that side of them forward. Also, the title suggests that their “oath” is not something to be put into words. If it’s set in the medieval world, where you can see a forest and a castle… I think the feelings that are concealed within their hearts would spill under the moonlight, rather than the sunlight. So the phrase “Dear Moon Light” was the first thing that came into my mind. I attached the word “Dear” to “Moon Light”. I think the dearest moonlight would affect the knight and the person they swore their loyalty to differently depending on each member. Each member would also hold different feelings regarding the phrase, “Don’t shine your light upon me” which comes up several times. Moreover, the reason why some members don’t sing certain lines… I think it’s something interesting to imagine. The choruses were done comparably quickly. The part “an eternity of purity” is referring to the title “Silent Oath”. It means to swear to an eternity that is clean of impurities.

Q: Leo’s singing “Because I will disappear myself” left an impression.

I put it towards the last chorus because I wanted to give it a meaning, because of the game’s story plot and also to make you wonder who wrote this line. Similar to this, there’s also the line, “This world filled with struggle”. While it stays within the idea of a fairy-tale, it also reminds you of the war era in the academy.

Fight for Judge: Conversely, this song perhaps brings out their true side. It can make you feel their determination in intentionally using the phrase “Fight for Judge”. I think it’s a song that audibly declares what kind of unit they are. “Nobly” is sung by Leo, but it’s not like he’s singing it thinking he’s a noble guy, but perhaps what he refers to as noble is actually his unit. He may seem to be someone who would say, “I’m noble!” (laugh) but maybe the fact that he won’t is what defines Leo. But when he’s with Knights, perhaps something like a resolve was born within him, that there’s no way he can walk away without saying the line.

Q: I was mesmerized by the line sung by Izumi, “Then once you’re prepared to struggle for it, come.”

It’s the part, “Come,” isn’t it? (laugh) If Izumi tells you to “come”… well, you would go, wouldn’t you? (laugh) There are times when I’d fling a word at a character precisely because they don’t look like the type to say it. But the amazing thing about voice actors is they’re able to make you approve of it. They grasp the intention of the song properly. They themselves are Knights, so if they’re asked to sing something, no matter what song, they’ll surely do it in this way. I think it’s something that will not change.

Valkyrie (Matsui)

Castle Upon Sand: First, I thought about the meaning behind Nazuna’s participation. From there, I thought that the theme, “coming apart” was necessary, and I started my work from creating an image in my mind perfectly and then smashing down the emotions. There are no specifics in what scene this song was sung in, and I didn’t give it a limit either. I think it’s okay to interpret the meaning behind the three singing this song in any way you like. But all of you know what happened, right? Maybe it’s when Mika started singing acapella in Marionette, maybe it’s when the three of them sang together in StarFes. After you come up with that, your imagination may start to expand, “What would the meaning of the lyrics become…” I chose the title “Castle Upon Sand” with the meaning of what seems to be perfect at a glance is something that crumbles so easily. But to me, this idiom also applies to “time”. Nazuna’s voice change also depends on “time”, and reconciliation perhaps depends on “time” as well. Also, there’s the line, “The key to the showcase is now covered in rust.” Perhaps “to rust” doesn’t have the nicest connotation, but if you think about the passage of time, antiques look more wonderful the more they rust. It’s a song that packs a variety of elements that can be seen as both good and bad.

Switch (Kodama)

Temptation Magic: Firstly, to inform more about the unit, we have the keywords “magicians” and “entertainment”. These are Switch’s first songs, so they would be introductory songs. On top of that, both songs share the theme, “We will attract your hearts with our magic, and make everyone happy!” Although, I approached both songs from different angles. To be specific, Temptation Magic uses the unit’s motif “lightning” and pierces through everyone. You can see a cool side of theirs that’s slightly more assertive.

Q: In “We’ll etch it in your heart …Switch,”* the part “Switch” is breathy and it had a great impact.

At first, I imagined that part to be a bit more machine-like. I already thought that would’ve been impactful enough, but I was surprised with how it turned out! It surely will be etched in your heart (laugh). It went beyond my imagination. It was truly amazing!

[*End of chorus: Kimi no HEART ni umekomu...Switch]

Knockin’ Fantasy: The picture I had is that in this song, they are showing their more natural selves than they do in Temptation Magic. While you don’t know if they’re expressing their true feelings, while you can feel the song’s insecurity and be entranced by it, they’re going all out with the happy feel to fill up the concert hall with smiles.

fine (Kodama)

Fortissimo of Fluttering Wings: I was given a request to reveal Eichi’s feelings. But I can’t make it into Eichi’s solo—it had to be a song sung as a unit. I started from there. So rather than Eichi’s own feelings, I kept in mind things like the burden that is shouldered by the unit fine that Eichi formed. Maybe, depending on the time period, both this song and the second track Neo Sanctuary would’ve been sung by different members. But I thought about fine’s purpose at a particular time period, and wrote the lyrics.

Neo Sanctuary: For this one, I thought about a way to make the listeners think that it might have been fine consisting of different members. Depending on how you see it, Eichi’s strong determination to open up a new world may be “evil”, but for some reason you can’t look away. Eichi is Yumenosaki’s top idol to those who don’t know him, but those he hurt wouldn’t be able to see him that way. Eichi and fine stand on top of such despair, all alone. That’s the image I have. Midorikawa-san’s “fine -the end-” was recorded more times than I expected…! For this part, I was asked to make it impactful, but I was surprised when I listened to the end product. Also, I thought the meaning of “Hibiki wataru/resounding” would waver if Hibiki himself sings that line, so I had the juniors sing it. In the chorus before the climax, Tori-kun’s “For eternity”* was so cool, and it left an impact. If Tori-kun can hit it off with a line like this, I couldn’t think of anything else but, “He’s really going to be the next emperor!” I could feel that all of the voice actors truly did a good job in making the character theirs.

[*“Towa ni ataeyou” | The whole line: We shall bestow you order (Yuzuru) for eternity (Tori)]

Trickstar (Matsui)

HEART→BEATER!!!!: What I worried about was if it’s going to overlap with the main theme, ONLY YOUR STARS. In the end, I decided that ONLY YOUR STARS expresses the excitement the [boys] have towards themselves, while in HEART→BEATER!!!! the four are going to get the audience excited. Regarding the title, there are two Trickstar members who are part of the basketball club, right? The term used in the sport, “buzzer beater” became an inspiration to the title, which means that “they are going to make your heart beat [loudly]”. You can feel that it’s something that the four would come up with after discussing with each other. You can imagine a good-natured conversation, like, “There’s this thing called ‘buzzer beater’, so what about ‘HEART→BEATER!!!!’? Sounds cool, right?!” “I like that!” Also, I added four exclamation marks, with meaning that these four are going to make a surprise together. For the lyrics, I also chose the words, as best as I could, so that it wouldn’t be surprising if Trickstar members were the ones who wrote the lyrics. There are parts where I wanted to emphasize that this is what they want to convey, rather than considering if it’s easy to sing. In that sense, the lyrics are something less technical than ONLY YOUR STARS. That’s why some lines seem like something I wouldn’t write. Youhei Matsui won’t write, “The spotlight will turn even sweat into light,”* but if it’s Trickstar members they would write it, I thought. It’s like they would put down how they feel as it is into lyrics. The line, “We can’t wait,”** expresses their feelings of wanting to sing on the stage right there, right at that moment. I didn’t have much trouble writing this song, and it felt like I wrote the lyrics after listening to conversations among the four of them.

[*Chorus of second verse: Spotlight ga ase sae hikari ni kaeteku **Beginning: Machikirenai no sa]

Rainbow-Colored Seasons: This song may not have been made by the boys in the present time. When they’ve become a bit more mature, I think they would have this kind of worldview. Perhaps, this is an expression of Trickstar members from one step ahead in the future. Firstly, Subaru’s “The changing seasons”*… it’s not something you would’ve imagined coming from Subaru so out of the blue (laugh). But that’s exactly why, if he’s singing something like this, he wouldn’t be the Subaru from “now”, but it would be Subaru who has slightly matured, has had and digested a lot of experience. Perhaps, it’s a song of Trickstar members who are aiming to stand on an even bigger stage.

[*Beginning: Utsuri kawaru kisetsu no]

#ensemble stars #pash #ra*bits #2wink #valkyrie #fine #switch #knights #trickstar #saori kodama #youhei matsui #staff

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