Don't Forget About Us (MDNSY Oneshot)
Makoto spares him an unimpressed look. “You looked like you were going to cry in front of a KFC of all fucking things a couple hours ago— and now you’re the drunkest I’ve seen you in months and seem determined to somehow sing your way out of a crisis.”
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“Not here,” Satoru says, which draws her up short.
They’ve just finished up a show at a nearby club, and despite the late hour are utterly ravenous. Kenji and Yui begged off for the night, leaving Makoto alone with her lead singer. Makoto has led them to the nearest appropriately greasy and unhealthy restaurant within eyeshot— a KFC. Not her go-to pick as far as fast food or even fried chicken is concerned, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Except they can, apparently, because Satoru seems pretty staunch in his disapproval.
Makoto stares at him incredulously. “Don’t tell me you’re on a diet,” she laughs, joking.
Her laughter fades as Satoru’s expression remains unchanged. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen that look on him before. Distant and constellated. Even with his glasses off he’s a bit impossible to read.
“Seriously?” Her look turns skeptical.
He’s the size of a waif and eats more sugar than should be statistically possible. And a bit of processed fast food is hardly the worst thing he’s done to himself in the time she’s known him. The cigarette dangling from his lips is a sure sign of that. And since when does he have a problem with fast food after a live show? He lives for this shit.
“I just don’t like fried chicken,” he returns, which is a blatant lie if she ever knew one. He likes fried chicken just fine; he especially likes it at one in the morning, when he’s starving after a setlist.
She rolls her eyes. “Oh my god, get something else on the menu then.” She’s starving right now, and the tantalizing scent of fried food is only making it worse.
“Anywhere but here,” he says, and this time, she can hear the threadbare shot of panic in the bottom of his voice.
Does he… Is he being serious right now? Evidently yes. Taking another look at him, he really does look unwell.
“Okay,” Makoto says, slowly, taking a step back from the well-lit doorway. “We’ll go somewhere else, then.”
“Preferably with alcohol involved,” Satoru adds, flippantly, and turns on his heel, as if the sight of a single fast food restaurant sign could do more damage to him than the excessive alcohol he’s about to consume.
Makoto lets it go, for the time being. This weird but shockingly talented bandmate of hers has the strangest hangups sometimes. She’s just learned to accept them, for the most part. And not ask too many questions— he gets real squirrelly with those. And every time she thinks she’s getting closer to the truth of him, he twists the paradigm around with yet another absurd and/or vaguely horrifying revelation.
Makoto shoves them into the nearest izakaya she can find— ironically a yakitori joint with ample fried chicken on the menu— and immediately orders them a round of beers that Satoru tacks on with a bottle of sochu. Ah. So it’s going to be one of those nights. They order a responsible amount of food with their drinks for the first few rounds, but eventually it just turns into the two of them getting wildly drunk and staggering out of the place draped over each other in search of the nearest karaoke bar.
Makoto would have thought the guy would have had enough of singing, what with performing a whole setlist just a few hours ago, but drunk!Ru-kun really only has two modes, slutty stripper Ru-kun or karaoke star Ru-kun, and since he’s still hung up over Hawks these days, it looks like they’re shutting down the karaoke bars tonight.
Not that Makoto minds, necessarily. It’s been ages since they’ve had a night out like this, and she’s got a whole weekend to be miserable and recover from what’s shaping up to be a raging hangover before she has to drag herself to work again. And for whatever reason, she’s sensing Satoru might be in desperate need of a night out himself.
The place they stumble into is equal parts nightclub and karaoke bar: a large, darkly lit open interior sprawls before them packed to the gills with dancers; disco lights zip across the crowds and the bottle services girls fighting their way to their tables with sparkling champagne thrust into the air like shooting stars; and at the far end an inebriated girl with cat ears is belting out a fairly decent rendition of Mariah Carey’s Shake it Off as she struts across the bar. In short, this is probably exactly the sort of place they were both looking for.
Makoto swindles them a free table with a bit of flirting with the hostess, and finds herself holding court among a generous crowd of random inebriated strangers thrilled to get drinks off her tab, while Satoru wanders off to find the mic. She loses track of him for a bit, but is unsurprised when he resurfaces wearing someone else’s blonde wig, up on the bar himself singing Baby One More Time as he fumbles his way through the dance routine with the cat-eared girl in tow. Still in his stage outfit from earlier in the night, he honestly looks like someone paid him to be up there, which is probably why the entire bar is clamoring towards him like he’s a celebrity or something.
He shows up at her table eventually, sprawling himself over her and the booth with his borrowed blonde wig in tangles across his face. She throws it off him as he makes grabby hands for a bottle of champagne on the table. She should probably cut him off at this point, but she’s wasted herself and doesn’t have enough fucks to care anymore, so she just pours them both another glass and clinks their glasses together.
She has no idea what time it is when she starts to feel hungry again and orders food. They could have been in this place for hours or days, and she wouldn’t be able to tell; it doesn’t seem to be in danger of closing on them any time soon. The crowds come and go, but the place stays packed and the loud music has yet to bother her, so she doesn’t feel inclined to leave. What would be the point? There’s no food at her apartment, and ever since she broke it off with her last fling, no one waiting for her either. From the way Satoru constantly gets his turn at the mic, she doubts he’s in any rush to leave either.
So maybe they’re both just eager to run away from things. But for his sake, she should probably get him to talk about it. The last time he was having some kind of internal crisis he was trying to drown out with alcohol, he’d ended up sleeping with a Top Three Hero and catching feelings for him.
“Okay, so what the hell brought this on,” she finally corners him, after he’s done with an obnoxiously impressive cover of Despacito for a guy who speaks absolutely no Spanish, and is once again sprawled in the booth with her.
“What? Nothing.” She supposes she should at least be happy to see him putting orange juice in his champagne, even if he’s yet to touch any of the food.
Makoto spares him an unimpressed look. “You looked like you were going to cry in front of a KFC of all fucking things a couple hours ago— and now you’re the drunkest I’ve seen you in months and seem determined to somehow sing your way out of a crisis.”
“It’s not my fault everyone keeps shoving the mic at me and picking great songs,” he retorts, stubbornly.
This probably means she should drop it and just let him run away from his own problems, but beyond just trying to save himself from the worst of his own vices, at this point she’s also just curious.
“Fine, drink your way out of a crisis,” she amends, then shoves a plate of dosas at him. “And at least eat something if you’re going to do that. I’m not dragging you home if you’re too drunk to walk.”
Satoru pouts ferociously, but nonetheless reaches for a crepe and tears off a bite. “I’m not having a crisis,” this idiot insists, like the emotionally stunted idiot he is.
“Really? Let’s go to a KFC then, if you’re not having a crisis about it. We’ll bring the whole band.”
“I’m not having a crisis about fucking fried chicken, okay,” Satoru says, expression turning a bit pinched. “I just— it was bad timing, is all. If I hadn’t just gotten done with playing our last setlist I would have been fine to eat there.”
This draws Makoto up a bit short. Her brow creases. “What does the setlist have to do with it?”
Satoru stares at her for a moment, indecipherable. Then he grabs his champagne and downs the whole thing. He sets the empty glass on the table as he says, “I almost had to kill my best friend in front of a KFC, once.”
It’s so unexpected she nearly drops her own drink. “What?”
No, seriously. What the fuck?
“He’d gone off the rails and killed a bunch of people,” Satoru continues, only bewildering her further. “I was supposed to put him down, but at the time I just couldn’t do it. I tracked him down, stood outside the store ready to kill him, and I just… I couldn’t do it.”
Makoto leans back in her seat, reeling.
She’d call it some bizarre made up bullshit, but sadly, every facet of Satoru’s life sounds like bizarre made up bullshit, so it’s probably the truth.
She scrambles for a response. “I— when was this?”
“A while ago,” he answers, clipped. He reaches for the entire bottle of champagne, and this time doesn’t even bother with the glass. She doesn’t stop him.
She has no idea what she expected from this mysterious and eccentric bandmate of hers, but admitting to attempted murder was really not in her cards for the guy. Then again, what did she expect? She watches him down the entire bottle as she tries, and fails, to get her thoughts together. There’s just so much to infer from this and she doesn’t even know where to start. Just what kind of guy was his best friend, that he’d gone on a killing spree? And why would it ever be Satoru’s responsibility to execute him for his crimes? And what does that have to do with their setlist?
She at least gets one of the answers she’s searching for.
Satoru wipes at his mouth, looking out into the strobe lights as he says, “He wasn’t a bad person. He just… wanted more than life could ever grant him.”
Makoto blinks, realization dawning hard and fast.
(I wanted more than life could ever grant me)
Satoru never talks about how he writes his music. He swears, in fact, that it doesn’t really mean anything to him at all— that he just makes them up off the top of his head. Makoto had never once believed that, and now she has the proof. She’s heard him sing Today is the Greatest hundreds of times at this point, but she’d always thought it was about himself. The more she learns about him, the more she realizes some of those lines align a little too closely to his own experiences to be anything but personal. But she supposes two things can be true at once; that song can be about him, but still remind him of a friend he’d lost.
She almost doesn’t want to ask, but… “What happened to him?”
Even the stifling, crowded warmth of the nightclub plunges into ice as he says, without looking at her, “I can only hope he found more peace in death than he did in life.”
Makoto startles at the implication.
But at the time, I just couldn’t do it.
So he managed it, in the end?
Before she can even fathom up a response, the cat-eared girl is leaping over the booth to wrap her arms around Satoru, begging him to get up and help her duet yet another Mariah Carey song.
“Make it Don’t Forget About Us and I’ll do it,” he says.
Without hesitation she agrees, and he grabs his ridiculous wig and jumps over the seat to join her. He’s probably eager to once again run away from his feelings and, this time, she can’t blame him whatsoever. Or on second thought, as they really get into it in the chorus, she has to wonder if this isn’t actually him running from his feelings so much as confronting them head on? "When it’s real, it’s forever" indeed.
//
She learns a hell of a lot about her ridiculous bandmate over the course of the following months, but she never quite gets a straight answer over his former best friend, and possibly first love, and she never directly asks, either. If he wants to tell her, she’ll listen, but otherwise she’ll let him approach it in his own time.
But she does make sure he knows she’s around if he ever wants to talk about it.
They’re at that same R&B karaoke joint, this time enjoying their time in a far more sedate and far less exorbitant manner with drinks at the bar. Satoru has long since lost that blonde wig, but the bartenders have clearly never forgotten ‘Karaoke Queen Ruru’ because they shower them with a generous amount of free shots and make pointed questions about the karaoke queue every time. Satoru waves them off with a laugh though, insisting he’s just here for a quiet night out.
“You’ve gotten boring ever since you got wifed up,” Makoto denounces as he hedges off yet another turn at the mic.
Satoru’s expression turns a bit pinched— and panicked. “I’m not married,” he hisses, furtively. “And don’t say that so loud! I don’t need the rumors to get any worse.”
“Not married yet,” Makoto revises, rolling her eyes. “For reasons that still allude me. What are you waiting for, exactly? You can’t ask for a more public or dramatic proposal than the one you already got.”
“It’s not that,” he insists, rolling his glass in his hands.
Makoto blinks at him. “Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet.”
“I’m not,” Satoru remarks, although he does look a bit shifty-eyed. Makoto squints at him. A bit of dread sinks in her stomach.
“Satoru,” she starts, cautiously. “If you really don’t want this…”
“It’s definitely not that either,” he assures her quickly. His mouth pinches into a tight line. “I know it took me, like, an inconceivably long amount of time to get to the point where I can admit it outside of our various discographies, but I do want Hawks. I don’t have any doubts about it.”
He stops, the silence holding for a heavy, offbeat moment as he seems to want to say more, but can’t manage to force the words out. Makoto isn’t sure what else to do but wait patiently for him to finish, and when he doesn’t, flag the bartender down for shochu shots. Nothing like a bit of liquid courage to brace yourself for some trauma dumping.
Satoru huffs out a laugh as she rolls one down the bar towards him, clinking their glasses together. “Thanks,” he says, as they cheers.
“What are friends for?” She counters, tossing the shot back.
Satoru follows her, then sets the glass back down on the bar as he wipes the salt off his lips. “I don’t have any doubts,” he repeats, after a moment. “I guess I just… need a bit more time to let go.”
Let go? Her brow furrows in confusion. Let go of what?
Then she remembers the last time they were at this bar. The last time Satoru had run away from his past straight into the arms of excessive alcohol and a cat-eared girl singing R&B classics. Remembers his request for his last song, where he’d stood on top of a filthy bar and belted out, “I’m just speaking from experience, nothing can compare to your first true love” to a packed dance floor all singing along with their hands in the air.
She sets her own glass down. “Were you and your friend… were you two like that?” She asks, hesitantly.
Were you lovers, before you killed him?
She’s a little relieved when he shakes his head. Romantic or not, she’s sure that doesn’t lessen the pain, just makes it a different kind of regret.
“No. Well— not exactly.” He looks conflicted. “We never… it was never like that. It might have been, but, well…”
Then he had some kind of psychotic break and turned into a mass murderer, and Satoru had to be the one to put an end to him permanently. Right. What a fucking mess. No wonder this guy has spent most of his life doing his level best to avoid his own past. The more she learns about it, the more depressing it gets.
She nudges him sympathetically with her knee. “It’s okay to mourn the loss of what could have been,” she says, gently. “It’s not wrong to need time to move on— no matter how much time that is.”
Satoru nods, looking lost in his own thoughts.
Makoto bites her lip. “... Does Hawks know?”
He blinks, surfacing from his own head to look at her. “Yeah,” he answers, without hesitation. Then he lets out a sharp, bitter chuckle. “He knows everything, but he sticks around anyway. I don’t really know what I did to deserve him.”
“And what are the rest of us then, chopped liver?” She kicks him in the shin. “I’m not going anywhere either, you jerk.”
Satoru’s eyes are very wide as he stares at her. Then he ducks his head, a bit bashful. “Yeah,” he agrees, looking a little wistful. “I got really lucky with all of you, didn’t I?”
“Damn right you did!” She kicks him again for good measure. “I’m sticking around, no matter how many stupid identity reveals you try to throw at me. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
He barks out a laugh, grinning widely. “Good! Mark your words, I’m holding you to that!”
(And when he confesses his plans for an anime of all fucking things, and reveals an entire past life’s worth of trauma at them, she screams a lot but she does, indeed, stick around to turn it into the best damn anime ever produced.)
--
idk I was listening to a lot of Mariah Carey's 2000's hits and remembered I'd made another Satoru cross-dressing alter-ego specifically to sing R&B karaoke hits so here we are 🤷♀️
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