Title: The Violin and The Owl
Fandom: Mitarashi Games
Characters: Mouse, Ko
Rating: T
Warnings: Mouse is wearing a towel?
Notes: Just a quick drabble — a slice of life with Ko and Mouse.
"Mousie, why is there no internet?" Ko called across the house as he heard the shower turn off.
"Aw, hell. Again?" Mouse stormed out of the bathroom holding a towel. "That's like the third time this week."
"I didn't do it." Ko put his feet up on his desk and retrieved the bowl of Froot Loops he'd started eating hours ago, before he'd gotten distracted. "Service sucks in this part of town."
Mouse returned from fiddling with the hardware in the linen closet, and leaned into Ko's room. "Should be up again in a minute or two. What are you working on?"
Ko waved Mouse over without turning around. "Got this thing, it's like a hundred and thirty beats per minute, but with tidal sounds behind it. I was thinking about heading down to the shore, tonight, to see who's got a bonfire, and this just sort of came out."
"So put it on! I want to hear it!" Mouse wrapped the towel around his head so his hair wouldn't drip, and leaned over Ko's shoulder to examine the waveforms in the sequencer.
Ko took another bite of cereal and pressed play with his toe. "It's missing something. I don't know what, but it's just got this hole in it."
Mouse closed his eyes and rested his chin on Ko's shoulder to listen. The slow sound of the waves crashing provided a dizzying contrast to the sharp drum sounds and the heavily distorted… was that cello? But Ko was right. It was missing something.
"Again." The song ended, and he straightened up, taking a step back into a clear patch of floor. He threw the towel on the bed and picked up a pair of boxers from the floor. "I'm stealing your shorts, Ko."
"Right. Just let me know when to put it on again." Ko took another mouthful of cereal, and his foot hovered over the keyboard.
"Go for it." Mouse could dance. It was part of why he was so ridiculously good with the theremin — he had a sense of the way that motion related to sound, and it was good enough that Ko could just about recreate a piece of music by watching Mouse dance to it.
Now, Ko turned to watch as Mouse captured the tide with his hips, and his hands picked up the staccato rhythm of the drums. There was the cello, in the forearm gestures. The dance was as incomplete as the sound behind it, until Mouse moved his feet. There were the missing sounds — in the bend of the knee and the angle of the heel striking the floor. The violin and the owl. Those were what he'd left out.
Ko smiled and nodded, turning back toward the machine without a sound. He carefully slipped the missing sounds into the sequence, timing them with his headphones, before releasing them into the track that played through the speakers. As he turned back around, he set the track to loop and leaned back to eat his Froot Loops and watch Mousie dance. Maybe, tonight, they should go to the beach. Maybe Mouse would dance him something to slip to the DJ, on Saturday night.
He ate his cereal quietly. None of his speculations were really relevant to the moment. What mattered was that he'd written something right, and now it was unquestionably complete.
