Every Caller Wins a Prize

[angelcage]

The bright of the decontamination chamber when Makoto enters the inner broadcast station is the closest thing he's seen to the sun in 146 days and counting-- and he thanks his lucky stars for that. It's bad enough, the disconcerting amount of fanletters he gets. It's one thing to know the world is ending, but it's another to read the ubiquitous trauma-dumps about how bad it's going, and yet another if he had to see it with his own eyes.

Hence radio.

And it's not just him. Radio was pretty much a dead medium, he'd thought, getting into it. But now, nope. Now he's got the ears of what's left of the nation. So much for a quiet way to step out of the spotlight, to letting his voice fade out into the AM station's white noise.

On the plus side, he's found he enjoys radio. And he doesn't really have to read his fanmail.

He steps out of the chamber, cool mist clinging to the plastic of his coat as he sheds it. He shakes it over the grate before he hangs it up in the much dimmer, inner hallway. Across the way, Nazuna is still wearing his and dripping on the linoleum, as he waves him a good morning. "Mako-chin! More letters for you! This one's real fancy, give it a whiff!" Nazuna bounds over and waves it beneath Makoto's nose, where the rare scent of mossy earth, fir, and cold water spills upwards from it— he sneezes.

"G-geeze, how do you have this much energy? It's still early, isn't it?" He wipes at his nose, chin to his chest and shoulder to his face as he fishes around in a pocket to double check that he's not late.

Nazuna baps him over the head with the letter, and then presses it under his arm while he takes out his own handkerchief. "Not that early," he says, though Makoto's phone affirms they've got an hour before the broadcast begins. "Here, go freshen up. I'll go put this with the rest of 'em on your desk."

"You're always so reliable, Nito-senpai…" He stops trying to wipe his face in his shirt and takes the offered handkerchief, cheeks going pink as he replaces his phone. "Sorry, I guess I'm still not awake yet. Thanks, I'll get it back to you after."

Nazuna grins up at him and tosses him a casual thumbs up. "No sweat!" And with that, he's jogging down the hallway, plastic coat still on and flinging droplets with each bounce.

Makoto looks down at Nazuna's handkerchief in his hands. Actually, he has his own. But he'd already failed to say anything so the sunflower fabric sits clean and dry, unused in the front flap of his messenger bag. In the washroom, he scrubs his face, scrolls instagram, leaves some likes, skims the news, and then finally wipes away the chlorine-and-disinfectant-scent from the water off his skin.

When he comes to his desk, true to his word, Nazuna has left the stack of letters on his desk with the offending perfumed letter proudly propped up on top. Someone's gone through a lot of effort. The perfume aside, the envelope paper is something heavy weight and crazy nice, a silvery medallion of stamped wax seals it shut, and what's probably an expensive blue ink has penned his name above the address with an overfamiliar nickname. Listeners hear Nazuna call him "Mako-chin" on the air and assume they've got every right to call him whatever they like, too.

Whispering, so Nazuna won't hear even if he chooses this moment to enter the room, Makoto says to himself, "Gross."

Honestly, he can live with Mako-chin. That's something they've heard, something he and Nazuna have let them in on. But sometimes he gets the feeling that all these letters aren't to him at all. Thank you for being there, they write, though he's never met them, not even the once. I'm having a hard time, and the details follow from there. You've done so much for me. Your voice, your kindness, your humor. What are they even talking about? Doubt mounts inside him that he's got any of those things, because the rest of the letter is bunk. He hasn't done anything. He just talks because it's all he can do. He's not cut out for the sunshine, and it increasingly feels like he's not cut out for the limelight either.

He'll have to find a way to put at least this one in the burnables pile without Nazuna noticing.

---

At first, Izumi had tuned into the radio just to help keep track of what day it was. He wasn't the socialite kind of influencer to begin with, so it's not like a little solitude was going to drive him nuts, or anything. Actually, it was nice not to have an idiot chattering in his ears all the time. It'd be totally counterproductive to turn on the radio for background noise, when he'd finally gotten the chance to not have some.

But there's something he can't quite put his finger on about one of the hosts that keeps him coming back.

He doesn't believe in fate. Still, the first time he'd tuned into the broadcast station the host was reading the daily horoscopes— "Taurus, the time between 4 pm and 5 pm will bring some
favorable news on the personal front— h-hey, wait! That's now, isn't it?" A beat fuzzy with radio static brushes by as Izumi glances at his clock and sees that it is. The voice comes again too, the timing as if he's just finished the same check. "Ahaha, it really is. I guess I'll let you all know when I get some!"

So he's a Taurus. Izumi rolls his eyes at the hapless camaraderie the radio guy is projecting, playing at friends with his audience. Annoying. It sounds fake as hell. No one's actually that positive. The glance up is as good a reminder of that as anything. Music notes still cling to his unwashed walls, nearest the top where he'd missed them during his first pass scrubbing the room. Irritation flares up as he glares back down at the radio, like it's the one that put them there. Oblivious, the guy on the radio reads out Gemini's future, and then the rest as Izumi fetches cleaning supplies to deal with the rest of the grafitti.

"Next up is the weekly song request hour! Any genre, any artist! Old or new, we want to hear from you!" He laughs, like he can't keep a straight-face at reading the lame copy, before remembering something and breaking into a sidebar. "Oh— just keep it under ten minutes. Uhm, not that last time's prog-rock wasn't cool! But no more Flower Travellin Band for now. Or Mars Volta. Thirty-two minutes is kind of a lot…"

Who the hell lets people request that crap? It's so obvious the station's got trolls, if people are putting in for songs that waste half the run-time. No one with any sense would put up with it, Izumi thinks as he scrubs harder, the brush in his grasp furious with activity..

A phone ring punctuates the broadcast. "Hello and welcome to the radio request hour. You're live on the air, with me, your host: Yuuki Makoto."

"Hiya, Mako-kun." Greets the new voice. "I really owe ya a debt of gratitude, fer keepin' me company all the time. 'M basically livin' with the radio on."

"U-uh, really?" Like it actually catches him off guard. "Wow," Makoto says, like he's impressed anyone would do that, like he's considering how much time it is he spends on the air and that someone would listen to his job like it's their job, and finishes like faced with the huge reality of that he can still scarcely imagine it, "...that's a lot of listening."

"Ngahhh, is it? Didn't mean t'make y'nervous. I just thought Oshi-san over here might like the company, and I don't got too much goin' on in my head, so there's not too much t'say. You've really helped us out. It feels like we've really gotten t' know yah. ♪"

"Ehehe." Izumi can almost hear the blush, the embarrassed but slyly satisified grin sitting behind the mic. "Well, I try to be myself."

"Yer doin' a good job at it." The caller compliments, and then pauses. "Anyway, uh— nggah this'z off topic! Ehh, what was it again— can you do that Mozart guy?"

"—Hey!!" Makoto squawks, indignant. "I said nothing too long!" And then, a gasp, "So that's why you were buttering me up!"

"It wasn't nothin' like that, I swear! I don't have the brain cells for that, promise. It's just… oshi-san woulda liked it, I think." A pause, and then after hesitation the voice continues. "Oshi-san doesn't really get up much anymore, not even t'yell when I really mess up. Not since stuff went real sideways. Still… I can't let him be, either. I remembered he liked classics an' stuff, so… mm, it'd be real nice. Mako-kun's voice is good company, but I thought he'd like the Mozart."

A few moments of silence, and then Makoto's voice chimes back in. "... I guess some of them aren't too long. Uhm, let me see here. . . Fugue in G minor? Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?"

"Oh, that last one's the happy one, ain't it? Let's go with that. Listen, Oshi-san, it's one've yer favorites! ♪ Let's give it a good listen together."

Warmly, Makoto agrees, "All right, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. It's the happier one, too. Let's start the hour off right. Okay everyone, here's Mozart's A Little Night Music! Mozart, take it away."

Izumi's hands had gone still during the exchange, and his chest cold. Soapy water drips down the wall, as the bright allegro of strings alights from the radio speakers. Because he lives alone now, as surely as the caller on the other end of the broadcast does, no one turns it off. He's free to listen, without anyone rolling across the floor or declaring they hate Mozart. If Izumi wants to not hear it, he has to turn off the broadcast himself.

But on his own in the empty flat, the music just plays— he never did understand why that idiot hated Mozart. But in that moment, he hates Mozart. In that moment, he feels like he understands.

So he tunes in daily, after that.

---

A sharp inhale ending in a soft khht-thunk delivers Makoto's mail down the pneumatic tube to his office in the underground bunker of the radio station. He groans and glares at the 2-way intercom on his desk. Of his two coworkers, he knows who to blame. Shinobu would have spirited them into his room without him noticing. This is a Nazuna move. Though Nazuna isn't really in the wrong. . . Makoto shouldn't have left them in a common area to begin with, at least not a working one.

He presses the button that connects to Nazuna and opens the conversation with an apology, sheepish. "Sorry… did I leave my mail in the broadcast room again?"

"Yup. Mako-chin, you can be a real airhead sometimes," Nazuna says, blasé.

"Well, if I'm honest about it…" He spins slowly in his desk chair, looking at the mail heaped at the bottom of the still-closed tube, and then back into place so Nazuna can hear the rest of his reply, "I don't really like them, so I try not to think about them too much."


"Mako-chin! Fans put a lot of effort into those!"

"I know. But still…"

"Still…? Hey, have creeps been after you? Mako-chin! If that happens you've gotta say something! I'll go right to the source and take care of them! I'll beat'r brains in, until it dribbles out dey— deir— their noses! 'Mgonn mudder 'em!"

Oh, Nazuna must be getting really worked up if he's fumbling his words. He can picture his face all red and going redder as he tries to get his mouth to work right, his little frame shaking with protective rage in the big high-backed gamer chair Makoto ordered him.

"No, uhm, it's nothing like that. I'm fi~ne. Really," he placates. "Ahaha, it's still, you know, a little weird for me. . . There's all this big stuff going on, and I just sit in here and read headlines and play music. I'm not doing anything special. The station could manage just fine without me."

"Mako-chin. . . No," Nazuna sounds sympathetic, but not enough to not rebuke Makoto for it. "No, without you, it'd just be the two of us running the whole station. Shinobun would die." That startles a laugh out of Makoto, as Nazuna continues. "So no more saying that. If you don't get why, you're not gonna figure it out without reading any. We can read them together, if you want!"

"Ah, no, I…" Nazuna's probably being nosy, wanting to make sure Makoto really doesn't have a stalker, but Makoto could think of fewer things more embarrassing than reading his fanmail with him. The thought of Nazuna seeing that he's causing all this fuss over a few empty compliments is humiliating. He sighs. "I'll read them by myself. Honest."

Nazuna hmms on the other side of the intercom. "If you say so. Stop leaving them around at least, Mako-chin. It's like you want me to scold you." And with that, Nazuna's end of the line goes dead before Makoto can respond.

Which is just as well, because he didn't have much to say to that.

Before the whole radio host thing, Makoto used to be a pretty high-profile speed runner. Game code buckled, sequences broke, and he shaved seconds off world records. He face revealed in a live-stream documentary— and then reality had folded like origami, the same way it did in his games. He doesn't have any stomach for glitches anymore, for going into the out of bounds and sliding straight through the edges of the world. He barely even likes seeing his face bounced back at him, the way he'd see it on off a retro cabinet's CRT screen.

The way he sees it now, looking at the plastic divider that seperates the booth where live musicians used to play, from the rest of the recording studio that's now his bedroom. In the reflected glare, his bright green eyes are the same color as the newly fractured sun.

He inhales, and pulls up a lo-fi playlist to calm his nerves. Skin still crawling, he stands to retrieve his fan letters.