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“Kana really is a lightweight, isn’t she?”
Aqua followed Akane’s gaze to where it rested on the girl in question. She was sprawled ungracefully across Ruby’s narrow couch, one hand dangling off the edge and the other cramped quite uncomfortably against her cheek. Streaks of red hair lay across her nose, fluttering slightly with the rhythm of her breath. He looked away before he could notice the way her shirt rose up and winked a flash of skin across her belly.
“It would infuriate her to learn you only ever call her Kana behind her back these days,” he said.
Akane laughed.
She was watching him, now, fingers tented under her chin as she rested her elbows on the tabletop they’d all been drinking on. Ruby and Kana’s glasses were still there, half-full of a dubious brown brew Memcho had promised was ‘international-standard whiskey!’ but which tasted like a hospital trip for smoke inhalation. Akane’s was down to the dregs for the third or fourth time that night, though you could only really tell by the shallow flush under her eyes; Aqua’s was untouched except for the single sip he’d needed to promise Memcho before she’d left him alone.
“I know,” she said, and she sounded happy. “I wonder if she’d forgive me if I call her ‘Kana-chan’ again when I present her with an Academy prize.”
“When?” Aqua tapped a finger on the side of his glass, studying the way it rippled his whiskey against the curve of the glass. “As her arch-rival, Akane, you sound awfully confident that she’ll eclipse you.”
“I’ll win one first!” Akane’s pout was probably fifth or sixth in her list of devastating weapons, but that was more a compliment to the depth of her armoury than any insult to the expression. She unpursed her lips—the pale blue of her lipstick a little smudged where it had kissed the edge of her glass so many times—and brushed a few stray strands of hair out of her face. “I almost had it last year, but Frill’s performance was more captivating. She’s spent too much time around Ruby.”
“You could have too,” he said. It wasn’t quite ‘spending time around Ruby’ he was referring to. He’d watched both films, after all. “If you’d wanted to.”
Akane nodded. The rivers of her hair, dark as the edge of the sea before the horizon hit, rustled around the shoulders of her long-sleeved shirt. “I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
For a little while, the room was quiet except for the hum of the air-conditioner and the rumble of Memcho’s snoring from where she used Ruby’s stomach as a pillow. They were both spread awkwardly across the carpet, two startlingly blonde splashes against the faded white fur. Aqua smiled, and almost took a photo to send to Miyako before Akane interrupted his thoughts.
“I guess I want the win to be mine,” she said, stretching her arms out across the table—nearly knocking her glass over—and resting her head on the marble surface. Her voice came out muffled and low with frustration: at herself, he was sure. “It’s easy, now, to be like Ai. To consume all the other stars on the stage and fill my eyes with them. To captivate the set, the shot, with my own personal gravity. But at the same time, it isn’t my gravity. When it’s Kurokawa Akane acting like Hoshino Ai acting like… whoever I’ve been cast as, is that really Kurokawa Akane at all?”
She sighed, her stare fixed on the wall opposite, painted a garishly bright shade of red because, even as an adult and two-time Non-no magazine ‘Most Fashionable Woman Under Twenty-Five’ winner, Ruby’s aesthetic sensibilities still tended toward ‘childishly extravagant’.
“I guess that’s my pride as an actress: I want to deliver a strong enough performance that you can’t look away from me, not her. That’s the lie I want to tell—Kurokawa Akane’s and no-one else’s.”
“You will,” Aqua said without hesitation. There were not many things in the world he’d ever been willing to rely on, but the raw brilliance of Kurokawa Akane was one of them. (That had been part of the problem: he’d been willing to rely on her talents even when he hadn’t let himself rely on her.) “I believe in you.”
A wry smile curled across her lips, and when she tilted her head back to look at him, the whole of her expression was dangerously soft: the puff of her cheeks, the crinkle of her eyes, the crease of her brows. “Thank you, Aqua.”
He looked away, and realised that meant he was looking at Kana and the way her small mouth had parted slightly in her sleep, and so found something fascinating in the kitschy cat clock ticking away on the mantel board instead. Miyako had forced it on him as part of his twenty-first birthday surprise, saying it had reminded her of him, grinning because she knew he’d never be able to get rid of it or else she’d cry.
“When are you going to tell Kana?” Akane asked, because of course she’d caught him and of course she’d had just enough to drink that she was willing to actually say it out loud. “You shouldn’t string along a girl like her, you know. She deserves better than that.”
She did. And she wasn’t the only one. That was, in many ways, the issue.
“It’s not up to you to decide if you’re good enough for her, Aqua,” Akane said, before he could find a way to disguise his hesitation to answer as anything else but truth. “Part of loving someone is coming to trust when they love you too.”
This time, he couldn’t glance away—this time, she allowed him nowhere to hide. It was as if Akane had pinned him to the kitchen counter he was leaning against, the needle-and-tooth of her regard transfixing him by the lapels of his winter coat. Aqua nearly patted his chest, just to check if there were any bloodstains blooming against the dark fabric. After all the things he’d lived through, the idea that Kurokawa Akane’s stare could cut would have been far from the strangest.
“Believe me,” she continued, not quite bitter, not quite rueful, “if there’s anything I know all too well, it’s that.”
“I’m sorry,” Aqua said, running a hand through the golden mess of his hair. He was sorry for a lot of things. Most of them were beyond apology. Too many he’d already been forgiven for.
“Don’t.” Akane slapped a hand on the tabletop to emphasise the point—before whipping her head around in a panic, but none of the idols slumped around the apartment so much as stirred. Memcho had rolled over at some point, her nose digging into Ruby’s sternum and muffling her snores; Kana was twitching slightly, like kittens did when they were dreaming. “I don’t want your pity, and if you’re going to lie to me at least make it about your feelings, not your actions.”
Then she blinked heavily.
“Oh. I really am a little drunk, aren’t I. Sorry.”
“Now we’re both liars,” he said, and, out of some strange impulse born from the hour and the memory of the way Akane had looked at him, knocked back half his now-lukewarm whiskey. It was even worse the second time around, and whatever he’d intended to say afterwards was lost in a series of spluttering coughs he frantically muffled with a hand.
Akane shook with silent laughter, leaning back to arch in her wooden chair and stretch, hands high above her head. The movement tightened the fabric of her shirt across her chest as well, the bright camellia pattern only serving to accentuate the curve. He’d been telling the truth, all those years ago when she’d offered him her body and he’d said he’d thought about it: Akane was a stunning woman, and even more so now that she’d aged into confidence.
He fixed his eyes on the kitchen counter, and the tiny little swirls of stone spun into the quartz, and hoped she hadn’t noticed that he’d noticed.
“Hey, Aqua,” she said after a strangely comfortable silence, “we really are both liars, aren’t we?”
“I guess we are,” he said. Ruby had named him well, back when he’d sprung their story to save Kana’s. “I’m sorry you had to be.”
This time, he was telling the truth.
Akane took a deep breath, let it out so slowly that it didn’t even disturb the long strands of hair that had crept their way onto her nose, and spoke. “And if I asked you to take responsibility for it, what would you do?”
“You wouldn’t,” Aqua said, not lifting his head from the dirty brown swirl half-filling his glass as he rocked it back and forth in a hand.
She laughed. It had that half-frustrated, half-pleased sound her laughter so often had around him. “You’re right, of course. You’re not my property, and I’m not yours.”
There was a pause. He recognised it immediately: the silence of someone wondering whether or not to lie.
When Akane spoke again, it was quieter. “But if I did. If I… had. What would you have done?”
Aqua didn’t need to think. He raised his face to meet hers and said, “I’d have told you to stop doing dangerous things.”
That hurt her. He could see it in the tension of her eyes, jade cutting itself sharper so there was less left to be vulnerable—could feel it in the sympathetic cringe of his fingers as her nails scraped across the table like he’d sliced her palm open. She blinked a couple of times. Aqua gave her the courtesy of not pretending he hadn’t seen the dew her long eyelashes wicked away.
“You would have, wouldn’t you?” Akane exhaled raggedly, the air dragged out of her lungs by seemingly sheer force of will. “I was right, all those years ago. I never could have saved you at all.”
“It was never your responsibility,” he said, trying for something as close to gentle as he thought she’d allow. “And I didn’t need to be saved.”
“Yes, you did.” Her tone brooked no disagreement. “And I know I brought it up, Aqua, but I don’t think you have any right to talk to anyone about things that aren’t their responsibility.”
He probably deserved that.
Akane turned to study Kana again—so inoffensively quiet in sleep as she was entirely incapable of being once awake. There was fondness in the reluctant curl of her smile. Aqua allowed himself to do the same, and hoped his own smile was far subtler.
“Arima Kana, the genius who can lick a lying snitch.” Despite himself, Aqua snorted a laugh. He hadn’t expected Ruby’s joke from Akane’s mouth. “She loves you, and she hates me, and she doesn’t even need to understand either of us to drive us up the wall.”
“She’s far too good at that,” Aqua said. “But I think she understands more than you realise.”
“And I think she doesn’t realise what we’re really capable of,” Akane said. That part of her—the one that refused to give an inch to Arima Kana, no matter what—had never stopped being strangely endearing. “You’d kill for her. I’d kill for you. And she’d hit both of us with a parasol for even thinking about it.”
“Kana isn’t that innocent.”
“Aqua.” Akane sounded exasperated, which was a much better look on her than the quiet hopelessness she’d worn before. “I’m not trying to disparage the girl you’re too much of a coward to confess to. I know better than anyone else in the world how strong Arima Kana is. I’m only trying to explain,” the to myself went unsaid, “that you don’t want someone who will accept you for who and what you are, who’d go to hell with you if you just gave her the word. You want someone who wouldn’t. Not because they’re weak. Because they’d want you to be better than that.”
She thrust a finger at Kana’s sleeping form, sleeve jerking back to expose the pale fluting of her wrist.
“That girl is right there. If you won’t take responsibility for what I did to myself, then take responsibility for what you’ve done for her. I’ll never accept playing second fiddle to Arima Kana, but I refuse to accept pretending I haven’t lost to her.”
Akane hadn’t raised her voice. If anything, she’d gotten even quieter, until she was less speaking than hissing, like her body was fighting her mind to stop her from admitting Kana had bested her in anything at all. But each word thundered through Aqua’s ears like it was Akane who was the divine messenger of Amaterasu, not two toddlers pretending.
“Why?” he asked, because that was easier than thinking about whether or not she was right.
(She was. Of course she was. Kurokawa Akane might make mistakes, but she was never wrong. She was the smartest person Aqua had ever met, in this life or the last.)
“I told you, Aqua,” she said, soft and sure the way secrets were. “On the bridge where you saved my life: I want to be your strength.”
She stood and stepped over to the kitchen counter, socks silent on the polished wood of the floorboards. She could have walked around it and stood beside him, and he thought a part of her might have wanted to, but she chose instead to mirror his pose, elbows leaning against it and glass entirely forgotten. There was something haunting about the way she moved—slow and graceful and nothing like Hoshino Ai at all.
Akane took his hand, slender fingers slotting between his own like a key might. She was warm despite the chill of the night; maybe the alcohol that swam in the swell of her blush, maybe the thing that wasn’t alcohol at all that filled her eyes like stars. It should have reminded him of someone else. Yet all he could see was Akane.
“That’s the truth, Hoshino Aquamarine. I—” and here, for the first time that evening, she stumbled over herself and she almost looked away. But she didn’t. His tongue was thick with awe when he swallowed. “I love you. I love you in a way I don’t know how to forget. And I know there’s a part of you that loves me. I think that’s what hurts the most.”
She let go of his hand to tap him over the heart, nail pressing into the heavy fabric of his coat, before dropping her arm away.
“But I also know the same thing I’ve known since a few months after we met. You love Arima Kana too. You always have.” He realised, then, that this was what heartbreak sounded like. Not sharp; nothing dramatic; nothing howling; nothing hateful. Just a little flinch of the lips and a sentence where the spaces between syllables stretched slightly too long. “And I’m tired, Aqua. I can’t forget you, I’ll never unlove you, but please—give me the dignity of pretending I have a chance to try.”
Her fingers were flat and stretched on the counter, and for a time they just stared at each other. Aqua wondered what she was seeing—blonde-haired, blue-eyed wunderkind Hoshino Aquamarine, award-winning director and actor and producer and writer and model before the age of twenty-five? No. This was Kurokawa Akane, who made even Hercule Poirot a fool beside her. She knew him better than that.
(That was, as ever, the issue.)
It came to him all at once, as it had when he’d slumped in the ruin of his room, a phone to his ear and her voice on the line what seemed like a lifetime ago. Giving up Akane would mean giving up this. Giving up the chance to be known to the hollows of his bones. Giving up the chance to be supported no matter how bloody the knife he asked her to hold.
Giving up a love that would kill the sky if that was what it took to keep him from the shade.
And yet.
Choosing her would mean turning his face from the Sun.
A girl on a stage, nervous and fumbling and then turning, turning, to see him, to see him, and like a sunrise unfolding in streaks of red across the sky the whole of her screams
“I’m gonna be your star!”
and he is lost.
Aqua let himself memorise Akane’s expression, the graven mask that sat across her features much as kintsugi did to pottery and the way she bent slightly into his space nonetheless—and then he looked deliberately past her to where Kana had by now half-rolled off the couch.
She was drooling in her sleep. It slipped down her jaw and stained the collar of her green button-down shirt darker. He wanted to wake her up and tell her so that he could see her explode in furious indignation and call him an idiot for daring to wake her, daring to see her in an embarrassing position, and daring not to stop her from embarrassing herself in the first place, all at the same time.
He wanted, he realised, to see Arima Kana.
“Thank you, Akane,” he said, as sincerely as he was capable of. “Thank you, and I’m sorry.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw her lips twitch into a smile. Or a sob.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. Her voice was cool, the way ice was even moments from the splinter. “You can do a lot of things, Aqua, but you can’t control your heart. Or mine.”
“She’s a hopeless idol,” he agreed, “and as a fan, I’m her hopeless slave.”
“I’ll tell her you said that.”
“Please don’t.”
They shared a laugh, low and easy as the silence that followed.
Instead of speaking, Aqua fixed his attention on the ceiling, painted to resemble the sky out in the wilds far beyond Tokyo, where the light pollution fell away and the stars didn’t have to burn themselves out just to be seen. Ruby had taken to losing herself out there every couple of months, walking the tracks with a body that never had to brace itself like it was just about to fall.
Was that how Akane had felt around him, the last few years? Was that how Kana had felt?
Watching. Waiting. Wondering.
And never, ever knowing.
He couldn’t do that to them anymore.
“I’ll tell her,” he decided. “You’re right. She deserves better than that.”
And so do you.
“You finally said it.” Akane seemed… relieved, almost, the way a drowning man might be when the flotsam finally cracks and there’s nothing left to cling to any longer. “I’m glad, you know. You said it and it was—it was definitely not a lie.”
She’d turned away from him, back toward the table, and missed the way her words splintered through him like a knife to the gut.
Aqua choked on his breath, and had to gasp another sip of the frankly horrendous whiskey just to disguise it as another fit of coughing.
But that, too, was comfortably nostalgic on a night that had spent so much time living in it. He’d had much the same reaction when she’d told him, casual as can be, that the only way Hoshino Ai had made sense was if she’d had a baby in secret.
You really are terrifying, Kurokawa Akane.
(He saw, then, what she’d look like when she won her Academy prize. She’d look just like this: half in motion as she spun back to see if he was alright, her face shaded in a cross-hatch of amusement and concern, and the audience left wondering if she’d ever split them in half at all.)
He opened his mouth to reassure her that he was fine, and—
“—Aquaaaaaaa,” groaned a voice burred rough by waking, “why are you dying?”
Kana’s head peeked over the top of the couch’s high back, flyaway hair latched onto her lips like it couldn’t bear to let them go as she blinked her eyes slowly clear of sleep. She glanced blearily from somewhere around his nose to slightly left of the near-empty glass gripped lightly in his hand, and nodded once.
“You idiot. How many times do I have to tell you not to trust drinks pushed on you by strange girls?”
Over Kana’s shoulder, Aqua saw the slumbering Memcho wince as if struck.
“Aqua’s a big boy, Arima. He can do whatever he wants with strange girls,” Akane said, like she hadn’t just spent the last half an hour backing him into the corner about his feelings for the very same girl she was teasing without a hint of remorse.
“Too bad for you that you’re not strange, Akane-chan,” Kana snapped back, glaring at Akane. “You’re just plain deranged, you fangirl. Do you want me to sign a poster so you’ll shut up?”
Aqua couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing, loud and bright and utterly amazed.
The two of them whipped around to look at him again—Akane pouting, Kana raising a quizzical eyebrow—but he just kept laughing until he collapsed onto the kitchen counter, cheek flat against the cool stone, his whole body shaking with mirth.
“Did Memcho actually spike the whiskey?” Kana whispered sotto voce to Akane.
“I don’t… think so,” Akane said, sounding remarkably hesitant for someone who’d finished three or four glasses of it without apparent ill-effect. “Maybe Aqua’s just as much of a lightweight as you are.”
“I am not a lightweight!”
“Arima, you passed out before you finished your second sip. Maybe leave the drinking to the adults next time.”
“I’ll show you an adult!” Kana said, launching herself over the couch like a very small lion—
—only for her stockings to catch on the backboard and leave her toppling precariously forward instead.
She closed her eyes, perhaps anticipating the thump of her skull against the carpet as Akane gasped; they sprang open again when Aqua caught her in a sprawling kind of dive that he was pretty sure sprained one of his ankles and ended with his shoulder slamming painfully into the back of the couch.
“Aqua?” she asked, somewhere between disconcerted and breathless. She was soft and warm in his arms, the sparkling garnet of her gaze as bright as her lips.
“Maybe it’s time you went home,” he said, and instantly realised his mistake.
“You two-faced jerk! Don’t catch me like a prince and then treat me like a child!” Kana frowned at him, folding her arms across her chest.
His mouth opened around the words Don’t act like one before he realised:
He’d made a promise to tell Kana how he felt about her, and sanctified it with the heartsblood of a girl he could have loved in any other life but this.
He’d broken a lot of promises over the years—but this one he had to keep.
So instead he said, “When I think of taking you home, Arima Kana, trust me when I say it’s not because I’m thinking of you as a child.”
“A—Ah.” Kana’s voice broke prettily, like a flower snipped from the stem. “I. I see.”
“You will,” he said, gingerly getting to his feet and immediately setting her down on her own in front of him. He was a little too on the slender side to be carrying girls around in his arms all day, no matter how light they were. “Shall we go?”
Despite her blooming blush, he caught the way her eyes flicked to Akane behind him.
Whatever she saw there had her blinking in what could have been sorrow, or apology, or simple acknowledgement.
When she glanced back at him, she smiled like the Sun.
“Okay.”
Akane watched them leave, not quite hand-in-hand but likely going to end up there before they reached Kana’s apartment complex.
She sighed, burying her head in her palms and feeling the creases of her skin with her fingers. The whiskey still burned low in her stomach and the back of her throat. Thank the gods for Memcho and her awful taste in alcohol. She didn’t think she’d have been brave enough for this without it.
Closing her eyes only called to mind Aqua’s expression, in the the moment when he’d chosen Arima Kana—the inevitability of it plain in the stupid little smile he hadn’t noticed he was wearing, the one that had looked so ridiculous against the sharp cut of his jaw and the ocean-in-starlight of his stare.
I’ll tell her. You’re right. She deserves better than that.
“You awful, awful man,” she said, and did not cry. “Why did you have to forget that I always liked you best when you were trying to be honest with me, you liar?”
