Chapter Text
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OSHI NO KO: KIOKU NO ZANGAI
Oshi no Ko X Five Night at Freddy's
CHAPTER 1
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The pain after a caesarean section is ordinary in the way that impossible things become ordinary once you survive them.
Every mother who has been through it knows. One child is manageable. Two is harder. Triplets carry their own category of risk, the kind that makes obstetricians speak carefully and in measured tones.
For a sixteen-year-old, there are no measured tones. There is only the operating table and the decision that has already been made.
The scar heals. If not, it can be hidden. That part is simple. What does not heal easily is everything that comes after: the stamina required, the performances scheduled, the growing gap between who she was on stage and who she had just become in a delivery room.
Being an idol was already a performance of someone else's ideal. Being a mother was something rawer than that, and far less forgiving of mistakes.
And Ai Hoshino understood both. She had known, walking into it, what she was choosing. Greedy, she called herself, because that was the honest word for it. She wanted all of it and accepted what wanting cost.
Exhaustion had settled into her bones by the time she finally lay still.
The hospital ceiling was bright without being harsh. She watched it while her body tried to remember how to be a single person again. Hours passed between the surgery and the moment the nurse came through the door.
"Your babies are healthy." The nurse smiled. "Congratulations! You're a mother!"
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...
...
It hurts.
It's painful.
And that just made me remember something.
About fire, which right now is burning me up and down.
I didn't think remembering it would terrify me, but... fire really does take a long time to work through skin.
The crackling is loud enough to swallow everything else. The heat doesn't feel like heat anymore; it feels like being remade into something simpler.
Looking at this fire and watching my body being burned... should have been terrifying.
At least to most people.
But for me, I don't think there is anything special about my body anymore. It stopped being what it used to be a long time ago. Even if it still carried me this far, I have no hesitation in letting it burn.
But still, this fire hurts more than I thought.
And what's worse is that inside this body, there is one thing that lingers and can't be erased.
The one that couldn't let me go.
The one that keeps me alive and will keep me burning for eternity in this place if they don't get what they want.
...
Them.
Did they get him?
Do they get what they want?
...
This is the worst plan he could have come up with.
He who I volunteered for. The one who used to be close to him.
I saw something in his eyes when I decided to take part in this whole thing, and I knew he held the same feelings I carried toward all of this chaos. But... he thought fire was the answer.
I told him once and explained what I believed I knew about what keeps them from leaving a place. He listened. But at the time, he gave no answer, so I didn't know what he would do with it.
But after seeing this fire spreading through the room, I don't think he heard me. I don't know why.
...
But maybe it's not a bad thing.
Because this plan has gotten him trapped somewhere in this building.
And there is someone who has been waiting for him in these walls patiently. Who has always known how to hold the others together, to give direction to what would otherwise be only grief and fury without a target.
And maybe they will all find him.
And when they do, when what they have been holding onto finally releases, the thing that has been keeping me here will go quiet too.
At least that's what those documents told me.
...
Ah, right.
He said something before he set this place on fire. I heard it through the speakers:
He said that none of this should be remembered.
That the suffering was real, but the terror it represented was too dangerous to leave behind. Too easy to rediscover. Too easy to build something worse from.
Bury it.
Burn it down and bury it.
I understand the logic. The things done here were not the kind you can put behind glass and trust people to learn the right lesson from. Some horrors have a way of inspiring the wrong people.
But...
NOBODY WILL REMEMBER THIS
NOBODY WILL KNOW THESE EXIST
NOBODY WILL REMEMBER
...
Maybe I should've just stayed quiet, these thoughts just kept me restless.
But now that I think about it, I wonder where they are right now.
I remember about him. The way he used to follow me. The way I used to let him. The way things between us changed. The way I told myself what happened to him had nothing to do with me, even as I stood there. Even as I watched at the party.
And then her. She... left the house and went to that place, while I was too busy looking forward to look back. She was eager to see that thing, and I didn't know what had happened until much later.
And then... him.
He wasn't someone who yelled. He was... something.
He was the kind that made strangers trust him immediately, the kind that made all children believe that what they saw in public was the whole of who he was.
The one who did impossible things.
And I was there, watching him.
And they were all stunning.
At that time, I...
...wanted to see more of them.
So I listened to him. Always.
Whatever he needed, I did it for him.
Whatever he needed taken apart, I took apart.
He always gave me options whenever he asked me for something. A freedom to choose.
And I chose the ones that made him pleased.
I know what I was.
And I, at that time, wanted to know...
...what he thought of me.
Did it change? Or did it change nothing?
But should I even want to know?
Even after I knew everything, some part of me was still that boy at the dinner table, watching him cut his food, still finding something in him I could not stop being drawn to...
Awe.
It's... hard not to.
I don't know what to do with it. I never did.
...
Maybe I—
Argh-!
It...hurts.
My head... It's so sudden, right before I...
This... pain.
Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.
The fire just makes it worse.
I should stop thinking.
I... I should have known this would be terrible.
Why are they taking so long?
What are they doing?
This body... having almost no organs but kept alive is painful as it is, but that headache takes a really different kind of hurt.
I should have known this would be brutal.
I... Remember me...
Please...
...
...
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...
Bright.
And warm.
It's like... something that was not there before, and now is.
Cold.
And something loud, somewhere very close. Something rhythmic that doesn't stop.
What just happened?
...
...Is that a heartbeat?
Wait.
Is it... my heartbeat?
What's happening?
Why is—
Wait a second...
...
Oh.
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Months Passed
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The apartment was quiet in the particular way that apartments with newborns are never actually quiet.
There was always something. A shift of weight. A small sound building toward a larger one. The specific tension of a room waiting for something to need attending to.
Ai Hoshino sat on the floor with all three of them around her, which was the only arrangement that made sense anymore, because there was no position in a chair or on a couch that accounted for three.
She looked at the first.
The baby was watching the ceiling with the focused, slightly offended expression he had worn since day one, as though the world had presented itself and he found it overwhelming.
She looked at the second.
The baby was already reaching for things that were not close enough to reach. Already certain she would get them anyway.
She looked at the third.
He was very still. He had been still since the hospital. Not in the way that worried the nurses, just in the way that made them pause sometimes, the way you pause when something is quieter than it has any reason to be.
Ai chuckled.
She looked down at her lap, contemplating something in her mind.
"...I," she began. "didn't think I'd have triplets. Somehow, I survived."
Then she smiled.
"But I'm very happy about it!"
She reached to the first.
"Aqua."
Her other hand came to the second, stopping her from reaching out to something.
"Ruby."
Once she settled the two on her lap, she reached out to the third and brought him to her side.
"Ame."
She wrapped her arms around all three, and the infants went still.
"..."
She didn't say anything. Just holding her newborns against her, feeling their warmth against her body.
It was comforting.
One of them, though, was somewhere else entirely.
“Ame, short for Amethyst. So that's my name now, huh. I should've been dead, but...”
He paused for a moment.
“I don't know how to respond to that.”
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To Be Continued
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