Quiet, Hard-Earned

She clocks out at the pathetic hour of ten pm; stumbles through the garage exit because that’s the one with the least fans blocking the exit, and only the most dedicated paparazzi still skulking around this late. Sure enough, she only spots a single familiar face lurking in the bushes when she emerges.

“Long shift you clocked in for,” says Sakura, the worst reporter ever born. “Are there maybe new songs being recorded? For a new album, perhaps? Neonite always have peak popularity in the summer, so maybe it’s their turn to hit the studio.”

“Shut up, Sakura,” Hakaze says, rolling her eyes. “Just take some pictures of me leaving. Here, I’ll pretend I’m on my phone and super distracted, maybe that’ll get you some page hits.”

“I don’t want to waste my storage like that, pictures of you hardly get any traffic anymore. Look at the way you dress, don’t you have any pride as a former idol?”

Yay. Though the note about the clothes actually stings, because Hakaze actually picked a nicer hoodie today. She doesn’t let it show, except Sakura probably can tell, the witch. 

“A-anyway. Who are you waiting out here for? If my pretty face isn’t enough for you.”

She makes a shooing motion. “Get out of here. Go get drunk with the same people you’ve been drinking for ten years with. God, your group was so boring to cover when you were famous. All you did was try to get alcohol poisoning. No one wanted to read that shit.”

Hakaze sighs and walks away. “Just say you never loved me, jeez. Make sure you get in your car if it gets too cold, it’s supposed to go below ten degrees tonight.”

Sakura throws her a middle finger, which Hakaze returns.

The night is chillier than anticipated; even through the hoodie, it bites at Hakaze’s fingers. The sidewalk across the street is crowded again with maybe eight girls with lightsticks tucked into tote bags, thermoses steaming in gloved hands. They’re quiet, scrolling on their phones, waiting. Someone has taped a handwritten banner to the lamppost: NEONITE FOREVER.

She takes a deep breath and hurries past, not making eye contact and joining the foot traffic of the tired office workers shuffling through the street. Boy group fans are something else.

When she comes to the next block, however, everything’s lit up: gorgeous and bright, and everyone’s laughing. She’s almost skipping by the time she nears a familiar doorway decorated with fairy lights, the interior dark and lit only by neon signs. She ducks her head in a bow as she enters, the same bar for ten years running. “Teacher, I missed you!”

The CEO’s wife, a gorgeous former actress with a pixie cut, rolls her eyes. “Yes, yes. Your little friends are out back, get them out of my hair, please.”

“No can do,” Hakaze sings, skipping through the divider. Here, about twenty pretty faces blink at her before they smile goofily.

The bar’s supposed to be secret, but no one really cares anymore. So what if a bunch of older celebrities go drinking at the same place almost every night? Except for their group, the rest of the idols always rotate, so it’s not like any of them are especially close.

Well.

“You’re so smart,” Kaori’s telling one of the actors, sitting alone at a table. “I’d love to hear you say more about abalones, but my beloved Hakaze’s here, so I have to go!”

“Please, don’t stop on my account,” Hakaze says drily. She collapses on the empty chair for the table of three, and Nao wordlessly pours her a glass of beer. “You look like you just fought a bear.”

“Feels like it,” she says. “Do we have anything stronger?”

“Not today,” Nao says. She drinks hers straight out of the bottle; she’s so cool Hakaze’s going to lose it. “Have a photoshoot tomorrow. Let me get you some snacks, fatso over there already ate all the gyoza.”

Her heels click on the flooring, clack-clack, the sound of having your shit together. She gets prettier every day, their Nao: fame suits her. Hakaze skips alongside, her sneakers skidding a little.

“When did you the new haircut? It looks so good. You look like an ice queen.”

“This morning. Like the highlights?”

“Love them! Did you get them for the new movie?”

Years ago, when the open wound of their disbandment was still raw, Nao had slammed a dossier in front of her. “I want to act,” she’d said, bluntly. “And if you’re going to throw a tantrum and never show your face in public again, at least use that brain of yours to help me.”

“You have a dossier about acting?” was all Hakaze could manage.

A shrug. “It’s a business, like any other. You need connections and you need a value proposition. Help me find mine.”

And now, five years later, Nao was way more successful than they’d ever been, to a degree that it’s almost embarrassing, like ECLIPSE had been holding her back. Hakaze tries not to think about it too hard, but sometimes it’s impossible to ignore: like now, when the only time they can talk is in this noisy bar that’s their second home.

“Hm? No, the new movie’s some fantasy thing, I’ll be wearing a wig the whole time. The highlights just seemed fun. You should get them, too. We’d match.”

She puts their order in, and Teacher smiles at her. Everyone had a soft spot for Nao.

“I could never pull it off like you do,” Hakaze says.

“Eh, come on. You never take risks anymore. Same boring haircut you had when we disbanded, it’s like you’re stuck in time.”

Hakaze blinks. Stuck had kept her afloat all this time. 

Nao pauses, just for a second, like she’d meant it half as a joke and only now realized where it landed. She sighs, softer when she speaks again. “You know what I mean.”

Hakaze does. That’s kind of the problem.

She’s had this haircut for years. Same part, same length, trimmed just enough to to be stylish. It's the haircut that she had for their disbandment announcement, something she got when she had a hundred things on her mind and somehow became her default. Somewhere along the way, the idea of waiting softened into letting things settle into how they should be. 

Still. Stuck in time lands like a kick in her chest.

“Aren’t you tired,” Nao says quietly, as they step out onto the patio, the noise swallowing them whole, “of waiting for her to come back?”

Hakaze opens her mouth, a joke half-formed on her tongue. The narrow of Nao's eyes tells her she shouldn't bother, before she slips on ahead, back to their table, leaving Hakaze to meander back alone.

The cold air helps. So does the sudden swell of laughter from the back tables, Kaori’s voice rising above the rest like a bell.

By the time they sit back down, Hakaze has smoothed her expression into something passable.

“We ordered edamame,” she says, brightly, as if nothing important had just happened. “This fashionable lateness is going too far.”

“Your father and I are worried,” Nao adds, crossing her arms. “Young lady, is this any time to be showing up to a meeting you called?”

“Nooooo,” Kaori wails. Even this is cute: her little rabbit face scrunches all the way up and her eyes go big. “You’re both so mean to me. Anyway, he was giving me good info! See!”

She triumphantly holds out her phone. On her screen is a photo of two figures in dark clothes, walking close together. The picture’s so low-res it’s amazing that someone bothered to take it, but the watermark has the name of a famous celebrity gossip site on the bottom-left corner. Nao and Hakaze squint at it.

“That’s Kim Dohyun gone too!” Kaori says. Her fist comes down on the desk. “I’m never getting a real harem at this rate!”

Post-disbandment, famous girl group ECLIPSE parted ways: Hakaze to obscurity and a studio basement, Nao to a successful career of acting, and Kaori back to her old life as freewheeling heiress with a baffling love life.

“Ugh,” says Nao, still squinting. “It’s hard enough to find one decent man, why are you trying to find a whole troupe?”

“You don’t understand, I deserve it,” Kaori sobs. “And all the boys in the isekai manga have harems, why can’t I?”

Nao snorts. “They’re not real, dumbass. Guess it’s time to update the list.”

Hakaze leans down to pull her laptop out of her backpack: in the spreadsheet titled KAORI MIRACLE ROMANCE PROJECT.xls, she finds Kim Dohyun’s name and changes his status to Alleged Relationship.

That only leaves nineteen names left.

“Damn,” Hakaze mumbles to Nao. “We might not fill out the harem by the end of this year, and her scary rich dad’s going to kill us for being bad friends.”

“We can only dream.”

Grimly, they clink their beers together.

“Oh!” Kaori raises her head from her face-plant in the desk. “By the way, Hakaze, why were you cussing out men in the group chat earlier? You sounded even more annoying than usual.”

“Oh, I almost forgot. Remember Harua? From Neonite? Little shit’s pulling favors again.”

Nao snorts. “He’s so much like you back then it’s scary. Serves you right.”

“Shut up. But yeah. He’s already got a girlfriend.”

Both their eyes widen. “What the hell, open with that! I thought you were about to tell us some boring stuff!”

“Isn’t Neonite going to win artist of the year again this year?”

Hakaze nods. Nao whistles and leans back in her chair. “Kid’s got balls. Does he want you to cover for him?”

“Oh, that’s where it gets weird.” Hakaze tells them about his request, which makes Nao frown.

“Ren Mikazuki? I don’t think you have the clout to tell him what to do anymore.” To illustrate this, Nao turns her beer bottle around: on the label is a boy with dark hair and a wide smile, giving the camera a thumbs-up.

Hakaze studies his features. He’s crazy good-looking. Even for an idol, there’s something about his smile that’s like the first frost of winter, the golden hour of dusk. Something shadowed and mysterious and otherworldly, like someone made of individual perfect parts to make one perfect, cohesive whole.

She exhales softly. “Whoa.”

The sound surprises her. She can’t remember the last time she reacted like that to anyone.

“Right?”

“He’s on my list, too!”

Hakaze blinks. Sure enough, row 17: Ren Mikazuki. Under the Positive Traits, it simply says: face.

Looking at that photo on the label, Hakaze fervently agrees: face.

“It also kind of feels like every other kid in the company’s talking about him,” Hakaze says, slowly. “You should hear them. It’s always Ren this, Ren that. Like saying his name might summon him.”

“Can’t be fun for him. What’s he like?”

“Never met the guy. Probably pretty perfect, if he’s so universally popular.”

“Bleh. Prince types are so hard to deal with. They always flirt too hard to have a proper conversation.”

Moments like this are when Hakaze misses Reina the most. Her reliable older sister with all the answers. Reina had always seen that core of Hakaze that never stopped wanting, because she had it too. 

She closes her eyes. The bar is loud, and the buzz in her ears is a pleasant distraction from her thoughts. Still, persistent, is Harua’s face, the way his cocky grin faltered.

Hakaze’s problem had always, always been that she went looking for people to love.

As if she’s reading Hakaze’s mind, Kaori smiles, sweet and wistful. “But you’re going to help him, aren’t you? That’s what you always do. Leader.”

And she does, she does.