but if you do

Kirishima's voice is still echoing, sneering and sure, in her head when she storms out of the conference room.

The thorn in Hakaze's side has always been how bad things got to her. Five years post-disbandment, the flash of Kirishima's professional smile grates just as bad as it did then, and Hakaze's aware that her fists are tightly clenched, her teeth gritted as she leaves.

All this would mean Eclipse went down for nothing, just like Neonite's about to be. All those things she told herself about scandals and endings and the industry would have been for nothing.

It was one thing to accept something was fated to end. It was another to stand here remembering Kirishima walking in, blank-eyed, saying: you’ll be announcing your disbandment next month.

At the time, she’d thought it was inevitable. What if it came down to a stupid meeting like this?

“Reina,” she murmurs, “you should have let me punch him when we had the chance.”

She shoulders open the balcony door and heat rushes up immediately, thick summer air—and freezes.

There’s a figure leaning against the railing, tall, broad-shouldered, a lit cigarette burning an arrogant little bead of orange against the white sky.

Her mood plunges lower. 

Not now. She’s in the filthiest mood, she can’t muster niceties for anyone—

"I'll find somewhere else."

Dark eyes blink at her, and it’s disorienting, like a sudden shift in elevation or the boom of far-off thunder.

“Please don't leave on my account,” says Ren. He clears his throat. “You look like you need it.”

“Thanks," she says, dry. 

"I didn't mean--" he sighs. Awkward, he offers, "I can shut up. You don't have to go."

She huffs a laugh through her nose, more surprised than anything. His eyes zip to hers, and he gives her a small smile.

He has the most interesting effect on the mess of thoughts curdling in her brain: they lose their edge, and she can examine them without wanting to claw at something. Maybe because her frustration’s so inefficient. Or his general grumpy grandpa vibe, the way he contemplates the clouds as they pass by, careful not to intrude on her space. 

Either way, she feels her jaw unclench a little from its aching, teeth-gritted fury. 

It's helped by how he seems to be having a minor episode as he stands. Taking a breath; opening his mouth; reconsidering, and closing it again. Finally, with a defeated sigh, he takes out a pack of cigarettes. They're the outdated brand she smokes, the ones that supposedly gave you super cancer. 

He offers one to her, and as she holds it between baffled fingers, lights it with a lighter that looks like something from a sci-fi movie.

"Prince," she says, and stops. "What?"

"It's inadequate," he says, grave, his eyes very dark and serious, "but I wanted to apologize. I was out of line, when we spoke before."

She blink-blink-blinks. 

"And I spoke to Harua. I thought it went without saying that I would never get in his way, but even after all these years, I have trouble reading him." His brow furrows. "Though. Admittedly. I've internalized all the lessons to ignore the haters too much, and turned a blind eye to my own flaws."

"Haters," Hakaze murmurs, feeling a little crazy. Then: "Flaws?"

"Like making assumptions about things I know nothing about."

She regains some of her footing. "And how you think you know best."

His head dips, his mouth in an unhappy curve. "Sometimes."

"And you're rude."

"Pushing it," he warns, but nods anyway. Stiff as a wooden carving, he adds, "I understand if my behavior has been unforgivable, but I'd appreciate it if you understood."

She's grinning now. "Harua was mad at you, huh."

He rubs his face, looking exhausted. "This is why he's more suited to be leader. All these years, and I still need him to tell me when I'm over the line." He gives her a look. "Though it's never been this bad before."

She nods. "You saw me being a dick and you thought, I can top that."

"Senior," he says reprovingly. 

Tracing the pained lines of his face, the truth is this: she wants to stay angry. God, she wants it— wants to keep the clean, sharp edge of it, the precise and detailed fantasies of how she'd humiliate Kirishima one day. And it would be so easy to take it out on Ren, too: what is he, if not the result of Kirishima's big play to replace Reina?

Softly, tiredly, Ren adds, "Ruined is far from how I'd truly describe you. I don't know what I was thinking."

All at once, the urge dissipates like seafoam, and Hakaze breathes. "Did you figure cantankerous is a better fit?"

"Senior," he says again.

"It's okay, you can say it. I'm aware I was abrasive, too. Anyone else would have de-escalated, but I'm not like other girls." She gives him a grin and a thumbs-up. "Forgiven, Prince. I can tell how sincere you are."

At her smile, his face does the strangest thing. His lips part with something like awe, eyes widening. Then, realizing, he snatches his gaze away with a huff.

Where did they find men like this, for him to look like this but be so stuffy? She's met idols and supermodels and actors, but good looks of his caliber let them coast through life with an easy smile. Objectively, he's hotter, even. From the outline of his hoodie she can see the straps of the black tank top he’s wearing, the cut of his shoulder, the muscle definition of his unreasonably buff arms. 

She looks away abruptly. Crazy, crazy.

“I’ve wasn't judging you, I just miss seeing you onstage. Eclipse was the most talented girl group of your era, and you were their best singer," he says. Then: “Senior, your face is red.”

He’s stepped closer to her, peering down curiously. Too close. She can smell his cologne, something earthy and cool.

She clears her throat. “What were you thinking about out here, Prince? Were you hoping someone would snap a candid?"

He flushes again, scowling. Hakaze’s struck by the sudden, deranged, suicidal urge to touch his cheek to feel how warm they are: she might as well self-immolate at that point. Seriously, her weakness for pretty faces needed to be studied.

“March 19th, 2017.”

She hums, eyes still glued to the redness of his cheeks. “Is that the day you were born?”

The flush deepens into outrage. “I’m only three years younger than you.”

“Sure, sure,” she says placatingly. “We need to let the older fans have hope. You're twenty-seven, wink wink."

"I really am," he says, frustrated. "You're mixing me up with Harua. I debuted at twenty-two."

"Huh. So that's why they let you be sexy. So what happened in 2017?"

He's blushing again, and looks annoyed about it. “You should know. It was your comeback stage for Do it Like That.”

“Ohhhh,” she blinks in recognition. “Yeah, that sounds right. Why do you know that, though, Prince?”

He tears his eyes away from her and angrily focuses on the ember of his cigarette. “It’s the only successful execution of magic onstage that I’ve seen out of all the performances I’ve seen. I was checking it for reference.”

Research. He’s too fastidious, too earnest in his pursuit of perfection to be watching old clips even at this golden crest of his career. Hakaze's overcome by a rush of incredulity: he really was serious about doing his best. As an idol. Half of his peers just worked out and had harmless surgery and called it quits.

The memory comes to her, blurred by time: Nao grimacing as she tried to do a card trick. This is going to be so ass, she’s saying. We’re gonna get booed off the stage.

Just commit, Reina next. If you do it with enough conviction, it’ll always look cool.

Speak for yourself, Hakaze had said. She demonstrates the trick perfectly, and Nao looks like she'd like to hit her. Some of us are just good at things. 

Damn it. She was just as bad of a tryhard as him. 

Hakaze pulls out her employee ID and credit card. “Okay, pick a card.”

He gives her a massively unimpressed look, sighing when she shakes them at him. He picks her ID.

“Now close your eyes,” she says, grinning. He sighs even louder but obeys, his lashes fanning over his pale cheeks. From a distance, she’s aware that millions would kill to have him like this: his dark hair lifting, slightly, in the breeze, perfect and waiting. He’s so gorgeous it feels vaguely criminal to see him like this, like she’s stealing a statue.

“Now open them,” she says, holding her ID behind his ear.

His eyes slip open, intense, pinning her under them immediately. Her throat goes dry.

He goes still for one beat. Something drops in her stomach, too sudden, too loud.

“Is this your card?”

He examines it, sharp, thoughtful. When she moves to put it away with a slightly strangled laugh, his hand shoots out; hovers over her wrist, not touching, but pinning it in place as if he’s holding it.

“That was not a very good trick,” he says.

“You're such an uncute kouhai. At least appreciate it when I teach you.” She snatches her hand away, at the cost of her ID: he holds on to it, examining it like it's a live grenade someone handed him. She grabs at it again, and he lets it go this time without resistance. 

“This is a terrible photo.”

“Huh? Oh. I guess. They didn't let me use any of my Eclipse photos when I came back."

“Why did you?”

His eyes are intent on hers.

And she thinks of it again: being born for fame. Even at the peak of her career, she had felt it, that the attention didn’t sit right on her. But what else could she have done? She’d been an okay dancer, an okay singer, and she’d spent so much time climbing to the top. It wasn’t as if she could have said no. It had felt like fame had a shape, and she was twisting herself into it, too aware of the places where she didn’t fit.

But Ren probably couldn't even imagine that. Ren, who was born in the shape of fame; who made every other idol who came after him contort themselves in his image. Whose eyes are sharp and bright as he stares her down.

But even a pretty face isn't enough to shake that truth free from its cage in her heart. Even when it is, admittedly, making her thoughts race way too fast.

“Came back to see how low the label had fallen," she says, light. "I heard that the guy they got as Reina's replacement was a real piece of shit."

He clicks his tongue. “Only because our senpais set a bad precedent."

“No, it's pretty in fashion. Especially when they're as incompetent as Astreon.” It comes out with a calm certainty that surprises her. In the absence of his familiar shitty attitude, he turns into someone as distant and cold as the moon.

Reina had been like this too: there was a diamond-hardness to her that most people overlooked, dazzled by her confounding good looks. 

Why is Hakaze back? Her whole life has been this: Reina always walking ahead, never beyond sight but only just ahead, and she waits for Hakaze, smiles and waves, but that gap always for Hakaze to traverse in the end. Even now, even with this impossible man, she sees that road again, that distance. It makes her teeth ache. It makes her want to leave as fast as she can without it seeming like she's running away.

Hakaze feels Harua’s frustration like a migraine at her temple: He’s Ren. What can I possibly tell him that he doesn’t know already?

Reina, golden and gorgeous: You can’t fix everything, fearless leader.

Something tight and irrational spikes under her skin, a feeling like being cornered in a room that’s too bright. 

She reaches out, and drives her fist into his side.

The movement is startling, too abrupt: it makes the pigeon that was lounging on the railing take off in hurried wingbeats. Likewise, she can see the shock in Ren’s eyes, the way his mouth parts around an indignant yelp. That distant, unhappy look is gone, replaced by a more banal one of pure annoyance. 

"What did you do that for?"

“Prince,” she says, ignoring this. "Last time we met up here. Didn't you say you'd do anything I asked?"

He blinks. A beat later, he blushes the hardest he has yet: every drop of blood in his body seems to rush into the veins under his face and ears. Even his neck is red.  

“Of course. Anything.”

She’s aware of her heart hammering against her ribcage, which is stupid, probably because she's having some kind of--sympathetic cardiac arrest, maybe, because he looks like he's in actual pain. He's standing way too close as well, the smell of his cologne frankly egregious.

His eyes are on her mouth. 

She cuts her gaze away as fast as she can. A strategic retreat. "Then you have to help Harua get Neonite's shit together."

He stills. The moment that stretched out like taffy breaks off.

“What.”

"You know that Neonite's being phased out. Astreon's whole plan seems to just debut a group that’s yours but softer, but they’re assuming there’ll be no competition, not even from Harua's new album. But if you put something out, they would—”

“Hm,” he says. Then, softly: “They can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

He shakes his head.

She raises an eyebrow. Whatever momentary madness had possessed her body has been flushed out like a disease, and she stares at him in disbelief. "Come on, we've been over this. You're the hottest man on the planet but there's no way they can't replace you, Prince, be real."

“They can’t,” he says simply. “It’s math. Kirishima should know, he’s the one who built the model.”

“What? What model?"

He steps forward, hums a wordless question that she nods to, frowning, before he sets his hands lightly on her shoulders, just a brief span of warmth, and shifts her so she’s standing where he wants her. His hands are shockingly big, careful over the curvature of her shoulders, and he stares at it for a beat, completely sidetracked, before he drops his hands like he'd been burned. 

For her part, she's too shocked at being moved like a loose sack of potatoes to protest. 

"I know we've established that you think in logical extremes, but imagine you’re Astreon,” he says.

She nods. "Great. Love that."

“You’re coming off a massive failure, where the country’s favorite girl group imploded. You try to figure out why that was: were they too popular, were their fans too parasocial? None of those are factors that you can control, especially at that massive scale. So you decide it was the girls themselves.”

"That's backward. They were out to get us from the start."

"Maybe. But that's a symptom, not the cause." He gestures at himself. “Now, take Eclipse. They were messy, brilliant, uncontrollable. Their leader had instincts like a bloodhound: she was the one who decided what promotions they’d do, which ones they wouldn’t, and the rest of the girls followed her. The only way to avoid that situation is to make sure that the idols are more dependent on the company than each other.”

Hakaze tilts her head, intrigued. His dark eyes don't leave hers.

“So you, Astreon, decide—from then on, you control everything. The schedules, the lineups, the albums. Every rumor, every post on every social network. All of it. They’re going to create the lightning in the bottle by looking at the numbers, the trends, what the state of the world was.”

“That sounds like a recipe for the most boring idol group in history."

“It is,” Ren agrees. He's treating this with his usual seriousness, as if Hakaze misunderstanding him would devastate him. “It never would have worked. Kirishima thinks that it did, but he’s a consultant at best, an outsider to the industry. He had no way of knowing that that approach ended up creating idols that faded into irrelevance in months.”

“So how did it work for Neonite?”

A small smile. “Because I was there.”

“Prince,” she says, almost awed. “Your arrogance really knows no bounds.”

“I’m not exaggerating,” he says, so unthinkingly confident she's almost envious. “I was born for this. They were writing articles about me since before I was scouted. And my parents were both former celebrities. They had me singing and dancing at four years old.”

And there it is: the root of the root. Hakaze’s known plenty of beautiful people, but none of them were perfect; not like him. Ren had been created in the image of perfection. 

His voice has dropped to something low and raspy and sweet. Without thinking, Hakaze has tipped her head close to listen, follows the bob of his Adams apple as he swallows, hard.

“So Kirishima’s plan won’t work,” he says, in that low voice. “I’ve met the trainees; none of them are like me.”

“Even a monkey can sing and dance,” Ren says. “And Kirishima can make money off the monkey. But if they get rid of my group, the money will never be the same. Even my plateau will be more successful than their hypergrowth.”

His arrogance is breathtaking. She says, "All that work to make you the best of the best, and you still have the personality of a hornet's nest."

So fast that it's almost cartoonish, his scowl returns. "I told you because you asked. Weren't you the one being loud about appreciating it when someone teaches you something?"

She leans back on her heels. Regards him, the cigarette smoke, the blue sky. "Thanks for telling me. It's still crazy that you called us all monkeys, though." 

He groans. "You know I didn't mean you."

"And! It doesn't change that you should still help Harua keep your team together. Just because you know you're irreplaceable doesn't mean suits like Kirishima do."

"He'll find out."

"It'll be too late by then!" It's like arguing with a wall. The residual tingles from his touch on her back--what had that been about, anyway?-- spark as she gestures in frustration. "It's all a big power play to them, Prince, they're not even seeing the real cost to the company. You can't just let them do what they want, and settle for a moral victory."

He sighs. His watch starts beeping with a meeting notification, but he pays it no mind. "Meet me at the first floor convenience store after work. There's more to this," he says, and gestures between them.

"That's not how you ask someone on a date, Prince!"

He slides the door open. "I'm aware. But traditional methods don't seem to work on you. Is that a no?"

And what the hell could that mean. The way he seems done with her shit doesn't support what he's saying, which is that he's--what? Flirting? Was this how idols did fanservice nowadays? Just confuse the hell out of them?

"Is that a yes or a no?"

It's an echo of her own question last week: you will or you won't? His eyes are glimmering with the promise of a laugh, and maybe he's holding himself back because he knows she'll hit him again. Truly, this couldn't be borne.

"Go to your Douchebag Meetup or whatever you're late for, Prince, you'll see me when you see me." Then, because his self-satisfied expression doesn't fade, "You're insufferable."

He nods mock-seriously, and goes. When Hakaze turns back out, she finds that her cigarette's almost gone out, just a stub in her hand. 

Infinitely worse, just catastrophically, monumentally bad news: she also finds that she's smiling.