but if you do

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 her fists are tightly clenched when she exits the conference room. 

And of course Nao would call her crazy; General Hakaze’s found another mission, except this wasn’t crazy, she’d seen it on the others’ faces: and when everything fell apart, five years ago, she’d tried to make sense of things, to wrap her mind around the concept of greed and its many grasping limbs, but this wasn’t just greed, was it? This was control. Neonite would fall like a collapsed star for control.

And that would mean Eclipse went down for nothing. 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’m sorry, I’ll go—”

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

“I thought we agreed that it was okay,” Ren says, his cheeks dusted with that faint flush again, but he quickly looks away, like he's trying to hide something. Cute, she thinks, with a fondness that fights through her sour mood like a flower through snow. “You look like you need it.”

“Perhaps,” she says. “Pot, kettle.”

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 every word before he says it out loud that makes it so difficult to stay in the rash, unpredictable mood she was in.

Either way, miracle of miracles, she feels some of the tension roll of her shoulders.

“I’m injured,” he shows her his cast. “I didn’t have as much downtime, before.”

She grins. He makes it too easy. “But didn’t you say an injury’s no excuse to slack off?”

His eyes widen, and his mouth pushes into an unhappy curve. Where did they find men like this, for him to look like this but be so cute? 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 been told it would hinder my recovery if I don’t rest,” he says. Then: “Senior, your face is red.”

He’s stepped closer to her, peering down curiously. She’s tall, famously so: he still easily clears her by at least a head. She’s not used to it, the angle, the strangely delicate bump of his Adam’s apple as he tilts his head, the thoughtful frown on his unrealistically handsome face.

She clears her throat. “What were you thinking about? You looked like a magazine cover out here, Prince.”

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 fire herself at that point. Seriously, Ren’s face was a nuclear level threat to common sense.

“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. “What happened on March 19th, then?”

“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. Somehow that’s even more dangerous—makes her even more fond of his single-mindedness.

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.

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.

“Okay, so 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.

“Tough crowd.” She’s sweating. She holds the ID awkwardly between them while his hand hovers over hers. “Why are you still looking at that?”

“This is a terrible photo.”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, they took it right after I joined, when I wasn’t even sure I should be here again. Guess that meant showing up for picture day looking terrible.”

“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 not so for Ren. Ren, who was born in the shape of fame; who made every other idol who came after him twist themselves in his shape. Whose eyes are sharp and bright as he stares her down.

But he is just a beautiful man, and she has worked too hard, and seen too much, to let him hold her secrets for her.

“To see you up close, of course! You know I’m your biggest fan, right?”

He clicks his tongue. “Why are you always so—”

He pulls his hand back. Only then does she realize his cigarette has burnt down to a stub. She plucks it gently from his fingers and drops it to the ground, crushing it.

“I kept in touch with some people at the label,” she says. “When Fuma got his own studio, he asked if I’d come back. Since we worked well together.”

He nods. His breathing is even, scowl finally gone. “What made you say yes?”

“Different reasons. Mostly boredom. And I wanted to understand the other side of all this. Corporate is nothing like what I imagined as an idol.”

Ren hums, low in his throat. Thoughtful, like he’s filing that answer next to something she can’t see.

“You sound disappointed,” he says.

She huffs a laugh. “I wouldn’t say disappointed. Just, um, surprised. I used to think the adults upstairs had everything under control.”

“They never have.” It comes out with a calm certainty that surprises her. In the absence of his familiar, adorable grumpiness, he turns into someone as distant and cold as the moon.

The heartbreak of Reina slipping through her fingers feels closer than ever. Ren, in side profile, looks like he’s far away already.

Why is she 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, it’s the same road, the same distance.

Hakaze feels Harua’s frustration like an ache behind her teeth: He’s Ren. What can I possibly tell him that he doesn’t know already?

Reina, her smile bracketed by tracks of tears: You can’t fix everything, fearless leader.

She reaches out, and pulls on his sleeve.

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 lips part. If she looked close enough, she would see herself reflected in them in technicolor.

Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

“Prince,” she says, “Didn’t you say you’d do anything I asked? Last time, when we met out here.”

His reply is a beat delayed. Voice hoarse.

“Of course. Anything.”

She’s aware of her heart ratcheting up, even as she fights to calm herself down, for her cheeks to cool. It’d help if his pupils weren’t dilated, if he didn’t smell so good, this close up—earthy and masculine. Caring senior, she reminds herself, harsh like nails on chalkboard. You are a concerned senior, and a fan. 

Hakaze tries not to think about how bad she’s fucking up. How much trouble she’d be in if she got caught even talking to him here. How much trouble she’s already in, some animal in her purring with satisfaction when his eyes keep dropping to her mouth like lead.

How his entire body’s leaned towards hers, a glowing light in his eyes.

“Then. You have to help Harua."

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

“What.”

She blinks a few times to recenter herself. “I just came out of a meeting where they discussed Neonite being phased out. Their 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. 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 huffs. “Arrogant. Do you think you can’t be replaced?”

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

“Okay, well, explain it to me.”

He steps forward, 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.

Dangerous, Hakaze thinks again. “Prince,” she prompts.

His eyes are very dark when he drags them up to hers. Something about the long, tense line of his body so close to hers undoes her in some way, an affliction that she can’t just shake out from the cavern of her ribcage.

She takes a deep breath and he mimics her.

“Imagine you’re Astreon,” he says.

She nods.

“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.”

Hakaze flinches. His mouth pulls down for an instant—regretful, apologetic. His thumb strokes the fabric of her hoodie absently, then drops his hand.

“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.”

Hakaze finds she doesn’t have anything to say.

“So they decided—from then on, the company controls 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’s—not how it’s supposed to be done.”

“It’s not,” Ren agrees. He’s so relaxed like this, his serious nature lightened for a moment by the clarity of his thoughts. A stray thought floats across her mind, that if he wasn’t holding on to her, he would simply drift away. “It would never have worked. Kirishima thinks that it did, but he’s a consultant at best, an outside 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 murmurs. “Your arrogance knows no bounds.”

“I’m not exaggerating,” he says, so unthinkingly prideful he’s gorgeous in it. “I was born for this. They were writing articles about me since I was scouted. Anyway, 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. Not like Ren, who moved through the world like the silence between heartbeats, crushing, inevitable force.

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.”

She’s smiling, but she feels the weight of his words. Ren is devastating, in his own way. He’ll ruin her life, if she lets him.

“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.”

Hakaze snorts under her breath. “Monkey, huh. You think so highly of yourself, Prince.”

Ren’s eyes flick toward her — one quick, unwilling beat — before he looks away again. “It’s just a metaphor,” he says, crisp, matter-of-fact.

Her smile curls. “Careful. It’s those monkeys that you’re watching for magic references.”

“I didn’t mean—” He cuts himself off, jaw tightening. “It’s research. Eclipse’s early concepts were unusually cohesive for your era. I wanted to see why.”

The huffiness is back. He’s glaring off at the distance like he wants to fight a cloud. Affection surges in Hakaze all over again. There you are. Annoyed, but not leaving. The scant inches of distance between them feel warm. How many fans got a chance to be this close to their bias?

She tilts her head just slightly. Closer, closer.

“You could’ve asked your wise senior. I could have given you insider tips!”

Ren stiffens.

“I prefer to learn new skills myself. I learn better that way. Plus,” he adds, with a blink, “I wasn’t convinced you could teach anything, earlier.”

He’s smiling.

The breath gets knocked clean out of her lungs. The wind, the summer air, the heat; and his smile, broad and open, his eyes crinkling.

It all feels like a magic trick.

Her heart’s so loud in her ears.

“Do you--” he’s quiet, voice low. He's watching her face carefully. “Will you be at the convenience store tonight as well?”

She’s having an out-of-body experience. She’s dead, perhaps, and hallucinating. Did this haughty prince just imply he wanted to see her again?

“All this ramen’s not good for your diet, Prince,” she says.

“Is that a no?”

Sunlight and blue skies and the curl of smoke. His serious expression. Hakaze’s never been at a fanmeet before; she wonders if this is how it feels. Like the sweetness of ice cream melting on her tongue.

She shakes her head at herself. Thirty years old, and losing her head over a pretty face.

But what’s the harm, asks a voice in the back of her head. Ren made a career out of being people’s unattainable crush. He wouldn’t mind one more, would he?

“It’s not a no,” she says, with a smile. “And thank you for explaining all that earlier. You really do have it all figured out, Ren.”

“Not everything.”

“Well, if you need help figuring things out, this monkey’s glad to help.” She pushes off the wall, and he takes a step back. She looks up at him for a beat, and he looks back. She can’t help grinning dopily: weird, misplaced crush aside, she really does think he’s cool. How can anyone who takes things as seriously as he does not be?

“I’ll see you tonight, Senior,” he says.

She hums. “Maybe. Depends on whether your beloved leader finishes his recording on time. Bye-bye, Prince.”