what remains

She loses huge chunks of time, after that. Fuma hands her twenty tracks for the survival show and she edits all twenty of them, then twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three, and there were planning meetings where people praised their team for all the speedy work, but Hakaze doesn’t sleep for three days straight, doesn’t even go home.

Harua crosses her mind once, twice, constant. She presses on the thought like a bruise: thinks about how he’s the one she’d have gone to for advice if he was around. Her idiotic little brother, tumbling from one disaster to another. She thinks about how she should try to save him and his precious Neonite, but even thinking about Neonite makes her whole body start shaking and sweating while the world goes woozy around her, so maybe not yet.

The dubious good news is that it’s all very familiar, like she’s been yanked back to the first few months post-disbandment. Back to squinting at a track on her monitor, clicking and editing waveforms with a glittery manic-edged focus, as the night sky pales and tints orange as the sun rose. Back to paranoia and anxiety and cabin fever, growing slowly to hate the basement studio every time she blinks and she’s alone, no Harua to swap gossip with, no way to risk taking a smoke break without running into Ren, which—no. No. No. No.

Back to the bad, and into the worse, because there’s no news of Harua, he won’t respond to her increasingly unashamed pleas for him to call back. She locks in on what she can control, the way she always does when her life starts to veer dramatically off track, going to company meetings and schmoozing with a dead-eyed and unthinking ease that no one seems to notice anymore. Even now, in the back of her mind, she catalogs who’s still being invited to meetings and who isn’t. Which execs had fallen from grace after Neonite officially got sidelined, which ones were still playing the game.

Appalling amount of loss, and yet she remains, haunting the halls of this building like a revenant.

Somebody shakes her shoulder on the fourth day, and she slices a glare, caged and cornered and barely functioning.

“C’mon, Hakaze,” says Fuma, sounding tired himself. “You need to go home.”

Hakaze shrugs his hand off, looking up at him mutinously. His mouth is in a rigid knot, and Hakaze wonders again if this was the cycle for anyone in production, groups falling and rising and throwing themselves against the rock of corporations. The same wound, opening and scabbing over and over every few years.

Fuma shepherds her outside and calls her a cab.

The systemic collapse of everything she’d held on to makes the debris mix so that Hakaze can’t measure the extent of Ren’s ill-advised confession. She can’t quite think about him in his whole, but Harua’s gone, too, so all she has are tracks specifically made to replace them both.

She makes the cab drive to the bar instead.

She greets Teacher on autopilot and moves to a quiet corner with a whiskey sour. She’s incredibly out of it, watching the thin winding smoke from the patrons’ cigarettes with a distant, frozen kind of wistfulness, and the sound of someone clattering a chair to her single table takes her badly aback.

“Any reason you’re not picking up calls, Leader?”

Hakaze let out a breath.

Kaori looks unreal in the dim lighting, her hair glossy over her shoulders and wearing a pink one-piece dress. Over the years, Hakaze’s had practice stopping herself from overlaying the idol Kaori’d once been over the version in front of her, but it’s hard not to when she looks so pretty. “I have a job! You don’t need me to babysit you anymore.”

“Hmm, is that why Teacher called me to haul your corpse off her property?”

“Traitor,” she says, and glares at the beautiful woman behind the bar.

“You’re so ungrateful. We didn’t raise you this way.”

“I raised you, brat.”

“Reina raised both of us, actually.”

It’s a shock to hear the name so casually, a bolt from the blue. Clean, because the way Kaori says it is so different from the way Nao or Ren or a million corporates say it. Kaori, maybe more than anyone else in the world, may have loved Reina the same way Hakaze did; with the same deep, abiding tenderness.

“You were what, thirteen when you joined as a trainee?”

“Twelve, and I was there before you. So I should be more fucked up about Reina than you, but here we are.”

She tips her beer into her mouth, gets excited when she likes it. Giggles a little and offers Hakaze a sip so she can’t even be mad anymore.

Still, she tries. “Not everything’s about Reina.”

“With you it is! Dumb Hakaze. Silly Hakaze. She thinks you’re being silly too, you know.”

“You talk to her?”

“Of course! But she’s silly too, all she talks about is how she ruined your life.”

Hakaze leans back. “What the fuck.”

“Right? Nao told me not to tell you. All three of you are so obsessed with protecting each other. You’re like toxic shoujo manga red flag male leads.”

Hakaze sips her drink.

“Do you think Reina ruined my life, too?”

Kaori hums, tilting her head like she’s inspecting a weird bug. “Mmm. I think you’re bad at losing.”

Hakaze snorts despite herself.

“No, seriously,” Kaori says, grinning. “Everyone told you you were special when we were kids. You believed them. So when things fell apart you went—” she makes an explosive sound with her mouth, hands flying apart. “Illegal. Rude. Unfair. I thought you’d punch Kirishima.”

“You make it sound so dignified.”

“It wasn’t!” Kaori laughs. “You were so mad. Still are.”

Hakaze takes a long sip of her drink. “I was twenty-five.”

“Exactly,” Kaori says brightly. “Ancient. Basically dust.”

Hakaze huffs.

Kaori leans forward, chin in her hands now, eyes sharp despite the childish posture. “You keep saying you want to save Harua like you’re auditioning for sainthood, but you look way more alive when you talk about Astreon eating shit.”

Hakaze freezes.

“See?” Kaori sings. “That face.”

She drains the rest of her beer and waves the empty glass for another. “You’re not just sad Reina can’t perform. You’re mad they decided she was done. Same with you. Same with Neonite.”

Hakaze’s jaw tightens.

“Harua’s album isn’t your redemption arc,” Kaori continues, breezy as ever. “It’s your tantrum.”

Every muscle in Hakaze’s body tenses. She doesn’t have Kaori’s easy familiarity with confronting honesty in any shape or form: instinctively, her eyes fly to the exits before Kaori reaches out and squeezes her hand. “I like you like this. It feels like I have my real annoying sister back.”

Hakaze looks at her.

Kaori shrugs. “You’re scary again. I missed it.”

Her hands drift up to squeeze her cheeks this time. “Also, I love you a lot. It was horrible watching you rot in that place. This way at least you’re doing something stupid on purpose.”

It makes it all sound so premeditated. Hakaze wonders if that’s true. She hates Kirishima, but—

Harua, in her head, is laughing: it’s an honor to work with you, Senior! Please take good care of me.

Hakaze doesn’t have the words to explain herself, doesn’t even know if she can. Part of it is that old, twisted hate, yes. But equally fierce is the sense that she’d move mountains for Harua. She feels guilty that she’s been so devastated by Ren that she hasn’t been doing it already.

Ren: she can finally let herself think of him. On the balcony, his brow furrowed in thought. In the convenience store, his shoulders drooping with exhaustion. The impossible force of his magnetism, his handsome face and honest eyes.

How he’d stepped forward every time she stepped back. Hakaze was hard to love, and Ren had set himself on the task with his usual single-minded focus. She would never meet someone like that again. She would never—

Her heart spasms. 

Okay. So not as over it as she thought. She tucks him away carefully in a box, shelves the thought away till she can think about him without her heart pressing, urgently, against her ribs. Her beloved prince.

She thinks about telling Kaori all this. But Kaori looks so happy already when she nods. She sits back in her seat, humming to herself. It’s an old song of theirs, the lyrics saccharine and lovelorn. May a love like mine never find you again, may all your roses have no thorns.

Hakaze smiles at her, helpless. Kaori’s still all sweetness, all light. When she said Leader it felt like Hakaze hadn’t fucked up so bad after all.

What’s one more lie?

“Thanks, Kaori, I feel better already. Thanks for coming out here," she adds, sincere/ 

Kaori beams at her, and Hakaze revels at the simple joy of it: at making the first person in the world who counted on her happy.