[ Bath ]

… And what an awful way to treat her friends, don't you think?

Her only friends, at that.

Even Miyazawa Misaki thought as much, sitting alone in the artificial hot springs of the inn (because there was no thermal activity in Kurasutome, see, just rocks shaped around an open-air pool of steaming hot mineralized water, fed in by a bamboo kakei, all of it an imitation, mere imitation—but man, what nice rocks they were), self-reflecting on what ought to have been guilt, but was in its stead a vague sort of nothingness which had pervaded her entire mental past for the past … however long. (And who was keeping track, anyway? Certainly not the defunct brain in question, that was for sure.)

Don't worry, Micchan! I've had voice nodules, too. You just need time to recover. Don't worry about the production, okay? Don't worry about the animators you're inconveniencing, the director, the writers, not even your agency that keeps representing you despite your being a net drain on their resources. Don't worry!!!

(Sure, Rikki-tan, but that was more understandable when you're voicing three or four voice roles every season, don'tcha agree?)

… But then, it wasn't just about the voice nodules, was it?

It wasn't even about the stalkers (yes, plural) obsessed with Miyazawa Misaki's portrayal of a middle school character, whose ongoing tenuous grasps on reality and fervent conflations of the character she lent her voice to and the, gee, I dunno, actual, human being behind it, fueled the endless near-daily deluge of fan letters (the handwritten contents of which ranged from the delusionally unhinged, like romantic confessions or matrimonial proposals, to the mundane, like garden-variety death threats; more often than not within the same one-sided correspondence) forwarded to her by her agency, which honestly should be doing a more thorough job of vetting the more egregious examples.

(And sure, Sasa-shi might have had her fair share of obsessive fans too, many of them worse than the ones Misaki got; but she was big enough for the corporate big-wigs at her recording label to assign her her own private military detail to deal with those creeps. … The simple tragedy of Miyazawa Misaki being that she was just well-known enough in the nichest of niche circles to attract the dregs of society; but not famous enough for anyone to protect her from any of it.)

And it wasn't even about the fact that the years following PuchiPura had been an endless series of failed auditions, because hey, as it turned out, Miyazawa Misaki was essentially a one-trick pony. She had talent, sure, she knew that: but that talent was so concentrated within the margins of this one single character type (and how exactly did she luck into that, on the first go, with her first role, so precisely??) that no matter what or who she tried to voice, all you heard was Miyanami Midori of Umehara Middle doing a bad impression of a mech pilot, or fantasy-world princess, or what have you, as though the FAC(T)'s 'heart' herself were performing the role in an amateur play at the school's culture festival.

("Thank you so much for coming out, Miyazawa-san. That was really great. We'll definitely be in touch." … And so on and so forth. Ad infinitum. Etc, etc.)

Nor was it about Miyazawa Misaki's seemingly all-encompassing anhedonia that, in recent years, in addition to erasing the small bits of simple, everyday joy that things like natto on white rice and miso soup in the morning used to bring her, obliterated both the obvious targets (goodbye joy? sure, but goodbye disappointment, too; all range flattened into one long plateau) but also the not-so-obvious ones (because when was the last time she felt hunger? you know, that most primal of all human feelings? she could go days without eating; and only after one or two bites, the prospect of continuing to eat seemed about the same as not).

… And it wasn't even about all the strange nightmares that had started around the time of PuchiPura Revival's announcement.

The ugly, grotesque, animated dreams, of Umehara under a blood-orange sky, and a missing Midori, replaced by a straw doll made in her image, which she saw every night without fail, (or, at least, on the nights she actually slept), like bizarre, corrupted episodes of PuchiPura, as though they'd been half-watched on TV during the throes of, and then later misremembered after, the delirium of some high-grade fever; in whose nightly, um, revues, let's call them, the members of the FAC(T) were regularly subjected to all sorts of pleasantries, such as, but not limited to: self-mutilation, ocular removal, torture, animal maulings, immolation, impalement, vivisection, and more.

… Oh, so much more.

(… And had Miyazawa Misaki believed, in the slightest, that dreams meant anything, anything at all, with regard to them being unconscious cries for help from a chronically-stressed mind, she might have concluded that, hey, maybe a retreat to an island town in the middle of nowhere was a pretty good idea.)

(… But seeing as how she no longer, if she had at all, held such beliefs; and seeing as how she'd also, and this was perhaps a bit more concerning, given up hope for any kind of personal recovery to any sort of former working neurological baseline …)

(… Well, then we've sorta talked our way out of the need for this triplet of asides, haven't we?)

And it certainly wasn't even about—…

… Wait.

Hold on.

If we've exhausted everything it wasn't about, then …

(Cue the sudden sound of Miyazawa Misaki laughing, snorting even, alone, in the bath.)

… Then what was it all about?

…

… What the fuck was wrong with her?

Why was she like this?

The extent of her friends' collective patience, their love, she surely didn't deserve.

Just look at all they put up with.

They remained friends with her, despite all the times she left the group chat on Read. (Or, sometimes, even just Delivered.)

They never abandoned her, not even after that time they (… well, it was just Rikki at first, but she called the others, who immediately dropped everything to rush over, even Sasa-shi, who was in some important meeting with some Very Important People …) found her in her one-room Tokyo apartment, curled up on the floor in the fetal position, screaming, Misaki's own private collection of PuchiPura paraphernalia (figures, limited edition what-nots, even a framed keyframe signed by some of the production staff) lying broken and torn in pieces all around her.

… And this was how she repaid them.

Snapping at them for no reason.

Staying silent, staring off into space, during group conversations.

Running off to the bath, by herself.

Once again, no guilt, even as her fingers began to prune.

Not the slightest compunction.

Or whatever the opposite of that would be.

Just emptiness.

Nothing, nothing inside.

Like as not there was simply nothing left in her.