Chapter Text
There was a gentle wind blowing when Akane stood for the first time before the grave of Hoshino Ai.
The stone itself was lovely—a thick, grey column with the characters for Hoshino Family engraved carefully in its front face, only slightly worn by the elements and without a speck of dirt or dust. It was clear that it had been regularly cleaned and polished. White flowers—not roses, never roses—with their blossoms sweet and small sprouted from delicate vases to either side of it. They were a few days old but still bright in the morning sun; they were proof that, somewhere in the world, Hoshino Ai was remembered, no matter how long she’d been buried for.
Akane was carrying flowers of her own, just like Aqua—just like Ruby, and Director Gotanda, and Saitou Miyako, and Saitou Ichigo, who she’d never seen except in old photos until this moment. His hair—a dull, unkempt blonde nowhere near as spectacular as the twins’ shimmering gold—was cropped short, and he had the beginnings of stubble over his lips and chin, his eyes hidden behind angular sunglasses. He looked oddly the same as he had ten years ago; just older, just worn, something vital cut from him.
He stood at a distance from the rest of them; Miyako did not look at him, her eyes slowly moving between the grave and the curve of Ruby’s back as she bent to pray, hands clasped together in front of her face. But Akane did not think the distance was entirely rejection—from Miyako, yes, but not Ruby. Not Aqua. It was just… a space, barely the size of a person. A woman.
It was the emptiness where Hoshino Ai used to shine.
Ruby straightened and stepped back; Miyako stepped forward to hug her, and they clung to each other, but they were both smiling even as Ruby cried, the breeze swirling almost playfully through their hair until they were nearly tangled together in a soft mixture of sunflower and rose-gold. Miyako said something that Akane thought might have been I love you, which made Ruby bury her head into the crook of her neck. Eventually, they released one another, and with a nod, Ruby broke the gap that separated Saitou Ichigo from the rest of the group.
Aqua had taken Ruby’s place in front of Ai’s grave, and Akane wanted to watch him; wanted to know how deeply the grief still weighed on him and how much the satisfaction of a revenge finally complete lifted him up. Instead, she turned away to focus on Ruby and Saitou’s awkward conversation—Akane knew herself, she couldn’t not when her childhood reading had been psychological textbooks and her entire acting style had been built on the desire to understand, and she knew she would want to fix whatever sorrow remained in the hollows of his cheeks. At any other time, she would have followed through. Here, though, before the rock and ash that commemorated the soul of Hoshino Ai… Akane thought it might be right to let him share his feelings with her spirit alone.
Saitou shifted a little as Ruby came to stand beside him, his head moving from where he had been studying the grey forest of gravestones that sprouted around them, studying the bare bark of the trees that curled across the sky in the distance, studying anything and everything except the whole reason he must have come. The two of them were quiet, for a time, until Ruby finally spoke.
“Hey, Ichigo,” she said. “It’s kinda weird seeing you when you’re not fishing.”
He snorted. “Don’t be a brat, kid. You’re getting too old for that.”
“I’m not a brat,” Ruby shot back, “I’m cute, clever, and considerate. Just like Mama.”
“One out of three ain’t bad, I suppose,” Saitou said. His arm jerked, sleeve flicking the edge of his vest on the way past, but he aborted the motion before his hand was halfway to Ruby’s head. “You really do look just like Ai, you know.”
There was something heavy in each word—they rolled slowly off his tongue and Akane felt the weight of them in her stomach like a stone. It was impossible to forget Ruby was Hoshino Ai’s daughter once you knew. Akane had pored over hours of footage, frame by frame by frame: Ruby had her mother’s face, the thin fragility of her waist, the width of her eyes and the delicacy of her hands and above it all the same incandescent presence, even if in Ruby it was shallow, immature, a flower turned but not yet open to the sun. To the man who by all accounts had practically raised Ai, who had brought her from obscurity to the heights of the Tokyo Dome… it came to Akane, then, that she might have realised one of the reasons he’d tried so hard to stay away.
She didn’t respect it. Not really. Not when Aqua sobbed Ai’s name out in his sleep and rose again each day to carve it into the city’s heart; not when Ruby took to the stage with Ai’s shadow curled into her own and sang the songs that might be the only words they had left to share; not when Miyako had raised two orphaned children alone and, impossibly, still given them reasons to turn their sorrow into joy.
But if nothing else, she thought she understood.
And it seemed Ruby did too—she softened, and said, “Yeah. I miss Mama as well.”
“What are you going to do now?” Saitou asked. The question slipped out of him, his mouth shifting into a grimace as soon as he finished speaking. “You—you don’t need those names, anymore.”
Ruby shook her head, smoothing down her wine-red skirt where it fluttered around her knees. “I guess I don’t. Were you really going to give them to me, if I got big enough that they wanted to meet me?”
“I probably shouldn’t answer that within breathing distance of Mr. Overprotective,” he said, “but gods help me, I was. If only so you’d come running to me about whoever was the most suspicious and I could kill the fucker myself.”
(Akane knew she was missing a lot of context for this conversation, but if nothing else, she suspected that Ruby’s recent, meteoric rise to success had not been entirely due to her newfound genius for self-promotion.)
“Grandpa is scary, scary,” Ruby said, exaggerating each syllable as wide as her faux-shocked eyes. “I’m going to tell Miyako you’re using bad words around a sweet and innocent idol like me.”
Saitou sighed, slumping where he stood. “So you’ve decided, then? You’re going to stay an idol?”
“I’m going to make Mama’s dream come true.” Ruby’s stare would have shamed the stars themselves. “B-Komachi will perform at the Tokyo Dome, and I’ll sing Mama’s songs for her so she knows how much the whole world would have loved them.”
Akane had been so focused on their conversation that she’d come close to missing Aqua finishing his bow to Ai’s grave, or Miyako hugging him, briefly, as she replaced him in front of it, or the way he’d gathered with Director Gotanda—who’d clasped his shoulder firmly and spoken, short and serious, into his ear—before joining Saitou and Ruby on the man’s other side. Aqua hadn’t missed her, though; he reached out and brushed his fingers against hers on the way past, favouring her with a small smile.
Her face warmed and she ducked into her scarf on reflex, like her body was trying to keep the moment a secret, a transient token of affection it wanted all to itself.
“What about you, Ichigo?” Aqua asked. Where Ruby had been… if not friendly, then at least open to the possibility of it, Aqua was flat and to the point, his voice in the same low register he’d used when he’d told Akane he’d had somebody to kill. “There’s no longer anything you need to do. Nothing left to drag Miyako into. Are you intending to come back?”
Saitou shifted uncomfortably, shoulders rolling, looking back and forth from Ruby to Aqua to even Director Gotanda; whatever it took to keep his eyes off his estranged wife, praying before his daughter’s grave. He didn’t say anything for several seconds, and when he eventually did speak, his chin had dropped to his chest until he was studying the well-swept paths beneath his feet.
“I shouldn’t,” he said, tone faint with uncertainty. “I don’t want to produce idols anymore. And you’re right, Aqua: there’s nothing left for me to do. I don’t need to raise you; Miyako did that. I don’t need to support you; Miyako did that. I don’t need to run the company; Miyako did that. And all I did—all I did was look for a man I couldn’t even manage to be the one to kill. Because she did that.”
He pointed at Akane, then, but it felt like the accusation was directed entirely at himself.
“You asked me if I had any regrets, Aqua,” Saitou continued, rubbing his nose with the bridge of his sunglasses, “and I guess I do. I regret being so fucking useless that I only find out Ai’s been avenged because you invite me to tell her at her grave. But that doesn’t change the choices I made, and now that everything’s over I don’t expect you—or Miyako—to forgive me for them. So I don’t intend to come back. I’ve spent the last fifteen years trying to avenge Ai. I think I’ll spend the next fifteen trying to apologise to her instead.”
“At least you acknowledge it,” Aqua said, his merciless sapphire stare backlit by the afternoon Sun. “You’re a terrible excuse for a grandparent, but I’ve had worse.”
Saitou’s eyebrows narrowed in confusion, and he turned to Aqua with his mouth shaping what was probably a question, but Ruby interrupted him.
“You’re right,” she said, “and I won’t forgive you. Not even if you do everything in your power to help get B-Komachi to the Dome. But Mama was much nicer than me. So maybe she might.”
“Ai? Nice?” Saitou shook his head, but there was something gentle about it, something old and fond and, for a moment, even happy. “Kid, my Ai was a professional liar. You just thought she was nice because she doted on you. You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Maybe,” Ruby said, shrugging, “but shouldn’t you, too?”
Saitou went still. When he looked at Ruby, Akane recognised the expression; it was the same one Aqua had worn when she’d looked at him and said I’d help you kill them. That sudden realisation that someone you thought you knew had one more secret than you’d expected. “Where did you learn that from, Ruby?”
“My brother is too obsessed with me to notice when I’m stealing from him too,” she said, flashing a peace sign and winking. Aqua groaned, barely catching his forehead in his palm. “So, Ichigo?”
Ruby extended a hand.
“Will you help me fulfil Mama’s dream?”
“I told you, I’m not coming back. The presidency is Miyako’s, now. And she’d fight like hell to hold it, when Ichigo Productions is one of the only things she has to keep you safe.”
“I know,” Ruby said, still waiting, fingers out. “I’m not asking you to replace Miyako. You can’t. I wouldn’t let you. But you’ve already been advising me for months. All I’m saying is that you can keep doing that, if you want.”
Her skirt rippled as the air swirled around her legs; her smile was barely a hint. She should have been an ordinary, if pretty, girl talking to a man she may not have even liked. But Akane could see the strobelights of the Tokyo Dome in the glow of her hair; could hear the chanting crowd in the slight echo of her voice as it bounced off the gravestones around them. And maybe—just maybe—Saitou could too.
He took Ruby’s hand and shook it once.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”
“Thank you.” Surprisingly—but not really, not to anyone there who knew him, and they all did—it was Aqua who’d said it, not Ruby.
He left Saitou’s side, then, shoes a soft rasp across the pebbles that wound through the graveyard. Akane allowed herself to fall into him as he came closer, slipping an arm around his waist just as he did to her. He was warmer than she was, and smelled of the flowers resting against Ai’s grave. They leant against each other in silence for a little while, watching Director Gotanda offer his respects, back bent impressively formally for such a casually unkempt man.
“I’m happy that you’re here,” Aqua said, squeezing her hip through the fabric of her dark blue dress. “I think Ai would be too. I can imagine what she’d say: of course my son has such a lovely girlfriend, my genes are too strong for anything else!”
Akane giggled, knocking her shoulder against his. “Your falsetto is awful, Aqua. Was Ruby the only one who inherited her mother’s voice?”
She felt Aqua shudder. “Ruby can sing because she’s had twice as many lessons as anyone else would have needed to sound good. It’s the one thing she’s bad at.”
A brief pang of sympathy took hold in her heart. If Ruby learning to sing had put him through anything like her parents must have had to deal with when Akane was learning to act…
“So,” she said, “the Dome. Are you really okay with Ruby wanting to perform there?”
He didn’t seem shocked that she’d been listening, or that she’d cut to the heart of the hesitance that had sat on his face as, opposite him, Ruby had browbeaten Saitou into supporting her.
“Not really,” he said. “But Kamiki Hikaru is dead, and I’m tired of Ruby losing things because of him.”
Akane pressed her cheek against his chest, hugging herself into him, and hoped he understood what she was trying to say.
Past them, from over where Ruby stood, Saitou began walking toward the grave.
He passed Miyako on his way, and they stopped beside each other, if only momentarily.
“Miyako.”
“Ichigo.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
Then he kept walking, and so did she, and if they spoke again, Akane did not hear it.