Leaving the hospital required navigating a gauntlet.
The reporters who had set up camp at the entrance—a bristling thicket of cameras, microphones, and shouted questions—parted only reluctantly, their voices overlapping into an incomprehensible roar.
Takahashi Mio kept her head down, one hand hovering protectively near Hojo Suzune's shoulder, and didn't breathe easily until they had rounded the corner and the clamor faded to a distant, angry murmur.
The cool evening breeze swept across her face, carrying the faint salt-tang of the nearby harbor. She inhaled deeply, letting the crisp air scour the hospital staleness from her lungs. Almost immediately, the drowsy fog that had been clouding her thoughts began to lift. Her mind sharpened. The world came back into focus.
And with clarity came an unexpected sensation: calm. A deep, settled, almost philosophical calm that felt foreign after the emotional typhoon of the past several hours.
Before tonight—before watching Hojo Shione's voice shatter like crystal on that vast, glittering stage—Takahashi Mio's heart had been a churning cauldron of jealousy. Every mention of the idol's name. Every knowing smile. Every graceful, infuriating gesture. They had all fed the green-eyed flame that burned in her chest.
Hojo Shione had seemed like a rival in every sense: equally beautiful, more accomplished, and far more deeply woven into the fabric of Shiratori Seiya's past than Mio could ever hope to be.
But now? Now the jealousy had drained away, leaving behind something quieter. Something closer to... resignation. And a strange, reluctant respect.
She's too ruthless. There's simply no comparison.
The thought surfaced without bitterness. It was simply a fact, like noting that the sky was dark or the hospital walls were white. Hojo Shione had done something Mio knew—with absolute, bone-deep certainty—she could never bring herself to do.
To stand on that stage, before thousands of adoring fans, and deliberately orchestrate her own destruction? To sacrifice her voice, her career, her public image, all to prove a single, desperate point?
That required a level of devotion that bordered on madness.
If that's the standard... if that's what it takes to claim his heart... then what's the point of comparing myself to her? We're playing entirely different games.
But the more she turned the events over in her mind, the more pieces clicked into place. Hojo Shione's ruthlessness wasn't limited to self-destruction. No—Mio's intuition, sharpened by weeks of studying character motivations and narrative structure, was whispering something darker. Something that had been lurking at the edges of her consciousness ever since the Kendo Club incident.
The timing was too perfect. The way Hasegawa Saori showed up, the way she knew exactly where to find him, the way she went straight for me with that sword... it all felt orchestrated. Like someone had pointed her in our direction and given her just enough information to ignite the fuse.
And who, she now wondered, stood to benefit from that chaos?
Who had the intimate knowledge of Shiratori Seiya's past relationships required to manipulate Saori so precisely?
Who had been feeding her information—seemingly casual, seemingly harmless, but carefully calibrated to provoke maximum disruption?
The answer was sitting in a hospital bed three floors above them, looking pale and fragile and utterly, heartbreakingly innocent.
Takahashi Mio recalled the text message Hojo Shione had sent her back then. The one checking in, asking how things had gone with Saori. The words had been so ordinary. So bland. So carefully, deliberately nothing.
At the time, Mio had been too preoccupied with her own tangled emotions to notice how unnatural that blandness was. A normal person, hearing that their ex-boyfriend's former lover had stormed into his life wielding a literal weapon, would have been curious. Alarmed. Something. But Shione had been as placid as still water.
Because she'd already known. Because she'd set the whole thing in motion.
They're all completely insane, Mio concluded, the thought arriving with a strange, hollow calm. Every single one of them.
Saori with her sword and her terrifying devotion. Shione with her pills and her staged collapse. It's impossible to say who's more unhinged. They're competing in a league I can't even qualify for.
But that raised another question. A troubling one.
If every woman who had ever loved Shiratori Seiya had been driven to some form of beautiful, terrifying madness... what did that say about him? What kind of gravitational pull did he exert that bent the trajectories of everyone who fell into his orbit?
And, more pressingly: what did it say about her?
Takahashi Mio's gaze drifted downward, settling on the small, silent figure walking beside her. Hojo Suzune's face was still crumpled into that tight, unhappy knot—her delicate brows furrowed, her rosebud lips pressed into a thin line, her dark eyes fixed on the pavement ahead as if it had personally wronged her.
A question surfaced. Unbidden. Slightly cruel.
Is she normal? This one? Or is she just as far gone as her sister?
What would happen if she knew the truth?
If someone told her that her beloved Nee-san had engineered tonight's catastrophe, had manipulated Saori into attacking me, had been playing a long, patient game of emotional chess while the rest of us stumbled around like pawns?
Would she crumble?
Would she rage?
Would she do something even more extreme?
Curiosity, sharp and dangerous, pricked at Mio's tongue. She weighed her options for a long moment. Then, with the careful, studied casualness of someone lobbing a test grenade into enemy territory, she spoke.
"Are you still worrying about your sister? You've barely said a word since we left."
Hojo Suzune's eyes flicked toward her—a brief, sharp glance, like a blade catching light—but she said nothing. Her silence was louder than words could have been. It radiated a clear, unmistakable message: I have nothing to say to you.
The cold shoulder was practically glacial. But Mio, uncharacteristically, didn't rise to the bait. Her earlier jealousy, her instinctive territorial hostility toward anyone connected to Hojo Shione, had been tempered by exhaustion and the strange, hollow calm that had settled over her. Instead of bristling, she simply tilted her head, studying the girl's profile with genuine, almost clinical curiosity.
"Actually... I've been wondering about something. Something personal. How do you feel about this whole situation? Your sister is sick, hospitalized, her career hanging by a thread. And the person currently sitting at her bedside, holding her hand through the night... is the same person you're desperately in love with. That's quite a complicated emotional cocktail, isn't it?"
The words landed like a slap.
Hojo Suzune's entire body went rigid. Her small hands, which had been hanging limply at her sides, curled into white-knuckled fists. She whirled on Mio with the sudden, fierce velocity of a stray cat defending its territory, her eyes blazing with a fury that seemed far too large for her diminutive frame.
"Are you finished? Have you said enough insensitive, cruel, completely unnecessary things yet?!" Her voice trembled at the edges, cracking on the final syllable. "Do you enjoy this? Poking at other people's wounds?"
Mio blinked. The reaction was more intense than she'd anticipated. For a moment, she looked genuinely taken aback—her eyes widening, her lips parting in a small, startled 'o'.
"Eh... there's really no need to be so hostile toward me." She let her expression soften into something approaching innocence—the kind of wide-eyed, who-me? look she'd been practicing in her acting classes. "I wasn't trying to be cruel. I was just making an observation. A practical one."
She paused, reaching up to smooth a strand of wind-tossed hair behind her ear. A heavy, theatrical sigh escaped her lips.
"Your sister... well. After tonight, after pulling a stunt like that... I'm honestly starting to think my position as his girlfriend isn't particularly secure anymore. I might as well start packing my bags."
The word struck Hojo Suzune like an arrow.
"Stunt?" She seized the word with the sharp, unerring instinct of a hawk snatching a mouse from the grass. Her footsteps halted mid-stride. Her eyes, still rimmed with red from earlier tears, fixed on Mio's face with an intensity that bordered on magnetic. Her voice dropped to something cold. Precise. Dangerous.
"What do you mean by 'stunt'?"
Takahashi Mio felt an involuntary thump in her chest beneath that icy, penetrating stare. For just a fraction of a second, she understood exactly how a witness must feel under hostile cross-examination. She pursed her lips. Forced a smile that was perhaps a shade too casual.
"Why are you suddenly so tense? Do you... also feel like something about tonight doesn't add up?"
Hojo Suzune didn't blink. Didn't waver. Didn't take the conversational escape route Mio was offering. Her gaze remained fixed—two dark, gleaming nails pinning Mio to the spot.
"Continue. Explain. Now."
The command was delivered with such absolute, no-nonsense authority that Mio almost laughed. This little radish... she really is Shione's sister, isn't she? The same steel core, just wrapped in a smaller package.
"Alright, alright. Since you're so insistent..."
It seemed the abnormality ran in the family. Takahashi Mio took a breath and began to lay out everything she'd pieced together. Every suspicion. Every inconsistency. The way Hojo Shione had been perfectly fine during yesterday's rehearsal. The way the first four songs had gone flawlessly.
The statistical improbability of such a sudden, catastrophic vocal collapse.
The text messages. The Kendo Club incident. The way Saori had appeared like a guided missile, armed with just enough information to cause maximum chaos but not quite enough to understand the full picture.
"Wait—Hasegawa Saori? That name again?"
Hojo Suzune's brow furrowed, a flicker of confused recognition passing through her dark eyes. She'd heard the name before—whispered fragments, a ghost from Seiya's past that her sister had mentioned once or twice and then never again. But she'd never been given the full picture. Her formal, consistent contact with Seiya had begun only after he'd started dating her sister.
Saori was a phantom. A footnote. Someone who existed only in the negative space of stories she wasn't told.
But hearing now that her sister's entire scheme—her collapse, her sacrifice, her desperate gamble—had been motivated by this woman? By a rivalry Suzune hadn't even known existed?
A fresh wave of bitterness surged through the girl's small chest. Her fingers tightened around the strap of her bag. So even she... even this stranger... has a deeper history with Seiya than I do. Everyone has a piece of him except me.
Watching the jealousy flicker across the little radish's face like heat lightning, Takahashi Mio felt a dark, petty flicker of satisfaction.
Good. Suffer a little. Join the club.
The urge to twist the knife further—to reveal the engagement, the three-year promise, the way Shiratori Seiya had looked at Saori with that desperate, tender intensity—surged up with almost irresistible force.
But she held it back. Swallowed it down.
No. That would be too much. The string is already pulled taut. If I add any more pressure...
A person's spirit was like a violin string. Stretch it too far, and it would snap. The resulting discord would injure everyone within earshot.
And honestly... she was worried about Shiratori Seiya. Despite everything—despite the philandering, despite the emotional ambiguity, despite being left alone in a hotel room while he kept vigil at another woman's bedside—she worried. The guilt on his face tonight had been real. Raw. The kind of guilt that carved permanent lines into a person's soul.
Maybe this is punishment enough for him. Maybe watching Shione collapse was punishment enough for all of us. Maybe I should just... let it be.
A heavy sigh escaped her lips.
The sound was barely out of her mouth when Hojo Suzune's hand shot out, small fingers gripping Mio's forearm with surprising, almost bruising force. Her voice was cold. Accusatory. Trembling at the edges with suppressed tears.
"Then why? If you're so sure she manipulated everything—if you've figured all of this out—why aren't you telling Seiya?"
"Huh?"
The question caught Mio completely off guard. She turned, her eyes meeting Suzune's—and saw, to her shock, that the girl's eyes were swimming with fresh tears.
"You're supposed to be his girlfriend. Right now. That's your title. That's your position." Suzune's voice was cracking, the words spilling out in a raw, unpolished rush. "Can you really just stand there and watch him suffer like this? Watch him blame himself? Watch him sit beside that hospital bed, drowning in guilt for something that she did to herself? Why don't you tell him the truth?! Why don't you help him?!"
"I—"
"You don't deserve to be his girlfriend at all!"
The accusation hit like a physical blow. Takahashi Mio's heart, which had been calm and distant and philosophical just moments ago, suddenly ignited with anxious, defensive fire. The words unworthy girlfriend echoed in her skull, each repetition striking like a mallet against a gong. Her arm jerked, shaking off Suzune's grip with more force than strictly necessary. Her voice came out sharp, unpolished, stripped of all her carefully cultivated composure.
"Heh. Heh heh. Tell him? You think it's that simple?"
She rounded on the smaller girl, her peach-blossom eyes blazing.
"What exactly do you expect me to say? 'Hey Seiya, your ex-girlfriend who just collapsed on stage and got diagnosed with stress-induced aphonia? Yeah, she faked the whole thing, probably. I have no evidence, no proof, nothing concrete, but trust me, I just know.' Is that what you want? Do you think that would help anything at all?"
She paused, chest heaving, and let out a bitter, humorless laugh.
"And besides—you're really something else, you know that? We're not close. We're not friends. We barely tolerate each other on a good day. I told you what I suspected, and you just... believed it? Without question? What if I'm lying? What if I'm making all of this up to turn you against your own sister? Did that possibility even cross your mind?"
Her voice dropped. Colder. Sharper.
"And even if you believed me... even if you took every word I said as absolute truth... do you honestly think Seiya would believe it? Do you think he'd accept, without evidence, that Shione—the woman he once loved, the woman he feels guilty for leaving—deliberately orchestrated her own destruction just to pull him back? Or would he just think I'm a jealous girlfriend trying to poison him against his ex?"
The words hung in the air between them. Sharp. Cruel. And, Mio had to admit, not entirely unfair.
But Hojo Suzune didn't fire back. Didn't argue. Didn't defend her sister or attack Mio's logic. She just stood there, her small shoulders trembling, her fists clenched so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. The tears that had been threatening finally spilled over, tracing silver lines down her pale cheeks.
"I can't bear it," she whispered, her voice so quiet it was almost swallowed by the evening breeze. "I can't bear to see him so sad. I can't stand it. It hurts more than anything."
And then, before Mio could respond—before she could apologize or explain or do anything at all—Hojo Suzune turned on her heel and fled. Her small figure sprinted down the dark street toward the distant glow of the hotel, her footsteps echoing against the pavement like a fading heartbeat.
Takahashi Mio stood frozen. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No words came. She watched the girl's silhouette grow smaller and smaller until it was swallowed by the night, and still she didn't move. A strange, hollow ache had bloomed in her chest—something that felt uncomfortably like sympathy, or guilt, or perhaps just the exhausted recognition of a kindred spirit.
Finally, slowly, she turned and began walking in the opposite direction.
"It doesn't matter anymore."
Hojo Suzune sat on the edge of the hotel bed, her phone clutched in both hands, staring at the message glowing on the screen. The words blurred. She blinked, and the blur resolved. Blinked again, and it returned.
She had typed out a long explanation. Paragraphs of frantic, desperate reasoning. All the things Takahashi Mio had told her. All the inconsistencies. All the suspicions. She had been ready to send it. To make him understand. To save him from the guilt that was consuming him for a crime he hadn't committed.
But his reply—those four simple, devastating words—stopped her cold.
She deleted the unsent message. Drew a shaky breath. And typed:
"Why? Why doesn't it matter? She's manipulating you. Don't you see that?"
The reply came slowly. Deliberately. As if each word was being weighed before it was sent.
"Shiratori Seiya: Suzune... did you know that your sister has been taking antidepressant medication all this time? For months. Every single day."
The phone trembled in Hojo Suzune's hands. The fight drained out of her. The jealousy. The anger. The desperate need to protect him. All of it crumbled, leaving behind only a hollow, echoing sadness.
In the darkened hospital room, Shiratori Seiya stared at the phone until the screen dimmed and went black. Behind him, the girl's breathing was slow and even—the deep, untroubled rhythm of genuine, exhausted sleep. Her arms were still wrapped around his waist. Her cheek was still pressed against his back. Her warmth seeped through the thin fabric of his shirt, as steady and inescapable as the tide.
He set the phone aside.
The reason he was lying here now, letting her hold him through the long, dark hours until morning, wasn't because of the accident at the concert. That had been a shock—a terrifying, heartbreaking shock—but it wasn't what had broken through his carefully constructed walls. Accidents happened. Voices cracked. Bodies failed. That was the simple, tragic math of live performance.
What had truly, deeply wounded him—what had lodged in his chest like a splinter of glass—was the revelation that Hojo Shione had developed depression after their breakup. That she had been suffering, silently, for months. That every calm smile, every serene "I'm fine," every gentle assurance that she had moved on... had been a mask.
He had underestimated her. Underestimated the depth of her feelings. Underestimated the damage that walking away would inflict.
Every time they met, she had smiled at him. Warmly. Gently. As if she had truly made peace with their separation. But in the spaces between those meetings—in the long, empty hours where no one was watching and no performance was required—she had been swallowing handfuls of pills just to keep her head above the darkness.
Two images kept cycling through his mind. Shione on stage tonight, her voice a glorious, soaring instrument, her face radiant with the joy of doing what she loved. And Shione alone in a dim apartment, a glass of water and a bottle of medication her only companions. The contrast was so sharp, so cruel, that it made his chest ache with a physical, grinding pain.
She's been carrying this. Alone. All this time. And I never knew. I never even suspected.
He felt the girl's hand, still wrapped around his waist, twitch slightly in her sleep—an unconscious, reflexive squeeze, as if even in her dreams she was afraid he might disappear. Slowly, gently, he reached down and covered her small, cold fingers with his own palm. He held them. Not passionately. Not romantically. But firmly. Steadily. The way you held onto someone who was drowning.