Chapter Text
It might have been cold in the interview room. Akane wasn’t sure; couldn’t really tell, not right now. Her nerves were pulled too raw, like a cello tuned to snapping. She’d done it. She’d done it.
It was finally over.
And soon it’d be over for her, too, unless she delivered the performance of her life.
“Miss Kurokawa, walk us through the events leading up to your conversation with Mr. Kamiki. Why did you visit him?”
“Okay, I, uh—” Akane said, and then swallowed heavily. She let her eyes drop from the sergeant’s face to study her hands, bunching them open and shut on the metal tabletop. Her fingers were slender, delicate almost; a teenage girl’s, not a murderer’s. “Sorry, this is just… a lot. I can’t believe he’s dead!”
“That’s alright,” the sergeant—she thought his name was Isshiki—said, not unkindly. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched, especially for such a heavy-set man, but that didn’t make it any less intimidating in the here and now. “You can answer in your own time.”
Her lawyer said nothing, just shuffled the notes he’d pulled from his briefcase into a more palatable order, so Akane assumed it was a fair question. She’d never had a lawyer before, outside of the woman her parents paid to look over all her contracts before she signed them, but this one, the tall, thin, bespectacled Mr. Sanda, had been Aqua’s recommendation. She probably should have been surprised that her boyfriend had a criminal lawyer almost on speed-dial, but really, she’d have been more surprised if he hadn’t.
“Okay,” she said again, clasping her hands together to run circles over her knuckles with one of her thumbs like she was trying to soothe herself, leaning forward slightly, closer to the sergeant’s space. Listen. Trust. “So, I won the Best New Actress award at the Japanese Film Festival this year and—sorry, I don’t mean to brag, it’s just that Mr. Kamiki sent me flowers as congratulations for winning, so—”
“Why did he send them to you?” the sergeant interrupted, but less brusquely than he could have. “Did you know each other?”
“Oh—no, we didn’t. Sorry, I forgot to explain. I asked about that too,” Akane said, because it was true. “My colleagues at Lalalie, my theatre company, they said he used to work there and every time one of us won something he’d send them flowers and a card. They all really liked him.”
She’d liked him too. Just for a moment; just for the ways he’d reminded her of Aqua.
She’d hated him for the same.
“I wanted to thank him in person,” she said, and glanced down and to the side at the sharp corner of the table, a grey cut against the stark white of the interrogation room’s walls and floor. “And—And maybe get some advice. He was a Lalalie graduate, with his own company! I watched some of his tapes, as part of my training. He was so good, and I was… well, I was a little star-struck?”
That was even the truth. The first time Kamiki Hikaru had looked at her, really looked at her instead of pretending to be harmless, it’d felt like staring up at the night sky and realising you were nothing but ashes and dust. What else could you call that but starstroke?
“I went to his company’s building, with some flowers of my own. White roses, just like the ones he gave me. They said he always sent the same type, so I thought he might like them. I asked the receptionist—sorry, I forgot her name, we didn’t talk much—if he was free and explained why I was there. She rang up and apparently he was free for the next hour so she sent me up and that was when I met him.”
The first thing Akane thought when she saw Kamiki Hikaru face to face wasn’t really a thought at all. It was a touch at the base of her spine, a shadow she blinked away in a moment. It was nothing she would have known at all, had she not been there on that balcony, answering the words what would you do then? and wondering how she’d missed the gravedirt that clung to Hoshino Aqua’s pupils like he’d had to claw himself from it just to see.
She lost it in an instant; Kamiki was smiling gently, his eyes invisible behind a pair of small, tinted spectacles, his hair obscuring most of his forehead and face. There was nothing but genuine warmth in his expression. If he was acting, she—she couldn’t tell. She’d expected that much, but that did nothing for the visceral thrill of fear that kissed the inside of her bones when she felt herself doubt, for a moment, if she’d deduced him correctly at all.
If not for the memory of that little prickle where her vertebra sat against her skin, light as a crow’s wing, that shadow of a doubt might have been enough to turn her from her course.
He really was terrifying.
“Hello, Miss Kurokawa,” he said, stepping out from behind his luxurious leather swivel-chair and in front of the wide mahogany desk that dominated the room. “It’s very kind of you to come all this way, just for a simple thank-you!”
“Please, Mr. Kamiki, call me Akane,” she replied, bowing slightly as she offered him the bundle of white roses that hid her knife from view. “If you were still at Lalalie, you’d be my senpai, and the others would never forgive me for being so rude to you!”
“Then I’ll hope you’ll call me Miki,” he said. He took the flowers, bringing them up to his face to inhale the sweet scent before turning to place them carefully behind him—so carefully that Akane, who had just realised the sound of the knife against the desk would give everything away, breathed a shallow sigh of relief. “How is Toshirou? As serious as always?”
“Director Kindaichi has been very good to me.” Akane did not stop the fond annoyance from spilling across her face—Kamiki would see through a performance almost immediately, that much his own had told her. If she was going to act, she would only ever be able to do it once. “Honestly, I wish he would sometimes be a little less serious, but then it wouldn’t be him and it wouldn’t be Lalalie, you know? He was the one who told me about the flowers. It’s very kind of you to do that.”
“I’ve always kept an eye on Lalalie,” Kamiki said, with another easy smile. He was a splash of gentle gold against the dark backdrop of his desk. “I have… fond memories of my time there.”
It was lucky, Akane thought, that she was here instead of Aqua. He pretended at so much distance and control, but she knew the heart of him—the heart that would have propelled his fist into Kamiki’s face right then and there.
“So do I.” Another truth. Akane loved Lalalie—her friends, her co-stars, and the fun they let her have with each breath upon the stage. She didn’t think Kamiki had. Not with the way he’d seemed as a child, in that recording she’d watched; just like Aqua had in the middle of a breakdown, except painfully deliberate, as if he kept himself there to remind you what it looked like to hurt. “I haven’t actually said it yet, so: thank you for the flowers, Miki. They have such a lovely fragrance.”
“It was nothing,” he said, waving a fine-fingered hand. Akane watched his black suit jacket stretch with the motion and wondered if the colour was meant to hide the blood, or just to offset the bright halo of his hair. “It’s my life’s work, now, to keep an eye on young up-and-coming stars.”
There was something about those words that touched the same hollow that the sight of him had, but Akane wasn’t sure what. She let it go, trusting her mind to figure it out, and said, “Ah—Actually, speaking as one ‘up-and-coming star’ to another…”
“I hope it’s not about a job,” Kamiki said, with the genial air of a man who wanted you to know he was only joking before he even opened his mouth, “because I’d hate to be used so mercenarily when we’ve just met.”
Akane waved her hands frantically in front of her, accidentally clapping one glove with the other. “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that! I just wanted—I just thought I could ask you for some advice?”
Kamiki chuckled, harmlessly friendly. “I didn’t mean to tease you. Please, ask away.”
She looked around the room—soft beige walls, one covered in photos of Kamiki with a who’s who of the acting world (always, always in a group)—in a show of the nerves she was actually feeling, and spoke. “I guess I just wanted to know… I’ve been in the entertainment world since I was five, but I’m only now setting foot into the big leagues: LoveNow, Tokyo Blade, the Film Festival, everything. It’s… nerve-wracking. The director showed me some of your acting reels, as part of my preparation, and I was amazed. Now you’re here, too, running your own company since you were twenty-five! I’m… What did it feel like, for you?”
Kamiki nodded seriously, like she’d told him something precious. She supposed she had—it was something she was worried about, though not half as much as she’d expected. He rubbed his hands together as if preparing to perform, and spoke.
“I like you, Akane, so I’ll tell you a secret in return. When I started acting, it wasn’t for the right reasons. I wanted to get back something that had been taken from me. I guess you could say that, in the beginning, acting was my form of revenge.”
Some low, sick part of Akane couldn’t help but think: like father, like son.
The rest knew she could never tell Aqua, not about this. She could tell him every word Kamiki spoke but not those, not the proof that he and his mother’s killer had once shared something beyond blood. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miki.”
“It was long in the past,” he said, shrugging. “I soon realised that there were far more interesting things to be acting for. Things that made me feel alive. Things that made this world of ours shine so bright it was like everything I saw was made of stars. I wanted to hold them in my hands. So I did. Just like you will.”
“It’s kind of you to say that,” Akane said, ducking her head. “Is that what keeps you going? A desire to see the stars?”
She had—there was something gnawing at her, fat and bloated like a corpse, and she had to know.
“That’s part of it,” he said, “but the other is…”
He held a hand out and tilted it, palm down, fingers to the roof. It was a simple, relaxed gesture, something worn smooth by practice. Akane blinked, and wondered why she’d thought he was holding something.
“Never forget the weight of your life,” he said, and when he met her eyes she felt again that trembling, awful pressure that licked a momentary horror through her gut. “This world we live in can be wonderful, but as someone who lived through the LoveNow backlash I’m sure I don’t need to tell you it can be awful too. You need to remember, always, who you are. No matter how bright the stars, even light bends to gravity.”
—and then he was back again, and he made it feel so seamless, just a man who’d been lost in the reminiscence of a time he’d long since left behind, a cloud whose silver linings now brought a smile to his face.
Akane felt her face go white with horror.
Raped at eleven.
Acting for revenge.
Himekawa Airi, his rapist, star actress.
Murder-suicide with husband.
Hoshino Ai, his lover, star idol.
Murdered by stalker.
Young up-and-coming stars.
Even light bends to gravity.
Kamiki Hikaru is a serial killer.
“I’m sorry,” Kamiki said, peering at her worriedly. “I didn’t mean to bring up any bad memories.”
“No, no,” Akane said quickly, “it’s not your fault, Miki. Thank you for the advice.”
In a motion so casual Akane didn’t realise it until he was already finished, Kamiki Hikaru reached up to nose and drew his glasses off, sweeping his hair with the back of his palm until it hung messily on either side of his face.
“It’s the least I could do for my son’s girlfriend,” he said, and his eyes were supernovae.