The morning sun, usually a welcome, warm pressure on my eyelids, was an unwelcome intrusion. I was awake. It was the day of the festival, and for the first time since I started high school, I was sitting at my desk by the window, wide awake.
I hadn't worked my full shift. After walking Hotaru home, I had gone out on my route, the engine of the scooter a low, angry buzz in the quiet night. But my focus was shot. Every shadow seemed to hold the memory of her tear-streaked face. Every quiet moment was filled with the echo of me shouting her name. I finished my essential deliveries and went home hours early, the equation of my life suddenly full of variables I couldn't solve. I didn't study. I just sat in the dark, and for the first time in a very long time, I didn't sleep in class.
I stared out the window, but I wasn't seeing the familiar school grounds. I was seeing a timeline of my own life, a straight, predictable line that had been violently bent the day she walked into the music room.
My life had a simple, brutal rhythm. Work, care for my grandmother, sleep at school. That was it. Friends were a luxury I couldn't afford. Emotions were a currency I didn't trade in. My actions were all based on a single, unwavering principle: survival.
Then she appeared. A chaotic, unpredictable force. A nuisance.
And since she appeared, I had broken every single one of my own rules. I had interfered. I had fought. I had helped. I had comforted. I had shouted a girl's name in the middle of a dark street like a character in some stupid, dramatic movie.
My gaze drifted across the classroom to her. She wasn't paying attention to the teacher, either. She was bent over her notebook, a pencil clutched in her hand, her expression a mask of fierce, absolute concentration. She was in her own world, the world of her song, a world she was about to present to everyone. The silver hair caught the light, a crown of brilliant, hard-won defiance.
A surge of something, a bitter, resentful anger, went through me. Look at her. So focused. So ready for a battle I had, in part, sent her into alone. My cowardice, my silence in the face of Ayame's threat, had put her on that stage by herself. And my moment of weakness, my pathetic attempt at comfort, had given her the strength to walk onto it.
I hated the contradiction. I hated the tangled, messy feeling in my chest. I hated that I had cared enough to shout, and I hated that I hadn't cared enough to fight.
She was a disruption to the system. My system. A system that had kept me safe, kept me sane, kept me moving forward. Now, the system was broken. I had to turn and face the strange new choices I was making, choices that were no longer simple, logical calculations for survival. They were messy, emotional, and utterly unpredictable.
I looked at my own hands, resting on the worn wood of my desk. These hands had fixed my grandmother's screen door, hauled crates of vegetables, and played a thousand angry, solitary chords on a guitar. Yesterday, they had held up a crying girl in the dark.
The bell rang, the sound a shrill, jarring end to the last quiet moment. She looked up, her eyes blinking as if coming out of a dream. She closed her notebook with a soft, final snap. Her face was pale, but her expression was set, a warrior preparing for the arena.
She was changing. And the most terrifying part, the part that kept me awake and staring out this window, was the undeniable, infuriating truth that because of her, I was changing too.
The bell rang for lunch, a shrill, jarring sound that did nothing to break the strange new tension in the room. I was still awake. And the entire school, a creature that thrives on gossip and the slightest deviation from the norm, had noticed.
The whispers followed me as I stood up from my desk. It wasn't the usual "delinquent" or "scary guy" talk. It was a new, more bewildered strain of commentary.
"He's awake.""Did you see? He was awake all morning.""Is he sick?"
I ignored it, my face set in its usual mask of bored indifference. But today, the mask felt thin, a cheap piece of plastic that could crack at any moment. I walked out of the classroom, and instead of turning toward the stairs that led to the roof, my usual solitary sleeping spot, I did something I hadn't done since my first year. I walked toward the cafeteria.
The decision felt like it belonged to someone else, an alien impulse overriding my own programming. The moment I stepped through the doors, the chaotic, joyful noise of the cafeteria faltered. The chatter died down in waves, spreading out from the entrance like a ripple in a pond. Students stopped mid-bite, their chopsticks hovering over their bowls, to stare. Even the teachers, sitting at their designated table, looked up with expressions of mild, professional shock. I was an animal that had wandered out of its known habitat and into the town square. Even I felt weird about it.
I got my tray, a bland-looking curry rice, and scanned the loud, crowded room. My eyes found her instantly. She was sitting with Emi and Yui at a table near the window. Emi was staring at me with the same wide-eyed, gawking expression as everyone else. But Hotaru... Hotaru didn't seem to feel weird at all. She just looked curious, just like she was before. Her head was tilted slightly, her silver hair catching the light, her eyes watching me with a quiet, analytical intensity. There was no shock, no judgment. Just a question.
That was good. Because now, I was curious about her, too.
I found an empty table in a far corner and sat down, my back to the wall. I ate the curry, the taste a bland, meaningless sensation. But my mind was a thousand miles away, connecting dots I hadn't even realized were there.
Her curiosity hadn't felt like an intrusion because it was a reflection of my own. All this time, I had seen her as a nuisance, a problem, a chaotic force that had disrupted my carefully ordered life. But that wasn't the whole truth. From the first moment she sang in the club room, a raw, broken thing, I had seen something I recognized. She was like looking in a mirror.
The loneliness in her eyes, the way she built walls of performance or silence, the feeling that she was a ghost haunting her own life... I felt like she was in pain, like me. We were two sides of the same cracked, dirty coin. Two survivors pretending we didn't need anyone.
I looked up, and my eyes met hers from across the crowded, noisy room. The world seemed to fall away. The chatter, the clatter of trays, the hundreds of other students—they all vanished, leaving just the two of us, two reflections staring at each other in a sea of noise. And in that single, silent moment, a new, terrifying thought took root in my mind. Maybe the system I had built to protect myself wasn't a fortress. Maybe it was just a prison. And maybe, just maybe, it was time to make a change.
The silent, shared look with Hotaru across the cafeteria was a match strike in a dark room. The decision to change, a terrifying, abstract concept just moments before, now felt solid. A reality.
But reality has consequences.
The final bell rang, and I packed my bag, the familiar routine feeling strange, disconnected. I walked out of the school gates with Mio and Kaito, the three of us falling into our usual, somber formation. The silence between us, once a comfortable habit, was now thick with unspoken things. Their misery over the festival cancellation was a heavy, suffocating blanket. My own turmoil was a secret I didn't know how to voice.
We were walking down the main shopping street, a stretch of small, family-owned stores that had been there for decades. As we passed the old Itō hardware store, Mr. Itō, a wiry old man with a perpetually dusty apron, was out front, struggling to pull down his heavy metal shutter for the evening.
Normally, I wouldn't have even registered it. He was part of the scenery, another piece of background noise in a world I moved through but didn't interact with. But today was different. I saw the strain on his face, heard the grating squeal of the old metal. Before I could stop myself, I paused.
"Need a hand, Itō-san?" I asked.
The words felt alien in my own mouth.
Mr. Itō looked up, his eyes widening in pure, unadulterated shock, as if one of his own hammers had just spoken to him.
But his reaction was nothing compared to Mio and Kaito's. They both stopped dead in their tracks, their feet seemingly glued to the pavement. They stared at me, then at the store owner, then back at me, their faces a perfect, synchronized picture of disbelief. Did he just look at the store owner? Did he just talk to him?
I ignored them, walked over, and gave the shutter a firm, steady pull. It came down with a final, rattling thump. "Ah, thank you, Takanashi-kun," the old man stammered, bowing slightly. "My back's been giving me trouble." I just gave him a single, short nod and turned to leave.
Mio and Kaito were still frozen, staring at me as if I'd just grown a second head.
"What?" I finally grunted, the attention making my skin crawl.
"What do you mean, 'what'?" Mio finally burst out, her voice a low, furious hiss. Her sadness from the past few days had finally found a target. "What is with you today? You're awake. You're eating in the cafeteria. You're talking to shopkeepers. Our band got sacked, and the next day you're all modest and cutesy."
"She's right, Ren," Kaito added, his voice full of a genuine, hurt confusion. "It's weird. We're all destroyed about the festival. But you... you don't even seem to care."
The accusation hit me with the force of a physical blow. They saw my change not as a personal struggle, but as a betrayal of our shared grief.
Mio took a step closer, her eyes narrowing. "That's it, isn't it?" she said, her voice dropping to a low, wounded whisper. "You hated the band. You didn't even care that it's over. Are you secretly happy this happened?"
I looked at their faces, at Mio's righteous anger and Kaito's wounded confusion. I couldn't tell them the truth. I couldn't mention Ayame's threat; it would just put them in more danger. I needed to build a wall, fast. I needed a reason, any reason, to make them back off.
"Maybe it's for the best," I said, the words coming out cold and detached, a lousy, unbelievable reason. "It was just a club. We weren't getting any better anyway."
The silence that followed was a different kind. It wasn't sad or angry. It was shocked. Stunned.
"'Just a club'?" Kaito repeated, his voice barely a whisper. "Ren, this band... it was the only thing you ever seemed to care about."
"Was it all a lie, then?" Mio asked, her fury replaced by a cold, sharp suspicion. "All that time you spent writing, practicing... was that nothing to you?"
They weren't shouting anymore. They were studying me, their eyes narrowed, trying to solve a puzzle that suddenly made no sense. They were looking at a stranger.
"I have to go," I mumbled, unable to hold their hurt, suspicious gazes.
I turned and walked away, leaving them standing on the sidewalk. I hadn't been abandoned. I had just given them a reason not to trust me. The gap between us was now a chasm of my own making, filled with a lie that was now, officially, part of my story.
I walked away, and I didn't look back. The lie I had told was a physical weight, a shroud I had pulled over myself. The hurt and suspicion on Mio and Kaito's faces were burned into my memory, a fresh new image to join the gallery of things I tried not to think about.
The sun was setting, bleeding orange and purple across the sky, but the world had gone grey. The familiar streets of my town, the ones I traveled every single night on my scooter, felt alien, hostile. I had just sacrificed my only two friends on the altar of a lie, and for what? To protect them from a threat they didn't even know existed. To protect a band that was already dead.
My path diverged from the one that led home. The sun was down, which meant it was time for work. I walked toward the small, industrial depot on the outskirts of town, my footsteps the only sound in the growing darkness.
It was just a club. The words echoed in my head, my own voice a venomous hiss. It was the most profound lie I had ever told. That club, that noisy, dusty room, was the only place in the world I could breathe. It was the only place the constant, grinding pressure of my life would recede, replaced by the simple, honest language of a power chord. It was the only thing that was truly mine. And I had just told the only two people who shared it with me that it meant nothing.
A bitter, humorless laugh escaped my lips. This was all her fault.
Hotaru Abe.
Before she showed up, my life was a miserable, predictable, but stable equation. I worked, I kept my grandmother safe, I slept. The loneliness was a constant, like the low hum of a refrigerator, a noise you get so used to you don't even hear it anymore.
Then she fell into my life like a meteorite, and the entire landscape had been rearranged.
I was breaking all my own rules. I was fighting in alleys, I was shouting in the street, I was comforting crying girls. I was talking to shopkeepers, for god's sake. The quiet, solitary fortress I had spent years building was being dismantled, brick by brick, by a girl with sad eyes and silver hair.
How was that possible? How could one person, one quiet, broken girl, have the power to do this? To reach into my carefully controlled world and turn everything upside down? To make me care about things I had no business caring about?
I had just destroyed my friendships, the only real connections I had. The little killer is a smiling boy, I thought, the line from some old song floating up from the depths of my memory. Except I wasn't smiling. I had just committed an act of social suicide, and I had done it with the same blank, bored expression I wore every single day.
I reached the depot, the familiar smell of gasoline and cardboard a strange, unwelcome comfort. My scooter was parked in its usual spot, a beat-up but reliable workhorse. I swung my leg over the seat, the worn vinyl cool against my jeans.
I thought that the noise of the engine, the mindless repetition of the route, the physical exhaustion, would be enough to drown her out. I thought I could go back to the simple, brutal equation of my life.
But as I kick-started the engine and pulled out into the darkness, I knew, with a chilling certainty, that it was too late. The static was gone. The background hum had been replaced by a melody. And it was a melody that was all about her.
I didn't know how, but she had found a way past all my defenses. She had, in the span of a few short weeks, completely and utterly managed to disarm me. And I had no idea if that was the best or the absolute worst thing that had ever happened to me.
The next two days were a strange, silent truce. It was the calm before the storm of the festival, a pocket of quiet tension where everyone seemed to be holding their breath. I kept my promise to myself and let her be. I saw her in the hallways, her head bent over her notebook, a world away, preparing for her solo battle. The distance was a necessary, self-inflicted wound.
On the last day of school before the festival, I walked into the cafeteria. The noise and the stares were a familiar, low-grade irritation. I got my tray and found my usual corner table, a solitary island in a sea of cheerful, chattering students. My eyes, against my will, found her. She was sitting with Emi and Yui, but she wasn't talking. She was just staring out the window, her expression distant, her silver hair a stark, beautiful anomaly in the crowded room.
She was preparing. And I was leaving her to do it alone. The thought was a dull, familiar ache.
"Takanashi-kun."
The voice was a smooth, unwelcome intrusion. I looked up. Ayame Kurokawa was standing before my table, her own lunch tray held with an easy, regal grace. She followed me from behind and slid into the seat opposite me without an invitation.
"You've been quiet lately," she said, her voice a pleasant, conspiratorial purr. "It suits you."
I just stared at her, my hand tightening around my chopsticks.
"I have to admit," she continued, gracefully picking up a piece of tamagoyaki, "I was worried for a moment. But it seems my intervention was for the best. Well, now your band is gone, you've become a good student. You see? Without the distraction of that noisy little club, you're free to be a better student. A better person."
Her words were perfectly crafted, each one a small, poisoned dart. She was praising me for my own destruction, framing my loss as her victory.
"I knew you were always a good person all along," she said, her smile a beautiful, sharp thing. "You just needed the right... encouragement." She took a delicate bite of her egg, her eyes never leaving mine. "But there's one thing I want you to still do."
She leaned forward slightly, her voice dropping to a low, intimate whisper, a sound meant only for me. "Stay away from Hotaru."
And in that moment, something inside me shifted. It wasn't anger. It wasn't fear. It was something new, something ancient and deeply territorial. It was a cold, clear, and absolute feeling of possession.
Why would I? She's mine.
The thought was instant, primal, and shocking in its intensity. It rose from a place deeper than logic. But just as quickly, another, clearer thought corrected it, a wave of self-awareness washing over the raw instinct.
I mean, she's no one's.
She was a person, not a possession. A broken, beautiful, fiercely independent person. That was the entire point. That was what made her different. That was what made me different.
Ayame saw her as a piece on a board, a doll to be dressed up and controlled. And in that instant, the entire game became crystal clear. This wasn't about the band, or the festival, or even about Hotaru. This was about a predator trying to put a leash on a stray that had wandered into my territory. Ayame was trying to stand in my place, and she didn't even know it.
A slow, cold calm washed over me. The confusion, the guilt, the frustration—it all vanished, replaced by a single, diamond-hard point of clarity. I knew what I had to do.
I looked up at her, my face a perfect mask of bored, weary acceptance. I let out a small, tired sigh, as if I was finally giving in to the inevitable.
"Yes," I said.
The word was a surrender. A white flag. And I watched, with a deep, hidden satisfaction, as a look of triumphant, condescending pity dawned on Ayame's perfect face. She had won. She had broken the delinquent and brought him to heel.
She stood up, her duty done. "I'm glad we understand each other," she purred, before turning and gliding away, leaving me alone with my cold curry and my brand-new secret. She had just given an order to the one person who was no longer playing