Chapter 19: Test
The air in the C4 studio still felt thin after Suki’s phone call. The unasked question hung between them for two days, a silent third party in every rehearsal. It was Mina who finally broke the tense equilibrium, slamming her water bottle down with a decisive plastic crack.
“We’re going out,” she announced, hands on her hips. “My treat. No arguments. We’re a team, and teams… do team things! Bowling! Arcade! Food!”
Hikaru, applying lip gloss with surgical precision in the mirror, didn’t look up. “Team-building? Or are you just stressed because you messed up the lyrics three times today?”
Mina’s cheerful expression wavered. “It’s both! A two-for-one special!”
Ren, slumped in a padded chair while a stylist fiddled with his cap, felt a deep, primal dread. Public outings were minefields. Fans. Cameras. The exhausting performance of being ‘Rena’ outside the studio walls. “I have… refining to do. On my pivot,” he mumbled, pitching his voice into its higher, softer register.
“Nope!” Mina chirped. “Yuna-nee said you have no prior engagements. I checked!”
Of course she had. Ren silently cursed his sister’s thoroughness.
Suki, quietly packing her sheet music into a leather folder, spoke without looking up. “A change of scenery might be nice.” Her voice was calm, but the offer felt like a peace branch, an attempt to reset the strange mood she’d created.
Hikaru snapped her gloss shut. A slow, cunning smile spread across her face as her eyes landed on Ren’s trapped expression. “Oh, this will be educational. Let’s see how our shy Rena-chan handles the real world. I’m in.”
And so, Ren found himself shepherded through the electric bloodstream of Tokyo, a frilled prisoner in a pastel gothic Lolita dress Yuna had deemed “casual enough for incognito.” It was, of course, a lie. The outfit drew glances—admiring, curious—everywhere they went.
The montage that followed was a special kind of hell.
At a crepe stand in Harajuku, a group of high school girls recognized them, their squeals piercing the humid afternoon air. “Rena-chan! You’re even prettier in person!” Ren offered a stiff, tiny wave, his smile feeling carved from wood, while Hikaru fielded the attention with practiced, bubbly grace, her arm looped possessively through his.
In a neon-drenched arcade, Mina dragged him to a rhythm game, chattering endlessly about combo multipliers. Ren’s competitive flame flickered. His fingers, trained on a mechanical keyboard, fumbled on the giant, garish buttons. He failed spectacularly. Mina won, jumping in triumph. “Don’t worry, Rena-chan! It’s all about fun!” The condescension was like acid on his pride. He bit his tongue so hard he tasted copper.
On the packed Yamanote Line, pressed between salarymen and shoppers, Ren felt the cage of his persona shrink tighter. The petticoats took up too much space. Someone’s briefcase bumped his thigh. The hats fibers itched his scalp. He stared at his reflection in the dark train window—a wide-eyed, delicate girl swimming in a sea of strangers—and felt a disconnect so profound it bordered on nausea.
Through it all, Hikaru watched him. Not with the fans’ adoration, but with the keen focus of a predator studying a new species. She saw the way his “shy” downcast eyes sometimes flashed with a sharp, irritated intelligence. She noted the way his delicate hands, when he thought no one was looking, would clench into frustrated fists before smoothing back into limp-wristed placidity.
By the time they tumbled into a subdued, wood-paneled izakaya in a Shinjuku backstreet, Ren was a live wire of social exhaustion. The smell of grilled yakitori and beer was a visceral anchor to a simpler, masculine world he was barred from.
They claimed a corner booth. Mina immediately ordered a parade of small plates and a giant tower of draft beer. Hikaru asked for a highball, cool and detached. Suki, after a moment’s hesitation, requested a plum wine.
Ren stared at the menu. Alcohol was a known debuff. It slowed reaction times, clouded judgment. Stats didn’t lie. “Just… a cola,” he murmured.
Hikaru’s eyebrow arched. “Not a drinker, Rena-chan? How unexpectedly pure.”
“I have a… sensitive constitution,” he whispered, the excuse pathetic even to his own ears.
The food came. The beer and drinks flowed. Mina’s laughter grew louder, her anecdotes more disjointed. Hikaru sipped her highball, her gaze growing lazily more analytical in the warm, dim light. Suki, beside Ren, was quiet. She nursed her first glass of plum wine slowly, then, as Mina launched into another story, she emptied it and quietly signaled for another.
And then another.
And another.
It happened gradually. The rigid line of Suki’s shoulders softened. The precise, pianist’s posture slackened. After her third glass, she let out a small, uncharacteristic sigh, her head tilting back against the leather booth.
“You know,” she said, her words beginning to blur at the edges, “this is nice. No one… expecting anything here.”
Mina, cheeks flushed, leaned in. “Suki-chan! You never talk about yourself! Where’s home?”
Suki stared into the amber depth of her wine. “Kyoto,” she said, the word dropping like a stone into the sudden quiet of their table. “It’s… all wood and whispers. And rules.” She took a long drink. “My family’s house is so old the floors cry when you walk on them. Sounds like ghosts.” A faint, bitter smile touched her lips. “They have opinions. About music. About careers. About… everything.”
Ren froze, a piece of takoyaki halfway to his mouth. This was the breach in the wall.
Hikaru set her glass down quietly, all feigned nonchalance gone. “What kind of opinions?”
Suki waved a dismissive hand, the gesture looser, clumsier than her usual precise movements. “The kind framed in gold leaf and hung on a scroll. ‘Traditional arts are pure. Modern music is noise.’ ‘A Yamato does not perform for strangers.’” Her voice dipped, a mocking imitation of a stern, older tone. “They wanted a court musician. A living museum piece. I wanted… sounds no one in that dusty house had ever heard.” She looked at her hands, the fingers long and skilled. “I send money. It doesn’t stop the calls. The reminders of what I’ve… stepped away from.”
The unspoken weight of that last phone call in the studio settled over them. It hadn’t been a wrong number. It had been a summons.
Suki’s head lolled toward Ren, her bangs shifting to reveal a sliver of glassy, unfocused eye. “You’re lucky, Rena-chan. You’re just… you. No history.” She reached out and clumsily patted his hand on the table. “Just pretty and new.”
The touch was warm, damp from her glass. A bolt of guilt shot through Ren. He was a fraud, a construction of lace and lies, sitting beside someone whose real, painful struggle was spilling out because of cheap plum wine. His own secret pressed against his ribs, sour and heavy.
Hikaru’s gaze was now a physical weight on the side of his face. He could feel her connecting dots he desperately needed to keep scattered.
Mina, sensing the mood had plummeted, fumbled for cheer. “Well! We’re your family now! C4! Crazy, Courageous, Colorful… uh, Cool!”
Suki gave a soft, drunken laugh that sounded dangerously close to a sob. She squeezed Ren’s hand once before letting go and reaching for her empty glass. “I think,” she announced with drunken solemnity, “I need another.”
The waiter was already approaching, but Ren saw the look on Hikaru’s face—not pity, but a sharp, reassembling calculation. The night air outside would be cool, but a deeper chill had settled into their booth, one that no amount of grilled meat or forced laughter could dispel. The team-building exercise was over. Something real had been excavated, and none of them knew what to do with the fragile, awkward shape of it now lying exposed on the table between the empty plates.