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Light music fills the bar. It’s not a bar but it does look like one. The walls are brown and a lone girl sits before the counter, one elbow leaning on it, keeping her hand up to hold her face. She kept her other hand raised, swirling the liquid in her glass as she stared through what was before her through it.
Where bottles were supposed to be stored, where if this was a normal club there would be glasses and a bartender swirling a drink or two, is a screen.
The girl sighs.
The glass is placed on the counter. She taps it twice.
The screen flicks to life.
[THE STAGE is falling apart. Just as the picture before, everything gets cut in half.]
JUNNA
All the stages you’ve prepared for me, I’ll cut them all short!
[THE STAGE is ripped in half. JUNNA and NANA stand on opposite sides. JUNNA’S face is shown. Her eyes burn enough to burn the entire stage should she want to.]
JUNNA
You are the one who’s being blinded by the light! Because! On this stage,
right now-
[All it takes sometimes is a leap of faith. A jump. An ocean to cross to reach the dazzling light.
JUNNA jumps.]
JUNNA
Of this stage, I am-!
[THE LIGHT is cut.
NANA realizes the truth all too late. A brilliance she wanted, the leap she wanted to see. All to the cost of her downfall.
Her eyes show us the truth: it was one that she is dazzled by and cannot- won’t- doesn’t want to stop. All she can do is see it happen.]
JUNNA
The dazzling lead– Hoshimi Junna!
[A leap of faith. The brilliance and fall of a star.
JUNNA falls and so does the stage.
One has fallen into brilliance and the other apart.]
JUNNA
That will be my next stage.
Now that I see that day, I’m sure I’m closer than ever to reaching it.”
The screen pauses. On it is shown a broken stage, two lights shining upon two girls. On the bar that isn’t a bar remain two girls. The tapping on the counter stops.
Junna sits down. A moment later, a glass is slid to her, one her hand stops right in its hold. The liquid is thick, pink. Strawberry milk.
“That’s not banana milk in your glass.”
The liquid swirls, a molten gold. The girl swirls it around in silence, contemplating her next words.
“It tastes just as sweet.”
“I’d assume it’s sweeter.” Junna raises her glass, sips and wipes her lips with the back of her hand when she’s done. “It’s a fruity drink. Disaronno, right? I don’t want to pretend I didn't see the bottle you used to keep at Saijo-san’s room so I didn't notice. I noticed.”
A chuckle. “Nothing can escape your sharp eye, Junna.”
“Related to you? I’m sure.”
“It’s a blessing and a curse.” The girl raises her glass, doesn’t drink yet. “I don’t think I could have been any more cruel for much longer.”
“I didn’t want you to act a role that fits the one you wrote for me.”
“It was a well done role, nonetheless.”
“You’re many things as a true stage girl, but you aren’t cruel, Nana.”
Nana’s glass is paused right as it touches her lips. She stares at its base until she opens her mouth and drinks the entire liquid left. When she puts the glass down, Nana taps it once. She knows Junna is looking at her, and at a glass that magically refills.
She hums to the tune of the song that fills the space around them.
“This rondo will end someday…” Nana sings quietly. “That’s what makes it so dazzling.”
A beat passes. “When did you know?”
“Huh?” Junna blinks confused. Nana turns to finally look at her. Her hair is shorter, her glasses round and their frame thin. “What do you mean?”
“That it wasn’t real.” Nana taps her glass again. Her thumb caresses its rim. “I mean this.”
She taps the glass again.
[JUNNA slashes her away. Pushes NANA with a force that is unlike all she showed until now.
Now the stage is green, just as the green of her eyes and the green of her gem.
Now the stage is JUNNA’S.]
JUNNA
I don’t need the role you’ve given me.
[A step over. Position Zero is now hers.
NANA is pushed away and JUNNA slashes but doesn’t go for the cape.
She’s a winner without a cape falling.]
JUNNA
My path is… something I’ll cut my way through myself!
The glass taps the counter again. Both stare at Junna’s face, frozen in the moment, young and seventeen and with a burning gaze that even now Nana stares at in amazement. Nana, for all her memory of years repeated, can barely remember more times than she has fingers when Junna had that gaze.
Now, with years and time clouding her memory, seeing such a gaze makes her wonder if she would ever see it again. Would it still light her entire being on fire? Would she let it destroy all around her just to feel its full wrath?
The girl beside her lacked that fire at the moment. She was wearing a soft cardigan above her black turtleneck, a beige color that looked too big on her. A sleeve hung loosely from her shoulder and Nana barely held back the urge to fix it herself. The girl beside her was the same girl that they both were seeing on the screen and yet she wasn’t.
The Junna who sat by her side was a Junna she didn’t know. A Junna whose memory Nana slowly day by day felt disappearing into a haze. Sometimes she’d freeze, try to remember a memory of Junna’s and start repeating facts she could remember. She liked mushrooms. She was sharp. She was talented and bright and loved when Nana cooked her mother’s dish and was a pillar of support and strength for all their class and didn’t really like swimming–
Nana tried. But there is only so much one can do against time. Against new stages and new things and life moving forward.
But with each nursing their drink sitting side by side, Nana felt the thrill of being so close to such a star rush through her veins, burning her from the inside out. A calm fire, one not so much different than a house fire, one that you didn’t notice until it was far too late to stop it.
The same fire she felt back then. Perhaps it was true, that the senses held unto memories for far longer than the brain.
“I’ve replayed this moment–” Nana tilts her glass to the face on the screen before them, “-more times than my repeatings. And it took me until much later to realize that you knew.”
“I didn’t, at first.” Junna spun her glass around, staring at it. “But then you slipped. Your feelings got to your role. The Nana you are– were and the Nana I didn’t know couldn’t be separate for much longer.”
“Only because of that?”
Junna’s smile could be heard in her voice, its bittersweetness dripping in her words. “Your Junna-chan. The Junna-chan whose brilliance only relied on looking up to the stars and always short of reaching them. It was easy to realize you were afraid I’d be stuck as that person. Why you were afraid when I fought back instead of being annoyed that I wasn't letting you win.”
“I-”
Nana stops. She’s sure that whatever apology she has will die on her lips before she utters it out loud. It would be meaningless. It would be a lie. She can’t apologize and say she didn’t mean her words, can’t lie and say that she was just playing a role when she told Junna that she was the Hoshimi Junna she didn’t know.
That revue had her in a role as much as it had her showing her true self. And with Junna beating her with her own sword, the irony of it all, the same sword Nana wanted her to die from, the line between role and truth blurred until it disappeared. Suddenly the Nana who was ready to move forward and the old role Nana obsessed with a brilliant Junna were one and the same.
“I was looking at you.”
Junna looks at her. Nana meets her eyes for the first time in years. They are as beautiful as she remembered them.
“All this time.” She swallows whatever is blocking her from being able to say her next words. “That’s what blinded me, you were right. I… I returned to my old role. And I was too much of a coward to kill you myself. I couldn’t do it. I thought you would know that– you have to know. That I’d never do it.”
“I know,” replies Junna. Nana doesn’t detect a lie. “You never would. Because the Nana I know could never cut my chord or because of who was stronger than who, that can be discussed. But that revue had no way of ending unless I won it. I told you, Nana, you may be talented and cunning, but you aren’t cruel.”
“I did cruel things.”
Junna’s hand touches her neck, perhaps instinct, perhaps more. Nana continues looking into her eyes, bears the guilt until she can feel its bitterness in her tongue. Junna doesn’t break eye contact either.
Here they are, the same two girls two seats away from each other, speaking of something they had left behind for years.
But they had to. It was the only way for this to go on.
“It doesn’t make you cruel.” Junna smiles. “It makes you a stage girl who has to perform your role. One who always lost control of her role when emotions took over. It’s what made you so entertaining, and us so pleasing to them.”
[JUNNA looks at us, body angled to the counter.]
“We had to perform Revue Starlight. It was the only way for us to go on.”
She knows, it seems, of the one thing Nana was sure only she and Hikari were aware of. Karen too, she learned later on. She often wondered how scary it had been to notice how close they were, how Revue Starlight had to happen for one last time.
“The train is going to the next station,” mutters Nana. The liquid in her glass swirls around as she spins the glass. “What about us? What about the stage?”
“It moved on too. Reached the next station.” Nana notices how Junna seems to focus back at her, green eyes taking her in. Nana lets herself be observed, enjoys the pleasure it brings her. “It took me to New York to keep chasing my dream in a new place and took you to London with Hikari. It took Maya, Futaba, and Mahiru together in Tokyo. Karen chasing audition after audition. Claudine in France. None wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t face who we used to be.”
“The last repeating.” A pause. “The last performance of the 99th class of Seisho.”
“Sometimes to find the new us, we must face who we were for one last time.”
Nana smiles. “Whose words are those?”
“My words. The words of a Hoshimi Junna who keeps devouring new, unknown stages as a brilliant lead.”
Dazzling. Even years later, Nana still could see the brilliance that Junna radiated. From the way she stared at Nana, to the way she spoke and existed.
It was perhaps why they were here. Why now, after all this time, they were able to be here.
“Do you want to go somewhere?”
“What do you mean?”
She taps the glass twice. The screen skips until-
NANA
I have to go to my next stage too.
[JUNNA is smiling. We cannot see her eyes but her dusted cheeks and smile are enough to show the brilliance of the feelings the words she says carry. There's another destination she wants to go, and it isn't her or Nana's own stage.]
JUNNA
But one day, on a new stage… Together.
The screen pauses again, Nana’s face of shock frozen. Nana wonders if this intensity was what she felt back then, the promise of a new stage, the possibility of a new one. Together.
Suddenly, the past wasn’t just something to leave behind and to never touch. Nor was it the present and the future. Now the past stage could happen again. Together again. Not with Starlight, not on Revue Starlight, but a new, never seen before dazzling stage.
Nana turns to Junna again. This time, Junna’s smile is wider, reflecting the one on Nana’s lips. Both stare at each other, side by side as a Hoshimi Junna and a Daiba Nana who they hadn’t met before.
There were still many things to talk about. Things to discuss and things they couldn’t ignore if they wanted this new stage to exist.
But for now–
“This isn’t real, is it?”
Nana looks around. The bar is empty but not furnished beside the counter and the chairs they sit on. She hums. “Their last gift for us.”
[NANA stares at us behind JUNNA’S shoulder. Her smile is melancholic, staring at us who she had time without conversing with.]
“It seems the light is shining on a new stage for us.”
“If you want to go, this time we can both be equal directors of it.” Nana stands up, slides the chair in its place. Junna does the same and both walk to the middle of the room.
There is a box which wasn’t there before. Nana pulls at the yellow bow which holds it together, the blue box falling open gently.
Inside, two rings rest. The green and yellow gems glow bright in the darkness that now surrounds them. Junna is the first to grasp the ring, staring at it from all sides as she twirls it around her fingers. Nana simply held it, staring at something far more brilliant.
Junna catches her eyes. “Together?”
A nod. “Together.”
Junna grins. Nana too, smiles widely. The rings slide in their ring fingers perfectly.
Around them, the darkness seems to consume all there is. Junna’s face glows underneath the light radiating from the rings. Nana doesn’t want this moment to end but doesn’t want it to last for much longer either.
There’s a stage waiting for them.
“See you later, Junna.”
Junna shares her thoughts, it seems. She stares at Nana for one last time before closing her eyes.
Nana, too, closes her eyes.
“See you later, Nana.”
Nana opens her eyes.
The room is bright, the curtains drawn open and the breeze making them flutter. She grimaces as she sits up, asleep on the couch since last night. She’d been reading the script, the one that was a week away from having all that would work on it together. She stares at it without paying attention, her dream hazy yet not forgotten.
Has it been real? Or–
Her phone pings. Nana doesn’t rush herself, leaning over the table to grab it and turning it on as she stands up. Her steps are slow, walking to the kitchen counter as the phone takes its time to open LINE.
Are you free to meet today? I landed an hour ago and I think I could pass jet lag better with a friend.
Nana blinks. She looks up, to the sky that burns in bright orange, to the flowers that glow from the sunset and to the kitchen counter–
The ring is there. Beside it, a daffodil rests.
Nana grasped the flower in her hand, touching its soft petals.
Nana smiles. She plucks one.
“She wants to.”
She plucks the second.
“She doesn’t.”
The third flutters on the counter.
“She wants to.”
The fourth falls.
“She doesn’t.”
Nana stares at the last petal. She focuses on it, then on the phone and the ring at the counter. She plucks it but keeps it on her finger and takes a picture of it. She sends it.
Junna reads it as if she were waiting on her phone for an answer. Nana types her reply after.
[NANA]:
the flower agrees with you~
[JUNNA]:
I had one too
(Junna has sent a picture)
[NANA]:
i guess we have no reason to not meet, do we?
[JUNNA]:
I’ll arrive around 7.
[JUNNA]:
Wait for me downstairs?
[NANA]:
of course of course~
[NANA]:
see you later then~ :D
Nana moves to grab the ring when her phone pings again. She places it down and grabs the ring with her pointer and thumb. Her text messages with Junna are displayed, Junna’s last reply making Nana smile.
[JUNNA]:
I’m happy to do so :)
The ring slides in her finger, a perfect fit.
[NANA stares at it with a fond smile before looking up to us.]
“You returned once again, haven’t you?”
[The room is silent. She continues staring at us.]
“Two of my old friends are returning once again. Wonder how bright it’ll make this stage.”
[NANA walks out of frame.]
Around her, the apartment is filled from the noises outside. She goes to the kitchen and pulls out the ingredients she needs. If she’s smart with it, she could cook a fulfilling meal by the time Junna arrives.
And she will, she will cook something that will make Junna smile and the warmth between them rekindle again.
For the first time, Nana is happy to experience a new thing of the past.