Chapter Text
Arima Kana is meant to be a star.
At least, that’s what Mama tells her. She has a talent, a gift, and it’d be a crime if she wasted it. Under the limelight, she flourishes. Kana’s always been a precocious child, quick on the uptake and effortlessly charming; acting challenges her in a way school (bo-ring) and friends (slow, stupid, immature) don’t.
She starts out with small roles. They practice together, her and Mama. Before breakfast, when school gets out, after dinner. Mama reads the lines to her (it’s called acting as a “script prompter,” Mama says) while Kana recites back her lines dutifully. They practice again, and again, and again.
“Success doesn’t come easy, Kana,” Mama says. “You have to work yourself to the bone.”
As she starts getting better parts, their practice time grows. Kana stops officially attending kindergarten—the teacher lets her take her homework to the set, and anyways, it’s not like they really learn anything. Mama says it’s all filler nonsense until high school, anyways.
So maybe she doesn’t get summers of fruit popsicles and firework sparklers like the other kids. That’s fine! If she’s to get anywhere in life, she needs to work hard. She’s putting in the effort way ahead of her peers. While they struggle to figure out their life in adulthood, she’ll be famous and rich and successful and happy.
It’s not a huge sacrifice, anyways. Kana really loves acting. She’s good at it, and she knows it: all the adult actors who work with her ruffle her hair and call her brilliant. She learns a couple of tips from them.
“You have to tap into yourself,” one of them advises her sagely. “Everyone’s felt a little sad, or a little angry, or a little happy at least once. You take those feelings and make them bigger.”
She takes that advice well. Kana gets a part in a big movie, one with Very Important Costars who she “needs to endear herself to.” She gets to the divorce scene and thinks about failing and that’s all it takes for her to burst into tears.
They dub her a child genius.
Kana laughs when she hears that. A couple of tears and suddenly the job offers are rolling in. She’s not complaining, though! The modeling is fun: it’s acting while standing still, drawing out the charms of the clothes much like she’d draw out the charm of her character in every TV episode and drama. The music video is a little less so—Kana hates bell peppers, but the producer of the song specifically asks for her and he’s well-connected so they do it.
They get a couple more interesting roles, and for the first time, Kana feels a little flicker of annoyance. Retake after retake after retake. Have these kids even read the script? How can they forget their lines like that? No, even worse: why do they have to burst into tears like a baby when they’re cut off? Kana is a professional. Every script she gets is diligently annotated, highlighted, and marked up with sticky notes.
So she gets snappish. Nobody tells her off because she’s right, so Kana nods her head, victorious, and carries on.
It becomes a habit, one that Mama is not pleased about.
“You can’t argue with the director, Kana!”
She juts her chin out, crossing her arms over her chest. Kana is a stubborn, headstrong girl. And she knows she’s right. “Why not? That scene needed a retake! They flubbed the lines!”
“What the director says, always goes. Why can’t you understand that?”
(Years later, Kana understands the importance of budgets and retakes and keeping a shooting schedule. There are more forces at play than just the “actors” in a production. But child genius Kana understands nothing about that. All she knows is that she’s put out a subpar performance and it’s annoying.)
Dominoes start falling. Kana gets her first “free day” in a long while. Mama’s busy on the phone, attempting to negotiate a new job for her. Papa’s at work.
Kana puts on a rerun of some silly romance drama. It’s for research, and she’s got her notebook and pen out, but she gets caught up in the plot. The romance is acceptable, whatever, but the friendship between the female lead and her schoolmate is what captivates Kana.
“I’ll always look out for you,” the female lead’s best friend tells her, slinging an arm around her shoulder. “Let’s go karaoke and forget about stupid breakups.”
Mama comes over and tells Kana to turn off the TV. She’s got a new job to do, one that they’ll have to prepare for meticulously. Director Gotanda has invited her back on set for a new production.
.
.
Arima Kana meets Hoshino Ai for the first and last time on that set.
She scorns her, at first. An idol last minute joining their production stinks of nepotism, and that is the antithesis of everything Kana stands for. She appreciates hard work, talent, skills—regardless of Ai’s pretty face, it means nothing if she can’t act.
Kana has little regard for the tagalongs the idol brings. There’s a little girl with blonde hair who’s crying on set, and a little boy who doesn’t even seem to be reading the script. Unprofessional, immature, stupid! Exactly the kind of thing Kana hates.
“In the original script, neither you nor the idol have actual lines!” Kana informs Hoshino Aquamarine, acting rookie, with an air of self-importance. “Mama told me it’s because the director insisted. That’s the worst!”
She’d know. She’s gone over the script a million times, then it got an update out of the blue on the director’s whims.
“That’s not exactly how—”
Kana steamrolls over his words, because she’s on a self-righteous roll. “I saw the last drama the director made, and she barely had any screen time!” (Because she’s studied it, of course she has.) “I bet her acting was so bad they had to cut it all out. She seems to be good at buttering up people, though.”
With that, she leaves, huffing. She’s got to put her bag somewhere—ah, the assistant director. “Hold onto my bag…!”
.
.
Only. Kana is forced to eat her words moments later. Hoshino Aqua is not some last minute nepo-baby: he’s good. Really good. Kana has never tasted defeat before, and it stings.
Her performance was good. Great, even. But Aqua’s was—brilliant, eerie, everything that she’s worked so hard to pull off. It makes her acting pale in comparison.
Failure, failure, failure.
The words slip out of her mouth before she can stop them. “...no good.”
Acting is Kana’s thing. She is meant to be a star. She is supposed to be the best. She will not settle for okay, she can’t settle for okay. It’s humiliating, it’s infuriating, it’s—
“Director, a retake. Please.” (She hasn’t used that word in awhile.)
He looks confused, even as she tugs on his jacket and swallows back her pride. “There weren’t any problems, though…?”
No, no, no! It’s not good enough! (She’s not good enough.)
“There is a problem!” bursts out from her, and everything comes spilling out at once. “The way Kana acted just know—I did so much worse than him…!”
She starts begging. Her voice wobbles. It’s the most emotional she’s ever been on set, and if she were more lucid, she’d be embarrassed. But she isn’t, and her cheeks are smarting and her eyes are watering and she thinks that she might just topple over.
Acting is Kana’s purpose. If she’s not even good at it, what’s the point?
“I’ll do better next time! One more time, please!”
She doesn’t get the retake. She does remember Hoshino Aqua’s name, though, and she makes herself a promise. (I won’t lose next time.)
.
.
She does not run into Hoshino Aqua for the next couple of years. Then again, that isn’t much of a surprise: job opportunities for her begin to dry up. Mama doesn’t even blame her; somehow, the silence is even worse than the lectures.
The actress Arima Kana is a thing of the past. She gets a couple modeling jobs here and there, but nothing substantial. The staff whisper behind her back. On Twitter, her name is tweeted less and less—until the latest result about “Arima Kana” is a tweet from four months ago wondering where she went.
They try launching her as a singer, trying to recapture the success of that one bell-pepper music video. She doesn’t do enough. She has no strong fanbase: you’d need continuous, ongoing content production to keep one alive, and she was never really known for her singing anyways.
The CDs don’t sell. The concert is a flop. Staff members wearing plainclothes help fill the venue so the very few who come to see her don’t feel out of place. Her singing days are quickly put behind her, plans for any future releases canceled almost immediately.
(Yet another failure. She avoids the staff’s gaze. They’re out of work as much as she is.)
Kana gets older. Her agency sees how the winds change and gives her little resources. When she finally musters the courage enough to ask for job opportunities (like a beggar asking for scraps, anything is fine, anything at all—) , they inform her that she’s aged out of their typical actor clientele.
Kana leaves the agency. She is a middle schooler now, anyway. It was only a matter of time.
(She doesn’t join another. At least this way, any failures are on her own head.)
Things spiral more and more.
“Your grandpa hurt his waist,” Mama tells her. “I was thinking of going back. Kana, you’re fine with living alone, right?”
Kana sits at the dinner table and puts her acting skills to good use. Her smile is bright. (It doesn’t matter, anyways. Mama won’t meet her eyes.)
“Of course it’s alright,” she says. “You should rest well too, Mama!”
She’s failed Mama, she’s failed her agency, she’s failed what few fans she still has. Now, Kana is on her own. At the very least, this means that her failures won’t drag anyone else down.
Kana sits at the dinner table, alone, watching TV. It’s a melodramatic soap opera this time, one full of twists and turns that make little logical sense. The main actress can’t act, but she’s got a pretty face. The main actor can act—Kana’s watched a couple of his other works. But something about his acting this time is…stiffer, less visceral.
He’s dumbing down his acting, she realizes. It makes the main actress at least a little more watchable.
Such mediocre acting won’t win him awards. But they will keep jobs coming, and maybe—just maybe—there’s something admirable about being able to change one’s skill level to suit the production. It’s not a challenge that genius child actress Kana would’ve done willingly, but it’s certainly something that fourteen years old Kana thinks she can take on.
.
.
Kana isn’t winning any awards anytime soon, but her efforts pay off. Slowly, slowly, she gets a few roles. She takes more acting classes. Self-improvement is the name of the game, and she can’t afford to get rusty.
There’s a high school that’s meant for those in the entertainment industry, and it’s a good place to make connections. She understands the importance of them now.
Arima Kana might not have any fans. She might not ever be able to live up to her success as a child actress. But she’s certainly going to keep giving it her best shot.
.
.
She gets her first lead role in over a decade. It’s for a TV production of a shoujo manga that she reads cover to cover, over and over again. Sweets Today isn’t a huge, groundbreaking manga that’s shaken up the industry, but it speaks to her. She sees a bit of herself in the main character—a lonely girl, one who’s been met with trial after trial.
The lonely girl finds someone who sees her for the first time, who lends her a hand out of the darkness that engulfs her. It’s not that she finds love: she finds hope.
Kana accepts the job.
.
.
Melt is a little self-centered, and he’s definitely terrible at acting, but Kana also can’t really blame him. His stuck-up attitude is similar to how she was when she first started working in the industry, and she’d be a hypocrite to judge him too hard.
What is hard to swallow is the travesty wrought upon Sweets Today. Kana knows that the production team is doing their best. She knows that each and every person at the film site understands it’s not the most perfect thing ever. She knows that all things considered, it’s pretty watchable even with a bunch of amateurs in front of the camera.
But there’s something gut wrenching about the way the mangaka doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Kana swallows, closes her eyes, and resolves to work harder.
.
.
Her world changes in April. Kana is in her second year, and she hears a familiar name.
“Aqua?”
And for a moment, Kana remembers one sunny afternoon that humbled her, that ignited her competitive love for acting, that was one of the last performances she did in which people gave a damn about her.
Kana has replayed her childhood memories more times than she could count. In the dark of the night, she’d think about all the bridges burned and opportunities scorned and wonder: if I’d met him sooner, would I have changed more quickly?
She’s wondered, over the years, if that brilliant child actor was doing well. She could never find much information about what roles he might’ve taken on after that production, but that comes to little surprise: Strawberry Productions shifted mostly to online media production after Hoshino Ai’s death, and “Aqua” was almost certainly a stage name.
“You’re Hoshino Aqua?” Kana repeats, and she knows she sounds like a broken record.
But this is Aqua! The actor she’s wanted to meet again for so long. She’s been working hard to achieve her dreams, to fulfill her goals—and one of her many promises to herself was to show Hoshino Aqua just how capable she could be. She’s gotten better at acting, even if she hasn’t been given many opportunities to show it off.
“We’ve finally met again,” she says, moved. It’s the first stroke of luck she’s had in a long time.
Then Aqua reveals he’s a general education student and she wants to strangle him.
.
.
Aqua leaves school declaring something about a director, and against all common sense, Kana follows him. He doesn’t respond to her very normal questions (A director? Even though he said he wasn’t acting anymore?) so she draws from the yankee drama she watches in her spare time. Kana doesn’t really have friends, per say, but she knows how to joke around.
This gets him to look at her, at least, so she counts it as a victory.
“Let’s talk—”
“Nope.”
“Karaoke—”
“Nope.”
“My place—?”
She wears him down eventually, and he takes her to see Director Gotanda.
(It’s been awhile since she last ate dinner across from someone, actually. It’s a whole lot better than Uber Eats.)
Kana extends a job offer to Aqua. It’s partly out of curiosity—how does the boy who showed her up so long ago compare nowadays? But there’s a bit of care, too. She’s a good senior like that. Aqua has been working with Director Gotanda for years. If he really hated showbiz that much, he wouldn’t spend his life involved with it.
Acting is still something Kana loves very much, and she wonders if deep down, Aqua still wants to do it too.
.
.
Aqua reports lackluster reviews from his family in regards to Sweet Today, which is half-infuriating, but she understands. The latest episode’s reception stung her too. Despite this, Kana insists for him to join the production. This isn’t about her. It’s not even about him.
She remembers the feeling of letting down others far too well. Their drama’s already done that for a lot of viewers, but there are still fans of the manga—the creator of the manga herself, too—who keep watching. Arima Kana is a professional, and she will do everything in her limited power to honor the source material and the creator’s vision.
The most important scene of the manga is being shot soon. She knows, deep down in her bones, that Aqua can bring something great to it.
“Please,” she says, and she takes Aqua’s hand in hers, urgently. “Join me in making this show a good one.”
.
.
He does, because of course he does. Hoshino Aqua has not given up on acting. He is every bit as brilliant as his child self, if even moreso. She can see how carefully he’s studied the script. She can see how much thought he’s put into every action he takes.
And when the actual cameras start filming, Aqua transforms into someone brilliant.
Kana watches as he draws the emotion out of Melt that she never managed to do. She watches as Aqua laughs and rages and lunges, eerie and intense and spine-chilling. She watches as Melt (Kanata, he’s Kanata right now..!) grabs the stalker by the shoulder and declares:
“This girl is a precious friend to me!”
And it’s good, better than anything she could have imagined. Her heart feels like it’s racing a million miles an hour. It’s The Scene, in all its glory. There are no cheesy “I love hers,” there are no melodramatic “she’s mines” — the original scene in the manga spoke to Kana because it drove home a message more important than love.
You are not alone, is what this scene conveys, and she’s dizzy, lightheaded, moved beyond words.
Her hand trembles as she lays it upon her chest. Tears are falling from her eyes, and she didn’t even need to work herself up to it—she hadn’t even realized she was crying until she felt them trace her cheeks and drip down her chin.
“Even so,” she says, and she’s speaking to the camera, to Kanata and the stalker, to the girls in the audience who feel the same way as her, to herself.
She smiles through her tears. “I believe there is light.”
.
.
Kana thinks she might be half in love with Hoshino Aqua.
.
.
The mangaka thanks her, bowing her head sincerely. Kana returns her thanks.
“It meant a lot to me,” Kana says. “The message about hope.”
The mangaka smiles. “It meant a lot to me, too.”
.