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It’s five minutes until she takes center stage.
Familiar fingers brush against the expanse of her skin she cannot see, and Astra almost gasps at the leathered touch.
Evelyn pulls taut at the zipper she’s yet to consider, meticulously observing as the zinc plated strips fasten tight as they travel through the route that is her dress.
She leaves no errors at her wake, precise in every action she takes.
“You’ll have ten songs to do today.” her bodyguard places the reminder into her head with another brush around the crook of her neck, a pang of red following its trail. Astra will blame it on the material of her black gloves if she asks—but it isn’t like it’s the first time this has ever happened, a vocalising thought chirps back as she avoids the other’s eyes in the mirror, and it isn’t like it’ll be the last time it’ll ever happen.
Pre-concert anxiety has always loved to bite her at her unknowest.
“The halftime break will have you switch into another outfit,” she continues on, her hand moving forward, “which the dressing committee is styling hastily to make sure the puffs don’t wilt in the middle of the concert.”
Evelyn pauses to tilt the pendant right above the curvature of her chest, before retracting her hand back behind her waist.
“That should be all.” she finishes, a step behind her, perfectly in line with the swivel chair she sits on in front of her vanity mirror, “Is there anything else you need, Ms. Yao?”
Evelyn is this: some paradigm of strict, unwavering will that will not hesitate to strike if she sees fit. An unmoving shield capable of guarding her from all sorts of unstoppable forces threatening to soil the red carpet she had worked so hard to attain. Astra would make a joke in these scenarios, something to lighten up the mood before a concert, that she herself was the one force that Evelyn could never stop, and Evelyn would make a brief reply that she would always move if her excellency demanded her so.
But the air is too thick to make a joke, and Evelyn has always had a subtle sort of fear that she’ll ruin her makeup just minutes before a show.
Astra sighs comically, swivelling her chair around in order to meet her face-to-face.
“It’s just that…”
She teeters around that end, under the weight of her companion’s gaze. The words piling in her throat, stuck inside like a puff of hot air, waiting for her to cue their release.
But she does force it out, somehow, that something.
“You know, Eve, it’s not like anyone’s watching.”
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(There’d been a hearty noise from the television in the living room of her then much smaller apartment as Evelyn held a plate of pasta in one hand and fried rice in another. Buzzwords were rampant in the sector of journalism, and even though she’d just started her popstar life for a little over a year, Astra thinks she would know enough to expect the unexpected, said unexpected being an expected kind of unexpected or not. What a paradoxical sentence, she’d thought then.
But she marvels, still, at the cliches and the expected unexpecteds of a show done right.
The idol drama that premiered at six p.m. that day, featured a forbidden love story between an actress and the loyal manager who had stood behind her heels from the moment she first took part in the spotlight in front of a heavy filming camera.
Evelyn had hummed at the sight, the last episode of a classic in the making, the iconic scene of the starlet proclaiming their secret to the world. It had been something Astra could see ending up in acclaimed nostalgic film lists in years to come.
Tear-gazed, starry-eyed, this was a show that made melancholic dramas a ban whenever she’d have a concert the day after. She remembers Evelyn having to buy tissues the day after because she’d finished them all blowing snot and wiping away from the crying the drama had induced.
“Her manager is quite selfish,” Evelyn had curtly remarked, forcing squeals of disagreement from her trembling lips, “that’s what I think, at least, Ms. Yao. The episode before this showed how much backlash his client received for all those rumors.”
Astra had considered firing back lines of disagreement in her way, had almost found herself in place for a debate had it not been for the sudden shift, the unexpected dial down of her bodyguard’s voice.
“If I were the reason for your downfall,” she mutters as the credit scene flashes beyond them, dollar store plates previously full of food now empty and left with nothing but traces of sauce and stray grains of rice, “I could never forgive myself.”
You won’t ever be the reason for that, Astra had assured coherently, despite the stutter threatening to insert itself from her yet to be finished session of crying.
Such an ironic playmaking of fate, she thinks now as Evelyn stares into her eyes.
When Astra watched the epilogue to the drama all that time ago, she never expected to force her to face that same dilemma now.)
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Evelyn stares into her, still, and some untrained eye would see it as a plea to expand on her words.
But Astra knows it isn’t, the all-knowing, reflex of a nervous giggle slipping past her ruby-red lips as proof.
“There’s still three minutes until I have to be on standby,” she reasons because she planned this part out. The perhaps, what-if thought that Evelyn might counter her out, “it won’t take long, I promise.”
Evelyn doesn’t say a thing, and the silence is one that kills.
But she isn’t one to back down. Not yet, anyways.
“Plus!” she strings her words along, “The lipstick is smudge-free.”
Nil.
Her bodyguard is unmoved, unwavering gaze staring down and fixed at the sight of her lips, maybe to test her claim. If there’s anyone who could with such a foolproof eye, it would be her Evelyn, Astra thinks. There is a reason that the agency has kept her through the years too. Aside from all of Astra’s praises, she knows how to do her job well. Too well, sometimes.
One final try, then.
“And...!” she offers almost enthusiastically, her last chance, "I also took the liberty of locking the door."
At least she's sure she did, unless Evelyn undid that part when she walked around the room. Though she's sure she did, she thinks.
There’s another thought that comes, sometimes, when a million pairs of eyes are trying to pick her apart and analyze the inner workings of the threads that make up the little world that is her mind. How through the years that have gone by, from era to era, trend to trend, there has always been one constant, unchanging warmth in her life that stands beside her in every press conference, that keeps the other side of her bed warm and full of life.
Only one pair of eyes is looking at her now, and she finds herself thinking that same thought.
Evelyn sighs, a mixture of self-chastise and eager mirth leaking in between.
When she finally kneels down, fitting herself between her knees, making sure not to step on her perfectly pedicured feet, Astra’s hands scramble for purchase around her neck, almost animalistically.
They don’t worry about the nail marks that she’d potentially leave—Evelyn has always been good at making excuses for such happenings.
“Just once,” Evelyn relents, even though she knows it won't be.
She doesn’t think much as she closes her eyes, the shuffle of Evelyn’s heels against the floor, of the brave pounding of a human’s heartbeat resounding in her ears as she takes in the soft pressure of Evelyn's lips against her own.
She never has, in these times.
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(There’d been some kind of scandal, just a week ago, circulating all around the Inter-Knot.
Some up and coming popstar, one Astra found herself as years ago, coming down under hard as the result of a vicious rumor. Girl meets boy: the secret love story of New Eridu’s potential-full songstress!, it’d said, filling up newspaper stalls from the corners of Reverb Arena to Sixth Street. She remembers the headline perfectly because it had been all the rage, had became the sole reason the two of them were called for an emergency online meeting at nine, when all they wanted to do was lie under the sheets to the tune of a romance they’d rented from Random Play, that same idol drama they watched long before they found themselves as leading actresses in its exact same scenario.
It’s a shame, but that’s just how it is, one man sighed in faux sympathy before drilling into Astra’s eyes through the monitor, you understand, don’t you, Astra? Your fans must come first.
Of course I do, sir. she goes, even though her hand found itself gripping tighter to Eve’s under the table, as the latter squeezed back. That won’t be a problem.
The video call lasted almost three hours long.
They end up returning the tape the next day, untouched.)
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“One minute, Astra.” she sighs, pulling herself away through that same, unwavering will of keeping her afloat, “Someone’s bound to search for you. It would be unwise to hoard you all for myself when they’ve all come to see you tonight.”
In spite of the pout that’s began to form on her proven true smudge-free lips, Astra hums in agreeance, smoothing down the folds of her dress that began to crease from the lingering handprints of her own grasp.
“I’m aware,” she responds, taking her one minute left of solitary reprieve to look her in the eyes, “you will watch me too, as always, won’t you?” and leaves her last sentence as a short-cut statement, “you will be watching.”
Evelyn smiles, pulling back a strand of hair that tugged itself loose due to the little moment they shared before, every last action she takes laced with large doses of assurance, wrapped in leather-covered gloves dripping with sickeningly sweet care.
Unmoving shield, unstoppable force.
She never guessed that she’d have to face her hunger as an enemy, back then.
“For you? I’ll never hesitate.”
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