I was sitting on the edge of a velvet-upholstered chair in the dressing room, my hands resting on my knees. If I looked at them too long, they started to feel like they didn't belong to me. These were the hands that had done it.
Every time I closed my eyes, the sensation returned—not the dramatic, cinematic version of the event, but the cold, tactile reality of it. The weight of the body, the smell of the salt air, and the absolute, terrifying silence that followed when a human heart stops beating.
I was exhausted, but it was the kind of fatigue that sleep couldn't touch. It was a cellular drain. I had spent so many years fueled by the black oil of hatred that now, with the tank empty, I felt like a machine running on fumes, grinding its own gears into dust.
"Aqua. You're shaking."
I didn't realize it until Akane spoke.
I looked down and saw my fingers trembling—just a slight, rhythmic tremor that made the fabric of my trousers ripple. I tried to clench them into fists, but the strength wasn't there.
Akane didn't approach me with her usual professional poise.
She didn't offer a playful remark or a leading question. She just walked over and sat on the floor directly in front of my chair, placing her hands firmly over mine. Her skin was warm, a sharp contrast to the chill that seemed to be radiating from my own bones.
"Look at me," she said. Her voice wasn't a command; it was an invitation.
I forced my gaze up from my hands. Her eyes were wide and dark, lacking the calculated shimmer she used for the cameras. She looked tired, too—probably from the sheer effort of keeping me upright for the past few weeks.
"The shoot can wait. Kaburagi can wait. The whole world can wait for ten minutes," she whispered, her grip tightening on my hands, grounding me.
"You're back here, Aqua. You're in a hotel in Tokyo. You're alive."
"And most importantly, not a zombie."
"That's exactly the problem," I managed to say, my voice sounding like it had been dragged over gravel.
"I wasn't supposed to be. I had everything balanced, Akane. One life for one life. But the scale... and now I'm carrying the weight of both."
The ghost of the man I killed felt like a shadow attached to my own.
It wasn't about guilt in a moral sense—I still believed he deserved to disappear—but about the physical stain of the act.
You don't just kill someone and go back to being a person who hasn't killed.
The world looks different. The colors are flatter. The people around you look like cardboard cutouts because they don't know what you know.
Akane moved, shifting from the floor to the edge of the chair beside me.
She didn't ask for permission before she pulled my head down to rest on her shoulder.
It was a move that should have felt intrusive, but instead, it felt like being thrown a lifebuoy in the middle of a dark ocean.
"Stop thinking about the cost of living!" she said, her hand moving to the back of my neck, her fingers tracing the hairline there.
"You think you're a monster because you finished what you started. But monsters don't get this tired, Aqua. Monsters don't shake like this! You're just a person who went through hell and forgot how to breathe the air on the surface!"
I closed my eyes, finally letting the tension in my neck snap. I let my weight lean into her. For a moment, the images of the cliffside and the cold water receded.
The haunting didn't stop—I knew it never truly would—but the volume of it was turned down just enough for me to hear my own heartbeat.
"Just stay like this for a minute," I murmured.
"I'm not going anywhere," she replied.
We sat there in the dim light of the dressing room, two people who knew too much about each other, waiting for the world to demand we start acting again. But for those few minutes, there was no script. There was just the cold room, the heavy silence, and the fact that, for better or worse, I was still here.