decorator | L-U-V! L-U-V! i don't really care if it's not meant to be!

[ Hoshino Ai dies on the morning of her 20th birthday, murdered in a jealous rage by a violent fan.

Oh, wait. That isn't quite right, is it?

'Ai of B-Komachi' dies after being stabbed in a jealous rage by a violent fan. She bleeds pure love out from her heart and the illusion shatters: when the news reports her hospitalization later that day, the name they use is "Hoshino Ai", for the first time since her debut.

Ai had asked them to. Really, it was impressive she'd been lucid enough to say anything at all by the time the police and the ambulance had arrived but she remembers saying that much, at least. And she remembers pouring those words out again and again until Aqua and Ruby weren't there to hear them anymore: I love you. I love you. I love you.

She spends two months in the hospital. She doesn't remember the first week particularly well and the days after are a blur of white walls, tubes and itchy bandages and the sharp, wooly smell of antiseptic. Ichigo and Miyako visit her. Aqua and Ruby only leave her side when they're physically removed from the room. The girls from B-Komachi make appearances: Kyun and Takamine come by once a week. Nino had spent an afternoon sitting with her, talking, laughing and crying and then never visited again. But that's okay.

Even when she returns home — or rather, goes home to the new apartment that her family had been moved into while the doctors had been patching her back together, she doesn't quite feel like she's come back to the real world. Something has changed; something has tilted on an axis that Ai isn't quite sure she can turn back.

It's been four months since Ai of B-Komachi was murdered and nobody has broached the topic of bringing her back from the dead yet.

Ai doesn't quite know how to feel about that.

She's still a celebrity, though. There are things she can do for Strawberry Productions, even as she is. She can't work in the same capacity she did before, not for another few months at least, so she pivots to net content as and when she has the energy for it. Support has been overwhelming; she thinks, wryly, that if she'd known a little blood sacrifice would make her this popular, she would've gotten it over with sooner.

But she'll keep that joke to herself.

She's alone at the apartment on the day things take another turn — Ruby and Aqua are at school, a recent and tentative return to normal routine. Ichigo and Miyako, too, have gone back to Strawberry Productions — they have a whole talent agency to run, after all. Which means there's nobody else around to hear when Ai hums out loud in thought from her spot on the sofa where she's been mindlessly scrolling her phone. ]

What's this...?

[ It's an icon on her home screen she doesn't recognize. There's no name — is it a glitch? An app that didn't install properly? She'd assume it was some kind of virus but this is her personal phone and she's had that sealed up with every kind of privacy software and antivirus known to man since she was sixteen years old.

So against her better judgement — as most things are — she taps it to open it up.

What's the worst that could happen? ]

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