Hoshino Ai, a young mother of just sixteen, had just given birth to her precious triplets. Physical exhaustion threatened to crush her against the clinical mattress, but adrenaline and an instinctive, raw, overwhelming love kept her anchored to the present. As she held her newborn son, the last of her Hoshino triplets, in her trembling arms, she marveled at his absolute innocence and fragility.
She had not the slightest idea that, behind that small, vulnerable baby exterior, lay the mind of an adult; a reincarnated, cynical soul, burdened with bloody memories and traumatic experiences that went far beyond the years she herself had lived.
It was a strangely quiet afternoon in the clandestine hospital room. The soft sound of the other newborns' cries in the adjoining room filled the air with the promise of new lives. Ai, exhausted to the marrow by the arduous and prolonged labor, felt an intoxicating mix of triumphant joy and suffocating apprehension as she cradled the little one. She had no idea of the extraordinary, dark, and twisted journey that awaited them all.
The dim light of the fluorescent tubes bathed the private room in a soft glow, casting long, tranquil shadows on the white walls. Ai's tired but star-filled eyes traced every millimeter of her son's delicate features, marveling at his purity. She had given birth barely an hour ago, and the crushing, beautiful weight of real motherhood was finally settling on her teenage shoulders.
She still wanted to see her son's eyes to fully convince herself of the name she had chosen. She sensed they would be beautiful, but only by looking at her youngest son could she get a real idea of the color of his pupils.
The last of the Hoshinos stirred slightly. His tiny eyelids flew open, as if he had felt the intensity of his mother's gaze, revealing an abysmal depth that didn't fit his infant form at all. It was as if his gaze held a thousand years of weary wisdom, an old, tired soul mistakenly trapped in a tiny vessel. But Ai, completely unaware of the true supernatural nature of her son, simply saw the curious innocence of a newborn adapting to the world's light.
"Oh, you finally opened your precious little eyes," she commented with overflowing happiness, watching ecstatically as her youngest son had acquired each and every one of her distinctive features. His beautiful deep purple hair, and now, she confirmed it: his eyes were exactly the same violet shade. "And you were born with mommy's visual genes. You should be very proud, little one."
She was genuinely happy. The only notable difference Ai could grasp was that her son's eyes shone in a strange way, lacking the natural spark of a baby, but her exhausted mind quickly attributed it to the fatigue of birth.
Her son's eyes stared at her fixedly, and Ai interpreted that fixity as childish surprise. She thought her son simply looked too cute to be real.
"So you arrived a little late, huh?" she laughed amiably, with a melodic voice that bounced off the sterile walls, as she playfully touched the tip of his tiny nose, holding him protectively with one arm in a warm embrace. "But mommy has no problem with that... Charoite."
Hoshino Charoite. That was her youngest son's name. A one hundred percent beautiful name, bestowed by his extraordinary mother.
Charoite suddenly looked down, staring at his own arms with what Ai interpreted as wonderful childish wonder, which made her smile even more, amused and happy at her baby's discovery. Then, the child's little head turned sharply to the side, towards where his older siblings rested.
Ai followed his gaze to her other two children, who were settled in their respective thermal cribs, while proclaiming with immense maternal pride. "Aquamarine! Ruby! Look! Your little brother finally opened his eyes."
She refocused all her attention on her youngest son, expecting to see a cute reaction. However, she was puzzled to notice that Charoite was staring at his siblings with an expression that eerily resembled pure horror and disturbance. His tiny face had turned pale as paper, almost translucent, as if he had just seen a ghost in front of him.
Ai shook her head, blinking to dispel the strange thoughts from her exhausted mind, convincing herself that she was surely seeing things that weren't there, although a small, cold seed of worry began to gnaw at her stomach.
Hoshino Ai had just given birth to her three precious babies: triplets. Aqua, Ruby, and the last of her children, Charoite, whom she held against her chest. She began to feel immense pride for having brought three such perfect creatures into the world. Not to mention how proud she was that Hoshino Charoite had inherited her genes perfectly.
But inside the mind of that little purple-haired baby, the reality was an infinitely darker and more terrifying story.
Michael Afton, now named Hoshino Charoite, was not at all amused by his current situation; he was profoundly and viscerally frustrated.
When that stupid red crocodile, Old Man Consequences, pushed him into the interdimensional void, Michael thought he would be teleported to some dark alley in a precarious position, perhaps in the body of an adult or at least a teenager, ready to begin his hunt. But instead, he was now a damn baby. And the one holding him was a giant teenage woman he didn't know at all.
Not to mention the crappy name she had just given him. Charoite. It sounded like a brand of French soap. But honestly, he wasn't going to complain out loud, considering he deeply hated his old name and all the bloody legacy the Afton surname carried.
But the real problem was his physical vessel. He thought he would remain a walking corpse, a purple shell held together by Remnant, until he found his father in this new universe and stopped him once and for all. But now he wasn't a corpse. He was alive. He was trapped in the useless, soft body of a newborn infant. Essentially, he had been reincarnated.In purgatory, Michael had already learned the hard way that alternate worlds existed, but discovering now that biological reincarnation was a real and tangible fact was a massive blow to his psyche.
Michael understood the true and crushing complexity of his situation only after that thought, and it was then that his physical body began to fail, struggling to breathe.
His adult mind wanted to deny it vehemently, but he couldn't escape the limitations of his new nervous system. His tiny heart began to beat at a breakneck pace, threatening to burst in his chest. Thoughts raced at lightning speed through Michael's mind, forming a quick and destructive whirlwind of pure fear and anxiety. He had realized the magnitude of his prison: he was a reincarnated soul, fully mature and traumatized, trapped in the dysfunctional body of a baby who couldn't even hold his own neck up.
The realization hit him like a tidal wave, drowning him in a sea of absolute helplessness.
With every shallow, ragged breath, Michael fought against the overwhelming feeling of confinement. His survival instinct clashed with his motor helplessness. He longed to express his anguish in words, to let the world and that girl holding him know the deep and terrifying disconnect he felt between his mature mind and his infantile state. But all that emerged from his constricted lungs were desperate, high-pitched, pathetic cries; a biological plea for someone, anyone, to understand his internal agony.
In the room, the woman who was his new mother, Ai Hoshino, perceived the change immediately. Michael didn't know if it was her newly formed maternal instincts or some other emotional reading ability, but frankly, he didn't care at the moment. He was suffocating.
As he tried to force his lungs to expand and control his erratic breathing, Michael turned his unfocused eyes towards his new brothers in the adjacent cribs: Hoshino Aqua and Hoshino Ruby.
Both babies had pale skin, but what chilled Michael's spiritual blood was the way they were staring at him. Their eyes were wide open, observing him with an intensity that made his skin crawl. He would swear on his rotten soul that those two babies were not normal. They were judging him.
Michael tried with all his might to stop being so pathetic. He was the anomaly hunter, the man who survived the Scooper. He desperately tried to calm his breathing to keep his new teenage mother and his creepy siblings from worrying or noticing his vulnerability. However, biology won the battle. His agitated breathing became increasingly painful, as if he were swallowing ground glass, and his vision quickly clouded with black spots.
At some point in his spiral of panic, he felt someone with gloved hands snatch him abruptly from his new mother's warm chest. Although he couldn't distinguish who the person was due to the lack of oxygen to his brain, his survival instinct told him they were doctors intervening in a clinical emergency.
Michael, or rather Hoshino Charoite, tried with all the strength of his adult mind to think of something positive, a happy place to calm his nervous system. But his brain was too damaged. He could only remember negative things, traumas embedded in his soul from his past life, and his breathing worsened catastrophically, triggering violent flashbacks.
"Hey guys, I think the little man said he wants to give Fredbear a big kiss!" The mocking voice of his own teenage self, wearing the Foxy mask, echoed in his skull. And then, the crunching sound of bone breaking. Hot blood splashing on his face, filling the inside of his mask, and soaking his shirt. The choked screams of anguish and incomprehensible pain from his little brother, Evan, echoed in every corner of his skull.
The blackness flickered, and the mental scene violently shifted to a cold, underground room.
"You're in the Scooping Room now." Baby's metallic, soulless voice resonated.
Something coiled around his forearms. They were metal wires, too many of them, icy cold and sharp, pinning him against the glass. Then he was completely enveloped in synthetic cables, completely helpless, paralyzed in front of the enormous and terrifying Scooper machinery.
"The Scooper only hurts for a moment."
And then came the impact. The overwhelming, cosmic, gut-wrenching pain of the mechanical blade tearing through his abdomen, shattering organs and ribs. An agony impossible for a human body to endure.
"You won't die." His sister's spectral and cursed promise.
His reanimated body convulsing in the shadows of a rainy alley, vomiting metal pieces, gears, and robotic eyes with a brute force that caused even more pain to his already anguished and putrefied body, falling into the mud like an empty shell.
It was obvious to him, even in his state of semi-paralysis, that the doctors around him were completely unaware of his situation. They were dealing, unknowingly, with a soul that had once been Michael Afton. A boy who, in his adolescence, harbored a poisonous bitterness towards his parents and a corrosive envy towards his siblings. His actions in the past were driven by a stupid desire to rebel, purposely underperforming academically just to annoy his strict and perfectionist father.
However, the real tragedy struck when his little sister, Elizabeth, mysteriously disappeared, triggering a spiral of aggression and cruelty towards his younger brother due to the overwhelming stress he didn't know how to handle. And accidentally causing his brother's death in the jaws of Fredbear plunged him into a deep, destructive depression. A darkness that only worsened irreparably with the loss of his best friend, Charlotte, and the subsequent suicide of his mother, who couldn't bear the weight of the Afton house.
Michael's father, William, the monster behind it all, abandoned him to his fate at the age of sixteen, leaving him alone to fend for himself in a cold world. In his crushing loneliness, Michael matured forcibly. The pain transformed him into a compassionate, kind-hearted person, someone who wanted to atone for the sins of his blood.
His biological life was tragically truncated at the young age of eighteen, when he fell victim to a deadly trap set by the vengeful and confused spirit of his own sister in the underground establishment. However, his persistent spirit, anchored to the dead flesh by Remnant, refused to depart to the afterlife. He was driven by unresolved guilt that burned in his chest and a burning, unshakable desire to confront his father and seek redemption for the souls of the lost children.
As Hoshino Charoite's neonatal condition worsened drastically on the clinic gurney, the medical team intervened urgently, placing a tiny mask on him to provide life-supporting oxygen.
Unknown to them, his soul had resided in a putrid body for three decades, refusing to depart until he had fulfilled his suicidal mission of stopping his father in the labyrinth of fire. Breathing had been an unnecessary luxury for him then; a mere formality to not scare the living.
Miraculously, as the pure, cold air filled his new lungs, driven by the machine, the crisis subsided. He stabilized. His mind temporarily surrendered to the demands of biology, and his body gradually adapted to the demands of his new life, showing, at least for the moment, no further major organic complications.
Michael was no longer aware of everything happening around him. The voices of the doctors and Ai's crying became a distant hum. But once his mind began to adjust to the reality of his baby body and brain, biologically realizing he needed to breathe constantly to exist, he began to perform the process unconsciously to stay alive.
A massive, crushing, sedative wave of tiredness overcame him. His eyelids weighed tons.
And before Hoshino Charoite could shake off the exhaustion to keep complaining about the universe, he felt the soft darkness consume him completely, dragging him into a deep, inescapable unconsciousness.
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Seiwa General Hospital had that particular kind of silence that only exists in places where life and death coexist without prior notice and cross paths in the hallways at three in the morning. It was a dense silence, built from rubber footsteps on polished linoleum, from voices lowered to murmurs, from machines beeping with a monotonous, almost hypnotic cadence. It smelled of bleach, of those expensive flowers that families bring when guilt won't let them speak, and of something harder to name: that suffocating mix of relief and tension that settles in the pores when the worst almost happens, but gives you a temporary reprieve.
In room 304 of the high-security maternity wing, that silence had a particularly bitter and heavy taste.
Hoshino Ai was sitting in the hard plastic chair next to the thermal monitoring crib where her youngest son rested. She was still wearing her hospital gown. Her body, which just hours ago had been subjected to the brutality of giving birth to three consecutive human beings, screamed in agony with every breath. She felt stitches in her lower abdomen, a dull ache in her lower back, and a tiredness that seemed to have dissolved her bones. But Ai ignored all of that. She was an expert at ignoring pain.
Her eyes, those eyes with twin stars that the media and her hysterical fans had countless times called the most magical in the industry, were fixed, almost unblinking, on the small purple form lying under the heart monitor wires.
Hoshino Charoite slept. He did so with that deceptive placidity that newborns have, as if the world were a warm and safe place, as if his lungs hadn't battled to the death just minutes ago to find the basic rhythm that nature is supposed to deliver factory-standard.
Ai couldn't look away from him.
It squeezed her chest. It terrified her. Her son was beautiful, yes, in a way that completely disarmed her. He had inherited her hair, that deep purple that on the baby seemed almost supernatural under the unit's fluorescent light.
But what had her paralyzed, her heart clenched in an icy fist from the instant he had opened his eyes, was precisely the look the child had returned to her.
Purple, like hers. But with something inside that Ai couldn't name. Something that didn't belong to a one-hour-old baby, an improper depth, like finding an ocean where you expected a puddle. It had lasted only an instant before the crying consumed everything, but Ai was very good at reading looks. It was, in many ways, the only thing she had blindly trusted for years.
And that look had made her feel observed in a way that didn't quite fit the logic of a newborn.
She shook her head slightly. Exhaustion did strange things to the mind. It made her see connections where there were coincidences. It was probably that.
Probably.
To her left, in two identical cribs lined up against the wall, her other two children slept, oblivious to their brother's medical drama. Hoshino Aquamarine had his brow slightly furrowed even in the depths of sleep, as if he were solving a complex math problem in his head. And Hoshino Ruby rested with an expression that Ai could only describe as ridiculously satisfied, her lips curved in a little smile that seemed too conscious to be a casual muscle reflex.
All three were breathing. All three were alive. She had done it.
And yet, Ai felt the ground beneath her feet slowly crumbling. Guilt, that old friend who had accompanied her since her childhood in the orphanage, began to climb up her throat.
The door to the room opened with that exaggerated, annoying care that people have when they try not to make noise and, because of it, produce exactly the squeaky sound they wanted to avoid. Ichigo Saitou entered. Her manager, her surrogate father figure, and probably the only adult man she trusted even a little. He carried a crumpled paper bag and two thermal coffee cups in precarious balance. The dark circles under his eyes showed that he hadn't slept either, and his usual tie was crooked and loose, which in Ichigo's strict body language was equivalent to declaring a national state of emergency.
"Eat something," Ichigo said without diplomatic preamble, leaving the bag on the metal table and handing her one of the steaming cups.
Ai looked at him with empty eyes. Then she looked at the cup. Finally, she turned her gaze back to Charoite's small ribcage, rising and falling mechanically.
"Ai," he insisted, using his agency president tone.
"I'm fine," she lied automatically. It was a conditioned reflex.
"No, you're not," Ichigo replied with that calm, brutal precision that irritated and comforted Ai in equal measure. "You just gave birth to triplets. One of them had a respiratory arrest less than two hours ago and almost slipped away. You've been awake for over twenty-two hours and haven't eaten solid food since yesterday noon. You're not fine. And pretending you are doesn't make you stronger; it just makes you useless if there's another emergency."
There was a tense silence.
Ai sighed, defeated, and took the cup. She held it in both hands, grateful for the sharp warmth radiating from the cheap cardboard against her icy palms, and took a sip. It tasted like dirt and vending machine dishwater, but the caffeine was real and, at that moment, that was all that mattered.
"The doctors say he might have chronic respiratory problems," she said in a low voice. "That given the number of consecutive births, my body might not have sustained ideal conditions for all three at the same time. That although everything seemed normal, there could have been complications at birth that didn't manifest immediately."
Ichigo sat down heavily in the visitor's chair. Outside the window, the neon lights of Tokyo continued to flicker, completely indifferent to the fact that the number one idol's world had just changed forever.
"I know," Ichigo said, his voice raspy. "I spoke with Dr. Murakami in the hallway while the nurses were cleaning you."
"I should have agreed to the C-section," Ai said, and her tone suddenly became flat, clinical. It was the mechanical way she processed emotions when they were too big and destructive to let out. "They suggested it to me twice in the last month. And I refused. I insisted on natural birth because..."
She trailed off. She squeezed her fingers against the cardboard cup until it bent.
"Because you were terrified of scars and of the press finding out you were in an operating room," Ichigo finished, without a drop of judgment in his voice. "Because you were alone. And because, damn it Ai, you're sixteen years old. You're a child. You tried your best to make everything turn out normal and you followed almost all the medical advice. You couldn't have known."
Ai didn't respond to that. But something in the stone tension of her shoulders loosened a millimeter. Which, coming from someone as hermetic as her, was equivalent to collapsing in tears.
"It's not your fault what happened to the boy," Ichigo stated, staring at her.
"I don't know," Ai responded in a barely audible whisper, the star in her eyes dimming with infinite sadness. "I lie about everything, Ichigo. I lie when I smile, I lie when I say 'I love you' to the fans. Maybe... maybe this is the universe's punishment. Maybe a professional liar shouldn't be allowed to create true lives."
That small, dark, unadorned honesty was the most devastating confession Ichigo had heard her utter in the four years they had worked together.
✦
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Ai's personal mobile phone had been vibrating intermittently in the pocket of her hanging coat ever since Charoite had been stabilized. They were cascading notifications from the PR team, hysterical messages from assistants, and missed calls from brands demanding to know why the star of B-Komachi had disappeared off the face of the earth citing a "prolonged flu."
Ai had ignored them all with that efficient coldness she had developed as a survival mechanism in the industry during all this time she had been inactive.
But there was a different vibration. A name on the illuminated screen that made her stop dead in her tracks when she went to get her headphones.
Kamiki Hikaru.
Six missed calls and several unread messages from her.
Ai held the phone in the palm of her hand for an eternal minute, staring at that name with an unreadable expression. Ichigo, watching her from the dimness of his chair, couldn't categorize the rictus on the girl's mouth. Ai had a complicated expression that he was sure even she herself hadn't noticed.
To say Ai was a little annoyed with him was an understatement; she knew Hikaru was fifteen. A year younger than her and that the responsibility might be a little stressful, but she thought afterwards that despite what happened the last time she saw him, she was still willing to let him see his children.
She remembered their time together when both were just two broken teenagers playing at being actors in the prestigious Lalalai theatrical company workshop.
Ai closed her eyes and, for an instant, the clinical smell of the hospital was replaced by the smell of floor wax and sweat from the rehearsal room. She remembered the first time she saw him. Hikaru was handsome, polite, talented. He smiled with the perfection of a porcelain doll. Everyone adored him. But Ai, who had built her entire life on the foundation of manufacturing fake smiles, saw through him on the second day.
Hikaru was completely empty and a loner.
Behind his bright eyes, there was no joy, no empathy, no light. There was a black hole. Hikaru faked emotions with chilling technical precision to fit into the human world, imitating others because, inside, something in him had been killed long ago. Ai, the biggest liar in Japan, had been drawn to the biggest liar in theater. They had been soulmates in their falseness. Two pieces of a broken puzzle that fit perfectly into each other's cracks.
For Ai, Hikaru had represented the naive hope of finding someone to truly love, without filters. But the relationship had become a toxic spiral of dependency. Hikaru may have truly loved her as a partner, but he also consumed her. He used her as his only emotional crutch to keep from falling into total madness caused by the secret abuses he suffered in the industry. Hikaru was a sinking ship, and he clung to Ai with such force that he was dragging her to the bottom of the ocean with him.
They had been too alike in the wrong things.
And then, the pregnancy test came back positive.
Ai remembered the day she broke up with him. When she told him she was pregnant, that she couldn't continue with him, when she told him she didn't love him, that he couldn't be in her life anymore and that it was better for each to go their own way, Ai had done it believing it was the most compassionate thing she could do. Hikaru depended on her in a way she recognized as unsustainable, the way someone clings to the only thing they perceive as real when everything else has become too unstable. Telling him "stay" would have been keeping him for herself, and he deserved more than that.
How ironic that when she had ended things with him so he would stop depending on her and not suffer from dependency in the long run. Now she needed Hikaru's help, and it made her feel incompetent and guilty. Asking for help from the boy she had rejected and pushed away, how cruel of her.
But what Ai didn't know, and in her teenage inexperience never calculated, was what happens in the mind of a very unstable person when you violently rip away their only anchor to reality without warning.
"Do you want me to leave?" Ichigo's voice cut through her memories like a knife, noticing how the girl trembled slightly holding the mobile.
Ai opened her eyes. She shook her head slowly.
She pressed the call back button and then brought the device to her ear.
The tone rang once. Twice, three times. Until Ai heard the call connect, which made her sigh with relief.
"Hello. Hikaru."
The voice on the other end took a full second to respond.
"Ai." His youthful voice, laced with confusion, spoke from the other side of the screen. Ai heard Hikaru take a deep breath. "I saw you've been calling me all day. What's wrong?"
Straight to the point. Without asking how she was. Without asking about the birth. The tone was of someone tired and hesitant. Hikaru seemed like he didn't want to talk to her at all.
Ai swallowed, feeling her throat scratch.
"Charoite," she said, clinging to the name to keep her composure. "Our youngest son. The third one. He had a critical respiratory crisis right after birth. His lungs collapsed. The doctors had to resuscitate him and stabilize him with emergency oxygen support. They say he might have respiratory problems, that my body couldn't sustain ideal conditions for three consecutive births. And that there may have been complications at birth."
Silence on the line.
A silence diametrically different from the previous one. Much longer. Dense. Suffocating. Ai could almost hear the sound of gears turning in the boy's fractured mind, processing information he hadn't expected to receive. His son being sick, that was an unexpected surprise.
"That's worrying... Is he stable now?" Hikaru finally asked. His voice sounded a little hoarse, as if he'd had a bad day.
"Yes. He sleeps under constant monitoring in a thermal crib."
"And the other two?"
"Fine. Healthy. Without any complications."
Ai could hear her own accelerated breathing and the electronic beep of Charoite's monitor mixing with the static noise of the line. In the background of Hikaru's audio, she could hear the faint hum of city wind against glass. He was in his apartment. Alone. In the dark.
"I need you to come, Hikaru."
She blurted it out. She said it before consciously deciding to say it. And because of that, it sounded truer than anything calculated. It sounded like what it was: a sixteen-year-old person, exhausted and scared, alone with three newborns in a hospital, asking for help from the only person who biologically shared the responsibility for those three lives.
Hikaru didn't respond immediately.
Ai could almost hear him processing the request, and it irritated her, because a request like that shouldn't require processing, it should simply require a human response, an "I'm coming" or a "I can't" or even an "I don't want to." There was none of those simple answers.
There was only that dark, calculating silence.
"Alright, I'll head straight there," the boy's flat voice finally said.
Ai breathed a sigh of relief, before giving him directions to the room she was staying in.
The call ended abruptly.
Ai lowered the phone and stared at the blank screen, feeling conflicted. On one hand, she wanted him to come, which is why she had sent him messages earlier giving him the address of the hospital she was in. On the other hand, she was a little angry that he hadn't come, and also a little worried about Hikaru's mental state.
Ichigo, who had maintained a rigid posture shamelessly listening to half the conversation, remained silent for a precise minute to let the air settle.
"Hikaru Kamiki? The Lalalai boy?" the manager asked, and disapproval dripped from every syllable.
"Yes."
"Ai... so all this time he was the father of your children?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me before?"
Ai didn't answer and looked at him with a slightly guilty expression before feigning a calm expression.
"There was no need. Until, now... I'm sorry."
Ichigo shook his head, disappointed, but didn't comment; Ai had just been through a scare, the scolding could come later. "And are you sure? After all, he didn't come to the birth."
Ai lifted her gaze to her manager. Her eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, but the firmness in her jaw was steel.
"No," she admitted with a brutal honesty that disarmed Ichigo. "I'm not sure at all. But he is the biological father of my children. And one of them is sick, Ichigo. I don't have the right to hide his sick son from him just because I'm angry with him for not showing up for the birth."
Ichigo nodded slowly, accepting her answer reluctantly. His businessman's mind was already calculating the risks of scandal, damage control, and escape routes in case all of this went down the drain.
"When that boy arrives," Ichigo declared, straightening his crooked tie, "I want to speak with him alone first."
It wasn't a request. It was an order from the president of Strawberry Productions. Ai didn't treat it as such either.
"Fine," she whispered, and fixed her starry eyes again on Charoite's fragile chest, silently begging any god who listened to liars that the baby would be more stable by the time his father arrived.
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Hikaru Kamiki took exactly forty minutes to cross the doors of the maternity wing.
Forty minutes was the exact time it took to cross half of Tokyo in a speeding taxi at that time of dawn. That meant one of two things to Ai's mind: either Hikaru had shot out the door the instant he hung up the call, or he was already wandering around the area, near the hospital. And honestly, Ai didn't know what to think of either option. One meant Hikaru had traveled here very quickly just at her request. The other was that maybe Hikaru had hesitated to show up for the birth and ultimately decided not to.
Hikaru entered through the private hallway with that kind of magnetic and unsettling presence that certain people have, a fluid way of moving that seems to devour the air around him. Physically, he was just a fifteen-year-old teenager, a handsome middle school boy. But in the cold hallways of that hospital, wrapped in a dark coat with his hands in his pockets, he radiated an abysmal heaviness.
His mind was a fragmented chaos.
A couple of days ago, blinded by the unbearable pain of Ai's rejection, he had contacted Ryosuke. He had given him the hospital's location. He wanted to punish Ai. He wanted her to feel the absolute terror of being cornered, so she would realize she needed him to protect her. It was the twisted logic of a mind that equated love with absolute possession and fear.
And now... now she had called him. Not because the stalker had scared her (in fact, there were no traces of the fanatic anywhere, which was curious), but because a piece of him, a son of his, was broken and struggling to breathe in an incubator. Guilt, worry, and morbid fascination collided in Hikaru's mind, creating a perfect storm of instability.
He stopped at the threshold of room 304.
His eyes, violet, shining with dark stars, scanned the space with the tactical speed of a predator. He registered the two healthy cribs against the left wall. He registered the thermal crib full of monitors and wires in the center. He registered Ai, looking more fragile, beautiful, and stressed than ever, hugging a cup of cold coffee. And finally, his eyes fixed on the wide, threatening figure of Ichigo Saitou, planted by the window with his arms crossed and jaw tense.
The two men, the protective adult and the unstable teenager, looked at each other.
It was only a second of eye contact, but the air in the room seemed to drop five degrees. In that silence, an invisible territorial war was waged. Ichigo made it clear he was willing to kill to protect Ai. Hikaru made it clear he didn't care about dying if it meant getting in.
"Kamiki-san," Ichigo greeted, peeling himself from the wall with that formal and icy courtesy that in Japanese culture can perfectly mean an insult.
"Saitou-san," Hikaru replied with an innocent smile, matching the monotone with his youthful voice, demonstrating he perfectly understood he was stepping on hostile ground.
Ai remained silent. Sitting in her chair, she looked at Hikaru with that brutal honesty she reserved only for him. She didn't try to smile. She didn't try to put on her idol face. She simply let him see all the exhaustion and fear consuming her. For Hikaru, that naked vulnerability was like a physical blow to the stomach. It hurt him, and at the same time, it gave him a sick satisfaction knowing that only he could see her like this.
Without asking permission, Hikaru crossed the threshold.
His feet carried him, almost autonomously, bypassing Ai and Ichigo, straight to the room's center of gravity: the monitoring crib.
He stopped a scant two steps from the acrylic box and looked down.
There was a dense, prolonged moment. No one dared interrupt it. The sound of the respirator and the beeps of the heartbeat filled the void.
Hikaru observed the baby. He was incredibly small. He had electrodes stuck to his fragile chest that rose and fell with effort, and a red oxygen sensor shining ominously through the translucent skin of his right foot. His hair was dark, purple, like Ai's. He slept deeply, his tiny fists clenched by his temples.
For Hikaru, the sight was a massive cognitive shock. He was a sociopath in training, though he didn't know it yet, a teenager who hours ago had thought about ways to ruin the life of a person he loved, just so she would admit she was wrong to leave him. But this... this tiny creature shared his DNA. It was a byproduct of his love for Ai.
Seeing that baby sleeping tensely while being fed oxygen, Hikaru felt a knot in his stomach that began to move towards the void in his chest. He didn't know what the correct feeling was for what he was feeling, but he knew that what he felt couldn't be healthy.
"What did you say his name was?" Hikaru asked, and his voice came out much hoarser and more human than his pride would have allowed.
"Charoite," Ai responded softly from behind.
Hikaru nodded slowly, hypnotized by the baby and also worried by how fragile he looked. After a few moments of looking at him, he took a deep breath before, with a brusque gesture, breaking the state of discomfort. Then he hardened his features and turned to face the manager.
"Saitou-san. You wanted to talk to me alone."
It wasn't a question, and it sounded more like a challenge. Ichigo didn't blink.
"In the hallway, if you don't mind causing a scene in here," the older man conceded.
"I don't mind at all."
Before turning on his heel to leave, Hikaru stopped his eyes on Ai. It was the kind of look loaded with toxic resentment and repressed adoration that people have when they want to beg for forgiveness, but prefer to spit venom. Ai withstood the eye contact stoically, refusing to look away first.
The heavy wooden door closed, leaving the two men outside.