#109: Fallen Angel / ep.2
The unprecedented, sweeping promotion had left her uncharacteristically flustered.
Tradition at Maverick held that anyone hoping to set foot on stage as a lead had to endure at least five more years in the ranks. Why the veteran director chose to take a scythe to that convention was never made clear, but her raw star quality had unmistakably factored into the decision.
Charlotte Gabriel — going by the stage name Akutagawa Alice since her debut — had, at that moment, arrived at the very starting line of stardom.
“Even you can get flustered, it seems.”
The flicker of anxiety on her face vanished instantly, papered over with a bewitching smile, and she gave a scornful little snort as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
“I couldn’t care less about myself. It’s the two of you I was worried about. Fumika-chan, this is your first supporting role, isn’t it?”
“No need to worry. My partner’s Iimori-san, after all.”
“B-but Iimori-san’s practically past it as a man, isn’t he? Can he even manage an affair convincingly, up on stage?”
Her anxiety clearly hadn’t faded. To spare her the needless worry over my supposedly withered manhood, I put an arm around Fumika, who sat beside me.
“An actor can become anything, that’s the whole point of the job. If Kuze-san loves me, then I’ll simply love her back in kind.”
I’d expected her to shrug it off, irritated, but the arm I’d wrapped around her shoulder was trembling, oddly. What I’d meant as a joke turned out not to be a joke at all for her. As I’d learn later, the same had been true for Fumika too—
“—and that’s how Fumika and I first got together, as it happens.”
Somewhere along the way, Iimori’s account had shifted from Shandy’s story to how he and Kuze Fumika had ended up together. Mikoto had kept nodding along, thinking it might connect somehow, but it was starting to feel like a genuine tangent.
“Um. Is the story about Kuze-san actually relevant?”
“Ah, sorry. Got carried away.”
The two stories were, in fact, entirely unrelated.
As Mikoto’s head sank in mild despair, Iimori pressed on.
“She’d landed her big break. Being cast as lead at such a young age won her fans overnight, and the troupe started pushing her front and centre for a proper marketing push.”
Starting with the cover of the troupe’s promotional magazine, Shandy began appearing across all manner of media. Apparently, choosing the black wig and red contacts, rather than her real blonde hair and amber eyes, for the sinister-looking Akutagawa Alice persona had been a deliberate directorial choice.
“She seemed to intend to reveal her hidden true identity only once she’d become a proper hit. For her, apparently, even reality itself was just another stage.”
“I can sort of see that. Apparently it’s obvious to people in the same industry.”
I never noticed, she left unsaid. Kotone had probably worked out the truth the very day they met in Yokohama. The only reason she’d never mentioned it was simple amusement. People who end up becoming actresses are rarely anything but troublesome.
“You don’t suspect her love might have been an act too?”
“Shandy-san’s not enough of a bad person to keep up a deception that thoroughly.”
“Well, well. That was an unnecessary concern on my part, then.”
Iimori hesitated for a moment. Choosing his words with care, he continued, slowly.
“She was stabbed in the back.”
What followed was the past Shandy had stubbornly refused to reveal. Whatever truth was about to surface, Mikoto resolved simply to take it in.
Rehearsals began for the production Amber-Colored Game of Love.
First came the read-through and cast introductions. Gathered in Maverick’s large conference room, she opened proceedings with a single provocative line and a supremely confident smile.
“Fufu. Thank you all for gathering, my dear supporting cast, here to set off my own brilliance.”
The lead, and now company head, Akutagawa Alice, had already completed building her character.
The role — an imperious, overbearing female bartender — was barely distinguishable from her everyday self. The playwright had surely written the part with her personality directly in mind, and it fit her so perfectly it was almost comical; Fumika, seated beside me, and I both burst out laughing.
But the only ones who laughed at that were myself, Fumika, and the playwright and director.
A cold headwind had already begun to blow against her.
“Fumika-chan, have you seen my script?”
“Lost it again? How many times does that make now?”
“Third time, I believe. I suppose I take after myself — hopelessly popular, wanted by everyone.”
She kept losing that script, over and over. Blessed as she was with looks and presence, when it came to actual acting she was barely a step above an amateur. That script, thoroughly read through and covered in countless annotations and sticky notes, was her lifeline, the anchor her heart clung to.
There was no way she’d actually lose something like that.
“I’ll say I lost it, then.”
“My, how considerate of you. I wonder if you’re this thoughtful toward other women too.”
By this point, she’d already sunk fully into the role. Whatever flicker of anxiety she’d shown at first had vanished entirely; her amber eyes narrowed and widened like a moon waxing and waning, as she performed a version of herself remarkably close to the real thing.
“At this rate you’ll be shaking a cocktail shaker any minute now.”
“I’ve decided a formally-spoken character has its charms, actually. However maliciously you insult someone, if the phrasing is elegant enough, it comes across as a perfectly respectable statement.”
“It gives me goosebumps hearing my senior speak so formally.”
“My, how cruel. You’ll make me cry.”
“Ugh…”
Teasing Fumika all the while, she — no, Shandy — spoke on.
A bartender who lived only in the present, sealing away her entire past. The character of Shandy, as drawn by the playwright and director, matched her own real self with uncanny precision.
It was likely around this point that Charlotte Gabriel was consumed entirely by the role. The beautiful, illusory Shandy the bartender must have offered her an elegant costume, wrapping and concealing her own miserable upbringing in an appealing mystery.
Never knowing that same appearance would only push people further away.
“I wonder why you happen to have my script.”
Days later, the rehearsal hall had turned into a battlefield.
After losing it again and again, this time the fourth copy, she’d apparently — for whatever reason — slipped an anti-theft security tag into the script to use as a bookmark. A clever device: hold a special scanner near it, and you can trace its location without ever rifling through anyone’s bag.
As a result, her script turned up inside the bag of a certain senior actress.
“Oh, oops, sorry. Must’ve slipped in there by accident.”
The senior actress said it with a laugh, but everyone present clearly understood it was no accident.
The culprit behind the string of missing scripts had been identified. It was, after all, an in-house matter. With the loaded gun of truth already levelled at someone’s throat, there was no need to actually pull the trigger and make a scene of it.
But Shandy didn’t back down, not even a step.
“Would you kindly not lie to me? If you’ve got the spare time for such childish sabotage, I’d think working a part-time shift at a convenience store would be a far more constructive use of it.”
“…What exactly are you implying, Akutagawa?”
“I’m implying that anyone too ignorant to grasp even the simplest irony has no business on a stage, and out of respect for our audience, ought to go find honest work in the real world instead.”
“Just who do you think you are?”
“Company head and lead, if that answers your question.”
Trying to defuse the mounting hostility, Fumika stepped in between them.
“Senpai, let’s all calm down. Like Sakura-senpai said, it was probably just an accident.”
“This has nothing to do with you, Fumika-chan. I simply can’t stand people who do wrong, and I refuse to acknowledge someone like that as a senior of mine.”
Shandy kept hammering home her point, entirely unbending, right to the very end.
In the end, the senior actress, Sakura, managed to smooth things over with an apology, but from that incident onward, the hostility directed at Shandy only intensified.
“Masayasu-san, look at this.”
Fumika, having by then taken to practically living in my private office, handed me her phone. Online message boards, social media. Scrolling through a sea of discussion about Maverick, I found a post that made me want to look away.
“That foreigner tramples on tradition and thinks she’s hot stuff, Akutagawa Alice should just die.”
“The troupe pushing that Akutagawa woman who’s honestly not even that cute is incompetent.”
“Can’t believe Sakura’s stuck in a supporting role. Fix the casting immediately.”
There are far too many people in this country who love hammering down the nail that sticks up. Fans were no exception. The harder the troupe pushed her, the more virulent the backlash from her detractors grew.
“Have you told her?”
“There’s no way I could. She’d probably say something like, ‘I’ve no interest in loser dogs who can only bark from the shadows.’”
Sure enough, when the troupe reported the online posts to her a few days later, she gave back, word for word, exactly what Fumika had predicted.
But not many people can walk away unscathed from that kind of concentrated abuse. Especially someone already this skilled at destroying herself.
“Senpai, are you all right?”
“Of course. After all, I’m quite full of myself these days. I’ll ride out one or two hostile comments same as any casual browsing.”
She always carried herself with that same effortless confidence. Refusing, with sheer force of will, to let the beautiful, strong illusion she’d wrapped herself in — Shandy — ever crack.
“Even so, your real name, the one you’d carefully kept hidden, has leaked as well. Any idea who might be behind it?”
“Far too many possible culprits to narrow down. I can’t rule out the two of you, either.”
“We would never do such a thing!”
“Words are cheap, in our line of work, aren’t they.”
“Whatever you think of us, we’re still on your side.”
“I’ll simply accept the sentiment, then, thank you.”
And she never trusted a soul. Not even Fumika and me, the two people who spent more time with her than nearly anyone else in the entire troupe — she never let either of us step into whatever depths lay beneath.
A woman who couldn’t open her heart to others, Charlotte Gabriel.
And the illusion that only hardened that stubbornness further — the bartender, Shandy.
She couldn’t allow herself to be honest. And because she couldn’t be honest, no one ever noticed her cries for help.
“Will the company head hold it together, do you think?”
The hostility during rehearsals had reached unprecedented levels.
Led by senior actress Sakura and her faction of allied performers and staff, an endless drip of near-harassment, thinly-disguised complaints rained down on Shandy as naturally as breathing.
“Isn’t the burden of company head a bit much for such an inexperienced newcomer?”
“No. This is my stage. I’ll shoulder whatever weight comes with it.”
She had nowhere left to run. The moment the words “company head” got invoked, neither Fumika nor I could shield her from it.
The company head represents the entire cast. However diverse and strong-willed a group of professional actors may be, a production simply can’t function without someone capable of pulling them all together through sheer charisma.
The responsibility of company head is, in effect, a rite of passage on the way up to stardom.
And so she had no choice but to stand her ground against the raging headwind.
What happened after that, neither Fumika nor I ever really knew. Regarded as her allies as we were, we never had any window into whatever malicious harassment must have been unfolding out of sight. And Charlotte, needless to say, was never going to volunteer details of whatever abuse she’d suffered either. I only learned what had happened the moment I heard the ambulance siren.
“Masayasu-san! Senpai, senpai’s—!”
Fumika came sprinting in, sobbing hysterically, and from her state alone, I could already guess what had happened to Charlotte. My guess turned out to be correct.
“Senpai’s… she tried to hang herself, on the doorknob…!”
At the time, Fumika had a private lesson scheduled with her. When the appointed hour came and went with no sign of her at the rehearsal hall, Fumika, suspicious, went to check her room in the company dormitory. The door was unlocked but strangely heavy to push open. Peering through the gap, she found her hanging from the doorknob, an extension cord looped around her neck.
Thanks to Fumika finding her so quickly, Charlotte was rushed to hospital and, by some miracle, survived. But the matter of a leading actress’s suicide attempt was a problem all its own.
By the end of that same day, the troupe had already descended into chaos.
On the surface, everyone expressed concern for Charlotte’s safety, but underneath, everyone’s real priorities lay elsewhere. Staff scrambled over whether the production could even go ahead, and how to salvage the schedule. Some started hunting for who was to blame. Others quietly began angling for the understudy’s seat.
Acting is a brutally competitive world. Only those still standing at the very end survive. Whatever the reason, the moment you step away, you’re branded a failure as a performer.
“M— Masayasu-san!? Where are you going!?”
“You’re coming too.”
“But you have a performance to give!”
“What kind of actor can’t even save one person right in front of him?”
I was ashamed of my own foolishness. And I bitterly regretted having kept myself from ever stepping close enough to truly reach her, having pushed her away without meaning to. Please, just don’t let this become something I can never forgive myself for. Carrying that thought, I rushed to the hospital she’d been taken to.
“So Shandy-san was…”
Iimori’s account was a tragic ending impossible to reconcile with the woman she knew today. Driven to the brink, and the failed attempt that followed. Looking at it as the fate of an actress who seemed bold on the surface but was, in truth, achingly fragile, it made a certain kind of sense.
“And that’s the point at which Chesha appeared, I take it.”
“Let me take over from here. I know more about this part than he does.”
Presumably having finished a shift and stepped into her break, Kuze Fumika settled into the seat beside Mikoto.
There had once been a time Mikoto suspected Fumika herself might be Chesha. She’d been only half-convinced at the time, but hearing Iimori’s account now, she finally understood why that suspicion had been misplaced.
“Please, go on. I’ve heard up to the point she was rushed to hospital.”
“Right. Everything from there, then.”
Fumika murmured briefly, deciding where to begin, then let her usual professional smile drop away entirely.
“The one who stayed by senpai’s side in the ICU, once she’d stabilised, was Chesha. Her real name is Ashiya Chie.”
“Ashiya Chie…”
Mikoto suddenly recalled having seen that name once, on some television programme she’d been half-watching. A venture-company president, early thirties, if she remembered right.
“At this point, they weren’t yet in a relationship. Chesha had originally just been a regular of Masayasu-san’s here, and also a fan of senpai’s.”
“She was such an enthusiastic one that I ended up introducing them once.”
Iimori, it seemed, had an unusual dual career — remaining a member of Maverick’s troupe while also, in his spare time, working as a bartender employed by the same company. Having picked up bartending as a fallback skill in case he ever retired from acting, it had simply turned into a de facto side job.
Fumika’s hand, resting on the counter, was trembling.
“But Chesha had been targeting senpai from the very start. She used Masayasu-san purely as a way to get close to her.”
There was a rawness to Fumika’s voice, some unresolved anger with nowhere left to go.
“…Once senpai had somehow recovered and settled, Chesha proposed a plan. She explained it as a way to kill senpai off exactly the way senpai herself had wanted.”
“I can more or less guess. Faking a suicide, right?”
Mikoto’s insight made both of them straighten, slightly. It seemed she’d hit the mark exactly.
“Yes. That’s precisely it.”
Mikoto focused entirely on Fumika’s account, determined not to miss a word.
Some day, four years ago.
Having abandoned the leading role and even failed at taking her own life, Shandy had been reduced to a state of exhaustion so severe it was difficult to say how she was still living at all. Kept under near house arrest in the Maverick dormitory, since no one could predict what she might do if let outside alone, she’d finally agreed to Chesha’s staged plan.
The truth behind Chesha’s engineered fake suicide was simple enough.
First, Shandy, still under confinement, negotiated with the troupe for permission to go outside, claiming she wanted to see the ocean. Naturally, the troupe would never have agreed to an unsupervised outing, but Kuze and Iimori accompanying her was enough to win them over.
Then, she met up with Chesha at a pier. The chosen pier was a popular spot with anglers. Shandy was left standing there alone, at exactly the distance that anglers could still just barely see her.
Her outfit for the occasion was a white dress. A blonde woman standing alone at a pier in a white dress, holding no fishing rod at all, would inevitably draw attention. Naturally — a faked suicide requires a third-party eyewitness. Preferably some upstanding, guileless fool, brimming with civic duty, who’d report without hesitation, “A woman in a white dress just fell into the sea.”
And then, Shandy leapt from the pier. Of course, she never actually jumped; she simply ducked behind cover and changed her appearance. From there, all she had to do was blend in with Kuze and Iimori and casually leave the scene, and the authorities would handle the rest — confirming through their investigation that the person who’d fallen into the sea was indeed Charlotte Gabriel, and she’d officially become a missing person.
“Senpai has no family to speak of, and the troupe judged it would be too much trouble if the truth of the suicide attempt ever came out. So no one ever filed a missing-persons report. Until the investigation formally concluded, senpai stayed holed up the entire time in a hideout Chesha had arranged.”
“Could that be… her current place? In Kyodo?”
“Yes. Officially, senpai is still a missing person, even now. Effectively without a family register, she’s unable to do anything as basic as changing residence, let alone sign any kind of formal contract — it would leave a trail.”
“Ah, so that’s why…”
Mikoto could only be stunned, but at least it finally explained why Shandy had never taken the step toward marriage.
Marriage, after all, meant rewriting a family register. There was no way Shandy, unable to prove any form of identity whatsoever, could ever file a marriage registration.
“Once seven years pass since going missing, a legal declaration of disappearance kicks in — she’d be treated, in effect, as dead. This is senpai’s fifth year, so there’s no issue yet.”
“Um, but legally speaking…?”
Mikoto found herself worrying first, in a moment of terrifying practicality, about whether her own fiancée might end up behind bars — disgusted with herself even as she asked it. Surely there were more pressing things to be worrying about right now.
“There’s apparently a possibility of being charged with forging official documents, but Chesha must have handled things carefully. The proof is that senpai’s able to run her bar at all right now. There’s no way something like a property lease could have gone through otherwise.”
Shandy had guarded her secret with such stubborn resolve, and it turned out the reason went far beyond her usual worn-out excuse of “I’m just shy, you see.” She’d been living her entire life under Chesha’s protection, concealing her identity out of pure necessity.
Which meant—
“Chesha… genuinely wanted to save Shandy-san, didn’t she.”
Whether reluctant to admit it, Fumika gave only the faintest nod.
Beyond the faked suicide, Chesha had shielded Shandy from every conceivable danger — food, clothing, shelter, right down to Antiqua itself. With her wealth and her competence, faking a whole life for one person probably hadn’t been all that difficult a feat.
“…Even so, I believe there’s no one better suited for senpai than you, Kurosu-sama.”
For a moment, Mikoto nearly mistook it for an attempt at comfort, and held her tongue.
There was no comparison to be made — in wealth, in capability, Mikoto lost to Chesha outright. Sheltering someone from society’s gaze entirely, not merely supporting them financially, was a feat Mikoto couldn’t pull off even if she won the lottery jackpot two or three times over.
Fumika continued.
“Senpai changed, after meeting you, Kurosu-sama.”
“From what Iimori-san told me, she didn’t seem to have changed all that much.”
“She has changed. Senpai revived her friendship with the two of us.”
“That’s true. After we parted ways at that pier, I never expected to see her again.”
Recounting their memories so freely, the two of them clearly still loved her — Charlotte and Alice both. Otherwise, they’d never have gone along with something criminal, nor would they be telling any of this to Mikoto now.
Mikoto let out an exasperated sigh. Aimed squarely at Shandy herself.
“It’s ridiculous. Having two precious people who trust her this much, and yet refusing to trust anyone in return.”
“That’s simply who she is. Though she never once told us anything about the environment she grew up in…”
“She’s fighting her own battle, struggling in her own way. Chesha too, of course. And so are we. And you as well, Kurosu-san.”
“Yes, I understand.”
The words she’d say to Shandy were already decided. It wasn’t going to be “That must have been so hard” or “Let’s get through this together.”
“I’m sorry, one more rude question, if I may. About Chesha.”
Under the watchful eyes of the married hotel couple exchanging a glance, Mikoto pulled out her phone.
“Please give me Chesha’s number. There’s something I need to tell her, first of all.”
“I do have it, but whether it’s still in use anymore…”
Soothing Fumika’s hesitant asking, Mikoto obtained the number that had connected to Chesha up until four years ago. She dialled immediately, right there.
After a few rings, a voice came through.
“Hmm, and who might this be? Silence won’t get you very far, you know.”
Swallowing down the heavy air between them, Mikoto declared:
“I’m going to save Charlotte Gabriel.”