"You're resting again today." Sakura felt the hand on her bare shoulder at the same time she heard the words, and her heart sank as she turned to see Kazuo waiting for her just a few feet away from the stage entrance. The other members of Diamond Pop Excitement filed past her, trying their best to pretend they didn't even see the leader of the group for fear of winding up in the same unpleasant position, and Sakura was utterly unsurprised to see an understudy slip into her place in the lineup. She'd had a bad feeling about her future the moment Choko joined the group, and any bitter satisfaction she might have felt about being right was lost in the tangle of helpless frustration she experienced at seeing a fifteen year old girl take her place onstage.
She fixed Kazuo with a resigned stare. "Why?" she asked, exasperation turning the question into an accusation. She'd been that fifteen year-old girl once, so absolutely thrilled at the thought of being the face on a million posters that it never even occurred to her what might happen ten or fifteen years down the line when she aged out of being an idol and she had to face the real world with no skills beyond singing and dancing and looking pretty. Ten years seemed like a lifetime back then. Now, twenty-five and struggling every day to keep her place in the lineup, Sakura was terrified that it might actually have been one.
Kazuo gave her an oily, insincere smile. "You slipped up during the last show. Footwork error, you were a half-beat out of sync with the other girls for the whole second number. I want you to spend a little time retraining." Sakura knew it was more like five seconds, but she also knew it was useless to argue. An error was still an error was still an error, and any blemish on absolute perfection was an excuse to pull her from another performance. And how much longer could she keep being perfect? Another year? Another two years? Sooner or later the agency would stop waiting for her to jump and give her a good hearty push with her very own 'graduation ceremony'. And then Choko would sing and dance every night, and twenty-two year old Hiroko would take her place as leader. It was the same story everywhere. Sakura didn't know why she ever thought it wouldn't happen to her.
Bitter fury roiled in her gut as she stared at Kazuo's placid, smiling face, but Sakura knew that arguing would only end her tenure with Diamond Pop Excitement that much quicker. Management didn't like girls who talked back. She gritted her teeth and grinned at him in a rictus that tensed her jawline like she was holding a venomous serpent inside her mouth, struggling to find a response that didn't give him the excuse he needed to fire her on the spot.
She must have stayed silent a bit too long, because Kazuo gave her a look of mock concern and said, "You're not thinking about retiring, are you? Only a lot of girls start thinking about moving on at your age, looking for the next thing, and... well, you're not getting any younger, are you?" Sakura was fifteen years younger than he was, but she knew better than to bring up that particular little bit of trivia. The industry looked for girls, not women. Someone Sakura's age was supposed to already be living off the royalties of their hit songs (Diamond Pop Excitement never had a Number One that lasted more than two weeks on the charts) or moving behind the scenes (Sakura didn't even know who to talk to about getting a job in production, and the agency had been resolutely, blandly unhelpful in finding her something) or marrying some rich fan and starting a family.
If Sakura had any rich fans, she didn't know it. "It's fine," she hissed through clenched teeth. "Let's go train." Behind her, she heard the opening strains of the group's first number as two thousand fans began to scream for their favorite idols. If any of them noticed Sakura's absence, it wasn't enough to stop them from cheering.
* * * * *
Kazuo led her back through the production company's labyrinthine maze of recording booths, offices, private gyms, storage vaults, and practice rooms, keeping up a steady stream of obnoxious chatter the entire time. "You're really lucky you've got access to the latest technology, honestly. A lot of girls your age, once they start losing a step, they're back to spending ten hour days in the studio practicing their footwork and making themselves look tired. And once their looks go, well... pffft!" He popped an imaginary bubble with his fingers, then chuckled with amusement at his own joke. Sakura wished she could just shove him into a closet and walk out of the studio forever, but she didn't know where to go.
She knew where she didn't want to go, though. Her skin broke out in goose pimples as she followed the all too familiar path, past the rooms where she once rehearsed her choreography until her calves burned with fatigue and the cramped soundproof booths where she sang herself hoarse. Without Kazuo there to set the pace, Sakura knew that her footsteps would be slowing down by now, dragged almost to a halt by her secret desire to be anywhere, anywhere at all but the small room at the back of the studio. The room she hated. The room she feared. The room that had saved her career more than a dozen times.
"Here we are," Kazuo said politely, tapping on the small sign on the door that read, 'Special Training'. "Let's get you inside and get you to work, hmm?" He twisted the handle. "Unless you'd rather not?" he asked, pausing his back to Sakura while he waited for an answer.
She could feel the tension in that silence. Sakura had never liked the training machine; for all that she noticed an instant improvement in her performance after just twenty minutes sitting in the narrow chair and allowing the heavy helmet to rest against her scalp, she always hoped that each time in the small, stiflingly warm room would be her last. Surely the machine had to arrive at a point where it had perfectly simulated the routines enough times in her brain to perfectly adjust her muscle memory to match. Surely her body wasn't changing so rapidly that the sessions went from every few months to every couple of months to every week to almost daily now. Surely she could stop and leave and run and get away from the room that always made her skin crawl even if Sakura could never pin down exactly why she hated it so much.
But it was her only salvation. It was the only thing that kept her competitive with the younger girls who never got tired, who could rehearse and rehearse and rehearse until their feet bled and laugh off the pain as just the price of success. Even some of them were beginning to use the machine now, and if Sakura didn't then she might as well start looking for some recording executive who wanted a trophy wife because she wasn't going to be an idol much longer. And as much as a part of Sakura's weary mind welcomed any alternative to strapping herself into the machine again, she wasn't ready to stop. Not today. "Let's just go," she murmured, numb resignation shading every word.
