My name is Aquamarine Hoshino.
To normal ears, it likely sounds odd.
Flamboyant, perhaps?
I don't know how else to phrase it.
In any standard definition, it's the kind of name that makes people pause, their eyes flickering with a silent, judgmental 'what?' before they settle on the easy way out.
To everyone—teachers, classmates, producers on my mother's sets—I'm just 'Aqua'. The 'marine' was quietly, conveniently discarded.
It's too much. Too lengthy. And too grand.
In short, I have no idea why no one ever pulled my mother aside and told her the truth. That naming your son Aquamarine is… excessive.
It's not just naming a child after a gemstone; it's naming him after a specific, luminous shade of blue-green, something you'd name a fairy-tale prince or a precious show pony.
It's the kind of decision that makes you wonder about her thought process. It's almost like naming your son Adolf Hitler and genuinely believing it's a great, strong name—a complete blindness to the sheer, awkward weight of it.
But the name is only the beginning of the bizarre.
The truly surreal part is who my mother is. Ai Hoshino. The Ai Hoshino. The radiant, flawless idol whose smile sold millions of records, whose every move was televised, whose very existence was a cultural phenomenon.
And I, through some incomprehensible cosmic glitch, found myself reincarnated as her son.
I remember it clearly—the dying thought, not even my own. In my last moments in my previous life, bleeding out on a sidewalk for reasons still murky, I overheard a whisper of someone's stupid, passing joke.
A fan, gushing to a friend: "God, I love Ai so much, I'd even want to be reborn as her kid!"
It was the pinnacle of pathetic fantasy, so absurd it circled back to being funny.
Apparently, the universe—or God, or Fate, or whatever sick, ironic force pilots this cosmic joke—has a literal sense of humor. That throwaway punchline, heard in my final moments, became my new reality.
The dream of some nameless netizen was grafted onto my dying soul and granted.
Just… fuck.
Yeah. What kind of degenerate wish is that?
Any normal person dreams of being their idol's partner, their lover, their equal. They fantasize about a shared life, a romance whispered in the spotlight's glow. They see them as a love interest, or someone to support from afar.
But this? To be her son? To be utterly dependent, to view her not as a peer or a dream, but as "Mom"? To have her wipe your face, scold you, tuck you in—all while knowing she's the untouchable star you once plastered on your wall?
Fuck that.
I don't know why the universe chose to grant that wish, of all things, at the exact moment of my death. I didn't ask for it. I didn't pray for it. But here I am.
And so, with a deep, internal sigh, I resolved to try my best in this second life.
To navigate the strangeness, the public scrutiny, the shadow of a name too big for any child, and the surreal reality of calling an idol "Mother."
At least, that's what I told myself.
That's what I thought, before the gears of this world truly began to turn, grinding my good intentions into dust.
Until that day.
That black, suffocating, and utterly final day that ripped the color from the world. The darkest moment of my life, a before-and-after line seared directly into my soul.
Someone intruded on our home. Our small, hidden, supposedly safe little home—the one place where Ai Hoshino wasn't the nation's star, but just… Mom.
He shattered the front door, and with it, he shattered every fragile piece of happiness we had painstakingly built.
He took my mother's life, carving it out of the world in the name of a twisted 'love' and a derangement only he could understand.
In the immediate, blinding aftermath, my heart didn't break.
It simply… turned off.
A switch flipped from warm, beating flesh to solid, impenetrable ice.
I felt nothing.
No screaming grief, no child's wailing terror.
Just a vast, echoing hollowness, a vacuum in my chest where a future used to be, followed by a chilling, absolute certainty: my life as I knew it was over.
Yet, the adult mind trapped inside this useless, small child's body held me back from a blind, screaming reaction.
A cold, clinical part of me, born from a previous life and honed by survival instinct, went eerily quiet and observant.
As my world ended in the hallway, I heard everything. I absorbed every slurred insult, every emotional outburst, every stab of the man's rage as his knife rose and fell.
I listened to his rambling monologue, the pathetic justification of a shut-in so deeply marinated in his own delusional world that he believed murder was an act of devotion.
And one fact cut through the haze of his insanity with crystal clarity: a man like that—disorganized, socially broken, a creature of forums and darkened rooms—would never have had the skill, the resources, or the lucidity to accurately locate this secret address.
Not on his own.
Our location was a secret guarded by an entire agency.
To find it required an inside track.
A traitor.
Someone from the inside had leaked the door to our sanctuary.
But who?
Ruby? Impossible. She was a child. She adored our mother with every fiber of her being.
Miyako? Also unthinkable. I had watched her. I had seen the genuine, weary affection in her eyes when she looked at us, the way she'd begun to see our chaotic unit not as a career liability, but as a family. She was written off the list.
Ichigo Satou? I knew his type. Ambitious, pragmatic, sometimes cold, but with a spine of stubborn loyalty. He had stood by Ai through her scandalous pregnancy, through the immense risk to the agency. He had gambled his career on her. Betraying her now made no personal sense.
That left only one answer.
One terrible, logical conclusion that made the ice in my veins freeze solid.
Our father.
The phantom. The man whose name I never knew, whose face I had never seen.
Ai had seemed… different lately.
Secretive, yet with a faint, fragile hope in her eyes. She must have been trying to contact him. To bridge the gap.
And in doing so, she must have handed him the one weapon he needed: our location.
He was the only one with both motive and opportunity unknown. He was the leak. And the intent behind the leak… wasn't reunion. It was extermination.
But… why?
The question echoed in the hollow space where my heart used to be.
What possible reason could he have? Was it fear of exposure? Greed? Spite? Some warped sense of cleaning up a mistake?
My child's mind couldn't grasp it, but the man's mind inside it vowed to tear the answer from the fabric of this rotten world.
I would investigate. I would peel back every layer of this reality until the truth lay bare.
But understanding his 'why' was secondary.
A luxury for a conscience I no longer possessed.
The core, unshakable law that now governed my existence was simpler, older, and written in blood: a life is paid with a life.
A tooth for a tooth.
He took my light. He took my family. He took my mother, and with her, the last warmth in this borrowed life.
In return, I would return his kindness a hundredfold.
As long as he drew breath, I would know no peace.
The thought would forever gnaw at the edges of my sanity: if he could do this to Ai, what would stop him from finishing the job?
What would stop him from deciding that her children were loose ends, destined to join their mother in the grave?
A sense of familial affection?
A father's love?
If he ever had any, I thought, the sarcasm a bitter acid in the back of my throat.
No.
The only safety for Ruby, for what was left of this broken family, lay in his permanent absence.
The hunt was no longer a question.
It was my new purpose.
The ice had a direction now.
It would flow, it would search, and it would freeze the life out of the man who thought he could shatter our world and simply walk away.
...
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