The V-tuber Who Became Obsessed With Me

Chapter 103: Everyone was living a different lives behind the scenes

( this Chapter is told from Ethan’s pov)

A month had passed since the warehouse.

Thirty-one days.

People said time healed things. Whoever came up with that had never watched their entire understanding of reality come apart in a single night.

I went to work every morning. Smiled when I had to. Answered emails, sat in meetings, gave people the version of me that functioned normally. Maybe I was better at performing than I had ever given myself credit for. Maybe people simply saw what they expected to see and asked no further questions.

Either way, nobody pushed.

That was probably for the best.

Since that night I could not shake the feeling of being watched. Not the dramatic kind from films, nothing so obvious as that. Just a quiet persistent pressure at the back of my neck. Every time I crossed a street or unlocked my apartment or left the office after dark, something in me stayed alert in a way it had not before. Whether that was fear or trauma or whether Katsuro Arashigumi actually did have someone following me, I could not say. After everything I had seen in that warehouse, none of those possibilities felt far-fetched enough to dismiss.

My entire picture of things had shifted.

The woman I loved was not who I had believed she was. The friend I trusted had been running a double life the entire time I had known him. And sitting with that, trying to absorb it into something workable, had made me look at every face around me differently. Which felt like its own kind of damage.

Eventually I called Jade.

"Hey, you busy?"

A brief pause.

"Ethan? It’s been a while. Everything alright?"

"Not really," I said. "You free for a drink?"

"Give me thirty minutes."

The bar was quiet in the way weekday bars were quiet, a handful of people unwinding from the day, someone knocking billiard balls around in the corner, soft jazz filling in the gaps between conversations.

I had arrived first and ordered whiskey on the rocks and sat with it while the bartender polished glasses behind the counter with the practiced indifference of someone who had heard everything and remembered nothing.

Jade came in with his tie loosened and his laptop bag on one shoulder, looking like a man who had been carrying his day for too long.

When he spotted me his face opened into a tired smile and he raised a hand across the room.

We shook hands.

He ordered a beer and dropped into the chair across from me and for a while we talked about everything except what I had actually called him about. Work, terrible clients, Nathan’s improbable promotion. The conversation moved easily and somewhere in the middle of it I almost forgot why I had invited him.

Almost.

Eventually a natural pause came.

I rolled the ice around my glass.

"I wanted to ask you something."

Jade glanced over.

"Sure."

"It’s about Kuro."

The ease went out of his expression immediately.

"What about him?"

"Has he contacted you? Recently or at all?"

"No."

He shifted slightly.

"He took a leave of absence about a month ago. Didn’t tell anyone where he was going, didn’t answer calls, never came back."

He looked at me carefully.

"Why?"

"No reason," I said. "I just figured you two were close."

Jade looked at his beer for a moment.

Then he scratched the back of his neck.

"We were a little closer than that, actually."

I waited.

"We were dating."

I stared at him.

He laughed at my expression.

"I knew that would be your reaction."

"I’m not—"

I put my glass down.

"I just had no idea."

"Nobody did. That was the point."

I sat back and let that settle.

And then the memories started rearranging themselves.

Every lunch break they had taken at the same time.

Leaving work together.

Weekend plans that somehow always overlapped.

I had assumed it was friendship, the easy proximity of two people who got along well enough to spend most of their time in the same orbit.

Now every single memory looked different.

Then a specific one surfaced.

Kuro had shown up at my apartment unannounced one afternoon, maybe two months before the warehouse. He had looked wrong. Bloodshot eyes, dark circles, wrinkled shirt, hair that suggested sleep had become something he was no longer on good terms with.

He had forced one of his awkward smiles when I opened the door and I had made some joke about him looking like he had not slept since the previous year.

He had laughed.

Not properly.

Just enough to make me stop asking.

We had talked for a while that afternoon, or at least I had thought we were talking.

Looking back at it now, I had not been talking.

I had been answering questions.

Was I happy?

Did I regret the choices I had made?

Did I think people deserved second chances?

I had answered every one without thinking much about it, had even teased him for going philosophical on me.

He had smiled and let me tease him.

That was not a conversation.

That was him memorising something he expected to lose.

A few weeks later he had come into the office looking like he had not slept at all and jade had made a zombie joke and everyone including me had laughed, and Kuro had laughed too, and I remembered now how hollow it had sounded, how he had slipped into his office afterward and gone quiet for the rest of the day, and I had not followed him, had not asked if he was alright, had not noticed that anything was wrong because I had been too busy assuming he was just being Kuro.

How many times had he been standing right in front of me, trying to tell someone something, and I had missed it entirely because I had decided I already knew who he was?

"I honestly thought you two just lived close to each other," I said.

Jade let out a short quiet laugh.

"I mean, technically we did. We lived together."

I looked at him.

"It was that serious?"

"Very."

His smile faded completely.

He looked into his beer the way people looked into things when they were trying to find something solid to focus on.

"Months before everything happened he started changing. Staying out. Coming home exhausted. Sometimes not coming home until morning."

He turned the bottle slowly in his hands.

"Every time I asked what was going on he’d tell me not to worry. Said he needed to fix something. I kept asking what. He never told me."

He was quiet for a moment.

"The last day I saw him he packed a bag. I asked where he was going."

A small tired exhale.

"He just smiled. Said he was finally going to make things right. He kissed me goodbye and walked out."

The words landed somewhere I had not been expecting them to land.

The warehouse came back.

Kuro’s face when everything he had spent twelve years building collapsed around him.

And underneath that, earlier, a moment I had filed away and not examined properly.

Thank you for being my friend.

He had said that.

I had heard it and let it pass.

I looked down at my glass.

Jade had been at home waiting for someone who was already in the process of destroying himself.

And I had been standing close enough to see it and had not seen any of it.

"I’m sorry," I said.

Jade frowned.

"For what?"

"I don’t know."

I shook my head.

"I just didn’t know. Any of it."

He gave a small sad smile.

"Neither did anyone else. We kept it private. I suppose we were good at it."

I stared into my whiskey.

Everyone around me had been living versions of themselves I had never accessed.

Raina.

Kuro.

Now Jade.

I had believed I knew these people and what I had actually known were the surfaces they had chosen to show me, which apparently bore limited resemblance to what was underneath.

Jade’s phone vibrated hard against the table.

He looked at the number and frowned.

Answered it.

"Hello?"

The colour left his face in one movement, the way colour left a face when the body received something before the mind had caught up.

He stood slowly.

"What?"

His voice had cracked.

"No. That’s not possible."

I watched him.

"Jade."

He was not listening.

His hand had gone tight around the phone and he was staring at a fixed point somewhere above my head.

"I’ll be there."

He ended the call.

The glass in his other hand slipped.

It hit the floor and shattered and he looked down at it without moving.

"Ethan."

His voice was barely above a breath.

"It’s Kuro."

He looked at me with eyes that were trying to hold something together and not entirely managing it.

"They said he wants to see us."