date posted: 2023-04-05
summary: And despite her perceived failures and shortcomings, which were always so pronounced and emphasized over anything she felt she did right – Yui was always sure of two aspects of herself: her ability to read people, and her inability to stop herself from chasing the unattainable.
word count: 1,223 words
notes: yeah idk what this is, all i know is that a good portion of it is probably just me projecting onto yuiyui. title from boku boku by avtechno (lyrics here)
Yahagi Moeka was everything everyone wanted to be, with the way she carried herself, the way she knew exactly what to say on the shows and to the staff and to her seniors. Her groupmates admired her, and envied and despised her for her talent in getting what she wants, in pushing all of her strengths to their absolute limits, and downplaying her weaknesses to the lowest they can be. Her confidence and skill was immediately apparent to anyone who laid eyes on her, and she was everything everyone wanted her to be.
She was lightning in a bottle, a shooting star, and the eventual outcome was inevitable, obvious to any outsider, anyone observing the AKB48 empire slowly crumbling. Yahagi was perfect, too perfect, launched herself too well into the front, too effortlessly. No matter how much everyone wanted to be her, nobody truly wanted to be her, be in her shoes.
And despite her perceived failures and shortcomings, which were always so pronounced and emphasized over anything she felt she did right – Yui was always sure of two aspects of herself: her ability to read people, and her inability to stop herself from chasing the unattainable.
For as long as she could remember, Yui had always been conscious of her poor habit of idolizing. Any time someone had shown kindness to her, or resonated with her in some way, they would immediately be elevated to unachievable heights in her mind – how that one girl at school, in the weeks before she turned twelve, strolled up to her desk during lunch and said her meek but determined ambitions were cute, immediately took up permanent residence in her mind, always on Yui’s mind, always wanting to be her, and get to know her more. Every time they talked at lunchtime after, every time they texted short little emoticons to each other in the night and Yui felt her heart flutter with each message, how much she slept over at the other’s house and Yui was captivated by how effortlessly nice the girl always was – each time only strengthened her want (need?) to know her, and to be her.
But that whole time – which feels like a fever dream, years after the fact – in the back of her mind, Yui knew it wouldn’t last. That the girl would rock her world, change everything for Yui, and then see her work is done, and would vanish, as always. And it went on, up until they went to different middle schools and Yui never saw her again.
And then in her idol years, girls like Miyawaki and Watanabe were always goddesses in her eyes from the start, goddesses that could do no wrong, goddesses Yui could never even compare to. She vaguely recognized their flaws – Miyawaki’s common slipups and accidents in performances, Watanabe’s growing tendency to simply go through the motions in her later years, her spark having faded years ago – but she immediately decided that their otherwise perfection had dwarfed everything in comparison. Yui wanted to be them, so, so badly, but she had always known that she could never compare.
Behind Yahagi’s layers of insurmountable perfection and genius, a young and talented anomaly of the idol machine, Yui had pinpointed from the beginning that it would eventually fizzle out. That Yahagi’s youth was one of her advantages, but her biggest disadvantage – her eventual downfall. Being sixteen and thrusted to the center would take its toll at some point, and Yui would know, with how her own ambition eventually crumbled under the pressure of being in the center, surrounded by all of her seniors, the seniors she so desperately wanted to be, but couldn’t become when the group needed her most. Yui never hit rock bottom – she never would, she knew that. But she knew exactly what she wanted, what she wanted to be and what she wanted from the group, until the pressure crushed her into complacency, to stagnancy, to moderate rankings and monotonous, unrepentant center performances of the same songs, the same livestreams, the same everything. It was exhausting, but the ambition, the endless electricity needed to keep the lights on underneath, to keep that fire going– it was impossible.
She was intimate with the feeling of crushing expectations, and every day was a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop with Yahagi.
And yet – the lived experience, the experience Yui had known so well – it hadn’t stopped her from desperately chasing the girl’s shadow.
Yahagi was everything everyone wanted to be, and everything Yui wanted to be. Speeding after the girl’s light, wanting to be her so desperately, and wanting to know her, to get to know her, to see the girl behind the genius. Yui had known the girl was doomed from the beginning – but she knew exactly what she wanted, always, and she wanted what Yahagi had, and what was behind Yahagi.
Any day, it was any day until the girl would crumble before everyone’s eyes under the pressure – she had clung to that in the time Yahagi’s rise was rapidly unfolding before the group’s eyes, just waiting for her expectations to be confirmed, for her thoughts – hopes, wishes, fears – to come to life. But even when that day came, when Yui had woken up in the late afternoon, the day’s schedule empty for the first time in a while, to dozens of hours-old texts from her friends and admired seniors, to news reports and emails from management, and gossip and rumors all over Twitter – the numbness immediately made itself home in her chest, the haze made itself known in her head, and her thoughts were scattered for weeks. It became so obvious that Komiyama, good as ever at reading people, had made it her business to ask, hey, are you doing alright?, and, how are you taking the news? I know it’s hard, I’ve been feeling it too – it’s definitely a shock to everyone.
And Yui had the answer ready moments before the other opened her mouth, but it hadn’t halted the storm in her head, then and now.
She had known the other answer then, too – she had known it that afternoon she took in the news, bleary eyed and disoriented, and she had known it the day Yahagi’s center was announced.
Yui knew how this would end, knew that chasing her shadow was impossible, knew the girl was a genius and simultaneously a ticking time bomb. But Yui had known from the beginning, that she could never be Yahagi, and Yahagi would never be her, would never come close to her, in status and proximity.
Yahagi Moeka was a shooting star, and shot by too fast to ever know Oguri Yui. And she had always known this, but the cold still coiled in her chest, the smoke still hovered in the back of her head and clouded her thoughts. At the graduation concert, she tried her hardest to purge her mind of any thoughts – held her limbs tight together and went through the motions, shot her best smiles at the audience, at Komiyama and Okada and Murayama – Yahagi, in the center, putting her all into everything, as always – at all the girls she respected and wanted to be so badly. But all she could think about, in that moment, was how she was always so predictable.