Her face was grim. You could see the cause in her glasses reflecting the laptop screen she was staring through — you couldn't read the text, of course, but you knew what a declining graph looked like. Not particularly surprising. You could see the beginning of the end a while ago — as this field of business started getting crowded, the usual trouble with permissions escalated into trying to force each other out of business with exclusivity deals. Turns out, for instance, Sony is an enormous conglomerate owning not only a large game library, but quite a lot of movies and music as well, and that Microsoft owning Minecraft actually mattered sometimes. No matter how loyal your fanbase could be, this left a sour taste in people's mouth, and this could be tracked through declining numbers quite easily. One could have assumed she was thinking about the declining revenue, but not you. You knew her too well. All Fubuki cared about was making people happy. 
 
You garnished rice pudding with a fresh mint leaf, put a double-folded omelette next to it, and went to put it in front of her. She shoved the plate aside, and you carefully adjusted its balance to not drop the food. 
 
"I already ate dinner with my friends." she said, furiously typing a message without looking up at you. "Eat this tomorrow."
 
You responded that it won't be as tasty reheated, and she narrowed her eyes and started ranting. "First: I don't care. Second: you can toss it into the garbage then. Third: why are you wasting food that you're buying with my money in the first place? What is wrong with you? You could have asked me when I'll be coming home and whether I'll need to eat when I do." 
 
You could have asked before cooking all of this, and you tried to, but she didn't answer your calls or messages. She knew that perfectly well. "By the way, while you're here: I will be eating with my friends tomorrow again. And the next day after. Just so that you are informed."
 
You didn't suggest joining her, because you knew the answer, you heard it so many times, same as always, "I'm your wife, not your friend" or a variation thereof. Instead you suggested that you could simply get a job if that's an issue, hoping for a reaction. She waved you away like a moderately annoying fly. "Your job is to be a husband. Try not to shirk it sometimes." 
 
You ate in silence, turned on the electric kettle and asked how the meeting went. No response. Did she see the EN3 girls? No response. Is Marine planning to come back? No response. You washed the dishes, put the rest of the dinner into the fridge in an off-brand tupperware container and, on the way back, gave her a quick hug from her back. Finally you got an emotion out of her. Fiery, uncalculated, real. Your little fox noticed your existence.
 
"DON'T FUCKING TOUCH ME!" Fubuki's nails were sharp and immaculate. You could feel the scratches very slowly swell with blood. She probably moderately regretted slapping your face like that, not because out of concern that it'd hurt (which it did) heavens no, but because that was a mark of giving you attention. Still, it was a tiny bit of skin on skin contact, and it was a shame to have to immediately kill the warmth with coldness as you disinfected the scratches with medical alcohol. It would be embarrassing to leave the house for a few days. Maybe that was part of the intent? No. Couldn't be. Fubuki stood up, grabbed her laptop, and went back to her sound-isolated room, at her usual pace, not showing that this incident affected her in any way.
 
Otaku culture wasn't the same these days. She never mentioned you on stream, of course, but it was a not particularly guarded secret that she had someone in her life, and she didn't even get any death threats over this. You did, sometimes, but didn't really care. It was not righteous indignation, but envy. The queen of Hololive, the pillar of the temple, CEO of Cover Corp. International, ever cheerful, ever charismatic, majestic demon fox Shirakami Fubuki regularly moans in pleasure and lifts her tail, and not just for someone, but for you, you no-name bastard gaijin, that drove dudes absolutely batshit insane. You considered this hilarious. They lacked the necessary information. It was half a year... actually, four months and eleven days, give or take a few hours, since she last allowed you to kiss her. You didn't "forget what she looked like naked", because, first off, that was impossible, and second, she didn't even care if you were in the room when she was changing. These scenes were burned into your retinas, every single one of them.
 
You didn't even care for sex. That was a hilarious delusion, of course you cared for sex, of course you wanted to feel her body contort in your hands again, to hear her say your name, to fluff her tail, to take in full lungs of her pheromones, but that was secondary. You wanted connection. Emotional response. Most of all, you wanted some warmth. Some body heat. You were so, so, so, so, so cold.
 
You took out your old droid cellphone with a cracked screen and opened up the streaming app. There used to be a whole war in that direction, Youtube versus Twitch versus OnDemand versus... but now, after the mergers, it was just "Streaming". She was running a guerilla stream. Guerilla zatsudans were a bit of a punchline, but not when it was Fubuki. There always was something interesting she could say, or you could just lay there and bask in her energy. Looking at how she behaved around you, you could say she was fake. No, that wasn't it. Singing along to a tune a member sent as a voice message, giggling at her own pun, ever cheerful, ever joyful, she was simply talking to two hundred thousand people about how her day went, how she met up with the girls, how they had to share the same parfait because the cafe ran out... That was her. That was the real Fubuki, that was who you fell in love with, that was who said "Yes, I do", so many years ago. The one you talked to today and yesterday and the day before that and... that was fake. 
 
There was a book you read years ago, about a city of happy people, the lynchpin of which was a starved, tortured and neglected boy, chained alone in the basement. He wasn't a criminal, he... they just decided he should be there. Turned him into their project. The horrible thing is that they weren't sadists, most of them didn't pay any mind. It ends with the protagonists leaving. Not the boy though, he's a background character. He's there.
 
Your phone was fairly shitty, the battery didn't last long and it overheated easily, even now, with just Streaming, it was like forty degrees. You plugged it into a wall charger. Fubuki was pretending to hug the screen. You hugged back.
 
Warm.
 
She knows you're always watching, she can't not. On some level she should be aware that she's hugging you too.
 
She will tear down the awful city. 
 
She will come back. 
 
One day.
 
Please.