fic for spiegelaugen
For: spiegelaugen
From: harinezumi_kun
Title: the gravity of you
Pairing/Focus: ohmiya
Rating: pg
Warnings: none.
Summary: M5 is a backwater pit of a planet, and no one ever stays. Nino knows this, but he can't help hoping that Ohno will.
Notes: sci-fi au, lots of inspiration drawn from "hitomi no naka no galaxy". i-i hope the reciever enjoys it :D;;
The streets of Riverside are dusty like always, and silent this late at night. Curfew was hours ago, but most of the night patrols are already well into their second and third rounds at the local bars. Nino makes his way to the edge of town with no worries of being caught, taking the back alleys and keeping away from the bright lights on the main road.
His feet drag, and he knows why even if he doesn’t want to admit it: because he’s going to say goodbye. Not that he isn’t used to goodbyes. M5 is a backwater pit of a planet as far as colonies go, and no one ever stays. He keeps walking.
Chalky pavement gives way to gravel that crunches under his boots, and blocky cement barracks give way to low, sprawling civilian complexes. Gravel turns to dirt, and the civilian lots end at the little villages of military tents huddled around the edges of the shipyards. Smaller passenger jets from Earth crouch in front of the hulking shadows of transport barges, still lit up by spotlights so the night crews can keep loading slabs from the quarries and crates from the mines.
It’s usually the mines that drive people away, make them crazy with wanting to go, to get off M5, go to Earth, go anywhere that isn’t here. That’s what did it for Nino’s father, anyway. Every day down the hole, breathing more soot than air, the tunnel collapses and injuries. He was the first one who left.
And then it was Sho-chan, for school, but they all knew he was meant for better things than growing up to run the Riverside District Office like his father, and nobody held it against him. Mao took off for M1 pretty soon after that, and Shun followed her just like everyone expected him to. Toma stowed away on a coal freighter when turned twenty, and for a long time they had all worried that he was dead or in jail, but eventually he sent them a postcard letting them know he was alive, he had made it to Earth, and he was working in a stationary shop in Nagasaki, of all places.
Watching Jun and Aiba go had been the hardest, because secretly Nino had been hoping they would stay. They were second-generation like him, colony kids, this was their home-but Jun had never been happy on M5, and he was determined to get them all off. Aiba was the only one who had been able to afford going when Jun got them seats on a jet off-planet, but they’d promised to come back: “I promise, Nino, I promise, we’ll work for a while and save some money and we’ll come back for you guys, okay?”
At last, Nino comes to the edge of town. Riverside is bordered on all sides by a massive concrete wall, ten feet thick at the base with repeated warnings of DANGER - DO NOT CROSS stenciled all along its length. It’s enough of a deterrent for most people, and no one really wants to go outside the wall anyway-all the food and shelter is on the inside-but here, on the far end of the airfield where no patrols ever bother to come, there is an evenly spaced line of toe-holds carved out of the wall. Nino steps into the lowest one and reaches up for a hand-hold that is at exactly the right height for someone his size. He is up and over the wall in moments, jogs across the flat top, and then clambers down the other side just as quickly, pausing only when his feet hit the ground.
Inside the wall, everything is grit and pavement and fiberglass and metal. Out here, the air is clear and sharp, and the waist-high grass rolls away for miles without even any bushes or trees to interrupt the view that goes straight over the ocean cliffs in the distance. Nino looks up. The galaxy arm that M5 sits on the end of arches across the sky in a thick band, glittering with a thousand different colors, bright enough to cast a deep shadow behind Nino when he finally steps forward.
He remembers the first time they went over the wall, just the two of them. When they decided they wouldn’t tell any of the others about it.
“It’s okay, right? It’ll be our secret.”
Ten feet out from the wall, Nino starts to run.
*
Ohno came to Riverside when he was sixteen and Nino was thirteen, and three years seemed like such a huge age difference. They saw each other at school sometimes-when Ohno actually showed up-but otherwise didn’t have much to do with one another, and Nino didn’t even think to care that much about the new Earth-kid until that first day at the wall.
Nino had been riding his bike past the shipyard on his way to one of Aiba’s grass-lot baseball games when he saw Ohno. The older boy was walking alone down the dirt path next to the big chain-link fence that lined the tarmac with a little bag over his shoulder. Nino watched him from the main road for a while: Ohno looked hunched and small in a pair of regulation coveralls, rolled up to the knee, and worn-out sandals on his feet. On a whim, Nino turned his bike and pedaled up beside Ohno. The other boy was going at a slow meander and Nino guided his bike in a gentle back-and-forth weaving to keep pace.
“You running away?” Nino asked curiously, figuring that was the only thing Ohno could be doing this far towards the edge of town all alone.
Ohno just shrugged, glancing at Nino only briefly. “Kinda.”
“You didn’t pack very much,” Nino pointed out.
“Weren’t you going to the baseball game?” Ohno returned, nodding his head at the mitt hanging off Nino’s handlebars and picking up his pace a little.
While normally this kind of dismissive behavior would have put Nino’s hackles up, he couldn’t help but be curious about Ohno. He’d only been on M5 for three weeks and he was already trying to run away.
“You’re going to the wall, right? You’ll never get over: it’s, like, fifty feet tall.”
“It’s not that tall.”
“It is too.”
“It is not.” Ohno’s eyes tracked Nino as the other boy circled him slowly on his bike. “You’re an awfully annoying little alien.”
Nino skidded to a stop, blocking Ohno’s path. “Who’s an alien?” he demanded.
“You are,” Ohno said. “I’m from Earth and you’re not, that makes you an alien.”
“Well, we’re on my planet, so that makes you the alien.”
They spent a few moments staring each other down, and then almost simultaneously broke into grins.
“Come on,” Nino said, tipping his head at the back of his bike. “I’ll give you a lift.”
“What about the game?”
Nino shrugged, grinning a little wider. “I think this’ll be more interesting.”
Ohno climbed on without further protest. The ride up to the foot of the wall was quiet for the most part, Ohno’s hands light at Nino’s shoulders, and a dry wind blowing the smell of asphalt from across the ship yard.
Ohno directed Nino to a stretch of wall that was situated in a little dip of land behind a row of storage warehouses. They left the bike on its side in the short grass before walking up to the foot of the wall, craning their necks back to see the top.
“Twenty feet,” Ohno muttered, pulling his bag off his shoulder and beginning to dig around in it.
“Still,” Nino said, “what are you gonna do, jump it?”
Ohno did not reply, but produced something from his bag with a triumphant smile. It was a sleek, sliver tube, roughly the length of his forearm and narrower at the tip with a toggle on the side.
“A laser-chisel?” Nino asked incredulously. “Where did you even get that?”
“Found it,” Ohno shrugged.
“Where?”
“In my sister’s tool belt.”
And Nino just laughed.
It took them the better part of the day to make it to the top of the wall, even with the chisel. They talked a little as they worked, about easy things like their families, what comics they read, which food cart had the best noodles. When they paused at the halfway point, Ohno dug a couple pieces of cellophane-wrapped candy out of his pocket, red and white striped, a kind Nino had never seen before. Ohno called it “peppermint” and it made Nino’s mouth feel pleasantly tingly and cool even though it wasn’t cold.
Once they were at the top of the wall the sun was already on its way over the horizon, turning the aquamarine of the sky to violent lavender and magenta, the clouds to spun-sugar gold. Ohno sat, dangling his legs over the outside edge of the wall, staring and staring out over the grass like he was drinking it all in with his eyes. He hadn’t said much about himself while they had worked their way up the wall, so Nino still didn’t know what was on the other side that Ohno wanted so badly.
“Freedom,” Ohno said when Nino asked, making it sound almost like a question. “I don’t know, I just…I’m not really running away, I just want to be able to. You know?”
Nino stared at Ohno for a few moments before turning his gaze back towards the sunset. “You’re kind of weird.”
Ohno just chuckled, soft and low. “Yeah.”
“Well,” Nino said after another round of comfortable silence. “If you’re not running away, do you want to come to my house for dinner? We’re probably just having curry or something, but…”
“I love curry,” Ohno said, by way of answer.
Once they were back down the wall and ambling towards town on the dirt road with Nino’s bike between them, Ohno turned to Nino again with a little worry line between his brows.
“You won’t…you won’t tell anyone about this, will you?”
Nino raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
Ohno’s gaze fell to his sandaled feet, quietly thoughtful for a while. “It’s no good, if too many people know about it,” he said at length. He looked up at Nino again. “It’s okay, right? It can be our secret.”
“Okay,” Nino said eventually. “Our secret.”
*
The tall grass tickles at Nino’s elbows, and the salt smell off the ocean gets stronger as he moves forward. There is nothing out here past the wall but waving grass and bottomless sky, and if it weren’t for the glow of Riverside’s lights in the distance it would be easy to get lost.
After that first day, Nino had forcibly included Ohno in his interactions with his other friends, until Ohno had loosened up a little and everyone else had eventually come to accept Ohno as part of the scenery. And even though he had hit it off immediately with Aiba and Sho, and had unwittingly become the new focus of Jun’s adolescent adorations, Nino still felt that he had dibs. He hadn’t thought much about why that mattered, about why it had made him glad to know that he was always allowed to be all over Ohno, that Ohno came over to his house the most. But it did.
Maybe that was part of the reason he kept their little escape route a secret. They had gone back a few days later to carve steps down the outside of the wall, and had waited even longer still before actually going out into the grass. They hadn’t known how far it was to the water, how long they would need to go and come back, but they had eventually decided to make it an overnight adventure: it would be fine as long as they were back before dawn. Nino remembers the first time on the cliff, looking out over the water awash in stars. He remembers the way his chest had clenched with the vastness and possibility of it, the first time he had really felt like there was a world beyond Riverside. It was almost dizzying, this feeling-exciting and terrifying all at once, like gravity letting go a little-and he had reached out for something to steady himself, his hand finding Ohno’s almost immediately and gripping tight, tight enough to hurt.
“Look at all of it,” Ohno had said. “Just…space. Not like Earth, there’s no room there, not any more. I just…I just want to go somewhere, like-like an uninhabited planet, you know? Nino? You could come, too.”
But Nino isn’t like Ohno. He needs people, things, to hold him down, he can’t just leave: this miserable little colony town is where he grew up, he’s rooted here. All he has ever known is the mines and the quarries and the mess-hall kitchens where he works. What would he do if he left?
After watching everyone else leave, one by one, it should not have surprised him when Ohno showed up with a supernova-bright smile and papers that proclaimed him the proud owner of his own C-Class Toyota Hyperion Jet.
“It’s just a planet-hopper, really, so I’d have to get a berth on a freighter or something if I wanted to go farther than M-System, but it’s start, right? Now we can get out of here, right, Nino?”
And Nino hadn’t had the heart to do anything but nod and smile and assure Ohno that it really was great news. But Ohno must have known that it wouldn’t be that easy.
The sound of waves gets steadily louder, the briny salt-smell of the sea stronger. Faraway against the flash of starlight on water, Nino can see a little silhouetted figure, tiny against the endless stretch of the galaxy above him. The flat sameness of the landscape always warps the distance and it seems to take longer to cross than it should, but eventually Nino comes up beside Ohno. Their hands come together in an unconscious pendulum swing, like magnets, like always.
Nino’s not sure how long they stand there without speaking. He doesn’t pay it much mind, honestly: after ten years of shared silences it is easy to be quiet with Ohno. The sound of the waves mingles with the sound of Ohno’s breathing, in and out through his nose, and the smell of the ocean and the sweaty working-smell of Ohno, and the galaxy reflected in the water and in the darkness of Ohno’s eyes.
“I can’t stay here,” Ohno says eventually.
“I know,” Nino answers. “But I can’t go.”
Ohno turns to him, brows furrowed, his usual golden-brown face washed out to a star-touched silver with deep, deep blue shadows. “I still don’t understand why.”
“I just,” Nino sighs. “My family is here. My whole life is here, I don’t-where are you even going? What would I do, out there?”
Ohno’s frown deepens, he shakes his head a little. “It’s not-you don’t have to do something. You can do anything.”
Nino lets a little grin quirk his mouth. “You make it sound so easy.”
“It is,” Ohno says. He turns fully, catching Nino’s other hand. “It is.”
“It’s not. I can’t,” Nino says again. If Ohno had asked him this years ago, if they could have gone with Jun and Aiba, if he asked when Nino had still been young enough and reckless enough to just go without thinking, to just go, but, “I can’t, I’m too-” he doesn’t finish. Instead: “I’ll miss you.”
For a moment, Ohno’s face falls, his hands tighten around Nino’s, and he looks like he doesn’t know whether to shout or cry. He closes his eyes, eventually lets out a slow breath before looking up at Nino again.
“I’ll come back,” Ohno says fiercely. “I’ll come back for you.”
And now it’s Nino’s turn to close his eyes, he has to, against the wash of loneliness that sweeps through him, loneliness and anger-at himself for being stubborn, and at Ohno for saying the same thing they all say, something he doesn’t mean, not really.
“Nino,” Ohno says quietly. He lets go of one of Nino’s hands to brush his fingertips hesitantly across Nino’s cheek.
Nino opens his eyes again, sees Ohno’s face, all trepidation and trembling breaths in the darkness, and knows in an instant what’s about to happen. Realizes in that instant that he’s been waiting for it, wanting it, for a long time, and hates that it has to happen now, like this.
Ohno leans forward, slow and inevitable, and kisses him.
It should be symphonies and stars colliding, Nino thinks, not the melancholy sound of waves and wind. He barely reacts at first, doesn’t even close his eyes all the way. They should just leave it at that, a kiss and then goodbye-but Ohno is determined. He kisses Nino again, and again, pressing a little harder each time, sliding his hand around to cup the back of Nino’s head, until Nino starts kissing back, starts thinking that maybe they shouldn’t just leave it, maybe this is the last time he will ever see Ohno, and maybe he should make the best of it. Ohno tastes like peppermints and like hot, salty tears, and Nino’s not sure which one of them started crying first.
Nino’s arms go suddenly tight around Ohno’s chest, and he pulls the other man down into the grass.
It is not perfect, or very comfortable, and Nino kind of regrets that they don’t get any farther than the kissing, but it’s too cold for anything that would involve fewer clothes. But mostly, Nino doesn’t care. All he cares about is memorizing Ohno’s taste, and the feel of his skin, and the sound of his little hitching breaths. Nino gets that dizzying vertigo again, like all those years ago, but this time he feels his loosened gravity realign, to Ohno, breathing hard beneath him, his eyes full of stars.
Already, it feels like Ohno is disappearing, already Nino knows that from now on, every time he looks up, he will hope that every contrail and every flash of light in the night sky might be Ohno. But no one ever stays on M5. They always leave. They never come back. Nino knows this, he knows, but he doesn’t know if he can stop hoping for Ohno.
The sun is slowing rolling back around from the far side of the planet, but they stay where they are, lying in the little patch of flattened grass they’ve made, watching the universe go by overhead.
“I heard this story, once,” Ohno says eventually. “About this prince and princess who live in the sky. Except they’re stars or something. They live on opposite sides of the River of Heaven, though, and they can only meet one day a year.”
“Why only one day?” Nino asks, half asleep.
“Don’t remember,” Ohno shrugs. Nino’s head, resting on his shoulder, bobs with the motion. “But they get to see each other, even though they’re far apart.”
“It’s not like you can’t call me,” Nino grumbles, squirming closer. “I’ve got SatLan on my cellphone and my computer. Or does your junker of a ship only have radio?”
“It needs some upgrades,” Ohno answers vaguely, and Nino resigns himself to the possibility of never even getting a call. “You like that kind of thing,” Ohno begins hopefully. “Electronic stuff. You could-”
“Don’t,” Nino says, his voice a low warning. “Please don’t, Oh-chan.”
Ohno sighs out a slow sigh, but doesn’t argue. Instead, he rolls to his side so he can face Nino, with their limbs tangled up and foreheads touching.
“Nino is my star-princess,” he says with a grin. “I’ll always be looking for you. Wherever I go.”
“Stupid,” Nino says. “Who says I’m the princess?”
“You’re the princess because you’re prettier.”
“So stupid,” Nino mutters, turning away but pulling Ohno’s arm tight around his waist when he does. “Really, really dumb and stupid.”
But Ohno just holds him tighter and says: “I love you.”
*
It takes time for Ohno being gone to really sink in.
They had gotten back to the wall just as the sun was coming up, and since they were so close to the shipyard, Ohno insisted on showing Nino his jet. It was a pretty sad sight, held together by a lot of electrical tape and wishful thinking, but Ohno was completely enamored of it. Nino had said his goodbyes there, and left Ohno to his last minute repairs. He had not turned around as he crossed the tarmac, and he had not come back later to watch Ohno leave.
The first week seems to drag by, a monotony of the same routine without the reward of Ohno coming through the mess-hall at lunch time and without Ohno waiting for him at the barracks gate at the end of the day. But the next thing Nino knows, it’s been a month. He walks by Ohno’s house and runs into Ohno’s mother, who greets him warmly and wants to know if Satoshi has been in touch.
It hits him, then, for some reason. Ohno is gone. He’s not just hiding up in his room, or working late at the quarry. Nino has to excuse himself hurriedly, and without really meaning to, he finds himself at the wall. He goes over, even though it’s not dark yet, goes all the way out to the water. And Ohno’s not there, either.
Nino stays and listens to the waves until it gets dark, and gets home well after dinner has gotten cold.
About three months after his departure, Ohno does actually call. The transmission is static filled and green-tinged, but Ohno is smiling and rambling on about his whirlwind tour of M-System, and Nino can’t help but smile back as he listens, nodding and exclaiming in all the right places until Ohno suddenly yelps that his minutes are about to run out, but “don’t worry, I’m coming back soon, and I learned how to find M-5 on my sky chart, and I love y-” and then the line goes dead.
“Love you, too,” Nino mutters to the SatLan logo filling his screen.
*
Almost a year after Ohno has gone, Nino’s mother asks him what he wants to do for his birthday. He tells her twenty-four is too boring to celebrate and not to worry about it, even though he knows he’ll probably get a cake and maybe some money, anyway. He gets a long SatMail from Sho, and an actual letter on pretty pink stationary from Toma, as well as a brief but enthusiastic call from Jun and Aiba at the stroke of midnight Riverside time, which is something like three in the afternoon on the space station circling Gl-712u or whatever the name of that planet is.
He’s not expecting any actual gifts, since he is notoriously hard to shop for, so the freight-mail package his mother hands him after their little family party is something of a surprise. He takes it up to his room to open, searching in vain for a return address. When he opens it, there is no card, just another box inside, gold wrapped and tied with string. There’s something about the way the string is knotted so carefully, the messy wrap-job, that makes Nino’s fingers tremble a little as he opens it.
Inside, tied with a blue ribbon, is a cellophane bag full of peppermints.
For a moment, Nino just stares at it, unable to move, struck with the electric shock of knowing that this is from Ohno, Ohno held this, wrapped it up, put Nino’s address on the outside. As the feeling dissipates, his fingers clench around the bag with a sharp crinkling noise, because despite everything, despite the fact that Ohno actually remembered his birthday and got a present to him on time, it’s not Ohno. It’s just a thing, like all the other things people insist on sending him-letters and SatMail and gifts-that can never fill up the yawning void that is left by the absence of a whole person.
Eventually he lifts the bag out of the box, hoping for maybe a card or a letter underneath, and instead finds a folded-up print out. It’s some kind of invoice or receipt, and Nino’s brow furrows. But, as he reads, his expression goes slowly from confusion to disbelief, and a moment later he is dashing out the door. The paper falls, open, onto his bed.
*
>>Docking Reservation Confirmation for SATOSHI OHNO (Cust. #: 186548802):
>
>
>>Vehicle #/Name: C-HYP5004-801026/HIKOBOSHI-MARU
>>Depart From: New Beijing Intergalactic (M1-XBIG)
>>Dock #: B-74
>>Departure Date/Time: 2521.06.14, 0:53AM M1-CST
>>Destination: Riverside Intersystem Spaceport (M5-RVIS)
>>Dock #: T-3104
>>Arrival Date/Time: 2521.06.17, 5:48PM M5-WST
>
>
>>>This reservation is non-refundable. Send questions/comments to M5-RVIS Port Authority.
FIN
From: harinezumi_kun
Title: the gravity of you
Pairing/Focus: ohmiya
Rating: pg
Warnings: none.
Summary: M5 is a backwater pit of a planet, and no one ever stays. Nino knows this, but he can't help hoping that Ohno will.
Notes: sci-fi au, lots of inspiration drawn from "hitomi no naka no galaxy". i-i hope the reciever enjoys it :D;;
The streets of Riverside are dusty like always, and silent this late at night. Curfew was hours ago, but most of the night patrols are already well into their second and third rounds at the local bars. Nino makes his way to the edge of town with no worries of being caught, taking the back alleys and keeping away from the bright lights on the main road.
His feet drag, and he knows why even if he doesn’t want to admit it: because he’s going to say goodbye. Not that he isn’t used to goodbyes. M5 is a backwater pit of a planet as far as colonies go, and no one ever stays. He keeps walking.
Chalky pavement gives way to gravel that crunches under his boots, and blocky cement barracks give way to low, sprawling civilian complexes. Gravel turns to dirt, and the civilian lots end at the little villages of military tents huddled around the edges of the shipyards. Smaller passenger jets from Earth crouch in front of the hulking shadows of transport barges, still lit up by spotlights so the night crews can keep loading slabs from the quarries and crates from the mines.
It’s usually the mines that drive people away, make them crazy with wanting to go, to get off M5, go to Earth, go anywhere that isn’t here. That’s what did it for Nino’s father, anyway. Every day down the hole, breathing more soot than air, the tunnel collapses and injuries. He was the first one who left.
And then it was Sho-chan, for school, but they all knew he was meant for better things than growing up to run the Riverside District Office like his father, and nobody held it against him. Mao took off for M1 pretty soon after that, and Shun followed her just like everyone expected him to. Toma stowed away on a coal freighter when turned twenty, and for a long time they had all worried that he was dead or in jail, but eventually he sent them a postcard letting them know he was alive, he had made it to Earth, and he was working in a stationary shop in Nagasaki, of all places.
Watching Jun and Aiba go had been the hardest, because secretly Nino had been hoping they would stay. They were second-generation like him, colony kids, this was their home-but Jun had never been happy on M5, and he was determined to get them all off. Aiba was the only one who had been able to afford going when Jun got them seats on a jet off-planet, but they’d promised to come back: “I promise, Nino, I promise, we’ll work for a while and save some money and we’ll come back for you guys, okay?”
At last, Nino comes to the edge of town. Riverside is bordered on all sides by a massive concrete wall, ten feet thick at the base with repeated warnings of DANGER - DO NOT CROSS stenciled all along its length. It’s enough of a deterrent for most people, and no one really wants to go outside the wall anyway-all the food and shelter is on the inside-but here, on the far end of the airfield where no patrols ever bother to come, there is an evenly spaced line of toe-holds carved out of the wall. Nino steps into the lowest one and reaches up for a hand-hold that is at exactly the right height for someone his size. He is up and over the wall in moments, jogs across the flat top, and then clambers down the other side just as quickly, pausing only when his feet hit the ground.
Inside the wall, everything is grit and pavement and fiberglass and metal. Out here, the air is clear and sharp, and the waist-high grass rolls away for miles without even any bushes or trees to interrupt the view that goes straight over the ocean cliffs in the distance. Nino looks up. The galaxy arm that M5 sits on the end of arches across the sky in a thick band, glittering with a thousand different colors, bright enough to cast a deep shadow behind Nino when he finally steps forward.
He remembers the first time they went over the wall, just the two of them. When they decided they wouldn’t tell any of the others about it.
“It’s okay, right? It’ll be our secret.”
Ten feet out from the wall, Nino starts to run.
*
Ohno came to Riverside when he was sixteen and Nino was thirteen, and three years seemed like such a huge age difference. They saw each other at school sometimes-when Ohno actually showed up-but otherwise didn’t have much to do with one another, and Nino didn’t even think to care that much about the new Earth-kid until that first day at the wall.
Nino had been riding his bike past the shipyard on his way to one of Aiba’s grass-lot baseball games when he saw Ohno. The older boy was walking alone down the dirt path next to the big chain-link fence that lined the tarmac with a little bag over his shoulder. Nino watched him from the main road for a while: Ohno looked hunched and small in a pair of regulation coveralls, rolled up to the knee, and worn-out sandals on his feet. On a whim, Nino turned his bike and pedaled up beside Ohno. The other boy was going at a slow meander and Nino guided his bike in a gentle back-and-forth weaving to keep pace.
“You running away?” Nino asked curiously, figuring that was the only thing Ohno could be doing this far towards the edge of town all alone.
Ohno just shrugged, glancing at Nino only briefly. “Kinda.”
“You didn’t pack very much,” Nino pointed out.
“Weren’t you going to the baseball game?” Ohno returned, nodding his head at the mitt hanging off Nino’s handlebars and picking up his pace a little.
While normally this kind of dismissive behavior would have put Nino’s hackles up, he couldn’t help but be curious about Ohno. He’d only been on M5 for three weeks and he was already trying to run away.
“You’re going to the wall, right? You’ll never get over: it’s, like, fifty feet tall.”
“It’s not that tall.”
“It is too.”
“It is not.” Ohno’s eyes tracked Nino as the other boy circled him slowly on his bike. “You’re an awfully annoying little alien.”
Nino skidded to a stop, blocking Ohno’s path. “Who’s an alien?” he demanded.
“You are,” Ohno said. “I’m from Earth and you’re not, that makes you an alien.”
“Well, we’re on my planet, so that makes you the alien.”
They spent a few moments staring each other down, and then almost simultaneously broke into grins.
“Come on,” Nino said, tipping his head at the back of his bike. “I’ll give you a lift.”
“What about the game?”
Nino shrugged, grinning a little wider. “I think this’ll be more interesting.”
Ohno climbed on without further protest. The ride up to the foot of the wall was quiet for the most part, Ohno’s hands light at Nino’s shoulders, and a dry wind blowing the smell of asphalt from across the ship yard.
Ohno directed Nino to a stretch of wall that was situated in a little dip of land behind a row of storage warehouses. They left the bike on its side in the short grass before walking up to the foot of the wall, craning their necks back to see the top.
“Twenty feet,” Ohno muttered, pulling his bag off his shoulder and beginning to dig around in it.
“Still,” Nino said, “what are you gonna do, jump it?”
Ohno did not reply, but produced something from his bag with a triumphant smile. It was a sleek, sliver tube, roughly the length of his forearm and narrower at the tip with a toggle on the side.
“A laser-chisel?” Nino asked incredulously. “Where did you even get that?”
“Found it,” Ohno shrugged.
“Where?”
“In my sister’s tool belt.”
And Nino just laughed.
It took them the better part of the day to make it to the top of the wall, even with the chisel. They talked a little as they worked, about easy things like their families, what comics they read, which food cart had the best noodles. When they paused at the halfway point, Ohno dug a couple pieces of cellophane-wrapped candy out of his pocket, red and white striped, a kind Nino had never seen before. Ohno called it “peppermint” and it made Nino’s mouth feel pleasantly tingly and cool even though it wasn’t cold.
Once they were at the top of the wall the sun was already on its way over the horizon, turning the aquamarine of the sky to violent lavender and magenta, the clouds to spun-sugar gold. Ohno sat, dangling his legs over the outside edge of the wall, staring and staring out over the grass like he was drinking it all in with his eyes. He hadn’t said much about himself while they had worked their way up the wall, so Nino still didn’t know what was on the other side that Ohno wanted so badly.
“Freedom,” Ohno said when Nino asked, making it sound almost like a question. “I don’t know, I just…I’m not really running away, I just want to be able to. You know?”
Nino stared at Ohno for a few moments before turning his gaze back towards the sunset. “You’re kind of weird.”
Ohno just chuckled, soft and low. “Yeah.”
“Well,” Nino said after another round of comfortable silence. “If you’re not running away, do you want to come to my house for dinner? We’re probably just having curry or something, but…”
“I love curry,” Ohno said, by way of answer.
Once they were back down the wall and ambling towards town on the dirt road with Nino’s bike between them, Ohno turned to Nino again with a little worry line between his brows.
“You won’t…you won’t tell anyone about this, will you?”
Nino raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
Ohno’s gaze fell to his sandaled feet, quietly thoughtful for a while. “It’s no good, if too many people know about it,” he said at length. He looked up at Nino again. “It’s okay, right? It can be our secret.”
“Okay,” Nino said eventually. “Our secret.”
*
The tall grass tickles at Nino’s elbows, and the salt smell off the ocean gets stronger as he moves forward. There is nothing out here past the wall but waving grass and bottomless sky, and if it weren’t for the glow of Riverside’s lights in the distance it would be easy to get lost.
After that first day, Nino had forcibly included Ohno in his interactions with his other friends, until Ohno had loosened up a little and everyone else had eventually come to accept Ohno as part of the scenery. And even though he had hit it off immediately with Aiba and Sho, and had unwittingly become the new focus of Jun’s adolescent adorations, Nino still felt that he had dibs. He hadn’t thought much about why that mattered, about why it had made him glad to know that he was always allowed to be all over Ohno, that Ohno came over to his house the most. But it did.
Maybe that was part of the reason he kept their little escape route a secret. They had gone back a few days later to carve steps down the outside of the wall, and had waited even longer still before actually going out into the grass. They hadn’t known how far it was to the water, how long they would need to go and come back, but they had eventually decided to make it an overnight adventure: it would be fine as long as they were back before dawn. Nino remembers the first time on the cliff, looking out over the water awash in stars. He remembers the way his chest had clenched with the vastness and possibility of it, the first time he had really felt like there was a world beyond Riverside. It was almost dizzying, this feeling-exciting and terrifying all at once, like gravity letting go a little-and he had reached out for something to steady himself, his hand finding Ohno’s almost immediately and gripping tight, tight enough to hurt.
“Look at all of it,” Ohno had said. “Just…space. Not like Earth, there’s no room there, not any more. I just…I just want to go somewhere, like-like an uninhabited planet, you know? Nino? You could come, too.”
But Nino isn’t like Ohno. He needs people, things, to hold him down, he can’t just leave: this miserable little colony town is where he grew up, he’s rooted here. All he has ever known is the mines and the quarries and the mess-hall kitchens where he works. What would he do if he left?
After watching everyone else leave, one by one, it should not have surprised him when Ohno showed up with a supernova-bright smile and papers that proclaimed him the proud owner of his own C-Class Toyota Hyperion Jet.
“It’s just a planet-hopper, really, so I’d have to get a berth on a freighter or something if I wanted to go farther than M-System, but it’s start, right? Now we can get out of here, right, Nino?”
And Nino hadn’t had the heart to do anything but nod and smile and assure Ohno that it really was great news. But Ohno must have known that it wouldn’t be that easy.
The sound of waves gets steadily louder, the briny salt-smell of the sea stronger. Faraway against the flash of starlight on water, Nino can see a little silhouetted figure, tiny against the endless stretch of the galaxy above him. The flat sameness of the landscape always warps the distance and it seems to take longer to cross than it should, but eventually Nino comes up beside Ohno. Their hands come together in an unconscious pendulum swing, like magnets, like always.
Nino’s not sure how long they stand there without speaking. He doesn’t pay it much mind, honestly: after ten years of shared silences it is easy to be quiet with Ohno. The sound of the waves mingles with the sound of Ohno’s breathing, in and out through his nose, and the smell of the ocean and the sweaty working-smell of Ohno, and the galaxy reflected in the water and in the darkness of Ohno’s eyes.
“I can’t stay here,” Ohno says eventually.
“I know,” Nino answers. “But I can’t go.”
Ohno turns to him, brows furrowed, his usual golden-brown face washed out to a star-touched silver with deep, deep blue shadows. “I still don’t understand why.”
“I just,” Nino sighs. “My family is here. My whole life is here, I don’t-where are you even going? What would I do, out there?”
Ohno’s frown deepens, he shakes his head a little. “It’s not-you don’t have to do something. You can do anything.”
Nino lets a little grin quirk his mouth. “You make it sound so easy.”
“It is,” Ohno says. He turns fully, catching Nino’s other hand. “It is.”
“It’s not. I can’t,” Nino says again. If Ohno had asked him this years ago, if they could have gone with Jun and Aiba, if he asked when Nino had still been young enough and reckless enough to just go without thinking, to just go, but, “I can’t, I’m too-” he doesn’t finish. Instead: “I’ll miss you.”
For a moment, Ohno’s face falls, his hands tighten around Nino’s, and he looks like he doesn’t know whether to shout or cry. He closes his eyes, eventually lets out a slow breath before looking up at Nino again.
“I’ll come back,” Ohno says fiercely. “I’ll come back for you.”
And now it’s Nino’s turn to close his eyes, he has to, against the wash of loneliness that sweeps through him, loneliness and anger-at himself for being stubborn, and at Ohno for saying the same thing they all say, something he doesn’t mean, not really.
“Nino,” Ohno says quietly. He lets go of one of Nino’s hands to brush his fingertips hesitantly across Nino’s cheek.
Nino opens his eyes again, sees Ohno’s face, all trepidation and trembling breaths in the darkness, and knows in an instant what’s about to happen. Realizes in that instant that he’s been waiting for it, wanting it, for a long time, and hates that it has to happen now, like this.
Ohno leans forward, slow and inevitable, and kisses him.
It should be symphonies and stars colliding, Nino thinks, not the melancholy sound of waves and wind. He barely reacts at first, doesn’t even close his eyes all the way. They should just leave it at that, a kiss and then goodbye-but Ohno is determined. He kisses Nino again, and again, pressing a little harder each time, sliding his hand around to cup the back of Nino’s head, until Nino starts kissing back, starts thinking that maybe they shouldn’t just leave it, maybe this is the last time he will ever see Ohno, and maybe he should make the best of it. Ohno tastes like peppermints and like hot, salty tears, and Nino’s not sure which one of them started crying first.
Nino’s arms go suddenly tight around Ohno’s chest, and he pulls the other man down into the grass.
It is not perfect, or very comfortable, and Nino kind of regrets that they don’t get any farther than the kissing, but it’s too cold for anything that would involve fewer clothes. But mostly, Nino doesn’t care. All he cares about is memorizing Ohno’s taste, and the feel of his skin, and the sound of his little hitching breaths. Nino gets that dizzying vertigo again, like all those years ago, but this time he feels his loosened gravity realign, to Ohno, breathing hard beneath him, his eyes full of stars.
Already, it feels like Ohno is disappearing, already Nino knows that from now on, every time he looks up, he will hope that every contrail and every flash of light in the night sky might be Ohno. But no one ever stays on M5. They always leave. They never come back. Nino knows this, he knows, but he doesn’t know if he can stop hoping for Ohno.
The sun is slowing rolling back around from the far side of the planet, but they stay where they are, lying in the little patch of flattened grass they’ve made, watching the universe go by overhead.
“I heard this story, once,” Ohno says eventually. “About this prince and princess who live in the sky. Except they’re stars or something. They live on opposite sides of the River of Heaven, though, and they can only meet one day a year.”
“Why only one day?” Nino asks, half asleep.
“Don’t remember,” Ohno shrugs. Nino’s head, resting on his shoulder, bobs with the motion. “But they get to see each other, even though they’re far apart.”
“It’s not like you can’t call me,” Nino grumbles, squirming closer. “I’ve got SatLan on my cellphone and my computer. Or does your junker of a ship only have radio?”
“It needs some upgrades,” Ohno answers vaguely, and Nino resigns himself to the possibility of never even getting a call. “You like that kind of thing,” Ohno begins hopefully. “Electronic stuff. You could-”
“Don’t,” Nino says, his voice a low warning. “Please don’t, Oh-chan.”
Ohno sighs out a slow sigh, but doesn’t argue. Instead, he rolls to his side so he can face Nino, with their limbs tangled up and foreheads touching.
“Nino is my star-princess,” he says with a grin. “I’ll always be looking for you. Wherever I go.”
“Stupid,” Nino says. “Who says I’m the princess?”
“You’re the princess because you’re prettier.”
“So stupid,” Nino mutters, turning away but pulling Ohno’s arm tight around his waist when he does. “Really, really dumb and stupid.”
But Ohno just holds him tighter and says: “I love you.”
*
It takes time for Ohno being gone to really sink in.
They had gotten back to the wall just as the sun was coming up, and since they were so close to the shipyard, Ohno insisted on showing Nino his jet. It was a pretty sad sight, held together by a lot of electrical tape and wishful thinking, but Ohno was completely enamored of it. Nino had said his goodbyes there, and left Ohno to his last minute repairs. He had not turned around as he crossed the tarmac, and he had not come back later to watch Ohno leave.
The first week seems to drag by, a monotony of the same routine without the reward of Ohno coming through the mess-hall at lunch time and without Ohno waiting for him at the barracks gate at the end of the day. But the next thing Nino knows, it’s been a month. He walks by Ohno’s house and runs into Ohno’s mother, who greets him warmly and wants to know if Satoshi has been in touch.
It hits him, then, for some reason. Ohno is gone. He’s not just hiding up in his room, or working late at the quarry. Nino has to excuse himself hurriedly, and without really meaning to, he finds himself at the wall. He goes over, even though it’s not dark yet, goes all the way out to the water. And Ohno’s not there, either.
Nino stays and listens to the waves until it gets dark, and gets home well after dinner has gotten cold.
About three months after his departure, Ohno does actually call. The transmission is static filled and green-tinged, but Ohno is smiling and rambling on about his whirlwind tour of M-System, and Nino can’t help but smile back as he listens, nodding and exclaiming in all the right places until Ohno suddenly yelps that his minutes are about to run out, but “don’t worry, I’m coming back soon, and I learned how to find M-5 on my sky chart, and I love y-” and then the line goes dead.
“Love you, too,” Nino mutters to the SatLan logo filling his screen.
*
Almost a year after Ohno has gone, Nino’s mother asks him what he wants to do for his birthday. He tells her twenty-four is too boring to celebrate and not to worry about it, even though he knows he’ll probably get a cake and maybe some money, anyway. He gets a long SatMail from Sho, and an actual letter on pretty pink stationary from Toma, as well as a brief but enthusiastic call from Jun and Aiba at the stroke of midnight Riverside time, which is something like three in the afternoon on the space station circling Gl-712u or whatever the name of that planet is.
He’s not expecting any actual gifts, since he is notoriously hard to shop for, so the freight-mail package his mother hands him after their little family party is something of a surprise. He takes it up to his room to open, searching in vain for a return address. When he opens it, there is no card, just another box inside, gold wrapped and tied with string. There’s something about the way the string is knotted so carefully, the messy wrap-job, that makes Nino’s fingers tremble a little as he opens it.
Inside, tied with a blue ribbon, is a cellophane bag full of peppermints.
For a moment, Nino just stares at it, unable to move, struck with the electric shock of knowing that this is from Ohno, Ohno held this, wrapped it up, put Nino’s address on the outside. As the feeling dissipates, his fingers clench around the bag with a sharp crinkling noise, because despite everything, despite the fact that Ohno actually remembered his birthday and got a present to him on time, it’s not Ohno. It’s just a thing, like all the other things people insist on sending him-letters and SatMail and gifts-that can never fill up the yawning void that is left by the absence of a whole person.
Eventually he lifts the bag out of the box, hoping for maybe a card or a letter underneath, and instead finds a folded-up print out. It’s some kind of invoice or receipt, and Nino’s brow furrows. But, as he reads, his expression goes slowly from confusion to disbelief, and a moment later he is dashing out the door. The paper falls, open, onto his bed.
*
>>Docking Reservation Confirmation for SATOSHI OHNO (Cust. #: 186548802):
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>>Vehicle #/Name: C-HYP5004-801026/HIKOBOSHI-MARU
>>Depart From: New Beijing Intergalactic (M1-XBIG)
>>Dock #: B-74
>>Departure Date/Time: 2521.06.14, 0:53AM M1-CST
>>Destination: Riverside Intersystem Spaceport (M5-RVIS)
>>Dock #: T-3104
>>Arrival Date/Time: 2521.06.17, 5:48PM M5-WST
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>>>This reservation is non-refundable. Send questions/comments to M5-RVIS Port Authority.
FIN