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“Your mother was, ah, a collector,” says her father. He moves the knight piece over on the chess board. “I guess you could call it that. A collector of broken people.”
Misora is ten years old, curled around her rabbit plushie, watching carefully as he plays chess by himself. The fire is burning and the café is warm and quiet, humming with autumn electricity. Outside the world has gone to sleep. She doesn’t have school the next morning, so her father lets her stay up.
It is, although she doesn’t know it then, one of the last truly peaceful nights of her life.
“Like you?” she asks.
Soichi smiles at her, although it’s as far-away as his eyes always seem. “Yes, very much like me. Before I met her… I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. She’s the one who introduced me to astronomy, to the world beyond Earth.”
Misora blinks away a stray tear. She doesn’t remember her mother much, but something aches in her when her father talks about her. Like he’s lost the only real thing in his life.
“Her friends were like me, too,” Soichi continues. It’s the most he’s spoken about her mother since she died. Misora suspects the bottle of alcohol he keeps high up in a cabinet has something to do with it. Her father’s never this open, not usually. “Lost, lonely, adrift. She was like a lighthouse. Because of her, I have…”
His words fade away. He’s looking at Misora, but he’s not seeing her, not really.
“Yeah?” Misora presses.
Soichi reaches out and tucks her hair behind her ear. “You,” he says. “You and the stars.”
Misora and the stars. She watches her father checkmate his own queen and wonders if the stars are worth all this.
Sento’s weird. Doesn’t quite fit in to the little life she and her father have carved out, ever since the stars and the Mars expedition and the coma. It’s like her father is trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, bringing him home and expecting her to deal with it. To learn to like him.
“I think your mother would like him,” her father tells her meaningfully, but he hasn’t told her a story about her mother since before she went into the coma so it doesn’t mean as much as he thinks.
Still, something in Misora has always been breakable, always at the thought of her mother, so she goes out at night when she knows Sento can’t sleep and sits with him on the rooftop as he scrawls figures and equations into his stupid notebook, her rabbit plushie in her lap.
“What are you trying to do?” she asks him, fed up of the scribbling and the erasing and the way his hand won’t stop moving, like if he doesn’t get it all down now it’ll disappear forever.
Maybe it will. She has no idea how amnesia works. She only knows that one day, she was twelve, and the next day, she was nineteen, and in the middle of that, her world had tilted over on its axis and her father sees her now but she doesn’t know how to see him.
But that’s not amnesia. That’s a seven-year coma and a childhood heartbreak of knowing your father spends more time staring at stars than he does reading you to sleep.
Sento barely looks at her. “I’m trying to solve a problem.”
“Is the problem your weird hair thing?”
“What weird hair thing?”
Misora rolls her eyes. Sento frowns and reaches up to flatten his hair back down. It doesn’t quite work, but it does still his hand for a long moment, as he smoothes his hair and stares at her like she’s a puzzle he’s trying to slot into place. Sento kind of stares at everyone like that, so she doesn’t take it personally.
“Sorry,” he says at last. “I didn’t know it bothered you.”
“What bothers me?”
“The fact that I’m…” Sento shrugs, helpless. “Here.”
Misora opens her mouth to say that it doesn’t bother her, but closes it quite abruptly when she realizes that it does. It’s not that Sento is a nuisance, even though he likes annoying her and stealing the last boiled egg at breakfast and keeping her up at night by running around the lab creating new formulas. Even though her father seems so much more interested in Sento than he does her, that’s not what bothers Misora.
It’s that he’s here, and her mother isn’t.
“I don’t even remember being a family, not really,” she confides him after a long and terrible moment of silence. “But I don’t remember it feeling like this.”
Sento studies her, thoughtful, gentle. It’s the softest he’s been since he got here, usually so full of sparks and energy and scientific exploration. Something about the night sky, like the starlight might swallow him up.
“We don’t have to be a family,” he tells her. “We can just be us. A genius physicist with amnesia and a girl who likes to sleep.”
Misora slaps him with the arm of her plushie. “Can’t I be more than that?”
Sento grins. “Whatever you want.”
Misora sits back on the bench and he returns to his writing, both of them ending up staring into the sky more often than not.
She feels strange, still—hasn’t really felt right since she woke up from her seven-year sleep—but sitting there with Sento, listening to his hums and the sound of his pen scratching on the paper, it feels like a return to the simplicity of childhood. To sitting in the café with her father and listening to him tell her about space and the planets and the vast, wide solar system beyond them.
Misora’s only just gotten used to Sento and his particular brand of strangeness when he brings Ryuga along. This, she thinks, is much worse—Sento, for all his eccentricities, was a quiet kind of weird, the kind to stay up late mapping out science theories and to fall asleep next to the toaster. Even her father, as much as he’s changed since she woke up, as much as he is weird and goofy and speaks too much random Italian, is not so loud.
Banjou Ryuga has never known anything but being loud, as far as she can tell. He comes in loud, he leaves loud, and he only stops talking when he’s asleep. She thinks, as soon as he gets here and she has to tie him up with chains, that she will hate him.
Unfortunately, he’s also hard to hate.
“Misora,” he calls one quiet morning when she troops out of the refrigerator still rubbing sleep from her eyes, his voice always too loud for the café, “look what I made!”
Misora grumps over to the counter and peers down into the bowl. “You made… instant ramen?”
Ryuga’s smile is incessant, unavoidable. “And I put an egg on it.”
Misora picks up a chopstick and pokes at the fried egg. It wobbles, but stays firm. “And you didn’t burn yourself?”
Ryuga coughs and shoves his bandage-covered pinkie out of sight. “No.”
Then he pushes the bowl towards her. “It’s for you. Owner had to go somewhere this morning and Sento has his Nanba Industries job now so I figured someone should make breakfast.”
“Oh.” Misora stares down at the bowl of ramen and egg, a strange sort of fondness swelling up within her. “Thank you.”
Ryuga looks so proud of himself, she can’t bear to tell him that she doesn’t actually like egg in her ramen. She eats the whole thing, anyway, and the two of them sit there and talk until the afternoon sun is high and Sento has finally come home.
“Did you two have fun?” Sento teases, wandering into the café and dropping his bag onto an empty chair. Strange, how quickly he has come to view this café as home, when Misora herself still struggles to think of it as anything except Not Faust.
“I made breakfast,” says Ryuga proudly.
“He put ramen in the microwave,” Misora clarifies.
Sento laughs as Ryuga makes a face at her and says, “Why don’t we order in for an early dinner?”
“Is Owner going to be home?” Ryuga asks.
Misora spins her chopsticks around her empty bowl. Sento glances at her before he replies.
“No idea. Best not to worry, though. He’ll come back soon, I’m sure.”
Sometimes, she feels like half her life has been spent waiting for her father. Waiting for him to come back to Earth. Waiting for him to wake her up. Waiting for him to take her away from Faust. Waiting for him to come home.
But it helps a little, having Ryuga’s noise and Sento’s spark to fill the café as she waits and waits. And when her father comes home at last in the evening, bustling over with cheery apologies, she barely even notices the time.
Sawa spends more and more time at the café, in the basement, out on the streets with Sento and Ryuga, to the point that Misora starts to resent her for it. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate her company, it’s just that—
It had taken so long, so, so long for her to get used to waking up in a bed and not a laboratory, to get used to Sento waiting outside the box ready to catch her and not Katsuragi with his cold, hollow eyes, to get used to Ryuga’s warmth and the way he shouts when he’s happy and the way he doesn’t look at her like a thing to be fixed (even Sento, with his scientist’s eyes, looks at her like this sometimes; even her father, with his faraway gaze.)
She likes them all, which is strange. Enjoys having her father around to help her with her idol show, enjoys hearing Sento’s babbling about science and technology in terms she can’t understand, enjoys watching Ryuga play with the little dragon that Sento had built for him. Enjoys sitting in the café with her rabbit plushie in her laps, listening to them all argue over what’s for dinner.
It’s not that Sawa changes it, much. It’s just that having her there doesn’t feel like having a friend over. It feels like opening the door to a much scarier, much worse reality than the one inside her basement. Like Sawa’s a key that’s unlocked something far bigger than any of them.
“How long were you asleep?” Sawa asks her, one evening when the air is slow and thick with warmth, the two of them sitting on Misora’s bed while Sento chases Ryuga around the lab yelling about experiments.
“Just now?” Misora asks. “Two hours.”
“No, I mean… before,” says Sawa, carefully. “Owner said you were asleep for a long time, before Sento. Before Faust.”
“Oh.” Misora plucks at a loose thread on her rabbit. “Seven years. That’s what the doctors said, anyway.”
Sawa’s gaze is curious, wondering—and not a little fearful. “And… you’re fine? You just woke up nineteen and went back to normal?”
Misora exhales. “I wouldn’t call this normal,” she mutters, gesturing to Sento who has wrestled Ryuga into a headlock to rip a strand of his hair out. “This is a crazy life. Nothing close to normal.”
Sawa laughs, a little. “I suppose you’re right.” She goes quiet for a bit, like she doesn’t know where to take the conversation without reverting back to being a snooping journalist.
Maybe Sawa doesn’t really know how to be friends with people either.
“When I woke up… I was with Faust,” Misora tells her after a long moment, debating over and over how to say it. “I didn’t have time to think about being nineteen, or being twelve, or anything in between. And then everything went wrong—I couldn’t purify the bottles, Dad took me away, and then we were here and I couldn’t ever go outside again because of Faust… and Katsuragi. My coma was the last thing on anyone’s minds, including mine.”
Sawa’s face is full of concern. “Shouldn’t it be?”
“No.” Misora traces a hand over her bracelet, twists it around her wrist. “Something happened to me before I fell asleep. Whatever it was… it saved me. I feel like I slept for seven hours instead. Dad asked me about it once—if the coma had changed me in any way. But I don’t think it did. Or at least, not in a terrible way.”
She looks up just in time to see something explode in the microwave and cover Ryuga and Sento both in gooey pink parts. A smile jumps to her face, unbidden.
“You think…” Sawa follows her gaze. “You think this is where you were meant to be?”
Misora looks at her, at the loneliness and ache in Sawa’s face. “Yeah, I do.”
She gets to her feet, dropping her rabbit plushie onto the floor, and offers Sawa her hand. After a deliberating moment, Sawa takes it and lets her pull her up, drawing the two of them out of the bedroom and into the lab.
“They’ll need help cleaning up,” Misora mock-whispers to her.
“Hey,” protests Ryuga, picking pink goo off his shirt. “I can clean up by myself.”
To prove it, he takes his shirt off and throws it at Sento, and Misora and Sawa burst into laughter as Sento runs around trying to get the goo off his face.
The only times she can really stand to be around Kazumi is when he’s not paying attention to her. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen a lot, and even less so after she moves the café and the four of them are more-or-less living there full-time with no idea when they’ll be free to go back out and live their lives again.
Misora isn’t sure if she’s the only one concerned about that—maybe she shouldn’t be, since it’s not like any of them have normal lives to go back to. Not Sento, with Katsuragi’s ghost hanging over him; not Ryuga, with the career he had to leave and the girl he had to watch die; not Sawa, with Nanba Industries on her tail for betrayal.
Kazumi, though—and it takes too much of her to consider him one of us for a while there—he does have something to go back to. A farm, people he loves, people who are waiting for him. People he’s fighting for.
She wishes he didn’t have such a good reason to stay.
Sento and Ryuga are pretty good at intercepting when Kazumi is about to ruin her mood. Sometimes, she sits on the roof and listens to them talk for as long as nobody notices that she’s there.
“Hey, do you think,” Ryuga begins slowly, tossing an old ball around between them, “do you think we’ll have something to do, after this is all over?”
Kazumi catches the ball and bounces it in place. “What d’you mean?”
“Like… jobs and stuff. Houses. All that boring stuff we haven’t been worried about since the world is kinda ending or whatever.”
“Since when do you care about boring stuff?” Sento asks, stealing the ball out from under Kazumi’s hands. “Besides, I’m sure there’s no shortage of jobs that need muscleheads.”
Misora giggles despite herself. Sento looks over at her and grins.
“Hey.” Ryuga glares at both of them. “Come on, Misora—what’s something you want to do? Like, properly do, without all this war and Skywall nonsense?”
“Mii-tan’s gonna be an idol,” Kazumi interjects before she can. “She’s the best one in all of Japan!”
“I’m not going to be an idol forever,” Misora snaps, and only feels a little bad when Kazumi turns a heartbroken look upon her. “I can’t, anyway. I’ll be too old for it soon.”
“That’s true, you’re twenty now,” Sento smirks. “Practically ancient.”
“Wait!” Kazumi frowns at all three of them. “Mii-tan’s birthday passed and no one told me?”
“You weren’t invited,” Ryuga says, and throws the ball at Kazumi’s chest so he stumbles trying to catch it.
“But I didn’t get you a gift!”
“I don’t need a gift.”
Kazumi abandons the ball and drops to his knees in front of her. “Tell me anything you want, Mii-tan, and I’ll make it come true.”
“You can’t promise that,” Sento protests. “It’s completely unachievable. What if she asks for world peace?”
“I’ll figure it out!” Kazumi insists.
Ryuga snorts. “Misora, ask him to stop being annoying, let’s see how he figures that out.”
Kazumi makes a rude gesture at him and Misora can’t help a laugh.
“I don’t have anything I need,” she tells him, and his face drops drastically. “Except… I guess… just keep fighting, you know. Against my f—against Evolt. That’s all anyone needs, right?”
Kazumi’s face brightens. “Anything for you, Mii-tan.”
“Tall order,” Sento remarks. “Sure you’re up for it.”
Kazumi’s expression drops to something more real, more resolved. “After what he did to my guys? What he’s done to all of us? Not a tall order at all.”
He gets back to his feet, and offers her a hand up. Surprising herself, she takes it and then catches the ball when Ryuga bounces it at her, and Sento smiles a little sadly and for the first time, it doesn’t feel like Kazumi is an annoying extra they picked up off the streets who follows her around with hearts in his eyes.
For the first time, it feels like her family is expanding, little by little, piece by piece, into something worth fighting for.
Gentoku is by far the strangest square peg they’ve ever tried to fit into their home, and it’s not even close. At some point, Misora has to admit that she actually enjoys his weird impromptu fashion shows and T-shirt communication, although it’s probably more correct to say that she enjoys bossing him around like he’s a wayward older brother who’s just come home from university.
“Way older,” Sento agrees when she mentions this to him. “How old are you, anyway?”
Gentoku pulls his jacket aside. His orange shirt says ‘35’ and both Sento and Misora stare at it in bewilderment for a second.
“Go change,” Misora orders, pointing imperiously at the bedroom. “Now.”
“Learn to use words!” Sawa calls after him.
“Technically, those are words,” Kazumi says, wandering in from the kitchen with a plate full of sugar cookies. “Just on his shirt instead. Who wants cookies?”
Misora manages to snatch three in the frenzy that descends upon Kazumi—Ryuga wrestles one straight out of Sawa’s hands, earning himself a hard kick to the knee, and Sento sneaks away with a half-full plate in the middle of their fight—before Gentoku comes back and frowns at them all.
“You didn’t save any for me?”
“Sorry, beardo,” says Kazumi apologetically. “I’ll make more tomorrow.”
“Or go steal them from Sento,” Misora says with a roll of her eyes. “He’s too skinny to shove all those in his mouth anyway.”
Sento pulls a face at her for giving away his secret cookie conquest, and reluctantly lets Gentoku march over to take four cookies off the plate for himself. “I’m a growing boy!”
“You’re done growing,” Sawa assures him. “If you get any taller, we’ll have to raise the roof for you.”
In the middle of the idle chatter and the laughter that comes from being in the only place where any of them could unwind, Gentoku sits down cross-legged on the piles of blankets and sleeping bags on the floor, offering Misora half of a cookie to make their gains even.
“Hey,” he begins, voice low enough that clearly only she is meant to hear it, “I think I found your mom in the Nanba database. You know, before I left. I was looking up Isurugi and… was her name Kirika?”
Misora stares at him, wide-eyed. She knows her mother’s name, but it’s the first time she’s heard it spoken out loud in—since before her father went away and came back a stranger with a monster in his mind.
“Yeah. I—yeah, she was.”
Gentoku nods. “She was an astronomer, too. I guess you know that as well.”
Misora pulls her knees up to her chest to try and calm her erratic heartbeat. She hasn’t thought of her mother in so long—thinking of her mother means thinking of her father and thinking of her father means bad things. She wants to hate Gentoku for bringing it up… but she hadn’t realized how much she had ached to hear her mother’s name, to talk about her with someone else.
“She was better than my father,” she bursts out, unsure why the thought comes to her mind first. “At astronomy—at physics. He always used to say, she was the best of them all. But she died before she could get her first mission.”
“I’m sorry,” says Gentoku, so frankly and earnestly that she doesn’t even doubt him for a second. “My mother died, too. It’s been a long time… but that doesn’t really matter when it’s your mother, huh?”
Misora presses her cheek to her knees and looks at him sideways. “No, it doesn’t. My father—my real father, before the Mars mission—used to say she was… she was a lighthouse. That people flocked to her.”
Broken people, she doesn’t say, and finds her eyes wandering from Gentoku to Ryuga and Sawa bickering in the corner, to Sento and Kazumi making plans for the next day by the whiteboard. People who were lonely, lost, and adrift.
“People like us?” Gentoku guesses. It takes her a moment to realize she’s spoken out loud.
“Yeah,” Misora says, and feels a small smile curl her lips. “People like us.”
It's not the end of the fight, sitting there with the four of them surrounded by their voices and their warmth. It's not even close. But it's far, far away from the seven-year sleep and the Faust labs and her father being lost in the stars. So maybe it was worth it. Maybe it was worth all this, in the end.