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Who are you?
No, wait, don’t answer that yet. It’s highly possible that this question lacks an objective meaning.
Is there anything you miss?
Yeah, that’s probably better. I believe you can tell a lot about someone by what they’re lacking.
Eh? Who should I be missing?
That’s ironic. I didn’t specify a subject, yet you went with a “who”. Humans are truly fascinating.
What are you talking about?
I don’t know.
Are you even real?
I’m not sure I can answer that. Whatever answer I give now will probably be different from how things will turn out.
You’re not making sense.
Probably. But you are, to me. In the end, you’re the one carrying that burden, aren’t you?
What burden? Stop toying with my brain!
I would never toy with something so valuable. A genius girl who is going so far in life and yet has so few answers to my questions.
You’re annoying. Where am I, anyway?
I believe you’re asleep at home. If that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t be able to echo through your brain.
So I’m dreaming?
Most likely. But dreams are just an extension of the many possibilities life could offer.
Why are you here?
To make you answer my question. Who do you miss?
There are many possible options. Some people say they’re missing someone else: a beloved one, someone long gone or a significant other they have yet to meet. However, that’s not your case. You’re missing yourself among the mist you walk through everyday. You’re having friendly conversation with people who only see you as the reflection of somebody else; you’re surfing among the sea of information and you’re very aware of how useless that is, but you nonetheless keep going. Amidst all that’s real, you find comfort in something you know is fake. You reach out your hand even though nobody will come in your aid. And the worst part is, you don’t feel anything of what I have just mentioned.
This… feels so wrong. I don’t think you got anything right.
You’re right. But that’s because I was talking about me.
Who are you?
Tu fui, ego eris.
That’s Latin, right?
Correct. I was you, you will be me.
You were… me? How is this possible?
You’re not allowed to know anything about this matter. But please remember that, when time comes, your heart will know better.
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Floating in endless space, which, although void, is impossible to escape.
If she had to describe those brief moments before waking up, she’d go for a deep paralysis and the light headache while her eyes adjust to the dim evening light. Even if our muscles normally take a few moments to be active, the feeling of being trapped while waking up is clearly uncomfortable for many people; the girl, though, didn’t despise the way space seemed to embrace her body one last time, the sceneries from her dream fading slowly but inevitably, and she wouldn’t give away those brief seconds of bliss before regaining full consciousness of her surroundings.
Getting up was the hardest part: the muscles felt a bit sore and her head was spinning. In the process, she felt something fall from atop her body. A handmade blanket someone had put on her while she was asleep. Rubbing her eyes, the girl scanned the room she was in: the only source of light was a desk lamp that had been turned away from her, probably not to wake her up. She was sitting on a sofa, while on the other side of the room a man was sitting on a chair, his arms partially on the desk, writing something on a paper sheet as though as he was taking notes.
“Dad?”
A rustle of papers and the deaf sound of a pen hitting the desk anticipated the man turning around and smiling after a couple of seconds.
“Oh, Kurisu, you’re awake”
The girl nodded sleeply, yawning and rubbing her eyes once more before looking back at him, who was gesturing for her to come closer.
She obliged and was lifted up so she could sit on her father’s legs. Her gaze immediately went at the paper he was writing on, and she smiled while staring at the familiar handwriting that told her about utopist discoveries and universal laws she had seen elsewhere so many times.
“Did I wake you up?”
Kurisu shook her head: “I had a very weird dream”.
“What was it about?”, her father asked with a seemingly genuine curiosity. The night sky outside and the faint sounds of cars engines, together with the dim light the lamp emitted, created an atmosphere so dreamlike Kurisu was concerned for a moment whether she had really waken up.
“I can’t remember”, she shuffled away her thoughts. “Were you busy with that equation?”
The girl pointed at the last line the ink from the pen had written, a confused and messy mixture of formulas and question marks, which ended with the straight drawn line her father used to point out that a mistake had been made somewhere in the process.
“Heh, I was. You sure do love peeking at what I work on, don’t you?”
“It’s fun. Your research focuses on new horizons we have not yet explored. I wonder if your research will get known worldwide, someday, Dad”.
The man smirked: “I hope so. No, I’ll fight to achieve that goal. The world will have to hear my voice and the one of my two fellow colleagues, willing or not”.
“Try to calculate the inverse function. It looks easier to solve”
“Pardon?”
The girl once again pointed at the paper, this times a few centimeters on the upper side of the page. Her father’s words were apparently only heard by deaf ears.
“Oh, you… I-I don’t think that’s the case, but I’ll give it a try. You’re smart for an eight year old, huh? Almost too smart…”
“You always tell me that, Dad. But I’m glad I can be of any help, to you”
“Who knows? Maybe you’ll grow up soon enough to be my assistant, little Kurisu”
The sound of the horns coming from the open window beside the desk were covered by the overwhelming sound of father and daughter laughing together, without a care in the world.
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“Oh, Kurisu, you’re awake”
The roaring sound of the engine and the propellers was now loud enough to make the background chatter barely audible.
“Senpai? Are we there yet?”
The green-haired woman smiled smugly: “Indeed, Kurisu. You’ve slept for quite a while, but I can’t blame you. No matter how many times we go back and forth to Japan, the jet lag is always unbearable”.
The genius girl laughed a bit and looked outside the small window on her right: the Japanese landscape was truly beautiful, maybe even more than the French or the Italian one. Although she had other… more private reasons to head there, her primary goal was leading a research team and holding a conference at the end of her stay, which she really hoped would end up lasting longer than a week. She took off her earbuds and put them in her pocket: even if there was no music playing on them, the pressure change while the plane was preparing to land was enough to make her feel uncomfortable and dizzy.
“So, are you going to introduce me to them?”: the chestnut haired girl was caught off guard by the question.
“Don’t you know them yet?”
“Your friends who own that laboratory? No, I don’t. That’s the first time we’re going to Japan together, Kurisu”
“Oh… right. Sorry, that was probably a lapsus”.
Kurisu was actually sure that Maho, her senpai and colleague at work, had met the lab members before. Maybe it was in her own dreams. Yeah, Kurisu tended to give more importance to dreams than what she liked to admit, but that was for scientific reasons: dreams were believed to be hidden memories of our brain, but one amazing discovery pointed out that our deja-vù s are actually anticipated by our brain while we sleep. That’s why one hypothesis shows that dreams are the closest we can get to time travelling
“You’ve talked to me a lot about them, so they should mean a lot to you, right?”
“They’re… friends! I just believed it would be nice if they got to know you, Senpai”
“Right, right. You never change, do you?”
Maho smirked and leaned back into her seat, checking her safety belt and breathing deeply, eyes half closed.
“Say, Senpai, do you have any plans about the Tanabata?”
“Eh? Tanabata?”
“Yup! It’s a traditional holiday in Japan, on the 7th of July. I thought it would be nice to spend the evening together, along with my friends here, so you can get to know them”
“That’s actually a great idea, Kurisu. I’m looking forward to it, then”, Maho nodded, which made Kurisu’s eyes light up in joy and smile. The older girl always thought that Kurisu’s smile, in cases like that, was contagious: it showed the most hidden part of her friend, the naive and childish one, and it came to the surface so rarely that she cherished every moment of that.
She now understood how glad she was to have met Kurisu.
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“I wish you were never born to begin with!”
She leaned on the cold, dusty street wall for support. Her knees were shaking uncontrollably and she doubted her own thinking process. Maybe some adrenaline would have helped her come to her senses, but right now she was overwhelmed by a desire to escape, to run away and leave nothing behind but a sense of loneliness.
Hope is a mind killer. She should have known it in advance and never have come to Japan to begin with. Her father’s conference was cancelled because of some chain of events and now she had made the mistake of calling him to hear his voice.
She should have known.
She should have realized how much people despised her.
Who was she? A so-called genius girl whose research was published on Sciency and the one who held seminaries worldwide. Envied by many, loved by no one: such was her fate, and she had been a fool to hope fate could be changed. Hadn’t it been proved impossible already by the side research she was taking part in with the other lab members? Then why bother hoping in a different outcome?
However, it still stinged. The crushed hope, the feeling of being rejected and those words… those words that echoed so loudly in her ears that she felt her brain explode.
Tears were flowing endlessly, like a river, never stopping once. She kept calling her father, asking him why he hated her, but it only lasted for a few more minutes until the receiver shut the call. Then, only her sobs were loud enough to break the silence of an almost empty Akihabara.
Nobody ever stopped by that old building anyway, much less at an hour like that. It was unlikely that anyone had seen, much less recognised, her.
Did anything matter anymore? Her memories of her childhood flashed in her head, and she did her best to filter only the happy ones: this, however, only made her heart ache more painfully.
Is there anything you miss?
A family. A place to call home.
She looked up to the building she had leaned onto: the laboratory lights were turned off, a sign that nobody was inside. Kurisu sighed: it was better like that. She would never want anyone to see her like that, a total mess of reddened eyes and flushed cheeks, the faintest trace of tears still on her cheekbones. The girl was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t her the light sound of footsteps coming towards her.
“Uh?”
She jolted and turned towards the source: it was her friend from the auto-proclaimed laboratory, Okabe Rintaro, and he looked even more bewildered than she herself was.
He opened his mouth to say something, but he never had the chance to do such, because Kurisu’s reflex to run away suddenly prevailed on her body weakness and she sprinted away from him, feeling fresh tears forming in her eyes.
She had never wanted to avoid him as much as she did then.
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She had never wanted to see him as much as she did then.
Okabe and Kurisu, in the two years that followed the reaching of the Steins Gate, had gone through a lot as a couple. To be fair, the whole concept of dating was new to both of them. Normally, there would be the teasing remarks they had been exchanging ever since they met, especially when theories and scientific matters were discussed in the laboratory. But something they both weren’t used to were the remarks turning to shouts and the bickering quickly becoming a heated argument.
She had never seen him so angry before, nor had she seen him raise his voice outside of his chuunibyou persona. They were alone in the lab when it happened, but Kurisu had missed calls from both Mayuri and Daru, signaling her that they were quick on grasping on the situation.
When he grabbed his white lab coat and stormed outside, slamming the door in the process, she swore that the sound waves of the metal clattering loudly against the doorframe might have been strong enough to break her heart in pieces.
There was something so incredibly disheartening in hearing him become quiet and just… stare at her in disbelief. While Kurisu had let herself get carried away and shouted at him, Okabe was more the peaceful type. This, however, meant that his silence just before vanishing from her sight was a death sentence.
Hours had passed since then, and now Kurisu was alone on the laboratory’s building roof: they were all supposed to meet at Yanabayashi Shrine to celebrate the Tanabata, but Okabe apparently wasn’t replying to phone calls and text from anyone, Kurisu could tell because Daru told her via RINE. She didn’t have the heart to answer back or to call any of her friends, however. Deep down her heart, she was insanely worried: Okabe had always been an unpredictable guy, but Kurisu didn’t have a clue about what his anger translated into. Of course, he could be the kind of person who calms down easily by taking a walk and usually comes back in little time; however, it was already clear that this wasn’t the case.
It was getting pretty late and the last trains would soon depart. She tried to think logically. Okabe had two options: either he had gone home, or he was heading to Yanabayashi.
No, the latter was unlikely: Mayuri had texted her just a few minutes ago, telling her that “Okarin is nowhere to be found! ç_ç Me and Luka-kun are waiting for him here at the shrine, call me if you hear anything new, okay?”.
He had gone home, then, unless he was thinking about coming back to the lab when Kurisu was gone. Actually, that would make a pretty clever move, because he’d assume that she would have gone to the Tanabata party and try to meet him there, at which point she would be kind of forced to spend the early night with the other lab members and thus to avoid him.
The girl sighed deeply, inhaling the cool air of a summer night. She tried to call Okabe a second time, but again, he didn’t pick up. Clueless about what to do, she looked at the city from the high spot the roof offered: the city lights and the pedestrians still crowded Akihabara, but Kurisu knew that it was only a matter of time before the streets would become empty and all the mixed voices and sound only a distant memory.
Then, with the city lights dimmed out, the bridge of magpies from the Chinese legend would form in the sky, so that Vega and Altair could be reunited once again. It would truly be an amazing sight for everyone.
However, Akihabara wasn’t the most lively district at night: this allowed the stars to come out sooner than the rest of the city, and they could be seen if one dared to focus their eyes on the ocean of white dots that extended endlessly.
That’s ironic. I didn’t specify a subject, yet you went with a “who”. Humans are truly fascinating.
Sometimes, when she was alone and lost in thoughts, a strange dream she had as a child would flash in her mind. Strangely enough, she could still remember most of it.
A strange voice once asked her if there was anything she desidered. In her early childhood, Kurisu had a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a place to belong to, her very first successes as a girl with an outstanding IQ.
She couldn’t phrase an answer back then.
Then, the voice went on. It told her about people who would not accept her when she needed them the most: that day, two years ago, when she faced her father’s final rejection… was it true, then?
People who only saw her as a reflection of their own ambitions.
Adults who tried to outsmart her in every way possible, only to be left with nothing but a sense of defeat. Trying to prove themselves by bullying a young girl… they were no different from a grey cloud in the winter mist.
All this time, since she had to face the downsides of being herself, there was only one thing she wanted the most and never got. The metaphorical spoon to her own fork, something she never knew she craved.
Someone to love and be loved in return.
A warrior who stood up in the most ridiculous way to follow his dumb ideals.
A comrade who was by her side when she needed someone to believe her and trust her, in spite of everything.
A friend who helped her in every way possible and never gave up, no matter what, in order to make sure she was safe and happy, even if it costed him his own life.
A man who had changed her life so drastically and dramatically, who had caused her so much trouble that she was still thankful she had met him.
She looked at the starry sky, stared at the stars in the Milky Way that were shining so bright. Fireflies, rays of eternal hope: when everything seemed so far away, the distant galaxies looked so close that one could reach their hand and feel their warmth for sure. Now, Kurisu understood the very concept at the base of what Mayuri’s “Stardust Handshake” meant.
To reach out to something that seems so close yet so far away.
Kurisu’s wish for the Tanabata was now set. She breathed deeply and did not dare to look at the two Orihime. Instead, with her eyes shut tight, she whispered.
“Oka-”
She was cut short by strong arms hugging her from behind. She was startled from a moment, but the wind immediately brought a familiar smell to her nostrils: a perfume which reminded her of a forest during a thunderstorm.
The man held his forehead against her nape for a few moments before resting his chin on her right shoulder and touching his cheek with hers. His breathing was uneven, as if he had been climbing the stairs in a hurry, and it tickled her in a relaxing way. The arms tightened around her and so did the embrace, the mad scientist hid his face from her and Kurisu swore his eyes were slightly wet.
Time froze, a feeling completely different from time leaping. One second was stretched to reach infinity, and the more time passed, the more the surroundings ceased to exist, leaving only Vega and Altair on the rooftop of an old building, hugging after being apart for way too long for their liking.
Her wish. Kurisu had yet to say her wish out loud.
“Rintaro”
She felt Okabe hold his breath. Never in two years had she used his first name to call him, mainly because the thought of it still felt too intimate to her, but also because “Okabe” had become some sort of nickname. It was only fair after the countless “Assistant”, “Zombie”, “Celebsev” and many other she had to go through, wasn’t it?
But please remember that, when time comes, your heart will know better.
Okabe lightly loosened the hug so he could motion her to turn around. Kurisu looked at the man she loved and she firmly believed no amount of faraway galaxies shining in the night sky could be more wonderful than the sight of him at that moment.
“I missed you”, the echo of her cries still in her voice, and maybe Okabe had noticed.
He held out his hand and waited.
Now, Kurisu understood the lingering deja-vù she had had since she was a child.
An event horizon she had witnessed with the innocency of a little girl had proved to be her salvation.
“Let’s go home”, he said. Kurisu grasped his hand and smiled.
She understood that it doesn’t take a lifetime to find somewhere to belong to. It doesn’t have to be your family, the people you were forced to grow next to or your everyday fellow citizens. Sometimes, the answer lies in a joke at the right time, a promise made against all odds or in a hand holding you tight.
After all, Vega and Altair are always there, watching upon those who seek each other.