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They say that Amane was born under a sea of stars, and that his brother was born at the break of dawn.
“Good day from … [static] … dquarters in … [static] … ty. It is July twentieth, nineteen-hundred and sixty-nine, and man is about to land on the moon. People will touch down approximately four hours and seventeen minutes from now if the fli … [static, unintelligible].”
Amane fiddles with his radio’s antenna in an attempt to find a clearer signal. He leans his head in close to its speaker, as if that could somehow make garbled words discernible from the rest of the noise.
“A-ma-ne.”
Leaning against the doorway is his twin, with hands covered in what Amane hopes to be ink from a red pen.
“Turn that thing off. It’s annoying.”
He startles a little at the sound of his brother’s voice, instinctively. Lucky for him, however, it’s just enough of a jolt for the antenna to be shifted into position.
“—truly a historic time in the li … [static] … existence of mankind. The two astronauts that will make the landing on the moon, uh, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — have already entered the … [static, prolonged] …st word is that all systems are performing very well.”
At that point, the feedback from the radio goes quiet, but Amane assumes it’s due to a pause in the report rather than a fault of the radio itself. He adjusts his position so that his palms lie flat on the floor, his knees press warmly together, and his right ear lingers a mere centimeter away from the speaker. Amane swallows, in anticipation, of what the broadcaster will say next.
Mankind’s first moon landing is to take place in t-minus-four hours. It is now a widely-accepted truth that the impossible is becoming possible, that the unattainable is moving just within man’s reach. Amane could live to one day know the stars, intimately, as he did the day he was born. He could live on to one day hold the moon within the palm of his hand.
But the things of this earth have a funny way of grounding him, or pulling him down from the exosphere by the collar of his shirt.
The radio goes from being an inch away from his face to flying six feet across the floor, to where it now lies, broken against the chipped green wallpaper, all in just half of a second. The kick was almost super-humanely clean, coming within a hair’s breadth of his skull without any actual contact being made. He would make the time to be impressed if it weren’t for his initial shock.
Above him, his brother pouts. “I told you to turn it off.”
Amane curses himself for being too caught up in the things three-hundred and eighty-thousand kilometers above his living room to listen.
Tsukasa then grins a wicked, unnatural thing — as bright and blinding as the sun, but immeasurable times more deadly.
“Ne ne, Amane, you can play with me now, right? You spend so much time listening to that piece of junk, I started to get jealous…”
Amane bites the inside of his cheek. His wrists are still sore and the bruises under his bandages are nowhere near fully healed — he can tell by the way they sting when he pokes incessantly at them throughout the day. His teacher never fails to berate him for never learning any better, nor any self-restraint.
The adhesive looks like it’s beginning to wear off. An indication that he should pay Tsuchigomori-sensei a visit after class tomorrow evening.
But there’s something about the glint in his brother’s eyes tells him that he doesn’t particularly care about any of the thoughts going through Amane’s head, nor does he care about the moon landing that Amane could only dream of since age four, nor does he care about Amane potentially missing the very moment it happens.
These things come as much of a surprise to him as does his own birthday, or the way plants grow when you water them, or the way they die when you don’t.
“Okay, okay, I will,” Amane concedes, relaxing the muscles in his body that had stiffened the moment Tsukasa walked in.
Tsukasa makes a variety of sounds — all out of excitement — as he skips out the door and off to some place where Amane will eventually have to find him. Amane crawls over the broken radio to assess the damage.
The radio is, indeed, broken, with its antenna bent and the glass that once encased the dial now shattered into microscopic fragments all over the floor. Amane is disheartened, of course he is, but this is certainly not the first appliance of his that Tsukasa has made ruin of. Such things can always be replaced with a bit of spare change, and then he need not think too hard about why he’s replacing them until the situation calls for it again.
Other things, however, are irreplaceable. There is a certain rock in the pocket of his slacks that feels especially heavy today, as it has most days since the Apollo missions and their objective was first announced.
Amane has felt acutely tethered to the stars since birth, and tethered to the moon since a rock tumbled out of the sky and landed in his front yard at age four. His fixation may just be an escape from all of the earthly things that cause him pain (in every sense of the word), but it does give him hope — just looking up at the sky, every now and then.
Amane spends a lot of his time with his legs dangling off the side of tall buildings, protruding from four-story windows, anywhere elevated off of the ground.
The universe is infinite. If one day he trips and falls off of the ledge, Amane thinks it’d be nice if he were to skip the plummet, and fall up into the heavens, instead.
⋆ ༄ؘ ･｡ ☾ ･ﾟ✧ : ⋆
It isn’t quite dark yet at nineteen-hundred hours, but the moon is not one to miss her own show.
Tonight there is not a cloud in the sky. Nor is there a breeze in the air. It’s hot, actually, and unfairly humid when packed in-between a small crowd of people outside of an electronics store, all watching in real time as man touches down on the moon.
He’s already had more than a few strangers give him odd looks this evening. Though Amane assumes that is a perfectly normal reaction to seeing a kid with a few broken blood vessels in his face and a pronounced limp in his leg stumble his way downtown, out of breath, and pushing his way through other bodies much larger than his own.
He lays his palms flat against the glass window as he peers into the display on the other side: a couple of cathode ray tube screens projecting live feedback all the way from America. There are several voices speaking things he can’t understand, but the enthusiasm in their tone is undeniably universal.
A woman on his left lets out a whistle. “There’s men up there right now — bout'ta be walkin’ on the moon. Ain’t that something?”
A man on his right huffs something condescending, before folding his arms flat across his chest. “Well I still think it’s all a hoax. No way they can get people all the way up there. That’s gotta be, like, a million kilometers away. And America’s on the wrong side of the planet too, you know?”
A series of groans sound throughout the crowd, Amane’s included.
“Sheesh, people will believe anything they see on TV these days,” the man derides, weaseling himself away from the crowded storefront.
Nobody seems to mourn his absence that much, not when black and white images of space are flashing across the screens, not while there are high-quality photos of the moon and her many craters to admire, and not during the live audio feed directly from the Apollo 11 space shuttle that cuts straight through the glass. Amane can hardly contain the width of his grin. He bounces, impatiently, up and down on his feet.
The people around him grow louder as the time draws near. There’s a buzz in the air, and it isn’t coming from the electric fan overhead.
To their luck, there happens to be a man who speaks fluent English in the crowd. He translates a few things for them, mainly updates on how much time there is left.
“Five minutes until landing, now three.”
Amane attempts to tune out the loud conversation from the teenagers behind him. He doesn’t understand why there would be talk of Godzilla versus space aliens at this moment when there’s real history being made in outer space, right there in front of them. Plus Godzilla would be too busy attacking Tokyo to concern itself with aliens — a sensible priority, if Amane’s being honest.
He presses his forehead against the glass. The surface fogs with his every breath.
“Thirty seconds, fifteen…”
The translator is no longer needed as the time runs thin. Amane holds his breath for every remaining second of the countdown—
“And five, four, three, two…
“…One.”
—and releases it as soon as contact takes place. Amane feels a bit like he’s on fire.
An astronaut’s voice rings out, strong and sure, from the T.V.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Amane might not understand English, but he doesn’t need to to know what the words mean to grasp their significance in this moment, to bury it in his memory and engrave it there so that he may never forget.
“They’re really there,” he says, barely above a whisper. “We made it to the moon.”
Amane stands with his eyes glued to the screen for a long, long while. He remains frozen there as the others around him begin to disperse, as their whooping and celebrations die down, as the magic of the moment starts to fade into the past.
But Amane lingers, as do the stars mirrored in his eyes. He’s the only one still there when he turns to look up at the moon.
It looks a lot smaller from where he stands—outside of an electronics shop at the foot of a hill—but it shines just as brightly as he remembers. All of the craters are exactly where they should be. Not a single thing about it, really, appears to have changed from how it looked the day before.
The moon seems indifferent to its earthly visitors. From such a distance, he can’t even see their silhouettes as they mark its surface with their flag.
Amane suddenly feels something deep within him coil up into a ball. The cool night air begins to waft into the valley, and the stray leaves drifting through the wind start to rustle their way down the street.
My feet are touching the ground, he remembers. Their soles are bound to this earth.
Amane’s throat constricts. The moon looks down at him and says nothing at all.
He fiddles, idly, with the lunar rock in his pocket. He presses his fingers against its ridges through the fabric of his pants, feeling carefully over the few sides of it that are smooth. It has always given him hope — an emotion he’s starting to think might be far too alien to exist in someone like himself.
The moon is a beacon of light, where his rock is a muddy, reddish-brown. It may as well have fallen down from Mars, instead.
Two, mutually exclusive statements suddenly occupy his mind. The first being that this world has almost never been a place for him, not since that very first break of dawn,
And the second being that it’s beyond silly — to dream of a life on the moon.
So where does that leave me, now? He wonders. The question drifts high up into the clouds.
Despite everything, the moon is there with an answer.
“Nowhere at all.”
Amane frowns. Then where can I go, from here?
Her face does not change when she speaks. Her craters are set in stone.
“I think you already know.”
⋆ ༄ؘ ･｡ ☾ ･ﾟ✧ : ⋆
He tells Tsuchigomori as such, when he places the lunar rock in the palm of his hand. He folds his teacher’s fingers over the piece of moon with his own, scraped-up ones.
“It’s just whenever I look at that rock, I feel like I could go anywhere.”
He spares a glance to the night at his back. Where the moon had been a waning gibbous yesterday, it is entirely full tonight.
“But… I’ve made up my mind, now.”
Tsuchigomori looks at him, warily, but holds the rock firm in his hand. Amane smiles.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
⋆ ༄ؘ ･｡ ☾ ･ﾟ✧ : ⋆
“Hanako-kun?
It is on rare occasions that Hanako does not respond to his given name.
“Hanako-kun? Are you listening?”
Given, as in, the one he gave to himself. Inadvertently. Word of mouth is a curious thing.
Besides, Hanako has almost forgotten what it’s like to be ordinary — what with being a flower girl for some forty decades passed. He can nearly, almost forget.
“Hanako-kun.”
But the memories, as old as they’ve become, can never truly elude him.
“Hm?” he responds, with an upward jerk of his head. “What is it, Yashiro?”
“Er...” Yashiro pauses for a moment, leaning nearly all of her body weight onto the mop. “It’s nothing, you just seemed a little spaced out, is all.”
Hanako takes note of the only clean spot on the floor: a small, circular area within half a meter of the bucket.
Like she has room to talk, he muses — the corner of his lips curling up into a smile.
Yashiro continues to idly mop the same, squeaky-clean plank of hardwood. “What were you thinking about?”
“Oh, the usual,” he answers, faux innocence dripping down from where his tongue peeks out of his mouth. “Dirty things.”
Yashiro squints at him. “You had an awfully dreamy look on your face for some kind of perv.”
Hanako does his best to stifle a laugh. “Yashiro, you’re not trying to make me out to be more knightly than I am, are you?”
“Of course not!” She grips her mop tightly between two, small hands. “It’s just. You just avoid topics so often, it’s not hard to see through it— when you are.”
Hanako’s gaze drifts from the ruffles on her uniform to the red doors on the stalls. He’d never advertised himself to be an open book. He has many secrets he’d rather keep to himself, until the day he’s finally absolved of his sins, at least. It’s easier that way. It makes it easier to live (if this existence can even be likened to something as distant as the near shore) with himself.
Yashiro points a sure finger in his direction. “There! And you have that look on your face, too! Like you’re somewhere — or someone — else, sometimes,” she accuses, voice ringing out a little softer on the final word. ”You’re so hard to understand.”
Hanako doesn’t miss a beat. “And here I thought mysterious boys were your type…”
“You—” She then closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath, in and out. Hanako watches with mild fascination.
“Seriously, I don’t know how I put up with you sometimes. I’m starting to think I should’ve just become the mermaid princess, instead.”
Hanako keens. “Hmm? You think so? Well, I don’t have a fancy tiara, but I did keep the fish tank…”
“…On second thought I think I'm gonna continue mopping,” she says, and Hanako is glad to see that she’s moved on to the next plank.
He watches as Yashiro sighs longingly into her movements, as if she’s imagining herself to be some kind of Cinderella — tasked with a lifetime of tireless servitude and complete compliance, but awaiting the day a prince comes to sweep her off her feet. As a matter of fact she probably is doing that, which would explain why she’s so terrible at keeping track of where she’s already cleaned.
The truth is: Amane could have never made it to the moon. That is something that he and Apollo 1-through-10 had in common.
But Hanako, however, has visited it once before. A painting of it, for the sake of technicality, but it was a spitting image nonetheless. He is something like an expert when it comes to these things.
Which is why it’s odd— that seeing Yashiro in the most mundane of times can make him lose sight of why he ever thought it was so brilliant, so mesmerizing, to begin with. And why he ever spent so much time dreaming of a life on its surface.
He has known since the beginning that when you arrive at the far shore, you can no longer have a future. You can no longer experience anything that even remotely resembles what it’s like to be alive.
But he sees the moon every night, and Yashiro every morning.
Perhaps, for an apparition, that is the most courteous of an existence he is allowed.