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Amane’s always been haunted.
It’s a weird thing to admit. At least, to other people, that is. Being haunted isn’t as readily accepted on the wheel of “odd facts about yourself” as say, having a birthmark shaped like Godzilla or having survived one of Tsukasa’s ramen nights. It was a strange quirk that earned him a lot of incredulous stares as if he’d suddenly grown horns and a lot of hushed whispers of “it seems like the Yugi kid’s been drinking too much” at college parties. Which was......well. It wasn’t unexpected he supposes. But it definitely didn’t help his already lame social presence.
And that was fine. Amane is used to standing out. He’d been the weird kid with problems at home in middle school, then the astrophysics geek in college, and then just plain old Yugi-san. Or Yugi-senpai, by his younger coworkers, which never failed to make him flustered even after all those years. Because with the title came two heavy-hitting realizations: one, that he had some actual responsibility at his job, and two, that he was probably getting old.
But never quite as old as Tsuchigomori, who’d been old when Amane was in middle school, old when Amane got his first assignment, and would certainly still be even older when Amane finally was old himself. If he wasn’t already. The few gray hairs that had snuck into his bangs and his ever thickening glasses were just a fashion statement, he told himself. Don’t worry about it. Don’t think too much, it might get worse.
And yet, Amane’s permanent haunting was only as much in the loosest of senses. It wasn’t a vengeful spirit out of one of those movies he’d watched with his brother (much too late in the night, mind you). It wasn’t some demon with an inclination towards knocking doors off their hinges and leaving scratches on his arms. Amane did the latter enough when he was nervous. No need for supernatural forces to add to his nervous ticks.
It was more of............a presence. He supposes. Just something he could feel whenever he focused hard enough. An oddly shaped swirl in his coffee mug. A smudge that followed him in his passing window reflection. A chill that nipped at his feet even when he wore socks and a warmth that sat on the corner of his bed when he had nightmares. Or something poetic like that. At least, Amane’d call it poetic, if he had any propensity for manipulating language. He much preferred numbers. Statistics. Complex calculations and trajectories and trials with a dash of tribulations from the workings of the scientific method.
Most people ask if he’s feeling alright when he brings it up.
Tsukasa asks if it has a name.
Amane isn’t sure if ghosts can have names — if ghosts can even speak to begin with — but he’s certain it’s a she. A woman with long hair, delicate fingers, even if he’s never seen her before. Not wholly. Not more than a chill up his spine or a static in the corner of his vision – which, granted, might have been from his outdated prescription, but he liked to give his poor vision more credit than it deserved.
And Amane finds himself thinking about this ghost a lot more when he gets older. A reverse imaginary friend. One that settles into his mind in those long nights at the library, at the office, in the capsule of his space shuttle. The first time he saw her on one of his missions he’d brushed it off as a hallucination — some pernicious mix of sleep-deprivation-becoming-chronic and hyper-filtered oxygen. And it was easy to dismiss. Most of the instances were. They typically followed scenarios that raised query to the clarity of his mind. A hangover induced haze. A 4 am call into work. A shadow cuffing his vision after he canceled his optometrist appointment for the third time that month, and so on. Just his own shade of normal. Most people dismissed such things, and so Amane learned to as well.
At least, he tried. Put in his best effort.
And though his most recent assignment wasn’t the first time he’d been alone in the universe’s embrace, it was certainly the farthest from home. From the planetary base, the sun was but a mere twinkle a few specks above the horizon, and even then the weather typically obscured its shine. Well, if it could be called “weather” in such a characteristically extraterrestrial environment. Something akin to snow dusted the ground and swirled through the atmosphere most days. Something just a bit cloudier, like ash, and a bit more lustrous, like crystal. Something equally as cold that crunched wherever he stepped, clung to the window in strange alien shapes, and left him wishing he’d packed a better space heater on the capsule that sent him there.
It’s not poisonous, at least according to his do-it-yourself chemistry kits, but Amane knows better than to put non-terrestrial substances in his mouth. He can’t say the same for his little brother though. It was probably a good thing that Tsukasa stayed on earth. The worst thing he could put in his mouth there was paint.
But he calls it snow. Because Amane’s not as creative as a guy with glasses as thick as his might appear, and because he knows just how characteristically awful scientists are at naming things. Hell, he’d spent the past three months sailing across the Milky Way . That told enough of a story to steer him clear of such endeavors.
And it’s in one of those snowstorms that he first sees her.
Or thinks he sees her.
He’ll admit, after getting a good night’s rest and decent breakfast, that it may have been just a trick of the light. The blue film on the base windows, shielding him from whatever radiation seeped off the nearby star, could have easily gotten smudged by his curious hands or caught a glare from one of the many switchboard lights. And sure, maybe he’s a bit jet lagged adjusting to intergalactic timetables, and sure, maybe he needs to get his eyes checked again.
If it weren’t for the tiny canvas bag on his desk, he might have just brushed it off as he and everyone else did all the times prior.
It goes something like this.
There’s a woman on the horizon.
A woman made of dust and snow and shadows. If a creature like that could be called a woman, or even human, or even living to begin with.
Amane stands with his cup of cocoa (his preferred drink, unless he needed the extra caffeine) and watches. And listens. His mp3 player (quite old school, he’ll admit) has fizzled into the playlist’s last fade out and left him standing in the silence of ticking machinery and the storm’s faint hum.
He isn’t sure when she appeared, because he’d been standing there for a good ten minutes before his eyes processed the scenery ahead. Maybe she’d faded in when his eyes lost focus to the ice crystal patterns. Maybe she’d been there the whole time, and Amane was just too lost in thought — a dangerous pastime of his — to notice.
And when he does finally notice, there’s a lot to process in that instance.
First, there’s the mental checklist he’s been conditioned to go through. Amane can clearly remember his days of space training when the tune made a sharp left from “there’s no such thing as alien life” to “ you have a good chance of encountering extraterrestrial beings. ” Which halted a lot of his peers in their careers and trimmed down his intergalactic exploration group by a sizeable amount, but that was okay. Amane certainly wasn’t cozy with most of them to begin with, and they certainly weren’t missed in those crowded assembly meetings.
Amane wasn’t quite sure if he’d ever believed in non-earth creatures, and instead opted to adopt the neutral standing he took with most every other aspect of his life. If they existed, he could say he wasn’t surprised, and if they didn’t? Well, what did it even matter at that point?
And it’s neutral that Amane attempts to stay as he goes through all the things he needs to do. First, contact mission control. Second, suit up. Third, make contact and recite the Intergalactic Alliance (or whatever they were calling it nowadays) creed and profession of peace: first in Japanese, then in Mandarin, Spanish, English, and Hindi, in that order of course. Which Amane always found kind of funny. One because he was certain that aliens wouldn’t be speaking any of those languages, and two because he never quite did memorize the Mandarin version, and hoped it wouldn’t be just his misfortune that Mandarin was the one language these creatures chose to teach themselves.
And he knows he probably shouldn’t think that, because he has a bad habit of jinxing himself.
Well.
Amane starts his checklist in the way one always does: by shredding it in two and throwing all caution to the wind. Then, he starts from the top.
Sticks his mug in the microwave with the fruitless hope that it will still be warm when he gets back. Digs out the underlayer of his suit (which he always hates wearing, because it’s much too tight in the gloves and much too large everywhere else) and dresses himself. Suits up and attaches his lure, which technically he shouldn’t need, to the inside of the hatch.
Makes his way out into the vast tundra cradled by the endless expanse of space.
And outside, it’s quiet.
Outside, Amane can’t even hear the storm through his polycarbonate helmet and earmuffs he kept on just to fight the chill.
His first realization is that it’s empty out there, about ten crunching steps away from the door. Which is how it should be, realistically, but there’s something about this recognition that dips Amane into a chilled sense of nostalgia and makes him suddenly feel very, very small. Maybe it’s the fact that through the breaks in the clouds, he can see the sun as the tiniest speck on the bridge of the galactic center, or Gemini twisted to an angle that looks more like a blade than a pair of twins. Maybe it’s the fact that he decided to forgo his undergloves at the last second after they’d chafed his hands for two minutes too long, and he was starting to pick up a chill. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s imagining things once again. As usual. As always.
The second realization is that he probably looks quite silly standing there alone in the snow. Or he would if anyone was watching, and for once, Amane is grateful to be alone so far from home.
So he slides his mind back into rational thinking and turns around. Stomps his way back through the icy terrain to the hatch glowing faint in the storm. Tries his best to navigate over the sharp crags in the rocky landscape, fails, and sends himself slipping flat on his ass into the cold that rushes up to meet him, and shouts a few swears just for good measure as the universe continues to kick him when he’s down. Great. At least he had a helmet on. It’s probably best not to be tasting a mouthful of whatever this snow was actually made of, a sentiment he knows his little brother wouldn’t share.
There was a reason Amane became the astronaut and Tsukasa stayed on terra firma, where things came with labels if they were poisonous, even if he didn’t abide by those every time.
And it’s as he’s attempting to push himself to his feet — and failing miserably — that he notices it. Just dull enough to stand out from the shimmer of icy slush, just small enough to nearly swipe under the compacted vision of his visor.
A tiny canvas bag, no bigger than his palm, pulled tight with red ribbon and adorned with a paper sticker that has long since run to smudge from the elements.
Amane picks it up.
Weighs it in the palm of his hand.
Doesn’t think twice about the implications and does what’s probably the stupidest thing since second year of high school when he let Tsukasa cut his hair.
He carries it inside. Just like that.
A star plucked from the sky. A zinnia from a stem. An alien artifact from the snow. Or something much more poetic, if Amane was more inclined towards that kind of thing.
And after taking the time to strip away his frigid suit and hang it up to dry, Amane takes the pouch in his hands — his bare hands — and does his hundredth folly of the evening. “Hundredth” because he’s not really keeping track anymore, and he’s certain spilling hot chocolate on his good holiday sweater wasn’t the first stumble on his descent to whatever layer of hell he’d be stopping at.
He opens the bag.
And out tumbles a small, chatoyant disk into the palm of his calloused hand. Glimmering a faint pearl color, still biting with the frost of the environment he’d rescued it from, and smelling oddly........salty? Yeah, it was definitely salt he was smelling. Something that might have made his face scrunch in disgust had it not been such a pungent shock.
It only takes a few seconds to register that it is indeed a fish scale. A rather large one at that, if fish could even be found in the rungs of the Milky Way galaxy so very far from the concept of evolution, or animals, or chordates. Amane palms the scale between his hands, lets the scent permeate through the cabin and through his nose, lets his mind swirl into a haze of frosted fog as he has the briefest inclination that perhaps he should be reciting the creed to something as tiny and insignificant as a fish scale.
He doesn’t, in the end. Because even if he wanted to, the shock of the moment leaves him unable to move. Speak. Breathe, which he quickly corrects with a gasping choke in, a sputtering puff out.
And for the briefest of moments, Amane is compressed – no, crammed back into a body barely reaching five foot, decorated with the war paint from a life he wishes to escape and hidden beneath a pile of messily tied bandages. A body that aches to even exist in. A body he’s long since outgrown, shed, burned and buried.
And in the briefest of moments, he’s snapped back into place.
Just like that.
Just like nothing.
Nothing except the roar of the storm outside, the faintest odor of his long cold hot chocolate and his own sweat, and the jittery thumping of his own heartbeat beneath a sweater he really needs to wash.
Amane does next the only logical thing he can do.
Shoves the scale back into its confines and ties the ribbon tight. Tucks it into the corner of his desk beneath his moon dangler pen – a gift from Tsuchigomori-sensei that he’s never been able to bring himself to use. Makes certain to wash his face, change his shirt, dump the remainder of his staled drink down the drain, and stumbles his way to bed in the most normal way he can muster.
And when he finally does make it there, Amane does his best to beat down his rogue thoughts and slip into a still, silent, dreamless sleep. One where he’ll wake up in the morning and find that he imagined this whole endeavor, that he’s set to go home and that his hot chocolate is still warm.
That the ghost that haunts him will be still just that. A ghost. A figment of his imagination. A weird discoloration of the sky or a trick of the stormy weather lighting.
He hopes.
He prays.
He’s not quite sure what he’s praying to though.
And when Amane finally does drift off, some three languid hours later, the room somehow is much colder, the blanket over him much thinner, the base much darker.
And his mind, as usual, is anything but at peace.
And so it becomes routine in the oddest sense of the word.
Amane sees the woman in the snow. Amane puts on his suit ( including the too tight undergloves) and makes his way out into the cold. Amane finds himself alone glazed in a starlight haze, except for some foreign object lodged in the snow as some sort of peace offering to the human that’s made camp on the planet. Or something like that. In a science fiction novel, Amane knows he’d be much more likely to be killed off by hostile natives, or better yet, turned into Sunday dinner. Which he’s certain would be particularly terrible for both parties involved, because Amane doesn’t have much meat on his bones, and he has a hunch he’d taste pretty terrible. At least, he hopes he would. Call it some sense of karmic justice.
So it becomes his new normal, if he can call it anything close to normal. Always something there, always something new, always something equally as peculiar.
One day it’s a set of hair clips shaped like magatama. Or, that’s what he assumes they are. He tries them in his own hair and finds they look a bit like horns and a bit like something an anime character would wear. He also finds that they are most definitely not his style.
Another day he finds an emblem, like that from a hat. One that, for some reason, draws up memories of his middle school orientation that he’s long since buried in the segment of his life he’d rather forget.
One day he finds a star chart, marred in blue pen annotations.
The next, a gardening trowel.
And the following, a painfully short book, smudged to a blur and warped by the elements. He can only make out the single character of “八” on the spine, and a color that might have once been white. Red. Something in between. He leaves that one in the snow. He doesn’t bother looking for the other seven.
It’s the days that Amane finds nothing that are the longest, because those are the days that he dreams.
Amane’s no stranger to hauntings in his sleep. He’d spent the three years of middle school living a bad dream, and the next three years replaying it. It’s okay. It’s better now. The old white marks on his arms no longer ache to the touch, and he’s got much bigger problems in the premature graying of his hair and the stain he can’t seem to get out of his sweater. Old news. Moved on.
And even though these dreams don’t leave his lungs crumpled in his chest and his skin drenched in sweat, it kind of reminds him of that. Just a bit. Just because of how frighteningly real it all feels, to the point that it takes him a good ten minutes to recognize when he’s finally dropped back into his body on a cold, lumpy mattress so very far from home.
It starts with the star chart.
Because after weeks of collecting these peculiar objects, Amane’s started to run out of room in the corner of his desk where he’s hidden them away. The out-of-sight-out-of-mind method he finds is only effective for as long as he can keep such things out of sight. So it’s late one night that Amane takes a radical new step in his strange planetary epic.
He hangs the chart over his bed.
A bit crooked, a bit off-centered, and stuck with a yellowing tape that is well on its way to losing its stick, but he manages. In fact, he can’t help but swell his chest in some childish sense of pride, because Amane always wanted a star chart when he was young. One to hang up over his bed and point out constellations to Tsukasa way past their bedtimes and dream about seeing himself someday. But life ran untamed in those years long ago. Life took what he had, what he didn’t know he had, and nearly took himself before he managed to subdue it. And because of that, such trivialities as star charts over his bed were merely that: trivialities. Imagination. Wishes from a childhood he never could quite get ahold of.
And that night, Amane dreams.
Dreams of a classroom and a bitter taste of nostalgia, like cough syrup or oversteeped tea. Dreams of children without faces, yet they all know him by name. Dreams of chalk covered hands. Dreams of Tsuchigomori, complete with his most recent poor choice of hair dye patterning, lecturing from the doorway, despite the innate feeling that it should be the other way around.
Dreams of hand-drawn diagrams. Of stars. Of planets.
It’s a nice dream, he’ll admit, even if it fits about as well as his suit from high school graduation.
And so the cycle starts, just like that. Just as smooth as cream into coffee, of figures into shadows.
One day, he finds a ring adorned with an opalescent gemstone. Amane dreams he’s in another bed, another city, another planet. He dreams he lies next to a woman dressed in rabbit pajamas, with long fair hair and hands made just for his. He never sees her face, but he sees the ring on the nightstand, along with a funny shaped brooch and a mug made for cocoa. It’s a warm dream, he thinks, and he wakes up feeling a bit colder. A bit lonelier. A bit more like the Amane who wasn’t going anywhere.
And another, he finds something like a claw, but larger than any animal he’s ever seen and sharpened to a point. Amane dreams he’s no longer human, but something more like a lizard towering above the clouds. He’s not quite sure. He knows he spits fire, has scales, roars instead of speaks, because his mouth isn’t quite shaped for words anymore, you see.
But it’s fine, because she can still understand him.
She’s not a monster like him, but more of a fairy, an angel. With wings like a moth’s and skin as pale as Christmas snow. And then in an instant, she isn’t. She’s towering over the world with him with a presence that rattles him all the way down to his feet standing in a smattering of crushed cars.
And all of her eyes watch him. And he wishes he had enough himself to meet her gaze.
Amane doesn’t eat that day, lost in a dizziness of feeling so very, very small.
On a particularly dark day, he finds a knife.
A kitchen knife. One with a bright red handle and a shine that clings to it even out of the block. Amane isn’t keen on the weight it holds in his palm, nor the shape that fits so easily between his fingers. He sticks it atop the refrigerator where it can’t do harm. Shouldn’t do harm. Won’t. He’s certain.
Amane doesn’t remember his dream that night, but he wakes up cold, short of breath, near the brink of tears and clutching his trembling hands to his chest. It aches, below his ribs. There’s something bruised much deeper there. Deeper than skin. Than bone. Than beating heart.
He sends a message to Tsukasa with weak fingers, but he can’t quite say why. And even though he can’t read the screen through his own misty eyes, the notification of a reply back is enough. It’s enough. He’s certain it’s enough.
Amane puts the knife back into the snow in the morning.
He doesn’t look back.
It’s gone the next day.
But there’s one particular dream that he has more than others.
It goes something like this.
Amane wakes up in a body made of glass – translucent, glistening, and so very cold. A body that never breached five feet, adorned with an old school cap and a sticker on his cheek that itches when he thinks about it. A body of a ghost, if ghosts could even have them.
In this dream, he keeps his name tucked in his shallow school-slacks pocket, and instead goes by something that feels like an inside joke he can’t remember. And that’s okay by him, because it feels nice. It feels like a name someone might call a friend. It feels warm as handmade mittens.
And there’s a girl in this one. There always is. With long pale locks dipped in moondust, and a face he can’t remember when he wakes up. But he knows it’s kind. He knows her hands, soft and solid, fit perfectly between his jagged knuckles, speckled from a childhood he never quite had. He knows her voice, her laugh, her cries, and her silence.
He knows her.
He knows the old school that they’re always in too. And a boy with a staff made of lighting with a personality to match. He knows a woman with a temper sharp as her fangs, a boy with a voice loud enough to cover his insecurity, a man who might have once been his teacher – if he had about four fewer limbs, that is.
He knows the moon. How it sits on a horizon just out of reach. How it shimmers through his hands to produce a kaleidoscope of stars.
Amane’s not going anywhere when he dreams.
He’ll stay right there, feet planted two inches above the ground, and tethered by gentle hands made just for him.
And to be honest, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
And every day is the same.
Every day is a new gift, a new glimpse. Every day leaves him handling a new object with frostbitten fingers and a shaky heartbeat, watching the woman on the horizon.
Every day, she’s there.
And every day, so is he.
It’s a Wednesday that Amane makes up his mind.
She’s standing on the horizon, as usual. As always. Hair whipped from shattered nebulae and eyes beaming like supernovae. If Amane were younger, before the years of fighting with a root touch-up kit once a month and squinting behind even his thickest set of glasses, he might be a bit more frightened. Might pull out his abort mission card and haul himself back to an atmosphere he could breathe without a suit. Where the strangest things to exist were ancient alien pseudo-documentaries, corporate Christmas parties, and whatever his brother attempted to cook at 2 am.
But the space heater isn’t chugging like it used to, so more than anything, Amane just feels cold. And a little hungry. But mostly cold. And well, what’s a little more cold if your fingers are already turning blue?
So he does the only rational thing he can think of.
It goes something like this.
Pulls on his suit, his helmet, and even those too tight undergloves. Attaches his lure — the long one, just in case — to the inside of the base wall. Opens the hatch and heads out into the storm as if it were just another day. Another hour. Another breath.
And Amane makes his way into the snow.
And Amane never looks back.
Not for a second. A minute. A blink.
Not even when his feet crunch to a halt after what feels like an entire millennium of walking on crags of snow and ice, when the lure pulls taught and leaves him standing still.
And it’s quiet, despite the storm around him. Perhaps it’s just his helmet, or too many years of concert-going.
Amane waits.
He waits.
He does.
He waits for as long as he can, even past the beep of his first oxygen tank depleting.
He waits......
.......And it’s only until he lifts his foot, just ready to turn back to the station that might be miles away now, that he spots her.
Just an arm’s length away and a thousand lifetimes deep.
So close, that it makes him the slightest bit misty-eyed, even if he can’t say why, but he doesn’t dare blink. If he blinks, she might dissolve back into the vapors, to gas, to the stardust that ghosted its way just on the edge of his vision for most of his life.
There’s a hundred things Amane should do in this instant. The Intergalactic Creed — or whatever it was called — comes to mind for the briefest of seconds, but he can’t even remember it in his own native language to recite it. He can’t even remember what language he speaks to begin with.
But he does his best.
Takes two deep breaths in the place of aspirin and rolls his shoulders back in the way those guest speakers always did.
Flexes his hands in his too tight gloves.
Amane asks.
“What’s your name?” A pause and a harsh swallow. “I mean – my little brother. He always wanted to know.”
Breathe in. Hold it. Forget to breathe out until it starts to ache like old scars he keeps tucked between his fingers.
And she smiles. At least, he thinks she does – if the curve of teal is meant to be her mouth and the soft spots of lilac her eyes. Amane doesn’t even think as to whether or not she can hear him through his helmet, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Not in the slightest.
“And what about you?”
“I’d......like to know too,” he admits, a bit embarrassed.
And that’s all it takes.
Because suddenly, she’s laughing. It’s the gentlest sound he’s ever heard, and yet Amane isn’t even sure that it’s reaching him through his ears. More something of a spectrogram etched into his brainstem, just under the base of his skull where he gets headaches when it rains. It doesn’t feel like a headache though. It’s something he can’t describe, but finds it closest to weightlessness, or melted whipped cream, or hands that are meant just for him to hold.
“Okay, I’ll tell you Hana- ah, it’s Amane-kun this time, isn’t it?”
He nods, but he doesn’t quite understand.
So she takes a step forward, somehow not moving at all, and presses her forehead to his helmet.
And speaks.
Whispers. Sends his head spinning into zero gravity and ignites his nerves like firecrackers.
Aligns the stars, just for him, and sets a sky up to watch their majesty.
And the universe says, I love you.
I do.
I do.
I do.
Amane finds he doesn’t remember what she said later that day, or however long it takes him to get back to the base. The world around him still swirls in a hazy winter storm, if planets this far from home can have winter, or storms, or snow. His oxygen has begun to beep to dangerous levels by the time he makes it inside and peels off his suit. Silently, as if he’d break taboo if he spoke.
Amane knows two things though.
Number one, that his hot cocoa skills aren’t too shabby when he finally sits down to write a letter with that moon dangler pen he’d been saving all these years. He knows he won’t be able to send it until he makes it back home, where the word “mail” has meaning and there’s people to give it such, but that’s okay. It’s the thought that counts. Like a late Christmas present, or a lunch date rescheduled.
And number two, that his space heater miraculously works much better now. It still makes that odd ticking noise, but it’s something he’s learned to live with. Something he’s sure he’d miss, just a bit, if he ever did end up replacing it with a new one. Besides, he likes this one. It’s red. Red’s his favorite color.
And that night, when he finally does drift off, Amane dreams something of a jumbled mess, spliced together into a supercut of sepia-drenched nostalgia that smells oddly like strawberries. He doesn’t remember much of it, when he finally stirs awake, but he’s certain it had stars, and telescopes, and people who loved him.
Amane’s certain it was gentle.
And Amane’s more than certain it was warm.