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The sun is beginning to set, and they are all still out by the lake. Astral is standing a little ways away from the group—Yuma and Kotori and Tetsuo and Cathy and Takashi and Tokunosuke—with his pants rolled up to his knees and his feet dipped in the cool, shallow water. It’s a sensation he hasn’t yet grown accustomed to, one he’s not sure he ever wants to be. The water ripples with his slightest movement, there is a gentle wind, and the sky is that golden red he’s come to love.
There are no colors like this in the Astral World.
Around him is pure, undiluted summer. Tetsuo and Tokunosuke are playing in the deep end of the lake, shirts long cast aside, laughing as a spluttering Takashi scurries away from their splashing. Cathy is perched on the branch of the tall tree that reaches all the way across the water, swinging her legs in lazy circles and watching the boys the way a cat watches koi in a pond. Beneath her, leaning against the tree’s trunk, Yuma and Kotori are talking about something Astral can’t hear, and Kotori is laughing.
There is no happiness like this in the Astral World.
He closes his eyes, as if doing so might make this moment last longer.
Astral is used to being hollow, has been so for most of his existence, but he aches when he thinks of it now. It has been on his mind a lot lately how good and full of warmth his life had become when he wasn’t looking, and how much it would hurt to forget. His memory has failed him before, maybe more times than he himself knows. On sleepless nights—those when he lies silent as his head sinks into his pillow, when he counts his breaths and reaches his hand up to the ceiling far above, looking at the shape of it in the dark and thinking of the differences between starlight and flesh—he tries to remember as far back as he can, all the way to the moment of his creation. That voice he had once hoped was gentle was motherly was loving would be there, but was not. He can’t find a who, only a what: a purpose given and a sentence to live. And Eliphas’s hand shows here, in the gaps between the memories that the Numbers restored. There is blue-tinted static, and beneath it broken-up words with jagged edges that cut into him when he tries to hold them, interspaced only by fragments of the battle that made fragments of him. He can’t remember much of that, either. He remembers… a blinding light. An echo of the agony of being torn apart. He remembers Eliphas, only a glimpse of gold and blue, the feeling of hands firm on his shoulders, and then sleep and the nothingness that was worse than static. He doesn’t resent Eliphas. He can’t bring himself to, though he has tried.
(Somewhere, he is aware of a loud splash and Cathy’s laugh joining Tetsuo and Tokunosuke’s. He is aware of movement because the water ripples and laps at his legs.)
Some time after he had returned to Earth, a little after he was taken in by the Tsukumos, Kazuma and Mirai pulled him aside and asked. They looked at him with pity when he explained this, and they said there was more there than just sleep. At least once he must have been awake, for he had met them, and during that time, they told him, he had been loved. Astral believes them, even if that version of himself is dead now. How can he be that person, still, shaped by those experiences of having known and been loved by them, if he remembers none of it?
(The water has calmed a bit. There is the rustling of tall grass and the sound of Kotori’s voice pitching into a question which Yuma replies to.)
So much of Astral has been taken from himself, by Eliphas, by battle, by his own mutinous memories. He knows it won’t happen again—he knows it, he hopes it—but the knowledge that it could is too much to bear. It should be impossible that all this growth be made nothing, that he be made empty without knowing he had ever been so full. And yet it would be so easy. It would be so easy, and not even he would know to mourn himself.
(Astral has his eyes closed, and he keeps them closed, as if like this he can burn this moment into the back of his eyelids, and, should he forget again, all he need do is blink and there would be his friends and the love they share, and he would remember, then, and he could never be made hollow again—)
“Astral!” calls a voice, bringing him back to the present. Astral opens his eyes to find Yuma bounding up to him and into the lake, casting ripples like a sea where he steps. “Here, here, Astral. Hold out your hands and make a cup with them.”
“For what?” Astral asks.
“Come on! Just do it.” Yuma has something cupped in his own hands.
Astral does.
With his tongue poking out between his lip, Yuma tips his hand and jostles it until something drops into Astral’s waiting ones. Whatever it is wiggles around and makes Astral jump.
“Don’t drop it!” cries Yuma. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to catch? Look, but don’t let it out yet!”
Astral peeks through the crack he makes between his fingers and is surprised to see a small green light flitting about, like a little stray star. He blinks. To his amazement, the star blinks back. He stares at it for a moment, watching it glitter, before pulling his eyes away.
“It’s a firefly,” Yuma says, anticipating his question. “When Mom and Dad would take us on camping trips, me and Akari would make it a competition to see who could catch the most.” He thumps a fist against his chest. “I always won.”
“Yet you just said just this one was difficult to catch. Curious.”
“Oi!”
Hiding a smile, Astral returns his attention to the little life in his hands. Its body is fuzzy and it tickles Astral’s palms whenever it bumps into them in its erratic flight.
“It’s lovely.” It is. It makes him think of stillness, somehow. “Why does it glow?” Astral asks Yuma.
“Fireflies are bioluni—biolumini— bi-o-lu-mi-nes-cent.” He lets the word linger in the air, making sure the sound of it settles right or at least close enough before he continues. “That means they make their own light. Something about the chemicals in their body lets them glow. Dad told me that’s how they communicate.”
Astral peers back at him. “Like a code?”
“Yeah, I think so! The patterns they make tell other fireflies what they’ve seen or how they’re feeling.” Yuma looks thoughtful. “Or was that bees..?”
This is a novel concept to Astral. The firefly in his hands glows, and dims. Glows, and dims. Glows… and dims. And then it glows again. What could it be trying to say, he wonders.
“‘Hey, why’s it so dark in here?’ probably,” Yuma tells him when he voices the question.
That seems likely, yes. Astral keeps looking between his fingers and wondering, too, about his old body, the one made of solid light. Bioluminescent. He had been that too, hadn’t he?
“And me?” he asks Yuma.
“And you what?” A gust of wind catches their hair, making them both shiver. They are still standing in the water, and they are the only two in the world.
“What did I tell you, when I used to glow?”
“Oh.” Yuma makes a face like he hadn’t thought about it. “I don’t know. It was pretty though. Sometimes you glowed really, really bright—”
Astral remembers that. It had been the only physical sensation he could experience besides pain, and, had he been asked, he wouldn’t have known how to describe it besides just that: not painful. Now when he thinks on it he is reminded of a cup being filled with water if water could be made of pure radiance. It was a living, pulsing thing, a joy that thrummed through him like something electric and ecstatic and tingling, like the blinding, precipitous spark he felt more than saw the night Yuma took him to a summer festival, seconds before fireworks burst in air and the world became all awash in colors impossible on Astral’s home world.
It is true that Astral doesn’t know what to call this feeling yet, and it’s true that he doesn’t remember much, but he’s certain he never glowed that way before Yuma.
Astral extends his cupped hands toward Yuma without thinking, and Yuma instinctively covers them with his own. This feeling, too, is one Astral knows he will never tire of.
Yuma’s head is tilted quizzically, but he’s smiling. Teasing. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Never mind that. What do I do with it?” he asks Yuma in a whisper, because they are standing close enough for it. He glances down at their hands to indicate the firefly.
“You let it go.” Yuma’s eyes are very large. They always have been, but it’s especially easy to be stricken by them when the light catches them just right like the sun sinking below the horizon is doing now, and Astral can’t look away. Sunsets and fireworks and Yuma’s eyes. Colors that don’t exist anywhere else but here, now.
“Then why catch it?”
Yuma shrugs. He’s whispering too, like it’s a secret. “For fun. To show you.”
Warmth blooms in Astral’s chest, and maybe it’s that he looks at Yuma too fondly, too helplessly, because Yuma’s gaze drifts away briefly, down at their joined hands. And maybe it’s because of the light, but when Yuma looks back up at Astral, grinning, his face looks a little red.
“Anyway, we can always catch another,” he says, and Astral hears the promise in his voice: on Earth, together, there can be infinite days like this. They can make them for themselves.
“Thank you,” Astral says, and Yuma isn’t bioluminescent, but he glows anyway.
“Ready, then?” His hands are warm over Astral’s. Astral nods.
Yuma opens his hands and Astral opens his in a way that they move in tandem, and the firefly flies out. It hovers in the air between them for a precious second and then is gone to meet its friends rising from the grass. Astral follows its flight path with his eyes until he loses it in the sea of green stars-on-Earth.
Their friends call them over from the lakeside, where Cathy leans against Kotori as the boys sit shivering and wrapped in their towels beside them. Astral blinks at the sight; he hadn’t even heard them leave the water. He follows Yuma out of the lake to join them. Kotori whispers something to Yuma that makes him shake his head and go beet-red, and when Astral sits down Tetsuo claps him on the back and Tokunosuke gets a sly grin for reasons Astral doesn’t understand, but that’s alright. Astral doesn’t know much about easy friendship like this, but he can learn. He draws his knees to his chest, content. He has all the time in the world now.
...
They decide to stay out for a little while longer because they still have snacks left over in the ice box and Yuma knows how to start a campfire and there is nowhere else they would rather be and there are so many fireflies out that the grass looks like the night sky. They huddle around the fire and tell stories, some scary, most not. Later, they will chase after fireflies and make a contest of who can catch the most.