Chapter Text
Togata knew the truth behind the night sky. Togata had lived for so long, so, so long, and he knew every mirage of hope burning up in every star.
But just because it was the truth and it was real didn’t make it any more interesting—reality hardly ever was—than the lies humans would spin for the sole sake of spinning them. People liked to create their own meanings for constellations that already had long, boring histories that would likely explode their brains just to know. Togata’s brain already exploded at the turn of each century so that kind of knowledge didn’t interest him at all, but myths, legends, folktales, on the other hand…
Stories were just as succinct as they were fascinating. He’d choose any number of them over a brain explosion any day.
“Togata-san, do you see that?” Neneto pointed an eager finger toward the sky. Togata’s eyes followed the line of her finger until he found what she was looking at.
“Ah. Shooting star,” he said. “Haven’t seen one of those in… A couple decades, at least.”
He omitted the part where he, prior to meeting Agni, did not go outside very often at all. Before his movies burned up he’d stay inside watching movies all day, and after his movies burned up he’d curl up in bed wallowing in the fact that he couldn’t watch movies anymore. There was even a point where he’d stare up at the dark ceiling of his room and try to imagine the films in his mind, scene by scene, frame by frame, projected out of nothingness. The comfort of that lasted just a few months before he began to forget some scenes, or the way a certain character looked, what exactly they were saying in a conversation. If only he’d been blessed with something like memory preservation. Enhanced regeneration abilities seemed utterly useless in comparison.
In the light of the shooting star, Neneto’s eyes grew wide and childlike. Sometimes Togata would forget that she was only thirteen. He wondered if he was ever amazed by anything that much when he was still thirteen.
“It’s so pretty,” said thirteen-year-old, star-struck Neneto. Togata hummed, tried to refrain from pointing out that it was just a flaming hunk of space rock falling rather slowly through the atmosphere. Kinda ruins the magic of it all.
The magic. “Aren’t you gonna make a wish?” He asked her.
Neneto tilted her head to one side. “Make a wish?”
“Yeah, like…” Togata began, clearing his throat, curling his arms around his knees, and cursing everyone on this earth for constantly needing things explained to them. “A very, very long time ago, long before I was even born, there were these ancient civilizations made up of Greeks and Romans. You don’t need to know anything more about them except that they got into fights a lot and came up with some really bizarre myths. Incest, and castration, and the occasional patricide, but mostly incest. Fun stuff.”
Neneto pulled a face as if to say she didn’t find those things very fun, but Togata couldn’t care less about what she found fun or not. He was the one with the creative vision here. He could make a story about incest into the most poetic goddamn thing anyone has ever seen, and if Agni’s weird yearning for his sister is anything to go by, he just might have to.
“Basically,” he continued, “…these Greeks and Romans believed that shooting stars were the result of the gods peering down at the earth from between their two spheres, and sometimes when they did this, a handful of stars would slip out from the gap. These stars appeared to be shooting across the sky, and so they were called shooting stars.”
Shooting stars were often said to forecast some monumental event, either good or bad, which is why the gods were sneaking a peak at the earth, I guess. And at some point, people started to make wishes when they saw a shooting star, either for the gods to bless them or protect them if the monumental event turned out to be a really bad one. But nowadays you can make a wish about pretty much anything.”
Togata had always found the intensity of Neneto and Agni’s stares while he told them stories a bit unsettling. The way they hung onto his every word as if he were their prophet, when it was supposed to be Agni playing their god… He wasn’t sure how they’d been able to fool anyone like this.
“Okay, then…” Neneto closed her eyes. “I wish that—”
“You’re not supposed to make your wish out loud, dumbass!" Togata interrupted. "And the shooting star already passed, anyway.”
Neneto looked to the sky for confirmation that the shooting star did, indeed, pass. Togata watched as her expression fell, just for a moment, before she closed her eyes again.
“Your rules are stupid so I’m gonna ignore them,” she declared. She then drew her hands to her chest and clasped them together, her knuckles forming ten sturdy arcs in prayer.
“I wish that… That at night, Agni wouldn’t have to scream so loud. I wish he could sleep peacefully, without being in so much pain.”
She let the weight of her wish linger for a while, before a cold wind pushed it up, up, up into the sky to be taken in by the gods. Togata doubted that they’d have much leverage in granting it for her, but…
“That’s a very selfless wish of you,” he said.
“Yeah, but it also means that I don’t have to hear him screaming in the middle of the night, which benefits my sleep, too.”
“So you are being a selfish brat.”
“Hey! Don’t act like you wouldn’t wish for the same thing.”
“Are you crazy?” Togata leaned back, supporting the weight of his upper body on his elbows alone. He could barely feel the snow through his spacesuit. “I wouldn’t waste my wish on something like that.”
“Then what would you wish for, Togata-san?” Neneto asked. It was a genuine question—she’d always been curious about him, he could tell—but Togata wasn’t about to tell her that he’d already made his wish. The second he saw the star streak across the sky, the wish had already crossed his mind. It’d always been inside of him, this wish, even if its only destiny was to get caught inside the star’s gravitational pull and turn to dust in its descent. Neneto wouldn’t be curious about him anymore, if she knew about all that. It was the same pathetic wish he made everyday—a wish that haunted him, a wish like a curse.
He didn’t tell her any of that because it would most likely confuse her, and she would look at him weird and Togata’s used to getting looked at weird but never because of that. It would change her perception of him, irreversibly, and Togata just couldn’t live with that. Knowing he allowed that to happen again.
So, he kept his wish to himself. She would never be able to understand, and he could live with that better than any alternative.
“...You know, Neneto, they also had this dumb nursery rhyme to go with shooting stars—well, normal stars, too—but I like it better in English,” he told her. There’d been a lengthy, leaden pause between Neneto’s question and his not-answer, but she didn’t seem to mind the quiet. Snowflakes were beginning to fall, and they clung to the snow like tiny specks of stardust.
“It goes like this: twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are." His own singing voice wasn't so bad, just higher in pitch than how he wanted it to sound. "Got it? Your turn.”
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are…” Neneto, on the other hand, sang egregiously off-key, but her English pronunciation was surprisingly good. Those lessons he gave them on various curse words must’ve really paid off.
“Hey, not bad! You could step in to be Agni’s teacher if I ever kick the bucket.”
Judging by her expression, the phrase seemed to go right over her head.
“Kick the… What?”
“…I’ll explain that one another day.”
That night, like every night, amid the villagers’ restless sleep and Agni’s tortured screams, Togata made his wish.
Please, God, let me rest easy tonight, and please allow me to die in my sleep. Please let me be born again into a world so far, far, far away from here. Please let me be born with the face of a man and the body of a man, with the masculine voice and flat chest of a man, with the penis of a man that swings between my legs like a baseball bat. I want to win the golden trophy that’ll sit behind plexiglass for a century. I want to jerk off into my glove and I want the climax to feel like victory. Please, God, let me be the protagonist of that movie.
And when his wish was done, after all the villagers had long been asleep and Agni had ceased his tortured screams, Togata himself drifted off into a dream. All night and through morning, the heart inside his chest continued to beat, beat, beat…