Work Text:
Being left a legacy is a little intimidating.
When they’re in the beginning processes of delegating the many tasks required to cultivate a new planet, Tomi chooses bioengineering because she likes the implications of the job. Her labmates are a pain at first—Gouto is more exacting than her math teacher back home, Shinonome’s personality is not unlike cut metal, and Okino is frustratingly ambiguous even when Hijiyama’s not helping out in the lab. But somehow they soften over time; it’s hard to maintain annoyances when there’s only fifteen people around on the planet.
For a while, everything progresses swimmingly. Considering that everyone’s still adjusting to their new circumstances while angsting over the psychological implications of essentially being test-tube babies for their whole lives, Tomi thinks she’s handling things alright. She wrangles the utilitarian jumpsuits that the computer spat out at them when they first emerged into something actually flattering. The first seeds she successfully synthesizes are camphor seedlings that will grow up to be the same fragrant trees that bowed over the gates of Sakura High. Tomi even does some digging in the staggeringly large online library that their predecessors left behind and finds some wonderful pop numbers that she plays on repeat in her corner of the lab until Shinonome pointedly pulls her headset low over her ears for the rest of the day.
So it comes as a surprise when a few months after they left the pods Tomi wakes up in the dead of night and realizes that she’s extremely sad. Like, super bummed. She misses her parents, hates the fact that she doesn’t know if her parents were ever real, and feels desperately lonely even though she knows that Megumi is right next door and Iori’s just across the hall. Tomi tries crying a little, but it just makes her feel more pathetic so she determinedly wipes her nose, shoves her sneakers on, and goes for a walk.
Outside is lovely and cool, though there’s a pinch in the air that hints at an early fall. Or maybe it’s a just-in-time fall—Gouto has observed that some infographics have stated that RS-13 Alpha has a similar rotation axis to Earth’s, albeit with a few marginal differences that have only resulted in shorter seasons. Regardless, Tomi shivers as she plods out of the apartment complex, rubbing her bare arms as she scans the grounds.
Due to their unique circumstances, Tomi’s not the only one awake despite the late hour. She can see Miura star-gazing on the roof, and the warehouse where Takamiya had set up a makeshift training gym hides a sliver of light underneath its sliding doors. But Tomi nearly jumps out of her skin when a gruff voice calls her name behind her. “Yo.”
“What the heck are you doing up?” Tomi hisses once both of her feet are back on the ground. “It’s the middle of the night!”
“You’re one to talk.” Ogata looks her over and grimaces. “You’re going to freeze, by the way.”
“I’m fine,” Tomi snaps, but too late, the big lug is already shrugging off his jacket and throwing it in her face.
“Just take it,” he grunts, red but still maintaining eye contact. “If you catch a cold, it’ll be bad for all of us.”
Tomi grumbles, but the jacket is warm and she slides her goosebumpy arms through the too-big sleeves. She snuggles into it and finds to her surprise that it actually smells kind of nice. Earthy and cozy.
Tomi looks back up at Ogata to tell him “thanks” and blinks at the way he’s looking at her. Exasperated, fond, and something deeper that she doesn’t have the nerve to unpack yet. It’s a look that she’s seeing on him more and more, and the strange warmth that had burgeoned on the day he confessed his feelings for her burns in her gut like a tiny tealight—too small to warm anything but impossible to ignore.
Tomi’s still not entirely sure what they are, at the moment. Dating feels like too real of a word. It has this cutesy sound that she only really attributes to Juro and Megumi, who are the sort of saccharine sweet couple who feed each other at every meal and hold hands no matter where they go. To say that she and Ogata are doing the same thing feels a little cheap.
“Better?” Ogata asks, and Tomi starts, jerking back to the present.
“Fine! Just fine!” She laughs a little too high, then winces when a light comes on in Sekigahara’s room.
“Come on, you shrew,” Ogata groans, and grabs her hand through the oversized sleeve. Tomi does shriek this time, but without batting an eye he pulls her after him with a speed belying his lanky frame and makes a beeline for the rice paddy.
Ogata is in charge of landscaping—well, it’s a general term for all of the hard labor he and the more physically-inclined have been doing. Irrigation, leveling, clearing—all of it brings Ogata a sort of fierce joy that Tomi doesn’t think she’s ever seen in him before. It’s a good look on him—much better than brawling, at least. She thinks he might even be standing straighter now, his shoulders broader.
Not that she’s looking, or anything. Geez.
“I forgot to cover this part of the field earlier today.” Ogata nudges a heap of plastic blue agricultural tarpaulin by the edge of the field with his foot. “We should do it before I get an earful from Okino.”
Tomi squints at him, momentarily dumbfounded. “This is your idea of a romantic getaway? Manual labor?”
Ogata makes a face back at her. “I’m just tryin’ to get your mind off things. You’re gonna roll with me or not?”
“Fine.” Tomi trails behind him as he shuffles over to the tarp’s flapping corners. “How did you know I was feeling weird?”
He grabs the corner and hands it to her. “Heard you cryin’.”
Tomi flushes and opens her mouth to tell him off, but Ogata just shoves more tarp into her arms until she’s staggering under its weight. He ignores her sputtering and shoulders the rest without much effort, much to her chagrin.
“Come on, put some back into it,” Ogata calls, adding insult to injury. He kicks off his sandals and begins splashing through the glittering field, spreading tarp as he goes.
Tomi huffs, but as she gingerly follows Ogata and mimics his actions as best as her much smaller frame could. He points out which parts of the field to cover and which to leave to the open air—she begins recognizing the little planted flags indicating the levels of nitrogen-based fertilizer that Okino had been in charge of overseeing. It’s not her first time out in the field in person, but it’s eye-opening to see the actual results in person instead of as little numbers on a screen.
This soft little contemplation quickly fades into reality as Tomi hurries to keep up with Ogata’s breakneck pace. At one point, one of her sneakers gets stuck in the mud and she yelps as her feet get immediately flooded with icy cold water. As Ogata cackles, she scowls and yanks off her shoes, stuffing her socks inside, and wades back into the muck clutching the crinkly plastic tarp.
“You’re an ass,” Tomi grumbles as soon as he’s within swatting distance again. But Ogata just takes the hit with a grin, the boyish kind that changes the entirety of his face until Tomi relaxes into that mutuality of his company, the kind that has always made her feel a little more ready to face the world and its myriad of problems again.
Soon, the entire field is properly covered with blue tarpaulin and secured with chicken wire. The timed sprinkler system that Miura and Natsuno had installed kicks on suddenly and sends them scrambling for dry land, sputtering and laughing until the fog of gloom that had lingered so heavily over Tomi earlier fades to a distant cloud on her mind’s horizon.
“Feel better?” Ogata asks her later, when they’re washing their feet and hands by the water pump and drying off their shoes. The sky is a little less dark, and a tiny hint of pre-dawn blue has begun creeping across the sky. Tomi is aching in places she didn’t realize she had and feeling the lack of sleep badly, but she feels lighter than she had in weeks.
“Yeah, I think,” she replies, running her glasses underneath the stream and squinting through them. She sees Ogata through a rainbow streak of errant water and grins, sliding the lenses back onto her nose. “I needed this. Thanks.”
“Anytime,” Ogata says, his smile magnified by a thousand water drops.
The next morning, when they meet in the lab to make their usual reports, Gouto looks at Tomi with a very suspicious tilt of his head and asks her if she wouldn’t like to help with landscaping duties during her afternoons? It’s a less busy time and it might be good for her health.
Tomi considers punching him, rethinks it, and asks in a too-bright voice why he brought it up.
“It’s good to take some air every now and then,” is all Gouto would say, and then makes it official in his omnipresent logbook.
Maybe she does it because she really does have an unfortunately huge crush on Ogata, or maybe it’s because of some cosmic debt she somehow owes the original Tomi Kisaragi (who was one of the more well-adjusted members of the 2188 colony, all things considered), but Tomi throws herself into her physical work with a fervor that surprises even herself. It takes some getting used to—developing calluses hurts a lot, and she begins tying her hair into a single braid instead of two so they won’t keep getting in her way, but Tomi is surprised at how much she likes it—at getting her hands deep into the soil and squeezing, like she’s pushing life back into the ground.
She’ll take all the good vibes she can get. Winter has seized the planet with some sort of seasonal depression, and the general mood of its fifteen inhabitants falters a little. Tomi counts herself lucky that she’s found her equilibrium pretty early on, because for some people their idea of therapy is punching the living daylights out of someone until the entire colony comes running to stop the brawl.
For once, Ogata didn’t start the fight. He is sporting a nasty black eye after getting between Hijiyama and Takamiya’s flying fists, but Tomi’s just glad enough that he didn’t get knocked unconscious or anything. Treating possible brain damage is not something she wants to deal with on top of everything else.
“That hurts,” Ogata complains as Tomi gingerly presses the toweled ice pack against his face. “And I can do it myself.”
“You really want to?” Tomi presents the pack to him and smirks in satisfaction when he grumbles and relents. She wrestles his head back into her lap and nudges the ice pack against his face again. “Just stay still.”
Ogata obeys, but she can see the gleam of his eyes piercing through his mop of hair as she hums softly, trying to emulate Megumi and failing miserably. But even a year of maturity does little to temper her propensity for gossip.
“So who started the fight? Was it Takamiya-san? I would put money on her. Amiguchi’s been real mopey lately.”
“I dunno,” Ogata turns his head a little and makes a hiss as the pack touches a tender spot. “I don’t think the two of them had any real beef; she probably just wanted to punch somebody.”
“Why not you then?” Tomi asks. “I thought you guys would be excited to beat each other up without any baggage.”
“Usually,” Ogata concedes, “but I really don’t know. Maybe they had something personal to work out. Hijiyama can be a real pain in the ass sometimes.”
“I thought Hijiyama had hang-ups about—you know, about hitting girls,” Tomi comments with a frown.
“I think he’s moved past that,” Ogata says in a wryly amused tone. Tomi feels him moving restlessly on the couch and kicks him in the shin.
“Hold still!”
“I am!” he complains, but Tomi crossly grabs his hand in hers and folds it across her knee. He stills at that, and Tomi relishes the brief respite as she starts humming again. It’s the idol song that Ryoko hates with a passion, but Ogata relaxes in her grasp until he starts lightly snoring—she scoffs at him and puts aside the ice pack, running her hand through his hair and wondering when this has become their new normal.
Okay, she’ll admit it. This isn’t half-bad.
“Production is coming along smoothly.” The 2188 version of Tomi Kisaragi speaks in clear, clipped tones, consulting a tablet of some kind as she addresses the camera. “At Professor Morimura’s suggestion, we added a few extra months of production for contingency’s sake, but so far no obvious anomalies have been detected. We’re ahead of schedule. I’m honestly surprised things are going so well thus far.”
Despite her optimism, this Kisaragi seems far more tired than in the first recording Tomi has seen of her; her hair frays from her thick plait and at one point she removes her glasses to wipe tiredly at them. Without her thick lenses, the face behind the monitor looks a little younger, sweeter—a face made to sing and smile at crowds of cheering fans.
“Regardless, I’ll have to finish the actual write-ups of the projections tomorrow—the planet should have one final shipment of terraforming drones shipped and…”
The Kisaragi-on-the-screen trails off. A good few seconds of silence pass as her shoulder visibly hunch, and she rubs at her eyes with the heel of her palm. When she speaks up again, her voice is a little thinner. “If I had a little less coffee in me, I think I’d be more terrified about this whole thing, but, well. I mustn’t let down the professor.”
Kisaragi reels in a fortifying breath and stares down the camera with slightly bleary eyes, but the determination in them is still the same. “1800 years. I’ll have to make sure the ship is in perfect working condition so that our efforts aren’t in vain. I suppose conducting another round of checks wouldn’t hurt.”
The log ends, and Tomi sits in flickering static as she gazes up at the frozen image, thinking quietly.
“You okay?” Nenji asks gruffly, nudging her with his shoulder.
“I think so.” Tomi reaches over and switches off the monitor. The light from the screen winks out, leaving them in a dimly lit laboratory long after quiet hours. They’re alone for once, and the soft liminal hum of the servers add a hypnotic quality to the cavernous chambers.
“Are there more?” Nenji asks, but Tomi shakes her head.
“That’s the last one she recorded,” she says, burrowing back under the blanket stretched between the two of them. “The only remaining correspondence I could find from her was a report on command ship specs for Professor Morimura’s approval. Nothing personal, nothing about family or anything.”
Nenji makes a distracted sound, and Tomi knows that he’s thinking about the original Ogata’s final log: a bloody, drawn out gunfight between the original Juro, Okino, and Hijiyama. He refuses to let her see it, not out of pride but because it’s genuinely difficult to watch, but he’s given her the gist of things.
“They had it rough, in those last few days. It was either them or the future, right? I thought the original Ogata had turned a new leaf or somethin’ when he supported Project Ark, but then I realized that he was just thinking about things the way a jackass CEO would. Securing his future assets or something, like he was expecting to make it out of that shithole. It really made me sick; he was so goddamn full of himself.”
Tomi knows that the fifteen of them have watched the logs of their original selves at some point or another, dealing with their own bundle of complicated feelings regarding their predecessors, but she can’t help but be grimly proud of her original self. Kisaragi was clearly scared, younger than most of the remaining 2188 colonists, but she pushed through with her work regardless of the dwindling life support in the colony. The ship they had emerged from exists because of her: a metal womb created thousands of years ago in the desperation of a dwindling race.
Tomi tries not to think about it too hard, but sometimes she wishes she can say thank you to the Kisaragi-on-the-screen. Genetically, she’s probably the closest thing to a parent she’s got, and if Tomi were a more sentimental person she'd consider her family.
But now, as she stares upward at the dull static of the screen lighting up the darkness of the quiet laboratory, Tomi knows the best she can do instead is to make sure all her hard work is worth it.
She glances up into Nenji’s face. The planes of his face are faintly bluish from the glow of the screens, but they come into more relief as he looks down at her.
“You okay?” Tomi asks him this time, seeing a preoccupied scowl on his face.
Nenji waves aside her concern and pulls her tighter into his arms. Tomi grunts when his chin knocks into her forehead and smushes her face into his neck, but he’s warm and solid-feeling as she winds her knobby arms around him and holds on tight.
“‘M’ glad you’re here,” he mumbles into the crown of her head, and Tomi can’t scoff at him because her mouth is against his heart.
It takes some convincing, but Gouto finally relents and lets Tomi and Megumi plant the orange sapling they’ve been cultivating for months now in front of the apartment complex.
It’s not a real tree yet, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a determined little sapling, having braved the winter and proudly put forth new leaves that are so shiny and green they look artificial. It’s not old enough to bud, but Tomi can just picture it in her mind’s eye: a gorgeous gnarled tree heavy with oranges and flowers, pretty as can be.
As they sit in the shade after hauling the tiny sapling over and digging out a suitable hole, Megumi pulls down her sunhat and fans herself with it. Summer heat has always given her a pretty, flattering flush while Tomi has to fight her uneven blotches of red with loads of sunscreen and cold baths.
“I wonder why there are whole bunches of softwood and hardwood trees all over the planet and not a single fruit tree in sight.” Tomi gulps down her barley tea and kicks her browning feet. “It’s almost like they were thinking too much about lumber productions to cultivate that aspect of civilization.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Megumi chides gently. “They left a variety of fruit saplings and seedlings in storage and in the synthesizers. And there are some breeds only achievable through cross-breeding.”
“Either way,” Tomi fumes, massaging her temple before she gets a headache from the sun’s glare, “it seems weird that they just left it like that.”
“Maybe they thought of it as something kind,” Megumi suggests. “To make rediscoveries so that we can choose how we cultivate things going forward.”
Tomi wrinkles her nose. “It’s a nice way to say that they just left us extra work. What with everything else, some species won’t be around for years.”
“I think it’s fun,” Megumi smiles, all soft curves and beautiful eyes, and not for the first time Tomi is a little jealous of Juro. “Even if we can’t complete them in our lifetime, we can at least set up things for the next generation to take over.”
“Well, sheesh, Megumi,” Tomi says after a beat of stunned silence. “You’re already thinking that far ahead?”
Megumi blushes and ducks her head a little. “I guess I’m still trying to make reparations…it’s the least that I can do. To make everything worth it, in the end.”
“Hey.” Tomi grabs Megumi’s hand and squeezes it tight. “Just us being here? Friends, like before? Alive and in one piece? I think that’s plenty good enough.”
Megumi squeezes back, warm as summer. “Thank you, Tomi. I’m trying to think that way—I really am.”
“And that’s enough for me,” Tomi says fiercely.
Megumi smiles at her, and behind and between them waves the little orange sapling, its leaves stretching forth in the wind for just a little more of sun.
There are days when Tomi feels bowled over by the enormity of what’s been left to them.
In the laboratory, there’s a server room meant to archive the entirety of humanity's digital footprint, which essentially boiled down to what the last fifteen survivors managed to salvage before the nanomachines ravaged the Earth.
It’s depressingly empty.
On busy days, Tomi sits in the cool and quiet server room to get her head on right. No one else really frequents it; the folks from older sectors don’t quite understand its purpose, and the few who do view it as a sort of a graveyard. Other than Tomi, only Okino comes to visit the server room, and even then it’s just for maintenance.
It’s not like they have nothing. There’s enough for several libraries: digital book collections, archived streaming websites, emulation systems, even detailed files on laws and systems of government. Subjects range from the practical to the nonsensical, including recipe books written in foreign languages, modern and traditional sewing patterns, and even mini biopics on famous celebrities dating from the 21st century and earlier. Tomi does further digging and finds museum guides with color photography, schematics of Western cars and telescope galleries with their hundreds of years of space exploration. Somewhere Okino unearths a whole file on outdated emojis, which he wastes no time in teaching the old-timers with uncharacteristic satisfaction.
But in the shadow of these artifacts Tomi sees a distinct missingness—the notable absence of certain countries’ entire cultural histories, missing or corrupted files on shadow governments that may have contributed to the nanomachine disaster. Even encyclopedias are missing pages from entries covering destroyed war monuments and the murky origins of prestigious stockholders. There is so much clumsily rewritten material that Tomi is close to scrapping out of frustration before she remembers that there’s no sense in destroying further what’s been left to them to rebuild.
The whole shittiness about the situation gives Tomi another existential crisis in the middle of the empty server room, but she thinks she understands now the urgency in Morimura’s voice, the grief in the 2188 Kisaragi’s too-young eyes. This—this empty server room with its missing entries and incomplete histories—is the whole point, to smash the hardening concrete poured over craters and turn it into fertilizer for green flowers, to repair the damage left by the past and build anew.
To remind herself of this, Tomi drags a milk crate into the server room, its slightly smudged wooden exterior at distinct odds with its sleek metal surroundings, and places some of the first flowering branches of the orange tree inside a bottle of water on top.
“That’s pretty,” Okino remarks the next time he comes to perform his minor maintenance.
“It is,” Tomi concedes grimly.
One day, despite all her talk and blather, Tomi realizes that she’s late.
Tomi has been quite pleased to find a nice, healthy supply of safe contraceptives that have been provided in the laboratory’s infirmary. Considering herself one of the more worldly members of their little group, she’s taken upon herself to educate her friends about safe sex practices, mostly because she’s one of the few who can talk freely about such matters without bursting into flames or shutting down. It’s quite helpful, seeing how many of them are steadily moving into each other’s quarters as naturally as anything.
Then Tomi glances at the little hanging calendar beside her desk one day, does a startled double-take, and then her brain short-circuits. She dimly hears herself sit down heavily with a stunned little thump.
Shit. The one time we didn’t and—
She allows herself a few minutes of pure, unadulterated panic before scrambling out of her seat, babbling some harebrained excuse to a bemused Gouto, and then flying to the infirmary wing to dig around in its cabinets for the untouched box of pregnancy tests that she knows exists somewhere. She’s shaking out drawers with increasing terror before someone carefully clears their throat and Tomi nearly jumps out of her skin. “Gah!”
“Er…” Ryoko takes in the mess on the floor with a careful look on her face. “You left in a hurry. Are you…okay?”
“Geez, senpai, you scared the crap out of me,” Tomi groans, but she forces her trembling fingers to still before she carefully slides an errant drawer back into its shelf. “I…um, was just looking for something.”
“Are you feeling sick?” Ryoko bends down to pick up the rolling tubes of antiseptics. “I can get Okino…or Tamao…”
“No! Er, not yet—” Tomi winces and slumps against the cabinet, removing her glasses and pressing the heels of her palms against her eyes. “Can you promise not to tell anyone?”
“Tell anyone what?” Ryoko asks, her concern melting into a sharp professionalism. Tomi usually finds her stiffness a little grating but at this moment it’s exactly what she needs.
“I might be…er…”
Tomi whispers the next word and Ryoko’s mouth falls open.
“O-oh.” Ryoko looks around quickly, the color mounting to her cheeks, but she bites her lip and strides over to one of the drawer units that Tomi had not ransacked. She plucks a box out of the second drawer and hands it over.
“Do you want it?” She asks as Tomi takes the box gratefully. “The baby, I mean.”
“I mean, I don’t even know if it even exists,” Tomi says with a watery laugh. At Ryoko’s stolid expression, she wilts. “I dunno. I wasn’t planning on this for a while. Nenji mentioned it once, and I was like, ‘yeah!’ but both of us thought it would be like a distant future thing. Not a—not a right-now thing.”
“Mmm.” Ryoko continues regarding Tomi with her steady expression.
Tomi squirms under her scrutiny and wishes, not the first time, that her mom was here. Mom would understand—she’d hug Tomi and tell her that no matter what she decided, she would be on her side.
Tomi’s eyes begin watering at an alarming rate at the thought and Ryoko clucks her tongue sharply. “Come on.”
She takes Tomi by the shoulders and begins herding her down the hall towards the bathrooms. “Just take the test. If you aren’t pregnant you can forget about this.”
“Fat chance of that happening,” Tomi gulps, trying not to let her lip quiver, but Ryoko unsympathetically kicks Tomi through the bathroom door.
“Just do it. I’ll be in the infirmary.”
Tomi lets the door fall shut behind her and sags against the wall. But Ryoko’s briskness has steadied her nerves enough so that she takes the test with only minimal anxiety. But the entire time she can feel her pulse thrumming against her throat, fluttering like a bird ready to take off into a strange, uncharted sky.
By the time she emerges, Ryoko’s cleaned up most of the mess in the infirmary. She’s sliding one of the last boxes of gauze onto the shelves when Tomi comes back into the room, calm.
“Well?” Ryoko asks.
Tomi smiles.
“You could’ve told me,” Nenji says afterwards. “I hate that you got scared and I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t know.” Tomi squeezes his knee. “And it’s fine. I think I just freaked out because it was so out of left field. We’ve barely been here for three years. Heck, we’re not even married yet! And all of a sudden this happens and I just…” she sighs. “I dunno. I lost my cool.”
“I would’ve too.” Nenji’s hands move through her hair, slow and careful. “I’m glad you’re alright now.”
“Me too.” Tomi smirks. But then her smile falls away and she sighs. “A part of me is torn, though.”
Nenji stills. “Why?”
Tomi twists around to look at him and ignores his swear when her unfinished braid slithers out of his hands. “Listen, Nenji. I do want to have a family with you. I want a kid with your stupid eyebrows and my hair. But I also want a bit more time with just the two of us before anything happens. Because if we have a kid, that little brat is going to be tagging along with us for a long time. So stick with me for good, okay? Because I’m not quite ready to give you up just yet.”
Nenji stares at her in stunned silence for a moment before a startled laugh leaves his lips. “Well, shit.”
“What?” Tomi demands, her face heating up. “Are you laughing at me?”
“No way.” Nenji shifts around her. “I wasn’t going to do this today, but close your eyes for a sec.”
“Why?” Tomi asks with suspicion.
“Just do it,” Nenji says exasperatedly.
Tomi obliges, closing her eyes. She raises an eyebrow when she feels his hand fumbling across her body. “Don’t try to pull a move on me, mister.”
“Keep your eyes shut,” Nenji scolds, but something in his voice seems off to her. She’s about to ask him what’s wrong before he takes her hand and something cold slides onto her finger. Despite herself, Tomi’s eyes fly open in shock because holy shit that’s an honest-to-goodness ring with a REAL diamond on her hand!
“I said not to look yet!” Nenji barks, but Tomi’s already squealing with delight and throwing her arms around him, chanting “yes yes yes” until he’s laughing and kissing her senseless. This kissing part goes on for some time until someone kicks down their door and starts pouring streamers into the room.
“Congratulations!” cries Amiguchi, brandishing a banner that says in god awful handwriting: CONGRATS ON THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT!!! Everyone’s crowded in the tiny hallway, all smiling at different intensities, and Tomi feels a burst of incredulous giddiness rise in her chest like champagne as she looks around at everyone.
“Why are you all here?” she asks breathlessly.
“Ogata came to me for love advice, and I had to share the news of my guidance,” Amiguchi says proudly. “I totally wasn’t listening at the door—” A shoe was thrown thanklessly into his face.
“Now all of you get outta here before you see something you don’t wanna see,” Nenji yells with one hand already up Tomi’s shirt, and she chokes on her spit.
“Everybody run!” Takamiya hollers, grabbing Natsuno and Tamao by the ears and hightailing out the door. Everyone else quickly follows suit, but the stupid banner gets left behind when the door finally shuts behind the chaos. It winds around their ankles when Tomi tries to straddle Nenji until she loses patience and wriggles around to try to untangle herself.
“Get back here,” Nenji half-laughs, half-groans, hands bracketing her waist, and Tomi makes a face at him as she finally kicks the banner free.
“You’re distracting me!” she huffs, gasping when he pulls her bodily against him.
“Alright,” Nenji laughs, a deep, smoky sound, and Tomi has to claw together all of her working brain cells to find the condoms somewhere in her pants pocket.
“This literally defeats the whole point of today’s scare, by the way,” she mutters as her beringed fingers fumble with the wrapper.
“Don’t worry,” Nenji says easily from somewhere between her breasts. “Pretty sure what I’m about to do won’t make a baby.”
“Oh,” Tomi breathes, and the smirk on Nenji’s face is enough to melt every joint in her body.
They celebrate the first birthday of their twin boys under the flowering boughs of the orange tree, trying to wrangle them still so Okino can take a picture of them together. Despite his and Megumi’s combined best efforts, the picture comes out blurry because the first brat’s screaming bloody murder and the second’s trying to eat his balloon. However, the camera also captures Nenji’s fondly exasperated expression as he leans over his sons and the easy, affectionate way Tomi leans against the arm he’s slung around her shoulders.
It’s nothing so grand as the legacy that she imagined, but this—her rough-and-tumble family—is enough for her.
Tomi hopes the original Kisaragi would think so too.
.
.
.
fin