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"OK, but you know – like, there’s one-hundred-percent a student club for this," Momo says around a mouthful of yakisoba-flavored dodekai. "I even looked it up, it has fifteen registered members –"
Okarun sniffs. Momo blinks, because it’s a little startling. If she didn’t know better, she’d believe Okarun was being condescending.
"Pedestrian," he mutters. "All of them. They’re not really invested—"
"Oh my god," Momo grits out between her teeth. "Are you kidding me? King Nerd can’t be bothered with the lowly peasant nerds that occupy the same batshit aliens-are-real kingdom as him?"
"You know aliens are real," he hisses out, rounding on Momo and jabbing a finger into the fleshier part of her upper arms she’s sometimes weirdly self-conscious about when wearing cap sleeves or tube tops. "And besides, it’s not like that."
"Oh really?" Momo smacks his hand away from her and then wipes her greasy crumb-covered fingers on the sleeve of his uniform jacket because she can and he’s being annoying. He jerks back like she’s burned him. Serves him right. "What’s it like then?"
"They’re all so self-importantly convinced that they know everything there is to know about UAPs, what they imply, just because they’ve read the latest updates to the r/SpeculativeEvolution subreddit, all of the subject-matter magazines, and have seen the really weird videos that only get circulated on Telegram," Okarun huffs out, and then pauses, adjusting his glasses, turning to keep walking forwards along the pedestrian footpath that runs along the Shingashi riverside. "The conversations they want to have are about impressing upon anybody stupid enough to listen to them about how significant their amassed knowledge on the subject matter is, not – not anything real. Not anything about meeting any of them. Nothing about shutting up for five seconds and getting out there to –"
He sort of gestures inarticulately out in front of them, flapping his hands in a way that’s meant to communicate the core of his huge affront. Momo thinks it’s really heartwarming when he gets this worked up about something, although he rarely knows when to curb his own verbal spillage for the sake of everyone else’s sanity. "To change their puny little mundane lives?"
"Yeah!" He stops and just looks at her. "Yeah."
They don’t talk about how much has changed for both of them since Okarun first lost his dick and then his balls. It would be too much, somehow. Momo obviously knows this, but somehow so does Okarun although he’s usually not super quick to pick up on stuff like that. Instead, the topic switches from ways to help Okarun make more alien-obsessed friends to the latest episode of Candy or Not Candy (Momo will never not find someone voluntarily licking doorknobs funny) as the two of them close the distance between them and the CO-EDO stop that actually drops them the closest to the shrine.
It’s late fall, so even though it’s not even dinner time yet, the sun is sitting low in the sky, stretching darkening shadows long on the pavement. The street lamps flicker to life as the bus pulls into the stop, the two of them boarding and procuring the fare from a weathered rubber Keroppi coin purse Okarun keeps tucked inside his jacket. It’s mostly tourists who use this bus, with its old bench-style seats and vintage carriage, so it’s no trouble for the two of them two take up two whole sections in the back as the bus itself trundles along sleepily to their destination. Momo’s got her feet in Okarun’s lap, her face pressed to the glass of the window, the neat geometry of the rice fields, the last hurrah of the tanbo murals that Momo has always found a little corny flickering by in between telephone poles. They’re passing a huge one of a fierce, almost demonic warrior defending two massive tamba pots from an orochi dragon when Momo’s phone starts buzzing insistently. She pulls herself away to look down at the rapid-fire messages coming in from her grandmother. They’re about dinner.
She kicks at Okarun gently who grunts softly and then straightens up to look at her. "Is it our stop?" he asks through a yawn.
"Are you staying for dinner?" Momo says instead of replying, the continuing rattling of the bus in motion along the highway answer enough.
"I hadn’t thought about it," Okarun says, but he’s looking at her feet as he speaks, and sometimes Momo really wishes he’d cut this shit out.
"So think about it," she says flatly, jostling him again. "Although if you’re staying for dinner, you should spend the night. Grams is asking if she should bother cooking or just pick up some katsu sandwiches."
"Her cooking just because of me seems like such trouble," he replies, even as Momo can clearly feel his stomach grumble under her legs.
She rearranges herself so she’s able to squeeze him between her knees, although he protests slightly as she does it. "You’re such a bully, Miss Ayase," he grunts out, still not quite looking at her.
"Stay for dinner," she says this time, not making it a question. She’s learning to work with what Okarun needs sometimes, just like he’s figured out how to be good for her when she needs him to be. Having him around is worth the annoyance of working with his insecurities.
He looks like he might argue, so she clams her legs around him tighter and he squeaks. "OK! OK, I’ll stay, you overbearing octopus."
She kicks a leg up in victory, which earns them both a disgruntled coughing fit from the driver who’s eyeballing them in the rearview mirror. Momo blows him a kiss, even as she straightens up and sits on the bench seat properly – the bus is only a few minutes out now, and she’s gotta reply to her grandmother before they get off and start walking or she’ll hear it when they get back home. It doesn’t escape her notice at all that through all of this – the agreeing to dinner, to stay over – Okarun hasn’t picked up his phone to do the same. She’s mentioned it to her grandmother a few times, and the responses have largely been the same: an accentuated puff on her cigarette and a shrug. There was a time you didn’t talk to me much either, Momo-chan. He’s showing up well-fed and in clean underwear at school, and sometimes that’s all you can really ask for she’d added the last time Momo had brought it up. Momo doesn’t know that she agrees with her, but she’s not sure what she can do about the situation except sometimes insist Okarun stay for dinner when he follows her home without asking or considering it, a bit like a lost dog.
"C’mon," Okarun says abruptly, and it’s Momo’s turn to be slightly startled as he pulls her up out of the bench seat and towards the front of the bus. It registers slowly, but they’ve come to a stop, the blue lights of the Lawson that sits right next to the bus shelter filtering in blurrily through the windows through a layer of condensation.
As they step off into the night, the sky looms large above them with stars freckling the sky. Momo’s about to run into the store to grab a carton of cigarettes for her grandmother since the night clerk hasn’t cared how old she is since she started picking them up for her a few months ago, but as she steps away to do just that, Okarun grabs her hand to stop her. She looks at their hands, fingers tangled together, and then at Okarun, who’s looking right at her with a bewildering amount of excitement.
"Look!" he exclaims, and then points at the sky; Momo follows his finger and looks. A string of lights slides eerily through the sky in a straight line – too high up to be weird airplane, too close to be any kind of bizarre series of stars. There are ten – maybe twenty – of them, slightly oblong, all perfectly spaced from one another, all moving with a purpose that makes their already strange presence even more uncanny.
"Chōchin-obake," Momo says wonderingly, mouth agape, even as Okarun delightedly exclaims: "Aliens!"
They both look at each other, poised to argue in favor of their own secret worlds, and it’s Okarun who moves first, slapping his hand over Momo’s mouth, a startling a burst of heat flying across her cheeks. "Who cares," he says, laughing breathlessly. "Just look!" And she does, but not at the sky; Okarun has come alive with joy in a way Momo has never seen before and she doesn’t want to forget what it looks like.
"It’s Elon Musk’s Starlink system, not aliens," comes a disaffected and deeply nasal voice from a dark corner behind them. "Idiots. As if aliens or ghosts actually exist."
Both Momo and Okarun turn together and glare at the convenience store clerk, who’s squatting down a ways from the entrance smoking a cigarette and paging his way through this week’s JUMP.
"You know what, grandma can get her own cigarettes in the morning. Let’s go, Okarun," Momo seethes, more than a little testy. Okarun grunts in agreement, and they begin to walk down the road towards the shrine. His head is still swiveled towards the sky, joy replaced with something a little tamer, a little steadier. Momo thinks it’s something closer to fascination, and it’s a little less wild, which saddens her somehow.
"It’s still cool," she says a bit defensively, loudly enough that she hopes her voice carries back to the fun-sucking clerk having his miserable little smoke break in the dark.
"Yeah, it really is," he agrees, and squeezes her hand, still intertwined with his.
The anger that had uncurled in Momo’s chest retreats slightly at the warmth of his hand around hers. It’s kind of cheesy to walk the whole way like this, but she’s not going to stop if Okarun doesn’t pull away from her, so they travel the way home like that – silence eventually broken once the satellites travel out of sight, Okarun launching into a diatribe on the newest Musk-centric conspiracy being discussed in online circles. Momo struggles to keep up somewhere past Okarun’s insistence on valid emerging photographic evidence of secret tunnels in Antarctica where alien probes have been buried for over two hundred years, and just kind of lets him vibe with it. He gets plenty out of just being allowed to talk, and it’s a nice bit of fortification against the sharply cold wind that’s kicked up.
They make it to the gate of the shrine before Momo’s even aware of much time passing, the outdoor lights of the main house on, the sound of her grandmother’s radio blasting out the open kitchen window accompanying the wafting scent of savory okonomiyaki batter frying away on the stove.
"Oh," Okarun almost whimpers. "Oh my god, is that kakuni I smell? Is she making pancakes?"
"If you keep reacting to her cooking like this, her ego will grow so big it’ll crush me to death in my sleep," Momo sighs, calling after Okarun as he breaks their handhold to run to the front door.
"So long as she keeps feeding me, I really don’t give a shit," Okarun says, toeing off his shoes in a hurry.
"I miss the bashful boy who was too shy to invite himself over," Momo grumbles, making a face.
"I can still hear you!" Okarun calls from inside the genkan.
"No you can’t," Momo scoffs, and dodges a half-hearted karate chop aimed at her neck as she makes it around the corner of the front door. She squares up with Okarun who seems like he genuinely wants to square up, a bit of that untamed energy flowing back into him at the prospect of a hot meal.
"Quit fucking around and come help me set the table," comes her grandmother’s voice from the kitchen; the tone’s mild, so she’s not genuinely irritated with them, but she’s serious, so they both deflate with a chorus of "yes m’ams" and trail into the back of the house.
Okarun pops his feet into a pair of slippers by the kitchen door, and it takes a minute for Momo to realize her grandmother must’ve set an extra pair out for him, her own pair of Cookie Monster slides still exactly where she left them. It takes another few seconds for Momo to process the fact that this means her grandmother has bought a new pair of slippers for Okarun to use, since their home has a been a two-slipper household for as long as she’s lived here. She stops short in the kitchen entryway, blankly surveying the chaotic tableau of Turbo Granny trying to operate a pair of tongs twice her maneki-neko size to drag the pancakes on the stove onto a plate that Okarun is trying to hold steady, while engaging her grandmother – flipping still-cooking offerings on the hot stove – in an argument over the best kind of single-cup sake to serve with teppanyaki. Momo feels something fragile inside of her gather like rainwater running off dry dirt; it feels uncomfortable, like she doesn’t really know where to put it now that she’s found it there.
"Oi, you don’t get out of this just because you invited Okarun to dinner," her grandmother pauses mid argument to stare at her, snapping her fingers. "Come help."
"Yeah," Momo manages to get out, spurring herself into motion. "Sure. My pleasure." She finds herself meaning it.
