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It was like a dream.
Littered in the dark sky, hundreds or millions of stars were shimmering, illuminating the sky in bright gold bursts of lights.
It was winter. The orphanage had been dead – its residents sound asleep, the world so comfortably silent when Kazuki quietly snuck out of his shared room and crept down the hallway to the room on the very left. He soundlessly opens the door, and sneaks over to the bed closest to the door, and taps the shoulder of the tiny boy sleeping on it.
Ojiro blinked awake, dazed and tired before realizing Kazuki was the one who shook him awake.
Together, they left the room, leaving behind the gentle and serene atmosphere of the kids sleeping, holding two thick and fluffy blankets. The two boys softly shuffled to the window at the end of the hallway and opened it, allowing the harsh cold winter air to infiltrate the warmth of the orphanage. Kazuki climbed out of the window, grabbed onto the drainage pipe on the right, steadied his feet on the supports in the wall and started climbing up, while Ojiro held onto the blankets and watched silently.
When Kazuki reached the rooftop, snow had slowly started to pile on the tiles as Kazuki pulled himself onto the rooftop and got into a good position. Then, from below, Ojiro throws both of the blankets as hard and as high up as possible for a kid. He was surprisingly strong, stronger than anyone would expect from a timid and shy kid like Ojiro. Kazuki would catch the blankets like always, and patiently waited for Ojiro while he climbed the pipe like Kazuki did.
By the time Ojiro got up to the rooftop, Kazuki had found a good spot and was lying down and completely wrapped in one of the thick, soft and comfortable blankets they had brought with them. Ojiro settled down next to Kazuki, grabbing the other blanket and covering himself with warmth as he laid down to look up at the sky.
It was like a dream.
Both Kazuki and Ojiro would often say their favourite season is winter, because the stars can be seen clearly compared to the other seasons.
The night sky was completely illuminated with the shining, bright light from all the stars. It was like millions of twinkling diamonds spread across the dark abyss, bringing it back to life.
Ojiro had always thought of the stars like diamonds, for the single reason that the view they had woken up in the middle of the night for every winter was worth so much more than how ever many thousands of diamonds could offer. To Ojiro, nothing could replicate that moment, peacefully lying next to his best friend and watching the stars flicker and twinkle and dance in the sky.
He would always look back at this moment after both he and Kazuki had been taken in by Tenshin, stuck in the facility and rarely, if ever, seeing the outside world, let alone the winter sky littered with stars. And when Ojiro had believed he was a lost cause, the one who Ojiro had betrayed his trust, came back to save him.
Kazuki, the one who had trusted Ojiro with his heart, who had always believed the boy from that night was still somewhere hidden in Ojiro’s heart, who had, no matter what, saved Ojiro from what he had already accepted as his demise. The boy Ojiro had laid down next to that night and every winter after that, the one who had treated Ojiro with kindness and taken care of him, who had introduced XB to him.
Ojiro owed everything to Kazuki.
Kazuki enjoyed the warmth of having Ojiro by his side, even more so than looking up at those dazzling stars. Kazuki may have had a dream, but Ojiro had always been in that dream, playing XB together on the same team. A simple dream which eventually, after so many years, came true when the ‘Ojiro’ Tenshin had built up had died alongside the royal family.
The stars had often formed many shapes. Kazuki liked to point them out and made stories about the images formed by the stars, while Ojiro listened.
“Those stars form the constellation Gemini which represent two twins! And they’re fighting that big dragon over there!”
Kazuki would go on and on for hours, until Ojiro had inevitably fallen asleep.
He would shake him awake, then climb back down the pipe and into the window they had left open, catching the blankets Ojiro threw down and waited while he followed Kazuki back down. They then would go creep back into their rooms and go back to sleep until the orphanage’s caretakers woke them up. Both Kazuki and Ojiro would be caught with darker than usual eyebags, though Kazuki hid his sleepiness much better than Ojiro.
Even after trash tribe was formed, both Kazuki and Ojiro had once again laid down, this time in a grass field, during the winter night and stargazed, while Kazuki talked about his experience with Minato Tribe, the stars once again lighting up the dark abyss that had surrounded them before.