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A hint of soft rain began to sprinkle over the patchy woods half a day up to Moleville. The little guy had predicted the weather, as always, but Mario's own sore knees had beaten him to it, and now the small of his back wouldn't quit announcing it over again as he tried to find a comfortable version of flat on the rocky ground.
They had cover, at least. They'd almost missed the rocky overhang, a lucky find just big enough for the three of them, but now they were safely tucked away under it for the night.
Well, two of them were.
Turning over again in his bedroll, Mario caught sight of their third team member standing some distance away. His back was to the overhang, a patch of moonlight catching his cape and painting the ground around him the same shade of blue. He was very still and perfectly quiet, as he often was, and staring up at the sky, as he often did.
Mario raised an eyebrow at the wooden figure, maybe the oddest acquaintance he'd ever made, and wondered if he cared that he was getting soaked.
The pool of moonlight began to dim; the sight of the open sky was almost fully curtained by the rainclouds. When it was gone, Mario wondered if he'd turn back toward them, but he didn't. His cape rose and fell on the breeze like a sigh, and from Mario's angle lying down he noticed that the wooden hands that hung at his sides were moving, slowly clasping and unclasping.
And for the first time — the first of what would be many, many times — Mario wished he knew what stars think about... specifically what the one in front of him was thinking right now.
"Hey... Geno."
"... Ah," echoed the doll-shaped, person-sized entity after a couple seconds, as if having momentarily forgotten he'd asked them to call him that in place of the funny, twinkly music-box-sounding name they'd butchered.
When he did turn, Mario couldn't decide whether to flinch, or laugh, or how exactly to react to the sight: the whites of his large round eyes hovered in the dark, not painfully bright, but plainly visible, like he was some kind of living Saturday morning cartoon.
"Yes?"
Mario stammered, suddenly not sure what he'd even intended to say. "Uh — you, uh... You good?"
For the slightest pause, the pair of floating eyes just looked at him, unblinking, not betraying anything about the thoughts behind them.
"Of course. It's kind of you to ask," Geno said pleasantly, and then after another pause, "Are you?"
It would be hard for Mario to remember exactly what they talked about that night, but impossible to forget how effortless it felt, and how easily the minutes turned to hours. Like him, Geno was a quiet type; maybe there was some kind of mutual comfort in that.
"Not even my brother can get me talkin' like this," he said at some point.
"I don't think I've ever spoken this much at once," said Geno.
Just like that, Mario's nights were full of him.
They took to staying up whispering about the past day, close and low so they wouldn't wake Mallow, Mario prying his eyes open for as long as he could and brushing off Geno's occasional questions about whether he was sure he didn't need more sleep than this. It took days, and an embarrassing series of exhaustion-fueled mistakes, for Geno to seem to put two and two together and finally insist Mario think of his health. And the others. And the mission, he added, not unkindly but firmly.
That evening, when Geno said 'goodnight', it seemed ... well... it was hard to put into words exactly what it was that bothered Mario about the sound of his voice, and he found himself even more awake replaying it in his head.
By that point Mario had noticed that sometimes Geno spoke with an accent — well, not an accent accent. It was more like accent marks, like how in Italian you don't pronounce the actual acute and grave, obviously, but you know where they're supposed to go and what they do to the syllable or the meaning of a word, stuff like that. And with Geno, you could hear (if you were real close and paying attention) that when he was happy or amused, his voice sounded shiny, kind of like if that 'twinkle in your eye' turn of phrase was 'twinkle in your ear' instead. And when they were fighting something that threatened and taunted them, Geno's defiant, targeted anger made his words (at very close range) sound like they were coming out of a blowtorch.
Mario was sure there were way better analogies than Italian for all of that stuff. He was sure there were probably a hundred times more nuance to it than glad and mad... but more than anything, he was sure Geno's 'goodnight' had echoed, like he was speaking the words in a massive, empty room.
He lay there, racking his brain, and thinking about the night he'd watched Geno stare up at the vanishing stars, his wooden hands do the same clasping thing Mario's own hands were anxiously doing right now...
Finally, Mario couldn't take it. He bolted upright and reached in his bag and felt around until he found it.
"Hey," he said, holding the book out to Geno. "Here."
Geno eyed it curiously. "What's this for?"
"For you. Y'know. To read."
The floating eyes blinked in the dark. "Ah..."
... Oh. It was dark. All at once Mario felt incredibly stupid — what had he been thinking? Before he could take it back, the novel lifted from his hands. "This is... a very thoughtful gesture. Thank you."
Mario rubbed his face. Wasn't really surprising that Geno would be gracious; he never seemed to fail to if someone seemed to mean well, even a complete idiot missing the mark. "A lot of good it'll do right now, heh... since it's... night..."
The silhouette of Geno shrugged. "I can see by starlight."
"You can?" Mario said, leaning in, and nearly forgot to whisper the words. "But... I mean, it's overcast too, though..."
Geno's eyes waned to this crescents, and then he was just a quiet laugh in the dark. "Ahh, my dear friend. I meant my own."
That night, Mario drifted toward sleep watching Geno's intense gaze move across the pages. It was only when they flicked briefly up to Mario's that he even considered that Geno could see that he was staring at him... like some kind of weirdo... but Geno only chuckled, and for once didn't ask why he was doing it.
Geno was a fast and voracious reader. Mario wasn't too well read in Mushroom Kingdom stuff, so every time their mission swung them back near his little crash pad near the castle, Mario would pop in and grab a few more of his own books from the other side of the pipe, stuff he knew (or at least hoped) Geno would like too.
Their nightly conversations — shorter but no less enjoyable — continued as well. As their party grew, all that changed was how close and quiet they had to be. At night, like clockwork, wherever they happened to be staying, Geno was never further away than the nearest bed or bedroll to his own.
The nights under clear starry skies were the best, though.
Earlier that day, Geno had looked at Mario funny, as if suspicious, and asked him how exactly he kept producing all of these books for him.
Mario had not been not prepared. It was unseasonably warm that week, and he was all too aware of how badly the weather was making him sweat on its own, even without the extra weight in his pack, let alone any grilling about unnecessarily-macho gestures. As he hemmed and hawed, it'd taken no time for Geno's relentlessly calm and gentle questions to pry it out of him.
"You've been carrying all of these for me at once?" Geno had said, leaning over the pile of books, sounding touched with a hint of you are very strange, Mario — "And you didn't ask for my help?"
Mario's protests had crumbled into speechlessness as Geno slipped all eight books into his floppy stocking cap one by one, without so much as a change in its shape.
Mario had opened and closed his mouth a few times like a fish before finally managing, "Isn't that heavy?"
Geno had just chuckled fondly. "Oh, my friend... where do you think the other twenty-seven are?"
"You, my friend," whispered Geno, "have been staring at me all day."
Mario didn't stop then either. He just grinned and scooted a little closer in his bedroll. "Hey, so, question... what can't you do?"
"I..." Geno looked away momentarily, up toward the clear night sky. "... hah. That's a kind question, my friend. But I prefer to focus on what's within my abilities." He said it warmly, but Mario wondered if Geno knew he could hear his words echo.
"Well... how on Earth does your magic even... y'know... work?"
Geno raised a brow. "How on... Earth?"
"Oh, you know what I mean!"
The sly look on the wooden face turned serious again. "All magical physics is complex, Mario, and star magic is immensely so. It'd take a lifetime to explain. We'd be here for a year just inventing new words in your language to translate the concepts."
"Okay, well, I'm a mechanic, I figure out stuff from the business end. So... let's see. You can magically wallop things." He held up one finger.
Geno grinned and shook his head a little. "Yes." The amused twinkle was almost more audible than his voice.
"You can turn toys person size." He held up another.
"Bit more complex than that, but yes, technically..."
"And you can shrink things." Three fingers.
Geno just bemusedly shook his head. At Mario's whaddaya mean gesture, he sighed, fiddling with his curls. "Properly explaining even the basics of how these things work is ... not one of the things I tend to be chosen for. Suffice it to say, for us, spacetime just... well... hits different."
"Hits different."
"It does."
"So is that a technical term, or more slang from the future?"
"Oh," he said, slipping a hand over his mouth as Mario silenced a snerk. "Please don't spread that one yet either, I'd rather not have to present about it to my authorities... stars, I've done enough public speaking on this mission to last my whole life."
"I get that!" Mario grinned, and scooted a little closer. "But, I mean, you don't even have to. Just do a silent magician schtick. Pull things out of your hat like bunnies."
"Bunnies?" Geno snickered.
When Mario just held up a fourth finger with a shrug, Geno bent forward to muffle himself in his bedroll. Mario did too, the muted sounds of their laughter mingling cozily in their precious little capsule that felt outside of time, warm with the smell of something woodsy-sweet that had nothing to do with the campfire.
Geno's curly bangs brushed against his nose with a soft little crunch.
Mario didn't realize he'd gasped until Geno looked back up at him. They usually didn't touch when they were like this, and now they were very close. For the silent space of a breath they just looked at each other.
Mario broke the silence, holding up a fifth finger. "You're real good at being mysterious," he managed to say casually.
"I don't mean to be..." Geno looked up at the stars. "There's a lot of mystery for me too. I find it funny... I know myself quite well, yet here, there's always some mystery about what my limits may be as part of this world..."
"What do you mean?"
"You asked what I can't do."
Mario was suddenly very aware of the way his heart felt in his chest.
"And my only answer is a map that's only part drawn," Geno said, in that down-to-earth but artful way he had of putting things sometimes. "I don't even know where the edges are."
A breath Mario didn't know he'd been holding eased back out. "Well, you know what that sounds like to me?"
"Strange, I bet..."
"Nah," said Mario. "It sounds like an adventure."
Geno turned his face back toward Mario's with the strangest smile, raising the ridge of his brow like he was trying to figure him out, or like he'd heard some new tone in his human voice.
Mario wished he knew what he was thinking.
"It's been an hour." Geno sat up and pulled a book out of his cap. "Sadly, time for me to let you sleep."
Mario sighed. "Aghh, alright... g'night."
After he got comfortable, but before he drifted off, a slight touch covered the hand he'd been counting with before.
Geno's hand felt like a little sparrow landing there, careful, balanced, nearly weightless, flitting away the barest moment later as if not to overstay its welcome.
"Goodnight, Mario," he said, and his voice sounded like music.