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Nozomi doesn’t speak her last words for a long-long-long time, all things considered. She belongs to Futuran society, by then, and her old stained clothes are in a museum, behind glass, a reminder of what horrors came before. Children have been born that will never glimpse another human besides Nozomi, never know the world-crumbling war. They visit Last Defense Academy on field trips, running where Undying Flames used to burn, laughing at Sirei’s statues; Nozomi will beg people to be kind to her friends’ graves, Invaders though they were. Though she was. She has left signs throughout the Academy, and protective barriers around their resting place. She visits and talks to them when she can.
For some of Nozomi’s friends, there were only scraps of cloth and handfuls of smeared meat and hair to bury by the end. Takumi was relatively whole. His corpse. Sometimes, Nozomi still dreams of going back to find him rotting, because she couldn’t just leave him under the sun forever. Her new friends from the ruins hesitated behind her, but helped in the end.
Whenever Nozomi’s tried falling into another man’s arms, over the years, she remembers Takumi growing heavy-limp against her, finally seeing her as he died. Trusting her completely, folding their whole team’s wishes into her hands. She hopes she’s carried them well, told their stories with love; she knows humanity will die with her soon. She isn’t as sad about that as her mother would’ve wanted her to be.
Nozomi helps rebuild what she can. She works in a laboratory like her mother on that long-lost artificial satellite, trying to regrow a world she also helped break. She can do so little, on her own, but she’s part of something big. She always has been.
(Perhaps, in her next life, Nozomi’ll have a night out with Moko, and Kako and Ima will meet again, and Gaku will learn how it tastes to feel lucky. Maybe there won’t be a next life at all, but Nozomi doesn’t want to think that way: she wants Takumi to come jogging up to her like it’s normal. “Hey! We’ve been waiting for you. That’s enough, come on home.”)
They record Nozomi’s last words for history books. She knows they will, so she tries drafting out something good, but she can’t think of much with substance. “I wish you all the best. You deserve the gentlest world.”