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milkteamoon · 3 years

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To Scale the Stars

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Fandom: Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun Rating: general audience Tags: space au, introspection Relationships: Amane Yugi & Nene Yashiro It gets lonely up in space sometimes. Maybe it's being alone that's making Amane imagine a fish outside his window. Written for Ad Lunam Zine @jshkspacezine

It’s early one morning when he first sees her.

Or late one night. The clock above his bed reads 5:53 am, but time means little when you’re floating through space, stitched between the dawn and twilight, caught up in the milky expanse of the moon’s glow.

Amane knows he should be better about keeping time. He’s been meaning to since college- work on that whole “getting your life together” concept. But life skips stones at the speed of light, and suddenly he’s twenty-one, twenty-seven, thirty-two. Suddenly he’s picking through his hair to see if that one particular strand is blonde or gray, sifting through the infinite amount of work contacts in his phone just to find his brother’s number, staring out over the tiny lights of the world below wondering if anyone misses him up here. He already knows the answer to that last one- Tsukasa asks him every day when he’s coming home (and every day he tells him “soon.” And every day his twin tells him “not soon enough,” and every day the cycle repeats). And though his middle school teacher would sooner drink pen ink than admit it, Tsuchigomori is all too quick to take him up on the offer to go get a drink sometime.

But seriously, Amane needs to get better about the whole time thing. It’s really ruining his sleep schedule (one he barely had to begin with), but he can’t help that his body simply won’t adjust to zero gravity even after six months of living it.

So it’s 5:53 am when he straps on his helmet, attaches his lure, and makes his way out into the inky void of the universe. It’s a typical space walk, like he’s done a thousand times before. Check the meters, skim the paneling, adjust the satellite dish that came loose after the station drifted through a cloud of space debris.

The usual.

He knows how it goes.

He knows how quiet it is out there, lost in only the vibrations of his own breathing and the soft whir of his suit.

He knows where his head starts wandering when left to his own devices.

And it’s wandering he assumes it’s doing when he spots the tiny nebulous cloud on the horizon.

Something….moving.

Swishing.

Swimming.

At least, that’s the best way he can describe it.

It’s enough to make him rub his helmet in place of his eyes, attempting to blink away some sleep-deprived hallucination or trick of the lunar light. Trying to convince himself that it’s just his imagination. That somehow the dream he had the other night about an alien movie he’d seen with his brother had wriggled its way into reality in the most tantalizing concoction of space dust and astral debris.

The reality check fails to dissipate whatever it is, so Amane does the next most rational thing.

Winds his way back around the space station paneling. Slips his way out of the vast expanse of space and into the comfort of his quarters. Takes two aspirin – just for good measure, reminds himself to get new contacts when he returns to terra firma, and does his best to force his mind into a fitful sleep.

He doesn’t drift off until about three hours later, but when he finally does, he dreams he’s at sea.

Floating. Drifting over an infinitely vast stretch of blue. One that he can’t see the bottom of, no matter how much he squints or how hard he imagines.

Which is funny. Kind of. In the ironic non-humor sort of way that elicits more of an exhausted huff than an amused chuckle. Because Amane never really liked the ocean. And he has an inkling that the feeling’s mutual.

It’s a fish, he decides. Or at least, something akin to it. Something with fins and gills that twists its way in between the satellite paneling and the tail of Ursa Major. That inches its way closer with every passing sunset, to the point that it chips itself out of his imagination and into the corporeal world just outside his window.

Amane’s first thought is that he’s losing it.

Naturally. Sure, it’s not the first time he’s been up in space alone, but it’s certainly the longest. Shijima’s team wasn’t set to dock for another three weeks, and the little human interaction he could manage were emails to his brother and the occasional check-in from mission control.

Which was....fine, he supposed. In all honesty, Amane much preferred silence or his own choice of music to the prattle of other passengers. The lilting hum of the spaceship and the occasional beeps from the dashboard to the snores of coworkers who managed a much better sleep schedule than him.

But Amane’s not stupid. He also knows how silence gets to a person. He’s seen it many times.

But he doesn’t linger on the possibility of a dwindling psyche. He’s much too intrigued by this odd little creature that has taken up residence outside his window.

And there’s something sorta funny about the whole situation, because Amane’s never liked the ocean. Never liked the possibility of millennium-old creatures dwelling in hydrothermal vents, of things waiting to drag him down beneath the waves. Never liked the way his classmates’ stares settled into the back of his head like eyes lurking in the deep. Space isn’t like the ocean. Space is infinitely vast and infinitely empty. Space is made up of numbers and theories and rocket-fuel and rocks.

Space is dead. But he’s okay with that. Amane likes the silence. Amane likes to be alone.

Amane’s always wanted to get away.

And he’s been true to that whole “space is empty” belief until now. Sure, alien life might be statistically probable, but it was biologically impossible. Not real. A fabrication. Nothing but pipe dreams.

Amane sends a message to Tsuchigomori before he crawls into bed that night. One he doesn’t really expect a reply to, because it’s nearly 3 a.m. in Japan. That is, unless Tsuchigomori’s been up grading again. Amane knows he has a bad habit of doing so.

And it’s nearly four hours later when he rolls over to check his smartphone and finds it blinking with a response that irks him for just how typical it is of his old school teacher, blunt as ever.

Amane: do you think there’s life out there somewhere?

Tsuchigomori-sensei: sure, why not?

And that weird little creature melts into his life much in the same way of cream into coffee: sweetly, slowly, and then all at once. To the point that his days feel empty the moments it drifts out of his glass canvas of the universe outside, if days can exist in a world filled with infinite sunsets. Well, about fifteen that is. Something that started awe-inspiring, then grated into a nuisance, and finally dipped their way into becoming the best part of his waking hours.

Because every sunset the fish would resurface, and Amane took the time to sit. Watch as the sun glimmered off the switchboard at the head of the cabin and twisted its way between the creature’s translucent scales. Breathed in the much too filtered air and breathed out a stillness he hadn’t felt in years.

It never speaks — not that he thought it would — but he comes to know its language. Its erratic swishes when he comes to peek outside, its bouncing when he tends to the zinnias. Maybe in another life, it’d have been a gardener, or a mermaid, or a novelist. Maybe that’s why it slows to a halt and allows him to bask in every glinting, rainbow scale when he finds the courage to speak.

It’s not the possibility that he’s losing it that eats at him. Of course not. Amane’s always been the weird kid, the hot topic of back-of-the-classroom conversations and breakroom gossip, and he’s used to that. It’s fine. In all honesty, finding out that he’s hallucinating sea creatures would probably be the least of his worries.

But there’s that small sliver of a chance that manages to keep him up at night. That somehow he’s.....not. That maybe, just maybe, the fish really is swimming through the stars outside the space station, and that maybe, just maybe, it’s nothing more than that.

Just a fish.

Impossibly normal.

Not some eldritch monster from one of Tsukasa’s horror manga, nor some anomalous amalgamation of undiscovered extraterrestrial life. Not some figment of a loose air tank that was slowly spinning his brain to mush.

But a fish. Just a fish. One with gills and fins and eyes glazed in nictitating nothingness. Just a fish as simple as that moon rock he had as a child, or the sun being nothing more than a ball of burning gas.

Perfectly........ordinary.

And that frightens him, but he’s not sure why.

Amane presses his face to the glass one evening and finds it cold as ice. And as he does, the fish follows suit, bopping its nose into the window and wiggling its horns (fins? He’s not quite sure) in a sympathetic gesture.

And Amane whispers into the space between.

“Are you real?”

Even though it can’t hear him.

And the fish stares glassy-eyed and keeps its mouth shut.

Always does.

Always silent.

Why should he expect anything different?

It’s a Wednesday that the fish fails to show at the day’s first sunset.

Amane sits alone.

Goes about his day as one would without a fish.

Once, he thinks he catches it skirting around the edges of the paneling. Clipping the last rays of sun before dipping back into the faint luster of starlight. Swimming just as brisk as if it were navigating the inky black waves that he used to fear as a child.

And then it’s gone. Just a blip. Just his imagination.

It’s gone again on Thursday. And Friday.

Amane sits at the window. Waiting. Watching for something that might have been a fish, or might have been just his imagination.

And when the final sunset dies on the horizon, he crawls into bed. Forces himself into a fitful sleep – or at least, he tries to. Because the whirs of the station are much louder now, much heavier and dripping into the static silence like mercury. Much more rhythmic, in a sense, that it almost reminds him of ocean waves.

Crashing. Clawing.

And then still.

Amane dreams of his old middle school.

Dreams that it’s still drenched in that awful teal paint and that the old wing still sits abandoned and unrenovated.

Amane dreams of himself. That he never grew past five-foot, squished down by some old school cap he remembers wearing on orientation day of first year. Amane dreams of a weird sticker on his face, ironically scrawled with the word “seal,” that he’s certain would itch like peeling face paint if his hands were just a bit more solid and his feet could touch the ground.

Amane dreams of a girl, one with droopy eyes and messy hair. One with a voice loud as thunder with ankles to match, and one that calls him some weird nickname he can’t remember when he wakes up. She yells a lot, and he laughs, and then she follows suit. As they should. As if they always should.

Amane dreams of the moon, stretched across the sky in luminescent majesty.

That the celestial body still holds the same wonder as it did in the tiny rock he had as a child. That rabbits still dance on its surface and that an old youthful wish still crawls beneath his skin.

Amane knows that he’s not going to the moon in his dream, but that’s okay. It’s okay when that funny girl drags him along, adjusts his cap, and calls him things he might be embarrassed by as an adult. It’s okay when the umbrella kid comes to eat donuts (plain, no less!) with them, and they laugh about a joke he doesn’t quite get.

It’s okay that he’s not going to the moon.

Amane’s not going anywhere in his dream, but he’s not so lonely this time around.

And it’s okay. Somehow, it’s still okay.

It’s 5:53 am when Amane is awoken by one, two, three knocks at his window. It’s just enough to pull him from the warm haze of his mind into the chill of the cabin, just enough to do a quick sweep of the monitors and valves. And logically he knows no one should be knocking on his window some 250 miles above the earth. That realistically it’s space junk, or rogue rocks, or even more likely his imagination. But it’s still 5:53 am, and it’s much too early to go back to bed.

So Amane does the next most rational thing. Straps on his helmet. Attaches his lure. Makes his way out into the inky void of the universe glazed in the red hue of another sunset.

Just another day in the booming silence of non-gravity.

Until it isn’t.

Until he makes it to the rim of the plexiglass paneling and spots what he’s been searching for for the past 2 weeks.

Something moving.

Swishing.

Swimming.

He doesn’t even need to stretch his tether to full length, because the tiny nebulous cloud comes to meet him.

“You’re still here huh?” he asks, not expecting a response. Because the fish never speaks, never gives him more than a shake of its star-dusted tail and a blink of those black, nebulous eyes.

And maybe a week ago he’d have been saddened by this. Upset. Angered. Lonely, like the ocean itself far below his feet.

But it’s okay.

It’s okay when it doesn’t respond as he whispers about going to the moon like he did as a child. About his dream to get away from those bandages that tied him down, and the infinite space to do so. About the silence, conversation just through pixelated text, a sky that pulls his loneliness from his chest and knits it across the stars for all to see.

And he watches the sunset until it slips beyond the horizon yet again. Until his suit beeps at half oxygen, and until he realizes he’s alone once more in the rungs of the night’s shadow.

Amane then does three things.

Makes his way back inside and peels off his chilled suit. Catch the faintest of glimmers on the horizon, of starlight and scales and gills that breathe space dust, just before it slips off into the twinkle between Alcor and Mizar. Heads to his desk, opens his messages, and sends a quick note to his brother promising to be home soon. Even though it’s only 6 am there, and Tsukasa won’t – shouldn’t be awake for another three hours.

The response is almost immediate.

Not soon enough.

And Amane laughs, just a bit, into the silence of the cabin before typing his response.

You can’t wait a week?

But he already knows the answer.

And for once, it’s something the both of them can agree on.

#jibaku shounen hanako kun #jshk #toilet bound hanako kun #tbhk #hanako kun #yugi amane #yashiro nene #my writing #round 2 of zine fics #jshk fic

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