Dreams of Tanabata

Unpacking has numerous advantages over packing as an activity. These include the general lack of looming deadlines (once all of the boxes have been removed from the truck, that is) and the fact that your possessions are being returned to you rather than sealed away, never to grace your current location again.

It is however no less tiring, Touma quickly realizes as he assists his mother in this endeavor.

By the end of the day, he is barely able to make his way through the necessary bedtime preparations before drifting off to a sleep where he has a dream more vivid than any he's had in years.

In it, he's at a festival much like the one he attended with Kusuo as a child. He looks for the horizon, but finds none and realizes that the twinkling lights of the stars in the sky are not stars at all but simply more festival lights and the sky is not a sky but rather the festival grounds sloping up and over and eventually back into themselves like a dyson sphere of festival built to fully utilize the festivity of some invisible star of celebration at its center.

He wanders through the festival aimlessly for a while, marveling at its strange layout, until a bunch of stuffed cows like Cream hanging up as a prize at a ring toss game catch his eye.

He tries to win one a few times without luck.

The stuffed cows begin to smolder away into ashes. They're all going to be destroyed just like the one Kusuo had won for him.

In a vain attempt to save them from this fate Touma redoubles his ring tossing efforts.

Asumi? What are you doing here?

Touma turns to see Kusuo standing behind him wearing a yukata with a red spider lily pattern. It's folded the wrong way round, the right side resting atop the left. He's still the child he was the last time Touma saw him and with faint surprise Touma realizes that he is his seven-year-old self as well.

"Mom threw away Cream, so I'm trying to win her back." Asumi says. He turns back to look at the smoldering remains of the unwon cow plushies, "As you can see it isn't going terribly well."

This is just a dream you know. Even if you won one you wouldn't be able to keep it.

Having said this, Kusuo starts to walk away from the booth.

"I suppose that's true," Touma says, following after him. "Besides I can't replace what made Cream so precious, since that was the fact that you won her for me."

Why did you keep it for so long?

"I needed something to remember you by. Something physical, I mean. I'm very grateful to you for putting a stop to the bullying but I cannot hold an absence, even one as wonderful as that one, close to my chest at night to remind me that you exist and that you loved me enough to give me something that I was unable to obtain on my own." Touma rambles, "She clearly served this purpose quite admirably, given that I still remember you even after everyone else I know has forgotten. Well, everyone except for Takashi, I guess. His lackies might remember you too, but I didn't manage to track them down before I moved."

They were institutionalized. Kusuo says, his head lowered. Takashi probably will be as well, once his mother gets too old to care for him.

"Ah well," Touma says. "I suppose that explains why I couldn't find them."

I broke them so badly even I couldn't fix them. Kusuo says, Shouldn't you be more bothered by this?

"Perhaps. Intellectually I know that the fate my bullies met was a harsher one than children like them deserved, as awful as they were notwithstanding, but emotionally I've never managed to feel particularly bad about what happened to them." Touma says, adding after a moment's consideration, "I'm sorry if that troubles you."

It's not that. Kusuo says, I mean, aren't you afraid of me?

"Of course not, you accepted me as I am, so it would only be fair for me to do the same for you."

You don't have to.

"But I want to. Won't you please come back and let me?" Touma says, reaching out to Kusuo.

I can't. I'm sorry. Kusuo says pulling away from Touma's outreached hand. I'll make it up to you, I promise.

"I don't want it made up to me." Touma says, his voice oddly quavering, "I want this to not be a dream, or rather I want to be able to see you in real life again instead of only in these dreams that make your absence sting all the more acutely once I wake up from them."

Wouldn't you rather forget me? Kusuo asks, looking up at the false stars. So you wouldn't have to miss me anymore.

"Of course not! My memories of our time together are among the most precious ones I have. I just wish that I could make new memories with you in the future as well."

After a long silence Kusuo says, You'll find someone to make new precious memories with someday. I promise.

"Finding someone else won't make me stop missing you. You were my best friend."

I was your only friend. You can make better ones. He smiles at Touma, a bit sadly, Odd as you are, you're far from unlovable.

Touma finds himself back in his bed before he can push back against the 'unlike me' that he suspects lies implicit beneath those words.

When he falls back asleep he dreams of the festival again but no matter how he looks, Kusuo is nowhere to be found.

*

Teruhashi Kokomi goes home alone.

Once there, she prepares and eats dinner alone and tidies up afterwards alone.

Both of their-

Both of her parents work overseas so with Makoto gone there's no one else in the house.

It doesn't feel real. There's a strange dreamlike weightlessness to it all that leaves her floating above herself as she goes about her life like nothing is wrong and Makoto's just left for his business trip a day earlier than expected.

She can almost convince herself that he did. It would make so much more sense and raise so many fewer troubling questions if that was the case.

This serene calm lasts until the next morning when she gets a panicked phone call from the production team of the drama that her brother's supposed to be in asking where he is, and suddenly the full weight of what happened comes crashing down on her.

She manages to retain her composure long enough to lie that she has no idea what happened to him, only that he left at his usual time so he should have had plenty of time to get there. After that she hangs up the phone and cries.

It's still hard to believe she'd killed her brother. It had all happened so fast. Him kissing her, her pushing him away. If only she had kept calm when he kissed her then she could have just let him down gently like any man who asked her out on the street.

Except that unlike all those other men she'd still have to go home with Makoto and sleep in the same house with him and meet his eyes over breakfast the next morning like he hadn't just French-kissed her the previous evening despite being her brother.

The truth is she's relieved he's gone, as guilty as she feels to admit that to herself.

There's still a part of her that grieves him though.

It's true that she's spent the last few years trying to avoid him as much as possible without making her distaste for him obvious, but when the two of them were small she would have counted him as one of her closest friends. Admittedly she hadn't had many of those even though she'd always been well-liked by her peers.

Now the once sweet memories of those days leave her nauseous as she combs over their history and tries to figure out where it had gone so wrong.

When had her time spent with him started to be tainted by that pervasive sense of discomfort and dread?

When had he stopped seeing her as a sister and started seeing her as a potential romantic partner?

Maybe he'd always seen her that way and when they were kids she'd just missed it because she'd been more naive and the true nature of his feelings towards her had been less obvious.

She allows herself a whole ten minutes of such moping then she goes to the bathroom and hides away all the evidence of her distinctly unangelic tears so she can go to school just as pretty and perfect and ready to bring joy to the masses as she's always been.