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2061
Ryoko watched the digital clock above the stove with a focus she’d never quite managed in her classes. She counted the seconds, held her breath for as long as she was able, almost made a game of it…
Time continued to march onwards.
6:22, 6:23, 6:24…
Each time that minute place clicked over, her eyes would flick to the front door, and her counting would begin again.
Around the time she hit ten or fifteen, her eyes would gravitate to the note pinned to the fridge: Going out with a friend from work tonight! Be back by 6! Love, Mom.
At 6:30, Ryoko began to drum her fingers against the untouched homework assignment in front of her. At 6:35, she yanked open the refrigerator door and grabbed what was leftover from the curry she’d made the night before. There was enough left for two people. At 6:45, she ate both servings, glaring at the door all the while. It remained firmly shut.
At 6:50, overly-full from too much curry, Ryoko shoved back her chair, left her undone homework and dirty dishes on the table, and strode to the door herself. She snapped back the lock, threw the door open, and stalked off into the night.
It was far too late for such a young girl to be out alone at this time of the year. The sun had set hours ago. The thought filled her with a self-righteous sort of satisfaction as she marched on.
It lasted until she was halfway across the neighborhood. It was like crashing from a sugar rush, realizing the heaviness was no longer in her stomach but in her chest.
Her steps slowed. She found herself staring at the lighted windows in the houses she passed, straining to see inside.
She saw families seated around the table still, parents and children tag-teaming the dishes, people of all ages gathered around television screens… She stopped in front of a house that felt unusually still, despite the lights shining in the windows. Ryoko was just debating whether her curiosity was strong enough to try and get a closer look… when a voice stopped her.
“What are you looking at?”
The voice was rough but young. It took her a second to locate the voice’s owner—a boy, maybe a year or two younger than Ryoko herself, seated on the front steps. There was almost something ghostly about his pale features, but his glare was steady. The deep purple bruise blooming on his cheek grounded him in the scene somehow—like a thumbtack pinned to the center of an otherwise blank board.
A ping of recognition registered in the back of her mind, like a text notification. “Oh. You’re that Sekigahara kid, right?”
“So what if I am?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t realize you lived this close.”
Ei Sekigahara. She’d heard about him. He’d gotten quite the reputation around town for constantly getting into fights. He wasn’t a true delinquent, exactly. As far as she knew, he wasn’t the type to go around shoplifting or vandalizing the bridge underpasses. But he was notorious for his bad attitude. His very presence tended to rub people the wrong way.
But Ryoko found herself surprisingly unbothered by his aggressive tone. She eyed the bright lights of the house, the boy sulking on the front steps… Banished, perhaps, for getting into trouble yet again?
Her mind drifted back to her own dark house. Was her mom home yet? If so, had she spared a single thought to where her daughter was at this time of night? Or had she simply collapsed onto the couch the second she walked through the door, as she had so many other nights?
Ryoko looked again at the boy watching her from the steps, and any lingering thoughts of turning around to appease her mother’s conscience flew away on the cool night breeze. “The convenience store at the bottom of the hill has a little café inside. It’s open 24 hours. You want to come get a soda or something?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Clearly whatever retort he’d been preparing was no longer applicable. He answered, finally, in that same hard voice, “I don’t have any money.”
“I do.”
Doubt flickered across those gray eyes. The set of his mouth softened, just a bit. “…Okay.”
They walked down the hill in silence.
She noticed the way his shoulders hunched inwards when the automated doors whooshed open, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans. The man working the counter glanced up when they walked in. Then it was like his eyes stuttered. His gaze sharpened and remained fixed on Ei for the duration of his stiff walk over to the empty café section. The boy plopped down in a chair, eyes turned resolutely away from the man’s accusing stare.
Ryoko wondered distantly what Ei had done to get on this guy’s radar—whose kid he’d beaten up, most likely—but outwardly, she ignored the whole exchange. She grabbed two cans of soda out of the refrigerated wall and threw in a prepackaged muffin for good measure. She didn’t bother to smile as her items were rung up and she handed the money over. The shopkeeper still wasn’t looking at her anyway.
Ei didn’t look up until she set the soda down in front of him. He looked almost surprised for a second, like he hadn’t expected her to actually get him anything.
“Thank you,” he mumbled.
She responded by tossing him the muffin, which he just barely managed to catch.
Later, she would learn that he didn’t even particularly like blueberries, but that night, he stuffed that cheap, store-bought muffin in his mouth like she’d baked it personally and just pulled it out of the oven. She wasn’t sure why, but it dispersed a bit of the weight still sitting on her chest.
They didn’t talk much that night. They drank their sodas in an increasingly companionable silence and then walked back up the hill at a leisurely pace.
“I’m Ryoko, by the way,” she said just before they parted ways in front of his house again. “Ryoko Shinonome.”
…………
That little, often empty convenience store café became their regular spot. By the end of the month, the man who usually ran the front counter in the evenings stopped paying them any particular attention.
He glanced over briefly this afternoon as Ryoko groaned and leaned back in her chair, lifting the front legs off the ground for a few seconds. “This is so stupid… How are you so good at this, Ei-kun?”
A tiny grin lit up his face, though not in an overly smug way. In the past few weeks, Ryoko had learned that this boy who was known for being aggressive and quick-tempered could be almost sweet under the right circumstances. He had a way of ducking his head when praised, downplaying his own strengths and accomplishments.
“It’s really not that complicated… You just forgot to carry a few numbers.”
He made a few more quick marks on the page before sliding her homework back over. Officially, it was a tutoring arrangement. Ryoko supplied the snacks. Ei would skim through her textbook and then walk her through the lessons her professionally-educated teacher had spent the better part of an hour failing to get her to make sense of. For a boy whose grades on paper weren’t any better than hers, he never failed to impress her.
“You should be an engineer when you grow up,” she commented, taking a sip of her drink. “Or a programmer. I don’t know. Something math-y.”
He shrugged, avoiding her eyes, scribbling some nonsense doodle on the edge of the paper. “I don’t know… Sounds like a lot of school. What are you going to do after you graduate?”
It was a painfully obvious redirect, but she let him have it. It wasn’t exactly her favorite topic, though. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
“There’s nothing you want to do?”
If it had been anyone else, she probably would have brushed him off, gotten a little irritated even. But Ei’s curiosity sounded so genuine…
“I guess… I’ve considered being a flight attendant, maybe.”
“Yeah?” He seemed surprised. She wondered what he pictured when he thought of her future.
"Yeah. I mean, at least I’d get to see the world, right?”
“Right… That’s a perk.” He looked like the thought of leaving the city had never even crossed his mind. Ryoko could relate. The idea of a world beyond these city walls felt almost impossible to someone whose entire life had been spent inside them.
Ei leaned back and stretched his arms above his head, the conversation slipping away. Ryoko hadn’t known him for all that long, but she was already noticing changes from the sullen tween she’d first met on the steps that night. She’d heard adults talk about how boys shot up like weeds once they reached this age, but now she was seeing it in real time. They were eye-to-eye now, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he was taller than her another month from now.
It was a tricky time for school uniforms. As Ei lifted his arms above his head, his shirt raised up well above his stomach… where Ryoko spotted yet another quickly-purpling bruise.
The sight immediately soured her mood, but she pressed her lips together, locking in her complaints. She’d gotten on Ei’s case before about getting into fights, and there was no more sure-fire way to get him to shut down completely.
He seemed to notice his mistake at once and hastily tugged his shirt back down. But that only made it visibly strain at the shoulders.
“You need to talk to your parents about ordering new uniforms,” she commented, reaching over to undo the top few buttons of his shirt faster than he could stop her.
Another tug left it sitting a little more comfortably on his frame… but her hands froze before they’d been fully retracted to her sides.
She’d revealed another, smaller bruise. A couple of them. Spaced across his neck, spreading to his shoulder. It only took a second to recognize the splotches as fingerprints. Marks from a hand far too big to belong to another child.
Ei was very still as he watched the dots connect in her mind. Her hands slowly returned to her lap. They were both silent.
There was an old storm roaring in Ryoko’s chest. A familiar rage and helplessness. She wanted to break down the door to Ei’s house, pin his father to the wall with a strength she didn’t have, and threaten him to where he’d fear for his life if he ever laid a hand on his son again.
But this storm resided in a very specific cavity of her soul. The same one that made itself known whenever Sanae’s mom would get suspicious, start asking after Ryoko’s mother. How late she tended to stay out, whether Ryoko made her own lunches and what was usually stocked in their fridge… Ryoko’s mom thought the other woman was a busybody, but there was a part of Ryoko that ached to open up to her.
But it was an ache that built and built until it blocked up her throat entirely. Until all that would come out were lighthearted platitudes and reassurances.
And life went on as it always had.
Or, as it always had until she’d come across Ei Sekigahara that fateful night.
Perhaps what she’d really been drawn to was a familiar sense of brokenness. Perhaps their connection was simply a desire to soothe in someone else what she couldn’t fix in herself.
Ryoko understood his rage… But she understood his silence too.
So she let the moment pass that day.
And a few weeks later, when Ei announced that he’d gotten a part-time job cleaning up at a nearby boxing gym in exchange for lessons, she held back any comments about messing up his sharp mind with a hobby so liable to leave him concussed.
You did what you had to in order to live with the hand you’d been dealt.
…………
2063
Ryoko had never been the best student, but she actually kind of loved Sakura High School. The buildings were all kind of mismatched from all the reconstructions and additions over the years, leading to a handful of hallways and stairwells that were all but abandoned in favor of newer libraries and science laboratories and the like.
It was in one of those stairwells that she’d come to hide now. Even once lunch ended, it was unlikely anyone would accidentally come across her here. The only thing left down this hallway were old equipment storage rooms.
Which is why she jumped a little when she heard footsteps on the stairs behind her. She didn’t have time to jump up and make an escape. Instead, she hunched in on herself further, hoping unreasonably that whoever it was would just pass her by without comment.
No such luck.
“Ryoko-san? There you are.”
Well. That wasn’t as awful as it could be. She untensed, just a bit, though displeased at the concern in his voice. A second later, Ei sat down on the step next to her.
“What’s going on? One of your friends said you ran out of the cafeteria.” His expression turned stormy when she lifted her head and he saw the redness of her eyes. “…And she said you’d been talking to Gouto. What the hell did that bastard do?”
Ryoko started shaking her head before he’d even finished the question. “It’s not like that, Ei-kun. I… I broke up with him.”
“Oh. You did?” He made an effort to sound sympathetic but clearly wasn’t disappointed. “How come?”
Ryoko shrugged, sniffed, wiped at her eyes. “I don’t know. I guess it was never really the way I pictured it. Renya-kun always seemed so mature and sophisticated… And he agreed to go out with me, so I thought he was interested…”
Ei grit his teeth but didn’t interrupt her. She sighed. “It was just little stuff, you know? I’d see the way his eyes lit up when he talked about whatever his latest research project was. He was never that interested in anything I had to say. I planned all our dates. I always initiated it when we held hands…”
She actually laughed a little, and it was real. Something about Ei’s presence seemed to be causing the hindsight to set in faster. “You should have seen the look on his face the first time I kissed him! Like the possibility had never even crossed his mind.”
Ei was holding up admirably, but he cringed visibly at the thought of Ryoko kissing the boyfriend he’d never approved of. It sobered her mood again. “There were a lot of things that never seemed to cross his mind like that. Like maybe he should come walk me to my next class… I don’t know, I thought all that was kinda basic when it came to dating. I guess he must just not feel the same way.”
“I’m sorry,” he said after a beat of silence.
She surprised him with a sharp jab to the arm. “Ha! No, you’re not. You never liked him.”
“I just didn’t think he was right for you,” he mumbled in his defense. “I was trying to avoid exactly this.”
He gestured vaguely in the direction of her face, her swollen eyes.
She pounced, wrapping an arm around his neck to pin him in place, grinding the knuckles of her other hand into his skull. “You dork. What do you know about love?”
Her tone was as playful as his was dramatic, considering how half-hearted his struggling was. “Ow! Ow! Stop that!”
Eventually, she let her hand drop, though her laughter continued to shake them both. Her grip was loose, but he didn’t pull away, choosing to rest his head on her shoulder for a moment instead. A brief respite from the rest of their lives.
…………
RS-13 Alpha, 3 Years In
Ryoko walked down the corridor slowly, relishing the sharp click of her shoes against the tiles. The facility left behind for them wasn’t small by any definition. When they’d first settled in, she hadn’t thought fifteen people could possibly fill the place up. Now she made a point of stopping to appreciate it any time she encountered a truly quiet moment.
Her journey came to an end at the door to the library, Renya’s only truly personal project. (Okino couldn’t fathom his desire to print out physical copies of nearly all the data saved to the colony’s mainframe.) Sure enough, she found him inside, surrounded by books and research papers.
He looked up when she shut the door behind her, his own peaceful moment broken.
“Am I interrupting something?” she asked, more as a formality than a true concern.
“Nothing serious. Just double-checking a few things,” he replied. “Is everything all right? I thought you were helping Okino run some final bug tests on the simulation today.”
She pulled out a chair and sat down across from him with something that was not quite a sigh. “Yeah, everything’s kind of devolved into chaos out there.”
Renya sat up a little straighter, a whisper of alarm crossing his features. In many ways, he was still the group’s commander. She knew he made a point to always have a finger on the pulse of the colony. He wasn’t used to being the last to hear any big news.
“Takamiya’s pregnant,” Ryoko announced without any fanfare.
“Oh.” Renya visibly relaxed. “Well. I suppose I’ll have to congratulate the happy couple. Once the larger celebrations die down.”
“I’m surprised it took them this long,” Ryoko commented in a tone dangerously close to disinterest. “I couldn’t believe Kisaragi and Ogata beat them to it.”
“Yes, well… I suspect there will be a lot more of those sorts of developments now that we’re properly settled here.”
Ryoko simply hummed in response, but she could feel his eyes on her a little more intently.
“If I were to guess,” Renya began slowly, “I’d say Fuyusaka and Sekigahara will likely be next.”
“Probably,” Ryoko agreed without a trace of the protective disapproval she knew he was listening for.
She liked Iori Fuyusaka. Truly. She wasn’t about to pretend it hadn’t been a shock when Ei had turned up to the final battle with a girlfriend of all things… But she was happy for them. She didn’t usually have much patience for Iori’s brand of cartoonish optimism, but she saw the way the younger girl smoothed out Ei’s usual awkwardness when it came to social interactions. She’d come across the two of them in one of the common areas the other day—Ei’s head in Iori’s lap, passed out after a long night spent staring at a wall of screens. Ryoko had stopped to watch for a moment as Iori ran her fingers through his hair, softly enough not to wake him up. She was gentle with him. Something he hadn’t had much of in his life. How could she not approve?
“…Have you ever considered it?” Renya asked after far too much time had passed for a follow-up question to feel natural.
“It?” she repeated mildly, though she had a pretty good idea what he was referring to. There was something sadistically satisfying about watching their fearless leader squirm.
“Having children,” he supplied stiffly. “One day.”
“Of course,” she answered simply.
“O-oh?”
“Not seriously,” she added, amused by his badly-disguised surprise. “But before the kaiju showed up? Sure, I imagined it. In the same way I imagined getting married and having some respectable job one day. I could never envision anything specific, but that was just the mental template for a successful life, right?”
“Yes. I suppose I can understand that.”
“Can you?” Her amusement hadn’t faded. Her teenage self, crying over him in an abandoned stairway, felt so far away.
"The notion of following a path simply because it’s silently expected of you? Yes, I understand that quite well."
Now he sounded more like his usual, controlled self. It stirred something within her. Ryoko cocked her head to the side, a new thought occurring to her. “Ah. So is that why you agreed to go out with me all those years ago? I’ve always wondered. I mean, you clearly weren’t interested.”
Renya shifted uncomfortably in his seat again. “I wouldn’t say it was so clear… Not at the time. Not to me, anyway.”
Ryoko looked at him head on, eyes a little sharper. “Something you’d like to share?”
Renya sighed, adjusted his glasses, finally set aside his book, and folded his hands together on the table before him in a controlled gesture. “It’s come to my understanding since that time that I don’t experience that sort of… attraction towards other people. Had I been more self-aware at the time, I would have used the term ‘aromantic.’ I apologize if my actions ever… led you on.”
Ryoko couldn’t help it. She started to giggle. And then slapped a hand over her mouth and forced herself to stifle it when Renya’s expression grew deeply unsettled. “Sorry! That was rude. I just… Oh man, I don’t know how to say this without being an asshole… Did you think you passed for allo?”
Renya’s shoulders relaxed a little, and the tension on his face cleared away. He even began to chuckle a bit himself. “No, I suppose I never quite got the hang of acting like I reciprocated your—or anyone’s—interest in me. Not that my time as your boyfriend was meant to be anything manipulative or sinister! I was simply… trying to determine whether I could. But I truly am sorry. I never meant for you to become the collateral damage.”
“Oh, take a breath, Renya-kun. I’m over it.” Her tone was dismissive, but her expression was almost wistful. “But thank you. For trusting me. It is nice to finally know where your head was at.”
“I must say, it was a nice surprise. Realizing I wouldn’t have to break out the slideshow and explain everything, term by term.”
There was no doubt in her mind that he’d actually made one, but she just snorted. “You must have missed Iori’s little self-discovery phase. She was pestering Okino with so many questions, they practically held a full seminar on all things LGBT by the end of it.”
They lapsed into silence—but a comfortable one. When Ryoko finally got up to return to the festivities, Renya cleared his throat.
“Ryoko… If our progress continues at the pace we’ve set, it’s not unreasonable to believe that the fifteen of us won’t be the planet’s only human inhabitants for much longer—”
“Not exactly beating the ‘robot’ stereotypes, are you?” she interrupted, a bit more rudely than she’d intended. “Just get to the point.”
“…Right. Sorry. What I mean is… The way everyone else here has paired off is not lost on me. I suppose I feel a little… guilty, at times. That your partner turned out to be a dud.”
She opened her mouth again to berate him for this take, but he held up a hand in a request for patience, and she obliged.
“I am at peace with who I am. But I do believe that you deserve better than you got. Your someone is out there somewhere. Or, they will be soon. I just hope you haven’t given up on the idea of a bright future.”
“My present is bright,” she corrected, firmly but not unkindly. “It’s such a fucking cliché but… I really was looking for love and fulfillment in all the wrong places. I can see that now. I never would have dreamed I’d have a family like this. For now, it’s more than enough.”
She turned and left him to his research then. Renya’s smile as he watched Ryoko go was as soft as the door closing behind her.