Planetes
One
Kokuhaku
[Confession]
I wonder if you remember,
when I fell in love with you…
—Kokuhaku, supercell (trans.)
There was a time in Ouma Shu's life when he would have thought with some certainty that he could just approach someone with Yuzuriha Inori's status, talk to her, and just get away with it. He would have, too. That was when everything was well with his world—when he gets everything that he wants with a flick of his wrist. When he wasn't so… content to stay in the shadows as he was wont to do these days.
But the transition from child to adolescent had been hard on his constitution, what with his widowed father passing away due to a brutal murder that was still yet unresolved, and Shu was left with his elder sister, twenty-two-year-old Mana, and his rather airheaded stepmother, Haruka, to manage the affairs of the house. He didn't mind his father's death as much as he did the sudden emptiness of the house. It was as if Shu's heart went along with the last of his parents.
And that was one of the many factors why he didn't just approach Yuzuriha Inori that morning as she went up to her desk just adjacent to his own, nor speak to her when he sensed her looking at him with those quiet, intelligent eyes of hers. He quite liked the way she stared at people vacantly yet inquisitively, as if everyone was a mystery that she couldn't quite unravel even with the frequency that she interacted with them every day.
Shu did note that that frequency was quite high, since Inori was rather popular in school, being one of the prettier girls of their year, and a rising internet idol at that. But it wasn't quite purely her beauty that attracted people to her—maybe it was the fact that she was rather unreadable in expression, making her practically an enigma in the eyes of the hormone-charged boys in the school. Everyone loves a mystery—especially if that mystery was in the form of a slender, pale teenage girl with dyed hair and a beautiful voice.
Shu had to admit, he was one of them.
"Shu."
He raised his eyes at the sound of the voice that called out to him, and met the glass eyes of Yuzuriha Inori. She looked unperturbed at his look of surprise, but Shu was already panicking deep inside. What was he supposed to say to the girl that he had crushed on for the better part of two years, and yet hadn't spoken two cents' worth all this time?
He dropped his eyes, suddenly afraid. Irrationally, he was afraid of Yuzuriha Inori's searching eyes. He was afraid of that low, blank voice calling out his name.
The bell rang. Inori made a little scowl with her brows, as if frustrated at Shu's deliberate ignorance of her, and turned back to face the front. Feeling the atmosphere lighten, Shu let out a sigh of relief.
"Stand…!"
"Shu! Hey, man, looking as spaced-out as always." Loud, bubbly, and ever-energetic, Tamadate Souta flung himself at the chair before Shu's desk moments after the bell had rung, his dark eyes positively shining with energy. Shu never got how Souta managed to keep jumping all over the place all day without tiring, but had not enough interest to actually ask.
"What is it? The forms were already filled out and giv—"
"No, I'm not after those, Yahiro's already told me that much. Anyway…" Souta looked around with an overly dramatic secrecy and whispered conspiratorially, "I saw Inori looking at you quite interestedly earlier. You don't think she's into guys like you, eh? Eh?"
Shu glared at Souta, or rather stared hard at him. Shu had always thought that there was something in himself that always reduced the intensity of his emotions by half, and either way, Souta was too busy probing into the matter to notice his irritation. "So, Ouma Shu-sama? What?"
"I don't think she's that interested in me," Shu finally replied disconsolately, dropping back on his arms, which were resting on the desk. "I'm just nobody."
"You have a bad case of inferiority complex, my friend." Souta tutted (sympathetically or otherwise, Shu can't decipher) and smirked as he watched Shu sigh into his arms. "I'd kill just to have her look at me that long. She's not much into acknowledging others, you know. Although, rumor has it that she's dating Tsutsugami Gai from next door, so maybe that's a contributing factor…"
"Tsutsugami Gai?" Shu groaned. "It's hopeless, then."
"Hopeless? So you do admit you're into Inori as well." Souta chortled as Shu resurfaced indignantly, looking a few shades worse than he did before. "He's, like, some kind of demigod. What with his inhumanly perfection and all. Not the type that strikes you on idol status, eh, Shu?"
"No." Shu narrowed his eyes, fingers clenching on the smooth desktop. "Never."
Shu had never told anyone this ever since getting into Tennouzu High School, but Tsutsugami Gai had been a sort of childhood friend to him back when he was seven years old… when all was still right with his world. Or maybe calling Gai a "childhood friend" was an overstatement. It had been just a fleeting summer memory, in fact—Shu only remembered Gai by his golden hair and ocean-blue eyes and his tremulous, shy voice. And then, as quickly as failing candlelight, he vanished, and emerged ten years later, strong, tall, charismatic—all the qualities that Shu himself had lost in the same time period.
Shu admitted quite grudgingly that it was one of the reasons why he hated the guy's guts so much… although he admired Gai for the same reason as well. It was quite something to see in him the qualities that Shu might still have possessed if only his father's death were not as sudden as it had been. Ouma Kurosu's murder caught Shu unprepared in childhood, sneaking into his life like a thief, stealing away the brightness that shone in his eyes and leaving a mere shadow of the boy that he used to be.
Shu stared at the window beside his desk. A ghostly image of him stared back.
"Damn," he muttered to himself, suddenly disconcerted.
The rest of the day would have been quite unremarkable for someone in Shu's disposition if not for a single, very simple incident that left him as confused as the next person.
The simple incident in question was a single, unsigned piece of folded stationery placed carefully inside his shoelocker, directly on top of his leather school shoes. It briefly crossed his mind that it might be a girl's love letter asking him to come meet him somewhere to confess her feelings to him or something of the sort, but his self-deprecation disallowed such nuances and squashed all romantic possibilities, leading him to stuff the letter inside his bag and forget all about it as soon as he stepped out of the school grounds.
The wind whistled dolefully after him as he walked to the station.
"Shu, this isn't normal anymore, you know."
"What the hell do you know about these kinds of things anyway, Souta?"
"Ouch." Souta grimaced melodramatically as Shu finally managed to glare at him for once, the piece of the now-familiar unsigned letter crushed tightly in his fist. "But even I can tell that this situation is unusual as far as situations like these go, y'know."
"I should've said this the first time you told me that, but thank you for stating the obvious." Shu raised his closed fist and opened it gingerly, feeling the crumpled paper within shift uncomfortably in his loosening grasp. "Do you think the writer's some kind of stalker or something?"
"I wouldn't go so far as that yet," Souta shrugged, his tone matter-of-fact. "All she's doing is send you little messages that tell you to come to the library once you've read this, right? And why haven't you answered that summons already? It's just proper to refuse her outright if you don't like her rather than avoiding her, you know. Poor girl must have the patience of a saint to wait for you if you're gonna show up for every afternoon of the past week."
"I dunno myself," Shu said with an unsure tone, his eyes staring at the paper. But in his head, a lot of thoughts were already running in his head, raw and fast and hopeless. I'm afraid that this is all just a joke, or maybe not but she's just gonna be disappointed if she'll get to know me more or maybe I'm being a jerk for not coming to her or maybe or maybe—
"Shu? Hey, are you still listening?"
Shu was startled out of his reverie, disconcerted. "Sorry. My thoughts kind of slipped away for a moment."
He had left that letter from a week ago unanswered since he hadn't actually read it, but every afternoon after that, he had received the same kind of note lying inconspicuously on his shoes whenever he went to change to go out. And when he read it, it had always been the same simple message, written in dainty feminine characters:
Meet me at the library once you've read this.
It worried and scared him like the plague, and thus he treated the message as if it were one, never once fulfilling the condition that was set out on the plain paper nor trying to think too much about it. That was, until that same afternoon when Souta asked him why he hadn't acted on the message yet. Obviously, the person on the other line hadn't made a mistake and really was dead-set on meeting him. Not anyone else. Him.
The usual note was again folded and placed carefully on his shoes when he opened the locker upon dismissal, and upon reading the same message that he had already memorized the past week within, he came into a decision and immediately sprinted back up to the noisy halls, past his classroom, and to the end of the corridor wherein the library was situated.
The library was quiet and empty today, except for the student assistant in duty for this afternoon who looked rather sleepy as she stared at Shu when he came in. Nodding rather nervously at the girl, Shu decided to comb the aisles for the mystery person who wanted to meet him in private so badly that they sent the same message without fail every day for the past week.
The library was pretty empty today, Shu only hearing his own footfalls as he stepped carefully along the side aisle to look at all the possible places. Seeing no one even at the very back, he huffed with annoyance and made as if to turn around—
"…Shu."
Hearing his name called out so abruptly in the silence of the room, Shu turned quickly, startled, his eyes focusing at the strange sight right behind him.
"You!" he finally managed to say out loud, his voice betraying him and coming out in an almost shrill whine. Blushing despite himself, he swallowed and stared at the slim, pale figure of Yuzuriha Inori standing behind him with a wary glance, as though she were some sort of mirage. "I don't believe it."
"Yes, me," was the quiet, almost amused reply—if Inori did have the capacity to look amused. "Why do you look so surprised, Shu?"
"'S just not possible," he said, stammering slightly. Fortunately, Inori did not catch it—or if she did, she made no sign to tell him so. "…why me? And why you?"
"Only one question should be asked in here, Ouma Shu," Inori said with her low, sweet voice, and Shu immediately knew himself for a goner. Those crimson eyes told him as much.
The sunlight streaming from the nearby window gathered the little dust motes and swirled them around, as the world bated its breath for a second.
"Will you go out with me?"
