Moonlight danced upon rolling waves, glistening off the backs of dolphins and other sea creatures. Stars interrupted the blackness of the sky and glowed in the eyes of two men. One was a man of the land and the other was a self-proclaimed men of the sea, but lived on the land in a city called Morioh. Morioh's building and street lights casted a orange tint across the polluted sky, choking the wondrous universe that hid right above it. The orange tint engulfed as far as the eye could see, allowing no normal human to see what laid above them. The lights, essentially, created a bubble for the citizens of Morioh where their world was condoned to one city on the Japanese coast. The knowledge of space was in everyone's mind, but many only experienced it through photos, thus it was forgotten by most of the population of Morioh. And one of those people was a man who never escaped from the bubble of the city, named Josefumi Kujo.
Despite being in his early twenties, Josefumi had not once seen the true nightsky in his life, a fact that boggled the mind of Yoshikage Kira, a sailor and a surgeon. Kira was a man who ventured out onto the vast ocean to provide medical treatment to other sailors, causing for him to frequently see the moon, the stars, the planets, the milky way, the constellations, and everything else contained in the universe. Being on land for too long sickened him, and the orange, murky skyline didn't improve the situation. Kira is far from being a spontaneous man (one thing that always serves to frustrate him is sudden news whether it be good or bad), but he knew he had to instantly take Josefumi out to sea, out away from Morioh.
And now, they sat with their legs hanging off the side of Kira's boat, their backs resting on the boat itself, and they were astonished by the scene that the universe portrayed at night. It was breathtaking; the sliver of comets that would streak against the atmosphere, the shy peaks of asteroids that one could vaguely pinpoint, the rhythmic rocking and soft lapping of the waves against the boat which stimmed the senses of the two men, the inviting space spectacles which felt so warm despite the cold ocean air. Josefumi was infatuated with the real night sky, and was grateful that Kira was the one who had shown him this gift.
The sailor raised a hand to the sky, pointing at a cluster of stars. "Do you see that tiny speck of red about an inch away from the moon?"
Josefumi's eyes traced Kira's finger, blinking at the conglomeration of bright lights which he couldn't distinguish. Though he had read many books on space, everything felt like a blur now that he was actually viewing it. The only thing he could dissect from the celestial bodies were the moon and the big dipper -something that he felt ashamed of. The man had spent years of his short lived life reading and researching to enhance his knowledge, allowing him to distract himself from his grievous situation at home and to give him a chance to prematurely leave said home. He was majoring in agriculture, but still partook in reading textbooks upon textbooks of a variety of subjects -the cosmos being a particular fascination of his. Now that he was staring in the face of space, it dawned on Josefumi how little he truly knew of the world above his.
Shaking his head lightly, Josefumi muttered, "I don't see it."
"Come on, it's right there," Kira said with a slight annoyance, aggressively pointing at the same spot.
Still, it was unrecognizable to the other man. Sheepishly, Josefumi shrugged, prompting an aggravated sigh from Kira. The sailor retreated his hand back down to his side, took hold of Josefumi's hand, manipulated so that it was pointing, and shoved it towards the sky. To assure that Kira had directed in the correct spot, he pushed himself against Josefumi so that he replicated what the college student was seeing. There amongst the mass of stars was a thin smudge of red, as if God himself had marked it with his own blood.
"That's Venus," Kira said.
"Venus..." Josefumi echoed. He remained silent for a few moments, intaking Kira's warmth and the indescribable clean smell that lingered around him. Slightly anxious about the sailor's actions, his breathing grew weaker, shallower, but he managed to say, "What's so special about Venus?"
Sighing, Kira let go of the other man's hand and stretched it towards the planet. His hand, normally steady from the career he led where he had to meticulously care for someone under extreme conditions, were shaking ever so slightly, tension building in his fingertips as he desperately reached up to the atmosphere. Josefumi watched him, Kira being a person that the younger man could never grasp what milled in his mind. He didn't know what the sailor was doing, but something compelled him to mirror him in an attempt to understand his actions. The two men strained their hands to Venus, as if the body part would detach and crawl through the night sky in order to grasp the red speck. Their shoulders creaked, muscles growing stiff as the blood rolled down their veins. The arm hair stood on its ends and goosebumps enveloped their skin like weeds in a meadow. Josefumi could feel his pulse in the pads of his fingers; Kira's nails were beginning to turn blue, which one could vaguely see thanks to the moonlight.
Numbness overtook his arm, but Josefumi continued to extend alongside Kira. With each passing second, the college student felt his body being pulled towards Venus, each cell uprooting itself from its bodily imprisonment. Again the sky was lit up by another marvel as slow particles of light filtered through Kira's and his palm and floated to the heavenly bodies above. With his mouth hanging ajar, Josefumi stared, completely and utterly in awestruck at the molecules which flowed from their fingertips. Josefumi's mouth went dry, his eyes began to sting from lack of blinking, but he continued to spectate the whimsical iotas of luminosity.
"This is why Venus is special," Kira scoffed, a twinge of fondness permeated his voice.
"Wh-what is this?"
A sigh leaked through the sailor's lips, and in the faint moonlight, his eyes gleamed with a slight wetness. "My mother, Holy, would take my sister and I on frequent sea outings, and there was a night that she woke us up and shuffled us to her boat. She took us far away from the shore -which looking back on it, was rather precarious of her- and laid us on our backs just as we are doing at this moment. Instructing us to follow her actions, Mother raised her hand upwards to the sky. My sister was still half asleep, but I did it. I still remember it; the sudden spark of light from our fingertips, how I tried to justify that it was just a random firefly that I had missed, how the glow traversed further away from us and melted into the darkness."
Kira grew silent, his breath wavered vaguely but it was suffocated by the ocean. With the sailor still pressed against Josefumi, the man could feel the hesitation creeping through Kira's body. His mouth opened several times, contemplating what to say and then shutting it with disatisfaction. But just as quickly as it occurred, Kira recovered from that momentarily expression of weakness and continued with his story.
"My mother said that these flecks of light only appeared under special conditions. One, the sky must exempt of clouds as far as the eye can see. Two, it must be on a night where Venus is at it's most prominent location. And three, verbatim from her words, you must be in the company of someone you care for since Venus is the planet of love."
"Ah…"
That was all the college student could muster in a reply, purposefully trying to appear nonchalant when in actuality his heart was beating against his sternum. Stiffening his body and clenching his jaw, Josefumi felt all too close to Kira in this moment. The man felt like a child once again who skipped school for several weeks due to a classmate confessing to him; he was unable to handle it then, as he is unable to handle the sheer thought of it now. He was a hypocrite, a paradox, someone who simultaneously desired affection and rejected it. The college student feared being hurt but feared loneliness. He desperately needed an escape.
Just as Josefumi obtained the thought of lurching his body away and flinging himself into the sea, Kira's hand that resided amongst the stars grabbed the college student's hand, so that his palm cupped the back of the other's hand and his fingers wrapped around to faintly touch the creases of Josefumi's hand.
"The lights stopped," Kira observed, adding, "you're also shaking."
"Ah, sorry," the college student mumbled. There was nothing more Josefumi wanted to do in that moment than to curl in upon himself, successfully erasing himself from existence. Hunching his shoulders and squirming away from Kira, he settled on that instead.
Kira gripped on his hand more, not yielding to Josefumi's attempts to break away. "Get out of your head and enjoy the stars; you don't know the next time when you'll be able to see it again."
Swallowing a lump in his throat and closing his eyes, Josefumi breathed in the sea air deeply, allowing it to fill his lungs and worm itself into every pore, artery, crease in his cerebrum, and breathed out his anxieties and fear. Kira was correct, per usual; he needed to present or else this opportunity was going to shatter like rocks before his eyes.
Lowering his hand (and Kira's along with it), Josefumi opened his eyes. He kept his gaze on the cosmos above, admiring the interstellar beauties, and felt as Kira slowly moved his hand that so the two men's fingers could intertwined together. Hesitantly, the younger man relaxed into the action. The college student's hand continued shaking, but in the comfort of Kira's, it soon stilled. Holding hands, albeit somewhat foreign for both men, was reassuring. It was something that they couldn't even recall when or why it began, but Josefumi took at as a sign of trust from Kira (and partially due to the college student having decent hands) and Kira found it to relax Josefumi during negative, intense emotions.
"You're right, knowing you, I don't know when the next time will be that you'll take me out to sea again. Especially on a night such as this."
Giving Josefumi a light circle rub with his thumb, Kira chuckled softly to himself. "Just enjoy it and become a man of the sea for the time being."
While the two men laid together, the universe reflected in their clear eyes once more, and they stayed out on the sea until the morning sun replaced the stars in their everglowing vision.