Among the Stars

Some days, she almost thought that he was too perfect.

He wasn't a typical boyfriend after all. There were never any suggestions of movies or dinners for dates, in all the time that they'd been together. No, Masaya was the type to enjoy long walks on the beach while collecting litter, or picnics in the park while observing bird nesting patterns. Not that she didn't love him for that. Masaya was truly the most thoughtful and caring person that she had ever met, and his concern for the environment made her smile. There was no one else that she could think of who could match the kindness of his soul.

But sometimes, on her dates with him, she thought that he might just be a little too perfect. Not that she was complaining. It'd be a silly complaint if she was. But while they walked along the beach, Masaya could simultaneously give directions to tourists, educate her on the fish that swam in the tidal pools nearby, and make friends with a couple's dog (though they'd warned him that their animal was a bit aggressive). Ichigo would stand off to the side, staring at the man that she adored while he threw a stick for the dog, and would smile when he'd tell her, "I think they were wrong about their dog." And she thought that he was perfect.

So their dates weren't the usual. Well, that was all right. She still got to spend time with him, and that was what was important. Albeit, it was time that he was also spending caring for the world around them and not just her. (But she was not selfish, and so of course she was not complaining.) Masaya cared too much about everything to just pay attention to her alone. Ichigo liked him for that, too. A man who was conscious about people's feelings, and who was aware about his carbon footprint. That was a part of what made him Masaya.

Masaya was too perfect. She was sure of that now, though she'd never said it out loud, not to herself and certainly not to anyone else. It was perhaps the fact that when they were together, they were so busy making an effort to do volunteer work and help out other people that she'd forgotten what had been her original purpose in seeing if they could do something together at all. Everyone loved him, and called him the responsible citizen, the well-meaning high school teen who would make it far in whatever career he chose. He was very efficient, and hard-working, and polite, and —there really was nothing bad to say about him at all, was there?

"The world really is astounding," Masaya had told her, as they'd sat on a hilltop after a one hour hike to see the sun rise over the trees. Ichigo had still been blinking sleep out of her eyes, and had stared out at the sky at the pink and orange streaks without fully taking it in.

But she had said, "It's a beautiful sun."

"Sometimes I think that people would really learn to appreciate the simple things in life a lot more, like this sunrise, if they only took care of the world a little more." He'd been glancing sideways at a stray condom box, clearly displeased that the perfect place to watch sunrises had been tainted by the carelessness of human beings.

Ichigo hadn't known what to say at that, but she'd made an effort at placating him. "Beautiful things can't be covered up so easily, though, can they?"

Such a brilliant smile had been shot at her, that Ichigo had thought that it had been worth it to climb an hour to see a sight that she saw every morning outside her window. Masaya's smile was more brilliant than the sun. She'd wanted to tell him that. But the thought had been embarrassing and cheesy, so Ichigo had bit her tongue to silence the words and had just smiled back.

When she stopped being the regular teenage girl and became a Mew, fighting for peace and for so many other reasons, Ichigo stopped thinking about the ordinariness of her life and her boyfriend and just focussed on the battle. Her heart would beat faster, her legs would spring with a suppleness she certainly didn't think that she possessed most of the time, and her ears would ring with every beat of sound. Her eyes, too, changed, not only the colour but the vision too. The scenery became sharper, the movements of her comrades and her enemies so much more defined and easy to follow. And the strength. That was one the thing that she didn't know how to describe, that incredible tautness of bunched muscle that she just knew would be able to make her punch a knockout hit. So on the days that she was more cat than human, Ichigo did not think much about her ordinary life with her perfect boyfriend. She thought of flying kicks and dodging and running and everything else that went along with facing monsters twice her size.

But on those days, sometimes, as the battles dragged on or ended and left her feeling hollow with lack of energy, she suddenly remembered and yearned for her plain and boring life. Her life with homework and her job at the café. At those times she was glad for Masaya, sincerely and utterly glad. Glad that the person that she was dating was simply a kind and caring person, with an itching to save the environment.

However; when she was just regular Ichigo, just a girl looking for some free time to go shopping or to rent a movie to watch with her boyfriend, she wished that he would suggest something other than science centres or walks along the beach for their dates. It was a very faint wish, and a silly complaint, but on those days Ichigo would look at herself in the mirror and wish that she had a more exciting boyfriend. But he had no flaws, so of course...she wasn't complaining...

Shutting down her thoughts, Ichigo looked down at her textbook and forced herself to get back to work. It was after school one evening, and she had dragged out her textbooks and had lugged them over to the rooftop of her school, just wanting some peace and quiet while she tried to finish her schoolwork before she went home. She was sitting with her back to the chain link fence surrounding the rooftop and her books in her lap. Down below, a small group of people were heading towards the building where the kendo club was doing some heavy practicing, and Ichigo could make out the excited chatter of girls wondering who was currently fighting who. She could have told them a little: it was her Masaya fighting another student whose name she neither cared to and simply couldn't remember.

She had told him that she'd wait for him to finish practice, and had gone off to try and get somewhere with her homework (or she'd be doing it the night before it was due, she was sure of it). Their practice had gone on quite late already, and the sun was just setting.

Ichigo worked through her math problems slowly, bored and not looking forward to the day ending, because the next day she had a long shift at work. Kendo practice dragged on, and Ichigo silently looked on at the building from above and admired the club's mental toughness. As the light dimmed too much for her to see the pages properly, she shut the book and sighed in some relief. Soon Masaya would be changing out of his gear and they would walk home together.

"You've waited hours for him, and he still hasn't shown up to take you home?" Mocked a familiar voice, in a highly irritated tone.

Rather than getting to her feet immediately and taking up a defensive stance —that would only egg him on, she was sure of it— Ichigo slowly turned her head and met the eyes of the owner of the voice. Who was standing on the other side of the rooftop across from her, leaning back against the fence with his arms loosely resting on his head, and shooting her a look to match his irritated tone of voice. "I knew he would be a while," she told him curtly, "I expected that, so this isn't an inconvenience."

He angled his head in a way that made his hair fall back to reveal more of his jaw, so she could clearly see him grinding his teeth. "I would have never made you wait this long." He said to her now, with a bit of a huff.

"But then you aren't my boyfriend, Kish." She returned, breezily. The unspoken words were as clear as if they actually had been spoken. I would never have been waiting for you anyway.

Dropping the relaxed pose, Kish strode across the rooftop and stopped not two feet away from her, piercing eyes staring down into hers. Wary now, Ichigo got to her feet. "You want to know if there's even the slightest chance that I care about your planet too, don't you, Ichigo?" He blurted out suddenly, and she started, not knowing where that had come from.

"You've done plenty of things to prove that you don't care at all," she said smoothly, crossing her arms over her chest. If he was not planning on trying to hurt her or make any advances on her, and just wanted discussion, then she could give him the time to explain himself. There was a part of her that didn't like to attack unless she was attacked first, and it was putting up a protest in the back of her head now, trying to beat down the lingering thought that the person in front of her was a threat. She didn't want a fight when it was unnecessary. Since there didn't seem to be any bad intentions on his part, she couldn't in good conscience raise up arms against him. "So no, I haven't been wondering if you cared." Where is he going with this? She thought uncertainly.

The distance between them seemed to have lessened when she wasn't paying attention. "Haven't you thought, even once, that it was possible that the people you were fighting against weren't as destructive and uncaring as it seemed?" Darkness was now more present in the sky that brightness, and the shadows cast on his face made his gold eyes stick out all the more.

Carefully, not wanting to upset the delicate conversation that they had going, Ichigo returned, "What are you trying to say? That you're not the bad guys, after all? How do you think that you could prove otherwise?" Now she could see where he was leading their conversation. It seemed like another attempt at telling her that she should like him. Ichigo was not impressed.

More intently now, Kish murmured, "We, most of all, see the beauty of this world, far more than you humans ever could." He held out his hand now, not in an offending manner, but silently, wanting her to take it. Ichigo just stared. "If, at any time at all, you felt even the smallest bit of curiosity to want to see things from my point of view, and you had the chance...would you?"

There were no lethal daggers in his hands now, no weapons at all to threaten her with. He wasn't making any gestures like he was about to grab her, but Ichigo did not move her hands from her chest. Instead she tensed a little, and Kish narrowed his eyes like he'd noticed. "You want to show me that you too can see the beauty of Earth?" She asked hesitantly.

Kish bared his teeth teasingly. "The Earth is the reason we care so much about this battle, Ichigo. The Earth is the reason we're fighting. I'm trying to prove that I'm not the enemy you think I am. We both want the same thing, you see. We're both fighting for the same beautiful thing."

They really were too close, for her to be able to hear his slight intake of breath as she shook her head. "Still trying to get me to like you, I see. Don't you know how much I love—"

Abruptly pressing his hand against her mouth, he hissed, "Don't say his name." Ichigo glared at him in response, so Kish pulled his hand away to get her gaze to soften. He went on, "This isn't about changing your opinion of me so you'll like me. It's about wanting to show you how I see your planet to get you to understand how we think. How I think." He insisted, but Ichigo didn't look quite so convinced.

When he offered his hand again, with a hopeful look on his face, she sighed. "If you're planning on kidnapping me, you should know that you'd never get away with it." The serious look on her face showed that she meant it. Kish tried to look suitably rebuked.

"Well, kitten?" His persistence earned him a weary glare.

But she took his hand.

Taking this as her acceptance, Kish suddenly pulled her forward and then scooped her up in his arms, getting a half-cry of protest from the surprised Mew in response. Then he launched himself into the air, gaining altitude quite quickly. Within seconds they were a good twenty feet above the school, and climbing.

Ichigo made a choked sound and grasped his shirt in her hands, gasping out, "Don't you dare drop me."

"Not in a million lifetimes," Kish reassured her with a serious glance.

The air grew much colder as they ascended, and she shivered at the air sliding over her exposed legs and arms. Which, she suddenly noticed, were being touched by Kish, and she fought the blush that was surely rising on her cheeks as the school drew further away below them. Strangely, she did notice the extreme height anymore so much as she noticed the warmth emanating from his body. But then Ichigo looked over her shoulder and down below.

Buildings and street lights were spread out over the land like playing pieces in a role playing game, and the people milling about looked like they could be figurines on a board. There was a spectacle of the red and white lights from the vehicles on the streets, forming a stream of colour that flowed in every direction. Kish prodded her with a finger that was wrapped around her shoulder, and she looked up at his interested face. "Haven't seen your city like this before?"

"I have," Ichigo retorted, "but just...from a window."

Kish stopped climbing higher and switched to moving forward, causing Ichigo to open her mouth to object, but he overrode what she was about to say by telling her, "You'll be back in time to meet your precious boyfriend." The tone was bitter. Ichigo closed her mouth again.

Stars were just starting to become visible in the night velvet of the sky, as cloudless as it was outside, and the innumerable amount of tiny pricks of light above her made her feel effectively small and meaningless. With the lights above and the lights below, and the wind in her hair and on her face, Ichigo felt a rush of adrenaline as they flew over the city. She was both awed and delighted.

"Kish..."

"Hmm?"

"This is...amazing, you know that?"

He grinned, toothily, and confidently. "I told you I knew of the beauty of your world."

"Not just Earth," Ichigo said, quietly. Kish gave her a startled look, not understanding. She smiled back up at him. "But the space beyond it, too."

There was a bit of silence from him. Then, cautiously: "Outer space?" The alien clearly did not see what she was getting at.

Laughing somewhat, and further startling him (she was enjoying herself? with him? was it possible?), Ichigo spread her arms as much as she could in a gesture of greatness. "Everything on this world has its own uniqueness to contribute to what makes this planet what it is. The cities, the people, the animals, the landscape. But I think that the space beyond this world makes Earth stunning, too. Just look, Kish." She pointed upwards, and Kish followed with his eyes.

Above, the endless universe lay like a great blanket over the planet, enveloping the atmosphere below it.

"Just look at it all..." Ichigo whispered. Kish was silent, taking it in. He'd never looked up before. It seemed like such an odd thought, but it was true. Why look up when their goal lay below them, after all? Why look up when beyond that atmosphere lay their dying planet, a place of misery and regret? But now he looked, and stared in wonder.

Somehow, the view that had been offered by their spaceship did not compare to the view offered from the planet called Earth, where the kaleidoscope of colours and images below only compounded onto each other, giving the world a look of fullness and busyness. This only made the sky above so much more striking, as simple and unchanging as it was. As black as it was, with the lights of the stars serving as distant reminders that Earth was not the only thing in the universe.

Ichigo sometimes thought that she had a boyfriend who was too perfect. She'd wished, some days, for someone exciting. But on those days when she was a Mew, she was dearly grateful for his ordinariness. Masaya, after all, cared for her deeply and took her out on long walks down the beach, and hikes up to distant hills to see a proper sunrise.

She stared into the golden eyes of Kish, who was so distracted by the vision above him that he failed to notice the attention that he was getting.

You aren't the enemy I try to tell myself you are, Ichigo thought, mystified.

Masaya may have shown her the sun, but Kish let her fly among the stars.

The End.