Don't own any characters. The sequel to "What Goes On." Don't know where the story will end, but here's the beginning of this part. Call it the Behind Blue Eyes saga.


01:Life


So as it turned out Makoto went far in life. She had three months to go before she was out of Juuban High – out on the street, as she considered it. Then Maehara-san ran away with some fellow, Keitaro or Kentaro or Keiichi, some name like that, Makoto had never paid attention closely, because the result was so much more interesting than cataloging Maehara-san's various dalliances. The result was, the store was bestowed, lock, stock, and barrel, upon Makoto. Maehara's Florist was then Kino's Florist overnight, and in a few months she built a monster of service that she sold, intending to move to the States. Skipping school to do so. And her friends were ready to come along. There was the bond between them. The promise of work and board was there as well, but of course they would have probably followed for less or nothing.

The three had moved in together the beginning of that year of fluxion their senior year, taking residence at Hikawa Shrine, helping Rei. Who could use the help. It was not necessarily that her friends, peers, perhaps contemporaries, had scruples born of a staunch Catholicism with respect to helping the upkeep of a pagan shrine – if girls' room conversations were any evidence, Rei would have impressed Mary Nazarene in terms of chastity. Rather, it was her manner, sometimes cold, sometimes supercilious, sometimes both, that endeared her little to the nuns, less to her teachers, and least of all to her classmates. So the only help, and in effect her only friends, were Ami and Makoto. Her grandfather had relinquished all his lust one sweltering day in July, a Monday, and by Wednesday evening he was gone, over Rei's protest, on a quest to find himself. However, as she used her psychic power less and less – she still got images of varying lucidity, but she peddled it less and less – receipts declined, and by the time the three went abroad the shrine's demise was not much of an end.

Ami's story was the most extreme. She had been top of the nation. Eventually she was neck-and-neck with Usagi, and eventually she settled with a bump on par with Makoto and Rei, at the tier they had reached around the same time. When Saeko was around she sighed, looking more tired than ever. Ami did not care. She still read profusely, and she still read things on the road to quantum gravitation, but she now merely showed up and slept in class, going home to read the masters. Similar to the others' attitudes. Makoto had never been brilliant, but any competitive drive, for which she was famous, a sort of zeal without prudence, was gone. As with Rei.

So that by the end of their senior year Ami and Rei were still responsible on some points but in many ways were depending on Makoto. Who had plenty to allow dependence. And they would work, that was certain and agreed. They had worked at Makoto's Florist, after the temple no longer made money and before Makoto sold out to some buyer de Vleet.

Rei had no explanation necessary to anyone – her grandfather was gone and beyond communication – and when Ami broached the subject with Saeko there was no resistance. Saeko was never around but she got, through a signed request from Juuban, a copy of her daughter's grades and exam scores, and she knew what would happen. She would not have been averse to the thought of putting up her daughter, whose prospects were now forgotten, but she had a hunch that her daughter would much rather go forth with her friends. Which was the idea.

And so, after graduations, in which these three were not included, they had toiled all summer and fall and winter and spring and summer again, building up the Florist more and more, before they sold out to that buyer for just enough capital to relocate and put up a business of a comparable size in the states. The three always had felt marked, Ami and the brains she bore like a thorny crown, Rei and her worldview like that of a medieval hangman, and Makoto dismissed as freakish or violent before she could even bother to show her true self, and so this leaving Japan for America seemed … right somehow. Minako had always gone on and on about turning eighteen and setting up shop on some Dating site catering to western men, as had Usagi until she found Mamoru (when appraised of the wonders of this plan Rei had put forth an eloquent evaluation of the blondes' notions, and those of the men, and those of the people who ran the site, which elicited a resolute though not forceful joint approbation from Makoto and Ami; that episode seemed to be the portent of the break that was to come later but surely), and of course the whole shining American culture thing was a big deal, but that was not the point.

It was far away. They were unknowns there, and they would be reinventing themselves, with all the baggage of their tawdry teen years gone. It was cloture.

And so when they stepped on the grimy plane, the sun blazing that brisk fall morning, it was more than a million new manga issues. It was all the wind and noise regarding the romance of Christmas Eve and Valentines' Day lost forever. Their contemporaries who had stuck to the system, they may have had a solid state, but then that state was static. That was all they would know.

Failure was real and maybe certain, but it was a faraway failure, if even real, and the faraway excused the failure anyway.