Chapter 4

"Minato…"

Subaru whispered the name to herself. A part of her was glad to finally be able to put a name to the figure in her memories, but a bigger question tugged at Subaru. She asked, "You mentioned he was in a coma. So is he better now?"

"He is. As far as the doctors can discern, his memory and cognition are intact. But he does have trouble with fine motor skills and verbal communication, and can only say a few words or short phrases at the moment. His sleep cycle is also still off, and he would often fall asleep during the day and stay awake for hours at night. But I don't think he really minds," Kyou smiled wistfully. "It lets him watch the stars at night, and in case he does sleep through the night, the nurse would sometimes turn on the planetarium so he could see the stars during the day."

She looked down at the black spherical projector in front of her and smiled fondly and said, "My brother's health had always been poor. Almost all of my memories of him were in a hospital setting of some sort. Our parents are also very busy, so I didn't get to see him that often even before his coma. But I remember whenever I did come to visit, I would always see him either reading about the stars or playing with the planetarium my parents gave him. For a long time this was his most precious possession."

"Was?" Subaru wondered aloud.

Kyou quietly walked over to her brother's sleeping form and picked up the framed paper star by his pillow. "I remember coming to see him one day and he showed this paper star to me. He said a friend of his gave this to him earlier in the day, and he was so happy to have received a present from a friend for the first time. That same friend had also left him two cartons of strawberry milk, and he had shared one with me. He told me the next time I visit he'll introduce me to his friend, and I remember being very curious about this mysterious person who had befriended my brother.

"But not long after that he became severely ill and fell into a coma. The nurses in the ICU knew how much the paper star meant to him, so they kept it at his bedside for all these years. It's a little worse for wear now, so when he was moved out of the ICU they framed it and gave it to him as a gift," Kyou said softly as she carefully placed the star back by her brother's side and smiled at his sleeping face.

"No can could explain what brought Nii-san out of his coma, but what we do know is that he still has a long way to go to recovery. The rehab facility he'll be going to has specialists who will work with him to improve his speech and help him walk again. It'll be hard not seeing him as often as I would like, but our parents say we both have a stubborn streak: once we set our minds on something, we don't give up easily. I know Nii-san will do his best to get better, and I will do everything I can to be there for him."

"When…when will he be going to the rehab facility?" Subaru whispered, not quite sure what to think as her mind tried to process everything she'd just learned.

"The morning on the day after tomorrow," Kyou answered. "We've arranged an ambulance to take him there."

Subaru stared down at the floor, and felt her heart sank. "So soon…"

Her lips quivered as the realization that she would discover and loose the friend from her childhood all over again, and she covered her mouth with her hand as a small sob forced its way out of her throat.

Kyou looked at Subaru in puzzlement. Unable to hold back her feelings anymore, Subaru's eyes briefly locked with the red-haired girls', and she began to say, "Kyou-chan, I…I—!"

The door to the hospital room opened and a nurse started in surprise at the sight of the two girls in the hospital room. "Oh! Kyou-chan! You brought a friend with you to visit your brother today?"

"Hi, Hinami-san. Eh, you could say that," Kyou smiled sheepishly as the nurse stepped inside the room. "My friend and I are helping out with the blood drive today, and I thought I'd come up to check on Nii-san during lunch break. Are you here to check on Nii-san?"

"That's right," Nurse Hinami replied, keeping her voice low so as to not disturb her patient. "Has he been asleep the whole time you've been here?"

Kyou nodded. "For at least a good 10 minutes now. Right, Subaru-chan?"

Startled by the question, Subaru nodded mutely. She watched as the nurse went about checking the numbers on the monitors beside Minato's bed, her eyes trained on Minato's reposed figure.

Beside her, Kyou glanced at her phone and gasped, exclaiming "Ah! Lunch break's almost over. Come on, Subaru-chan, we should get going." Kyou took Subaru by the hand and led her back out into the hallway. "I'll see you later, Hinami-san!"

Hinami watched the girls take their leave and turned back to her task. As she looked up from the heart monitor, the boy in the hospital bed stirred and his blue eyes fluttered open.

"Good afternoon, Minato-kun," Hinami stepped next to her patient, "I just came in to check on your vitals. How do you feel right now? Any feeling of pain or discomfort?"

Minato gave her a small shake of the head and a wan smile. Hinami dutifully wrote his response down, but her pen paused when she saw he had lifted his hand towards her.

"Who…" he said, his labored voice a thin whisper. "…Was here?"

"Kyou-chan and a friend just came by. Sorry we woke you. Do you think it will be okay for me to check your blood pressure?"

Minato closed his eyes and gave the nurse his consent with a short nod. Leaning back into the bed, he partially opened his eyes and looked at the hazy white ceiling.

A friend… Minato reflected. Somehow the voice he thought he heard seemed familiar, like a voice he remembered from a dream.

The truth was, for Minato the last seven years of his life had felt like one long, disjointed dream. He remembered sitting in the lush interior of a greenhouse, traveling to the depths of the ocean, flying across the boiling surface of the sun, and racing through the emptiness of space. Throughout it all, there was always a pink-haired girl, who managed to find him no matter which exotic locale he found himself in.

He recognized the voice he'd just heard in his room as the voice of the timid but sweet little girl who had given him the paper star that sat next to his pillow. But he was lucid enough, despite the limitations of his bed-ridden body, to recognize that her presence next to him had to have been just another part of his dreams. The little girl who had appeared out of the blue that one day had long since disappeared back into the great big world outside his hospital room.

I can only see her in my dreams now, he thought, and closed his eyes to the pale room.

As much as he was grateful to the powers that be for letting him wake from his coma, Minato recognized the fact that he would now have to contend with the uncertainty of his future. In his dream world, where time neither moved forward nor backward, he could observe events from afar, with no influence on their outcome. But now, it was time to let go of dreams, and start facing the future of his reality. *

For the rest of the day, Subaru had a hard time focusing on the tasks at hand. There were lots of things to do, and people to talk to, but Subaru found herself staring into space, a hollow feeling gnawing at her heart.

When the blood drive concluded, the girls waved farewell to Kyou, who had elected to stay late. The five girls waited outside the hospital by the pickup area for their parents to arrive, and talked happily about their day and their plans for tomorrow's Tanabata Festival.

"Last year's fireworks were wonderful! We should get to the river early so we can find a good spot," Itsuki said.

"But if it rains they would have to cancel the fireworks display," Nanako cautioned. "We should see what the weather is like first."

As the others chatted, Aoi glanced to her right and saw Subaru with her head bowed, looking absently down at the ground. Gently nudging the pink-haired girl with her elbow, Aoi asked, "What's wrong, Subaru? You don't look so good. Do you feel sick?"

Hearing this, Hikaru piped in, and said in a scary voice, "Oh! Did Subaru catch one of the scary germs that they have in the hospital? You know there are flesh-eating bacteria that can eat you alive in places like this!"

Aoi shuddered and shouted back, "Hikaru, don't say creepy things like that!"

Itsuki touched a finger to her lips and looked thoughtfully at Subaru. "Aoi-chan has a point though. Subaru-chan, you haven't looked very cheerful since you came back with Kyou-chan after the lunch break."

"Did Kyou say something that upset you?" Nanako asked evenly, but from her expression it was clear she was concerned whether something had happened between Subaru and Kyou.

Subaru shook her head and smiled appreciatively at her friends' show of concern. "It's nothing like that. It's just that…I saw an old friend, that's all."

"'An old friend'?" The girls said in unison and stared hard at Subaru.

"What kind of 'friend'?" Hikaru asked bluntly while Itsuki blushed. "Is it a he or a she?"

"It's a boy, but I had met him many years ago when I was little, and he…he didn't recognize me," Subaru answered, unable to mask the sadness in her voice.

"So you spoke to him, then?" Itsuki wondered.

"No, I didn't…um…" Subaru wasn't sure how to explain the situation to the others, so she said resignedly, "there was no way for me to reach him."

This puzzled the girls who looked at one another then back at Subaru. "But did you try to talk to him?" Hikaru wondered, and Subaru shook her head.

"No, I couldn't, because—" Subaru began to say.

But Hikaru wasn't done. She interrupted Subaru and continued to say, "In that case, if you didn't even get to talk to him, then of course he couldn't recognize you!"

"Hikaru-chan's right," Itsuki echoed. "Next time you see him, you should talk to him. He may very well remember you. It's just that it's been so long that he might not recognize you immediately; but if you remind him about the time you spent together, then I think he will remember you."

Subaru frowned and looked down at her shoes. She absently touched the star-shaped clip in her hair and said in a bare whisper, "But I don't know if it's possible for me to see him again…"

That night, as Subaru wrapped up her writing assignment for the day, she turned her attention to the window. The gray sky during the day had given way to a pitch-black night. The light from the stars was completely obscured by the thick clouds, which signaled rain in the day to come.

I wonder if this is what the universe will look like one day; once it has expanded to the point where the distances between stars and galaxies is so great, their light will never reach one another…

Subaru closed her eyes and put down her pencil. When she opened her eyes again, her book on stars and mythology came into view, and her thoughts went back to the story of the celestial maiden and cow herder as she put away her notebook and started to get ready for bed.

If it rains on Tanabata then Orihime and Hikoboshi have to wait until the following year to see one another again…

But humans don't enjoy the same kind of time that stars do; our lives are short and brief in comparison. We pass each other by, have chance meetings, and sometimes never see one another again. That's simply how life is. We hold onto the precious memories of our meetings with those we love and cherish, but in the end, no matter how much we want to hold on, we have to say goodbye at the bridge across the Milky Way…

With these lingering thoughts on her mind, Subaru nestled herself under her blankets and allowed the veil of sleep to cover her eyes.

The familiar furnishings in her bedroom shifted and transformed. When Subaru opened her eyes she saw a white hospital room with gray, cheerless clouds outside the window. The only splash of color in the room was in the form of a young boy with shoulder length red hair and a young girl with cotton candy pink hair.

Minato-kun? Is this from back when we were kids? Subaru thought distantly as the younger version of herself reached into her little purse and presented Minato with two cartons of strawberry milk.

"Here you go! I brought some more this time since you said you like them!"

"Thanks," Minato smiled as the young Subaru placed the cartons on the nightstand, next to the colorful paper star she had given him a few days before. Studying the girl, he noticed the touch of sadness in her eyes and wondered, "What's wrong? You look kind of down today."

Young Subaru's shoulders drooped. Crawling onto the wide hospital bed, she sat down next to the boy and curled her legs to her chin. "I was watching the news this morning with Dad, and there was a meeting where scientists were discussing whether Pluto should be a planet again or not. I was really hoping they would change their minds, but in the end they decided not to make Pluto a planet again, and that made me really sad."

"Oh," Minato absorbed the news thoughtfully. "But I don't think it matters how people choose to label Pluto. People like to place things into neat categories like planets, dwarf planets, asteroid, and comets. I think no matter how people choose to label it, in the end, Pluto will always be itself."

The pink haired little girl looked at her companion tentatively as she thought about his words. Finally, she smiled and the sadness that was in her eyes lifted. "I guess you're right. Just like how you're you, and I'm me. We'll always be ourselves."

Minato smiled back and gave her a firm nod. "That's right!"

"I wonder what Pluto looks like," young Subaru mused. "There are photos for all of the other planets, but no one knows what Pluto looks like." To her friend, she beamed and said, "Maybe we should go there next time?"

"That's true, but unlike the other places we've visited before which are light years away, there's a space probe called New Horizons that's on its way to Pluto right now," the red haired boy pointed out. "Within a few more years we should be able to see pictures of Pluto from the probe; then everyone will know what Pluto looks like."

"That's true…" young Subaru contemplated, then she stood up on her knees as a thought struck her. "In that case, then to be fair to everyone else, we should wait until the probe gets there before we see Pluto! That way everyone will know at the same time what Pluto looks like!"

"Okay! Promise?" the boy held out his pinky finger.

Giggling, the girl and the boy hooked their pinky fingers together.

"Promise!"

Gradually the sound of innocent laughter in Subaru's ears gave way to the sound of waves crashing onto a rocky shore. An overwhelming sense of drowsiness overcame Subaru's senses, and she struggled to keep her eyes open. Try as she might, all she could make out from between her heavy eyelids was a large moon hovering above a setting sun.

A warm presence next to her shifted and took her hand. The sensation was at once comforting yet distant; tenuous like a thin wisp of smoke that would vanish with the slightest breeze.

"You tell me to live. There's no end to how cruel you are," a familiar but unidentifiable voice spoke softly to her ears.

The fingers around her hand tightened their grasp just a little, and despite the fragility of this moment, Subaru wanted nothing more than to hold onto this feeling of warmth and contentment in her heart for the rest of eternity.

She tried to keep her eyes open, but the urge to sleep was too strong. As the sound of waves grew louder and louder, slowly drowning out the presence next to her, the comforting voice whispered, "But because I met you…I am now able to see the hope that I thought was out of sight."

Subaru's eyes blinked open at those words, but the gentle voice in her ear was gone, replaced by the sound of rain against glass. Rubbing her eyes groggily, Subaru sat up in her bed and looked through her window at the overcast landscape beyond the panes of glass.

As memories became dreams and dreams transformed into memories, Subaru repeated the word that stood out most clearly to her from her night's sojourn.

"Hope…" she whispered as the rain continued to fall outside.

A/N:

* Based on what I read in the medical literature and feedback I got from an MD, someone in Minato's situation would probably have some problems with memory and motor skills after so many years in a coma. However, to keep things a little more upbeat and hopeful, I decided to forego some of the hard, cold facts, and made it so that while Minato's body is in a weakened state, his mind is still sharp and he remembers everything that happened in the canon, albeit in the form of a long dream.

As for why Minato recalls the events of the anime as a dream, my interpretation of his two split personifications is that they're two parts of his soul. One chose to try and change his fate, while the other stayed behind (as for why the other half stayed behind and created the green house, I have no good explanation for that at the moment :p). In the end, once they've fused back together and returned to Minato's body, the whole thing seemed like a dream to him.

You can find the illustration for this chapter here (remove the spaces and replace the period with a dot): fav (period) me/d92fzb0

Thanks to Tomoyo Ichijouji for beta-ing!