What do you want to do with your future?

Yuno stared down at the piece of paper that the teacher had just handed out. It was Yuno's last year of middle school and the teachers were pushing all their classes to get serious about their schoolwork and start thinking ahead to their futures. It wouldn't be long before high school started.

"Be sure you turn it in before you go home today."

'Future? What should I write…?' For Yuno, the question may as well have been an unsolvable equation. 'There's nothing I could write that would come true.'

The harder she thought about it, the wider the mental chasm stretched before her. All around her, the other students were diligently working on their own papers. No one knew her plight. No one knew what she had done, and that she no longer had anything to live for. She had never felt as alone as she did now, surrounded by other students, each of them with a parent and a life and a future to go home to. In her mind's eyes, she could see her own parents back at home; her mom's pretty face rotting away, her dad's eyes staring unseeingly ahead. It made her sick. She had to stifle a whimper - if she wasn't in the middle of class, she would have found somewhere to curl up in a ball and started to cry.

'That's what I should write. I started to cry and didn't stop until I was dead – that's my future.' Yuno still didn't want to die, but she was rapidly losing her will to go on. She was a monster – what kind of daughter killed her own parents? They had given her a chance by adopting her, and that's how she had repaid them.

'I deserve to die…'

Before she knew it, class was over and she still didn't have anything written down. The other students had already packed up and left. For the first time since it had been passed out, Yuno looked up from her paper and realized she had taken too long to write something down. Even the teacher was gone.

But she wasn't alone in the room. Another student was still in class. It was that boy who she had once thought was cute long ago. …Or was it long ago? At most, it could have only been two months ago, but it felt like a hundred years had passed between then and now. It was almost like someone else had had those thoughts. Yuno felt like she had been a different girl back then.

She couldn't see his expression from where he was sitting, but she could tell he was staring down at the paper on his desk. Someone was having trouble imagining their future besides her? Yuno was surprised. What could be giving him so much trouble?

Curious, and desperately wanting to take her mind off of her own bleak future, she stood up from her desk and walked over to him.

'Stop…what are you doing? What are you going to say to him?'

"What's the matter?" Yuno asked him, approaching his desk. "You don't know what to write either?" For some reason, just knowing that someone else was having difficulties thinking of something made her feel slightly better. She wasn't so alone after all. He looked up at her and she leaned over to look at his paper.

"I want to go see the stars with my family." She read out loud. So, he had written something down. She was a bit disappointed; he wasn't like her after all . Then what was the problem?

"My parents got a divorce last week." The boy, Amano, said. "I bought a telescope so we could all see the stars together, but now it won't happen. …It's stupid, right?" He laughed a little and looked up at her again. Despite her own problems, she felt sorry for him. He sounded so sad. "I'm going to erase it…" He began to rub the eraser against his writing, but she reached out and put her hand over his to stop him.

"It's not stupid." Yuno could understand why it was so important to him. Family was important. How many times had she wished that her own family could be like they were when she first came to live with them? When they went on family trips and had fun together? Too many times to count. So, she could understand why he would be upset that his family would never be whole again.

"It is!" He insisted. "I have to show it to the teacher!"

"…Why don't we see the stars together, then?" It would give her something to do. Yuno could get out of the house for a change. "There's an observatory nearby." It could almost be like…a date. "Isn't that a great idea?" She asked a note of desperation in her voice.

"No, uh…I wanted to go with my family…" And just like that, her suggestion was shot down. She sighed. It was hard to contain her disappointment.

"Geez, you're so stubborn." But Yuno was enjoying her conversation with him. It had been so long since she had just spoken with another person, outside of occasional words she said to teachers and other students. In these past weeks, she had been living in a world of her own. And thinking back on it, even before the incident with her parents, she had never had much of a social life with other students. She already felt closer to this boy than she had to anyone in a long time. If her circumstances were different, she could have seen herself falling for him.

"How about this?" She took his pencil from him and began to write on his paper.

"I'll become your bride in the future." Yuno wrote down and read out loud at the same time. She wasn't sure what possessed her to write it. It wasn't like her to be so impulsive at all.

'I could see myself with him. We could be together. It would be nice to have someone to love…' For the first time, she could imagine a future for herself; a future where she was someone's wife. But it was such a long shot, and she prepared for the inevitable rejection.

To her surprise, he just smiled a little. "When we grow up…" He replied gently.

'I-is he serious?' Yuno stared at him, in shock. He had actually… agreed? Honestly, she had expected him to laugh it off even though she had been serious. This was so unexpected. She could feel a blush growing on her face. Her heart was racing. For the first time in a long time, she smiled.

"Okay!"

She had a future again.

A/N: This was a very hard chapter for me to write, and I hope I did it justice. I wanted to convey how isolated Yuno felt and how desperate she was to connect with anyone at all. She's seriously starved for kindness right now, and Yuki was the first person who was nice to her or who talked to her in quite a long time. So she latched onto him. I'm not 100% happy with how it turned out though. I hope you still enjoy it anyway!