Word Count: 4,051
"What. The. Fuck."
When she goes down to weed the garden, the last thing Nobara expects to find at the edge of the cabbage patch is a strange, well-dressed young woman, lying face down and fast asleep in what has to be a fresh, shallow crater.
Nobara pulls a face. There is no way some rando (already a rarity in these stupid boonies) just dug that and passed out earlier. It's gotta be a prank, she thinks as she hops around and over the vegetable rows to get closer. It's just gotta be. She slides over to the woman and shakes the dirt out of her sandal, not caring in the slightest that it gets all over the presumed prankster's clothes. (Who probably deserves it, for wasting her time like this.)
Now, let's see who's responsible for this. She stifles a laugh as she pokes at the other woman's head with her dirtied foot, leaving a thin streak of dirt on her cheek as she turns her face up to the light.
It's a stranger.
Nobara slams a hand over her mouth to keep from shrieking in surprise, her foot recoiling so fast she ends up dancing backwards to keep her balance, desperately trying not to trample the plants in doing so.
Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Nothing else comes to mind, just spinning terror and shock up there. She plants her feet into the earth, its coolness helping to ground her, and she lets out a breath. What's going on here? she wonders. She turns her head towards the main house, then back to the woman in the dirt.
She's dressed very beautifully, as anyone with even a fraction of Nobara's taste could tell you, albeit in an almost medieval sort of way. She stirs, glimmering faintly in the dawning light, almost like she's made of pure stardust. (Nobara swallows, her heart racing still.) It fades as the sun's rays touch her, though, so perhaps it's nothing?
(It would be fun if it weren't nothing, though.)
Nobara bites her tongue, crosses her arms, and digs her toes into the soft, cold dirt as she thinks. The beat of her heart makes her restless, and she tosses her gaze back to the main house, briefly toying with the idea of getting Grandma's opinion.
She tosses her bangs out of her eyes as she shakes her head. Grandma's opinion, pfft. She scoffs at the idea.
Still, she needs someone else here with her, so Nobara kicks her sandals off and runs back towards the main house as swiftly as her feet can carry her. However, instead of actually entering, she exchanges the sandals for a better pair of shoes and jumps over the fence surrounding the yard, dusting off her feet and cramming them into her shoes midair. She won't be running in them for too long anyway.
She grunts as she hits the ground, rolling over in a somersault to spread out the force, and sets off in a sprint down the road to the neighbor's house without missing a beat.
She bangs at their front door, kicking her toe against the ground as she does so, the little bit of dirt inside the shoe irritating her. "Fumi!" she shouts. "Fumi, wake up!"
Nothing happens for a moment, leaving Nobara tapping her foot on the concrete doorstep like a goat preparing to charge. (She takes a second and adjusts the tongues of her shoes, even though she knows she'll be kicking them off in a minute anyway.) She knocks on the door again, slamming her fist into the wood, almost considers leaving dents in the thing, if that'll help attract attention.
Luckily for the door, it finally, finally, finally opens, revealing Fumi's father standing in the doorway.
"Ah, Nobara," he says, nodding in greeting. "So nice to see you on this fine morning."
Nobara pushes past him. "Yeah, nice to see you, too, Mr. Matsumoto," she says, toeing off her shoes and wiping the last of the dirt off her feet. "Fumiiiiii!" she calls, running up the stairs to her best friend's bedroom. "Fuuuuumiiiiiii!"
She knocks on Fumi's bedroom door, waits a few seconds (examines her fingernails in the meantime), then says:
"I'm coming in! You hear me, Fumi? I'm coming in!"
At last, she hears Fumi stir, mumbling something about being tired, Mother, may she sleep in just a little bit longer? Yes, it's been three months since she's graduated high school, but three years' worth of lost sleep is not easily caught up on, you know.
Nobara opens the door, marching right on over to Fumi's bed and yanking the blanket off of her. "Fumi!" she repeats, shaking the young woman in question by the shoulder. "Fumi, wake up!"
Fumi wriggles a little, sort of getting up, but also sort of not. "Nobaraaaaa," she groans, which naturally only makes Nobara even more frenzied. "All right, all right, I'm up, I'm up already!"
Nobara lets go of Fumi's shoulders and instead turns heel to start rifling through her drawers. "Hurry up and get dressed," she says, picking out a pair of denim overalls and tossing it straight onto Fumi's face as the latter sits up of her own accord. "I've got to show you what I found just now!"
Fumi grunts as Nobara beans her in the face again, this time with a shirt to go with the overalls.
Nobara pulls out a sock ball and turns around, tossing it up and down impatiently. "Well? What are you waiting for?" she demands.
Fumi groans. "Nothing," she sighs. With a wishy-washy hand, she waves off Nobara, who takes that as her cue to wait outside, which she duly does.
There, once the door is closed, she stares at her fingernails, picks at the grime underneath. It feels odd, loitering in the shadowed hallway corner of her best friend's house when it feels like she's on the cusp of her life's greatest turning point. There's a sort of emptiness to the moment, like it's not supposed to be here.
Nobara finishes all ten of her fingernails, so she presses her back against the wall and cracks her knuckles. Her toes wriggle with impatience, almost as if begging her to run back home already.
Then, Fumi's door opens. Fumi walks out with a yawn and a head of unkempt hair, but Nobara snatches her hand up in an instant, dragging her down the stairs so quickly, they both nearly tumble down instead.
"Let's go!" Nobara shouts. Her head starts buzzing as they put on their shoes and run out the door (giving Fumi's father their hasty goodbyes), Fumi lagging a few feet behind as normal.
"You're not gonna believe what I found by the garden just now," Nobara says, opening the front gate for Fumi to come through.
"What did you find, Nobara?" Fumi asks, eyes still a little dazed.
"C'mon." Nobara grabs her hand, leading her carefully through the garden rows, all the way to the back. The strange woman's still there, lying in the dirt.
Guess she's a heavy sleeper, Nobara thinks as she and Fumi crouch beside her. Because really, it's a miracle that she's as fast asleep as she is; Nobara already feels a trickle of sweat run down her neck, tickling her spine, thanks to the unforgiving summer sun that already beats down on their backs.
"You don't happen to know her, do you?" Nobara scoots over to give Fumi a better angle on the stranger's face, but Fumi just shakes her head. "Figured."
"Is this a prank?" Fumi asks, glancing around the shallow crater.
Nobara shrugs. "Could be," she replies, but the excitement building in her belly makes her start to grin. "Or maybe it means something."
"It could just mean that they're starting to hire people to aid in pranking you." They quiet, shuffling back and forth as they stare at the stranger.
"Is she even alive?" Fumi asks, leaning over to nudge Nobara, who turns to her.
"Excellent point, Fumi," she says, the smile suddenly becoming a little hard to maintain. "Would you like to do the honors?"
Fumi hesitantly picks up the stranger's arm as it sits right before their feet. Tiny creases form on her forehead, her nose crinkling and her lips pursing and she concentrates on finding a pulse. Nobara holds her breath watching her, unsure of what it would mean if she were, like, dead.
Fumi sighs through her nose. "She's alive," she says, and now Nobara lets out her breath. "Her heartbeat's there, but it's a little faint. We should probably get her inside."
In an instant, Nobara scoops her arm underneath the stranger, hoisting her up into her arms. "Bro, help me," she says to Fumi, who blinks in surprise first. She scrambles to help lift the stranger, though, and together, they clumsily and a little awkwardly take her back to the main house. ("Together" used loosely here, as Nobara's more well-built than the willowy Fumi.)
"Bro," Nobara whispers after they've gently dropped her onto the couch, still miraculously out cold. "I can't believe what's happening."
Fumi skitters around for the broom and dustpan, as their sandals have inevitably left crumbs of dirt by the door. "It is a bit of a strange incident to wake up to," she agrees as Nobara takes the broom from her, violently shooing the dirt out of the house before Grandma can come in and scold them. "I mean, what kind of person falls asleep outside and then just—" Fumi flails for a few seconds, a gesture Nobara understands to mean, "ends up like THIS?"
Nobara shuts the back door and tosses the broom aside now that she's done with it. She flops down on the loveseat next to the couch, linking her arm with Fumi's as she does so, so that the both of them crash into the cushions together. "Hell if I know," she says, crossing her legs and propping her head up by her elbow rested on the armrest. "But it's gotta mean something." The excited buzzing in her chest tells her that much at least.
Fumi's not exactly sold, though. "I don't know about that, Nobara," she replies. "What could it possibly mean?"
Nobara opens her mouth, then realizes she has nothing. However, never one to back down, she stubbornly says the first thing that pops to mind:
"That our lives are going to change! Maybe she's going to be our way out of this stupid, provincial village and into Tokyo, and, like—" Go to college there. Live their best lives away from it all. (Find Saori. Move in with her.) Nobara loses her words in her excitement, reduced to simply smacking her fingers into her palm for emphasis. "What if it's magic? Or destiny?"
"Or," Fumi suggests, unlinking her arm from Nobara's so that she can fold her arms over her chest, "it might not mean anything."
Nobara deflates, pouting as Fumi sighs. "That's not fun."
"Well, there's no such thing as magic," Fumi says. "And destiny is debatable. 'Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.'"
Nobara lays a hand on Fumi's face. "I know this," she says (as this is far from Fumi's first time reciting Sherlock Holmes at her), and she makes her eyes wide and begging (while Fumi goes pomph! like a little cat), "but, what if we pretended for a second? What if she is magic? Hmm?"
Unfortunately, Grandma chooses that moment to enter the room.
"What's going on in here?" she snaps, approaching the girls from behind. "Who's that on my couch? Why is there dirt on my floor?"
Nobara dodges Grandma's hand and turns around to face her. "There's no dirt on the floor, Grandma; you're just going blind!" she shouts. "I swept it all up!"
"Then what's this?" Nobara yelps as Grandma circles around to snatch up her foot, dusting it off none too gently. "You haven't been tracking mud into the house again, have you?"
Fumi, sweating bullets, stands up, giving Nobara the space to wrangle her foot free.
"No, Grandma, I haven't! That hasn't happened since I was nine; stop bringing it up all the time!"
Grandma tuts her tongue. "Your feet are dirty," she warns, then points her finger at the stranger on the couch. "She's dirty, too! Where did you find her? Did you drag her in from the garden?" She lets out a fat, dry, "HAH!"
Nobara almost wants to open her mouth to say, "Yes. Yes, she was from the garden, and I am TRYING to romanticize that fact, Grandma," but Grandma's already grabbing the broom and swiping at the imaginary dust on the floor, muttering to herself about who-cares-what. So instead, Nobara faces Fumi and pats the seat next to her.
"It's whatever," she sort of grumbles, sort of huffs, as Fumi quickly, nervously, switches between looking at Nobara and her grandma. "She'll be gone in a minute anyway."
"Have you finished weeding the garden?" Grandma demands, giving Nobara a sharp jab in the back of her neck with the butt end of the broom. "Go weed the garden," she says, shaking her head and tutting her tongue some more. "How will you girls find good husbands if all you do is sit on your butts and gossip all day?"
Nobara pointedly rolls her eyes, taking great care to make sure that Grandma can see it, and even Fumi develops a mildly distasted expression on her face.
"I'd better go," Fumi says, however, dipping her head at Nobara. "I have my own chores to do." She quickly bows to Grandma. "Thank you for having me over."
Grandma grunts in acknowledgement as Nobara's one and only support makes her hasty break.
There's a silence between the Kugisaki women once the door scrapes shut. It's perhaps a bit tense, but no more so really than what Nobara's already used to.
Still, it feels like a sin to defy Grandma for so long.
"I found her when I was going out to weed the cabbages," Nobara says after a moment, if only to keep the silence from becoming oppressive.
"Probably a drunk," Grandma snips. And well, she's probably not wrong. It happens from time to time, with strange men (who definitely never look this well-dressed) stumbling into town on the midnight train and passing out in some back alley dirt road. Being the final stop on the railroad kind of did that.
Grandma returns the broom to its proper space and settles into a chair not directly across from Nobara, but still near enough to put her on edge.
Silence again.
Nobara refuses to acknowledge the budding, blooming tension in the room, crossing her legs and examining her nails as her grandmother pulls out her needlework. There's dirt in her cuticles again (there's always dirt in her cuticles), and the edges are running a little ragged (but it can't be helped with all the farm work to be done). She frustratedly scowls, holds a growlish sigh in her throat, and folds her hands atop her lap instead.
"We will decide what to do with her when she wakes up," Grandma says at last. She pauses her needlework to make distinct eye contact with Nobara.
A tiny smile tugs at Nobara's lips. (She can work with this.) She breaks from Grandma's gaze as she stands up, dusts off her overalls, and twists her hair up into little buns on either side of her head.
"I'll be in the garden," is all she says before skipping off.
Maki wakes up in a strange bed with a pounding headache.
She groans as she rolls over, smooshes her face into her arm for a moment. There's a funky scrape to her skin as she does so, and her cheek distantly stings. It's not worth waking up just yet, is it? What's she got to do tonight anyway?
Her eyes snap open, and she bolts upright, patting down all her pockets in search of—
She stops. Slowly, mechanically, she finds herself turning her head towards a window.
It's dark outside. Twilight, cusp of dusk. It's hard to see.
What am I looking for?
There's a crisp click to her left, and Maki whips her head towards the light that just came on so fast, the tip of her ponytail stings her cheek.
"Oh," says the strange girl standing in the doorway. "You're awake." Her hand falls from the light switch back to her side.
"Just woke up, thanks." Maki feels her eyebrow twitch involuntarily. "What's up with you?" she drawls. She doesn't get an answer, so she scowls. "Cat got your tongue?"
"No," the stranger replies, matching her tone. "Long day." She tosses her ginger hair out of her eyes and marches over to a desk.
Maki watches her tug on the desk light, then gasps when she picks something up. "My glasses!"
"Oh, so these are yours." The stranger holds them out to her, and Maki takes them despite the subtle hostility she's sensing. "The name's Kugisaki Nobara. I found them in the garden, near where you fell. You're lucky they didn't break."
Maki frowns as she puts them on. (Ah, much better; she can see now.) "Fell—?" she begins, looking back out the window, only to freeze up at the unfamiliar world sprawling before her. The stars hang above, shining as they do, and the moon (lazy ass) sits low on the horizon.
"I'm on Earth," she breathes.
(Something pulses in her head, making her wince.)
"What do you mean?"
Maki tears her gaze away from the window, tries to focus on the girl, Nobara. "I'm on Earth," she repeats.
Nobara raises an eyebrow. "Where else would you be?" she asks, crossing her arms and plopping her ass down in her desk chair.
"The sky."
Nobara's eyes bug out, and her jaw falls open. "Wait—"
Maki rubs her temples, trying to soothe the pain. What happened? She struggles to remember, but everything's lost in a blurry haze.
"Who are you?" Nobara asks.
Maki sighs, turning to face her. "Zen'in Maki," she says, slowly, deliberately, "and I fell from the sky." And that's all she can say with certainty, as the headache keeps her from retrieving anything else.
"From the sky," Nobara says, disbelief written all over her face, though in more of an awed way than a mean way. She gasps, bouncing up in her seat. "You're a star? Or a constellation, maybe. Is that why there was a meteor shower yesterday?"
Maki doesn't know what to say. She doesn't know anything about herself other than her name. "Yeah," she says, though, because she knows at least she was neither the sun nor the moon.
"So then what are you doing here?"
Maki sighs. "I don't know," she says. Not that she's sure she'd say if she did know, but hey, at least now she doesn't have to keep track of a pack of lies.
"Was it to be forgotten?" Nobara asks. Her tone is perfectly casual, but the words still feel almost like they're stabbing Maki between the ribs.
"Well," she dryly says, doing what any respectable person would do in her situation and using sarcasm to hide her pain, "I certainly have forgotten a lot of things, it seems, and not by my own choice."
Nobara hums, but does not apologize. "Why don't you stay here for a while?" she asks, and Maki senses an undercurrent of anticipation in her words. "It's all gotta come back to you with time, right?"
Maki purses her lips and crosses her legs as she thinks. It's hard to know how to feel in this situation. There's this constant upper layer of unease that comes from the new environment, which, coupled with the general fear resulting from the sudden amnesia, makes it hard to pick out any other emotions at all, let alone ones that will help her make a decision here. After all, it's hard to go with your gut feeling when your gut's too busy crying over something else.
(Besides, has she even done anything yet to earn a place to stay?)
But to stay will mean stability, safety, rest, preparation, perhaps even allies, if she's lucky; to leave will mean uncertainty, uncertainty, and more uncertainty— it's uncertainty all the way down, really. In a time where Maki isn't even sure of her own self, her best bet is to stay.
"Sure," she says at last, pushing certainty into the word, but somehow feeling like it's wrong regardless.
Nobara puffs up in excitement, and she jumps from her chair straight to the bed to tackle Maki in a hug. Maki stiffens, startled and unsure of how to react at first, but settles into it after a few seconds. (It's nice, after all, and it eases her anxieties.)
"Don't worry," Nobara says, eyes alight with delight, "we'll find your prince of stars."
Prince of stars?
Earlier that same day, in a little coastal town by the Pacific, Itadori Yuuji runs down to the beach. There are rocks by the beach, see, all smooth and clean, with a delightful weight to them when kept in his pockets, and he has stuff to do all day, so the day's search has to take place now, right before dawn.
The lull of the waves greets him when he walks onto the sand, and he takes a moment to stare at them. The stars are fading from sight, and the sky is already shifting from blue to grey to orange, the moon nowhere in sight. The fresh sea breeze gives his nose chilly nips, and he takes a moment to shake off the cold.
Rocks. Rocks, rocks, rocks. There's a cove nearby where a lot of sea glass likes to wash up; he trots along the sand, kicking the waves as they lap against his toes, to get there.
Oh, this one's nice, he thinks, picking up a blue-black and oblong one and dropping it into his pocket. This one, too. He picks up a flat, grey stone with a hole worn through the middle. Oh, and red sea glass; that's rare.
He pulls the glass out of the sand, wipes the grit off of it with his shirt. It's still got all its shine, so it can't have been broken off that long ago, and yet it has no sharp edges, as if they've all been smoothed away by the current. He holds it up to the dawning light, admiring its ruby redness against the grey-green ocean, when suddenly, he hears something shift in the cove.
He jams the red shard into a pocket separate from his other rocks and whips around.
"Hello?" he calls, taking a couple steps inside. "Anyone here~?"
He scrambles over a couple rocks, expecting to survey the area from their higher vantage point, but he stops as soon as he can see over them, for lying curled up in the sand on the other side is a young man, apparently fast asleep. His hair (which, honestly speaking, reminds Yuuji of a sea urchin) is black as the night, his skin is pale as the moon, and his entire being seems to shimmer faintly in the light.
Yuuji's mouth falls open, and he makes a little surprised sound. "What the…?"
author's note ii.
yuuji: OHH LOOK LOOK THAT'S ME! I'VE APPEARED! HALLOOOOO~~! *waves at the version of himself inside the story*
me: hehehe yes you have (and now we wait like two more chapters for you to show again in any relevance)
yuuji: what was that?
me: don't worry abt—
gojou: heyyyy heyyyy what about meeeee? do i appear~~~?
me: yeah eventually
gojou: c'mon, i wanna know about me! when do i appear~~
me: dude i said eventually
gojou: *flounces* what about me? won't anyone think of—
me: *turns to the rest of the cast* makiiiiiiii
maki: *tases him*
me: *pushing gojou's body under the rug with a casually disdainful foot* so as i was saying, yaaay yuuji's debut this chapter!
and also technically megumi's. gojou will play his own significant role in the story EVENTUALLY, and there will also be significant satosugu probably from his introduction on. i'll tag their characters when they show up since they have very important roles and there will be segments told from their pov, but i'm not gonna put satosugu into the relationships tag because there won't be enough of it for me not not feel like i'm being rude to the people who are searching primarily for satosugu. when it starts cropping up, i'll put it in the additional tags section, since like i said just now, it's big enough to be plot relevant.
so yeah, in case you were wondering, itafushi will play a large enough role and get enough development throughout this fic that i think if you came in here just for them, you'd be satisfied, hence why they're tagged in the relationships section. i'm the kind of person who gets really salty when i see people tag a bunch of minor relationships into the relationships tag bc it clogs up the smaller ship tags or makes it hard to find fics where they're central to the plot and like [rant cut for brevity].
but yeah thank you for reading you'll have to get used to the stupid long a/n, leave a review, and stay safe out there