There were only so many times that Hotaru could talk to her parents over the phone about a rather set, regular life taking place in a small parameter. This time, before Hotaru could even talk about what had happened since the last time she called, Haruka told her she should at least explore the town a little.
"But only when it's safe," she added, worry suddenly spiking in her voice. "In plain sight of everyone – wait, damn it, that might make it easier for someone to snatch you up. Is there a dojo there? A good one? I should have taught you judo before you left."
Given that she had been in pain just being near her and the others, Hotaru didn't think being taught judo before arriving in Namimori was all that viable.
"I'll be okay," Hotaru reassured her, trying to cut Haruka off from her train of thought before she decided that Hotaru needed to carry a weapon on her at all times. For all that Kawahira liked to be out of the house doing who-knew-what, he also wouldn't not be keeping an eye on her or Granny in someway, as evidenced by how he always showed up when the two of them were looking for him.
"She still has her communicator," Michiru said calmly. Hotaru glanced down at her 'watch', a purple watch made out of 'plastic' at first glance. An observant person might have noticed that there weren't as many decorative features on it as expected from a child's toy watch, or that the materials weren't really plastic at all, but few people would ever look that closely to notice the oddities.
And even fewer would ever realize that it was actually a very high-tech equipment, magic and science combined to do what was presently impossible.
"If anything happens," Michiru continued. "You know what to do, Hotaru. We'll be monitoring your signal constantly, but the moment the alarm goes off we'll be there to make the philistines regret it in the short time they have left alive."
Never mind, there was no calmness in her either. She was just very good at pretending to sound like the voice of reason.
The true voice of reason in the trio spoke now. "Did something happen, Hotaru?"
"Nothing bad," she replied fondly.
"Nothing 'bad'?" Setsuna echoed.
Her smile deepened at the memory. "Just, some people I met at the park."
The library wasn't a bad place to read, but sometimes it was too quiet, and Hotaru needed background noise other than the sound of pages flipping, throats clearing, people moving every now and then. A place to people-watch, so to speak.
For that, the best place to read was the park, near the playground. The sound of children playing – loud and free, happily unaware of everything except their own world – and the fresh air brought by the breeze, shaking up the trees and making their presence known kept her company.
It was September, and while the day was warm, it was also growing colder. Already she was wearing tights under her skirt and a long-sleeved sweater. Soon she wouldn't be able to read outside without the chill affecting her. Best to enjoy it while she could, then. It could be, if everything went well, that she would no longer be in Namimori by the time spring came along.
Today's main provider of background noise was a young boy, maybe five or six years old, and a woman that could only be his mother, from how similar their smiles were.
"I think you gave Daddy a fright," said the woman. "I've only ever seen him turn that color when I went into labor."
"Labor?" the boy repeated.
"When Mommy was giving birth to you."
He stared very hard at the flat stomach of his mother, and Hotaru raised her book to hide the lower half of her face, and more specifically the smile that had involuntarily spread across. Today's background noise was a little too funny to watch to be just background noise. Her book could still be read when she returned to the Kawahira residence, but fleeting moments like this didn't come back. "Is it scary?"
"Very." His mother leaned in to wrap her arms around her son. "But worth it, so worth it."
He squirmed and broke free. "Mom!"
"There's no one around!" she protested. "No one can see me hug you!"
"There are people around!" he argued back, eyes skipping from person to person. For two seconds his eyes landed on her, before he moved on to other witnesses to his 'shame'.
"Okay," said his mother with a fake sniff. "I guess Mommy will just be sad that her baby boy's all grown up now. Takeshi's an adult now, Tsuyoshi. What will we do now that he doesn't need us?"
"Mom," 'Takeshi' said with the tone of a long-suffering person only embarrassed children could pull off genuinely, but he did quickly hug her. "There."
Hotaru was listening in a little too closely, she had to admit, but it was truly adorable to watch.
"But why is the sky blue?" asked the child to his mother, now that everything had been resolved except for his original curiosity.
She laughed. "I don't know!"
Hotaru dropped her book at that unexpected turn of events. It landed on her foot, and unfortunately on the edge. She hissed and winced at the pain – of course it would be when she had a hardcover book, of course she would drop it on her foot – and sighed at her luck. At least she was wearing closed-toe shoes, even if they had been too thin to really protect her.
The boy darted over to her before she could bend at the waist to pick it up, and snatched the book from the ground to hand it to her. "Here."
"Are you alright?" the mother asked, looking concerned.
Yes, definitely someone too good for this world. Both of them.
"Thank you. I'm fine." That sounded too . . . stiff and formal. Was there a way to try and soften it up? Maybe it was the feeling of dépaysement she had been experiencing since her arrival in Namimori that drove her to add the next part to her sentence. "And the sky is blue because of light."
Judging from Takeshi's blank look, he hadn't understood.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Hotaru smoothed out her face and fought to keep from blushing. "Do you know the colors of the rainbow?"
The boy looked at her, wide-eyed in the way only young children could be, and nodded slowly.
"The rainbow comes when the sunlight bends into different colors from all the water in the sky left by the rain," she said, picking words and explanations easier for someone his age. Not that Hotaru really knew what was age-appropriate. Most kids didn't like reading Virgil's works when they were technically six months old.
"But it rained," said Takeshi. "And the clouds disappear after the rain."
He wasn't rejecting her, and he was asking questions. Hotaru gave herself a mental pat on the back.
"It's still damp after, right?" When he nodded, she continued. "The sky is also a little wet from the rain, and when the sunlight passes through the water, it bends."
"I think I know this," he said. "Like through a – a triangle thing."
"A prism." That made things easier, if he knew what a prism could do. "Exactly. Air doesn't bend light like water or a prism, but it makes it scatter. See how the sky's really big?"
The two of them – three, Hotaru corrected herself, seeing the mother also glance up – looked to the sky, open and wide, capable of embracing everything. The weather really was warm, for a September afternoon, and the sky was gorgeous.
"All that air," Hotaru explained, making sure to keep it simple because he probably wouldn't understand the different layers of the atmospheres or the concept of particles, not without her getting off-track to explain that as well. "And everything in it scatters the light of the sun, a little similarly to how a prism makes a rainbow by bending the light. Light usually looks white, but it's actually the colors of the rainbow combined."
Takeshi considered this explanation with a frown on his face. "Then why isn't the sky the color of the rainbow?"
He asked some good questions. Hotaru was rather glad she had taken the jump and answered his question unexpectedly.
"If the sun's up high, like during the day." She held her hand in position to demonstrate as best as she could. "Then the color of light that gets scattered the most is the blue. Have you seen the sun rise or set?"
He nodded eagerly, guessing where she was going.
"What color was the sky?"
"Red! Orange? Kind of both? Sometimes pink," Takeshi blurted out almost immediately.
Now it was Hotaru's turn to nod. "Because the sun's lower at sunrise or sunset," she said, lowering the hand that represented the 'sun' into the correct position for demonstration. "Then the colors that get scattered the most are different from blue – orange, red, pink, like you said."
He looked at her very carefully. "You're not making that up."
Odd how he didn't immediately trust or accuse her. It almost seemed like he was gauging her, assessing her as a person along with her answers to see whether she could be trusted in what she had said.
"I'm not," she promised. There was little merit in lying to a stranger, and besides, it wasn't like it was a hard question to answer.
He considered her words and then apparently decided that she was okay, because he smiled. "What's your name? I'm Takeshi."
"My name is Tomoe Hotaru," she introduced herself, and gave a small bow of her head to his mother, who beamed at her with the force of the morning sun. "Nice to meet you, Takeshi-kun."
"Same. Do you know how airplanes fly?"
She did, and after an explanation that had him slightly confused but mostly accepting of the science behind it with the help of a few sketches on the dirt of the ground, she also answered the questions of why the seasons changed, why the moon had different shapes and why humans didn't lay eggs.
"Then how are babies made?"
Hotaru opened her mouth to begin answering before the question actually sank in, and she snapped her mouth shut. Deciding that this was a question requiring parental permission before she went and answered Takeshi, Hotaru looked to his mother.
Takeshi's mother, upon seeing her inquisitive look, promptly burst out into loud laughter, laughing so hard that she ended up bent at the waist. Even after nearly losing her balance and falling over she continued laughing loudly.
Not sure what exactly had triggered this fit, Hotaru looked to her son for guidance.
"She does that sometimes," Takeshi said, not at all bothered by his mother's fit of laughter. "So how are babies made?"
"I think," Hotaru said, raising her voice to be heard because his mother was still laughing. "I need your mom's permission before I can answer that."
That might not have been the best response, because his face turned a little mulish. "So you know the answer?"
"Yes."
Takeshi sighed. "Is it one of those 'you'll know when you get older' things?"
"Hopefully," Hotaru said with dead seriousness. "You can know the theory, but you can't start trying it when you're young."
He gave her a 'duh' kind of look. "I don't want a baby now," he said like it was obvious. "I just want to know."
"Of course." She bit back a smile. Behind him his mother, who had been calming down, had to turn her head to not laugh outright again as well.
"Really," Takeshi said when it was clear to him that they didn't believe him. "What would I even do with a baby?"
"That's a good point," Hotaru agreed. "You can think about it in the future, if you ever choose to have one."
Still shaking a little with laughter, Takeshi's mother finally cut in. "I'm sure you had a lot of fun with Hotaru-chan, Takeshi," she said, eyes crinkling at the corners. "But I think we might have to let her go home now, before it gets too dark."
She was right. A glance at the sky showed darker shades of blue, mixing with violets. Near the west, where the sun was setting, the air around the horizon was beginning to be tinted with a reddish orange.
Hotaru stood up. "It was nice speaking with you, Takeshi-kun," she told him solemnly. "I think you can ask your father that last question. He probably knows that one."
"Oh, he does," agreed Takeshi's mother, fanning the flames with utter glee. Mischief danced in her eyes in equal measure to the mirth that had been present already. "He knows more than how to just make sushi. I'm sure he'll be happy to explain. We run a sushi restaurant," she added for Hotaru's sake. "TakeSushi, near the station."
"You should come to TakeSushi," he told her. "We have the best sushi in town."
Kawahira, the ramen enthusiast, hadn't really shown her any other eating places. Hotaru liked sushi well enough – it was Michiru's favorite food, and naturally she'd been raised eating what was deemed the 'good stuff' by Haruka.
"I'll come by sometime," she promised. It had been fun, speaking to people. At home Granny worked and Kawahira wandered off to do who-knew-what, and while she could tell her parents anything all three were very busy people.
Besides, she could go with Granny, maybe treat her to food that she didn't have to make herself for once. "Bye, Takeshi-kun."
There had been a time in her life when she had feared social interactions. When the sight of other people made her nervous, when speaking to others would make her tense and worried. After the accident when she was eight, to when Tomoe Hotaru first 'died', her life had been pain and misery, and there had been no comfort to draw from another person in her world.
Not until Chibi-Usa and Usagi, who had brought back a light she hadn't known could exist into her life.
Hotaru looked at the skies, the blue of daylight starting to give way to the sunset's influences. It was a beautiful sight, all of it – the sunset, the people, the trees. The brief conversation with strangers had been – fun, easing something within her she hadn't been aware of.
It wasn't bad, she decided. Not bad at all.
AN: I have a final exam tomorrow but I also really want this story to get to action starting so here have a meeting with the first of the Namimori gang. Since there's no mention of 80's mom in canon, I guess she's a minor OC. Her name is from Ringo Ameyuri of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist from Naruto, because I liked the name and also it was kind of fitting, seeing as how Ringo Ameyuri is a swordswoman and her name means 'beneficial rain'. Yamamoto Ameyuri is probably nicer than Ringo Ameyuri, though.
Sweet Dreams~