GLOSSARY

Eszopiclone: used to treat insomnia.

Zoloft: commonly used for depression.

Bufferin: helps reduce heartburn and upset stomach that aspirin may cause.

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"I will sacrifice all I have in life to clear my conscience."

―T.A.T.U.

유|웃

Koizumi Itsuki opened his shower door and stepped onto the vinyl mat with water raining down his legs. Droplets pearled his scalp as he toweled his hair expressionlessly. His feet squelched across the wet floor in their progression towards his medicine cabinet. After wrenching it open, he perused the prescription bottles staring back at him.

Eszopiclone.

Zoloft.

Bufferin.

Itsuki removed them from their balcony and searched for a foxhole no guest would find them in, particularly one with the G protein-coupled receptors of a bloodhound's genome. His mission to compose an air of normalcy was completed by staging his condominium for entertainment. Pictures framing the jolly faces of Agency associates were used to replace nonexistent family photos. Certificates and middle school awards were tacked onto the foyer's walls to exhibit an energetic childhood. The lacquered Buddha he disliked was carried from the closet and seated beside his indoor Bonsai tree to pepper the living room with a cultured touch.

Koizumi Itsuki spent all evening trying to make his crash pad look like the home of a boy who lived a quiet, carefree life furnished with loved ones. He was in the middle of spraying the crown of his head when his phone vibrated on the chinoiserie armoire in his bedroom. His palm skated the device down to his end of the oak shelf and flipped the lid open. "You're late," he barked into the mouthpiece.

"What a greeting," the recipient hammed. "I had some trouble getting service from the hospital, Your Excellency. Miss Mori just gave me an update on the meeting you had with everyone about an hour ago. The vagaries of Miss Suzumiya's mind are truly intractable, aren't they? Is she changing that quickly?"

Itsuki crowned the armoire with his hairspray bottle to hold his elbow. "I was told by Arakawa that Miss Suzumiya's anterior insular cortex is maturing at a healthy rate. In this case, gaining empathy isn't necessarily a bad thing, but things could become problematic if she starts suspecting that the S.O.S. Brigade members around her are all leading double lives."

"Well, what has she been expecting from you in particular?"

"Myself, apparently..."—he looked at the wasp headbutting his windowpane—"though something tells me that isn't exactly the case."

"Care to explain?"

Itsuki nonchalantly unsealed the window. The wasp zigzagged in the air before flying out. "Miss Suzumiya has been reading a manga called Tsubasa, which has most likely been influencing her perception of me ever since Asahina's prognosis came into the picture." He locked the window's bolts and dropped the blinds. "To make a long story short, she's comparing me to a fictional mage."

"And from that convoluted plot, of all things. Fai, right? The similarities between your lives are too big of a coincidence to even be called a coincidence. What would happen if she found out about your family tree? You know, she'll probably start to think you're a slider since Fai jumps through dimensions, too. Hell, maybe your powers will change and a hot vampire will bite you."

Itsuki squeezed the phone's spine. "This isn't some kind of joke, Tamaru. I could very well find myself waking up in a nightmare that isn't too different from the one you just described."

"Then what are you gonna do to reprogram her?"

"Miss Mori, Arakawa, Keiichi, and everyone else asked me to maintain the status quo until further notice. If Miss Suzumiya probes tonight, then I'll let her in."

"Into your staged life?"

"That's right."

"So you'll lie about everything after all, including your memories of the past..."

"Everything except the parts of my childhood that don't need editing."

"I hope this is a good idea at this stage, Koizumi. If you're actually honest about your emotions like she wants you to be, she might become bored enough to lose interest in you because it'll be the new norm. Don't forget that the facade you have now was also a product of her expectations."

Itsuki's stance seesawed. "...That was one possibility we had discussed, yes. We just haven't discussed it in detail yet."

"So then what about that sonsy Asahina? Why shouldn't the Agency be worried about her?"

"You and I both know that the older Asahina is a fabricator. Since she's the one who's been guiding her younger self in this time plane, it's safe to say that neither one of them can be trusted."

"...If that's the story the whole Agency is going with, then I guess I have no choice but to go with it, too. Listen, the nurse is coming in. I'll call you tonight at nine."

"Don't be an hour late this time. It'll interfere with my dosage schedule."

"Got it. Au revoir."

The call ended without Itsuki saying "Goodbye" or "I hope things get better for you." He stared into the eye of his LCD screen before laying the phone down on its stomach. 'It can't be helped.' The esper padded over to his kitchen and tied the tails of an apron into a bow behind his back. Afterwards, he fetched a whisk from his drawer and held it up, smiling like a friendly chef on a pancake mix box. "Time to finally put Miss Mori's instructions to use."

Well into the gloaming hours, Suzumiya's voice funneled through the foyer's intercom: "Koizumi, it's Haruhi."

Itsuki exited the kitchen to titivate his appearance in the living room mirror. He walked away from his somber reflection and perched his palms on his knees as he spoke his twinkly greeting into the intercom's base, "Ahoy, there. Come on up." His thumb punched the gate button.

In a little under five minutes, the doorbell gonged. Itsuki unbolted his door chain and received his guest with smiling eyes. "Miss Suzumiya...!"

Like a runner who had just won the Olympic medal, Suzumiya Haruhi stood knock-kneed on his bamboo mat with her chest puffed out and her wrists against her hips. Her grin reminded him of a cat's mouth just as much as her vibrant, blinking eyes reminded him of an actual cat.

"Welcome to my home." Itsuki performed a thirteen second bow without removing his hand from the knob. "I'm happy to finally have you here. Please, come on in." He sidestepped the slippers that were parked by the door's jamb to introduce his unnatural habitat to her.

Her nod comprised of the full lowering and lifting of her chin. Without delay, she snatched her oxfords off her feet and wiggled her toes into the house shoes he provided.

Itsuki watched her stroll into his vestibule like a giddy pioneer entering an undiscovered jungle. "I was making Daifuku just in case you had gotten a little hungry on your way here."

"No thanks," she rejected. "I'm on a time limit." Her coat hit his sectional sofa and slumped into its lap, followed by a tumbling pink purse. "Your place is pretty expensive, isn't it?" Suzumiya's hands mounted her hips again. "That loaded uncle of yours must've paid a ton for the whole thing upfront!"

"Yes. He can certainly be generous with his blessings," he prevaricated.

Suzumiya Haruhi looked left and right, appreciating sparkly garniture such as the Meiji vases, wall-hanging fountains, and Shoji lamps in his living room. Her smile faded the more she toured. "Wow," she mildly exclaimed. "It sure feels lonely in here."

Her description made him open both eyes and blink. He rebooted his deputy chief firewall by smiling self-consciously instead of shutting down his system. "Lonely?"

"It doesn't look lonely," she explained, "but the vibe feels...strange." Suzumiya held her chin between her finger and her thumb as she scanned the tea room. Out of nowhere, she snapped her fingers. Her head swiveled around to him, making his back snap straighter than a telephone pole. "You should add more ink paintings and look up fengshui while you're at it," she preached, enthusiastically twirling her finger in a circle. "That'll lighten up the vibe in here."

"I'll make sure to take it into consideration," he acquiesced, snuffing out his trepidation.

She caught a glimpse of the picture frames peopling his otherwise naked sideboard. Her fascination lingered on the snapshot of him standing alone with his telescope at the age of six. Itsuki could see Suzumiya's chest swelling up with glee in response to the image. Her head spun around to him again, unleashing the solar power from her eyes onto his mortal being. "Where are they?!"

Itsuki scratched the dimple in his cheek. "I beg your pardon?"

"The tel—la—scopes, of course! Are they outside?!"

"Oh! That's right." Itsuki closed his hand into a fist and nodded animatedly. "They're right this way!" He guided her to his spacious balcony, a refuge he was actually quite fond of. The three telescopes on the patio had been coincidental birthday presents from Miss Mori, Tamaru, and Arakawa. Even though they took up elbowroom, he never returned them to their senders because he didn't mind the company.

Itsuki asked his visitor to meet the smallest telescope in the family. He followed up with describing the personality of large, moderate, and small refractors to help her adopt one relative out of the litter. Suzumiya seemed more than happy to be told what to look for in the best stargazing companion.

"If you'd like to see celestial objects such as stars, planets, and our own natural satellite, then it's better to have the 80mm refractor than the 150mm telescope." Itsuki petted the nose of his Stellarvue SV80 Access. "If you want to see surface details like craters, mountains, rings, and natural satellites of other planets, then the Orion StarSeeker IV 150mm will outflank the Stellarvue." He bent over to increase the telescope's magnification before smiling up at Suzumiya's intrigued face. "Would you like to take a look?"

Her eager nod was so childlike that witnessing it made his affection for her burgeon. She took his place and peered into the refractor's eyeball with her hips still supporting her wrists. "Huh, you're right. This one's different from that other one you brought on summer vacation." She clamped her tongue between her lips and toyed with the adjuster. The bows in her ribbon shook as she chattered excitedly, "Wow! I can totally see the moon's mountains in this thing! So cool!"

The chuckle Itsuki produced was genuine. "Our moon will look approximately the same through any refractor," he added, "but a larger one like this will allow you to get a more intimate look into its world."

Suzumiya giggled in her throat as she optically dined on the moon's landscape for three minutes straight. Itsuki listened to the cicadas in the meantime.

"So, how many planets can you see through these things, anyway?" Suzumiya breathlessly asked, wiggling her hips.

He lightly bopped himself on the head to illustrate that he had to jump-start his memory. "Eight, if I'm remembering that correctly. However,"—he waved his finger—"only Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars tend to reveal their true natures in a telescope."

She peeked at him before looking back to the eyepiece and mumbling, "True natures? What'd you mean by that?"

"I mean the most intricate details in their untouched terrains." Itsuki pointed his mellow eyes at the heavens. "Saturn's rings, for instance, look more like computer-generated sonic waves than halos in the Orion StarSeeker. That particular telescope can even show you all of the dust storms and cloud bands on these three planets. In a moderate telescope, Venus and Mercury will reveal their phases, but in comparison, Neptune and Uranus will only look like small disks."

"What about Pluto?"

"Pluto would very difficult to observe with these telescopes, and even if you did manage to see it, it'll only look like a dull star in the Kuiper belt. According to astronomers, he isn't much to look at, so very few people even bother."

The silence stuck around like gum on their shoes.

"...I feel bad for him," Suzumiya intimated. "The way people don't acknowledge his existence. It's like he's not even a member of the same solar system as all the other planets. He's practically invisible in everyone's minds."

He smiled at the back of her head with curved eyebrows, and then closed his eyes. 'Of course she does.'

Tired from bending her knees for so long, the little astronomer stood up and slapped her hamstrings. She quirked an eyebrow at the constellations and groaned, "I wish they'd hurry up and get down here already! It shouldn't take this long to find us."

Itsuki knew whom she was referring to. "Well, some do say they're already observing us," he jested.

She answered him with an oblique glance, blinking.

"And if that's true, then I can understand why they have no intentions of visiting us. It's hard to say what kind of impression we've made as earthlings, but the perpetuity of so much sanguinary and destruction on our planet would deeply discourage me if I was an extraterrestrial being. Whoever's out there probably lives a peaceful life in a more intelligent society, which would most likely cause them to think that the entire human race is too immature to be spoken to."

Her expression was indecipherable. The intensity he felt from it diminished when she closed her eyes and folded her arms to contemplate his logic with a pout. Twelve seconds later, she peeled them open, resistant to embracing her own agreement. "I guess that would make some sense, but..." The uncompleted sentence stood between her and his theory.

"But," Itsuki plugged in, "I can't say I don't understand the overall desire to meet someone who's not from our world. When I was in elementary, I used to blink my flashlight off and on towards the planets I had charted in hopes of another being recognizing my Morse Code. I even wrote a message on the beach late at night after the first sky telegraph failed."

Suzumiya yanked her head up. "Huh?!" She was as awed by his causal confession as she was blindsided. "I didn't know that..." The undercurrent of guilt in her tone implied that she felt bad about never asking, but frustration and exhilaration overwrote it in nothing flat. "Why did you keep your mouth shut this whole time, then?!" She squeezed her fingers into fists and increased her height by standing on her toes. "Did the sand message work? Did anyone ever respond?! Spit it out already!"

Itsuki surrendered his palms. He surprised himself by not falling over the handrail despite the fact that she was only an eyelash away from his nose. "No, not at all! Unfortunately, nothing that phenomenal ever happened, so I gave up the following year."

His mood deflator pulled the ripcord from her elation. The face she made as a result mirrored a child who had unwrapped a Christmas present that they didn't want. She lowered her feet back onto the cement and folded her arms again, throwing her disappointed glare to the iris flowers in the balcony's garden.

Itsuki smiled wishfully at her. He ventured to explain the commonness of their positions, "Humans have been trying to make contact with extraterrestrials for thousands of years, Miss Suzumiya. So far, all the telegraphs we've sent have gone unanswered in that same amount of time. Considering what I mentioned earlier, it's probably better that way. Mankind should focus on improving its own world before trying to seek out others. We as humans still have a lot of—"

"If you knew that, then why did you try to reach out to them in the first place?" she boomeranged.

Itsuki took a long, hard look at his commander. Her blinking eye was partly hooded by her eyelid, signaling her melancholy to his built-in detector. He smiled with compassion. "That's a very good question." The esper heaved a sigh from the canyon of his bosom and returned to the scenery, holding one hip with his right hand. The left hand cradled his chin as he pretended to reflect on his childhood. "Well...I guess you could say I was looking to cure my feelings of insignificance back then."

Starlight shuddered in Suzumiya's pupil. She eyed him peripherally. Itsuki's pupil darted down to hers. His head followed suit to deliver a timeless Koizumi Itsuki smile. Her shoulders sank with her tension, and a rare glimmer of vulnerability seeped up from the constellations multiplying in her eyes, but she quickly demoted her gaze to her knees with a flinch, masking her introspection behind another grimace.

"Now, then," Itsuki chuckled, resetting the conversation. He left her sulking side to train the Orion SpaceProbe on the Pegasus constellation he'd memorized from his star chart. "Have you figured out which one you want?"

She looked up at him, irritated by her own confusion.

"A telescope, that is."

Her understanding resurged. She silently reevaluated the clan of refractors. Itsuki felt like seasons had passed before she finally said in a snooty voice, "I'll have an easier time deciding on a full stomach."

For a second, he was at a loss for words. After a short recovery period, he was on board with her plan. "Right." He nodded.

"Uh-oh, I think we used too much olive oil in this one..."

Daifuku hadn't been enough to sate Suzumiya Haruhi's appetite. Like an expert event planner, she'd talked him into building castles of food. She would occasionally join him on the stove when she wasn't trumpeting, "Coming through~!" with a steaming pot in her hands, but he was much happier to be sitting across from her on Zabuton cushions as they nudged brown rice into their mouths. He'd been quite famished after overdrawing so much energy for that cardiovascular exercise called cooking.

"Did you at least enjoy my Futomaki, Miss Suzumiya?"

"Too dry. I almost thought it was—..." Her twiddling chopsticks refrained from pinching a sliced ribbon of salmon. "...Hang on a second..." Incredulity changed her expression into that of a parent's after they had just finished reading a bad report card. "Have you been calling me that the whole night?" Astonishingly, she laid her chopsticks on her napkin and lectured him with the granite-like hardness of a strict mother, "How many times do I have to tell you to call me Haruhi? We went over this after school with an entire PowerPoint presentation, didn't we?"

"Right..." Itsuki relaxed his wrists on the Chabudai table and nodded remorsefully at his persecutor. "Sorry about that. It'll just take some getting used to on my part."

"Hmmm..." Her eyes found the ceiling fan as she held her chin with one finger pressed against her jowl. "I guess it's like that for me, too." She looked at him. "Then how about only using my surname during your brigade duties? It'll make more sense that way, anyway."

"Sounds fair enough."

Suzumiya grinned like a cute imp with her thumb still pressed into the indentation of her jowl. A text message alert chimed in the room. The source was Suzumiya's back pocket, but she ignored it. "So just to stonewall more surprises, I think it's high time that I interrogated you about this super mysterious childhood of yours."

"Alright." He told himself that her sparkling face didn't make him nervous. "What is it that you'd like to know?"

"For starters, where are your parents?" Suzumiya's chopsticks walked across a plate of glazed carrots. "I've never heard you talk about them before, and there're only two photos of them on the sideboard."

"Well, my father lives in the U.S." It was a half-lie.

"And your mother? Is she overseas, too?"

"Actually, she passed away a while back." It was a fact.

"Really...? And your father just spends his rent money in America while your uncle pays yours?" Her chopsticks clinked harder against her bowl as she wadded up her ramen into a steaming ball of noodles. "What a piece of work this guy is, leaving his son here all alone like that," she muttered into her bowl. "Tragedies are supposed to bring family members closer together, not boat them out to foreign countries." Her 180 degree maneuver was suspicious to Itsuki.

"I wouldn't necessarily put it like that—"

Suzumiya's phone chimed again. "Now what?" Her hand dove behind her back to dig into her pocket and whip out the noisemaker.

Itsuki watched her face go pale. "Miss...Suzumiya?"

Her expression changed into a glare.

On the opposite end, Itsuki's hair felt like a carpet that was damp from trapped heat. "Is everything—"

She rocketed up to her feet, glossy eyes still glaring at the LCD screen. Before he could process the situation, Suzumiya collected her purse, shoehorned her heels into her oxfords with her thumb, and then headed for the vestibule.

"Miss Suzumiya...?"

She tugged the door open and slammed it behind her. The dizzy spell Itsuki underwent came with stomach-sickness. One blurry object in his peripheral vision took the solid shape of Suzumiya's beige coat.

Gasping, Itsuki seized the frock and went after her. "Miss Suzumiya!" Out in the hallway, he could hear her shoes thunking on the metal stairs that would lead her to the parking lot. His feet thundered down the stairwell as he catapulted her name at her back. He couldn't tell whether she didn't hear him or if she was just hellbent on going where she needed to go, but it was clear to him that anger piloted her now.

By the third landing, Itsuki lost her shadow. He exploded out of the emergency exit and jogged onto the flagstone pavement, where Suzumiya Haruhi was standing limply under a sodium lamp.

"Miss Suzumiya!" Itsuki called, short of breath. "You forgot your coat!"

She was distracted. Although he was panting behind her, Itsuki managed to follow her unbroken sightline. There in the sky flashed needles of light.

"A meteor storm," Itsuki commentated, audibly stunned.

They watched the speeding flickers light the darkness, showering the planet in what could've been compared to rain falling horizontally.

Suzumiya squeezed her phone against her heart. She was the first to break the spell with, "We'll always be insignificant on this planet, won't we...?"

The whisper sank inside Itsuki's heart like a tiny snowflake melting on his tongue. "Even butterflies are important to the ecosystem, Miss Suzumiya." He came towards her, hoping she would awaken from her mind long enough to notice his shadow and turn around. "I would like to think that we're all significant, including myself...but as far as you're concerned, there isn't any doubt in my mind that you're an irreplaceable person." He paused. "I think even Pluto can see that," he lightheartedly finished. Inch by inch, his arms stretched out to cover her back with her coat.

Her chin declined. She turned her head and lowered it a little, looking at her shoulder. The uncurled fingers dangling by her thigh clenched into a fist before she walked away. Koizumi Itsuki's stomach dropped. He stood there, abandoned under the lamplight with her coat held out.

In an alternate universe, Suzumiya Haruhi would still be standing in front of him. He would touch the back of her oxfords with the toes of his socks and shelter her with the warmth of her coat. Her shoulders would shake under his hands until she shielded her eyes from him with her wrists, using one after the other to wipe her tears away. He would then kiss her scalp and hold her against his heartbeat―

―BUH-LING―

Itsuki's knees almost buckled at the sound. He shakily pulled his phone out of his pocket and read the text message banner on the screen:

[ Miss Mori: Suzumiya's parents texted her after they were already in Paris. They never told her they weren't coming home tomorrow. Again. ]