Chapter Text
“Yuuma.”
The boy sat up quickly, wiping the sleep away from his eyes as they found the luminescent figure in the doorway. “Astral! I thought you were going to say goodbye in the morning.” A smile spread across his sleepy features; after their latest battle, he and his friends were resting in Astral World before returning home, and laying in the dark with the constant glow of the plane shimmering outside had reminded him of falling asleep in his hammock to Astral’s gentle glow. Something had kept him from seeking his friend out, but the delight he felt that ze had come to him… well, he wouldn’t think too much about it, but he was happy.
“I was considering,” Astral stated, and then stopped as if that was zir whole sentence. Ze floated over to Yuuma’s bed and perched on the edge, and only continued when he tilted his head and gave zir a quizzical stare. “Though we were able to spend quite a bit of time dueling together recently, we have had little time to talk, and it has been quite a while since we were able to exchange letters.”
“Yeah, I wish there was an easier way to get things across dimensions.” He gave a bittersweet smile. “Have you convinced Eliphas to work on getting cellphone towers here?”
Astral gave a chuckle that warmed Yuuma’s heart. “I have broached the topic with him, but I believe our engineers have several projects they consider more important to complete before undertaking such a difficult endeavor.”
Yuuma sighed with a smile, shifting to sit more upright, his hand brushing against Astral’s as he did. He left it there as he said, “Well, Kaito’s still doing his inter-dimensional research, so if he hasn’t figured it out yet, I don’t think anyone here could.”
“I would be insulted if I did not believe you were correct.” The two of them chuckled, and in the silence that followed Astral spoke again. “What of the others, our friends?”
“Oh, we’re all the same as ever really, just older.”
“I have noticed that, Yuuma, though I cannot say the same for myself. You are now taller than I am.”
“What? No way!” He jumped off the bed, grabbing Astral by the arms and pulling zim up with him to stand eye-to-eye. Or eye-to-brow, as it were—Yuuma exceeded zim by over an inch. He pumped his fist in the air. “And it only took me four years! Kattobingu!”
“I hardly believe that is the cause of your growth,” Astral groaned, then appeared thoughtful. “Though I cannot say the same for the state of your hair. How did that come about?”
Yuuma froze and dropped his fist, running his hand sheepishly through hair now a still-unruly two inches, dark pink strands mixing with black at his brow. “I, uh, heh, lost a bet to Tetsuo.”
Astral shook zir head with a smile. “Same as ever indeed. Nevertheless, it is… how would you say… a good look for you.”
“Haha, thanks, but you couldn’t have said the same when I first shaved it off. It wasn’t a bad day overall though,” he continued thoughtfully, “Alito and Kotori got back together then. Of course, they broke up again last week, but we’ll see how long that lasts.”
“You refer to… some specific relationship they share, yes? What was it… dating?” Astral frowned. “Were not Kotori and you engaging in dating at some point?”
“Astral, that was years ago,” Yuuma chided. “She’s been on-and-off with Alito for a while now.”
“On-and-off?”
“Yeah, he keeps doing stupid things to piss her off. Like that time he convinced me and her to go on a double date with him and failed to mention we’d both be dating him.”
Astral’s head was tilted in confusion, but Yuuma just laughed and shook his head. Even if Astral didn’t understand the meaning behind some of the things he told zim, it was still nice to be able to tell zim about his life outside of inter-dimensional catastrophes.
“You have engaged in dating with several people, then?”
“Eh,” he replied, scratching his head and shrugging. “Depends what you mean I guess. I’ve gone on a lot of dates. What was it…” He counted off on his fingers. “Five with Kotori, six if you count the one with Alito… three with Cathy… two with Anna… two with Alito, three if you count the one with Kotori… two with Michael… one with Shark, he won’t admit it was a date but it totally was… Shingetsu asked me out a few times—“ Yuuma saw a murderous expression flash in Astral’s eyes and hurriedly continued, “but Shark told him that he’d reinvent Barian World and throw him in it if he touched me, so yeah… that’s how I got Shark on that one date though. But I haven’t really dated anyone like, in a relationship.” Yuuma suddenly laughed nervously, sitting back down and slapping his hands on his knees. “So, that catches you up on my dating history!” Why had he felt the need to present Astral with an inventory of it?
“I see,” Astral nodded solemnly. “I am happy to know of your life.”
Silence fell again, and the dim glowing outside the window reminded Yuuma that this was precious time not to be wasted, but with all the time he spent yearning for Astral to once again be a constant part of his life, he could not think of anything important to talk about.
“It has not gotten easier.”
Astral’s words cracked like a whip across the silence. Yuuma looked to him, startled from his reverie. “What?”
“Being without you. I thought that when I returned to my home, when I remembered the duties I had that did not involve you, this feeling would fade. But it has not, and I have not felt at home since I returned here. I do not know if I ever actually felt this to be my home.”
Yuuma’s head reeled, trying to make sense of the sudden confession. “What feeling?”
“It is an aching, somewhere deep inside me. At first it was dull and quiet and I thought it would be fleeting, but it has only grown worse, and it is strongest at these times, when I know that the next day will bring your absence once more.” Ze clenched Yuuma’s hands atop the bed. “I do not understand, but I do not think I can bear another parting with this aching inside me.”
“Then I won’t go.” Yuuma could barely talk past the sudden lump in his throat, and he’d somehow managed to lace his fingers together with Astral’s so that their hands locked them together from across the bed. “I won’t go, I’ll stay with you.”
Astral’s face, previously suffused with emotion, seemed to snap shut in a vice of logic. “No. No, I cannot ask you to do that. I should not have said—“
Ze tried to pull zir hands away, but Yuuma gripped tighter and tugged back hard, leaving zir inches away from his face. “You’re not asking me anything! Dammit, Astral, you’re the one who left me!” He saw something break in zir eyes and immediately regretted his words. “That’s not what I meant. Just…” He straightened and loosened his hold on zir hands, holding them gently in his own. “You said you had to go back, and I had to keep living my life, and I’ve been trying, but if you want me…” His voice cracked, and he cursed the emotions that he wouldn’t name for blocking his throat when he could finally speak them. “If you want me to stay, then I’ll… I’ll do anything to be with you.”
Astral stared at him rivetedly, and he’d never seen an expression quite so torn on zir face before. “It is not simply what we want. A living soul could never be allowed to reside in Astral World.”
“Then come back with me!”
“I could never be allowed to leave my post. I would be brought back if I went to Earth.”
He would have almost thought that ze was just making excuses, if ze didn’t look close to tears. “Then we won’t go to Earth!” He wasn’t sure what he was saying, or how they had gotten here. He just knew there had to be a way for them to stay together. “There are all sorts of other places, right? We’ll go somewhere they won’t find us! We can run forever if we have to!”
“Yuuma… we cannot…” But there was a look of hope in zir eyes that he wasn’t going to let go of.
“We can do anything together.” He spread their fingers until they laid tip-to-tip, palm-to-palm, a reminder of what the gesture used to be, and looked at zim through their splayed fingers. “Haven’t we already proven that?”
---
“Where’s Yuuma?”
It was a cursory question first thing in the morning as they prepared to head back to earth. Shark and Rio were the only ones accompanying Yuuma this time (it had been a small disaster, after all, and Shark wondered to himself how much they’d actually been needed and how much this was a way to get Yuuma a free trip to Astral World).
But as the time for their departure approached, the question was asked with more urgency. And before long, “Where’s Yuuma?” was accompanied by a second question, “Where’s Astral?” And Yuuma wasn’t responding on his D-gazer and Astral wasn’t responding to Eliphas’ summons, and the denizens of Astral World began to fear that the latest evil had returned and done them harm. But Shark and Rio looked at each other and knew they had other ideas, and when the search parties formed they set out on their own.
---
Their hands had remained locked all the way from Yuuma’s bed on passed the edge of the city, Astral leading them down a pathway that started as smooth river pebbles, but whose rocks grew larger and jagged as they went. “The barriers are thin here,” ze told him. “We will make it out of Astral World soon.”
Yuuma nodded. He hadn’t asked where they were going. He didn’t much care. He just knew, with every step, every sudden drop, every slip that made him scramble and scrape his hands on the rough rocks, they moved further away from the forces that separated them.
Eventually Yuuma slid down one particularly steep slope, hit even ground, and paused, panting. “You need to rest?” Astral asked him, concern in zir voice.
“Is that alright?” he asked between gasps. He was exhausted—he hadn’t slept since their battle, and he’d been hard-pressed to keep up with Astral’s effortless glide—but the thought of what they’d left looming behind them made him want to press on.
“We are quite a distance away already,” ze replied, pointing back the way they’d come. He could see the city faintly above the cliffs they’d descended, but it seemed too fuzzy for the apparent distance, like between it and them lay a heavy fog, or maybe a swath of sheer fabric. “We can rest here for a while.”
Yuuma nodded, taking unsteady steps forward as he straightened. The ground here seemed to be made of large, ancient boulders, but they were worn away and interlocked and coated with thick layers of moss in such a way that made for even footing. The same rocks as the ones that scraped his knees rose sporadically in isolated spires—he hadn’t noticed when he’d been trying not to fall on them, but they were a shiny cobalt blue. He found a swell in the ground with a soft bed of moss and sat down. “Where is this place?”
“It is an in-between space,” Astral replied, floating over and perching beside him. “It has… a foot in two dimensions, as it were. If we continue on, we will enter another dimension.”
Yuuma squinted towards where ze gestured, and saw vague, cloudy shapes in the distance. “What’s that dimension?”
“I am not highly familiar with it,” Astral admitted. “But it will be safe enough for a while. Long enough to make plans.”
He nodded. He didn’t want to think about plans right now, and, if he could judge from Astral’s voice, neither did ze. “Let me know when we need to keep going, I can make it.”
“I will. Rest for now.”
Yuuma lay back on the ground, expecting the exhaustion in his body to drag him into sleep immediately. But his mind kept him awake, racing from thought to thought before he could ever identify more than the lump they put in his throat. He tried counting the blue spires within his field of vision, but their glistening blue brought only one thing to mind, and soon his eyes drifted with his mind to the pale shimmering being beside him.
“Have I ever told you you’re beautiful?”
Astral blinked at him, surprised by his voice. “No, I do not believe so. Why?”
Yuuma gave a sigh of laughter as he sat up; trust zir to miss the meaning by miles. “Because I was just thinking it.”
“That I am beautiful?” ze asked in surprise. “Why would you be thinking that?”
Now he couldn’t help but laugh outright. “Why do you think? Because it’s true!”
“O-oh.” Astral considered this with a confused expression. “I have never given much thought to my appearance. I am unable to change it as you are, so it seems a futile thing to consider.”
“But you don’t need to change anything anyways.”
Astral’s body did something strange at his words—a sort of shift in tone of zir luminescence, and Yuuma wondered for a heart-stopping moment if ze was blushing. “Then, what is it?” ze asked softly, looking up at the sky and carefully away from him. “That makes me beautiful?”
“You’re… you’re radiant,” he said, trying to remember all the ways he’d described Astral to himself in these pining intervening years. “You look like you’re made of stars. Like a galaxy I want to map every star of…” He hadn’t realized he’d been moving closer to zim, but he stopped when he felt their knees brush.
Though Astral lacked many of the tells that gave away emotion in human bodies (shaky breath, sweaty palms, crimson cheeks), Yuuma believed he may have found another—an uneven undulation in zir glow that seemed to broadcast disruption.
“I… also find you aesthetically pleasing,” ze finally said, blinking as ze turned zir eyes to his.
He laughed again, harder than he should have, casting his embarrassment out with his breath. “Do you really?”
“I do,” ze replied, tilting zir head in confusion at his laughter. “More so now, I believe, that your hair is not quite so outlandish.”
“What?!” Yuuma sputtered. “You’re one to talk!” He reached out to Astral to demonstrate his point, sifting his fingers through the upward swirl of zir hair. Only it didn’t quite feel like hair, more like supple glass, or spider webs, or tiny streams of water…
“Yuuma, there is a look in your eyes.”
“Is there?” he asked breathlessly. “What kind of look?”
“It is… a look I like very much,” Astral replied uncertainly, leaning towards Yuuma until their noses almost brushed. “What does it mean?”
Yuuma fought the urge to look away, willing himself to keep showing Astral the message in his eyes, hoping it would convey what he couldn’t explain in words. “I love you.”
Astral blinked once, but did not move or look away. “I have heard you say this before to others, but not to me. And it sounds different, somehow, now.”
Yuuma swallowed once and nodded, shaking with the effort of maintaining eye contact that was stripping his soul bare. “It is different. The way I love you, I… I’ve never loved anyone else like this.”
Zir eyes softened in a thoughtful expression. “And this is what the look in your eyes means.”
“Yes.”
Zir mouth turned up in a small smile. “Then I think I understand. Yes. I also feel this love for you, Yuuma, and only you.”
Yuuma asked quickly, before he could second-guess himself. “Can I kiss you?”
Astral’s reply, only moments delayed, was barely a whisper. “Yes.”
Yuuma tilted his head so that their lips met, eyes snapping shut as he did so because there was, after all, only so much he could bear to show. Astral’s lips were inhumanly smooth and cool, and pliant beneath Yuuma’s inexperienced pressure.
It lasted only a moment before he pulled back, opening his eyes slowly to gauge Astral’s reaction. Zir eyes were already open wide (had ze kept them open the whole time?) and zir mouth hadn’t twitched from the barely-parted position they had taken during the kiss. Yuuma swallowed hard passed the lump in his throat. “Astral?”
“So…” ze said slowly, bringing zir fingertips to zir lips. “That was a kiss.”
Yuuma’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t even know what a kiss was? Why would you tell me that I could kiss you?”
“Because you may do whatever you like with me, Yuuma.”
It was said so innocently, so simply, that he felt a shiver run over his body before he knew how to process it. “Don’t say that, Astral.”
Ze cocked zir head. “Why ever not?”
He stood suddenly, spinning around and hoping Astral couldn’t see how furiously he was blushing. “Come on, let’s go!”
“But Yuuma,” ze called, floating up beside him. “Are you not going to rest?”
“Oh, right.” He stopped mid-step and sat down, throwing his arms over his face as he lay on his side.
He heard Astral give a bemused chuckle before he his head was gently lifted onto zir lap. Their eyes met and, miraculously, in a moment he fell asleep.