Enjoy!

'July?' Suou frowned, green eyes narrowed in concentration as she fiddled with her camera. 'That's a strange name, don't you think, Maki?'

'Not really. It is more common than you think,' the boy replied quietly from his seat next to July, the blond neighbor refusing to take part in the conversation and preferring instead to stare out the café window with a hand pressed against the glass. 'I have heard someone being named Wednesday, for example.'

'Wednesday? Next thing you'll tell me you know an April or an August. Sounds like a codename.'

'Well, codenames tend to have numbers attached to them. It makes their identities anonymous.'

'What, like November 11?'

'Not exactly.'

A dark-haired girl in a high school uniform plopped a tray loaded with drinks on their table and seated herself next to Suou. 'Sorry it took so long,' she said apologetically. 'The queue was longer than I thought. What did I miss?'

Suou filled her in, grabbing the milk shake and sticking the straw into the carton. 'What do you think's a proper codename, Mai?'

'Off the top of my head: BK201.'

Maki pointed at Mai approvingly. 'Now that is a codename. Sounds mysterious.' He picked a soda for himself, a slight glimmer of disapproval in his heterochromatic irises. He preferred hot beverages like coffee as opposed to anything to anything that had ice in it or came out of a fridge.

Whatever Suou was trying to do with her camera, she gave up and returned it to her bag. 'It's a bit of a mouthful, though. Why not something cooler, like Izanagi, or Carmine?'

Mai waved a hand at her. 'Izanagi sounds silly. But Carmine would be a pretty awesome name to have. What about Yin?'

'Those are not codenames,' Maki said. 'Those are aliases.'

Suou smirked. 'What's the difference?'

'For one, codenames are secret, whereas an alias is just a false name.'

'Bah. Semantics.'

'No I am being serious. Check a dictionary if you think I'm wrong.'

Suou sniffed. 'Ceebs.' Mai glanced at her quizzically. 'Ceebs,' Suou repeated. 'It's short for cbf. It means can't be-'

'Anyway,' Maki said loudly, cutting off the redhead. 'Getting back on topic, a code name would stand out in public, whereas an alias can be both incognito and unremarkable.'

Mai frowned. 'What is the point of this discussion?'

Suou threw both her arms up, one hand holding her drink. 'What is the point of life?' She proclaimed facetiously and dramatically. 'What makes the sky blue? Why are we here? Why we? So many questions, so much homework.'

Mai reared her head and loudly groaned to the ceiling. 'Thanks for the reminder. I got to pull an all-nighter today.'

Suou wagged a finger. 'Ahh but speaking of all-nighters, guess who's going to binge-watch a whole season of Maurice The Rose while everyone else is asleep?'

'I have no idea what that is,' Maki murmured. 'But I think I can guess.'

Suou pointed at him. 'Then that settles it. You're joining me and by tomorrow morning you'll know the joys of elephant love too.'

'I am not.'

'Are too.'

'You are weird.'

'You're uncultured!'

July turned his eyes away from the window and dreamily watched the two bicker as Mai's phone began to ring, smiling as Suou reached over the table and poked Maki's nose, to the boy's resentment. 'Guys,' he murmured. 'Everyone's looking at us.'

Suou halted in mid-sentence, flushing as she looked around to find all other eyes in the café upon them. Maki discovered an interesting blemish on the table and kept his eyes on it. Mai hurriedly took her call. 'Anime's silly,' Maki grumbled under his breath when he thought the attention was gone, so self-conscious he forgot to forgo the contractions in his speech for once.

Suou glared at him. 'I dare you to say that again. I may not look it but I have a mean right hook.'

They continued to bicker, albeit in hisses this time.

'Sorry, I can't do tonight,' Mai was saying, phone to ear. 'Yes, it's homework. Sure, tell them I said hi. Alright, I'll catch you later then.' She finished the call and glanced at July. She shrugged. 'Friends want to go for karaoke,' she simply said as means of explanation.

July blinked. 'Karaoke?'

'Singing.'

July nodded. 'Ok.'

Within the hour, as they had left the café and were waiting at the intersection just outside, a blonde-haired woman wearing a beige trenchcoat walked up to Maki and tapped him on the shoulder. 'I think you dropped this,' she remarked, pressing a feather necklace into his hands.

Maki stared at her for a few seconds before blinking and averting his eyes. 'Yes I did. Thanks ma'am,' he mumbled and pocketed it.

The woman smiled. 'Such a polite kid.' She ruffled his hair in passing and walked off. The traffic lights went from green to amber and the motorists began to slow to a halt before the crossing line.

Maki watched her go, watched her stop to warmly greet another woman wearing red glasses and a blue business blouse and watched them both walk into the café together. 'Déjà vu,' he murmured, a look of puzzlement on his face.

Suou turned and frowned at Maki. 'You say something?'

'Just talking to myself.' The traffic lights went from amber to red and then there was the ringing warble signaling the pedestrians to cross as the motorists all halted to a complete stop. 'Come on,' he called over the sounds of a crowd's feet beginning to walk onto the road. Unbeknownst to them, Mai and July split off from the pair, the former walking down the street, lost in thought, and the latter to a blonde-haired man wearing a suit and green shades.

'Hey, wait up Maki!'

Despite her insistence and her success in persuading Maki to come over to her house - a feat accomplished by the offer of hot chocolate - Suou never managed to get Maki to watch Maurice the Rose later that night.

'It's not bestiality, it's romance,' Suou sulkily hissed as she stomped back upstairs.

'I also made sure to block that fanfiction website you'd bookmarked!' Her father called from the living room, now in possession of all the volumes and CDs of Maurice the Rose that he had confiscated from his daughter on the pretext of them being 'inappropriate' for her. 'So don't even think about it!'

Suou walked into her bedroom, aimed a kick at the door to slam it shut and hopped around grabbing her foot as her eyes watered from the pain of performing such an action without shoes. 'Dammit, dammit, dammit,' she croaked. 'Maki, don't touch my telescope.'

The boy pulled his eyes away from the device. 'I did not pick you for a stargazer.'

'Neither did I.' Suou plopped down on her bed. 'Neither did my parents. Speaking of them, you could use my phone to call yours to tell yours where to find you.'

Maki held up her cell. 'I already took the liberty of doing so whilst you were downstairs. They're going to pick me up in an hour or two. Nice wallpaper by the way.'

Suou scowled and snatched it out of his hands. 'I thought I put a password on it.'

'It still allows calls.'

The girl grimaced. 'Right.' She stood up and shuffled her way to her desk, sitting herself down in the chair. She pointed out the window. 'Did you see my favorite star by any chance?'

Maki started looking back into the telescope. 'Which one is it?'

'The one that looks like it's winking…wait, scooch over, let me adjust this a bit. These things are very fine-tuned. I usually have it set to always be looking at it. Just give me a sec. Alright, now look. Do you see it? The one that's glowing just a little bit brighter. In the middle.'

Maki did see it. Not long after that, seconds became minutes as Suou started to point out to him the constellations – Orion, Scorpius and the like – and the clusters, prominent stars like Sirius and so on and so forth. Minutes turned to hours as they both pored over the photos of the stars Suou snapped with her camera and kept lovably preserved in a leather-bound folder, the girl explaining to the boy the painstaking care she took them, throwing around words like chromatic aberration, color balance and polarization which only gave Maki a headache.

'As far as I know, I'm the only one I know who has this sort of hobby,' Suou said as she returned her folder to the filing cabinet underneath her desk. She pressed a hand to the top of her head and smiled uneasily, nervous for the first time. 'But it's alright. In a way, it feels sort of…right to me. Sometimes I think when I look out there, I feel like someone's looking back.' She awkwardly shrugged. 'Kind of weird, isn't it?'

Maki didn't get to answer her, for right then Suou's mother came up the stairs to tell them that Maki's father had arrived.

Suou saw him out. 'Promise me you'll watch Maurice the Rose!' She called from the porch as Maki walked to the car parked on the sidewalk where his father sat inside, waiting.

'Hell no!' Maki called back as he opened the door, sat down, and swung it back shut, watching in chagrin as Suou stuck her tongue out as a reply. Then his dad started the car and they were off on the trip home.

'She seems like a nice girl. What's her name, Maki?' his father remarked cheerfully after a minute of driving, that one observation seeming to more than make up the fact that his son broke curfew and visited someone without asking him for permission.

'Suou,' the boy answered, staring out the window as the car reached the highway. Normally, he'd be plugging his earphones in and nodding off to some tunes. Strangely, he didn't feel like it this time. 'It's not what you think, Dad.'

'Sure.'

'She dragged me into it.'

'Okay.'

'Dad,' Maki said warningly.

'What? There's no need to explain. I understand.'

Maki leaned his head against the glass, shifting in his seat for a comfortable posture. It seemed quite amazing to him, how he'd taken the view of the night sky for granted for so long. 'Dad?'

'Yes squirt?'

'Are you angry with me?'

'Why would I be angry with you?'

'Because you're supposed to be working right now, and instead you're here.'

'Not really. I had to leave early today. My boss is forcing me to take some time off for the next few days.'

'Oh. Ok.' After a minute: 'Dad?'

'Yes squirt?'

'Do you think I can visit again on Saturday?'

'I thought she dragged you into it?'

'Dad,' Maki said, dragging out the syllables in that way only a child could do to get what he wants.

'Maybe. We'll talk about it with Mom.'

'Okay.' Maki watched as one of the stars fell from the sky, a sliver of silver seeming to dart down into the city. 'Dad?'

A heavy, drawn-out sigh. 'Yes squirt?'

'Do you have a pair of binoculars I could borrow?'

Maki's father glanced at the rearview mirror and saw his son still gazing out the window, transfixed with something both inexplicable and familiar to the astronomer. He thought about the dusty old telescope he kept in the garage and said out loud: 'You know, I think I might have something even better…'

Thanks for reading.

PS: There was no way for me to hint at this, but I was picturing Maki's father as Nick Hillman, another minor character from the DTB universe.

PSS: The hardest part of writing this was finding the name of that anime the pink-headed girl and a bunch of other characters liked to gush over.