No Starlit Skies

He leans back in the chair, looking over the view of the school campus from the window. It is all rather out-of-place, he thinks. There shouldn't only be a single person in the room that has always been crammed full of Battlefront members, and the chair he is sitting on now should've seated Yuri instead, her chin propped on her palm, always smirking, always serious, and in all the time he has been here he has never seen anyone usurp her chair. But hell if it hasn't look like the comfiest chair around and once he has stepped into the room he couldn't resist touching its plush and then sitting on it like he owns the whole goddamn place. Which he does now, now that he thinks about it. In the massive campus meant for hundreds of students, he is the only one left. Except for the NPC's, of course, but they (those bastards seem to exist solely to annoy the actual people, he realizes) are as alive as the chair he is sitting on now. But still, he is very grateful for those NPC's. They may not be real people, but at least it is better than talking to trees.

With a yawn, he stretchs out, leaning back so far on the chair that his head almost touchs the table behind him. On the wall to his right is the calendar. Four red X's stare at him. It has felt like forever. Of course he has cried, and of course he has been the most lonely man in the world, and of course he still secretly wishes everybody to be back here again, selfishness be damned, but in the end it has all passed. Not his grief, not his boredom, not his loneliness – but his regret has passed. Everyone else is probably singing karaoke in heaven now, he thinks, staring at the cloudless summer sky through the window. They are probably arguing about whose turn it is, and who keeps hogging the microphone (it is Noda, of course), and who has ordered the pineapple pizza nobody wants to eat, and…and, perhaps – just perhaps – someone would look around and say Hey, where's Otonashi? and the others would fall silent, looking around also, and then they realize that they are indeed missing someone. Hey, you're right! Where is that guy? I thought he was right behind me! It is Hinata, confused but not particularly worried, who says that next, moments before Yui pounces on him and gets angry at him for not keeping a closer watch on his friend, and all the while Kanade is sitting by herself (or maybe not by herself since she has Yuri now), holding a glass of soda in her hands and staring at it in that peculiar way she always stares at things. Maybe she says something like He's not coming. He decided to stay behind. but her tiny voice is lost in the rabble that has resumed, because Noda still has that microphone in his hands and is now singing a terrible one-man rendition of I Want It That Way, and that pizza nobody wanted has just been upended unceremoniously on Hinata's head by a fuming Yui who has already forgotten her reason for being angry. A few minutes later, or perhaps half an hour later, an employee comes in to tell them that they are too loud, that their time is almost up, and then they all quiet down while Yuri gets up and pays him more money for use of the karaoke box, and once the employee leaves feeling self-satisfied, the noise starts again until the next employee comes in to tell them they are being Too loud! You're disturbing the other guests! Or maybe there are no employees like that in heaven. Maybe it is just an endless maze of free karaoke boxes and faceless bellhops who bring whatever-the-hell food anybody orders, even if nobody wants it.

A lump rises in his throat. He swallows it down as hard as he can because he knows that once he starts he cannot stop (and God only knows how much crying he has already done in these four days). But it is difficult to do so, so difficult, because he misses them more than perhaps he has missed anything in his life. He tries to console himself with the fact that he will join them eventually – perhaps not today, or tomorrow, or in a thousand tomorrows, but definitely in the future – and that knowledge is more soothing than all the opiates in the world. The lump sinks down to nothing. Soon his eyes are once again as dry as the hot summer air.

He sits back up, once again returning his gaze to the track field. A small disturbance has caught his eye. The track team is clustered around a person who is dressed in something that is definitely not the regular school uniform, something like a winter uniform but he can't quite make it out from his perch so far away. If it is a winter uniform, then those long clothes are probably baking him beneath the blazing summer sun, Otonashi thinks. The coach yells a few words and the crowd slowly disperses. The person looks around, confused. Yawning once again (he finds himself doing that a lot lately, probably because there isn't a lot to do now that everybody has left), Otonashi stands up, stretching one more time for good measure to rub out those kinks that develope with sitting down for so long.

He exits the room, and when he spares a final glance back he thinks that it will soon be full again. He walks through the empty hallways and past the empty classrooms, empty now that school is over and the only people left are the ones in the clubs (and himself, of course). By the time he gets down to the track field, the person who has caused the commotion is no longer where he used to be. Otonashi finds him near the vending machines, shuffling his pockets for change (it is a winter uniform after all, Otonashi notices, but he has rolled up his sleeves and unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt).

"Hey, you there!"

The person turns around, surprised, even more so when he finds a quarter flying at him. But he still manages to clumsily catch it at the last moment.

"Who are you?" he says.

Unable to stop himself from smiling, Otonashi walks up to him, feeling a not unpleasant sense of déjà vu. All that is missing is a gun cradled in his arms and starlit skies above. He remembers the explanation Yuri had given him. It had turned out to be incorrect, of course, and it had left him more confused than ever, but what the hell, he thinks, he hasn't planned a speech ahead of time and those words from months ago still sound as appropriate as ever.

"Welcome to the Afterlife Battlefront."