[Omake] Life at the Orphanage Before Hina Left

Note: This chapter was assembled together from world building notes, and as a result, is somewhat dry, and mostly a tell-don’t-show summary of Hina and Yasu’s childhood. I’ve made some effort to sprinkle in some interesting story tidbits, but you may want to skip this chapter and the next if you find it uninteresting.

Yasu’s first memory was of Hina. When they were three years old, another girl attempted to grab a toy rocket out of Yasu’s hands, and Hina pushed the girl away, admonishing her to play nice.

Hina’s first memory was of scarfing down a plate of brownies that she stole from the kitchen when they were four. She didn’t remember that Yasu had distracted the kitchen staff for her, but she did remember how Yasu gently wiped the chocolate from her face with a napkin afterwards.

The orphanage director’s first memory of the two of them was the night they arrived from the hospital. Due to a miscommunication, the orphanage had received two infants when they were only prepared for one. She wasn’t about to send one back, however. The government was promising large, under-the-table payouts to orphanages that raised girls accepted into the space program. This had set off a fierce competition among orphanages for girls, because they knew that the more they got their hands on, the better odds that one of them would be exceptional.

The two infants shared a birthday, but were not related. Both were fussy, as if they were aware that their parents had abandoned them without leaving them so much as a name, but when they were placed in a crib together, they immediately settled down.

One chirped excitedly and wiggled around every time someone leaned over the crib. The director decided to name her Hina, because the chirping reminded her of a baby bird. The other remained quiet, staring back with curiosity at the orphanage workers. This girl, the director named Yasu, because she appeared so peaceful.

She would later regret that choice.

After spending the first few days as cribmates, the orphanage acquired an additional crib, but when they tried to separate the two, the babies became irritable. Hina could be distracted as long as one of the staff paid attention to her, but when left alone, even for a moment, she would begin bawling at the top of her lungs. Yasu was completely inconsolable. She would fidget and cry softly whenever taken too far away from Hina, so, reluctantly, the director ordered that they be allowed to share a crib. Hopefully, they would soon grow out of their dependence on each other.

Contrary to that hope, the two grew even closer over the next few years. Hina learned to crawl first, and her boundless curiosity drove her to make a break for it every time something caught her attention, but she always returned to Yasu’s side. For her part, Yasu only showed interest in crawling after watching Hina. A few days later, she was following Hina around, but she wasn’t able to crawl fast enough to keep up.

One day, in the middle of another futile attempt to match Hina’s pace, Yasu stopped, sat down, and looked at the older children in the play area. At first, it seemed as if she had given up, but a few minutes later, she pushed herself onto her feet and walked in Hina’s direction unaided. Though she stumbled a few times, she quickly got the hang of it, and was soon running after Hina everywhere she went.

Their toddler years were characterized by Hina seeking out mischief and Yasu aiding her. When Hina wanted to see what was inside the storage closet, Yasu devised a way to open the handle and pull the door open. The brownie incident was particularly troubling for the staff, and not just because all the sugar caused Hina to regurgitate them an hour later.

“Do you understand why I’m mad?” an orphanage worker asked the two of them after they had been sent to time-out.

“Because I ate the brownies!” Hina squealed with laughter at the memory, completely unchastened by the consequences of her actions.

“And do you know why I’m mad that you ate the brownies?”

“Because… You wanted to eat the brownies?”

“No, because those brownies were for everyone. The other kids won’t get dessert tonight because there aren’t any brownies left.”

“No dessert? I’m soowwwwwy. Please don’t take my dessert away.” She started sobbing, and Yasu patted her on the back.

“Don’t cry. I’ll give you my dessert.”

“Wai! I love you, Yasu!” As Hina threw her arms around her, Yasu looked at the worker with a smug expression on her face.

Realizing that he wasn’t getting through to Hina, he turned his attention to Yasu. “You’re not getting any dessert tonight either.”

“I know. Hina ate it all.”

“If you know that, then why did you help her steal the brownies?”

“Because she wanted them, and I like Hina more than I like dessert.”

“The other children won’t get dessert either. Do you think it’s right to take things from them and give them to Hina?”

“I like Hina more than I like them, too.”

The feeling was mutual, but Hina wasn’t as intense about it as Yasu. Shortly after the brownie incident, she began opening up more to the other children, and in the process became popular. It shouldn’t have been surprising. She was kind to everyone, athletic, and unafraid of social interaction.

Yasu, on the other hand, was shy. At first, Hina tried to include Yasu when she played with other children, but after realizing she was making Yasu uncomfortable, she started splitting her time between Yasu and the others.

During her alone time, Yasu took up reading. At first, the staff thought she was playing games on the tablet, but when they caught her swiping through pages of Night on the Galactic Railroad, they suspected she was pretending to read in order to appear that she wasn’t lonely. It wasn’t until she read a passage aloud to them that they realized she had taught herself to read.

“What about the words you don’t know?” an astounded caretaker had asked.

“I tap the word and open the dictionary.” Yasu turned the tablet towards the woman and demonstrated.

This put Yasu at the top of the orphanage’s priority list for a while. They encouraged her to read technical manuals instead of novels, started teaching her math, and tried to pique her interest in outer space. After consulting with JAXA however, they realized that Yasu was lacking an all-important skill: teamwork.

“Don’t you want to play with the other children?” they had pressed. “Your friend Hina has lots of fun with them.”

“Hina needs other friends. I don’t.”

“That’s very grown up of you, but you need to learn how to get along well with others.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t go to space all alone. It’s a team effort.”

“That’s OK. I don’t want to go to space. It’s scary.”

Not only a loner, but too timid for JAXA. Still, the staff continued to work with her for a year, hoping to instill in her the qualities required of a hoshinaut, but Yasu was too stubborn—and uninterested—to go along with their plans.

By the time it became clear that Yasu was not going to become a hoshinaut, there were only a few months before she would need to enter elementary school. Given her academic achievements, the orphanage director decided to apply for scholarships to elite elementary schools, the kind once exclusive to the hereditary goshujin caste. In a public school, Yasu would quickly become the proverbial nail that got hammered down.

Of course, the director was thinking of the orphanage first and foremost. The government would still supply a bonus, albeit a smaller one, for raising an exceptional scholar.

When Yasu learned she would be going to a different school than Hina, however, she did not take it well. She ran directly up to Hina, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her away from the group of kids they were playing with.

“You need to learn how to read,” she explained as soon as they were alone. “Otherwise, they’ll send us to different schools.”

“But I already know how to read.” Hina wanted to keep playing, but she could see how serious Yasu was, so she allowed Yasu to drag her away.

“You need to learn how to read as well as I do.”

“No way! You read big kid books. I can barely read Guri and Gura.”

“I’m sorry. This is my fault. I should have realized they would separate us. Our only chance now is to make them think you’re as good at reading and math as I am.”

“I have to learn math too?” Fear was creeping into Hina’s voice, and Yasu knew she was about to cry.

“It’s OK! The adults taught me, so I’ll teach you. It’s not hard once you learn how it works. Please, Hina, I want to go to the same school as you. Don’t you want that too?”

“Yes. I want to go to school with you. I’ll try my hardest.”

Hina found the lessons excruciatingly boring, however. Yasu attempted to teach her the phonics-like system that she had deduced after learning the alphabet, but Hina couldn’t wrap her head around it. Maybe if they were a year or two older, it would have worked.

Eventually becoming frustrated herself, Yasu switched to math lessons, and here, Hina showed more promise. After explaining multiplication, she showed Hina a times table that went up to 10x10 and tried quizzing her. To her surprise, Hina got all the answers correct, without even looking at the times table. That is, she got them all correct until…

“Ten times eleven,” Yasu prompted.

“I don’t know that one. It’s not on the table.”

“But you know ten times ten, right?”

“One Hundred.”

“So just add another ten.”

“It’s… One hundred and ten?” Hina barely managed to figure it out.

“Yes. Ten times twelve.”

“One hundred, ten, and ten?”

“You don’t understand multiplication at all, do you?” There was no harshness to Yasu’s voice, no criticism, just a dawning realization.

“I can do it if you make me a table with all the numbers.”

“That’s not possible, but maybe I can make a table with enough of the numbers to fool the adults. Let’s try the same thing with reading.” Grabbing a tablet, Yasu flipped to a random page and pointed to a word. “Christa…”

“Christa,” Hina repeated.

“…made history when she became the first teacher selected to go to space.” As she read, she moved her finger along with the words.

“A teacher went to space? I thought only kids could go.”

“The spaceships were bigger back then.” Yasu regretted that she had chosen that particular passage. None of her books contained any information on Challenger or Christa McAuliffe after 1985. It wasn’t hard for Yasu to put two and two together, and she knew trying to explain that to Hina would be a distraction, so she quickly moved past it. “OK, now try to write the word ‘history.’” She switched the tablet to the notes app and handed it to Hina.

“Like this, right?” Hina had gotten it on the first try. Yasu tried a few more random words from the sentence, and Hina aced them all.

Thus, a plan was formed, a plan to have Hina memorize as many words and mathematical equations as possible. It only took two and a half weeks before Yasu was confident that they could fool the adults.

The orphanage director saw through it. She knew Hina too well to believe that she could suddenly read at a third grade level. Besides, it was clear to her that Hina had merely memorized the sounds of the words. She didn’t know their meanings, and unlike Yasu, she spoke in simple phrases, appropriate to her age.

Even so, she was impressed by Hina’s ability to memorize so much in a short period of time, and never before had she seen Yasu so motivated to do anything. Fearing that Yasu would become even more uncooperative if her plan failed, the director coached Hina through the interview with the school.

“We only recently discovered that Hina was gifted as well,” she had told the school. “It seems the two of them have been spurring each other on academically, but Hina was hiding it so that she didn’t alienate her other friends.”

Between the three of them, they managed to fool the interviewers, so come April, Hina and Yasu enrolled as scholarship students at a nearby escalator school. Fearful of ever being separated from Hina again, Yasu was very careful not to let her intellect show too much. The two of them maintained grades just high enough to keep their scholarships, but not outshine the brightest kids from the upper caste.

For the school administrators, this was an ideal outcome. The threat of Yasu and Hina bypassing them motivated the rich kids to study, and the school’s peaceful hierarchy was preserved. The orphanage director, unfortunately, lacked that perspective, and was immensely disappointed in Yasu for not excelling enough to raise the orphanage’s stature. Even though she was an adult, she allowed that disappointment to fester into resentment.

At first, it wasn’t a problem, but then the bullying began.

Aoi Lalande was a girl one year older than Yasu. Though she didn’t realize it herself, she had developed an innocent crush on Hina, and she was jealous of all the time Yasu got to spend with her. She had become good friends with two other girls around her age at the orphanage, Gina Bréhier and Camille Todorović. The three of them were removing their shoes in the orphanage genkan one afternoon when Yasu returned from school. Upon seeing Yasu, Aoi immediately perked up, expecting Hina to be close behind, but she was nowhere to be found. Realizing that Yasu was alone, Aoi decided to take her frustrations out on the younger girl.

“Hey, welcome back, ojou-sama.”

Yasu eyed Aoi warily. “I’m not an ojou-sama. You don’t have to call me that.”

“But you go to an ojou-sama school,” Aoi insisted. “Out of the way girls, us commoners mustn’t get in her way.”

Snickering, Gina tried to get in on the bullying, but she wasn’t as clever as she thought she was. “Goki… Goki…” She had forgotten the word gokigenyou, but eventually managed to say, “Gokiburi”.

“That’s not right,” Camille said, trying to correct her friend.

“No, it isn’t, but it works just as well.” There was a coldness in Aoi’s voice that frightened Yasu, who was already skittish around the other children. She tried to hurry into the orphanage, but Aoi stuck her leg out and tripped Yasu.

That was how the bullying started. Whenever Hina wasn’t around, the three of them would torment Yasu. They’d make snide comments, put thumbtacks in her shoes, pinch her, and pull her hair, but by far, Aoi enjoyed tripping her the most. Yasu was clumsy and uncoordinated, so she almost always went down, and on the occasions she didn’t, Aoi would simply push her to the ground.

Yasu would never fight back. She would just cry and flee to her room as quickly as possible.

Of course, Hina wasn’t oblivious to all this, and she started sticking closer to Yasu to prevent the behavior. The orphanage staff weren’t oblivious either, but the bullies were smart enough never to do it when someone was looking. There was no proof, and after how much of their time and effort Yasu had wasted, they weren’t going to go out of their way to help her. Besides, they rationalized, she needed to learn how to stand up for herself.

One night, a few weeks after Yasu had started volunteering to help prepare dinner each day, the three bullies fell ill with food poisoning. Of course, Yasu was pulled aside for questioning.

“I didn’t mess with their food. If I had wanted to do something like that, I would have messed with everyone’s food, to hide my intentions. This was just an unfortunate coincidence.”

“Yasu,” an employee had told her, “this is serious. You could have hurt them.”

“So when they hurt me, it’s not serious?” Yasu knew getting emotional was a mistake. It would only make the adults more suspicious, but she couldn’t stop the pain and frustration leaking into her voice. “I didn’t do it, but I guess that doesn’t matter, since you didn’t catch me in the act. That’s how this works, right? Or is it one rule for them, and a different rule for me?”

With that, Yasu sealed her fate. When the bullying escalated, the adults might have stepped in, but in their view, if she was going to turn their prior inaction into a rule and throw it in their faces, she could deal with the consequences herself.

And the bullying did escalate. When the girls recovered from the food poisoning, they were merciless in their revenge. Things came to a head when Aoi tripped Yasu at the top of the stairwell. She tumbled down one flight of stairs, and luckily, she escaped with only a couple bruises and a warning from a caregiver not to horse around.

When Hina heard about this, she went ballistic. She marched right up to Aoi in the middle of the common area and slugged her in the stomach. Aoi fell to the ground, but before Hina could get a kick in, Gina placed herself between the two of them.

“You can’t hit girls!”

This only enraged Hina further, and she swung at Gina. “I’m a girl too!”

Caretakers stepped in and separated the girls. After giving them some time to cool off, they brought Hina, Gina, and Aoi to the director’s office.

Before the director could say anything, Hina launched into a defiant defense of her actions. “She tried to kill Yasu! I was only telling her off.”

“Yasu tried to kill us first.” Aoi was much more calm and collected as she spoke. “She poisoned us.”

“No she didn’t,” Hina insisted. “It wasn’t her.”

“Then who was it?” Aoi shot back.

“Well…” There was no way Hina could admit that she had poisoned the bullies, not in front of the director, so she clammed up. Aoi interpreted this as proof that she had been lying to protect Yasu, but the director recognized there were other possibilities, and realized she and the staff had allowed things to get out of hand. After giving the three of them a scolding, she warned them to cut it out, while looking Aoi directly in the eyes.

Although Aoi never did anything to endanger Yasu’s life again, she had learned from the experience that bullying Yasu would get Hina’s attention. Whenever she could get away with it, Aoi would jostle Yasu or pull her hair in Hina’s presence. This inspired Hina to stick closer to Yasu, keeping her safe from most of the bullying. Yasu was sad that Hina could no longer spend much time with her other friends, but she was thankful that Hina was protecting her, allowing her to live a normal life again.

Over the next few years, Yasu became completely dependent on Hina to protect her from any situation that made her uncomfortable, and Hina was fine with that. Occasionally, she would realize that Yasu wasn’t learning how to take care of herself, but when she saw Yasu’s grateful smile, she resolved to protect Yasu for the rest of their lives.

⁂

When they were twelve, Hina and Yasu were taken to a JAXA office to be tested, as all orphan girls their age were. Having learned her lesson about letting adults know how capable she was, Yasu purposely held back. She knew she couldn’t hide her intelligence, but when they put her in front of a simplified Shuttle simulator, she performed poorly.

Hina, on the other hand, aced every simulation they threw at her. She appeared to have an intuitive understanding of the controls, moving her hands into place sometimes before the adults gave her the next instruction. This was the first time Hina registered JAXA’s interest, but when they asked her if she wanted to learn to fly for real, Hina turned them down without hesitation. She wanted to stay in school, she told them. She had worked hard for her scholarship, and she wanted to make the most of it.

They let her go that day, but JAXA was determined to get her in the program, but they knew she would need to come willingly to be useful. Every few weeks, they would try to entice her, even going so far as to send out their local celebrity, Sachiko, to meet with her.

It was actually Yasu who caught Sachiko’s attention. She had been sent to figure out what was keeping Hina at the orphanage, and it didn’t take her long to identify the childhood friend staring daggers at her as the problem.

“You’re holding her back from her true potential.” Sachiko pulled Yasu aside while Hina was talking once more with the JAXA recruiters.

“I’m doing no such thing. Hina’s smart. She’s going to do great things someday, and she doesn’t need JAXA. Besides, we both know how dangerous space is, and neither of us have a death wish.”

Sachiko left empty-handed, but it wouldn’t be long before Hina changed her mind. She was starting to get funny feelings around other girls, especially Yasu. As those feelings grew, she had no outlet for them, and one night, while Yasu was sleeping, Hina almost kissed her. She didn’t think Yasu would mind, but she knew it was wrong to do it without asking, and she was afraid of how their friendship would change.

Around the same time, Claire caught Hina’s attention. There was something about the way Claire’s curly hair bounced as she moved around that Hina found alluring. She didn’t love Claire one bit. In fact, she was still upset with Claire for rubbing mud in Yasu’s hair that one time, but that only made it easier to kiss her. She didn’t have to worry about hurting Claire, because she didn’t care about her.

If only love were so simple. After a couple snogging sessions, Hina found that it’s not always so easy to separate physical love from emotional love. She still didn’t love Claire as much as Yasu—it wasn’t even close—but she developed enough feelings to be deeply hurt when she caught Claire kissing a boy.

Yasu was oblivious to all of it, most of all, to Hina’s feelings towards her, so she was taken by surprise when Hina told her she was leaving for JAXA.

“But what about school?”

“I aced the entrance exam for Seien High.” Hina handed the acceptance letter to Yasu. “As far as I’m concerned, I finished my compulsory education, so why not give JAXA a try? If I hate it, I can always go to high school when I’m older.”

“So that’s why you’ve been studying so hard recently. But why JAXA? We’ll be apart.”

“You’re too dependent on me. You need to learn to stand up for yourself.” That much was true, but it wasn’t the real reason Hina was leaving. She was unable to admit to Yasu that she had her heart broken by Claire, which only happened because she had developed inappropriate feelings for Yasu.

No matter how Yasu begged, Hina wouldn’t change her mind. Yasu wracked her brain for a way to stop it. Perhaps she could kidnap Hina and flee to another country. But as she thought through all the possible scenarios, she came to the crushing conclusion that she would have to let Hina go.

On the day Hina departed, the entire orphanage lined up to see her off. Everyone, that is, except for Yasu, who couldn’t bear to say farewell.