Lunar Expedition

Chapter 3: Unexpected Wind

Setsuna would not have looked up at all if not for Yasuke closing the door a little harder than usual. When she did look up, the smell of take out assaulted her senses and she took a deep, hungry breath. She hadn’t realized she was hungry until this point. She stretched, feeling the crick in her neck and the pop of her spine. She must have been sitting there for much longer than she’d thought.

Yasuke walked towards her, turned off her microscope, and placed one of the delicious-smelling bags right into her lap. “You need to take a break,” he said firmly. “You have been working fourteen hours straight. I should know, I’ve timed you.” He lifted his watch to demonstrate.

Setsuna blinked and rubbed her eyes, wondering where the time had gone. This made her smile a little, thinking of the irony of her thoughts. She stuck her hand in the bag and pulled out an indecipherable piece of food and ate it without looking at it. Yasuke watched her, lifting an eyebrow at the mechanical way she ate.

He’d grown accustomed to her strange devotion to their work, her slightly manic way of studying things that normally made people her age nod off. But there she was, calculating her next project without seeing anything around her. It was enough to make Yasuke wish he were a few years younger and a few degrees braver, just to ask her on a date.

The thought made him uncomfortable. He was a noteworthy number of years older than her and he worried sometimes that other people suspected something inappropriate in their friendship.

No one should have worried though. He’d known Setsuna for about six months and he liked her well enough, and she was certainly beautiful enough for any man to want her, but her mind was always on work. He imagined dating her would be like dating a very lovely robot.

No, he told himself, I want to ask her out just to see what she would do. He had the mind of a scientist and even in this, his coworker’s personal life, he wanted to experiment to see if she really was human. The single-mindedness of her devotion to work was staggering sometimes and Yasuke wondered if maybe he should start forcing her to take vacations. It just wasn’t normally.

Didn’t she have friends? Didn’t she have at least one man out there that looked past her brains and wanted her just for her looks? Not him, he was quick to point out. He was far too old for her. And even if he were her age, he would never be good-looking enough to date her.

No, it had nothing to do with his own fascination. She looked like she needed those kinds of real world experiences, the ones where she had her heart broken, where she laughed, where she cried. She needed the things that made life worth living. That did not include slaving away in front of a microscope for the rest of her life.

What Yasuke didn’t know was that Setsuna loved her life. This was the most she had been able to live, the most she had been able to socialize, in eons. He had no idea what her real life was like. For her, sitting in the lab all day, talking intelligently with Yasuke and studying the secrets of the world felt like a sliver of heaven. 

She could still taste the stale air and sense the thrumming power of the Door of Time. She could feel it calling to her, always in the back of her mind, always pressing the loneliness down on her heart. For her, this cold, empty lab was a paradise of experiences and sensations and life.

Being outside of Time’s loop overwhelmed her sometimes but here, quiet, with Yasuke there whenever she wanted someone to talk to… it was peace.

“Don’t you have some friends who might want to see you?” Yasuke suddenly said, noticing Setsuna’s eyes straying back to her microscope. She still held her food in one hand, forgotten and limp.

“Hmm? Oh, yes, I do actually,” Setsuna said with a little smile. Her eyes brightened all of a sudden and Yasuke felt the breathe leave his lungs. Her beauty was suddenly different. Instead of cold and closed off, he saw a passion he hadn’t anticipated. It made him rethink the “too-old-for-her” part of his argument that had always stopped him from asking her out.