Sayonara no Tsubasa- A Second Wish

The song pumped fire through her soul. Sheryl stood next to her, giving her the strength to stand. Then she heard the missles aproaching, stopping Alto's beautiful dance, like an angel in the sky. He looked toward her and said, "I'm sorry I can't return your feelings, Ranka, but, thank you," He then turned to Sheryl and said, "It might be too late to say this, but I..." and then the missles hit.

When Ranka woke up, her chest ached. She reached up to touch her face, and her fingers came away wet. It was a dream...but a memory. She stepped out of the bed to look out of her window. The view revealed the home planet of the Vajra, that they had fought so hard for not a month before.

There came a knock on the door, and Nanase entered the room. Ranka quickly moved to wipe the tears from her face, but not before Nanase saw that they were there.

"It still haunts you, doesn't it?" she said, crossing to embrace Ranka.

"No. He's going to come back. He promised," Ranka said, stepping back with a confident expression, "And until then, I'm not going to cry. Okay, Nanase?"

She smiled. "Alright, then. But you have to hurry up and get ready. Your manager wants you to do a commercial today. Don't forget to smile."

But smiling was hard these days.

Later that day, she found herself looking down at Sheryl, laying in the hospital bed, barely alive. Sheryl had collapsed at the end of the battle, and hadn't gotten up. Ranka knew that Sheryl had loved Alto just as much as she herself loved him. The only difference was that he loved Sheryl back. Too many times, Ranka had wished that she was the one in that hospital bed.

"He's going to come back, Sheryl-san. And when he does, I just know that you'll be awake." She said, before turning to go, "Until then, I have to do my best. Everyone is depending on me. Especially Sheryl-san, even though she wouldn't say it. I have to keep going, if not for Alto, then for the Vajra."

As she started to go through the doorway, she looked up to see Michael and luca. Luca was holding a boquet of flowers, and looked up from them in surprise.

"Oh, Ranka-san. You're here."

"Yeah, but I was just leaving. I've been busy with work." She tried to push past them, but Michael caught her shoulder.

"Don't push yourself too hard just to get your mind off of it, Ranka-san. We're hurt enough without having to worry about you, too."

She just smiled and snuck through, feeling their eyes on her back as she walked away.

 The clean air of the Vajra home planet was welcome after the stifling air in the hospital. Like usual, the sky was blue, the flowers were blooming, the grass was emerald green for as far as the eye could see, and Vajra, big and small, milled about. Looking at it like this, Ranka found it hard to believe that they had been in a bitter war with the huge, insectoid aliens less than a year previously. 

That thought would change when she got to the city, she knew. The Macross Frontier fleet had been severely damaged over the course of the battles, thousands of people had died, and the humans were still recovering. 

Ranka made her way to the main city ship, where her brother had promised her a good meal with her SMS friends at Nyan Nyan before her concert the next night. There'd been a lot of events like that since the battle for the planet. Michael introducing her to one of his friends. Luca giving her some high-tech gadget she still wasn't sure what to do with as a present, and countless surprise parties. She knew that they were trying to make her feel better. But she she felt terrible because during all of their events, she couldn't seem to stop staring off into the distance and forgetting where she was. 

She walked into the city, over a few remaining piles of rubble, just in time to see a dirty soccer ball roll past her feet. She picked it up and looked in the direction it had come from- a dirty alleyway where a few children were playing. One of them ran towards her, and she held out the ball for him. As he took it from her, a Vajra larva peeked out from under his sweatshirt hood and squeaked at her. The boy reached up and patted his head. 

Ranka smiled. "He's cute! Is he your pet?" 

The boy nodded shyly. "Yes, Ranka-san."

"What's its name?"

"Sheryl. After the pretty lady that helped you beat the evil people."

Ranka bit her lip to prevent herself from crying. "That's nice. Go back to your friends and play now, okay? But don't do anything dangerous!" she called after him as he ran off. She stood up and continued on her way, through the dark, damaged outskirts of the city. She waited in line for the streetlight to change color, and looked up to see a young Vajra fly by, squealing in fright. Several of the other people waiting for the traffic light were pelting it with stones they picked up out of the rubble by the roadside, shouting profanities. Despite how long the fleet had been on the planet, this was a common sight. It seemed that the children had been able to change quickly from fear of the Vajra to a peaceful coexistance, but the adults had a much harder time getting rid of the hatred that had come from the death of loved ones at the hands of the Vajra.

Ranka put her hands to her stomach, where she could feel the Vajra virus inside of her, the thing that had given her so much power, and had put Sheryl in her current state. Thinking about it like that, she supposed that the people had a right to still be angry at the Vajra. Pain like that took a long time to heal. 

She walked into Nyan Nyan, to hear a loud "Welcome back, Ranka!" from the gathering of SMS pilots in the Chinese restaurant. She smiled wanly, and sat down at a table with Nanase, Michael, Klan, Luca and her onii-chan.

"Eat whatever you want, Ranka, it's all on me," Onii-chan encouraged, putting his arm around her. She opened her menu and ordered randomly off of it. The black-bean noodles weren't bad, from what she remembered from her years of being a waitress at Nyan Nyan. It seemed like a thousand years ago to her, even though it really hadn't been that long.