Chapter Text
This beach… it's unlike any he remembers. The tint of the water, the shape of those rocks, the way they pile up, looming above him, twisting themselves into formations that make his head spin and his stomach churn in recognition of something he’s not certain he should know, cautioning him, beckoning him… They shouldn't be here. Or maybe he’s the one who shouldn’t be here. He couldn’t even say where ‘here’ is. He can’t remember how he got to this place; he can’t remember the last time he had a full night’s sleep. Was he walking again? Is that the source of that pounding in his head, walking, walking, ever walking until the wailing of his blisters, the ache in his legs drowned out the screams of his soul and then walking further and further still? Was all that stopped him now the lack of ‘further’, nothing ahead but the sea and only another kind of nothing to turn back towards?
Why did he come here, to that ocean Ash never got to see? Above him, the sky is dark, not the dark of night but that of a world devoid of light, no proof of the existence of a sun behind that blanket of clouds, thick, sinister wool with not a single thread missing. In front of him, around him, everywhere is the sea and he can feel it calling him, pulling him closer, closer than he should be, closer than is safe. What is it that keeps drawing him in, that compels him to speak for the first time in weeks, to scream at an empty horizon and uncaring waves?
Who is it that answers, and why does he feel such little surprise that they do?
“BRING HIM BACK! GIVE HIM BACK TO ME!” His words reverberate off the rocks, swallowed whole only to be spat back at him. They rub his throat raw on their way out, the salt of the sea mixing with his own. “PLEASE. PLEASE. Let me do it over, let me go back, let me save him, I’ll do better this time, I’ll—”
“It is not that simple.” There is no source to the voice and yet it is all around him, in every droplet of the spray against his face, the sand beneath his feet, the wind in his ears. One voice, a thousand voices, booming, whispering, all of this, none of this, painful to withstand, impossible to pin down. “What you are asking for has a price. It demands a sacrifice.”
“Anything!” he screams, and it is as much a plea as it is a pledge. “I'll do anything.”
“The price is to give him up.”
“Wha— bu— but that’s the opposite of what I asked!” he stammers, stares in confusion but there is no face to turn to, just the waves and the voice. “I asked you to bring him back, that’s the whole point, for him to live!”
“You asked for a chance to do it all over, for time to be turned back to save a single life. This is the price: he will get to do it over, but you will not. You will never go to New York. You will never get to meet him. You will not get back the things you shared.”
The ground shifts beneath him, turns into quicksand, a bottomless pit, a black hole stabbing its fork into his soul and spooling it up slowly. Right. He asked for two things, didn’t he? “But he… he will live? Does that…” Every word is an effort. There’s so much less of him by the second, chopped into bits, sucked away to some distant, airless place. “Does that mean I would always have killed him no matter what?”
“Foolish child.” The words are chiding. The voice is not. “If that were the case, there would be nothing to sacrifice. This is what is being asked of you, this is what makes it one: that you give up what you could have had.”
“And if I— if I do that he'll live?”
“He will have a chance to. Things will be bent in his favour to ensure that he survives past that day, but we will not interfere beyond that. We do not like to involve ourselves in your affairs. Your fingers would suffice to count the number of times a request such as this has been granted since the very birth of your world and even then, we keep our involvement to a minimum. Once that day has passed, everything will be up to him. Your sacrifice might be for nothing. He did not know happiness until he met you and there is no guarantee he will find it again on his own, or that a violent death won’t still come for him at a later time.”
“But there is a chance?”
“The only reason your plea found its way here, the only reason you were granted an answer, is the certainty with which you alone have always known that to be the case. Are you so quick to lose that faith now that something is at stake?”
There’s a shaking, shivering warmth of calmness spreading all through him, a feeling as at odds with itself as everything he once thought he knew about the world. Everything but that one, unshakable pillar at the core of it all. Ash. Everything he is, everything he deserves, everything he is capable of. “No. You are right. I have always known that.” He brings his head down with determination. “Do it then. Save him.”
“You will lose everything you shared. And if he does find happiness, it will not be with you.”
“I'm fine with that if it means he lives.”
“Your sacrifice will be greater than just that.” If it’s supposed to be a warning, it lacks any sort of emotion or urgency behind it. It feels more like he’s being asked to confirm he’s read the terms and conditions. “You will be back at a point in your life that you hated and you will have lost not just him but all of the people who have shaped your life for the past years. And unlike them, you will retain your memories. Do not underestimate the loneliness of a knowledge that can’t be shared.”
“I’m fine with that too.”
Perhaps this is nothing more than the punishment he deserves. He swore, didn't he? He swore he wouldn't run away anymore and then he did just that; he ran away when it mattered the most, from the person that mattered the most. From the one thing he truly wanted. Maybe it's only right that he won't get to see the ending with his own eyes now.
“Are you certain? You will be given this choice but once. It cannot be reversed.”
“You think any of that would make me change my mind?” He balls his fists, squares his shoulders against the wind fast turning into a storm. “I don’t care how big the sacrifice is, I don’t care how much you make me give up and I never will. Tell me he’ll have a chance to survive, a chance to be happy, a chance at that normal life he always wanted and I’ll do anything you ask of me and more. I need him to live. That’s all that matters to me.”
“Very well then.”
The rocks are upside down, the beach high above him, a faint blur through the foam and the spray, the waves grabbing at him, pulling him under and he falls, deeper and deeper. His lungs are burning. He can’t breathe. He can’t move. He can’t make a single sound and maybe this is what drowning feels like; maybe this is—
He sits up with a start, clutching at the futon beneath him. The water is gone, replaced by cold sweat, the clamminess of a body that feels wrong. A body he outgrew years ago. The clothes thrown haphazardly over his chair, the date staring back at him from the calendar on his desk, the dread of today is a school day permeating every particle of air around him… He’s back in his old bedroom. He’s fifteen again. Downstairs, his parents are arguing; his sister is crying and he can feel the confines of the world around him starting to press against his chest, crushing his windpipe, stripping him of his voice. They’re pulling at him again, so glad to have him back at their mercy, those currents of hopelessness that started to ebb away the moment Ash’s eyes met his for the very first time.
Ash.
He will live. He won't die five years from now alone in a library, with the world looking on but not seeing. He will live.
Five minutes. He will allow himself five minutes of tears before he will get up, put on those clothes and walk down those stairs, before he will do them all over again, those years he barely managed to make it through the first time. He can do this. He can do anything if it means Ash will live.
Does it hurt to love someone you used to share everything with but who will never even know you exist now? To mourn a life everyone else has forgotten? To wake up every day not to what you have but to what you’ve lost, to miss voices and faces you will never meet, to have five years’ worth of memories stuffed inside a body that is too small to contain them all?
It does. Every second of every day as the weeks creep on into months, into years, a slow crawl, an unstoppable force. It is never not painful. It is never not a struggle. But Ash has a chance now, and that alone makes it worth it, every ache, every insult, every loss. And more than that. He reminds himself of it every day; he must never risk forgetting it for even a second: if Ash has a chance now, that means he does too. His mountain may be of another kind but that doesn’t mean he, too, can’t make it down. There’s more than one way to live, more than one way to be happy. And he will find it. He will find himself a life that is not too narrow, that doesn’t crush or suffocate, far away from the people who’d prefer for him to be small and stackable. He has his memories now. He knows what’s possible. There’s more for him out there, and he will find it. And through it all, he will know that somewhere across that ocean, Ash might too.
The square is full of tourists, as always at this time of day when there’s not a cloud in sight. There’s a reason he rarely takes the shortcut through here. Unless he really needs that quarter of an hour it saves him, it’s simply not worth all that bumping and shuffling and weaving your way through throngs of people too distracted by the sights to pay attention to such small details as your feet and not to step on them. Foreigners hardly stand out in this place, geared towards visitors as it is but that laughter still has some heads turning just by the sheer volume of it.
Two small children, storming ahead, no constraints to their voices, no bounds to their joy. A man chasing after them, not scolding, no, laughing along, almost outshining them with his glee. Another man behind him, easily catching the children’s backpack he threw at him when he set off, slinging it over his shoulder by a single strap as he follows them at a much more measured pace. Neon pink bouncing against blond hair starting to grey in places. That profile, that smile…
“ASH— Oh.” His feet were leading the charge. His mind has only now caught up to where the problem lies. “Sorry, I must have mistaken you for someone else. I thought I knew you but it turns out I don’t.”
Ash’s eyes are on him, narrowing, making it impossible to turn and slip away like he meant to. He stares back, kept in place by that same instinct that made him run in the first place. Towards. “You called out to me with ‘Ash’ though. That’s my name.” He pauses and as he does, his frown only deepens. “Or it used to be, for a while.”
“Weird.” He gives a nonchalant shrug and it might not be convincing but hopefully, his smile is. Because never before has it been this sincere, this ready to split his entire face apart at the beauty of the sight in front of him. He knew it. He knew he was still alive. He knew he'd make it; he always did. He's still here. Ash is still here and he's as striking as ever. “Maybe I know you from a previous life then.”
Ash gives him a long, hard look. Those flickers on his face are familiar; he remembers them as if it were yesterday – distrust, suspicion, vigilance. And just a handful of seconds later, all of that falls away, everything about him softening in the sunrise of his smile. “Maybe.”
“Well,” he says as he makes to turn around, “maybe I'll see you again in the next one.”
Somehow, Ash’s smile turns even brighter, a light that used to be so timid finally fully unchained. “I’ll be looking forward to that then.”
Eiji nods, gives him a smile in return, a smile that will have to stand in for everything he once should have said, and walks away.
“Hey! What's your name?”
“Eiji,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Until that next life then, Eiji.” Ash grins, winks and for just a second, that man of nearly fifty looks exactly like he did at seventeen.
Eiji merely waves. He doesn’t stop until he’s a little further down the square. Ash is still standing in the same spot, waving back at him when he sees him turn around, when Eiji allows their eyes to meet for one last time.
What would he think of Eiji's life now, this Ash he doesn't know? Would he be glad to know how lucky he is, how loved? Would he like his boyfriend; would he chuckle at how close he got with the sketch of “that American exchange student” he gave him for the first birthday they celebrated together just because he thought Eiji “should have something to remember him by since he lost all his pictures when his parents’ house was flooded”? Would it make him happy to see that it’s still on their wall, in between all those photographs of the life they’ve made together? What would he think of their house and the friends they share it with? Would he kneel down to pet their dogs; would he take a stroll through their garden, admire their flowers? Would he be interested in his work; would the name of his company ring a bell? Has he seen any of them? Has at least one of the movies he helped create, one of those stories he poured his everything into, those tiny bits of hope against hope he tried to send out to him and everyone suffering like he did managed to reach him? Has he seen the one that tells their story, the story that would have been if only Eiji had been a little braver, smarter, faster? Did he like it?
Would he be proud of him and the battles he's fought, the walls he jumped over, the bonds he broke and the freedoms he gained, this Ash who jogs up to what must be his family, whose laugh at the quizzical look the other man gives him is just as uninhibited as theirs, who lets himself be pulled to a nearby stall by that little girl who looks nothing like him but whose grin is the mirror image of his? The shirts they are wearing, the garish souvenirs threatening to spill from their bags… Clearly, they're on vacation. The little girl demands ice cream so loudly Eiji can make out every single word. The other man catches up to them, shaking his head in an attempt at sternness that manages to fool neither Eiji nor the children. Their cries get louder and Ash gives the man a kiss on the cheek, smiling as he takes out his wallet. He looks radiant. He looks happy. And he finally made it to Japan.