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solongsun Since early childhood, Kaoru has been using doors to travel backwards and forwards through time: a motion he is sometimes able to control, and sometimes not. At the age of 22, he opens a door to the long-ago autumn of 1996 and finds something he never expected – a man who, decades before Kaoru's birth, seems to know exactly who he is...
00 // Heroes
He opens the door and the scene changes.
It's automatic; it's meaner than a blink. Like a reflex – a reflex that only he has – hurling him through time.
The cold stings abruptly at his face, and when he exhales, he breathes out a long plume of white mist. He shivers, not dressed for it; in the time he's just left, it was spring. Spring of 2053.
A great grey sky lies overhead, fat-bellied with snow, and though the ground is bare Kaoru can smell it in the air; the flinty smell of winter. The ground is frozen under his feet, and when he walks, his footsteps ring out around him tinnily.
He is in some kind of a cemetery, but the years on the graves are long ago: 1990, one says, and further up, towards where the newer graves are, 2014. He examines them as he walks, trying to find out exactly when or where he is. The cemetery isn't yet full, and he has yet to find a date more recent than 2014 on one of the monuments, so he supposes it must be loosely around that time.
His heart performs a strange kind of jump in his chest, because 2014 – it must be his time. Toshiya's time.
The thought is such a pure and strong one that Kaoru actually turns around, his hair whipping around his face, as if Toshiya might be hiding behind one of these gravestones.
Stupid, of course; he's completely alone. The depth of the silence – a silence that hasn't been broken in days – should be enough to tell him that.
Just outside of the walls, a grey winter tree stretches its branches jaggedly towards the sky; they look sharp enough to tear a hole in the thick clouds overhead. As if they have, the first tiny snowflake settles on Kaoru's shoulder, melting into his clothes as he shivers and watches it.
He feels like he is the only thing alive for miles. Everything beyond the cemetery walls is fog, and he understands: he isn't supposed to see.
There is nothing else to do but move forward, and to wander amongst the graves and read their names and dates. None of them mean anything to him, and when he finds a small caretaker's hut and tries the door, he finds it locked.
All the grass is dead, yellowish and straggly. Every so often he gets a whiff of something smoky and sweet, like incense on the air. His footsteps echo off the tall monuments surrounding him as if somebody else is walking behind him, right on his heels, and he finds himself turning to look over his shoulder more often than he needs to.
In his heart, he's convinced Toshiya is somewhere around. 2014, if it's 2014; Toshiya will be 37, an age Kaoru has never seen him at, and he will be out there somewhere – his life progressing in the normal way with none of this jumping around; each day following the next, the years rolling over linearly, and Toshiya following that steady current: being born, living, dying. Like a tide; like a planet following a singular orbit, whilst Kaoru spins helplessly into retrograde.
Washes up against strange beaches.
There doesn't seem to be any way back. Cold, he begins to work more methodically, trailing his fingers over each gravestone to mark it off, breaking lines in the thin layer of frost that covered over everything. His shoes shake mini icicles from hibernating bushes; a few more flakes of snow whisk through the air in front of his eyes. Everything is white or grey and dead.
In his head, Toshiya as a sixteen year old boy sings to himself as he whirls through a long ago, messy bedroom: we can be heroes, just for one day.
He is the only thing that feels alive for miles.
Toshiya's gravestone is right at the back, with the newer graves, where Kaoru must surely have known it would be. It should have been obvious from the moment his feet had touched the frozen ground, but like an idiot, he'd gone on pretending it could possibly have been something else, or something other than this strange man who had started throwing rocks into the current of time – who had made ripples, ever expanding, that swell against Kaoru even now.
原
敏
政
Hara Toshimasa.
Kaoru stands very still. The photograph by the stone is blurry with fresh snow, and he doesn't want to wipe it off. Instead, he lets his eyes linger on those dear characters, tracing every stroke of his sweet name, dwelling on the dates: 31 March 1977 to 9 November 2014.
Kaoru wonders how it had happened, and if he will ever find out – if it had been quick or slow, time for last words or not.
He hopes he had been there.
He hopes he had been able to hold Toshiya's hand, so he would have known that he wasn't going by himself.
Hara Toshimasa. Toshiya.
It kills Kaoru to think that he might have been frightened, and rigidly he places a hand on top of the gravestone to steady himself, thinking: his funny, crazy, slapdash Toshiya, always throwing himself around, rushing into things with no abandon. Finally flinging himself out of this world.
Please, let me have been there.
Don't let him have been alone.
It hurts him more than he could possibly have imagined to know that Toshiya has died before he is even born: evidence, as if he'd ever needed it, that their lives should never have crossed; that Kaoru should have stuck to his own rules.
Besides the characters spelling out Toshiya's name, on the slender monolith of his gravestone, an incongruous object: round, brass, shine rubbed off by Kaoru's touch over the years. A doorknob.
Before he touches it, he picks up the picture and slips it out of its frame. He allows himself a split-second glance at the face he has known so well before he tucks it carefully inside his jacket, where his heart beats against it wildly.
His face is so cold that his tears feel hot. He grips the doorknob.
He opens the door and the scene changes.
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Thanks for giving this a go, especially if it's not your usual pairing! I'll do my best to not make it too jarring for you. Kaoru/Toshiya is one of my huge OTPs <3