‘I make folks horny’, Daiki says, and tucks his hands in his pockets. ‘I touch them, and they go batshit crazy’.
It has been like that ever since the thunderstorm. It’s not something he can control, a smooth power he can wedge like those superheroes in the comics, all dandy and cool and prettily wrapped around their capes and daddy issues. It just happens. Two hands brushing over a busy intersection, a nudge of the knee as he’s sitting on the train, and people get these sudden fits of desire, whip their heads around and look at him with wide, blank eyes before lounging forward, all hard and stiff and with filth rolling from their lips as a waterfall. ‘Let me suck on your toes, let me choke on them’, ‘Pound me senseless as my father is watching’, ‘Let me sit on your face, I want to ride you like a pony, babe’.
They get these fits of desire and they shape them onto something different, something twisted and macabre and pumped only by raw instinct. Daiki sits next to the window when he has to take the train, hands buried deep in his pockets, nails digging crescent moons onto his palms, find someone else to shove an arm up your ass clenched between his teeth whenever someone asks him if the seat next to him is taken.
Sometimes, he feels like a toddler again, reduced to a simple stream of tantrums as he looks up at those strangers and stomps about how he doesn’t want be approached, leave me alone, as he pouts and has to cross his arms over his chest, because if he doesn’t, he knows he would just lounge forward, grapple desperately onto those people like the emotionally stunted child he’s become ever since the thunderstorm, please sir, my skin is so hungry, please.
One day, when he feels like he can’t take that madness anymore, he takes his car and drives to the suburbs, calls people scantily clothed with a whistle and hollers at them his troubles from afar, hands hurled deep in his pockets, about how he just wants to be touched, squeezed tight because his skin feels weird and alien sometimes, like a crack in the illusion of life. ‘I make folks horny when I touch them, they go batshit crazy’, he hollers from afar at those hookers. One of them laughs, shrugs, and swings an arm around his shoulders, a smug expression curling up his lips.
‘I think I can handle some heat, bab-’
And Daiki winces when those hands suddenly grip tightly around his arms, wide eyes going blank and dark as hunger sets to fill the gaps. Daiki winces because this physical contact he’s offering him – this physical contact he has paid for – still feels weird and alien to him, like a loophole in the lines of consent, a moral flaw making his brains itchy.
He takes a stutter step back, and when the man tugs harshly at the hem of his shirt and slides a hand down his arm, he finally shoves him away with a firm movement.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have- I’m so fucking sorry’.
He turns on his heels and runs away, fast, and stomps harder when a desperate voice in the distance yells at him how he just wants to be stepped on, please, oh please, make me bleed master.
And as the wind is slapping his face, a flat palm of nothing bruising his lips, he can’t help but to think how that’s all there’s to him. Nothingness etching onto his skin that’s all Daiki can starve for.
*
He eventually finds him sitting on a bench, with his head bent forward and two fingers pressed onto his nose, rubbing the dark circles under the eyes. Daiki turns around when he calls him with a whistle, pokes at him on the ribs with the red umbrella he’s carrying. He wears a charcoal colored turtleneck under a wool coat, and a pair of boots where scoffs had begun to wear the leather thin and pliable, had it folding in wrinkles to the sides.
Daiki arches a questioning brow at him, and when he burrows his hands a bit deeper in his pockets and mutters a fuck off between the teeth, the red umbrella pokes him on the ribs again.
His first memory of Kento goes something like this: liquid, smooth as the tufts of hair behind his ear and yet awkward somehow, tense and groovy as the curve of his brows.
He tucks the coat neatly underneath his legs as he sits by his side with a casual gesture, like an old acquaintance, and not someone that had just watched a person going batshit crazy after having tapped an aberration on the shoulders. It’s that casualness what prompts Daiki into turning his head and looking at him in the eye, to take a proper look. Kento tilts his head to the side, as if he’s staring at Daiki through a pair of dirty lenses and can’t focus him just right, and Daiki squints his eyes too, wondering if they’d met each other already, worrying if he’d wronged him somehow – that, on the path he’d carved through hell during that past year, he might’ve hurt him with a careless nudge on the knee or an accidental shoulder bump.
‘Do I know you?’ He asks, and Kento looks up at him with this unreadable crease smudging his lips. It looks disturbing somehow, that scowl on his face, the corners of the mouth curling up in an almost nostalgic frown. It turns his eyes sadder and rounder, and it’s as if he knows this because he quickly presses a thumb over the bottom lip, scratches an itch that is not there so Daiki can’t see that scowl anymore.
‘I’m the only folk you can’t turn crazy’, he replies instead, and pokes Daiki again with the tip of the umbrella as a punctuation of sort.
Daiki raises both brows at him now, and Kento just smiles a cheshire smile in return. And there it is again, that pathetic gleam at the corner of his eye. It sits wrong with Daiki, like a nail sticking out in the smooth waves of his brains. But then the man hunches over and carefully, ever so carefully, wraps a hand around his shirt and presses his face close as if wanting to share a secret, and Daiki hammers his brains still with that nail.
‘What do you say?’ He asks, and even though his voice is pummeling down all sultry and slow, Daiki can still isolate the cracks in it, the uncertainty.
Daiki has to roll his tongue a couple of times for some sound to roll out of it. He can feel the hardness of the nails through the shirt, the sweetest and most mind numbing warmth as the man rolls his thumb, and when that hand slides up his bare neck and squeezes down at pressure point, that heat suffusing through the skin almost whips him unconscious.
‘How-’, Daiki asks in a raspy voice, and then turns his head slowly. Blood is frizzing painfully under the temples, his hands feel like a sweaty mess and he tucks them in between the thighs to hide all those emotions playing him wrong. He feels frazzled as he looks up at the man, baffled and wobbly and stuffs he’s still too confused to put a proper label on yet.
One year and that’s the most contact he’s felt ever since the thunderstorm. He rubs the back of his neck, scratches on the rough skin there as if afraid of what might happen. After a few heartbeats, when Kento doesn’t start wailing about wanting a foot shoved up his ass or something equally gruesome, Daiki blinks up and swallows nervously.
‘How can you do that?’ He repeats, and briefly realizes he’s starting to sound like a broken record.
Kento averts his gaze and ducks his head, checks on his wristwatch instead of replying, and furrows his brows in a tick line at the time. ‘How your brain works, I can control that’, he grumbles then with his head still bent forward, quiet and sheepish, but when he looks up again the way his lips stretch feels affable somehow, a hint of teeth, a soft glean in the eye. ‘I can help you controlling that’.
Daiki doesn’t really understand, and for a long moment tries to wrap his thoughts around those loose concepts, to picture his brain, all squishy and ugly and undoubtedly smooth, and figure out how a person could single-handedly manage all that mess, millions and millions of cells doing their own thing and sparkling bright and dumb. He looks up at him again, and sees him now fidgeting under his stare as he’s waiting for a reaction, tapping his fingers nervously, and Daiki almost feels like he’s thirteen again, and a classmate’s just shoved a box of chocolates into his hands with her feelings loosely scrabbled all over it, and he almost wants to laugh because it’s making no fucking sense.
‘You look like a high school girl’, he says, and laughs because he knows he’s making no fucking sense. ‘The way you’re squirming, feels almost like you might be asking me to prom or something’.
Kento winces at the comparison, clearly taken aback, and for a split second the scowl on his face looks bashful and childlike, and it makes Daiki think candor suits him better after all. But then he’s quick to slap again a mask of boastfulness to cover up the embarrassment, and when he raises a cocky brow and asks, well, will you go with me? Daiki just stares at him.
He measures that stranger carefully, apparently the only person that can still make him feel something, and looks like a struggling bundle of insecurities, and whose eyes tell a story Daiki is not sure he wants to hear yet.
‘That damn storm has fried your brains, am I right’ He says, pocketing his hands as he stands up, and tips his nose at Kento, waits for him to lead the way.
Kento hides the goofiest smile Daiki has ever seen behind a dry cough and goes for his umbrella.
The hooker Daiki has approached earlier passes them by, and doesn’t stop.
*
The former drug dealer has been the hardest to get in. Kento’s first impression of Kato Shigeaki was of a man constantly tiptoeing on a fine line of stress and dread. Perhaps it was the lifestyle, perhaps were those powers he wrapped around his fingers and still couldn’t – didn’t know how to – use himself, or perhaps it was the irony of having to put those godlike abilities at the service of a bunch of brain-dead teens.
(Kento was there when one of those kids – Ryo was his name – had sauntered in Shigeaki’s office and asked, hey merkin, those time travelling powers you gave me, you have a backup copy, right? And Shigeaki had scrunched up his nose like he could smell the house he’d burnt down, and asked, slow and nice, why are you asking? ‘To make a boring story short, I went to a Beatles concert and now Hitler might know how to time travel’. And that had been that).
Once the timeline had been fixed (or so Kento had been told a couple of days later by a very twitchy, very sleep-deprived Shigeaki), he’d asked the drug dealer to trade his power to control chemicals and synapses for some time travelling passes. Shigeaki had popped two pills of Xanax onto one hand before reaching for Kento’s with his left one, and then – very slowly and not so much nicely – had snarled, bring another mad dictator back, and I’ll make sure to hang you dead with that bitch’s colon, capeesh? And that had been that.
*
The train maniac and the hooker have been the easiest to find; miscalculations impossibly easy to spot, anomalies fluctuating in the curve of time without a real purpose. Picture a beginner level of Finding Waldo, but simplified.
Kento had actually met the train maniac before. Find someone else to shove an arm up your ass, Shige had clenched between his teeth when he’d asked if the seat next to him was taken, and the man had furrowed two tick brows at him with a gesture reminiscent of a math teacher before moving past them, grumbling something about younger generations being a fucking mess. Then the first reset unfolded and for whatever reason decided the time was not ripe for Shige and Kento to meet yet, Shige boarded that train alone, and somewhere along the waves of this new, confused timeline, the man must also have decided that acting out his frustrations was probably a healthier approach than bottling up everything inside, and stabbed Shige dead in the eye with a ball pen.
Kento leapt through space for a second time to fix that bump in the timeline, and once he was over and done with it when it came for Shige to open wide that loud, loud mouth of his, the man merely blinked at him. (He might also have forgotten how to play Sudoku and double tie his shoelaces but hey, Kento shrugged, this was a problem for another Kento to fix).
*
The hooker has been easier to track down. Kento was a creature of habit, after all, and even though his dimensional alter had showed enough sense of initiative to pick fight over flight and snap Shige’s neck in that back alley, his lifestyle was still predictable as a house tour.
He was drinking himself hysterical when Kento knocked on the door to his one-room apartment. The floor was littered with empty beer cans and letters with pages dog-eared Kento fully knew they would’ve never sent to their mother, and when the man stumbled back in his drunk stupor, slurring at Kento, hey, you look sexy familiar, all it took was a little nudge on the brain, a poke around two synapses or three-thousands, to convince him to pay no attention to the antics of a man he hadn’t met yet.
Shige had been murdered at 8:23PM sharp, and when at 8:21PM Nakajima passed by Shige and Kento, and didn’t spare a glance at their direction, Kento patted himself on the back and heaved a sigh of relief. (Shige also called him a high school girl for that, and by the way his heart kept thrumming inside his chest, Kento couldn’t find the gulls to disagree).
*
Shige is the hardest to get on board every time. And it confuses Kento in a way he doesn’t know how to put into words, his brains gnawing and munching on those… vibes, and making absolutely nothing out of them. He calls it the ‘slide’, it happens every time a new timeline uncurls and something in Shige slides along with it, goes rounder around the edges and shapes Shige slightly different from the person he was before.
Shige is always the toughest to connect with. It hasn’t always been like that, things were different when Kento was starved for adrenaline and stupor and any kind of rush he could shove inside his body – one way or another, and Shige was willing to give him just that. It hasn’t always been like that. He calls it the ‘slide’.
And it pushes Kento to work harder every time he meets Shige for the first time, to accentuate the curve of the hips and how he slurs his words, hands finding their nimble ways to the back of Shige’s neck and arms and collarbones. He does this because with every reset it feels almost like their story is slowly sliding too, bits of what they used to be, of the wrongs they’ve fixed together, dissipating through the curvature of time and getting lost in space.
(‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have- I’m so fucking sorry’, Shige had apologized to his alter at the beginning of the fourth reset.
You don’t mind as long as I pay, right? Was the only warning the unedultered version of Shige had given him instead before sliding a hand down his face).
Sometimes Shige stares at him like he doesn’t understand what Kento is doing, all those uneven pieces he’s trying to glue back together. You’re terrible at this sexy stuff, the way he furrows his brows seems to mock sometimes, and Kento wants to say, it’s because I don’t know how to be that person anymore. On those splits seconds when Shige doesn’t seem to understand a past he cannot remember, all Kento wants to ask is, will you love me still?
*
Kento was tiptoeing on a precipice when he met Shige. ‘I make folks horny’, Shige had told him, tucking his hands in his pockets. ‘I touch them, and they go batshit crazy’.
Kento shrugged it off and swung an arm around his shoulder because that kind of rush was exactly what he was seeking, just another way he could endure the lifestyle – minus the style, ecstasy fluttering beneath his veins and shaping all that dullness weighting him down into something bright and exhilarating; and Shige didn’t push him away once he’d grappled onto his arm and desperately crashed their mouths together, because Shige needed that adrenaline just as much as Kento did.
Things have been easier before the ‘slide’. Kento hated just how easy they were.
Kento fell in love with what Shige could give him way before he acknowledged the person behind those powers. It was devastating the grip they had on him. A poke, a shy brush of the hand, and all Kento could do was to let himself being maneuvered like a ragdoll, really, as his sensory perception slowly started to slid and slip in every direction like goo.
It was a high almost impossible to put into words: the feeling of experiencing everything, anything and nothing all at once; of being filled from the very inside out like a bursting balloon by your own senses, and Kento sighed happily every time Shige made a tool out of him, content, flapping his eyelids because those tiny sparkles erupting right at the corner of the eyes gave him a childish enjoyment of sort. Shige had been the greatest of all highs.
Kento wasn’t always doped when they met. Sometimes he ditched the pills because he didn’t want intoxication to come between him and that exhilarating euphoria. It was the sweetest pull slapping him slack and pliant every time, and then working almost in reverse on his senses and hyping them to this sort of caffeinated buzz, everything blurred and fiery brightly saturated, and whenever Shige cradled his jaw it felt like a hand around his cock but from the inside out, orgasms piling up in his tummy like jenga towers and hemorrhaging inside a brain that felt weightless, a feather floating on endorphins and forgetfulness.
He often swung an arm around Shige once they were done and over with it, and he felt completely wrung and above everything. He did it because he loved how that junk made him feel like, billions and trillions of particles fluttering beneath damp skin, only a tacky layer of cotton away for him to poke, inject straight into his brains and dope his consciousness dumb with it.
Something in Shige felt different on those moments. It had taken Kento more than a month to notice, because he wasn’t always clean when they met. He wasn’t always there when they met. Shige’s lashes fluttered some time when he looked at him, drooped, and then there was this unreadable crease smudging his lips whenever he lifted his hand and let it hover over his head, enough for Kento to isolate its firmness, its warmth, but not close enough for him to get burnt with it.
‘What are you doing?’ He had asked him one night, and Shige’s eyes had gone wider for a split second – like that question had caught him by surprise, like Kento had somehow hurt him by pointing out the elephant in the room - and he quickly tucked that hand in his pocket, and Kento squirmed there, just a little.
He couldn’t figure out that look Shige had given him, and for weeks he mulled over it, felt strange and alien towards it. It made him want to go loud and foolish and draw his knees up to his chest, like he used to do when he was a child and found his mother passed out on the floor. Kento felt off the kilter on those weeks, a little off of center, as if he’d been sitting inside a snow globe put in the hands of a hyperactive child.
It was almost like someone had poked him on the brain, turned it slightly to the right, and then shouted, look over there! And now that his attention had been momentarily drawn away from those powers, it came easier for him to focus on the man behind them instead.
He didn’t like Shige at first. Perhaps it was the shampoo he used, something cheap and citrus based that stung Kento at the corner of the eye every time. Perhaps it was the sluggish way he crossed his legs, the tick inflection or how his tongue couldn’t seem to enunciate properly ‘L’ and ‘R’, and spelled this indistinct ‘LO’ sound every time. Perhaps it was how much he cared, and the hundreds of little ways he had to show for it.
His affection was crude and stiff around the edges, and it never came out perfectly. Why the hell should I know, he snarled one day when Kento had asked him where his pills had gone and shook an empty bottle right under his nose, like Shige was a misbehaving dog that had just wet his good rug.
Shige had jutted his chin out just a little then, eyes glancing in the general direction of the sink when Kento asked him again, and because he still needed that high and his better alternatives were now disintegrating down some drain, Kento had pulled him by the collar of his shirt and crashed their mouths together instead.
On those days when pills clogged his sink one by one, Kento took his frustration out on Shige and Shige set up a punishing rhythm that had the both of them pushing against each other almost painfully, like he had a point to prove. Isn’t this better? The smug look on his face seemed to boast every time. Does it feel good? Sometimes he ghosted against his lips. On those days they fucked each other.
And Kento maxed up the volume of his stereo every time he heard Shige stumbling about the bathroom, pulling the toilet cover over and shaking empty detergent bottles like maracas, and then flushing down everything he could get his hands over with a symphony of scrooching water. Kento looked away on those days, pretended to not notice, just so he could get mad at Shige later, give him a reason to prove all those idiotic points he wanted to make, seep deeper onto his skin like a chemical as he moved faster, pushed deeper, rocked harder. On those days they fucked with each other.
Kento pressed his heels against the tailbone and rubbed their arousals together when Shige brushed the fringe of his bangs, and Shige struggled with keeping his balance, unzipping his jeans, and wriggling out his shirt. Kento helped things along a little by scooting down and throwing a leg on the back of the sofa so Shige wasn’t hunching as much as he was leaning against him, tongue tasting the roof of his mouth lazily, like all their headaches had combusted along with the rest of the world, and now they had all the time to discover each other.
He reached between his legs, and Kento threw his head back, and would’ve hit on the armrest, but Shige’s hand was there, cushioning it and then curling around his hair as he brushed the tufts behind the ear, in a way – ever so gentle – that had Kento going stiff and rigid, but for all the wrong reasons.
When he came later, he did it with a push and a moan, a wanton and a hand stretched maybe for strip of paradise, and from beneath his fluttering eyelids he saw Shige’s sleepy smile and for a moment it felt warm as the sun.
When he came later, his senses finally tagged along.
*
It altered his brain chemistry, that gesture, etched deep and impaired something in Kento for the weeks to follow, like the year was 1940 all over again he’d been electro shocked to fix his daddy issues. There weren’t a lot of memories of Shige he could recollect clearly – 50% the booze and the 50% the way those powers left him buzzing, so he spent most of his nights with a hand pressed to his nose and eyes squeezed tight, trying to remember, understand how they’d gotten here, the things he must've forgotten along the way.
The mental photographs of their time together always seemed to be saturated by euphoria or accentuated by those hot stones piling up in his tummy, hemorrhaging in a kaleidoscope of pleads and fiery outbursts under those fleeting touches. Kento squeezed his eyes tighter and tried to isolate the single moments, those splits seconds in between, I wasn’t expecting you so early, and, harder, faster, right there, oh god, oh god, yes.
He relived the little things first, details only his body seemed to remember. He remembered how one night Shige had supported his weight onto one arm and leaned forward one as they were lying on bed, resting a hand on his shirt, close to the heart, so close it almost burnt. He remembered euphoria and shooting stars and that dazzle in Shige’s eyes, so bright and rapt, as if his vision had narrowed down to nothing past this moment, past the two of them.
He remembered the coldness of the floor as he was rocking under the sink, stiff and crumpled like a roach, blown out pupils following things he couldn’t see or wanted to understand. Shige’s breath always smelled like candy, and when he’d leaned over and tapped him lightly on the cheek with a toothbrush, Kento felt like someone had dipped his head in cotton floss. You aren’t really here, are you, he vaguely remembered Shige mumbling, and just how thin and stranded his voice had sounded like. He remembered the two of them almost tripping over their feet as they stumbled about the bathroom; remembered Shige drawing a blanket over him and sitting on the side of the bed, reaching for his hand underneath the covers and squeezing it tight in his, a fit as snug as the gloves he’d been wearing, and it’d reminded him of all the things he missed about his foster home.
He remembered beaten up guitars playing only dissonant notes, the walk they took that night, the two of them smoking on the veranda and breathing in butane from their lighters, that coffee stain on Shige’s white apron, running water and hungry kisses and nimble fingers feeling his heartbeats. And suddenly Kento felt high all over again, high as never he’d felt before, standing on a precipice as he tiptoed on a line stretching thinner and thinner as Shige kept pulling on the other side.
Suddenly, Kento realized with a hiccup, he was falling.
*
It happened sometimes. A shoulder bump as Shige was passing over a busy intersection, someone accidentally leaning against him on the train commute, a lost tourist tapping him on the shoulder and asking for directions, and people got these sudden fits of desire, and they weighed Shige down like a dead weight, made him age thirty years. On those days Shige would knock at his door – at midnight, at 3AM, whenever – and pour out his frustrations in between clenched teeth, those white, shark like teeth Kento liked so much now ruined by the six pack Shige had nursed all day long and the cigarettes he’d chain-smoked on his way to Kento’s.
On those days Kento would stretch out a hesitant hand and brush the fringe of his bangs, trying to calm him down, to calm himself down as he could sense his sanity slipping and sliding in every direction, and that it’s not your fault he so wanted to utter dying a quick death on a tongue now tangled all around Shige’s.
Now Kento hated when intoxication came between the two of them. The feeling became unbearable on those days when Shige spent his time curled on the opposite side of the couch with this unreadable look in his eyes and those hands tucked in his pockets like they were something devious that needed to be locked in a vault. Kento would scoot closer on those nights, fake a smile for both of them and graze Shige’s forearm, try to brush that stiffness away.
‘Don’t’. ‘I don’t mind, Shige’.
When he slipped a hand into his pocket and their fingers entwined, he tried to hold himself back for as long as he could – pressing his legs close together, biting that traitorous tongue of his, thinking about sick kittens and climate change and the gender pay gap situation. On those days, as he wrapped himself around Shige and shoved him against tables and doorknobs and countertops, Kento sometimes wished he could pull a Baron Munchausen worth stunt and delve into his brains, drag himself out that madness by the ponytail.
It had been eleven months of this push and pull now, and Kento was sitting against the headboard. His abdomen was slick with pre cum, that length stiff and painful in between his legs and Shige hadn’t even touched him yet, just brushed his hand shyly – in that gentle way he seemed to have wrapped around his fingers – when Kento had told him that maybe, almost certainly, those flu symptoms he thought he’d been nursing for the past week might have been love after all.
Shige had hunched over then and nosed the underside of his ear, there, right there where nerves ran like hot like wires and knotted something in his brains when a slick tongue followed second, traced an invisible whorl around the ear shell. I was thinking, he ghosted against his lips, low, so low Kento had to force himself to breathe through the nose so he could hear him over those pitiful noises he was making.
‘I was thinking that maybe I don’t feel that good myself’.
Leaning forward, he pressed his tongue into his mouth, and Kento reached the end of his rope with a string of lewd noises. His mind constricted in strips of yellow, synapses imploding in refracted lights, and he felt so tense his legs became sore, spread wide open as Shige was stroking his thigh with one hand, nimble fingers working their way up and then deep in the depression of the tailbone. He could picture the words he wanted to say, their fuzziness and mind numbing warmth – as soft and idiotic only a love confession can be sometimes – but they all seemed to have imploded on the path to his mouth, transfigured to a mess of empty gurgles, a long and devious sutra of more, yes, harder, right there.
Shige had confessed his feelings but it all seemed secondary, almost non important right now, as his world kept narrowing and narrowing down to those firecrackers popping in the pit of his stomach. And it was unfair, Kento thought, so unfair it made him want to howl, roll Shige onto his stomach and make him whimper, dig his hips into the mattress before he pushed back against him with the most arousing groan, that deep stir in the throat Kento loved so much, so much his heart sometimes ached for it, for that dazzle in Shige’s eyes wherever their fingers entwined, that cock sucker cun-
Suddenly, consciousness reemerged with a fiery blast, waves and waves of it pouring onto axons and dendrites, and wiring them up with a shock. Kento gasped as a newborn, feeling that electricity flowing from the tip of his hair to the toes he had curled, and when confusedly he blinked up at Shige, he saw he’d pulled back both hands, tucked them hastily between the thighs.
‘You begged me to stop’, he mumbled, slowly, and Kento could sense the confusion in his voice, that rasp stirring the last two syllables almost to a squeak. ‘You begged me to stop’, he repeated, as if doing it made it more impactful somehow, and perhaps he was right, perhaps what had happened in that past minute would’ve changed the sorts of humanity in ways only plagues and nuclear events are known to do.
He untangled himself carefully, leaned back on the pile of clothes they’d discarded at the edge of the bed and tilted his head sideways. ‘Kento?’
When he held out a hesitant hand, Kento scooted back, pushing on the mattress with both hands. Shige backed away with a sharp inhale – so fast you might have thought someone had burnt him – knocking into the night table and widening his eyes, so wide Kento thought for a moment he could see the heart shattering behind them.
It had taken him a while to figure out the tortuous lengths of Shige’s powers. It had taken him a while because Kento had already gotten used to live only in fractions, those moments in between red pills and the pink ones, and when his teeth were completely wrung and tired, that magic powder he inhaled till his nostrils felt funny and the world around him crumpled to a symphony of squeaking noises.
It had taken Kento a while to notice those black outs because he had already gotten used to live in the dark, had rooted in it for so long, indeed, he realized it was gone only when its gaps became apparent. He started to notice the little things first: a hand hovering over his head and another one cushioning it, mint candy scent as he was lying on the floor with piss drying at his ankles, and arms reaching out for him and holding him tight, so tight Kento almost wished he could etch onto them through osmosis and disappear, leave that forsaken life behind.
It occurred to him one night, as he was lying on bed with two fingers pressed to his nose and eyes squeezed tight, that during some post orgasmic haze he’d let a hand hover over Shige’s head, statics sticking all that hairdo onto his palm, and the endorphins fluttering beneath his veins making him sleepy and dizzy; and that, sometime after that, he might’ve called Shige as two red pills were slowly dissolving under his tongue, their taste just as alien and foreign as his mother’s voice over the phone. Hey Shige, did you know my sister had died a year ago, cause I didn’t. ‘Where are you? Tell me where you are, I’ll pick you up’.
It’d taken Kento a while to notice those changes – somewhere between three and five months – because Shige’s powers were just that tortuous, and they had this way of twisting his mind, making him forget everything but that need of lust hungry want. It was almost like running a marathon with his subconscious, watching himself changing from afar and dropping a whole lot of baggage behind as he went, and as his conscious mind kept tripping and falling over those bags, sometimes Kento get to see these glimpses telling him how he’d gotten so far. He kept changing, bettering and progressing, but in a way he couldn’t remember; somehow he had fallen in love already, but he just didn’t know how.
He’d just wished for things to go differently this time, to stroll back home under a pale moonlight shine and have to contain his giggles, that childish enjoyment at getting his heart back after having lent it away for so long. He just wanted to remember, that love story they’ve built over things he’d forgotten along the way.
‘I didn’t want to forget this time’, he mumbled, and couldn’t look at Shige in the eyes, not yet. ‘What you’ve told me, I didn’t want to forget’.
He had kept his eyes trained onto the mattress because he couldn’t look at Shige in the eyes, not just yet, but he didn’t miss the way his hands had slowly curled into fists, grasped onto those bed sheets as if the world had suddenly flipped onto its axis and he was about to fall out of it.
The covers shuffled under his weight. ‘This time’. A pause, then that painful stir of the throat again. ‘So I’ve made you forget things already before’.
When Kento finally mastered up enough courage to turn his head, he realized Shige had slumped back even further, sitting on the tailbone and staring at some non-existent spot behind the headboard. He had drawn his brows together in a tick line, and the way his lips had parted reminded Kento of that one time they were drinking their coffee on the veranda, watching two sparrows down the street fighting over a half-eaten croissant, when a truck suddenly had passed by and ran both of them over. Shige had split his lips in a similar ‘O’ shape back then, anguish and confusion flashing over his face and then converging in that subtle tic of the mouth. It had happened more than two months ago, but Kento had remembered it just now. Shige’s powers have always been that tortuous.
‘How far back?’ He asked, and caught Kento off guard, had him scrambling his brains to find the right words. When he thought about this argument they were meant to have at some point – on those nights when he felt particularly masochist or just couldn’t close his eyes because Shige had rolled closer in his sleep – he’d always imagined having to dodge through a whole lot of directional questions before finally have to fire that bullet, and shred what they had built with it. ‘What do you mean?’, ‘Why can’t you remember?’, ‘Kento, I don’t understand’.
Questions seemed to have disappeared now, converged perhaps in that subtle tic of the mouth Shige couldn’t seem to shake off. And Kento didn’t really need to be a mind reader to know where they’d gone; he could see it in the crease of Shige’s forehead, in the way his brows had perched up as he was probably replaying in a silent loop all those times he had accidentally used his powers – at train stations and on crowded streets, on men, women and anything he could reach, really – and never had to face any consequences for his carelessness. Not because people were afraid of this freak walking amongst men, or feared what he could do to them, but simply because they couldn’t – weren’t allowed to – remember the monster that had ghosted over their necks.
‘How far back can’t you remember?’ He asked again. His knuckles had turned white, so white they almost disappeared among the bed sheets he had ruined without realizing.
Kento thought about his two sparrows, the lilacs he had bought to mourn his sister a second time, the mint candy scent. Three months, four maybe. ‘A month or two’, he lied.
‘A couple of months?’
For seemingly no reason he recalled that walk they took seven months ago. ‘A couple of months’.
‘So I’ve made you forget a couple of months’. That crease around the brows softened and then disappeared, and something in Shige seemed to vanish along with it.
Kento didn’t need to be a mind reader to notice: it doesn’t take superhuman abilities to recognize a broken person when you step on their shards.
‘A’ right’, Shige shrugged, simply, and Kento stared, dumbfounded, as he got off the bed and reached for his shirt. ‘A’ right’, he repeated as he pushed an arm through one sleeve. ‘A’ right’, the second one went. ‘That’s a’ right’. Jeans and socks and then the shoes he’d forgotten to tie, and Kento realized he was halfway through the door only when he tripped over a lace and almost lost his balance there, had to hold on to the closet to not fall.
Three minutes and twenty-five seconds. It had taken Kento less than three minutes and twenty-five seconds to destroy that paradise they had built together.
It took him less than two seconds to wriggle his way out of bed and cut through the bedroom, slip past Shige and nail himself like the Christ before the door, because he knew that if he hadn’t done that, if he had just shouted or howled or begged him to stay, Shige would’ve never stopped. But Kento didn’t budge, and Shige took a stutter step back, clenched his teeth.
‘Move’.
‘Not until you listen to what I got to say’.
‘I think I’ve heard enough’.
‘You don’t know half of it’.
‘No, you don’t know half of it’, Shige bit back, and under the glow of the window light Kento finally saw his mask beginning to crack. He looked wild, desperate, narrowed brows and lips and the wrinkles at the bridge of the nose folding like an origami.
‘You have been clean for more than ten months, did you know that?’ He snarled. ‘You’ve joined a self help group, they gave you a token last week, we’ve framed it too, do you even remember that?’ He was shouting now, shouting like Kento had never heard Shige shout before, like only a wounded animal would. ‘They’ve celebrated you, and your life, and the accomplishments you’ve made, but you can’t remember any of that because you’ve been roofied all the fucking while!’
And it was almost like all that fire burning him up had extinguished with that last syllable. Shige brought a hand to his chest and inhaled a sharp intake of air, eyes popping wide open as a short rasp left his lips, and then another one, and another one came. ‘Oh my god, I’ve roofied you. I’ve roofied you’. Kento watched petrified as two knees gave up under him, and soon he was on the floor, only a hand holding him upright as he struggled for air, and he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe Kento realized with a hiccup, and when he squatted down and tried to reach out for him, something sharp hit him at the corner of the eye and cut him open, and it took him a split second to realize it was the car keys Shige had thrown at his face.
‘Stay the fuck away from me!’ He howled from behind the hand he’d pressed over his nose and scooted back with a whimper, shivering when a pearl of sweat rolled down his eye and burnt him.
A moment filled by sweat and tremors and terror was all they that had left to mourn the things they would’ve never become. And maybe a tad of regret too, Kento thought wistfully, as he saw Shige’s eyes drifting to the keys at their feet, to the miniscule red stain he’d put there with his carelessness, and gulp back a sob with the most pitiful sound. Please, he squeaked. Please, don’t make me touch you.
Kento forget the weight he was supposed to carry and let himself fall onto the floor instead, slumped back till his shoulders hit something firm and solid – the closet – and drew his knees up to his chest, and felt ugly and powerless as if he’d turned eleven again, and his mother was wriggling in a pool of her own vomit on the kitchen floor.
When he found himself wrapped in the millions and millions of synapses that run Shige’s brains, he didn’t even know how he’d gotten there.
Unlike Shige’s, his powers have always been unpredictable like that.
Too dangerous, Shigeaki had labeled them one day when Kento had offered him a trade for some oxycodone. Too powerful, he didn’t want any of the kids to mess with that. Too dangerous. And Kento almost had wanted to laugh there, with that weird fit of giggles that always crept on him whenever he mixed red with pink, because Shigeaki was making absolutely zero sense.
In theory, what the former drug dealer had told him made perfect sense. Kento hadn’t fried his brain yet – well, not entirely – and still retained some notions from those biology classes he had taken in third grade: what makes people people, are just glorified chunks of brains with only a little of bones and nasty dangling from them, and all it would’ve taken for Kento was just a nudge, a poke on the right cluster of synapses, to have whoever he wanted dancing – and bending and changing their minds just as swiftly as seasons – on the palm of his hands. On a more practical level, the most Kento had ever accomplished had been to make his landlord pass out every time he inquired about the rent he still owned him.
Perhaps it had been the drugs, he rationalized one day, all that crap he had shoved into his body making it impossible for Kento to focus on more than a task at a time, let alone to guide a person step by step into doing dog tricks and walk on the tips of their hands; or perhaps it was just how little he cared, the way he never listened to what people had to say, and how he had never expected anyone to bend their ways for the things he asked for in return.
Perhaps, Kento rationalized one day as he was watching a romantic comedy with Shige, and caught him scowling at one particularly sappy kissing scene, it was all about finding the right reason for the right person.
He’d never told Shige about his powers. He never did, because Kento was afraid Shige might’ve hanged himself with that string of hope once it would’ve inevitably snapped under his clumsy fingers. But at night, sometimes, Kento sat against the headboard as Shige was asleep, and toyed with all those millions of synapses spread in front of him, trying to make a sense out of things, to find that sweet spot where Shige’s powers nested and set a match to it. He got Shige to move idly sometimes – an arm or an uncoordinated foot wriggling underneath the covers, to fuss and to turn and to kick, and one night he thought he might’ve gotten closer when he poked around something shaped as a nugget, and Shige fluttered his lashes there, held out a shaky hand and looked up at him with this sort of drunken stupor before turning over in his sleep. The REM phase.
He never got to control anything past the fucking REM phase.
Now millions and millions of cells were dancing before his eyes to an idle waltz, and Kento watched astounded as his fingers curled around a particularly dense cluster without thought, bent it in half with a gentle snap. He could feel the adrenaline pouring out of it, the shards of Co2 Shige was breathing in too fast pooling on the palm of his hand and making his skin itch, and it came instinctive to him to brush them away, shoo shoo, like a swarm of buzzing mosquitoes.
Once he started to get the gist of it, it felt almost like playing a game of tetris on a nightmare scale of difficulty, and when he flipped a particular long piece so it could fit it in between two narrow spaces, the hand Shige had clutched at his chest fell lax onto his lap, and he exhaled a long breathe of air he didn’t even know he had been holding.
Slowly, synapses started rearranging in a way that felt similar to the usual, incomprehensible chaos Kento was used to, and when he finally pulled out that colorful mess with a tug, it took him a minute to readjust to the tints around him, everything so plain and painfully tame his eyes had to blink a couple of times to make a shape out of that carpet of grays.
He distinguished only a handful of things at first: two lean sticks standing right in front of him, maybe a movement or a brush of white painting the air, and finally something devouring him whole, warm and heavy, and it took him a moment to understand that had been Shige limping closer and wrapping a blanket around him.
Kento looked down at his toes and realized he was naked – had been naked all along, since he’d tripped his way out of bed – and as Shige sat by his side and quietly lit up a cigarette, he felt vulnerable as never he had felt before. This is it, he thought, because Shige would’ve never had a breakup with him lying exposed like that. This is it, he thought, and feeling vulnerable as never he’d felt in his entire life, he wrapped a hand around his knees and waited for the inevitable to squash him down.
It didn’t take long, only three cigarettes, maybe four. Only a little more of poison to lie quietly between the two of them and squeeze a whole lot of happiness out their lungs.
‘Sometimes I wished my powers were different, you know, that I knew how to time travel instead or stuff like that’, Shige breathed out after a while, stiff and tired and completely unprovoked, and Kento looked at the swirls of nicotine floating up in the air, dissipating somewhere up in the ozone layer. 'That I could pull time by the hair and make a bitch out of it’.
His voice drifted over with a dry cackle, dissipated as hastily as those whorls of smoke, and Kento held on to its tick inflection, to how it couldn’t seem to align properly its ‘L’ and ‘R’, to the nasal squeaks it made sometimes. He couldn’t seem to find the words, so he held on to Shige’s instead, reached out his hand and held on to the ruined hem of his jeans too.
Shige pressed up against his shoulder, the lamest brush, a near-miss. And when he craned his head, Kento didn’t miss that helpless look in his eyes, like maybe he wanted to touch him, like maybe wanted to tend the graze he’d put on his face and wrap a spell of forgetfulness all around him – and, oh, just how sweet that would’ve felt like - and when he leaned forward and grappled onto the blanket instead, buried his face in it with this ungodly cry, Kento wondered if maybe Shige felt just as wrung as his back looked like, all bent and crumpled.
He wrapped two hesitant arms around those shoulders, held on to them like a child, and pretended to not notice the man breaking down like a toddler in between them, to ignore his hiccups and apologies, because guilt was a weight those shoulders weren’t ready to carry yet. Didn't deserve to carry.
‘Sometimes I wished I could’ve have stopped myself from taking you down with me’.
And his voice was now thinner than the curve of his spine, thinner than the tears dipping in the hollow of his cheeks, thinner than the line of his mouth and face and the layer of nicotine hovering over them and dissipating, and when after a minute or maybe a century Shige sniffled quietly from one nostril and placed a butterfly kiss on the blanket he’d wrapped all around him, Kento knew this moment too was about to dissipate.
‘I shouldn't have done this to you’.
He thought of mint candies once Shige was gone, their flavor thick and rich until he was suffocating with it. He thought of empty bleach bottles and the tokens they’d framed somewhere on the wall behind the fridge. He thought about tongues pressed into his mouth, nimble fingers in his hair, and time and space and thunderstorms toying with the life they’d built together, toppling it over like a jenga tower, and then a chance, maybe, towering over all that dismay. A hunch.
A whole lot of delusion, and maybe a string of hope to crown his neck with.
*
‘Well, seems to me you’ve hanged yourself just fine with that string of yours’, the short teen – Ryo was his name – snorted while spinning on Shigeaki’s chair like a child and almost toppling out of it. Kento slumped down the couch and sighed.
After having dealt with the anomalies brought by the second reset (read: his psycho alter), he’d leaped back again and made a bee line for Kato Shigeaki’s office. He’d walked in expecting to find the man hunched over his desk, nursing a migraine or maybe glaring at the umpteenth corpse Ryo had shoved inside his locker, the pink memos clipped to it always reading something along the lines of couldn’t fit both of them into your car – R.N, or a slight variation of that, usually changing accordingly to how many little hearts Ryo had decided to scribble this time.
Kento had expected a long afternoon ahead of him having to demonstrate the former drug leader how actually they already knew each other, knew each other so well, indeed, a Shigeaki from a different timeline had trusted Kento with those time travel abilities he cherished so much. And then, after having given Shigeaki a minute or two to digest all that information along with some anxiolytic, Kento had expected having to retell the story of how actually he’d gotten here: of how he’d time travelled to a couple of days before the thunderstorm, the first time, to convince Shige to leave the city, and how a train maniac had beaten him on time and stabbed Shige dead in the eye instead. And then how, the second time, Kento had managed to persuade the man to ignore Shige, only for his dimensional alter to snap his neck in some back alley a day or two later.
Now that made round four, and Kento was starting to lose his hope, to really feel that fucking string choking him at point pressure. He’d spent more than a month dancing around the same loop – switch his powers, travel back, hold on to Shige’s body, wait for the thunderstorm to happen, switch his powers again, cleanse and repeat, cleanse and repeat – and now he felt completely wrung, stale as if he’d aged thirty years in the span of thirty days.
He’d just wished for things to go differently this time, to mellow Shige’s brains for just long enough to sling an arm around his shoulders and sleep-walk him out the city. But the fourth reset seemed to have a different agenda on mind, and had flung Kento way past the day of the thunderstorm, to an already infected Shige stumbling and knocking his way through damnation. So Kento had tiredly dragged himself to Shigeaki’s office for a fifth time, resigned to have to switch those darn powers all over again and take another leap. Only, this time, Kato Shigeaki wasn’t there waiting for him.
Fucking Ryo Nishikido was.
‘So, let me get this straight’, he had stopped spinning now, and looked at him like Kento was stupid, which granted maybe he’d gone. ‘Are you stupid?’
Kento blinked at him. In all the loops he’s ever lived, the former drug dealer had never questioned his character; he was usually content with knowing Kento had no intention to travel past the early 2000s and ruin Spice Girls for him, or drag any mad dictator into his charades. Granted, Kento knew every reset couldn’t be a perfect carbon copy of the previous one: something had to change to show the dents he’d left during his incessant wandering, be it one more little heart scribbled on a post-it or Shige dying a less gruesome death every time. But logically speaking, Ryo questioning his reasons deified the purpose of the loop itself: why bothering scribbling a period to a nightmare potentially endless?
Ryo grabbed the jacket Shigeaki had left behind on his way out, and fished out one pocket a pack of cigarettes he was probably too young to smoke. He smacked his lips pensively as he lit up one, and gave Kento this kind of look that made him feel like he’d turned ten and an idiot all over again, cause he’d just told his teacher he had no idea how to calculate percentages.
‘I mean’, he frowned while drawing at his cigarette. ‘Why go back now?’
‘The storm has come and gone’, Kento pointed out, slowly, because he was starting to think the teen might not have heard a single word of what he’d just said. ‘Shige is infected in this timeline’.
Ryo smacked his lips again, and curled the corner of his mouth in this pretentious curve that seemed to say, So what?, like he couldn’t understand, the way Shige’s eyes drooped sometimes, the holes he’d burned in his pockets. And Kento stared blankly at him and said nothing, because maybe Ryo really couldn’t understand the way these holes bothered him, how somehow they’d etched a similar burn inside his chest too.
When their eyes met, Ryo’s pupils went wider and rounder, and he slapped a hand to his knee with a snort, and spilled a little of ashes onto Shigeaki’s rug when he pointed his cigarette at Kento.
‘Oh my God, you really don’t get it, do you?’ He laughed.
Kento looked across the room to where Ryo was stubbing the burn in the fabric with his shoe. He didn’t really know why he was being questioned like that: the trader just traded powers, that was all Shigeaki did, he’d never offered opinions on the use people made of them or made fun of their reasons. This timeline was a clusterfuck.
Ryo rubbed the dirt off his sole on the armrest, and when he looked back at Kento there was this sharp smile now splitting his lips. ‘The timeline is perfectly fine, you absolute dumbass’.
Kento stared at him speechlessly. Ryo made a pained noise and took his head in both hands.
‘Let me over simplify it for you, K?’ He stubbed his cigarette on the desk and held out his hand. ‘You decide you need to rescue your princess, and travel back in time. But trip number one goes to waste cause some asshole gets his period while sitting on a train or something, and goes on a stabbing spree with a ball pen’, and he wriggled his finger index. ‘So you travel back in time again, get this bitch some pads, but then your evil twin-’, ‘Dimensional alter-ego’, ‘What’s his face snaps your boytoy’s neck like a cracker’, his pinky followed. ‘For good measure, you scramble his brains too, and take another leap’.
‘Let’s skip to round number four’, and now he had four fingers in the air, and conveniently flashed the middle one at Kento. ‘Shige is out running some errands for me and I’m stuck here doing the graveyard shift, and some moron saunters into my office and starts crying about how for a month, for a fucking month, he’s done nothing but successfully melting brains right, left and center’.
He paused and looked at him straight in the eye. For a month, he repeated, and held out both hands as he spelled it out for Kento, slowly, for a month, you’ve done nothing but controlling people’s brains, you absolute retard.
And Kento swallowed there, his tongue suddenly dry and thick in his mouth and his synapses freezing in a way that had his head spinning for a split second, like someone had dipped his face in a pool of ice cubes, and he had to grapple onto the armrest to not lose his balance.
Ryo probably must’ve sensed the magnitude of the bitchslap he’d just inflicted him because he said nothing for a while, lighting up another cigarette and releasing smoke through pursued lips. He waited for several moments before stubbing it under his shoe, burning a new hole into the rug. ‘So you get it now, right?’ He asked then.
‘It wasn’t about Shige’, Kento’s voice trailed as he wrapped a hand around his torso. An air bubble had floated and then glued itself somewhere underneath it, and it made it difficult for him to breathe, to spell and properly articulate what he wanted to say, to describe the ground he couldn’t feel under his feet anymore. ‘It has never been about Shige’.
He pressed a hand to his face and squeezed his eyes tight. He thought about the train maniac and the geometrical shapes of his brains, their hardness and dullness and how pliable they’d started to feel under his pads after a while, so mellow he didn’t even have to squeeze that consciousness anymore for the man to bend to his will, just plant a whisper, an idea, as he slung an arm around his shoulders as they both were waiting for their train to arrive. That kid looks so disturbed, doesn’t he? Probably doesn’t even know what he’s talking about, poor thing, pay him no mind.
He thought about his alter and the splotches coloring his head hysterical, so bright and vibrant and absolutely nonsensical, and how lost he’d felt the first time he got trapped in there. He thought about the white walls he’d learned to raise with time, the curtains he’d lifted and draped all around those things Nakajima couldn’t stand, so he wouldn’t have to act out his fears anymore. And then he thought about the peaceful smile he had flashed at him one day, so bubbly and radiant, when Kento had whispered to his ear, tell me, don’t you feel better now that you don’t need those darn pills anymore?
‘Every reset was about learning how to control my powers, it has never been about Shige’s’.
Ryo snorted there. ‘Please don’t sound this excited knowing you can rescue your princess now’.
‘It’s not that, it’s just’, he stopped, smacking his lips together. He didn’t know to convey the sudden sense of loss that had started eating him up. The two years he’d spent falling in love with Shige – his Shige – he knew he couldn’t get back, not in this timeline, not even by digging his way inside Shige’s subconscious and sleep-walking him through each and every second they’ve lived together. Kento had discarded all of that the moment Shige had walked out his door, that night. He’d done it because he knew, believed deep down, this was probably the last string left for him to pull, with Shige’s powers being that tortuous and his owns being that unpredictable.
But now. But now.
‘Do you think…’ He paused again, looked at his hands. Even from across the room he could feel the energy radiating from Ryo tickling his fingers, seeping deep underneath the skin. He peered inside his mind, just out of curiosity, and stared at the long branches of his axons, the electrical impulses they sent almost buzzing to a mellow, soft rock rhythm. It had taken him all his concentration to diffuse the panic attack Shige had that night, but this, now, this felt natural as flying for birds or stomping for elephants.
He broke the connection with a quick little tug, looked at Ryo snapping shut a mouth he had no idea he’d left agape.
‘… Do you think I could’ve learned at some point?’
‘In your timeline you mean?’
Kento nodded.
‘Hell if I know’, Ryo shrugged. ‘Do you think you could’ve pulled it off without destroying four different timelines first?’
Kento bit his upper lip and tucked his hands in his pockets. He brushed the residual of Ryo’s energy off his fingers, and tried to remember instead how it felt whenever he immersed in Shige’s subconscious, deep enough to drown in all those whorls and knots cluttering his mind he couldn’t seem to untangle; remembered the way those clusters slipped through his fingers sometimes, rolling down fast as marbles, whenever he tried to balance them onto his palms, and Kento remembered just how stupid and hopeless he felt every time until eventually he always gave up with a groan.
He thought about the first time he held on to Shige’s body. It was because of that sense of helpnesses, because of that stiffness and the way Shige’s eyes had rolled, that he’d collected all those loose strings and tied them around his wrists, wrapped them so tight, indeed, that at some point they just etched into his skin like a scar. If he hadn’t spent night after night sitting next to his alter, watching his eyes flutter under the influence as he rooted inside his mind, digging his heels as he pushed his power through the other man, he would’ve never learned how to untangle all those incomprehensible knots.
And Kento couldn’t help but wonder if that was what every reset had tried to show him, maybe, what love is all about. An incessant struggle and a wish to fulfill, and stretching yourself so thin over it that everything that is not him starts feeling non important, tertiary almost, from the powers fluttering underneath your veins to the balance of some universe now you couldn’t seem to care less about.
For some reason, his mind wandered to the little mole on Shige’s jaw, the most minuscule skin flaw. Kento had always wanted to touch that, and every time he realized he couldn’t – or that, if he’d done it already, he just couldn’t remember it – it rubbed him wrong like an itch he couldn’t seem to shake off. It happened whenever Shige smiled at him over his coffee and that dot peered at him, all smug and cocky, and Kento had to grapple to his mug every time cause he felt like a child getting waved the hugest and fattest red button in the world right under his nose.
He still wanted to do that, touch that imperfection, laugh at the sudden scowl on Shige’s face and brush it away with a kiss, slow and wet, and everything around him messy and incoherent and absolutely perfect, because when Shige would’ve kissed him back, Kento would’ve noticed how velvety his tongue felt between his teeth, and how gross the shampoo he used was like, and the weird stickiness of his lip balm. Because in this scenario Shige would’ve been the only thing clouding Kento’s mind, and a mole would’ve been just a mole, and skin wouldn’t have tasted like madness, and Kento still would have lost his mind fifteen minutes from now, but for all the right reasons.
Because maybe that was what love is all about, and a laugh escaped Kento there. Ryo arched a brow and peered at him. ‘What?’ He asked.
‘I might have fucked up four different timelines over a mole’.
Ryo drew at his cigarette and shrugged. ‘Every now and then I summon Hitler back just to get some idiot’s attention. Love can be like that sometimes’.
And Kento laughed again because he knew they were sounding utterly and completely insane, but maybe they also were the only ones that truly had gotten it right, this love thing.
Across the room Ryo shook the pack of cigarettes and frowned when he realized it was empty. He flung the little box somewhere past his shoulders with a shrug, then said, Shige has taken the new probation officer out for a ride, should be here any minute.
‘My powers reset after every jump’, Kento reminded him. ‘The only reason why I came looking for Shigeaki was because-’, and trailed off, because he hadn’t missed the way Ryo’s brows had perched up there, that slightest curve almost begging him, c’mon, idiot, give me another reason to call you an idiot, idiot, c’mon.
‘I don’t need his services right now’, he shrugged indifferently, and kept his face still because he remembered having heard once how certain classes of predators can smell the noradrenalin in your blood.
‘Well, you could still use his car’, Ryo shrugged. He had pressed his heel onto the rug, and took on swinging in slow circular motions, pushing one foot against Shigeaki’s leather briefcase for balance. ‘There’s no way to tell with these fucking resets. You get there one minute too late and, oops, there goes your princess getting sucked by a tractor beam or eaten by a flying shark’.
He swung a full circle and laughed heartedly at the scowl on Kento’s face.
‘I’m just kidding, kidding’, he waved him off. ‘But it would be dumb even for you to refuse a free ride when offered one, and it shouldn’t take Shige that long to get back anyway’.
He indicated with his thumb the park across the street. ‘We always bury those probation officers right around the corner’.
(And that had been that).
*
It’s an old apartment, some ugly, grey-ish looking council house standing at the cross between two intersections. The road leading to it can be described as a crossable dismay at best, with run down shops and food stands littering every corner, and tufts of grass dotting the less trafficked side of the street, tall and sharp enough to scratch a person at the knee. Probably nettle or something as equally annoying, Daiki thinks.
He has never been to this side of the town before, but once they reach the point where the road splits in two different intersections, instead of going right and following the main artery opening to the suburbs, Daiki turns abruptly left and picks the less crowded path. When then they come to a stop in front of this chipped wooden door, and the man starts fumbling with his keys, Daiki instinctively taps his foot against the bottom hinge and punts it with the tip of his shoe. Kento furrows two confused brows at his direction, and when the door slides open with this creaky sound, Daiki shoves his hands in his pockets with a non-committal shrug and slides past him, kicking off his shoes.
It has been like that for the past thirty days, Daiki calls it the ‘swing’. It happens every time he’s distracted doing something and this nasal, noisy voice inside his head suddenly perches up and starts screeching at him, that’s not how you’re supposed to do it, you moron. And every time it feels like his brain is splitting in two distinctive halves, undulating in between what Daiki is doing and what he actually wants to do, and all his synapses swinging front and back in this dull waltz and never coming to a right decision.
Daiki calls it the ‘swing’. It has been like that for the past thirty days.
The first time Daiki noticed something was wrong with him, he was on the veranda shaking a lighter into working again, and somewhere down the street two birds had started fighting over a half-eaten sandwich. Daiki felt something wet and hot dipping in the hollow of his cheeks, and immediately cursed the unforeseen rain cause he’d just done watering his plants, for Christ’s sake, until he heard this nasal, soft mewing sound and realized he’d been crying for the past minute. He labeled it as a fluke – he’s had quite a few of these ever since the thunderstorm – and didn’t think much of it. Probably the pollen, he told himself later as he chugged a glass of water with some antihistamine, all that fucking nettle polluting the air having a banquet on his seasonal allergies.
Then, a couple of days later, his brain decided to take him for another swing. Daiki was coming back from work when he noticed this scantily clothed person at the corner of some street, paying some kid a roll of money and quickly pocketing the little brown bag he’d shoved at his face.
The hooker – Daiki assumed – looked like this weird combination of both rights and wrongs, a walking Mandela effect of sort. His hair was short but should’ve been longer, the way his lips had curled seemed fine but Daiki knew it should’ve been sultrier, sharper, all razor edges. You were supposed cut yourself on those lips if you were not careful enough. And the little brown bag... The little brown bag shouldn’t have been there at all, Daiki thought, and he didn’t know why it bothered him so much, a random hooker finding an alternative way to endure the lifestyle, but somehow it did.
It made him want to go ugly and violent, pull that man by the hair and slam him against that fucking wall and then take him, right there, right here, bark to his ear, don’t replace me with this cheap crap, and then cup the papery skin on his balls and make him beg for it cause Daiki knew he would’ve let him, knew he would’ve loved it.
It had taken Daiki all his self-control to walk past that scene, to not bend to the will of that annoying voice chirping to his ears, look what he’s doing to himself, now, this idiot. And you ain’t gonna do nothing about it?
Kento kinda reminds him of that hooker. Not the plain adaptation of it, that pale imitation that had bothered Daiki so much, but the fragrant and overly saturated version he couldn’t seem to shake off his head. Perhaps it’s the way he has squinted his eyes, there, while staring at him from the bathroom door; or perhaps it’s how he’s pulled his lips like a cat, that curvature inching more to the right, like a comma, a parenthesis in between books of untold. Daiki doesn’t know, can’t really understand it.
‘It contains detergent’, Kento tells him from the door, and Daiki blinks at the bottle he’s weighting in one hand. He doesn’t even know how he’s gotten here, in some man’s bathroom, sniffing at his detergents like a perfect creep. One minute he was at the door kicking off his shoes, and the next one he’d made a beeline for the bathroom like someone had set a firecracker up his ass. He blames it on the swing. When in doubt, always blame it on the swing. Fucking swing, been screwing his life for thirty days and counting.
He puts down the bottle and clears his throat with this nervous chuckle. ‘Look, I didn’t mean to-’
‘It contains only detergent’, Kento punctuates. ‘It’s been containing nothing but detergent for a year, three weeks and six days marking today’.
And there’s something in his voice, something raw and open that shakes Daiki to his core, there, fills him up with this sudden sense of pride. He looks up at Kento and he’s smiling this slow smile at him, his eyes tired but alight, and when he scoots closer and gently pries the bottle from his hand, Daiki almost wants to lean forward, brush that tiredness off the fringe of his bangs.
I wouldn’t mind, Shige, that weird glint in Kento’s eyes, not Kento, but that glint smiles when Daiki looks up at him. And it’s like their first encounter all over again; the way his eyes droop, the nostalgia they spill, the untold peering from underneath the cracks, and Daiki tucks his hands in his pockets with an indifferent shrug there, cause he feels like he’s swinging again, harsh and fast and with his stomach up to his throat, and maybe I’ve missed you dancing on the tip of his tongue.
‘What do you do to make it last that long?’ He asks instead.
Kento pauses, blinks away his confusion, and when finally he snorts with this ugly sound, something Daiki hasn’t realized had fallen off track in his life instantly goes back to its right axis.
‘That’s, like, the lamest pick up line ever’, he laughs, and it’s beautiful the way he sounds, bumblebees and lousy guitars and the way Daiki’s heart is gritting underneath his chest. He turns around, tips his nose at him with this quirk smile now splitting his lips.
‘C’mon Casanova, let’s get you fixed up’, he says and heads for the kitchen.
He could’ve asked Daiki to follow him to hell, with that smile, and Daiki probably would’ve just asked, which way?
*
‘You just have to relax to it’, Kento says, and toys absent-mindedly with the empty beer can to his left. ‘It’s like giving in to sleep, really, you won’t feel a thing’.
Daiki looks up at him through the glaze in his eyes, his head full with tiredness and too many noises and the four cans of beer he’s chugged down on an empty stomach.
(It’s easier for me if you’re tipsy, Kento replied with a shrug after Daiki had eyed suspiciously the six packs he’d shoved at him and asked, is this one of those scenarios where I’m going to wake up in a bathtub with loads of ice and a huge migraine?
Daiki had narrowed his brows at that. ‘Can’t you just knock me out or something? I dunno, pull some of that hypnotism shit they always air on TV at 8PM’, he asked, and didn’t miss the way Kento had pursued his lips there, that slightest frown now wrinkling the tip of his chin like an origami. I could, he’d replied, fumbling with his thumbs. It’s just, and when he’d looked up at him, the way hurt had cracked his eyes, Daiki couldn’t seem to find the words to describe it.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice to remember?’ He asked with a tight smile.
Daiki reached for his can just to not have to come up with those words).
He looks up at Kento again. He’s sitting on the other side of the table, legs crossed with a casual kind of grace and this dullness in his eyes, like he’d been the one chugging beers nonstop for the past hour, and Daiki knows he’s just tried to slip past his consciousness again when he feels this sting, this itch at the corner of his eye, like someone had pushed a stick through his ear and repeatedly poked at his brains with it.
He blinks the sensation away, and Kento smacks his lips and crosses his arms, and laughs with this amused chuckle like he’d predicted that, somehow, Daiki acting like a miserable fuck.
‘You’re doing it on purpose now, aren’t you’
Daiki shushes him off, wriggling the index finger of his hand and placing it vertically in front of his lips. 'I think I've raised my hand first'. He draws his brows together and pauses with a little slur, tries to properly align the words he wants to say to a neat conga line.
‘What if’, he stammers after a moment, and looks at Kento in the eye. ‘You kinda hate the place once you get in there?’
‘The place being your head?’ Kento laughs. ‘What do you think is up in there, a Hawaiian resort?’
‘Yes, a resort! Exactly that’, Daiki agrees with an exaggerate gesture. ‘What if you’ve booked yourself a fancy one night stay only to find out the place is a one star rated cesspool?’
'A what now?'
Kento throws his head back and snorts with this ugly sound, like he can’t understand what Daiki wants to say, like he doesn’t know about that time Daiki had thrown rotten eggs at some of his classmates cause he’d hated the way they had stepped on that frog, down at the riverside; and how he lied, sometimes, whenever his mother asked if he was happy with his life; and the people he didn’t like and the twisted reasons why he liked whoever he liked; and then that hooker he couldn’t seem to shake off his head, and those miles and miles of legs sometimes he pictured wrapped around his waist, holding him close till he couldn't breathe anymore.
Kento throws his head back and snorts like he can’t understand how much this is bothering Daiki, and how it would break him – in some disturbing and incomprehensible way – if Kento really came to understand, if in the act of flipping his brains upside down he would get a glimpse of all that nasty polluting Daiki’s head and then tell himself, you know what? Thanks but no thanks.
Daiki pokes his head around the fist he’s pressed to his nose, sniffs from one nostril. ‘What if you take a look at the place, and it’s a fucking dumpster?’
‘I wouldn’t give a damn’, Kento replies easily, not a single thought crossing his mind.
And there’s a lot of blurred motions happening after that, and Kento rolling up his sleeves and sliding off his chair and cutting the distance between them with two steps, and before Daiki can really think about it, he has crowded him against the table, inching close enough Daiki can almost count his lashes, see how they flutter when their eyes meet.
‘I wouldn’t give a damn’, he repeats, spells it out, slowly, for him. ‘Cause for the past two years that dumpster has been my home’.
Daiki swings as he squints up at him, and Kento leans over and presses a hand to his shoulder for balance, and now they’re so close Daiki can pinpoint his reflection in the moist at the corner of the eyes, isolate the subtle tic of his mouth, that slightest tremble, and when Kento tilts his head, that inhale of air is sharp and tense, and smells like the mints Daiki always leaves strategically around the house cause he hates whenever his mother comes unannounced and complains about his smoker’s breath.
The chair screeches as it slides across the linoleum. Something in Daiki slides along with it.
‘I’m going to distract you now’, Kento whispers to the underside of his ear, and before Daiki can finish biting his tongue with that quick little gasp, he leans in and presses his lips on the corner of his mouth.
It feels a lot like a tussle first, messy and ugly and stinging with too many teeth, and Kento biting on his tongue like he has every intention of sucking his whole nervous system out his mouth. Then there’s this sting, this itch at the corner of his eye Daiki is too dumbfounded to scratch, and suddenly everything slows down to this timid brush of the tongues, to these soft noises now Kento is making whenever Daiki licks the roof of his mouth, chasing after that mint scent he’s picked on earlier, and it tastes thick and rich on his tongue, and it reminds Daiki of how Kento would stare at him, sometimes, when they’re on the veranda looking how the sun sets far away.
Kento’s mouth is hot along his neck, and when Daiki wiggles out a hand and brushes the fringe of his bangs like he’d wanted to do just half an hour ago, that name rolls common in his mouth, tastes easy and familiar on his tongue, like he has said it hundreds of times before.
‘Kento’.
It’s a common name after all.
'... What did you just say?’
He just doesn’t know from where it’s coming from.
Kento shrinks away with this stiff movement, and when their eyes meet and he swallows with a stir of the throat, that stick Daiki has felt poking at his brains for the past five minutes suddenly snaps with a harrowing sound. Chaff, it goes. Chaff.
It happens.
It happens sometimes. It has been like that ever since the thunderstorm. It’s not something Daiki can control, a smooth power he can wedge like those superheroes in the comics, all dandy and cool and prettily wrapped around their capes and daddy issues.
It just happens.
His hand brushes the trail of skin on Kento’s forearm, and Kento gets this sudden fit of desire, whips his head around and looks at him with wide, blank eyes. He’s hard and stiff and his breathe comes out in raggedy waves, but instead of lounging forward, he stumbles back, grapples onto the chair to his side and slams his foot with it, hard, hard enough for Daiki to hear the little bones snapping painfully together.
It’s that little sound that sets him off, sets a match to the fog inside his head, and when he lunges past the table, Kento scoots back from where he’s fallen on the floor and furiously shakes his head.
'Don't', he gasps. ‘Don’t. Stay away from me’.
‘Stay the fuck away from me!’
He’s stiff as a piece of cardboard and the hand he’s pressed over his face is damp with sweat. He breathes through the nose one time, two, before finally looking up at Daiki.
‘I got distracted and lost focus’, he says with this weird giggle, like the foot he has cradled underneath the tailbone ain’t shattered to pieces, like his face ain’t bloated with tears and snot.
‘I just lost focus’, he repeats, like he can’t see how Daiki’s face has fallen. ‘Your touch didn’t hurt me’.
‘Please. Please, don’t make me touch you’.
Like he can’t hear, that absolute idiot, how fast Daiki’s heart is thrumming.
‘Hm-m’, Daiki goes, and this moment should go differently, he thinks, like in the movies.
But there’s no accompanying score to any of those images, no fiery flashes rolling behind his closed eyelids, no ground disconnecting from his feet and his palms aren’t damp with sweat. It feels like a slow, natural flow instead, like waves wash offshore sometimes, like standing in front of a fax machine with this load of paper sheets, and vaguely remembering how this freshly opened pack of Pokémon cards smelled as a child.
No cards have ever crowded his memories with Kento, but if Daiki closes his eyes and focus just hard enough, he can isolate the wooden scent of that IKEA frame he’s bought on his way home, because Kento is at this meeting now, and it’s been five months since pills have littered his bathroom. And if he looks at Kento now sitting on the floor, he can paint in wide brushes this mental photograph of how sometimes he sprawls himself half on and half off the couch, one slipper fallen off, and this lazy smile slipping off his face as sleep slowly is claiming him over.
‘We can still try again later, right?’ Daiki asks as he squats down and holds out his hand, hovers it on top of Kento’s head like he’s done countless of times before. Like suddenly he should remember having done countless of time before, with lousy flashes rolling behind his eyelids and sweat dripping from him palms.
And he can’t help but think it should go differently somehow, this second chance they had at this love thing, more fiery and dramatic and softly hue saturated perhaps, like in the movies.
‘You don’t mind as long as I pay, right?’
Or maybe not, Daiki thinks, because when Kento slowly squints at him and understanding pries his lips open, that idiotic smile blossoming on his face shines brighter than any projector, brighter than any spotlight, and the ground underneath Daiki’s feet suddenly crumbles as a sandcastle, and his hands are now cold and sticky, and damp with sweat.
Because maybe, Daiki thinks, this is what love is all about: not an uncanny and glorious journey, not a story written to draw a gasp, but only a string of imperfect moments between two imperfect people, and how much they can piss each other off into improving themselves.
And maybe Daiki’s knees are giving out under him not because of how flawlessly Kento is now poking at his mole with this mused look in his eyes, but because Daiki finally remembers all those other clumsy attempts he’s made in their previous timeline, remembers uncoordinated hands as he writhed and cursed and howled on bed, and that ache in his eyes whenever he looked at Daiki over his cup of coffee, the morning after, and how it wrenched Daiki’s heart every time.
Because maybe that is what love is all about, an uncoordinated mess through the lapses of time and this mind-numbing addiction you can’t seem to shake off, no matter what, and Daiki can’t help but laugh there.
‘You idiot’, he snorts loudly, and maybe there’s a bit of snot dangling from his nose and maybe he’s crying with these tiny, ugly noises, just a bit. And maybe he doesn’t give a fuck, cause this moment is as imperfectly perfect as it should be. ‘Fucking up a timeline over that dumb fixation of yours, you absolute cretin’.
Kento laughs and then winces cause he’s accidentally wriggled his foot, and everything slides in place beautifully imperfect.
‘Make them four’.
*
He would protect them this time.