[jin/yamapi] press the play, again and again [1/2]
Title: Press the Play, Again and Again
Pairing/Group: Pin / KAT-TUN / NEWS
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: AU. Weirdness.
Notes: Influenced by the Time Traveler's Wife. A huge thanks to my betas and test readers, ky_rin, sanjihan, gothicauthor and where_wordsfail for their support and encouragement throughout the writing of this monster. Written for myxstorie for je_holiday with the original post here.
Summary: Time, as Yamapi said, had never quite made logical sense for them.
Press the Play, Again and Again
The day is always stood on the edge of a sharp knife;
It is hard to trace the beginning of this story; when had it begun, actually? Chronologically, in the early 1900s; but then again in the 1700s, and yet once again in the 1980s?
Time, as Yamapi said, had never quite made logical sense for them.
-
As a child, Akanishi Jin prayed to the gods for the latest toys that all his friends were playing with; Digimon, transforming robots, mini railway tracks that made his soul scrunch up in yearning; prayed for good grades, for his father to love him always, for numerous other little things that he forgot once he stepped out of the temples.
As a teenager, the need to control time took over all other prayers; not a supernatural control, but the simple ability to stay fixed in time that was granted to every other human being except himself and his parallel friend, Yamapi, who prayed for the same thing and never got it answered.
As an adult, he stopped praying and watched themselves instead - the invisible moments of their histories and presents and futures, because he began to see how they aligned, converged, grew apart; he saw how the moment of desperate clinging in a barn in a mid-winter night colored all coming moments. He watched Yamapi bending over the child Jin, saw the beauty of it all, the childhood and the old age and the hours in between, the evanescence of time, the sex, the sunlit days in his apartment when he'd thought that they'd been through enough, that time had let them go at last. He saw the simmering heat of the war-torn June afternoon where he'd stayed for four minutes, only four minutes, forever contained in four minutes, the fear, the helplessness, saw the pain of it all, the irony of being unable to change things even with his seemingly powerful gift. How everything would come back to that moment in that cold barn, everything, even when he was sitting on a hilltop bench overlooking pine-clad islets and Yamapi was looking at him with sad eyes and he was listening to silence thick enough to awaken his blurring, aging mind to their converging and separating histories, presents, futures.
-
Where does this story begin? For time's sake (though time should not be given any consideration at all, seeing as it had stood always on the edge of a sharp knife), this is the closest to the beginning;
Chiba, 1907-
She should never have had the baby, but here she was, lying beaten on the hospital bed after four hours of perspiration and pushing and screaming that the terrified new nurse half thought she would not survive through. Her colleagues took the bloodied baby-thing away to be washed and weighed and the doctor took a moment to relax his muscles, so tense after the nightmarish birth.
"A healthy boy," he said.
He looked at the young mother lying unconscious. For a moment he saw her as she had been at seventeen, bright and beautiful and the stuff of his dreams before the scoundrel from the north came and put all those lines on her forehead, tiny wrinkles around her eyes.
The nurses came back with the clean baby who opened his eyes, blinked at the world, and scrunched them up again. "He has a blood spot in his left eye," the doctor remarked, thinking of the scoundrel who'd had his own blood spot condemned by the town people as being 'potentially dangerous'. Maybe there was some truth in strange superstitions, after all.
"Hopefully he'll cause her less trouble than his father did," said one of the nurses. "Poor lady."
Tokyo, 1984-
It had not been an easy birth at all, the baby had taken his time coming out.
"A beautiful boy," said the doctor, turning to the father who couldn't bear to look at the baby just then; "in perfect health, with everything intact."
The father averted his eyes, watching as the nurses gently laid a cloth over the face of what had been his wife; lines on the forehead smoothened, tiny wrinkles around the eyes gone, marble-faced.
"I wonder how he's going to bring up the baby on his own," whispered one nurse to the other. "Poor man."
-
But this, perhaps, is where the story really starts;
Tokyo, 1990-
Jin is 6, Yamapi is 19
The sunlight bit into his eyes when he landed, fresh from an early autumn morning in 1926, with his coffee spoon still slung between his thumb and index finger. It took him less than a minute to figure that he was nowhere in time that he'd been before - a couple that was drifting past him, thankfully oblivious to his strangely-dressed, coffee-spoon-holding figure, wasn't wearing anything that he recognized; though, to be strictly accurate (and this was very weird…), the girl looked like she was wearing pants; those leggy things that only men wore.
Yamapi got up from the sidewalk and brushed himself down. He was in a warm shadowed alcove between two buildings - it was a lucky thing that he hadn't landed in a bush or in the middle of a stone-cold wintry night (god, that had been a pretty awful experience) - and stood waiting for what seemed like close on ten minutes before he realized that the person he was waiting for wasn't going to show up as promptly as he'd done on the past two occasions. Slacker. He'd known from the start that Akanishi Jin couldn't be trusted; any guy with such girly lips was not to be trusted.
He left the alcove and wandered out into the main street, ignoring the puzzled glances from the people around him. The sun was hot on his head and he deduced that it was mid-afternoon; also because the bulk of the people he saw walking around were women and little children. Some things remained the same through the centuries (and he did, actually, have a right to say centuries because he'd already been in three; impressive, really, for a guy not yet twenty-one); same things like men laboring in various work places and women getting mid-afternoons to themselves. There were cars driving leisurely past on the small road before him; odd-looking cars, nothing like what he was used to in 1926 and hadn't seen in the 1700s or the 1800s; so, he had obviously been thrown into the nebulous future. Perhaps this was Jin's timeframe since the guy had been born in 1984; maybe he was at school now, or working at his part-time job, or flirting with his girlfriend? While Yamapi was time-traveling alone! Betrayal, if nothing else.
"Kei-chan," he heard a little voice say behind him, "why is that man dressed so funny?"
"Shh," shushed an older voice, "you mustn't say such impolite things about other people, Jin-chan."
Yamapi turned at the sound of that name to see a young man standing behind him holding the hands of two little gaping boys. The young man smiled sheepishly at him, but Yamapi wasn't really looking at him at all; one of the little boys had lips that looked suspiciously like Akanishi Jin's; plump and girly and just like Jin's. "Jin?"
"I'm so sorry," said the young man. "Jin-chan hasn't learned his manners properly yet. I really apologize…"
"Akanishi Jin?"
There was a pause in the young man's blabbering, and feeling the weight of his stare, Yamapi looked back at him. "I'm sorry," he said, "it's just that he looks a lot like…"
"I didn't know you knew him!" the young man suddenly looked inordinately excited. "You should have said so before! Jin-chan, do you know this Nii-san?"
"No," said little Jin flatly, eyeing Yamapi with suspicion.
Yamapi's doubts were abated with a completeness perfect and absolute in a way few doubts in this world get to be. He'd seen that look in the 1700s, albeit on an older face, and some things just didn't change no matter which century you were in. "Jin!" he said happily (though why he was so happy he didn't know; much use Jin was to him as a little idiotic kid). "So it is your timeframe!"
"Eh?" said the young man confusedly, and Jin instinctively moved a step back.
"Kei-chan, I don't like this old guy."
"I'm sorry," Yamapi apologized now, moderating his voice to a more socially acceptable, kid-friendly pitch, "it's just that I haven't seen Jin-kun in a really long time. He won't remember me, but I…took care of him once about a year ago."
"You didn't!" Jin denied hotly. "Kei-chan, this old guy is lying!"
The young man started smiling again. "Oh. No wonder he doesn't remember you. I'm taking care of him today, and I wish I wasn't! This other boy is Tegoshi Yu-chan, and I'm Koyama Keiichiro. Nice to meet you."
"I'm Yamashita," Yamapi said, "but I go by Yamapi."
Koyama looked at Yamapi's clothes; a western-style shirt with 1926-style corduroy trousers (good thing he wasn't wearing his vest); and seemed about to remark on his (very) old-fashioned attire when the other little boy started to cry. There was no visible reason why he should be crying unless Jin had pinched him (and Yamapi wasn't too inclined to defend Jin; he seemed like the pinching type), and all conversation between the two guys ceased while Koyama attempted to check the crying. "Big boys don't cry!" he kept repeating, "big boys don't cry…" although it was very clear that the kids were not exactly big boys.
"Maybe he just wants some sweets," Yamapi suggested.
"Do you want some sweets?" Koyama asked the crying kid-what's-his-name-chan.
"Yah!" said the kid. And stopped crying.
Some things don't change, Yamapi thought, rather obnoxiously now since it was the third time that he was pursuing this thread of wisdom; and accepted Koyama's invitation to follow them to the sweet store despite Jin's loud declarations that he didn't want the funny old guy to be with them (such a pleasant kid, really).
-
Jin stole Tegoshi Yu-chan's sweets. Why, nobody could understand, because the same sweets had been bought for each of them - Yamapi couldn't name the sweets because they looked like nothing he'd ever seen before; one multi-colored circle thing on a stick and a bar of hard brown stuff - neither looked very appetizing to him but Jin stole Tegoshi Yu-chan's sweets anyway and Tegoshi Yu-chan started crying (again). Yamapi suspected that Jin had perpetrated the crime because Tegoshi Yu-chan was cuter than him.
"Shut up crying!" Jin told Tegoshi Yu-chan, who just cried harder (though, noticeably, without an increase in tears; not possible, good grief, the kid was only three years old. Kids were not cunning at three years old).
Koyama shushed Jin and lifted Tegoshi Yu-chan into his arms, soothing him and promising to buy more sweets. Yamapi and Jin looked at each other.
"You were quite the little beast, weren't you," Yamapi murmured, and would have said more if only his head hadn't started buzzing. "Till next time, Jin-kun. Hopefully you'll be older than six."
He patted Jin's head fondly and bolted before Koyama could stop him. He made it to the back of a building before he was sucked into the vacuum of time and thrown back onto his kitchen floor at 10am on his lovely 1926 autumn morning. Three hours gone. He wondered where his coffee spoon was.
Kobe, 1713-
Jin and Yamapi are 16
The first thing he noticed was that he was in the middle of a bush. The second thing, that he was definitely no longer in 2000, hanging out at an arcade in Ueno with his friends. The third thing, that there was someone else in the bush with him.
Jin brushed a twig out of his eyes and stared at the guy lying beside him; judging from his dressing, he hadn't been to Harajuku in a while, if ever. Those suspenders and corduroy trousers did nothing for him, and he really wasn't fiddling around with a hat…
"Who are you and what am I doing here?" Jin demanded confusedly.
The guy looked up at him with a (much to Jin's dismay) similarly confused expression on his face. "I don't know," he said. "Who are you and what am I doing here?"
That question wasn't going to be answered by remaining in the bush, so they picked themselves out and stood on a patch of grass, brushing down the seat of their pants and, in Jin's case, shaking out bits of leaves from his slippers. The guy was wearing shoes, he noticed; real, proper, brown shoes, like he'd never seen anybody his age wearing before except at weddings and funerals. Then he realized that the guy was staring at his slippers too.
Jin took his fascinated gaze off footwear and looked around them. They were in some sort of park, mostly deserted, with a few people hanging out under some distant trees. The air was cool and evening-spring-like; a little too cool, actually, for his current attire (it had been a hot day in Tokyo), and he noticed the lack of signs and wooden benches and brown rubbish bins. Still unable to shake off his bewilderment, he turned suspiciously to the guy beside him. "Did you do this?"
"Do what?" the guy said, staring at their surroundings with such a clueless face that Jin began to feel worried.
"This! Where we are now! I was in an arcade and the next minute I know, I'm in a bush and you're beside me and we're in a park and it's like, spring and this has to be your doing because it's totally not mine."
"I didn't do anything either," the guy retorted. "I was in my Mathematics class when suddenly my head started buzzing and then I found myself here."
"My head started buzzing too." Jin stared at him, and he stared back. "Maybe this is all in our minds. Maybe you don't really exist."
"I do exist," said the guy. "I'm Yamapi."
"Maybe I'm just imagining that you exist. Real people don't have such weird names anyway."
"No, really," said Yamapi with a little, frustrated sigh, "I am not a figment of your imagination. I am a living, breathing, existing person, and I have my own reasons for giving you a weird name. I'm 16 years old, born April 9, 1907, from Chiba…"
"Wait." Jin held up his hand. "You were born in 1907?"
Yamapi nodded.
"Then why aren't you…like, really old?"
"What are you talking about?"
"By now you should be 1) dead or 2) seriously handicapped with a walking cane or 3) with white hair at least. But you say you're only 16."
"I am not old," Yamapi said, rubbing his eyes - probably hoping that all that rubbing would bring him back to wherever he'd come from. "I'm 16 and where are you from, anyway?"
"Year 2000. I'm Akanishi Jin and I was born in 1984. Explain this whole situation to me."
Yamapi stared for a long moment at Jin, then at their surroundings, and then at Jin again. Just then two women clad in kimono walked past them and they could hear their voices carrying clearly in the fresh spring air; "Good heavens, would you look at the way those two young men are dressed! I have never seen anything like it. It is positively indecent. What is your thought, Sakamoto-san?"
"Disgraceful!" Sakamoto-san remarked. "Most entirely queer! I cannot imagine where they could have gotten such attire from."
Yamapi looked back at Jin.
"Shut up," said Jin.
"If I didn't know better…"
"Oh shit."
"It seems that we might have…gone back to an earlier time."
"Damn you," said Jin.
-
When a very puzzled man selling wares on the street told them that they were being ruled by shoguns in the Tokugawa period, Jin grabbed Yamapi frantically around the neck. "I can't stay here. They don't even have electricity and they talk like people out of my Japanese classics class."
"Electricity?"
Jin gave Yamapi a tragic look. "Am I the only living person on this planet who knows what electricity is?"
"I've heard of it," Yamapi said in an attempt to be helpful. "It sounds interesting."
"It's not interesting, it's vital to life."
"Will it help us get out of here? Or even find us somewhere to stay for the night?"
"Not if it hasn't even been invented yet, idiot." Jin wanted to cry.
"What's so vital about your electricity then, if it can't do anything unless it has been invented?" Yamapi gave him a bland look.
Jin very earnestly considered crying.
-
In the end, they didn't have much trouble with finding a place to spend the night; they were picked up by a scary police-looking man who gave them one stern look, barked a few questions at them, and pushed them into a police station-looking place where, despite Jin's efforts at explaining away their attire, they found themselves locked into a cell for indecent exposure.
Yamapi perched himself on the futon looking like he was lost (which, technically speaking, he was). Jin stood by the cell bars and fantasized about breaking them in half. "This is all your fault. They didn't like your suspenders."
"It's your fault for wearing those…things," Yamapi gestured at his slippers, "and not even covering your arms."
"It was summer!" Jin shrieked. "Why should I be wearing long sleeves during summer!"
They collapsed sulkily beside each other on the futon.
-
"Oi." Jin reached over and poked Yamapi.
"What," Yamapi muffled.
"They have no right to keep us here. Just because people wear slippers in the 21st century and I happen to be from the 21st century doesn't make me an indecent person."
"I know. You only said that three times in the last hour."
"Do you think they're going to kill us? Or make us commit hara kiri?"
Yamapi turned over and went back to sleep.
-
"Yamapi."
"Nrrgh."
"Do you think they'll bring us before a judge? What am I going to say? That I want my lawyer? Do you think they'll give us a lawyer?"
"Will you prease. Just shleep."
"How can you sleep. We're stranded in some ancient time period and we're in jail and we might be ordered to kill ourselves tomorrow. There is no sleep in this at all. Besides, I'm having jet-lag. It's only like, 10pm where I came from."
There was no response.
-
"Yamapi. Yamapi. What if we end up staying here for life. We don't have any money and I don't talk their kind of Japanese. They still ride horses. I don't think I could survive a month here."
"I wish I hadn't time-traveled with you."
"It's not like we had a choice."
-
In mid-morning, they were served rice rolled in seaweed. 1700s' prison food. Jin raged about the bad quality of the rice and Yamapi wished he would shut up, really really wished he would shut up, when suddenly Jin said "My head is going nuts…" and vanished, leaving behind crumbs.
Yamapi stared at the empty space for a few moments before resuming his chewing of the rice ball. If Jin had disappeared, logic told that he would disappear soon too, and wouldn't have to be killed, kill himself, or any of the other cheerful things that Jin had predicted.
It was much quieter without Jin there.
Tokyo, 2000-
Jin is 16
"You must have eaten too much curry last night," said Nakamaru upon the third retelling of Jin's Tale of the Awful 1700s.
"I can remember that the prison guard had a pimple on his chin," Jin said indignantly. "It had nothing to do with curry. Besides, I can't believe that I just disappeared and you guys didn't even notice."
Ueda shrugged. "We thought you were just being funny."
"I was stranded in a jail cell with some ancient guy and you people just went back home and ate dinner and slept without even thinking about me! We're supposed to be buddies!"
"Um," said Kame, "even if we had thought about you, there wasn't much we could do, was there? Since you were in the 1700s."
Jin gave his buddies a stare of death.
Tokyo, 2001-
Jin is 17
A year had passed without incident, everyone had begun to believe in the curry being the cause of time-traveling hallucinations, and Jin was happily munching an apple on his way back from school when suddenly his head began buzzing and he thought oh shit.
Chiba, 1924-
Jin and Yamapi are 17
The next moment, Yamapi was leaning over him with concerned eyes. "You should have aimed for the bed, Akanishi-kun."
"I'm going to break my back one day landing like that," Jin grumbled. "Oh my god. It's you. The really old dude. Where am I?"
"You're in 1924." Yamapi squatted beside him. "In my bedroom."
Jin sat up and groaned. "This is not happening. I thought I'd dreamed up the whole Tokugawa period shit."
"You didn't." Yamapi was just as gloomy.
They eyed each other for a moment. "So when did you get beamed back last time?" Jin asked. "You were still around when I got out."
"Soon enough after you vanished," Yamapi said. "It gave me time to finish my riceball."
"What is it."
"What?"
"This thing that makes us time-travel." Jin stared at Yamapi. "What is it? How do we stop it?"
Yamapi looked depressed. "I think…I don't know."
Five minutes later, they gave up on speculating and held a fashion consultation session for Jin instead, outfitting him appropriately in 1924 attire before heading out to raid the kitchen for eatables.
-
Jin really didn't like his suspenders. He looked, he thought, like something out of a historical documentary (and he'd never had much of an opinion of the fashion in historical documentaries).
"Going by your timeframe, you are in history," Yamapi said. "It's not my fault that you arrived at a time when suspenders are the popular thing."
"Why am I always in history?" Jin sulked. "Why can't I travel to my future and see if I've become the rich CEO that the fortune-teller told me?"
"Rich what?"
"CEO…chief executive officer. A really big boss."
"Oh." Yamapi thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Maybe time doesn't want to show you that the fortune-teller lied?"
"Do not," said Jin, appalled, "tell me that you've traveled to my future. Will I get married?"
"I haven't traveled to your future. I just made a natural assumption," Yamapi said.
"Then you naturally assume wrong," Jin said.
-
Yamapi bought future-rich-CEO Jin something which he called his favorite, favorite snack (two favorite's, yes), some white floury balls on a stick with weird sugary syrup on them. Jin personally thought that he would've preferred a packet of potato chips, but since Yamapi was giving him those hopeful 'you must like it?' looks, he made suitable 'I like it!' eyes.
It was a quiet late afternoon with middle-aged women walking daintily down the streets and shop banners swaying languidly and creakily in the air. There were cars hanging around the streets, not many, but the kind with curved tops and crank-up engines that made Jin long for his handphone so he could snap some pictures (why, why had he left it at home that morning? Nobody would accuse him of overeating curry if he had photographic evidence).
"My mother thought I'd run away from home," Yamapi said in response to Jin's indignant telling of his friends' blasé attitude towards his disappearance. "She was crying when I appeared at the front door. Even now she thinks that I'd run away and then decided to come back. She doesn't believe in my time-traveling at all."
"I don't have a mum," Jin said. "She died giving birth to me."
Yamapi blinked. "I don't have a father. He ran away after getting my mother pregnant."
"Wait." Jin stopped, and so Yamapi stopped too. "Are you getting like, this supernatural feeling?"
Yamapi looked at him like he was nuts. Jin proceeded to explain, because he didn't like being looked at like he was nuts. "See, you and I time-travel together."
"Once," Yamapi said.
"Well, once. But here I am out of time again and you're with me, so I'm counting this as a together sort of time-travel too. And then you don't have a dad while I don't have a mum. See?"
Yamapi didn't see.
"We're parallel!" Jin said impatiently. "It's like a drama."
"So you're saying that maybe we've been born into two different time periods leading parallel lives?"
"Exactly. Time thinks that we should meet each other because we're so parallel."
Yamapi thought for a bit. "But you know, we're not really parallel. There are lots of people who don't have their mothers or fathers…"
"But none of them time-travel together at the same time," Jin said triumphantly. "So you see, my theory is right. There's no other reason why all this should be happening."
Yamapi sighed. "Are you going to stay the night because we're so parallel?"
"I don't know. I'm waiting for my head to buzz." Jin chewed on the last floury ball (if it wasn't for the fact that Yamapi had bought him the snack and so he was under obligation to eat it, he would've dumped it a long time ago). "In any case, I get guest privileges. That means the bed."
-
Yamapi's mother looked puzzled when Jin showed up for dinner, but accepted Yamapi's introduction of him being one of his friends from school. Dinner consisted of miso soup, rice and fish, and Jin couldn't remember when was the last time he'd eaten such simple food; or, if you came to that, home-cooked food. His dad never cooked, that was for sure, and he wasn't entirely sure that he wanted his dad to try. Jin contemplated the rations in his kitchen and couldn't recall anything that actually needed to be cooked; the most frequently used electronic appliances were the fridge and microwave.
"…home?" Yamapi's mother was asking.
Jin blinked. "Um, I'm sorry, I didn't catch that…"
She smiled patiently ."Where do you live, Akanishi-kun?"
"Uh…"
"A few blocks down," Yamapi said quickly. "Near Kato's place."
"You should come by more often," said his mum, smiling at Jin. "I like to know all of Tomohisa's school friends."
"I'll come whenever I come," Jin said, smiling winningly at her. He hoped he had some chocolate with him if he should pay them a visit again; home-cooked miso soup and fish were all very nice but he really craved the oily potato coquettes from the conbini's bento box. Oh, for modern conveniences.
-
"Akanishi-kun."
"What?"
"Isn't your head going to buzz yet? The floor is hard and I want my bed back."
"It's not like I'm deliberately keeping it from buzzing!" Jin's voice hammered down in the darkness and Yamapi's arm shot up to pinch him. "Shut up, my mother's sleeping!"
"You were the one who started talking," Jin grumbled. "Also, if you keep calling me Akanishi-kun, I'll call you Tomo-chan."
-
Jin woke up with a shock to find himself lying on his kitchen floor, 2001, with his dog sniffing his toes curiously. The clock on the wall pointed to 3 and it was dark out, so he assumed he'd been gone for about eight hours. Not that anyone would notice.
He raided the fridge for some 2001-type food. Floury balls were best off in 1924 where Jin wouldn't have to touch them again unless absolutely necessary.
Chiba, 1925-
Yamapi is 18
Sometime in autumn, Yamapi knocked his head onto a chest of drawers, bit his tongue so badly that he had to have stitches on it, and spent a week in silence trying to communicate in a language where "ock" was the sole grammar particle and vocabulary word. He wasn't quite sure why, but during that week the thing he was most concerned about was not his inability to say anything other than "ock" nor his mother crying every time he attempted to say something, but rather the terrifying prospect of having his head buzz and ending up somewhere in time with "ock" as his only defense against police arrests.
He didn't count Jin as being very much more useful than "ock". It was a slight relief to know that he would most probably be with a person who could talk, but that person tended to say the wrong things most of the time. So for that week, Yamapi confined himself to his bedroom, prayed very earnestly that he would not time-travel, and thought of Akanishi Jin (a lot) whenever his mother bought him the floury balls for a treat. Jin had liked them.
Sapporo, 1862-
Jin and Yamapi are 18
They landed, one from a basketball court and the other from a school festival, in a sort of street with houses on both sides in the middle of a stone-cold wintry night. Jin, perspiring from his basketball match, immediately began shivering as his perspiration turned into a layer of coldness on his skin. The cold hit Yamapi two minutes later.
Without a word of greeting, Yamapi sprang up, dashed into the nearest house, and emerged barely a minute later with thick blankets to where Jin sat on the snow, teeth chattering and hands tucked under his armpits. Yamapi wrapped a blanket as securely around Jin as he could manage and the two of them huddled together, violent shaking gradually giving way to a low and bearable shivering.
Eventually Jin's lips stilled enough for him to ask, "W…where did you get these from?"
"Some bedroom," Yamapi said. "I just grabbed the first thing I saw."
"This is worse than being in a bush," Jin groaned. "This is really…c…cold."
"And I don't know where in time we are." Yamapi stared around them, at the clear, mocking night sky and the wooden houses. "It seems like the 1700s."
"Oh god, not that again." Jin sank his neck into the blanket. "At least they can't arrest us this time if they can't see what we're wearing. I was…I came from a basketball match, you know. I'm not even wearing pants."
"Just keep the blankets around yourself and you won't die from hypothermia," Yamapi said, but he was really quite concerned with how much color Jin's face had already lost. He unwrapped his arms around himself, pushed through material and space to get to Jin's body, so cold beneath his fingers, and circled them around Jin's midriff. Jin looked at him, shivered and said nothing.
"Maybe we should go elsewhere," said Yamapi. "Somewhere warmer. With a roof, at least."
"If you can find a roof, I'm willing to be under i…i…eeeeet," Jin said, trying to force a laugh through numbed lips.
-
The hay was scratchy beneath them; they could feel the prickliness through their clothes. Jin's face was stiff with cold, hands clenched against his stomach, legs entangled in blanket. Yamapi was lying close beside him, shifting uncomfortably on the hay with his legs scrunched up against his chest.
Jin leaned his head closer towards him. "H-have you ever been so c-cold?"
"No," Yamapi whispered back, "I've never slept in the outdoors before in the middle of winter."
"I wonder what we did wrong this time," Jin said. "Maybe this is some sort of sick punishment for our wrongdoings. I stole money from my dad's wallet yesterday and spent it on porno magazines just to see Kame trying not to drool over them. Kame's one of my, like, friends."
"Um," Yamapi said, vaguely wondering what porno meant.
"So maybe that's why we're here." Jin reached out and grabbed Yamapi's arm with a cold hand. "I brought this on us!"
Yamapi sighed. "Your hand is really cold and should be under the blanket."
Jin retracted his hand and mimicked Yamapi's sigh, only it turned into something much deeper and despondent.
-
"I hate this barn," said Jin eventually. "I want to go home."
"I want to go home too." Yamapi thought of warm fresh bed sheets, grim portraits on the wall of him and his mother, steaming bowls of homemade miso soup. "Although I quarreled with my mother recently. This doctor wanted to marry her and she refused. I thought she should have married him."
"Why?"
"Lots of reasons." Yamapi stared over Jin's shoulder. "She won't have people asking her all the time where her husband is and then getting judgmental when she says he's not around. And I think she'd be happier with someone to take care of her. She hasn't had anyone to turn to since my dad ran away. But she said that she'd gotten used to life just being her and me."
"Maybe she's happy enough now," Jin said.
Yamapi was silent. Bent his head and pushed it against Jin's padded shoulder; closed his eyes to doze.
-
An hour passed before either of them spoke again.
"You know." Silence. "It's scary. This whole time-traveling thing. I'm scared that we might never g-go back."
Yamapi reached out an awkward arm and curled it around Jin's neck. There was real fear in Jin's voice; tears, in fact, frozen on his cheeks. "I get scared too," Yamapi said. "Or that one of us might go back and the other is left…here."
Jin shook, pressing his teeth together to keep them from chattering. After a moment, Yamapi moved his legs down and they pressed in, wrapping arms around each other. Yamapi rubbed Jin's cold cheeks, his back, and slowly they started shivering less.
"…home," Jin murmured hazily. "You know, there's this English song that goes, not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name, lord I'm five hundred miles away from home…"
Yamapi smiled a little and Jin smiled and by degrees they fell into a sort of sleep, a sleep that was not quite sleep yet drowsy and beneath consciousness. They fell asleep, heads close together.
-
When Jin awoke at the first glow of sunlight through the papered window, he found himself lying alone on the haystack, arms and legs spread out on the space where Yamapi had been the night before. He didn't know what to do at first, never having been alone in his time-traveling before - come to think of it, Yamapi had always been with him - and then he found himself burrowing deeper into the haystack, a vague sort of fear beneath the cold, praying that he would be beamed to…wherever. 1925, if Yamapi was there. Five hundred miles away from home. Or back home, to 2002. He wasn't entirely sure right now where he wanted to be.
Tokyo, 2003-
Jin is 19
Sometimes, Jin wondered if he was going to time-travel again. It had been over a year since that cold wintry night of huddling on a haystack and feeling the scant warmth of Yamapi's arms under the freezing material of his sleeves. Jin didn't want to time-travel again, not exactly, if it meant that he was going to wind up in more uncomfortable situations, but he couldn't help wondering if somewhere out there, Yamapi was stranded in yet another unfriendly time period with inappropriate clothes and no money. If that happened, Jin wanted to be there with him. It just wasn't fun being in trouble alone.
Sometimes, when he slept, he dreamed of Yamapi. It was so natural, Jin never wondered why.
Osaka, 1735-
Jin and Yamapi are 20
"Can I ask," Jin said, "why is it that we never seem to wind up in the future where they have flying cars and holographic concerts?"
"I traveled to the future last year," Yamapi said, yawning. "To your timeframe, in fact."
"What?" Jin perked up. "I didn't see you! Did you see me? Was I a CEO?"
"No," said Yamapi thoughtfully. "I mean, I saw you, but you weren't a CEO. Not at all."
"Great, and you didn't even bother to say hi. What was I then? Famous soccer player? Wealthy businessman? Teenage idol? Girls galore hanging from my arms?"
Yamapi scratched his head. "Actually, you were six."
Jin stared at him in disgust. "That's not the future!"
"In case you forgot, it is to me," Yamapi retorted. "And you were quite the little brat too. You were bullying some kid called Tegoshi and your nanny Koyama had a hard time managing you."
"I don't believe it," said Jin. "You had the chance to arrive at my timeframe and you chose to come when I was six. How much more of a failbag can you be?"
Yamapi rolled his eyes and they flopped sulkily against each other in the backyard of some mansion, idly watching a leaf falling from a tree; it was summer, judging from the temperature, and Jin was glad that they weren't in the cold, but it wasn't like he wanted to be in the heat either.
"You know," he said gloomily, "I thought I wouldn't be time-traveling again. It has been like, two years? Since the last time? And I thought that was it, you know, whoever was controlling this whole traveling thing had died or something. But then now we're here and I kind of really hate your face right now."
"Liar," said Yamapi lazily, not even bothering to quirk his eyebrows. Jin felt insulted.
"Will you be more alive? We should go explore instead of hiding here in this backyard like criminals."
"If we go out, we will be criminals, or have you already forgotten the stench of that prison cell?"
"I remember the hard rice ball," Jin admitted.
"There you go," said Yamapi, and went to sleep.
-
They stole into the mansion five hours later, because Jin swore that it was empty and he wasn't going to stay in the backyard anymore, no way, it was pretty damn hot, okay, and geez will you wake up before I melt from boredom and have brains leaking out of my ears.
Yamapi locked the door of the spacious bedroom they'd decided to settle themselves in and ran his fingers jumpily over a wooden table. "If anyone finds us in here, we'll get arrested for indecent exposure and housebreaking. That's felony and we'll be behind bars until we're sixty and I'll never get to marry."
"Stop worrying," said Jin, happy now that they were out of the sun. "You'll time-travel back to the 1920s before you're sixty and you'll get to marry whoever you want, or rather whoever who would want to marry you after finding out about your time-traveling disease, and it'll all be okay, happy ending, so shut up and sit down."
"Do you really think nobody will want to marry me?" Yamapi said sadly, sitting down beside Jin on the bed.
Jin shrugged. "I guess you'll find someone crazy enough."
"What if I have kids." Yamapi started getting worried. "Won't my kids become time-travelers?"
"How would I know? Maybe your kids and my kids will time-travel together like what we're doing now."
Yamapi sat there looking unhappy. Jin waited for him to say something more, but a worried Yamapi wasn't a Yamapi that talked much and Jin was getting bored. He glanced over, studied Yamapi's frowning eyes and pursed lips for a few moments until, fueled by an impulse that he didn't really understand, leaned forward and pressed his mouth against Yamapi's.
Much to his credit, or maybe because he was simply too stunned, Yamapi didn't pull away. They sat there for what seemed like a very long time, mouths pressed together, Jin staring into Yamapi's surprised eyes until the need to breathe pulled them apart.
"I'm sor…" Jin began, before changing his mind, "actually, not sorry. Your lips are…kind of…nice."
They sat looking at each other. Jin tried a flippant smile but it didn't come out right; it was tentative instead, almost shy. Yamapi's face was still and strange, almost contemplative as though trying to decide whether he'd enjoyed the kiss or not, then he reached out and pulled Jin in and they were mouth on mouth again, teeth clanking together (it seemed like neither of them was very experienced in this whole kissing business). Neither really thought about what they were doing. Maybe they were too bored with sitting in a room with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Maybe they'd missed each other too much. Maybe it was something else entirely. Whatever it was, they didn't bother finding out.
-
They stopped sometime later when their lips were swollen and Jin was beginning to get a crick in his neck. Yamapi drew away and they sat side by side, not touching, a little like old friends who suddenly couldn't think of anything to say to each other. Jin reflected sadly on how kisses had the magical ability to make things awkward.
Then Yamapi cleared his throat and turned to him. "That wasn't too bad."
Jin, blinked at him and their eyes met and suddenly he was hot and cold and thrilling to the tenderness he saw in Yamapi's eyes.
"You know," said Yamapi, smiling, "this.."
Jin reached out almost instinctively, possibly to touch Yamapi's hand, he didn't really know. But he didn't make it; Yamapi frowned and touched his forehead and the next moment he was gone, sucked clean into air or space or time or wherever it was they went when they disappeared.
Jin dropped down onto the bed and held his head. He wanted to say come back, but it wouldn't be fair; Yamapi was out of this place. And Jin was a fair person. He knew a good thing when it happened.
He just wished that Yamapi had had the time to complete his sentence before he'd vanished.
Tokyo, 2008-
Jin is 24
It would be a lie to say that Jin remained faithful for four years. He had his first sexual experience with a guy from the college baseball team when he was in his first year, his first serious relationship in his second, and his first tear-inducing breakup in his third. Occasionally he remembered Yamapi and the taste of his kisses in the old empty mansion back in ancient time, but most of the time he told himself to forget; it was easy, anyhow, when not having time-traveled for four years meant that nobody believed in Yamapi's existence anymore.
After his last travel, Kame and Nakamaru had been alarmed to the extent of forcing him to visit a doctor, who couldn't diagnose a thing worth consideration and seemed to suggest that Jin was more suited for the mental hospital. Jin, once his initial annoyance was past, didn't really blame him (you shouldn't take it out on old farts like that). Still, Kame and Nakamaru had insisted on accompanying him everywhere for a time in hopes of getting video evidence of him disappearing. It was extremely irritating until they got tired of it, told him that he'd probably dreamed up all his time-travels ("Go write a children's book," Kame had said in disgust) and left him to forget everything at his leisure.
Life was full now. He'd gotten a job at Sompo Japan Insurance, moved into his own apartment, and had his eye on a nice-looking boy in the I.T. department who didn't look like he would be averse to going out for a meal and maybe a little more after that. There were times when Jin had flashes of remembrances, vivid and disconcerting, of hesitant first kisses and cold nights and Yamapi having patted his head when he was six. He missed Yamapi in spurts, never too long nor too short, and sometimes considered punching out Yamapi's face when (or if) they traveled together again for having taken so long to meet up.
But for most part, work was tiring, the I.T. guy was proving to be a harder chase than he'd seized him up to be, life wasn't too bad, and he didn't think of Yamapi at all.
Tokyo, 2009-
Jin is 25, Yamapi is 26
When he arrived in the 21st century, Jin didn't recognize him. His hair was longer, his face was thinner, and his clothes looked a little more like what Jin was used to seeing in his history textbook (that was nice, that Yamapi had caught up with the pictures in his textbook). He didn't immediately realise that it was Yamapi who'd arrived smack on his living room floor in the middle of a spring evening even though he'd been thinking about him on and off during the past five years.
Yamapi sat up, dazed, and they stared at each other. Yamapi began to smile, eyes lighting up, when Jin said, "I hope you still recognize me, because I almost didn't recognize you."
Yamapi seemed to deflate. "No way."
"No way what? It's been five years!"
"I'm sorry," said Yamapi, with a hint of apology and sadness that Jin didn't get. "I forgot. You actually traveled to my timeframe a couple of years ago, when you were older."
"So we've…met in the past five years?" Jin questioned, blinking.
"We have," Yamapi affirmed. "I think you were about 27 or 28. You said you were doing something called…insure? Insuration…no. Insurance? Yes, that's it. Are you doing insurance yet?"
Jin squirmed. "This is like some freaky fortune-telling session. Yeah, I've been selling insurance for a year. And I don't like that you know more about me than I know about you. How come I've never traveled to your future?"
"I don't know," said Yamapi. "Maybe you haven't been selling enough insurance, ha ha."
Jin just looked at him until Yamapi cleared his throat. "Um. Actually, I would really like a shower right now. I'd just returned home from a stressful business dinner and it was around 2am. I was about to get ready to go to bed…"
Jetlag. Jin had almost forgotten what it was like to be jet-lagged…or, more accurately, time-lagged. In fifteen minutes he found out that Yamapi was technology-lagged as well. By the time Yamapi consented to be left alone in a bathroom of bewildering taps and a shower cap that could spray water fast or slow, Jin was exhausted and running late for his dinner appointment.
"You'll just have to find out where the bed is. I need to get going," he said through the toilet door. "My old school friends are waiting for me."
Yamapi didn't reply, and Jin decided that he'd died inside. "Okay, going," he shouted and left.
-
"So, let me get this straight," said Kame slowly. "Your ancient friend has reappeared."
"He should be out of the shower by now," said Jin. "If he hasn't drowned inside, of course."
Koki and Nakamaru shared a look that said That's it, he's gone off his head, registered at the funny farm, slipped over the edge. Poor thing.
"I am not off my head," Jin said. "And anyway, who are you to look skeptically at me when Ueda believed for the longest time in fairies and pixie folk."
"We pretty much thought he was mad too," said Koki.
Ueda looked hurt.
"Well…let us know if you find any bodies in your bathtub," said Kame, and Jin glared at everyone as they laughed appreciatively at Kame's amazing awe-inspiring witticism.
-
Where they'd stayed only a few hours in a timeframe before, Yamapi was still there the next day, and the next, and the next, until Jin suggested that maybe he was going to be there for a while. Yamapi took it in his stride like he usually did; he learned his way about the apartment surprisingly quickly, was fascinated by the television, and even more fascinated by Jin's laptop, which he couldn't make head or tail of and just came to regard as a pretty but useless toy.
Jin taught him to operate the kitchen (particularly the fridge and microwave) and Yamapi found it so interesting that he insisted on being the one to press buttons on the microwave. "Just because it's fun to see the thing light up and the dish going round and round," he said cheerfully.
"You're like a baby," Jin said. "One day you're going to electrocute yourself and I'm going to have to cart you to hospital and we'll be in deep shit because you're probably supposed to be dead. By the way, what about your work back home? Aren't you going to be in trouble for being absent?"
Yamapi leaned down to watch the dish making its rounds inside the microwave. "I don't know. I figure I'll just deal with it when I get back; I can't really do anything about it now. I might lose my job though. I was a publisher's assistant. I was lucky to have gotten the job through my ex-schoolmate…Japan is in financial trouble now and many people are jobless."
"Now, too," Jin agreed. "You're from the 1930s, right? I remember there was something called the Great Depression happening during that time. Lots of money, er, gone down the drain. Bad global economy."
"How long does it take for the economy to recover?" Yamapi asked.
"I don't know," said Jin. "I never did anything useful in my history lessons. All I know is that Japan goes to war with most of the world during that time too."
Yamapi went quiet.
"What?" Jin said.
"It's weird," Yamapi shook his head. "It's as though you're foretelling my future." The microwave beeped and he opened the door to take out the plate. "Maybe you shouldn't have told me that."
-
Jin was away most of the time for work, so Yamapi donned on appropriate clothes, took some money from a wallet in the bedroom, and took to wandering the streets. Everything was foreign to him; the exotic people, the tall buildings, the huge pedestrian crossings. Jin told him about the concept of conbini and he went into the first one he saw, ogled at the amount of ready merchandise, spent a few hours reading package labels, and finally decided to learn how to cook in this modern and convenient world.
His first efforts at baking bread and making udon were disasters and Jin said he was going to gas himself to death one day the way he was pressing the knob on the stove, but he kept at it. There wasn't much else for him to do anyway, aside from watching TV all day (and there were only certain things that he wanted to watch…9pm drama on Mondays, 10pm dramas on Wednesdays and Fridays, 11pm…"okay, okay," Jin said, "I get your drift. God, you're like a drama-addicted baba.") By and by his efforts became results and three weeks later he was able to serve up food that Jin would deign to eat.
"You settle in so well," Jin commented. "It's almost like nothing worries you."
"Lots of things worry me. I just don't show it."
"Oh yeah, the ever-cool Yamapi Tomohisa. You know what, I don't think I know your surname."
Yamapi picked out a piece of chicken karaage and bit into it, squeezing his eyes shut in exaggerated ecstasy. "Delicious~ I could get used to lifestyle in this century."
"You don't do the avoidance thing very subtly," Jin observed.
-
Their sleeping arrangements were simple; Jin on the bed, Yamapi in a sleeping bag on the floor. Jin had considered giving up his bed at first, but Yamapi hadn't agreed to it and Jin decided it wasn't his fault that Yamapi had shown up out of nowhere. He was already housing, feeding, and clothing him; it was too much to expect him to give up his nice soft bed for a barely comfortable sleeping bag (though he did supply Yamapi with a more-than-adequate amount of cushions).
Yamapi was neutral about his sleeping platform, but he hated the alarm clock that set off every weekday morning at 6am. Not for the life of him could he understand why anyone would want to invent such a torturous instrument and he refused to accept any of Jin's explanations for the usefulness of its existence. "Back home I condition myself to wake up when needed," he complained. "I don't wake the whole house up with me."
"Well, we aren't so good at conditioning our bodies here, okay," said Jin, bored with the topic. "We're soft and suffocated in technology and we need man-made instruments to wake us up."
"If this is how mankind has degenerated in 70 years, I can't imagine what the world will be like in 140 years," Yamapi said caustically.
Jin made sure to step on Yamapi that night on his way to the toilet.
-
"Do you know what I'm wondering?"
"Do I want to know?"
Jin kicked Yamapi's legs. "I'm wondering if somewhere in Japan, there's a really old you hanging around."
"What." Yamapi looked displeased. "If I'm still alive, I would be 102 years old."
"There are guys who are 102 years old."
"I'm not one of them."
"Maybe you're related to me," Jin pondered. "Maybe I'm an offspring of your son or something, and I've inherited your genes, which is why we're both time-traveling."
"No." Yamapi was vaguely distressed now. "We are not related."
"Hm." Jin looked contemplative for a few minutes, then gave it up. "Yeah, actually, I don't wanna know if you're my grandfather or granduncle or not. That would be a total science fiction flick. And if you're 102 years old, I don't want to be near you."
"Am I supposed to feel comforted?"
Jin transferred a few pieces of his cauliflower to Yamapi's plate. "It's okay, continue eating."
-
It was around 3am of a Sunday night and Jin was just about dozing off when he heard "Yamashita."
"What?" he shifted his head on the pillow to peer down at Yamapi on the floor.
"My surname is Yamashita."
"Oh." Jin wanted to say that he didn't see what was the point of hiding such a common surname, but some instinct kept him silent.
Yamapi's voice was quiet in the darkness. "When I was growing up…I really hated my surname. It reminded me of that man who'd run away from my mother and me. At school the boys mocked me for having an unmarried mother. One day I just decided to change my name to 'Yamapi' and I fought anyone who still called me 'Yamashita'. I guess I was good with my fists because after that, everyone started calling me 'Yamapi' and I think of that as my real name."
"It's not so bad to have a single parent now," said Jin after a pause. "My dad never bothered too much about me and I'm glad to be away from him at last, but at least I was never teased about not having a mum."
Yamapi sighed and turned over on his side. "Like I said, I could get used to lifestyle in this century."
-
They were getting closer, or rather, Jin was getting close to Yamapi; for some reason he felt that Yamapi was already close to him, in ways that he couldn't fathom. They never discussed their kiss in the empty mansion five years ago (or what was five years ago to Jin, at any rate), but sometimes Jin wondered if they'd done anything in the before time-travel that hadn't happened to him yet. There were times when Yamapi would reach out to touch his hand and then withdraw as though remembering that he shouldn't; even times when he would gaze at him with a sort of wistfully thoughtful look on his face.
"What are you staring at?" Jin would ask, and Yamapi would reply, "I didn't realize I was looking at you."
For most part, Yamapi behaved as though the kiss had never happened and Jin went along with it. If that guy was going to play the avoidance game then fine, he could play it too. And it wasn't like there was anything to talk about, anyway. They'd just gotten bored and kissed and that was the end of it. There wasn't any way he was going to fall for a weird old guy whom he only saw at irregular intervals.
Jin believed what he told himself, steadfastly and unwaveringly (though Kame would have told him that when Jin was at his most self-doubtful, he was steadfast and unwavering), until one night Yamapi kissed him briefly on the mouth and he didn't pull away . Didn't even think of pulling away, though he should have. The only pulling he did was to pull Yamapi closer and his breath was hot and wet and the taste of him was intoxicatingly sweet and they were lying on the sofa in a tangle of arms and legs, kissing as if their lives depended on it.
"What was that all about?" he murmured later when Yamapi was lying half on top of him and they were both trying to catch their breath and work out their minds (or at least, Jin was trying to work out his; Yamapi seemed disturbingly self-assured).
Yamapi looked at him out of very brown, very intense eyes. "I don't know…exactly," he said. "But it wasn't too bad, right?"
"You said that the last time," said Jin.
"You remember!" Yamapi looked pleased.
"I remember pretty much everything." Jin sighed. "So you don't know what it is and I don't know what it is and that doesn't really mean anything good, but…well. Whatever it is, let's roll with it."
-
Part 2
Pairing/Group: Pin / KAT-TUN / NEWS
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: AU. Weirdness.
Notes: Influenced by the Time Traveler's Wife. A huge thanks to my betas and test readers, ky_rin, sanjihan, gothicauthor and where_wordsfail for their support and encouragement throughout the writing of this monster. Written for myxstorie for je_holiday with the original post here.
Summary: Time, as Yamapi said, had never quite made logical sense for them.
Press the Play, Again and Again
The day is always stood on the edge of a sharp knife;
It is hard to trace the beginning of this story; when had it begun, actually? Chronologically, in the early 1900s; but then again in the 1700s, and yet once again in the 1980s?
Time, as Yamapi said, had never quite made logical sense for them.
-
As a child, Akanishi Jin prayed to the gods for the latest toys that all his friends were playing with; Digimon, transforming robots, mini railway tracks that made his soul scrunch up in yearning; prayed for good grades, for his father to love him always, for numerous other little things that he forgot once he stepped out of the temples.
As a teenager, the need to control time took over all other prayers; not a supernatural control, but the simple ability to stay fixed in time that was granted to every other human being except himself and his parallel friend, Yamapi, who prayed for the same thing and never got it answered.
As an adult, he stopped praying and watched themselves instead - the invisible moments of their histories and presents and futures, because he began to see how they aligned, converged, grew apart; he saw how the moment of desperate clinging in a barn in a mid-winter night colored all coming moments. He watched Yamapi bending over the child Jin, saw the beauty of it all, the childhood and the old age and the hours in between, the evanescence of time, the sex, the sunlit days in his apartment when he'd thought that they'd been through enough, that time had let them go at last. He saw the simmering heat of the war-torn June afternoon where he'd stayed for four minutes, only four minutes, forever contained in four minutes, the fear, the helplessness, saw the pain of it all, the irony of being unable to change things even with his seemingly powerful gift. How everything would come back to that moment in that cold barn, everything, even when he was sitting on a hilltop bench overlooking pine-clad islets and Yamapi was looking at him with sad eyes and he was listening to silence thick enough to awaken his blurring, aging mind to their converging and separating histories, presents, futures.
-
Where does this story begin? For time's sake (though time should not be given any consideration at all, seeing as it had stood always on the edge of a sharp knife), this is the closest to the beginning;
Chiba, 1907-
She should never have had the baby, but here she was, lying beaten on the hospital bed after four hours of perspiration and pushing and screaming that the terrified new nurse half thought she would not survive through. Her colleagues took the bloodied baby-thing away to be washed and weighed and the doctor took a moment to relax his muscles, so tense after the nightmarish birth.
"A healthy boy," he said.
He looked at the young mother lying unconscious. For a moment he saw her as she had been at seventeen, bright and beautiful and the stuff of his dreams before the scoundrel from the north came and put all those lines on her forehead, tiny wrinkles around her eyes.
The nurses came back with the clean baby who opened his eyes, blinked at the world, and scrunched them up again. "He has a blood spot in his left eye," the doctor remarked, thinking of the scoundrel who'd had his own blood spot condemned by the town people as being 'potentially dangerous'. Maybe there was some truth in strange superstitions, after all.
"Hopefully he'll cause her less trouble than his father did," said one of the nurses. "Poor lady."
Tokyo, 1984-
It had not been an easy birth at all, the baby had taken his time coming out.
"A beautiful boy," said the doctor, turning to the father who couldn't bear to look at the baby just then; "in perfect health, with everything intact."
The father averted his eyes, watching as the nurses gently laid a cloth over the face of what had been his wife; lines on the forehead smoothened, tiny wrinkles around the eyes gone, marble-faced.
"I wonder how he's going to bring up the baby on his own," whispered one nurse to the other. "Poor man."
-
But this, perhaps, is where the story really starts;
Tokyo, 1990-
Jin is 6, Yamapi is 19
The sunlight bit into his eyes when he landed, fresh from an early autumn morning in 1926, with his coffee spoon still slung between his thumb and index finger. It took him less than a minute to figure that he was nowhere in time that he'd been before - a couple that was drifting past him, thankfully oblivious to his strangely-dressed, coffee-spoon-holding figure, wasn't wearing anything that he recognized; though, to be strictly accurate (and this was very weird…), the girl looked like she was wearing pants; those leggy things that only men wore.
Yamapi got up from the sidewalk and brushed himself down. He was in a warm shadowed alcove between two buildings - it was a lucky thing that he hadn't landed in a bush or in the middle of a stone-cold wintry night (god, that had been a pretty awful experience) - and stood waiting for what seemed like close on ten minutes before he realized that the person he was waiting for wasn't going to show up as promptly as he'd done on the past two occasions. Slacker. He'd known from the start that Akanishi Jin couldn't be trusted; any guy with such girly lips was not to be trusted.
He left the alcove and wandered out into the main street, ignoring the puzzled glances from the people around him. The sun was hot on his head and he deduced that it was mid-afternoon; also because the bulk of the people he saw walking around were women and little children. Some things remained the same through the centuries (and he did, actually, have a right to say centuries because he'd already been in three; impressive, really, for a guy not yet twenty-one); same things like men laboring in various work places and women getting mid-afternoons to themselves. There were cars driving leisurely past on the small road before him; odd-looking cars, nothing like what he was used to in 1926 and hadn't seen in the 1700s or the 1800s; so, he had obviously been thrown into the nebulous future. Perhaps this was Jin's timeframe since the guy had been born in 1984; maybe he was at school now, or working at his part-time job, or flirting with his girlfriend? While Yamapi was time-traveling alone! Betrayal, if nothing else.
"Kei-chan," he heard a little voice say behind him, "why is that man dressed so funny?"
"Shh," shushed an older voice, "you mustn't say such impolite things about other people, Jin-chan."
Yamapi turned at the sound of that name to see a young man standing behind him holding the hands of two little gaping boys. The young man smiled sheepishly at him, but Yamapi wasn't really looking at him at all; one of the little boys had lips that looked suspiciously like Akanishi Jin's; plump and girly and just like Jin's. "Jin?"
"I'm so sorry," said the young man. "Jin-chan hasn't learned his manners properly yet. I really apologize…"
"Akanishi Jin?"
There was a pause in the young man's blabbering, and feeling the weight of his stare, Yamapi looked back at him. "I'm sorry," he said, "it's just that he looks a lot like…"
"I didn't know you knew him!" the young man suddenly looked inordinately excited. "You should have said so before! Jin-chan, do you know this Nii-san?"
"No," said little Jin flatly, eyeing Yamapi with suspicion.
Yamapi's doubts were abated with a completeness perfect and absolute in a way few doubts in this world get to be. He'd seen that look in the 1700s, albeit on an older face, and some things just didn't change no matter which century you were in. "Jin!" he said happily (though why he was so happy he didn't know; much use Jin was to him as a little idiotic kid). "So it is your timeframe!"
"Eh?" said the young man confusedly, and Jin instinctively moved a step back.
"Kei-chan, I don't like this old guy."
"I'm sorry," Yamapi apologized now, moderating his voice to a more socially acceptable, kid-friendly pitch, "it's just that I haven't seen Jin-kun in a really long time. He won't remember me, but I…took care of him once about a year ago."
"You didn't!" Jin denied hotly. "Kei-chan, this old guy is lying!"
The young man started smiling again. "Oh. No wonder he doesn't remember you. I'm taking care of him today, and I wish I wasn't! This other boy is Tegoshi Yu-chan, and I'm Koyama Keiichiro. Nice to meet you."
"I'm Yamashita," Yamapi said, "but I go by Yamapi."
Koyama looked at Yamapi's clothes; a western-style shirt with 1926-style corduroy trousers (good thing he wasn't wearing his vest); and seemed about to remark on his (very) old-fashioned attire when the other little boy started to cry. There was no visible reason why he should be crying unless Jin had pinched him (and Yamapi wasn't too inclined to defend Jin; he seemed like the pinching type), and all conversation between the two guys ceased while Koyama attempted to check the crying. "Big boys don't cry!" he kept repeating, "big boys don't cry…" although it was very clear that the kids were not exactly big boys.
"Maybe he just wants some sweets," Yamapi suggested.
"Do you want some sweets?" Koyama asked the crying kid-what's-his-name-chan.
"Yah!" said the kid. And stopped crying.
Some things don't change, Yamapi thought, rather obnoxiously now since it was the third time that he was pursuing this thread of wisdom; and accepted Koyama's invitation to follow them to the sweet store despite Jin's loud declarations that he didn't want the funny old guy to be with them (such a pleasant kid, really).
-
Jin stole Tegoshi Yu-chan's sweets. Why, nobody could understand, because the same sweets had been bought for each of them - Yamapi couldn't name the sweets because they looked like nothing he'd ever seen before; one multi-colored circle thing on a stick and a bar of hard brown stuff - neither looked very appetizing to him but Jin stole Tegoshi Yu-chan's sweets anyway and Tegoshi Yu-chan started crying (again). Yamapi suspected that Jin had perpetrated the crime because Tegoshi Yu-chan was cuter than him.
"Shut up crying!" Jin told Tegoshi Yu-chan, who just cried harder (though, noticeably, without an increase in tears; not possible, good grief, the kid was only three years old. Kids were not cunning at three years old).
Koyama shushed Jin and lifted Tegoshi Yu-chan into his arms, soothing him and promising to buy more sweets. Yamapi and Jin looked at each other.
"You were quite the little beast, weren't you," Yamapi murmured, and would have said more if only his head hadn't started buzzing. "Till next time, Jin-kun. Hopefully you'll be older than six."
He patted Jin's head fondly and bolted before Koyama could stop him. He made it to the back of a building before he was sucked into the vacuum of time and thrown back onto his kitchen floor at 10am on his lovely 1926 autumn morning. Three hours gone. He wondered where his coffee spoon was.
Kobe, 1713-
Jin and Yamapi are 16
The first thing he noticed was that he was in the middle of a bush. The second thing, that he was definitely no longer in 2000, hanging out at an arcade in Ueno with his friends. The third thing, that there was someone else in the bush with him.
Jin brushed a twig out of his eyes and stared at the guy lying beside him; judging from his dressing, he hadn't been to Harajuku in a while, if ever. Those suspenders and corduroy trousers did nothing for him, and he really wasn't fiddling around with a hat…
"Who are you and what am I doing here?" Jin demanded confusedly.
The guy looked up at him with a (much to Jin's dismay) similarly confused expression on his face. "I don't know," he said. "Who are you and what am I doing here?"
That question wasn't going to be answered by remaining in the bush, so they picked themselves out and stood on a patch of grass, brushing down the seat of their pants and, in Jin's case, shaking out bits of leaves from his slippers. The guy was wearing shoes, he noticed; real, proper, brown shoes, like he'd never seen anybody his age wearing before except at weddings and funerals. Then he realized that the guy was staring at his slippers too.
Jin took his fascinated gaze off footwear and looked around them. They were in some sort of park, mostly deserted, with a few people hanging out under some distant trees. The air was cool and evening-spring-like; a little too cool, actually, for his current attire (it had been a hot day in Tokyo), and he noticed the lack of signs and wooden benches and brown rubbish bins. Still unable to shake off his bewilderment, he turned suspiciously to the guy beside him. "Did you do this?"
"Do what?" the guy said, staring at their surroundings with such a clueless face that Jin began to feel worried.
"This! Where we are now! I was in an arcade and the next minute I know, I'm in a bush and you're beside me and we're in a park and it's like, spring and this has to be your doing because it's totally not mine."
"I didn't do anything either," the guy retorted. "I was in my Mathematics class when suddenly my head started buzzing and then I found myself here."
"My head started buzzing too." Jin stared at him, and he stared back. "Maybe this is all in our minds. Maybe you don't really exist."
"I do exist," said the guy. "I'm Yamapi."
"Maybe I'm just imagining that you exist. Real people don't have such weird names anyway."
"No, really," said Yamapi with a little, frustrated sigh, "I am not a figment of your imagination. I am a living, breathing, existing person, and I have my own reasons for giving you a weird name. I'm 16 years old, born April 9, 1907, from Chiba…"
"Wait." Jin held up his hand. "You were born in 1907?"
Yamapi nodded.
"Then why aren't you…like, really old?"
"What are you talking about?"
"By now you should be 1) dead or 2) seriously handicapped with a walking cane or 3) with white hair at least. But you say you're only 16."
"I am not old," Yamapi said, rubbing his eyes - probably hoping that all that rubbing would bring him back to wherever he'd come from. "I'm 16 and where are you from, anyway?"
"Year 2000. I'm Akanishi Jin and I was born in 1984. Explain this whole situation to me."
Yamapi stared for a long moment at Jin, then at their surroundings, and then at Jin again. Just then two women clad in kimono walked past them and they could hear their voices carrying clearly in the fresh spring air; "Good heavens, would you look at the way those two young men are dressed! I have never seen anything like it. It is positively indecent. What is your thought, Sakamoto-san?"
"Disgraceful!" Sakamoto-san remarked. "Most entirely queer! I cannot imagine where they could have gotten such attire from."
Yamapi looked back at Jin.
"Shut up," said Jin.
"If I didn't know better…"
"Oh shit."
"It seems that we might have…gone back to an earlier time."
"Damn you," said Jin.
-
When a very puzzled man selling wares on the street told them that they were being ruled by shoguns in the Tokugawa period, Jin grabbed Yamapi frantically around the neck. "I can't stay here. They don't even have electricity and they talk like people out of my Japanese classics class."
"Electricity?"
Jin gave Yamapi a tragic look. "Am I the only living person on this planet who knows what electricity is?"
"I've heard of it," Yamapi said in an attempt to be helpful. "It sounds interesting."
"It's not interesting, it's vital to life."
"Will it help us get out of here? Or even find us somewhere to stay for the night?"
"Not if it hasn't even been invented yet, idiot." Jin wanted to cry.
"What's so vital about your electricity then, if it can't do anything unless it has been invented?" Yamapi gave him a bland look.
Jin very earnestly considered crying.
-
In the end, they didn't have much trouble with finding a place to spend the night; they were picked up by a scary police-looking man who gave them one stern look, barked a few questions at them, and pushed them into a police station-looking place where, despite Jin's efforts at explaining away their attire, they found themselves locked into a cell for indecent exposure.
Yamapi perched himself on the futon looking like he was lost (which, technically speaking, he was). Jin stood by the cell bars and fantasized about breaking them in half. "This is all your fault. They didn't like your suspenders."
"It's your fault for wearing those…things," Yamapi gestured at his slippers, "and not even covering your arms."
"It was summer!" Jin shrieked. "Why should I be wearing long sleeves during summer!"
They collapsed sulkily beside each other on the futon.
-
"Oi." Jin reached over and poked Yamapi.
"What," Yamapi muffled.
"They have no right to keep us here. Just because people wear slippers in the 21st century and I happen to be from the 21st century doesn't make me an indecent person."
"I know. You only said that three times in the last hour."
"Do you think they're going to kill us? Or make us commit hara kiri?"
Yamapi turned over and went back to sleep.
-
"Yamapi."
"Nrrgh."
"Do you think they'll bring us before a judge? What am I going to say? That I want my lawyer? Do you think they'll give us a lawyer?"
"Will you prease. Just shleep."
"How can you sleep. We're stranded in some ancient time period and we're in jail and we might be ordered to kill ourselves tomorrow. There is no sleep in this at all. Besides, I'm having jet-lag. It's only like, 10pm where I came from."
There was no response.
-
"Yamapi. Yamapi. What if we end up staying here for life. We don't have any money and I don't talk their kind of Japanese. They still ride horses. I don't think I could survive a month here."
"I wish I hadn't time-traveled with you."
"It's not like we had a choice."
-
In mid-morning, they were served rice rolled in seaweed. 1700s' prison food. Jin raged about the bad quality of the rice and Yamapi wished he would shut up, really really wished he would shut up, when suddenly Jin said "My head is going nuts…" and vanished, leaving behind crumbs.
Yamapi stared at the empty space for a few moments before resuming his chewing of the rice ball. If Jin had disappeared, logic told that he would disappear soon too, and wouldn't have to be killed, kill himself, or any of the other cheerful things that Jin had predicted.
It was much quieter without Jin there.
Tokyo, 2000-
Jin is 16
"You must have eaten too much curry last night," said Nakamaru upon the third retelling of Jin's Tale of the Awful 1700s.
"I can remember that the prison guard had a pimple on his chin," Jin said indignantly. "It had nothing to do with curry. Besides, I can't believe that I just disappeared and you guys didn't even notice."
Ueda shrugged. "We thought you were just being funny."
"I was stranded in a jail cell with some ancient guy and you people just went back home and ate dinner and slept without even thinking about me! We're supposed to be buddies!"
"Um," said Kame, "even if we had thought about you, there wasn't much we could do, was there? Since you were in the 1700s."
Jin gave his buddies a stare of death.
Tokyo, 2001-
Jin is 17
A year had passed without incident, everyone had begun to believe in the curry being the cause of time-traveling hallucinations, and Jin was happily munching an apple on his way back from school when suddenly his head began buzzing and he thought oh shit.
Chiba, 1924-
Jin and Yamapi are 17
The next moment, Yamapi was leaning over him with concerned eyes. "You should have aimed for the bed, Akanishi-kun."
"I'm going to break my back one day landing like that," Jin grumbled. "Oh my god. It's you. The really old dude. Where am I?"
"You're in 1924." Yamapi squatted beside him. "In my bedroom."
Jin sat up and groaned. "This is not happening. I thought I'd dreamed up the whole Tokugawa period shit."
"You didn't." Yamapi was just as gloomy.
They eyed each other for a moment. "So when did you get beamed back last time?" Jin asked. "You were still around when I got out."
"Soon enough after you vanished," Yamapi said. "It gave me time to finish my riceball."
"What is it."
"What?"
"This thing that makes us time-travel." Jin stared at Yamapi. "What is it? How do we stop it?"
Yamapi looked depressed. "I think…I don't know."
Five minutes later, they gave up on speculating and held a fashion consultation session for Jin instead, outfitting him appropriately in 1924 attire before heading out to raid the kitchen for eatables.
-
Jin really didn't like his suspenders. He looked, he thought, like something out of a historical documentary (and he'd never had much of an opinion of the fashion in historical documentaries).
"Going by your timeframe, you are in history," Yamapi said. "It's not my fault that you arrived at a time when suspenders are the popular thing."
"Why am I always in history?" Jin sulked. "Why can't I travel to my future and see if I've become the rich CEO that the fortune-teller told me?"
"Rich what?"
"CEO…chief executive officer. A really big boss."
"Oh." Yamapi thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Maybe time doesn't want to show you that the fortune-teller lied?"
"Do not," said Jin, appalled, "tell me that you've traveled to my future. Will I get married?"
"I haven't traveled to your future. I just made a natural assumption," Yamapi said.
"Then you naturally assume wrong," Jin said.
-
Yamapi bought future-rich-CEO Jin something which he called his favorite, favorite snack (two favorite's, yes), some white floury balls on a stick with weird sugary syrup on them. Jin personally thought that he would've preferred a packet of potato chips, but since Yamapi was giving him those hopeful 'you must like it?' looks, he made suitable 'I like it!' eyes.
It was a quiet late afternoon with middle-aged women walking daintily down the streets and shop banners swaying languidly and creakily in the air. There were cars hanging around the streets, not many, but the kind with curved tops and crank-up engines that made Jin long for his handphone so he could snap some pictures (why, why had he left it at home that morning? Nobody would accuse him of overeating curry if he had photographic evidence).
"My mother thought I'd run away from home," Yamapi said in response to Jin's indignant telling of his friends' blasé attitude towards his disappearance. "She was crying when I appeared at the front door. Even now she thinks that I'd run away and then decided to come back. She doesn't believe in my time-traveling at all."
"I don't have a mum," Jin said. "She died giving birth to me."
Yamapi blinked. "I don't have a father. He ran away after getting my mother pregnant."
"Wait." Jin stopped, and so Yamapi stopped too. "Are you getting like, this supernatural feeling?"
Yamapi looked at him like he was nuts. Jin proceeded to explain, because he didn't like being looked at like he was nuts. "See, you and I time-travel together."
"Once," Yamapi said.
"Well, once. But here I am out of time again and you're with me, so I'm counting this as a together sort of time-travel too. And then you don't have a dad while I don't have a mum. See?"
Yamapi didn't see.
"We're parallel!" Jin said impatiently. "It's like a drama."
"So you're saying that maybe we've been born into two different time periods leading parallel lives?"
"Exactly. Time thinks that we should meet each other because we're so parallel."
Yamapi thought for a bit. "But you know, we're not really parallel. There are lots of people who don't have their mothers or fathers…"
"But none of them time-travel together at the same time," Jin said triumphantly. "So you see, my theory is right. There's no other reason why all this should be happening."
Yamapi sighed. "Are you going to stay the night because we're so parallel?"
"I don't know. I'm waiting for my head to buzz." Jin chewed on the last floury ball (if it wasn't for the fact that Yamapi had bought him the snack and so he was under obligation to eat it, he would've dumped it a long time ago). "In any case, I get guest privileges. That means the bed."
-
Yamapi's mother looked puzzled when Jin showed up for dinner, but accepted Yamapi's introduction of him being one of his friends from school. Dinner consisted of miso soup, rice and fish, and Jin couldn't remember when was the last time he'd eaten such simple food; or, if you came to that, home-cooked food. His dad never cooked, that was for sure, and he wasn't entirely sure that he wanted his dad to try. Jin contemplated the rations in his kitchen and couldn't recall anything that actually needed to be cooked; the most frequently used electronic appliances were the fridge and microwave.
"…home?" Yamapi's mother was asking.
Jin blinked. "Um, I'm sorry, I didn't catch that…"
She smiled patiently ."Where do you live, Akanishi-kun?"
"Uh…"
"A few blocks down," Yamapi said quickly. "Near Kato's place."
"You should come by more often," said his mum, smiling at Jin. "I like to know all of Tomohisa's school friends."
"I'll come whenever I come," Jin said, smiling winningly at her. He hoped he had some chocolate with him if he should pay them a visit again; home-cooked miso soup and fish were all very nice but he really craved the oily potato coquettes from the conbini's bento box. Oh, for modern conveniences.
-
"Akanishi-kun."
"What?"
"Isn't your head going to buzz yet? The floor is hard and I want my bed back."
"It's not like I'm deliberately keeping it from buzzing!" Jin's voice hammered down in the darkness and Yamapi's arm shot up to pinch him. "Shut up, my mother's sleeping!"
"You were the one who started talking," Jin grumbled. "Also, if you keep calling me Akanishi-kun, I'll call you Tomo-chan."
-
Jin woke up with a shock to find himself lying on his kitchen floor, 2001, with his dog sniffing his toes curiously. The clock on the wall pointed to 3 and it was dark out, so he assumed he'd been gone for about eight hours. Not that anyone would notice.
He raided the fridge for some 2001-type food. Floury balls were best off in 1924 where Jin wouldn't have to touch them again unless absolutely necessary.
Chiba, 1925-
Yamapi is 18
Sometime in autumn, Yamapi knocked his head onto a chest of drawers, bit his tongue so badly that he had to have stitches on it, and spent a week in silence trying to communicate in a language where "ock" was the sole grammar particle and vocabulary word. He wasn't quite sure why, but during that week the thing he was most concerned about was not his inability to say anything other than "ock" nor his mother crying every time he attempted to say something, but rather the terrifying prospect of having his head buzz and ending up somewhere in time with "ock" as his only defense against police arrests.
He didn't count Jin as being very much more useful than "ock". It was a slight relief to know that he would most probably be with a person who could talk, but that person tended to say the wrong things most of the time. So for that week, Yamapi confined himself to his bedroom, prayed very earnestly that he would not time-travel, and thought of Akanishi Jin (a lot) whenever his mother bought him the floury balls for a treat. Jin had liked them.
Sapporo, 1862-
Jin and Yamapi are 18
They landed, one from a basketball court and the other from a school festival, in a sort of street with houses on both sides in the middle of a stone-cold wintry night. Jin, perspiring from his basketball match, immediately began shivering as his perspiration turned into a layer of coldness on his skin. The cold hit Yamapi two minutes later.
Without a word of greeting, Yamapi sprang up, dashed into the nearest house, and emerged barely a minute later with thick blankets to where Jin sat on the snow, teeth chattering and hands tucked under his armpits. Yamapi wrapped a blanket as securely around Jin as he could manage and the two of them huddled together, violent shaking gradually giving way to a low and bearable shivering.
Eventually Jin's lips stilled enough for him to ask, "W…where did you get these from?"
"Some bedroom," Yamapi said. "I just grabbed the first thing I saw."
"This is worse than being in a bush," Jin groaned. "This is really…c…cold."
"And I don't know where in time we are." Yamapi stared around them, at the clear, mocking night sky and the wooden houses. "It seems like the 1700s."
"Oh god, not that again." Jin sank his neck into the blanket. "At least they can't arrest us this time if they can't see what we're wearing. I was…I came from a basketball match, you know. I'm not even wearing pants."
"Just keep the blankets around yourself and you won't die from hypothermia," Yamapi said, but he was really quite concerned with how much color Jin's face had already lost. He unwrapped his arms around himself, pushed through material and space to get to Jin's body, so cold beneath his fingers, and circled them around Jin's midriff. Jin looked at him, shivered and said nothing.
"Maybe we should go elsewhere," said Yamapi. "Somewhere warmer. With a roof, at least."
"If you can find a roof, I'm willing to be under i…i…eeeeet," Jin said, trying to force a laugh through numbed lips.
-
The hay was scratchy beneath them; they could feel the prickliness through their clothes. Jin's face was stiff with cold, hands clenched against his stomach, legs entangled in blanket. Yamapi was lying close beside him, shifting uncomfortably on the hay with his legs scrunched up against his chest.
Jin leaned his head closer towards him. "H-have you ever been so c-cold?"
"No," Yamapi whispered back, "I've never slept in the outdoors before in the middle of winter."
"I wonder what we did wrong this time," Jin said. "Maybe this is some sort of sick punishment for our wrongdoings. I stole money from my dad's wallet yesterday and spent it on porno magazines just to see Kame trying not to drool over them. Kame's one of my, like, friends."
"Um," Yamapi said, vaguely wondering what porno meant.
"So maybe that's why we're here." Jin reached out and grabbed Yamapi's arm with a cold hand. "I brought this on us!"
Yamapi sighed. "Your hand is really cold and should be under the blanket."
Jin retracted his hand and mimicked Yamapi's sigh, only it turned into something much deeper and despondent.
-
"I hate this barn," said Jin eventually. "I want to go home."
"I want to go home too." Yamapi thought of warm fresh bed sheets, grim portraits on the wall of him and his mother, steaming bowls of homemade miso soup. "Although I quarreled with my mother recently. This doctor wanted to marry her and she refused. I thought she should have married him."
"Why?"
"Lots of reasons." Yamapi stared over Jin's shoulder. "She won't have people asking her all the time where her husband is and then getting judgmental when she says he's not around. And I think she'd be happier with someone to take care of her. She hasn't had anyone to turn to since my dad ran away. But she said that she'd gotten used to life just being her and me."
"Maybe she's happy enough now," Jin said.
Yamapi was silent. Bent his head and pushed it against Jin's padded shoulder; closed his eyes to doze.
-
An hour passed before either of them spoke again.
"You know." Silence. "It's scary. This whole time-traveling thing. I'm scared that we might never g-go back."
Yamapi reached out an awkward arm and curled it around Jin's neck. There was real fear in Jin's voice; tears, in fact, frozen on his cheeks. "I get scared too," Yamapi said. "Or that one of us might go back and the other is left…here."
Jin shook, pressing his teeth together to keep them from chattering. After a moment, Yamapi moved his legs down and they pressed in, wrapping arms around each other. Yamapi rubbed Jin's cold cheeks, his back, and slowly they started shivering less.
"…home," Jin murmured hazily. "You know, there's this English song that goes, not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name, lord I'm five hundred miles away from home…"
Yamapi smiled a little and Jin smiled and by degrees they fell into a sort of sleep, a sleep that was not quite sleep yet drowsy and beneath consciousness. They fell asleep, heads close together.
-
When Jin awoke at the first glow of sunlight through the papered window, he found himself lying alone on the haystack, arms and legs spread out on the space where Yamapi had been the night before. He didn't know what to do at first, never having been alone in his time-traveling before - come to think of it, Yamapi had always been with him - and then he found himself burrowing deeper into the haystack, a vague sort of fear beneath the cold, praying that he would be beamed to…wherever. 1925, if Yamapi was there. Five hundred miles away from home. Or back home, to 2002. He wasn't entirely sure right now where he wanted to be.
Tokyo, 2003-
Jin is 19
Sometimes, Jin wondered if he was going to time-travel again. It had been over a year since that cold wintry night of huddling on a haystack and feeling the scant warmth of Yamapi's arms under the freezing material of his sleeves. Jin didn't want to time-travel again, not exactly, if it meant that he was going to wind up in more uncomfortable situations, but he couldn't help wondering if somewhere out there, Yamapi was stranded in yet another unfriendly time period with inappropriate clothes and no money. If that happened, Jin wanted to be there with him. It just wasn't fun being in trouble alone.
Sometimes, when he slept, he dreamed of Yamapi. It was so natural, Jin never wondered why.
Osaka, 1735-
Jin and Yamapi are 20
"Can I ask," Jin said, "why is it that we never seem to wind up in the future where they have flying cars and holographic concerts?"
"I traveled to the future last year," Yamapi said, yawning. "To your timeframe, in fact."
"What?" Jin perked up. "I didn't see you! Did you see me? Was I a CEO?"
"No," said Yamapi thoughtfully. "I mean, I saw you, but you weren't a CEO. Not at all."
"Great, and you didn't even bother to say hi. What was I then? Famous soccer player? Wealthy businessman? Teenage idol? Girls galore hanging from my arms?"
Yamapi scratched his head. "Actually, you were six."
Jin stared at him in disgust. "That's not the future!"
"In case you forgot, it is to me," Yamapi retorted. "And you were quite the little brat too. You were bullying some kid called Tegoshi and your nanny Koyama had a hard time managing you."
"I don't believe it," said Jin. "You had the chance to arrive at my timeframe and you chose to come when I was six. How much more of a failbag can you be?"
Yamapi rolled his eyes and they flopped sulkily against each other in the backyard of some mansion, idly watching a leaf falling from a tree; it was summer, judging from the temperature, and Jin was glad that they weren't in the cold, but it wasn't like he wanted to be in the heat either.
"You know," he said gloomily, "I thought I wouldn't be time-traveling again. It has been like, two years? Since the last time? And I thought that was it, you know, whoever was controlling this whole traveling thing had died or something. But then now we're here and I kind of really hate your face right now."
"Liar," said Yamapi lazily, not even bothering to quirk his eyebrows. Jin felt insulted.
"Will you be more alive? We should go explore instead of hiding here in this backyard like criminals."
"If we go out, we will be criminals, or have you already forgotten the stench of that prison cell?"
"I remember the hard rice ball," Jin admitted.
"There you go," said Yamapi, and went to sleep.
-
They stole into the mansion five hours later, because Jin swore that it was empty and he wasn't going to stay in the backyard anymore, no way, it was pretty damn hot, okay, and geez will you wake up before I melt from boredom and have brains leaking out of my ears.
Yamapi locked the door of the spacious bedroom they'd decided to settle themselves in and ran his fingers jumpily over a wooden table. "If anyone finds us in here, we'll get arrested for indecent exposure and housebreaking. That's felony and we'll be behind bars until we're sixty and I'll never get to marry."
"Stop worrying," said Jin, happy now that they were out of the sun. "You'll time-travel back to the 1920s before you're sixty and you'll get to marry whoever you want, or rather whoever who would want to marry you after finding out about your time-traveling disease, and it'll all be okay, happy ending, so shut up and sit down."
"Do you really think nobody will want to marry me?" Yamapi said sadly, sitting down beside Jin on the bed.
Jin shrugged. "I guess you'll find someone crazy enough."
"What if I have kids." Yamapi started getting worried. "Won't my kids become time-travelers?"
"How would I know? Maybe your kids and my kids will time-travel together like what we're doing now."
Yamapi sat there looking unhappy. Jin waited for him to say something more, but a worried Yamapi wasn't a Yamapi that talked much and Jin was getting bored. He glanced over, studied Yamapi's frowning eyes and pursed lips for a few moments until, fueled by an impulse that he didn't really understand, leaned forward and pressed his mouth against Yamapi's.
Much to his credit, or maybe because he was simply too stunned, Yamapi didn't pull away. They sat there for what seemed like a very long time, mouths pressed together, Jin staring into Yamapi's surprised eyes until the need to breathe pulled them apart.
"I'm sor…" Jin began, before changing his mind, "actually, not sorry. Your lips are…kind of…nice."
They sat looking at each other. Jin tried a flippant smile but it didn't come out right; it was tentative instead, almost shy. Yamapi's face was still and strange, almost contemplative as though trying to decide whether he'd enjoyed the kiss or not, then he reached out and pulled Jin in and they were mouth on mouth again, teeth clanking together (it seemed like neither of them was very experienced in this whole kissing business). Neither really thought about what they were doing. Maybe they were too bored with sitting in a room with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Maybe they'd missed each other too much. Maybe it was something else entirely. Whatever it was, they didn't bother finding out.
-
They stopped sometime later when their lips were swollen and Jin was beginning to get a crick in his neck. Yamapi drew away and they sat side by side, not touching, a little like old friends who suddenly couldn't think of anything to say to each other. Jin reflected sadly on how kisses had the magical ability to make things awkward.
Then Yamapi cleared his throat and turned to him. "That wasn't too bad."
Jin, blinked at him and their eyes met and suddenly he was hot and cold and thrilling to the tenderness he saw in Yamapi's eyes.
"You know," said Yamapi, smiling, "this.."
Jin reached out almost instinctively, possibly to touch Yamapi's hand, he didn't really know. But he didn't make it; Yamapi frowned and touched his forehead and the next moment he was gone, sucked clean into air or space or time or wherever it was they went when they disappeared.
Jin dropped down onto the bed and held his head. He wanted to say come back, but it wouldn't be fair; Yamapi was out of this place. And Jin was a fair person. He knew a good thing when it happened.
He just wished that Yamapi had had the time to complete his sentence before he'd vanished.
Tokyo, 2008-
Jin is 24
It would be a lie to say that Jin remained faithful for four years. He had his first sexual experience with a guy from the college baseball team when he was in his first year, his first serious relationship in his second, and his first tear-inducing breakup in his third. Occasionally he remembered Yamapi and the taste of his kisses in the old empty mansion back in ancient time, but most of the time he told himself to forget; it was easy, anyhow, when not having time-traveled for four years meant that nobody believed in Yamapi's existence anymore.
After his last travel, Kame and Nakamaru had been alarmed to the extent of forcing him to visit a doctor, who couldn't diagnose a thing worth consideration and seemed to suggest that Jin was more suited for the mental hospital. Jin, once his initial annoyance was past, didn't really blame him (you shouldn't take it out on old farts like that). Still, Kame and Nakamaru had insisted on accompanying him everywhere for a time in hopes of getting video evidence of him disappearing. It was extremely irritating until they got tired of it, told him that he'd probably dreamed up all his time-travels ("Go write a children's book," Kame had said in disgust) and left him to forget everything at his leisure.
Life was full now. He'd gotten a job at Sompo Japan Insurance, moved into his own apartment, and had his eye on a nice-looking boy in the I.T. department who didn't look like he would be averse to going out for a meal and maybe a little more after that. There were times when Jin had flashes of remembrances, vivid and disconcerting, of hesitant first kisses and cold nights and Yamapi having patted his head when he was six. He missed Yamapi in spurts, never too long nor too short, and sometimes considered punching out Yamapi's face when (or if) they traveled together again for having taken so long to meet up.
But for most part, work was tiring, the I.T. guy was proving to be a harder chase than he'd seized him up to be, life wasn't too bad, and he didn't think of Yamapi at all.
Tokyo, 2009-
Jin is 25, Yamapi is 26
When he arrived in the 21st century, Jin didn't recognize him. His hair was longer, his face was thinner, and his clothes looked a little more like what Jin was used to seeing in his history textbook (that was nice, that Yamapi had caught up with the pictures in his textbook). He didn't immediately realise that it was Yamapi who'd arrived smack on his living room floor in the middle of a spring evening even though he'd been thinking about him on and off during the past five years.
Yamapi sat up, dazed, and they stared at each other. Yamapi began to smile, eyes lighting up, when Jin said, "I hope you still recognize me, because I almost didn't recognize you."
Yamapi seemed to deflate. "No way."
"No way what? It's been five years!"
"I'm sorry," said Yamapi, with a hint of apology and sadness that Jin didn't get. "I forgot. You actually traveled to my timeframe a couple of years ago, when you were older."
"So we've…met in the past five years?" Jin questioned, blinking.
"We have," Yamapi affirmed. "I think you were about 27 or 28. You said you were doing something called…insure? Insuration…no. Insurance? Yes, that's it. Are you doing insurance yet?"
Jin squirmed. "This is like some freaky fortune-telling session. Yeah, I've been selling insurance for a year. And I don't like that you know more about me than I know about you. How come I've never traveled to your future?"
"I don't know," said Yamapi. "Maybe you haven't been selling enough insurance, ha ha."
Jin just looked at him until Yamapi cleared his throat. "Um. Actually, I would really like a shower right now. I'd just returned home from a stressful business dinner and it was around 2am. I was about to get ready to go to bed…"
Jetlag. Jin had almost forgotten what it was like to be jet-lagged…or, more accurately, time-lagged. In fifteen minutes he found out that Yamapi was technology-lagged as well. By the time Yamapi consented to be left alone in a bathroom of bewildering taps and a shower cap that could spray water fast or slow, Jin was exhausted and running late for his dinner appointment.
"You'll just have to find out where the bed is. I need to get going," he said through the toilet door. "My old school friends are waiting for me."
Yamapi didn't reply, and Jin decided that he'd died inside. "Okay, going," he shouted and left.
-
"So, let me get this straight," said Kame slowly. "Your ancient friend has reappeared."
"He should be out of the shower by now," said Jin. "If he hasn't drowned inside, of course."
Koki and Nakamaru shared a look that said That's it, he's gone off his head, registered at the funny farm, slipped over the edge. Poor thing.
"I am not off my head," Jin said. "And anyway, who are you to look skeptically at me when Ueda believed for the longest time in fairies and pixie folk."
"We pretty much thought he was mad too," said Koki.
Ueda looked hurt.
"Well…let us know if you find any bodies in your bathtub," said Kame, and Jin glared at everyone as they laughed appreciatively at Kame's amazing awe-inspiring witticism.
-
Where they'd stayed only a few hours in a timeframe before, Yamapi was still there the next day, and the next, and the next, until Jin suggested that maybe he was going to be there for a while. Yamapi took it in his stride like he usually did; he learned his way about the apartment surprisingly quickly, was fascinated by the television, and even more fascinated by Jin's laptop, which he couldn't make head or tail of and just came to regard as a pretty but useless toy.
Jin taught him to operate the kitchen (particularly the fridge and microwave) and Yamapi found it so interesting that he insisted on being the one to press buttons on the microwave. "Just because it's fun to see the thing light up and the dish going round and round," he said cheerfully.
"You're like a baby," Jin said. "One day you're going to electrocute yourself and I'm going to have to cart you to hospital and we'll be in deep shit because you're probably supposed to be dead. By the way, what about your work back home? Aren't you going to be in trouble for being absent?"
Yamapi leaned down to watch the dish making its rounds inside the microwave. "I don't know. I figure I'll just deal with it when I get back; I can't really do anything about it now. I might lose my job though. I was a publisher's assistant. I was lucky to have gotten the job through my ex-schoolmate…Japan is in financial trouble now and many people are jobless."
"Now, too," Jin agreed. "You're from the 1930s, right? I remember there was something called the Great Depression happening during that time. Lots of money, er, gone down the drain. Bad global economy."
"How long does it take for the economy to recover?" Yamapi asked.
"I don't know," said Jin. "I never did anything useful in my history lessons. All I know is that Japan goes to war with most of the world during that time too."
Yamapi went quiet.
"What?" Jin said.
"It's weird," Yamapi shook his head. "It's as though you're foretelling my future." The microwave beeped and he opened the door to take out the plate. "Maybe you shouldn't have told me that."
-
Jin was away most of the time for work, so Yamapi donned on appropriate clothes, took some money from a wallet in the bedroom, and took to wandering the streets. Everything was foreign to him; the exotic people, the tall buildings, the huge pedestrian crossings. Jin told him about the concept of conbini and he went into the first one he saw, ogled at the amount of ready merchandise, spent a few hours reading package labels, and finally decided to learn how to cook in this modern and convenient world.
His first efforts at baking bread and making udon were disasters and Jin said he was going to gas himself to death one day the way he was pressing the knob on the stove, but he kept at it. There wasn't much else for him to do anyway, aside from watching TV all day (and there were only certain things that he wanted to watch…9pm drama on Mondays, 10pm dramas on Wednesdays and Fridays, 11pm…"okay, okay," Jin said, "I get your drift. God, you're like a drama-addicted baba.") By and by his efforts became results and three weeks later he was able to serve up food that Jin would deign to eat.
"You settle in so well," Jin commented. "It's almost like nothing worries you."
"Lots of things worry me. I just don't show it."
"Oh yeah, the ever-cool Yamapi Tomohisa. You know what, I don't think I know your surname."
Yamapi picked out a piece of chicken karaage and bit into it, squeezing his eyes shut in exaggerated ecstasy. "Delicious~ I could get used to lifestyle in this century."
"You don't do the avoidance thing very subtly," Jin observed.
-
Their sleeping arrangements were simple; Jin on the bed, Yamapi in a sleeping bag on the floor. Jin had considered giving up his bed at first, but Yamapi hadn't agreed to it and Jin decided it wasn't his fault that Yamapi had shown up out of nowhere. He was already housing, feeding, and clothing him; it was too much to expect him to give up his nice soft bed for a barely comfortable sleeping bag (though he did supply Yamapi with a more-than-adequate amount of cushions).
Yamapi was neutral about his sleeping platform, but he hated the alarm clock that set off every weekday morning at 6am. Not for the life of him could he understand why anyone would want to invent such a torturous instrument and he refused to accept any of Jin's explanations for the usefulness of its existence. "Back home I condition myself to wake up when needed," he complained. "I don't wake the whole house up with me."
"Well, we aren't so good at conditioning our bodies here, okay," said Jin, bored with the topic. "We're soft and suffocated in technology and we need man-made instruments to wake us up."
"If this is how mankind has degenerated in 70 years, I can't imagine what the world will be like in 140 years," Yamapi said caustically.
Jin made sure to step on Yamapi that night on his way to the toilet.
-
"Do you know what I'm wondering?"
"Do I want to know?"
Jin kicked Yamapi's legs. "I'm wondering if somewhere in Japan, there's a really old you hanging around."
"What." Yamapi looked displeased. "If I'm still alive, I would be 102 years old."
"There are guys who are 102 years old."
"I'm not one of them."
"Maybe you're related to me," Jin pondered. "Maybe I'm an offspring of your son or something, and I've inherited your genes, which is why we're both time-traveling."
"No." Yamapi was vaguely distressed now. "We are not related."
"Hm." Jin looked contemplative for a few minutes, then gave it up. "Yeah, actually, I don't wanna know if you're my grandfather or granduncle or not. That would be a total science fiction flick. And if you're 102 years old, I don't want to be near you."
"Am I supposed to feel comforted?"
Jin transferred a few pieces of his cauliflower to Yamapi's plate. "It's okay, continue eating."
-
It was around 3am of a Sunday night and Jin was just about dozing off when he heard "Yamashita."
"What?" he shifted his head on the pillow to peer down at Yamapi on the floor.
"My surname is Yamashita."
"Oh." Jin wanted to say that he didn't see what was the point of hiding such a common surname, but some instinct kept him silent.
Yamapi's voice was quiet in the darkness. "When I was growing up…I really hated my surname. It reminded me of that man who'd run away from my mother and me. At school the boys mocked me for having an unmarried mother. One day I just decided to change my name to 'Yamapi' and I fought anyone who still called me 'Yamashita'. I guess I was good with my fists because after that, everyone started calling me 'Yamapi' and I think of that as my real name."
"It's not so bad to have a single parent now," said Jin after a pause. "My dad never bothered too much about me and I'm glad to be away from him at last, but at least I was never teased about not having a mum."
Yamapi sighed and turned over on his side. "Like I said, I could get used to lifestyle in this century."
-
They were getting closer, or rather, Jin was getting close to Yamapi; for some reason he felt that Yamapi was already close to him, in ways that he couldn't fathom. They never discussed their kiss in the empty mansion five years ago (or what was five years ago to Jin, at any rate), but sometimes Jin wondered if they'd done anything in the before time-travel that hadn't happened to him yet. There were times when Yamapi would reach out to touch his hand and then withdraw as though remembering that he shouldn't; even times when he would gaze at him with a sort of wistfully thoughtful look on his face.
"What are you staring at?" Jin would ask, and Yamapi would reply, "I didn't realize I was looking at you."
For most part, Yamapi behaved as though the kiss had never happened and Jin went along with it. If that guy was going to play the avoidance game then fine, he could play it too. And it wasn't like there was anything to talk about, anyway. They'd just gotten bored and kissed and that was the end of it. There wasn't any way he was going to fall for a weird old guy whom he only saw at irregular intervals.
Jin believed what he told himself, steadfastly and unwaveringly (though Kame would have told him that when Jin was at his most self-doubtful, he was steadfast and unwavering), until one night Yamapi kissed him briefly on the mouth and he didn't pull away . Didn't even think of pulling away, though he should have. The only pulling he did was to pull Yamapi closer and his breath was hot and wet and the taste of him was intoxicatingly sweet and they were lying on the sofa in a tangle of arms and legs, kissing as if their lives depended on it.
"What was that all about?" he murmured later when Yamapi was lying half on top of him and they were both trying to catch their breath and work out their minds (or at least, Jin was trying to work out his; Yamapi seemed disturbingly self-assured).
Yamapi looked at him out of very brown, very intense eyes. "I don't know…exactly," he said. "But it wasn't too bad, right?"
"You said that the last time," said Jin.
"You remember!" Yamapi looked pleased.
"I remember pretty much everything." Jin sighed. "So you don't know what it is and I don't know what it is and that doesn't really mean anything good, but…well. Whatever it is, let's roll with it."
-
Part 2