[jin/yamapi] press the play, again and again [2/2]
It was high time for Yamapi to get acquainted with more 21st century people than just Jin alone (or so Jin insisted), so they invited Kame, Koki, Ueda, Nakamaru and Taguchi over on a Saturday night for dinner. Taguchi and Ueda couldn't make it, but five was a good enough number and when all was said and done, Jin was relieved to have three people gawking at Yamapi instead of five.
"We thought you weren't real," Nakamaru confessed to Yamapi over salmon teriyaki. "Akanishi kept telling us all these incredible stories of meeting you in the 1700s and freezing in a barn or something and visiting your house in the 1920s. We thought he'd been snacking too much at midnight."
"I don't blame you," Yamapi said. "I wouldn't have believed him either."
"Jin's not easily believable," Nakamaru agreed.
"Hey," said Jin, outraged, "that sounded like an insult."
"So are you really from the 1920s?" Koki asked curiously. "What's it like there?"
"Actually, it's the 1930s now," Yamapi said. "Emperor Showa has been on the throne for six years. It's very different in some ways from this timeframe...we don't have all your modern amenities. But in other ways, it's not really that different. We still have cars, movie theatres, and restaurants; I'm fascinated by how moving pictures are in color now."
"He means that he doesn't mind staying here for the rest of his life," Jin said.
After the meal, Koki and Nakamaru volunteered to help with the dishes and Yamapi joined them to ensure that nothing was damaged in the process of washing. Kame and Jin leaned out of the living room window for a smoke.
"You know, Akanishi," said Kame abruptly, blowing a trail of smoke into the air, "he's great and I like him a lot, but you have to remember that he's not really here."
"What are you trying to say?"
"Yamashita-san. I've seen the way you look at him. He's not really here, Jin."
"If you want, you can punch him to see how 'here' he is."
"That's not what I'm saying, and you know it." Kame flicked ash off his cigarette. "One day he's going to go back, and another five years might pass before you see him again. How's that going to work?"
Jin turned a tight face to him. "I don't know why you're seeing the need to remind me of that. And anyway, if he disappears tomorrow, I'll find a way to deal with it. You don't have to worry your heart out about me."
Kame shrugged and let the subject drop.
-
They were pushing against each other on the bed, breaths coming thick and frequent, Yamapi making a small and deep sound at the back of this throat when Jin breathed against his ear and did something particularly pleasant with his hips. The material of Jin's shorts was scratchy and the night air was cool against his skin and when Jin whispered "Are you okay?" he said "Take off your damn shorts."
Jin laughed. "I must say, for a person in the 1930s you're hardly a prude."
Yamapi, struggling beneath him, half-opened his eyes to glare. "If you insist on sitting on me and laughing, I swear…"
"What?"
"I'll go to the toilet and all you'll be getting tonight is sleep."
Jin thought the better of it. In less than a minute his shorts were off and they were both fully naked, Yamapi writhing on the bed as Jin licked a strip from his neck to his abdomen. His body was beautiful, Jin thought, surprisingly so, almost white in the pale moonlight filtering in through the window, toned and supple and perfect for lovemaking. His erection curled red and thick against his body and when Jin wrapped a hand around it, Yamapi jerked and let out a breathless cry.
He kept a hand on Yamapi's cock and searched the bed for the containers of lube and condoms that he'd bought the day before and thrown onto the bed earlier when they'd started making out. His fingers finally closed around the lube and he removed his hand from Yamapi to unscrew the cap and coat his hands liberally.
"Are you okay with…" he began, but Yamapi had spied his actions and was curling into himself, lifting his legs high enough for Jin to get better access to his entrance. Jin smirked and got on his knees, resting a hand on Yamapi's thigh and watching his face as he pushed a finger inside. Yamapi breathed in deeply and his hold on his legs slackened. "Are you…" Jin began again, worried, but Yamapi just growled, "You're like a grandma, get on with it."
Jin obliged with a second finger; it was amazingly hot and tight and he felt himself growing harder just at the thought of being inside, surrounded by Yamapi, sinking into Yamapi, inside. He probed and stretched and Yamapi gasped, eyes sliding shut, and he added in a third finger before Yamapi moved a little and indicated with meaningful sounds that he was ready.
A couple of movements, sliding on of the condom, quick breaths and then the head was sliding in, Yamapi was gripping his legs tight leaving red marks on his skin, and Jin was struggling to keep a firm hold on his control, to not shove in and start fucking him hard like every cell in his body was dying to do. This was Yamapi and he didn't want to hurt him; this had to be good for both of them, equally good, and fuck it felt amazing and Yamapi was conforming to his length, closing in around him, and he felt his legs tremble.
"Do it," Yamapi said, and raised his legs to wrap around Jin's back as Jin leaned forward to press a kiss against his mouth.
He pulled out slightly and thrust back in and wasn't prepared for the loud groans that tore from both their throats, the flood of sensation and heat and almost-tears at how good it felt, and they were kissing and he was angling himself, thrusting deep and hard and then shallow and quick and swallowing Yamapi's cries god the neighbours upstairs could probably hear them but he didn't fucking care and then he finally hit it and Yamapi's entire body shuddered, his hands tightening so hard on Jin's hips that it would be painful, only not.
He slid out and raised Yamapi's legs, turning him over onto his stomach, and Yamapi obliged without resistance; his mind was still blank from Jin hitting against his prostate. Then Jin drove in again, forsaking all gentleness this time, leaning over Yamapi and biting the curve of his neck and shoulder as he rocked to and fro, in and out, listening to the cries and incoherent words that Yamapi was muffling into the pillow. He felt needy, urgent, desperate almost, to get into Yamapi as much as he could, as deep as he could, it wasn't nearly enough; he turned Yamapi's head and pressed their mouths together again, bruising their lips, slamming in and out and Yamapi was moving his hips as well, entering the rhythm, and then Yamapi screamed and his knuckles turned white clutching the pillow and Jin came in a flash of insanity and feeling and pleasure so intense that he collapsed against Yamapi right after, unable to move.
Yamapi inched forward and kissed his nose. Jin remained wrung on the bed, drained, as Yamapi slowly got up and returned with a damp towel to wipe over the both of them. The damp was cool on his skin, heavenly, and Jin smiled. "You definitely seem experienced at what we did."
"Shut up," Yamapi said, throwing the towel onto the floor and getting back into bed beside him.
"Only not. And that was great." Jin rested a hand on the nape of Yamapi's neck; kissed his cheek softly. "Thank you," he said.
A short while later, they fell asleep, Jin pressed up against Yamapi's back.
-
The days were getting stiflingly warm and Jin longed to install a portable air-con in his room, but Yamapi couldn't understand the logic behind making the room cold and then putting blankets over themselves to keep warm. Jin said that Yamapi was so old-fashioned in his tastes that he couldn't enjoy the finer things in life; Yamapi said that Jin's modern sensibilities were a puzzle to him. They fought about it and Jin went in a huff to look at his portable air-con only to find that he couldn't afford it. Yamapi laughed at him, but cooked him a nice dinner to make up for the absence of cold air.
Sometime in July, Jin took a short three-day leave of absence from his company and took Yamapi to Kyoto by shinkansen, which Yamapi was endlessly fascinated by. "It's like we're flying," he said, and couldn't take his eyes off the window even when they were going through tunnels.
They wandered around the Gion district, climbed up to the Kiyomizu Temple, and almost missed the opening hours of Kinkaku-ji. Yamapi wondered out loud how the places looked like and whether they were accessible to the general public in his time period. He took kindly to the digital camera after being mystified by it initially, but he wasn't so kindly towards his first café latte, which he found almost unbearable. Jin said he'd just have to keep on getting used to café latte if he was going to stay in the 21st century.
They shared a bed now; Yamapi had never slept with anyone in the same bed before, and he was surprised at how non-intrusive it was to have Jin beside him, snoring and drooling on his pillow. It was true that Jin's bed was a little too small for two people and the heat of two bodies pressed together was sometimes too much for them, but neither suggested going back to their previous sleeping arrangements. The sleeping bag gathered dust in the cupboard.
In the midday heat of the weekends, they were sometimes too lazy to move into the bedroom. They had sex in the living room instead, hardness of the floor eased by cushions, tongues trailing down jawbones and necks and stomachs, sweat and teeth and tight dizzying heat and time standing still, finally standing still. Yamapi avoided Jin's collarbone since he knew that touching it in any way caused violent reactions, but Jin loved his; said it was possibly the sexiest part of Yamapi's body. Yamapi loved Jin's arms and how strongly and securely they could hold him against the wall as they fucked, again and again, urgently, as though any moment Yamapi would disappear.
"Maybe," Jin said one night as they lay together by the living room window staring up at the clouded sky, "you aren't going to disappear. You've been here for four months already, maybe you're just going to stay. Maybe this is how it ends."
"It isn't," Yamapi said.
"How are you so sure of that?"
Yamapi let a moment pass. "You visited me," he said, "and it doesn't end here. I do go back eventually."
Jin rubbed his eyes. "Does that mean that the next time I see you, you won't even know that all this took place?"
"No," said Yamapi, and when Jin rubbed his eyes again, he grabbed Jin's hand and kissed it. "When that time comes, don't keep me in the dark."
-
That following Thursday, Jin arrived home from work to find thawing pork bones in his sink and tiny plates of chopped ginger and garlic by the stove. Yamapi wasn't in the toilet, nor the bedroom, nor anywhere that he could fit his body into. Jin sat down at the dining table and waited; he wasn't sure when he fell asleep, nor whether he fell asleep at all. He only knew that when the morning came, Yamapi still hadn't come back from wherever he was.
So this is how this chapter ends, he thought, and he was so sad that he couldn't even find the anger to curse time for playing this on them again. He just kept thinking, so this is how this chapter ends.
Chiba, 1934-
Yamapi is 27
It had been a year since he landed in Jin's sunlit apartment; a year made up of five trips to the doctor and a single very useless trip to a middle-aged woman in the neighbourhood reputed to be an expert in talking to spirits (which apparently could be consulted about everything on earth, including time-travels and disappearances). What had been slightly over four months in 2009 had been a month in 1933, and there was no glossing over his disappearance this time; friends believed that he'd been murdered and his mother had almost gone off her head with grief and worry. Yamapi couldn't keep the truth from her. A visit to the doctor was scheduled that very week, even though Yamapi had lost his job and there wasn't enough money in the house to pay the doctor for what, Yamapi was certain, would turn out to be a futile visit.
So it was, largely, but not entirely; the doctor was puzzled, not disbelieving. He had graduated from Tokyo University ten years ago and he said he'd never heard of anything like this, an actual time-traveler who'd traveled to the future, and he was interested in examining Yamapi and possibly coming up with a hypothesis about why all this was happening. He didn't talk about preventing it, and Yamapi was glad, because that meant he didn't have to avoid the doctor. He went for four more inconclusive visits before their money ran out and rumours that the Japanese government might be over-spending itself started circling around the streets; that money was being poured into the armed forces and that Japan needed oil and ores that China and Malaya were not supplying in adequate amounts.
War, Yamapi remembered Jin saying that day in the kitchen, Japan goes to war with most of the world. He was afraid to tell anyone what he knew; he was afraid that saying it out loud would turn it into reality, even though he knew that it was already reality, that somewhere out there war had already happened. The knowledge weighed on him.
He tried not to think too much about Jin if he could. He wasn't sure, still, if what they'd had for four months could be considered love, because he really didn't want to fall in love with Jin, that would be so messy; but he did know that he missed Jin with an ache that grew sharper with time instead of dulling. He remembered the panic he'd felt when his head started to buzz, the terrifying seconds when his vision had blanked out and the shock of opening his eyes to find himself in bed in the 20th century, in his own bedroom, nearly eighty years away from where he'd left Jin. It had taken him almost a month to find himself again, get used to the absence of all that he'd grown used to, acclimatize himself to the life and the pursuit of a new job and the knowledge that he was on his own again.
He thought that Jin had come off better than him in this situation; at least Jin had something to look forward to in knowing that they would meet again in his future. He, on the other hand, could only hope and wait.
Chiba, 1931-
Jin is 28, Yamapi is 24
When Jin arrived, the first thing he did was to throw his arms around Yamapi and hug him tight, even though they were on the street just outside Yamapi's house where anyone could see them. "You dumb bastard," he said, "how dare you disappear without even waiting for me to get back? I sat there waiting for hours, damn you."
"Jin!" Yamapi exclaimed joyfully, and they hugged for a few moments before Yamapi recollected that they were on a street and hastily pushed him away. "What on earth were you talking about? You were right there when I went. And don't hold my arm in broad daylight."
"Are you back to being a prude?" Jin sighed. "I'd gotten used to you not being one."
Yamapi looked like he thought Jin was nuts, which he probably did. "I was going out to visit a friend," he said. "But I suppose since you're here, I'd better take you back home and lock you in the room." He eyed Jin's Rolling Stones t-shirt and faded jeans. "You're not really dressed in the fashion of the day."
"Well, you are at liberty to do what you like with me," Jin announced happily, "just as long as you don't leave me to fend for myself. My visits are like gold. I don't just drop by any day, you know. Take me back to your house and dress me up in the ugly fashion of your day."
"It's not ugly," Yamapi protested.
-
Jin wasn't outfitted in appropriate 1931 attire. He'd disappeared along with Yamapi's clothes the last time he visited, and Yamapi wasn't too keen on losing a second set of clothes (it was more economical to just shut him up in the bedroom). They spent some time catching up; it was easy to make small talk when there was so much to update each other about. Yamapi had found administrative work with a publishing company; Jin was working as an insurance agent with Sompo Japan (and here he had to stop to explain what 'insurance' was). Yamapi seemed interested, but by and by he fell silent and when your conversational partner replied in words of a monosyllabic nature, you tended to fall silent too.
"You know…" Yamapi fidgeted when the silence passed the uncomfortable three-minute mark. "The last time, before I went, we were…"
"Kissing," Jin said.
Yamapi fidgeted a bit more, looking at the floor. "Right. Um. I don't want you to think that I go around doing that to random people because I don't, and I haven't really kissed anyone since then, and actually you were a bit like my first, or rather you were, and. Um."
"What you're trying to say," said Jin helpfully, "is that you kissed me because you wanted to."
"Something like that," Yamapi admitted.
"It's fine," said Jin. Yamapi was looking anywhere but at him, and he felt a need to correct that. "I kissed you because I wanted to, too." Yamapi smiled in relief, but kept his eyes on the floor and Jin nudged his foot. "Maybe we should try it again."
This was, he figured, a much more effective way to indirectly inform Yamapi of what happened in 2009 instead of telling him outright, since anyone would freak out to hear of sexual exploits and confessions of love that he was to make in the future. Not that Yamapi was a prude, by any means, judging from what he'd done in 2009 and what he was doing now, all that tongue and heat and hot damn, the guy knew how to kiss.
-
When they finally broke the kiss in need of air, they were both hard and mindlessly pushing against each other. Yamapi's eyes were wide, this had never happened to him before, and Jin bent his head to kiss along Yamapi's jaw, feathery light kisses that had Yamapi whining at the back of his throat and grinding his hips more vehemently against Jin's.
Jin briefly considered taking off their pants, but he wasn't sure he would be able to deal with the buttons on Yamapi's pants and struggling with buttons was not hot. He gripped Yamapi's hips instead and grinded down, cloth against cloth and body against body, Yamapi threw his head back and groaned and this was alright, this was enough after all, just to see Yamapi like that, and fuck he'd missed this. He thrust a few more times with Yamapi's breath on his ear and then they both came, muffling cries into each other's mouths as they spilled over into their pants.
Jin rolled off and they lay, boneless and spent, on the bed for a long time before Yamapi said, "That wasn't too bad."
"You have no idea," Jin said, keeping his eyes closed.
Yamapi turned to his side and slung an arm and a leg around Jin; it felt warm and intimate and comfortable and Jin caught himself thinking, god I love you.
-
"I think I'm going back soon," Jin said later, when they were appropriately cleaned and tidied. "One final thing before I go. Do you remember the last time, you were saying something before you zoomed out?"
Yamapi thought for a moment. "Oh, yes, I do remember. I was saying…"
"Quick," said Jin, "my head is buzzing."
"This is the most…"
Jin opened his eyes to find himself lying against the sofa in his own living room, 2012. Beautiful Sunday afternoon. "Clearly, you don't want me to know what he said," he told empty air.
He wondered how long he'd have to wait before he saw Yamapi again.
Saipan, 1944-
Jin is 31, Yamapi is 37
He was there for four minutes, four minutes only, barely time enough to take in his surroundings. There was smoke in the air, gunfire, a smell of death and blood and taut fear. He raised his head from behind a bush and saw two Japanese soldiers six feet in front of him, crouching behind another bush at the edge of a cliff with rifles in hand, aiming and shooting at something below with precise motions. Snipers. One of them turned his head to the side and Jin saw, so quickly that he didn't have time to react, that it was Yamapi, squinting his eyes at a target.
He aimed and fired. Aimed and fired again, and again, until Jin wanted to drop his head between his knees and forget all that he was seeing. A couple of grenades were lobbed over the cliff and burst less than ten feet away from him, blowing debris and bits of grass all over him. He wondered briefly if this was how he was going to die, unarmed and defenseless in the middle of a war that was supposed to have happened seventy years ago with Yamapi barely six feet away from him, aiming and firing.
He heard it before he saw it. There was an explosion in front of him, a roar so loud that it filled his eardrums, and when he opened his eyes he found everything in front of him gone, the bush, the soldier, Yamapi. He wanted to scream, but the roar was still ringing inside his eardrums and he wasn't sure if he screamed or if he just sat there, stunned, thinking that it couldn't be real, this had to be some sort of nightmare, and then his head buzzed and he was gone.
Tokyo, 2015-
Jin is 31
Jin didn't sleep for a fortnight. He tried calling Kame, but Kame was away on a business trip and he didn't quite feel like telling anyone else that he'd just witnessed Yamapi's death. He lay in bed and looked up at the ceiling and replayed it in his head, over and over, the fear and the shooting and the grenade explosions and Yamapi being blown into dust, absolutely gone, as though he'd never even existed. He felt the grief creeping up on him, tying knots of cold oppressive fingers on his stomach, digging into his throat until he expelled most of his meals.
Somewhere out there, Yamapi had died.
When he started sleeping and eating again, he felt that he had to have the power to change it; maybe this was what the whole time-traveling gig was about, for him to eventually save Yamapi from an untimely death. Maybe, if he told Yamapi to avoid that cliff, Yamapi would find somewhere else to take cover and the grenade will be lobbed into empty air and nobody would be hurt. He began to read up on the battles of the second World War, trying to find out where he'd been, to work out a sort of timeframe of which he could warn Yamapi about. It had to work. Surely.
Jin refused to think about the other thousands and thousands of soldiers who hadn't been assigned companion time-travelers to warn them of their impending deaths. He refused to wonder why Yamapi should be deemed special enough to cheat death. This was what all the time-traveling had been leading up to; it had to be. If it hadn't led up to this, if Yamapi was to die the way he died, everything would be completely meaningless.
Osaka, 1967-
Jin and Yamapi are 31
The tears blurred his eyes almost immediately, though he hadn't meant to cry. Perhaps he was helped by the sight of Yamapi's tears, which flowed the moment they opened their eyes from the impact of landing on a hard concrete floor and looked at each other. Yamapi reached out to hold him, trying to say something through his sobs but it came out thick and mangled and Jin thought it was like an awakening from the dead, practically, even though logic told him that Yamapi hadn't died yet.
"I've missed you," Yamapi finally managed to say. "You aren't getting away so fast this time. Five years, Jin. That's a hell of a long time."
"Damn you," Jin said, holding him back, "you have no idea how long it has been."
-
They removed themselves from the place where they'd landed in - some sort of warehouse; Jin was extremely grateful that time had not seen fit to throw them onto a pile of boxes - and parked themselves on a bench in a park nearby. They were somewhere in the mid to late 20th century, judging from the fashion of the people around them, and while the two of them looked odd, nobody really gave them more than a faintly puzzled look.
Yamapi talked about the five years that had passed. He was married now, he said, to the daughter of a businessman. He'd met her during one of his company's projects and courted her for two years before proposing. They got married eight months ago. "She's an excellent wife," he said. "She does everything about the house; I don't even know where my shirts and buttons are now. She takes good care of my mother too."
Jin looked at the brown hand that Yamapi had laid across his thigh, and reached out to squeeze it once. "I'm glad to hear that."
"I feel really helpless sometimes," Yamapi confessed. "When I'm rushing out of the house, I can't find my clothes or shoes and I have to call her to ask where my things are. At first I was frustrated but now I've grown used to it. She's about the best wife that any man could wish for."
"I'm glad to hear that," Jin said again.
Yamapi looked at him. "How about you?" he asked after a pause. "Have you met anyone?"
"I was seeing a guy," Jin said. "I broke up with him half a year ago. Since then I haven't been seeing anyone."
"I hope you'll find someone soon," Yamapi said sincerely. "Listen, Jin…" he stopped and cleared his throat awkwardly. "You'll always be special to me. But you do know…after all…with the nature of our relationship like that…it's impossible. We have to go on living in our own lives."
"I know."
Yamapi smiled uncertainly. "What's wrong? I know you well enough to recognize a bad mood when I see you in one."
Jin looked past him to the statue of a playing cat under a canopy of trees. He suddenly felt dry and old, tired of grief and fear and not knowing, worn out with the emotion of having Yamapi beside him, alive, again. "The thing is…" he paused. What gave them the right to change their lives through the power of time-traveling, after all? Why hadn't a time-traveler been assigned to Adolf Hitler or Stalin or all the evil dictators to assassinate them before they could cause so much destruction? The conclusion was simple: they didn't have the right. Nothing would be changed.
"What?" Yamapi was asking, peering at him in concern. "What is it, Jin?"
He wondered if he should tell Yamapi now. The beauty of living life was not bearing the burden of knowing when or how it would end. He looked at Yamapi, wanting to change things and knowing they couldn't, wanting to believe that he could change things regardless, and couldn't find the words.
Yamapi stared back, and then his mouth settled into a hard line. They sat there in silence and Jin thought he really should break it, get them away from the threat of death that was hanging over them; maybe by not talking about it he wouldn't make it into reality. But just then Yamapi said, "You saw me die" and Jin was crying again.
He wasn't strong enough to bear the burden, after all.
-
"You don't really understand the mentality of the people today," said Yamapi later. "We're at war now. Men are being sent into the army every day, and everyone knows that not many of us will come back. Death isn't something that we're shirking from."
"So you can say, when you're not facing it," Jin said.
Yamapi leaned back on the bench, stretching his legs out, staring at the late afternoon sky. Somewhere behind them, two kids were playing with toys and giggling while their mothers gossiped on the bench beside theirs. He thought of how singularly perfect this day was; the high mists of clouds spread across the sky, the women on the next bench laughing, an old man walking by with his cane, the children laughing, the gift of being beside Jin, the friendship, life. "I've gotten my summons. I'll be leaving home in a month's time; basic training for a couple of months maybe, and then they'll be assigning me out…probably to a rifle company, going by what you said."
"We can change it."
Yamapi quirked his eyebrow at Jin. "We can't. It has already happened."
"Maybe we have the power to change it. If we can find out when and where it happened…"
"All you saw were a bush and a cliff."
"We can figure it out. I have the internet. I can research."
"Even with your resources, there isn't much you can find out about a bush and a cliff, Jin."
"Don't be so fucking calm about this," Jin snapped, "don't you get it. You're going to die, damn it."
Yamapi reached out, thumbing the edge of Jin's eye to catch an angry tear. "It's not as bad as that," he said gently. "I knew I was going to have to die sometime, if not this year then next, if not next then after. We're at war."
"You have the responsibility to be alive for your wife and your mum and for me."
"There isn't any such responsibility as that," said Yamapi. "I'm not guardian over my life and death." He patted Jin's shoulder. "You haven't done anything wrong in telling me about it. Far from it. At least now I know that I won't die in torture. I'll go, just like that. I won't end up paralysed or missing a couple of limbs or even that wound that all of us are scared shitless about." He grinned. "I don't mind dying without any pain."
From the other eye, the angry tear fell out anyway. "But I have to live with it. I'm living with your death now."
"I'm not dead yet," Yamapi said. "You can punch me to find out if I'm really here."
When Jin blinked and stared at him questioningly, Yamapi grinned again, only slightly guiltily. "I overheard bits of the conversation between you and Kamenashi-san."
"Eavesdropper," Jin said.
Yamapi laughed.
-
Evening fell, and they began to get hungry. Yamapi didn't have any money on him, and Jin only had 500yen in his pockets, so they set off in search of what food they could get for 500yen.
"Things should cost less," Jin said confidently, and found out that while he was right, he was also very wrong. His 500yen barely covered the cost of two onigiri from a roadside stall.
"The yen might have lost its value," Yamapi said helpfully. "I'm guessing the war ended not too long ago." Then he frowned. "Does that mean that we lost?"
"I thought you would've realized that from the time you spent in 2009," Jin said, munching his onigiri and imagining with satisfaction the seaweed and rice moving down his gullet. Behind them, the old man at the roadside stall began to hum an Elvis Presley tune.
Yamapi started unwrapping his, then froze. "My head is buzzing," he announced, "do you think we…"
"Wait!" Jin's hand shot out to grab Yamapi's shirt, but he wasn't fast enough and the next second he was left with empty air and the old man open-mouthed with shock.
Jin re-wrapped the onigiri and put it in his pocket. His appetite was completely gone.
Chiba, 1934-
Jin is 33, Yamapi is 27
He traveled fast again, shot out from a normal working day at the office and spat into a strangely familiar street. It was freezing and he wasn't dressed appropriately. He looked around for Yamapi and saw him almost immediately, huddled up in winter clothes and walking away from him.
"Yamapi!" he shouted and Yamapi turned around, surprise and joy flashing across his features, and Jin got up to go to him, but his head buzzed loudly and Yamapi was calling him and the next thing he knew he was on his knees in front of his office desk and his colleague was peering over at him asking if he felt sick. Jin ran into the toilet to vomit into the sink.
Tokyo, 1745-
Jin and Yamapi are 37
"It goes round and round," said Yamapi.
They were back in the 1700s again, hiding in an abandoned shack situated in the outskirts of a small village. It was autumn; the trees outside were orange and red and while the weather was cool, they weren't freezing. They'd come, one from a tiring Tuesday afternoon of playing golf with a client and the other from the middle of war, to this shack removed from the world and Jin felt that he should be more emotional, should have hugged Yamapi back as vehemently as Yamapi had hugged him, but he was dry of emotion. Calm, even though this could be their last meeting for all he knew; though, when he thought about it, he was grateful for the calmness. Calm meant that he would be able to recapture every moment in his mind later, when memories were all that he had to fall back on.
Yamapi was sitting on the floor with his legs drawn up; he looked much older than Jin had remembered. There were wrinkles around his eyes, not the fine wrinkles of sleeplessness or everyday worries, but deeply-etched wrinkles that seemed to have emulsified into his skin. He was wearing a soldier's uniform, but looked far from resplendent; the uniform was caked with dirt and his boots were the scruffiest footwear that Jin had ever seen. "Haven't had a hot meal in a week," he said, and Jin hated that they were in some desolate era where food was present but not available.
"Where did you come from?" he asked.
"Saipan," said Yamapi. "I was sent there six months ago. Hate that place. It takes forever to get our supplies." He coughed long and deep and Jin realized that he was sick beyond repair, that if a grenade was not to blow him from this life to next, this illness would, in a far less merciful way. He blinked back the burning sensation in his eyes and reached out to touch Yamapi's arm.
"The war never meant anything to me before," he said. "Now it's going to take you."
"At this point, I don't much mind being taken." Yamapi coughed again, then smiled tenderly at the sadness he saw in Jin's face.
"I spent the last six years wondering," said Jin, "every single damned day whether you were still alive. Whether I'd missed seeing you one last time."
Yamapi shook his head. "You wouldn't. This isn't the last time either."
"There's another time? After this one?"
"It goes round and round," said Yamapi reflectively. He returned Jin's eager grip. "Time hasn't been all that bad to us, Jin. Listen. When I was 32 years old, I traveled to the future. A really far future. You were an old man by then."
Jin blinked almost disbelievingly. "You visited me when I was old?"
"I was with you throughout." Yamapi stroked Jin's fingers. "I won't tell you more, you'll have to find out for yourself. And you'll realize what's in this for both of us, too. There is something good, after all."
"How long will I have to wait?"
"Long enough. But I'll be there. It has already happened." Yamapi grinned and he looked so much like the boy that Jin had met long ago - really long ago, in fact - that first confused day in the 1700s; so young and full of life despite his wrinkles and scruffy footwear that Jin pulled him closer and held him as though by physical touch alone he could prolong the scanty moments that time afforded them.
-
"This is a pivotal time, isn't it?" Yamapi said. "It's the in-between."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Jin said.
"I've been doing a lot of thinking recently," said Yamapi, arranging himself on the floor so that he and Jin lay side by side, bodies pressed together. He touched Jin's cheek with his fingertips. "It's been crazy, all this time-traveling. Never knowing whether I'll be here one moment and then freezing my butt off in some wasteland the next minute. I've met you, and I've loved you, but there was no way we could be together and I went on with my own life. But after all's said and done, it's been a blessing, in a way."
Jin tilted his head. "This sounds like the ending heartwarming speech in a dorama. You know, the one that the inspirational main character makes after all the lessons have been learned and everyone's standing around looking touched."
Yamapi poked him. "So I'm obviously not doing a good job since you're not looking touched."
"I think it's the lack of camera angles and zoom-ins. And background music."
Yamapi laughed until Jin started laughing too.
-
They left at the same time, back to where they'd come from.
Two days later, the shack was pulled down by village men who deemed it too unsightly to allow it to continue standing.
Chiba, 2029-
Jin is 45
The little girl standing beside him holding his hand only knew that 'Otou-chan' looked sad. She was dressed in a pretty white dress with frills at the sleeves and hem, and she was trying very hard not to yawn even though she'd been woken up early that morning because Otou-chan looked sad and when Otou-chan looked sad, it was rude to yawn.
When Otou-chan finally looked down at her and smiled, she said, "Otou-chan, what are you looking at?"
Jin bent down and carried his daughter up to eye level, then pointed at the stone tablet nested among others that he'd been looking at. "Nanako, this belongs to my friend, Yamashita Tomohisa. I've been looking for this for a long time."
Nanako couldn't read very well as yet, but she saw the numbers '1907 - 1944'. They didn't make any sense to her.
Otou-chan traced the four big kanji on the right with his index finger, over and over (she could read the first character, she'd learned it not too long ago, it was 山), and she watched silently because she instinctively felt that somehow, Otou-chan was doing something that meant a lot to him.
Matsushima, 2054-
Jin is 70, Yamapi is 32
The smell of old people hit him the moment he arrived, worn out from daily drilling and marches, in the toilet of a big grey-stone house. He was still wearing his army fatigues and when he walked out of the toilet stall, every man he passed, old and middle-aged and young alike, all stared at him in puzzlement. Yamapi ignored them and continued walking, trying to orientate himself and maybe, possibly, hopefully, find Jin amid these very strange surroundings. He couldn't think why there were so many old people hobbling or speeding around in motorized wheelchairs.
He turned a corner and walked past huge floor-to-ceiling windows where a couple of old people were sitting on wheelchairs enjoying the scenery. Yamapi vaguely perceived sea and greenery, but he was too disturbed by his surroundings to care very much about whether the scenery was nice or not. Then he heard someone saying hesitantly, "Yamapi?"
The sound of that voice made him stop. He thought he'd heard it somewhere before. He thought he should know, should recognize - and then he turned around and Jin, a much older Jin, was looking up at him with an expression of mingled surprise and joy and Yamapi could only stand still and gawk.
"You're here at last," Jin said, and his face screwed up so much that it almost looked as though he was crying. When Yamapi stepped forward, he saw that Jin's cheeks were indeed wet with tears. "You took long enough, you dumb bastard."
"Jin," Yamapi said, and was totally at a loss for words.
"You look like a monkey in that uniform," Jin said, and then laughed and cried and Yamapi knelt down to allow Jin to wind arms around his neck.
-
Jin registered Yamapi under 'nephew' (at the same time chuckling at the irony of the 'ancient guy' becoming his 'nephew') and introduced him to all his friends and nurses in the nursing home (for that was what the big grey-stone building was). All the younger nurses simpered a bit when they were introduced and Jin shooed them off with, "I'm sorry to announce that he's taken, but if he ever becomes available I will let you know. Just write your names down on the list of people to be informed."
He insisted that Yamapi was going to stay for a long time, and so within a day he'd gotten one of the nurses to run out and book a room for Yamapi in a hostel nearby meant for relatives. "And get him some clothes," he said, waving yen at her. "He wore that uniform for a prank without knowing that he was going to get kidnapped by me, so here's the money and bring him out for a shopping trip."
Yamapi felt the irony of being in the middle of a huge hustle and bustle created by this frail old man sitting in his wheelchair but he reminded himself that it was Jin, and Jin being Jin meant that at 70 years old, he was still able to create a lot of noise. He moved into his tiny room at the hostel, bought a few changes of clothes, and went back to the nursing room that evening to have dinner with Jin in the garden.
"It's so weird," he confessed as they sat eating out of bento boxes - or rather Yamapi ate; Jin picked at his food. "I was in my army camp and then I was here, and you're old, and…it's so disorientating, somehow. And you don't seem surprised to see me."
"I was waiting," Jin said. "You told me years ago that you'd be with me in my old age, so I figured that you had to be showing up soon. There isn't a lot of time left, you know. I was diagnosed with the last stages of lung cancer a year ago. The doctor gave me eight months, so I'm on borrowed time now."
Yamapi started to turn his head away, but Jin caught hold of his chin and held his head in place. "You don't have to feel sad or sorry or anything. My daughter is in Australia working as an engineer and she can't come back to take care of me, so you'll have to oblige in her place. You're not here to slack."
"It's not that…" Yamapi managed to say. "It's…seeing you as you were last time, and then now…it's too much."
He leaned forward and Jin stroked his hair with gnarled fingers. "At least you've showed up," he said, then, teasingly, "It shows that you do have some sense of responsibility."
Yamapi snorted through his tears.
-
He heard all about Jin's daughter as he pushed Jin along a hillside path the next morning. Jin said that there was a bench in the middle that was his favorite; he loved to sit there and look out at the Matsushima Bay. "Just shows my age," he said. "I can sit there for hours. One day they'll find that dust has tied me to the bench and I won't have to go back to that nursing place with the smelly old folks."
When he was 38, he'd felt the yearning for a child and so managed to get Nanako through a surrogate mother. His whole life changed, he said, when he had Nanako. Life had an object of meaning for him again; someone he could wrap his life around and live for. "I didn't need any lovers, they just got in the way of Nanako and I. She was everything to me, that kid. She still is. She got herself into the best schools and colleges and she never complained when I didn't have enough money to buy her all the branded goods that her friends had. She wanted to quit her job in Australia and come back to look after me, but I told her that I wouldn't receive her here if she did that. And anyway…" Jin grinned at Yamapi, "I was waiting for you. It would be too troublesome to explain to Nanako that 'Yamashita Tomohisa' had come back to life after I took her to your tablet every year."
"You found it," said Yamapi.
Jin nodded. "I stopped going a couple years back when my legs stopped working. But Nanako carries on the tradition, so you can rest assured that there's someone praying for you still."
Yamapi continued pushing Jin's wheelchair in silence. He didn't know what to say. There was nothing, really, that one could say in the face of such loyalty.
-
Every day he came and took Jin to his favorite bench that overlooked Matsushima Bay and its famous pine-clad islets. They exchanged stories, Yampi of his war and army camp experiences, Jin of his years struggling to climb up the corporate ladder and dabbling in various side projects that failed one after the other. "No use wailing about them now, they're over and done with and I'm comfortable with my savings," he said. "The smelly old folks aren't too bad to live with either. Lots of company."
Sometimes they didn't talk. Jin was old and his lungs were almost gone and talking too much strained him; he preferred to sit in silence, shoulders and back slack against the bench, watching the play of colors on the sea. Yamapi liked the silence, too. He'd grown so used to gunfire and shouted commands that silence had an added charm for him; he came to love sitting speechlessly beside Jin, listening to the whistle of the wind blowing past his ears and the rustling of the trees around them, to Jin's occasional cough and sigh and movement. It was as though he was living an old age that he wouldn't be able to get in his own real time; an old age spent sitting beside Jin.
"Thinking about it now," said Jin, "it has been a pretty good life. So it's been crazy at times, but I've had you and Nanako, and now all these comfortable days passing just like that. I think that's enough for a man."
"I've always wanted to do that," said Yamapi. "To look back at the end and think, 'it's been a good life'. I won't get to do it, but it's nice to know that one out of the two of us managed to."
"You're making fun of me," Jin remarked congenially. "It's okay. You youngsters don't know anything."
-
"Jin."
"Yeah?"
"It's beautiful," Yamapi said. "Don't you think? Imagine, even if we'd lived normally and met as children and grown old together, I would never have been able to pat your head as a six year old and then to look after you when you're old, like now."
"That works out fine for you," Jin retorted. "Time didn't see fit to send me to your childhood days."
"Maybe I was a generally better behaved person," Yamapi suggested, and Jin longed to be in his twenties again, if only to punch the smugness out of Yamapi's face.
-
They were on the bench again, the wheelchair standing beside Jin as Yamapi held an arm lightly over his bony shoulders. Jin seemed to be shrinking by the day, Yamapi thought, growing light and brittle under his touch, as though the merest breeze could break him in half. And so anyone passing by would think, too; a frail old man living out his last days, already becoming transient, withered as an old leaf. Only Yamapi knew of the indomitable strength beneath the vulnerable exterior; the strength that had brought Jin through a life that had demanded so much of him through no fault of his own.
"I've been thinking," said Jin abruptly, "after this, you'll go back and meet me again, like how you're here now with me. After death."
Yamapi nodded.
"That's cool, isn't it?" Jin grinned at him. "It's like we never really die."
Above them, the sky was reflecting its sunset red onto the Matsushima waters. There was death ahead of them, but life too, continuing life, never really an end. Time, in all its bewildering, frustrating, cruel inconsistencies, had at least given that to them. Yamapi reached out and held Jin's hand; he remembered the firm grip of the young Jin's hand, the coldness of his fingers the night they had learned to love each other in the barn. It came to him now, the years and years that they'd spent together, the fear and suspicion preceding the love and laughter and trust, the separate yet joined lives that they'd led, the parallels, the paradoxes. The sunset red was dipping into the semi-darkness of dusk and his heart was too full for speaking.
He nodded and caressed Jin's fingers. We never really die.
-
This is where it ends.
Once upon a time when we were friends,
I gave you my heart.