Chapter Text
Eiji woke up mid-flight with the niggling sensation something somewhere was wrong. The fuselage was softly lit, encouraging people to sleep, small screens that would later show another in-flight movie currently displaying a tiny plane making its steady progress over a map indicating they were somewhere over Canada, nearly at the Pacific coast heading north-west towards Russia, maybe two or three hours into the flight. The painkillers he had taken back in New York were starting to fade, and he would have to wait a while before he could take anymore. Most of them, codeine-based capsules mainly, were illegal to take into Japan anyway, so he’d had to leave them behind until he could see a doctor back home and get a new prescription. He didn’t like taking them much anyway; they made his head fuzzy and his thoughts weird, but plain paracetamol didn’t quite cut the mustard. He’d swallowed his last couple right before boarding, hoping they would help him sleep.
Ibe-san was snoring quietly next to him, and apart from the soft drone of the engine reminding him that they were 10,000 feet in the air, everything seemed normal. The aeroplane was warmly heated, again to encourage people to snooze, but he felt cold for some reason. He shivered, wincing as the involuntary tensing of muscles aggravated his wound, sharp pain lancing his midriff. He wasn’t certain why he felt so tense, but his mind drifted to someone who meant a lot to him. He couldn’t help but think that, maybe, the feeling was linked to his situation rather than his own.
“Ash…”
He hadn’t seen him since that day in the hospital, when he had pleaded with him through tears to leave before Charlie caught him. Ash had used the word ‘sayonara’, a word well known and commonly taught but rarely used in Japan. It meant farewell, but a very specific form of farewell; it translated to ‘goodbye forever’. It’s what you say when you don’t intend seeing that person again. Sayonara was a word that severs bonds and ends relationships, but Ash wasn’t to know that. Eiji was never given chance to explain that there were other, less severe ways to say ‘bye, see you later’, like ‘mata ne’ or ‘ja ne’, which sound far friendlier and less final.
‘I should never have taught him it…’
His stomach ached, nagging pain clawing at his insides, and he fought the urge to cry again. He’d already sobbed into Ibe’s shoulder just as they left New York, weeping quietly until his medication kicked in and blurred his mind into a woozy blank slate. Ibe had said that Ash was the best friend he had ever made, and Eiji agreed with him. He’d never had a friend like it before, someone who trusted him so much, would share so much of themselves with him and who he wanted to stay beside no matter what. He missed him already, wondered why he never came to see him again in the hospital, why he let him leave without saying goodbye properly. Did their relationship mean less to him than it did to Eiji?
‘No. He cares, I know he does, but he blames himself for so many things. He is worse than the Japanese in that respect. And he had already said ‘sayonara’…’
Maybe he had read his letter by now. He hadn’t appeared at the airport, and the extra seat he had booked for him remained empty next to Ibe, but it could simply have been that he had not had chance to read it yet, that time had been too short for him to make it. Did he have a passport? Wouldn’t it have been in Dino’s care if he had? Eiji had never even considered that…
‘Idiot…’
Sing had said he’d delivered it though, and he trusted the young Chinese boy to be true to his word. He just hoped he had made his feelings clear enough in writing. English was difficult, and it had taken several drafts for him to write, his previous attempts screwed up in tight paper balls in a bin in the hospital, a mess of spelling errors and mistranslations.
‘Please… Don’t let this ‘sayonara’ be forever…’
He stared out of the window at the pink sky, the plane perpetually chasing the sunset on the horizon, trying to ignore the gnawing torture pricking at his wound.
He drifted back off to sleep without even realising it, escaping his pain and misgivings in the abyss of slumber.
***
Ibe gently shook him awake several hours later, the plane soaring over the ocean somewhere between Alaska and Tokyo, and he blearily opened his eyes to find a stewardess hovering over them.
“Meat or Fish?” she asked pleasantly, her Japanese carrying a strong American accent. Hearing his own language from someone other than Ibe was strangely jarring, a reminder that he was very nearly back in his own country after having been away for over a year.
“Whuu? Oh – sorry! Meat please,” he mumbled, rubbing grime from his eyes with his knuckle. She handed a plastic tray with a bread roll, a foil container of re-heated beef stew, a small pot of chocolate pudding and a set of plastic cutlery on it to him, Ibe taking it from her as a middle-man and pulling his lap tray down for him to rest it on while he struggled to wake up fully, fighting the last vestiges of drug-induced drowsiness.
“Sorry, Ei-chan! I didn’t want to wake you up, but you slept through the first in-flight meal and haven’t eaten a thing in almost 24 hours – you need food to keep your strength up,” Ibe said apologetically.
Eiji gave Ibe a small ‘hmm’ in agreement, letting him know that he forgave him, before turning his attention to the unappetising-looking food. He nibbled the bread and ate a couple of spoonfuls of the strangely dry stew before deeming it inedible and switching to the pudding. Wasn’t food, even usually bland and disgusting things, supposed to be tastier in the air? Everything tasted like salt and sadness. Besides, he didn’t feel hungry, and every swallow caused him pain anyway. Ibe gave him a sympathetic expression, smiling at him encouragingly.
“Just eat what you can, Ei-chan,” he said. “We’ll get something better once we land.”
Food unfinished but finished with, he pushed the tray away from him. Ibe handed it back to the stewardess when she returned for collection, giving her a small apologetic smile when she saw its mostly uneaten state, and she nodded politely in understanding. She could see just at a quick glance that the young man sitting there, pale and slightly tacky with sweat on his forehead, was in no real fit state to eat right now. Eiji had discovered, much to his umbrage, that his painkillers had now completely worn off. Every position he tried to sit in was agony, spidery tendrils of ache and discomfort weaving their way across his abdomen. He changed the position of his chair, reclining it slightly to try and find some relief, half paying attention to the in-flight movie as a distraction, half regulating his breathing in an effort to relax and stop the muscular twitches and ease the vague sense of nausea intense pain can bring on. The first port of call upon arrival back in Izumo would be the hospital, but first he had to make it through customs at Tokyo and onto a connecting flight.
It would be several hours before he would be able to see a doctor and find relief, so he grit his teeth and tried to be strong.
‘Be like Ash…’
They landed at Haneda, and with some difficulty he was able to hoist himself over the seats and into a chair, gasping at the pain and having to pant slightly from the effort. He and Ibe were the last off the plane, Ibe wheeling him as smoothly as he could through the airport. They had plenty of time to make the connection, but they hit a bit of a hitch when they got to customs.
Ibe had handed their passports over to the border guard, a neat and orderly middle-aged gentleman with a kindly-looking face and receding hairline under his peaked cap, who ran their names through a standard check. However, both their names flagged on the computer.
“I’d like to welcome you back to Japan, sir,” the guard had said, addressing Ibe with a serious tone, “But were you aware that the two of you overstayed your visas in America?”
“What?!” Ibe asked, surprised
“The database brought up a query when I ran your names. It says here you overstayed by at least six months.”
“T… That’s impossible! I got them extended in California, and Ash promised he’d get them sorted the second time – I’m certain of it!” Ibe stuttered nervously.
“Ibe-san? What’s going on?” Eiji asked him.
“I… I sent the paperwork while we were in California! I went through the publisher and… Oh no! I haven’t been able to contact Tadashi since then, because… Shit! What if the paperwork bounced? Or maybe something else was wrong? He wouldn’t have had an address or phone number to let us know!” Ibe muttered to himself. “And if the initial application bounced, we wouldn’t have been able to renew the second time! That would put us… yeah, that would be about seven, maybe eight months over… Did Ash even realise? He knew we were about to go over our allowed time, and he said he’d sort it, but our visas would have been the least of his problems really… especially seeing as he intended to send us home anyway… Oh, I knew I should have checked personally and not left it to a kid with too much on his plate anyway! But Max wouldn’t let me out and he had Eiji under lock and key too and…”
“Ibe-san?”
“Sir?”
“I am so sorry!” Ibe apologised to the guard. He bowed low, although really the guard was the wrong person to be apologising to. There wasn’t really a right person to direct those words to in this situation. “This was never meant to happen! I definitely tried to extend those visas! We ran into some trouble over there and I didn’t realise something went wrong with the application!”
“Ibe-san???”
“I’m sorry, Ei-chan! Oh, my God, I am so, so sorry! We may be in trouble here…” Ibe told him sheepishly.
“Sir, please stand up,” the guard said, looking a little embarrassed. “This happens more often than you’d think! We have a procedure to follow and we will need a few minutes of your time to get the ball rolling, but… you can still come home! That’s fine – we’re not going to arrest you at the gate! I’m surprised they didn’t pick up on this Stateside, to be honest.”
“It’s not the coming home that worries me, it’s the going back,” Ibe said sadly.
“Ibe-san, what is going on?” Eiji demanded to know.
“I messed up the visa extensions, Ei-chan. We were illegal aliens in the states for a few months… which means we won’t be able to go back legally for… well, it could be several years!” Ibe explained.
“Years?” Eiji gasped. “But… I…”
“I’m sorry,” Ibe said remorsefully.
Eiji could feel his eyes stinging, threatening tears again. It seemed like nothing ever went smoothly for him where his relationship with Ash was concerned. Serendipity had brought them together, but a stream of unfortunate circumstances and incredibly bad luck kept tearing them apart. It was bad enough that Ash kept pushing him away – he’d always been able to ignore him and chase after him regardless, and had been planning to go back to New York once he’d healed sufficiently to seek him out and scold him for not coming to say goodbye properly. Now even that option had been stripped from him. What kind of horrific thing had he done in a former life to deserve this karma?
“Sir, can I just ask you to fill in this form? We’ll be in contact with more details on where you stand and what you can do to contest the decision,” the guard said, looking apologetic. People didn’t usually have a minor breakdown like this at his booth, and it was clear to him that Ibe-san had made a genuine mistake. “Sometimes they allow waivers, depending on the, err, situation around the overstay,” he added optimistically, his eyes flicking to Eiji in his chair. “You both came back of your own accord too, which works in your favour! Try not to worry too much about it.”
“I… I understand,” Ibe stuttered. He filled the forms in as quickly as he could, handing them back to the patient guard. “J…just out of curiosity, what sort of punishment are we looking at here?”
“Well, your overstay was less than a year, and it looks like you encountered some, err, extenuating circumstances…” The guard’s eyes flicked down at Eiji again before returning to Ibe. “I would say… you’re both looking at a three-year ban of entry into the States.”
“Three years?!” Eiji breathed. A lot could happen in three years.
‘Three years before I can go back… Three years… before… Ash…”
“I’ll contest it,” Ibe promised him. “I’ll see if I can query it – there’s bound to be a paper trail, and I’ll contact Charlie and Jenkins, see if they can help! There must be someone Stateside who can overrule this!”
“Good luck with that, sir,” the guard said, stamping the papers and handing back their passports. “For now though, welcome home!”
“Thank you,” Ibe said, bowing again before grabbing Eiji’s chair and scurrying away. Their luggage should automatically be transferred for them, so he followed the signs past duty free for internal connecting flights.
“How long until the connecting flight?” Eiji asked.
Ibe looked at his watch, frowning. “About forty minutes,” he replied. He looked at Eiji closely, taking in his unhealthy pale pallor bleaching his normal warm olive tone, noting his breathing was a little laboured even though he was sat down. “You OK, Ei-chan?”
“Painkillers wore off,” he muttered. “I’m okay.”
“You want some paracetamol?”
“It doesn’t do anything,” Eiji murmured sadly. “I just… I kinda just want to go home now.”
‘I should have come home earlier… Should have listened to him and returned… It would have hurt so much less, and I don’t mean because I wouldn’t have been shot…’
“Well, it won’t be long now,” Ibe said encouragingly. “Your mother should be waiting for us at the airport, and she has already made you an appointment at Izumo hospital – you’ll have more pain meds soon! You’ll feel better if they can dull the pain.”
“Yeah…”
“You’ll recover in no time, young and fit lad like you,” Ibe told him. “And don’t you worry about the visas – you leave that with me, I’ll see what I can do about it!”
“Thanks, Ibe-san.”
Boarding the final flight was harder than disembarking the previous one. By then, he was in a considerable amount of pain, whimpering as he transferred himself from his chair to his assigned seat. Thankfully, the local flight to Izumo was just over an hour long, and he spent the entire journey leaning heavily against Ibe, clutching at his wound and trying to ignore the raw soreness that now throbbed in time to his heartbeat.