Chapter Text
Yu’s often heard it said about him that he’s an extraordinarily patient person. It’s not exactly true, but it’s not enough to waste his breath disagreeing, which is really the root of the problem. He so rarely finds it in him to spend enough energy on most things to bother with being impatient, let alone intolerant of any process of time.
It’s only in the rare instances something stirs him he realizes it’s not true at all, not even close.
December comes, and lots of things happen after that. He leaves the first week of that month feeling shaken like a ragdoll, concussed and nauseous, head swirling with half-baked images. Cards hidden up sleeves, cheap beer—his first ever—on his lips, barefoot on the back lawn with each of his sister’s hands in one of theirs, knees touching underneath the table, breath on the shell of his ear, fingers—
The walls of a hospital closing in on a man losing control, a noose illuminated in four walls of red-and-black violence. An illusion shattered in a burst of gunsmoke and broken glass. The bearer of fog and a body limp in his arms.
It’s past midnight when he reaches the gas station, a single light still on in the window along an otherwise dark street. It’s the glow of the Velvet Room door he’s after, though, and if the late hour surprises anyone there, they don’t stir. It’s only Margaret’s eyes that change at all, like she knows what he’s about to say before he beckons her. Sure enough, he says her name, and she’s already rising to her feet, book dog-eared underneath her arm.
They occupy the other side of the limousine when they speak. It’s just a formality. He’s never been too concerned about the particulars, but he’s pretty certain Igor could read his thoughts if he really wanted. Either way, it’s not too much of a comfort when he’s both fully aware he’s about to say something insane, and absolutely sure there’s no way in hell he can stop himself from asking it.
He couldn’t even wait until tomorrow. How could he sleep?
Margaret sits down on the velvet seats once more, but Yu remains standing, not sure what to do with his hands but dig the nails into his palms some more. He knows his face doesn’t betray him, but it’s a forgone conclusion here.
“Is there a way to prevent this?” He thought about the wording all the way here, but even saying it, he's still not sure it’ll get the outcome he’s looking for.
“I thought that’s what you were doing,” Margaret says, evenly. There’s a small, nearly imperceptible crease in between her eyes. There’s change, everywhere, all around him, and only God knows how long he’s been willfully blind to it.
“Is there a way to prevent him?” He doesn’t want to say it. He can’t bring himself to. He hopes the acid in it is enough.
“Is there a way to prevent a tiger from devouring its prey?” Igor asks in that drawl of his, just to prove he’s still listening.
Yu doesn’t have the energy for this, either. He doesn’t even look back. “Is there?”
He hates how it sounds in his own ears. Desperate. Just a little on the edge of crazed.
In reply, Margaret just takes a hand in hers and closes her eyes.
There are conditions, of course. But not many. Nothing that would prevent the both of them independently arriving to their power, not that Yu thinks he could stop that if he wanted. Nothing that would break time, but he doesn’t entirely know what that means. But he has to believe in the thing that sent him stumbling back to the Velvet Room in the first place: that fate, this fate at least, isn’t an inevitability. If that’s the truth, then the rules shouldn’t matter. Or he’ll find out when he gets there.
He wakes up on his futon, early morning light from the dusty blinds of Dojima’s spare window dancing sunbeams onto the equally dusty table and illuminating the dormant television screen in stripes. Half of his belongings are unpacked, his clothes and a haphazard array of school supplies all splayed out with half-emptied boxes still taking up a corner under the cheap shelving unit. When he squints, he can just make out where he’s put his last ‘x’ on the wall. April 12th.
Yu tears the pillow out from behind his head and covers his eyes, pressing his fists into the sockets through it. It’s too late. Too late for the first, to avoid the sin entirely, too late…
He slides the pillow down just a little, taking a deep breath. It might not be too late for the second.
He moves through school unnerved by the photo accuracy of every conversation, the choreography of bodies moving through the hallways, the glints in his new (old) friends’ eyes, and he’s playing at every action like an actor with half-remembered lines. Beneath it all is an electrical current, calculating the degree of change from every movement and how soon it can carry him to the lobby of Junes, alone.
The sun’s setting by the time he finds him, relief flooding through him at the sight of Tohru Adachi in his ill-fitting suit and blank expression leaning against the bike racks outside the store. It takes him longer to look up at his approach than Yu has ever been accustomed to, and it makes him feel off-center until his shadow passes over him and he watches Adachi’s eyes contort into that practiced doe-eyed ignorance, sharpening in a blink. This he knows.
“Can I help you?” Adachi asks, just on the flat side of his usual facade. Not that anyone but him would notice. “I’m actually on break right now, so…”
“Yu Narukami.” Yu cuts him off by extending his hand, searching his face for a single shred of recognition, of awareness, and finds none. There’s just bewilderment, and a barely-there sharp upturn of his shoulders before they fall into that practiced slouch again. Yu clears his throat, says, “I’m Dojima-san’s nephew. I heard you’re his partner?”
Adachi’s wrist is limp and his hand is clammy, leaving behind an unpleasant sheen of sweat in his palm, but it’s the first contact they’ve had since… God, Yu doesn’t even want to think about it anymore. He’s reluctant to drop it, but he takes care not to let it show, especially with Adachi so hasty to break the connection.
“Uh, yeah.” Adachi twitches like he’s about to wipe his hands on his pants before thinking the better of it, plastering that fake smile even wider across his teeth. “Come to think of it, he did say you’d be in town. Did he tell you to introduce yourself or something? Sorry, kid, he’s so formal! We would have met sooner or later carrying him home after the bar… er…”
“I won’t tell him you told me that,” Yu interrupts, because he’s heard this schtick what feels like a thousand times, and he’s sick of it. “Look, I need to talk to you. Alone, preferably.”
If there’s genuine suspicion or shock there, it’s buried under such an elaborate, obtuse masquerade that his wide eyes and parted lips just look comical, as if there was anything about this situation worth laughing about. “What do you mean?”
“I‘ll explain in a minute,” Yu replies, fighting the part of him that’s furiously insisting that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that this will go south faster than he can blink, that he has to have a real plan and this isn’t one. He steels his eyes and shoulders, forcing himself to look at Adachi’s face, devoid of the knowledge and intimacy they’d built that he misses like a phantom finger, even if it was maybe never his to begin with. The mask is so empty without it. “Would you mind taking me to the station?”
He mutters some bullshit about procedures and being on the clock and they’re going to ask questions, you know, but it doesn’t matter, because Yu has always been right about one, inexplicable thing. There’s something about him, something he doesn’t even understand himself, that makes Adachi want to listen. Even now, apparently, because it takes very little convincing to get Adachi to buckle, even though he knows well enough the signs of annoyance written across his brow.
It’s not the best plan he's ever had. In fact, it might be one of the worst, but he has to at least try it, and it might as well be first. He’s brought to a familiar place, the interrogation room he’s learned doubles as Adachi’s informal office, and watches with a lump in his throat as Adachi locks the door behind them.
He starts from what he knows, and studies the contours of Adachi’s face as they go from willfully ignorant, to genuine confusion, to a brief flash of horror, to a final crack of the mask it took Yu months and months to break the first time only to now watch it shatter across the floor. His thin lips snarl into a cold smirk that matches the dark, lightless pits of his eyes, and when he laughs, it’s not the unhinged, manic laughter of the shadow world, but rather a cruel facsimile of the passion it took to produce the first time, hollow and emotionless.
Yu doesn’t feel anything when cold metal presses against his temple, nor when Adachi’s foot finds the small of his back. His only thought before the barrel’s slammed down across his skull is simple, mechanical.
Well. At least one thing doesn’t work.
He doesn’t know if he’ll wake up after that, but he does, and the only emotion he can muster is mild surprise. Distant relief, maybe, but not in the way skirting death should pound at his heart. Instead, he just blinks in a new day, sighs at the blank white walls of his room, and tries to come up with something better.
There are a few more April 12ths that go about as well as the first, but at least he doesn’t end up with cold metal to the skull again. Yet. Chased out of the police station, cursed out by Dojima, fucking up the timeline and having to restart by not saying the right thing to Yosuke or Chie at the right time, come up as the suspect himself once or twice, yes—but he never makes that mistake. Mayumi Yamano can’t be saved, and he’s already long wasted that breath on Igor begging for one week more to no avail. Every time, though, Saki Konishi is still on the table. It’s just a few days, but it’s on the table.
Twenty versions of that pass in a blur of time that is neither as slow nor as fast as the weeks have always felt, a temporal experience he has no words for other than a sense of otherness that remains alien from his own linear perception. Twenty loops, twenty forced ‘hellos’ through his lips to sound like the very first time, twenty impersonal handshakes with Detective Tohru Adachi, twenty anxious nights spent in front of a static TV, and the part of him that’s felt trapped in April 2011 for months before this already feels like the only part of him that’s ever existed.
He watches Saki Konishi die seventeen times. He can’t bring himself to stick around for the other three. He gets Tohru Adachi to his dinner table, the only starting point he knows how to approach with any sort of confidence or sound strategy, about ten. If he counts the ones not concocted under ridiculous false pretense, it’s only three.
Beyond the first and by far the most severe fracture, he catches a glimpse of the gaps between his mask once.
Well, if he’s being generous with himself, which a pointed lack of results has made him disinclined to do, he’s seen micro-fractures. If he can call them that. The first time it happens, it’s not even intentional. The fact it’s an honest mistake might be worse, but he can’t say for sure he wasn’t looking to dig into something in the way his words so often are designed to do. It’s around the eleventh or twelfth, in the middling ones where he plays it close to the teeth, and he’s sweet-talked Dojima into yet another tour of the station right when he knows Adachi will be arriving in a hurry, five minutes late on the dot as usual.
The strange thing about the loops, he’s starting to realize, is that they aren’t identical even if his actions don’t change. According to Margaret, that’s not how time works. The structure of events that surround him and the forces that catalyze them won’t alter until Yu affects it, but small details shift here and there. What tie Adachi is wearing, the order Dojima categorizes the case files in under his arm, the few red lights in town they hit on the way there, things like that. Insignificant aberrations of change over time, according to Igor.
It’s only after the brief glimmer of hope it brings is crushed he learns that, though. When he and his uncle arrive at the station on Friday to find Adachi already there, leaning on the shared rusted coffee maker and stifling a yawn with one hand, Yu feels something dangerous and anticipatory catch in his throat. He barely remembers to greet him as Adachi waves a lazy hand, raising his eyebrows in exaggerated pleasantry.
“Morning, Dojima!” Adachi chimes, pulling down two mismatched mugs from the cabinet above that Yu guesses was last painted sometime in the seventies. “Oh, and Yu, was it? Nice to see you again!”
Looking into the corners of his eyes for that telltale hardness feels like grasping at straws, but he does it anyway, chasing the corners of his faint wrinkles until they disappear into his uneven hairline. He’s careful to watch the timing of his reply, offering a quick, “You, too.”
He’s heard this particular morning lecture of Dojima’s so many times he could recite it from memory complete with hand gestures if pressed, and it’s no more interesting hearing about Adachi’s intentional misfiling of busywork the tenth time around, so Yu tunes it out. Instead, he watches the bones of Adachi’s wrist strain against his gaunt skin as the detective pours two cups of coffee one after another, dark liquid right up dangerously close to the brim.
“Cream or sugar?” Adachi interrupts Dojima mid-sentence to shove one of the mugs in his direction, flinching imperceptibly when a splash hits his thumb.
“Not today,” Dojima replies. He softens a bit in tone, but he’s ever-so-careful to keep that scowl permanently plastered on. “You? I can’t remember the last time you were early enough to make it here.”
“Nah,” Adachi dismisses. “You know me.”
Yu knows better than most, but somehow, he doesn’t feel like it would take keen eyes to notice the way his mouth quirks at the first sip, betraying the obvious lie. But Yu’s known that since June.
“You hate it black.” It comes out before Yu can stop it. Or maybe just doesn’t try to.
It’s brief, but Yu catches it because he’s looking too closely not to. His eyes widen, flat despite the arched eyebrows, and takes in a long sip, knuckles turning several shades white around the handle. His thin lips press into a line around the brim, but before Yu can study it further, he masks it over into neutral surprise, confusion lighting up his face. “Huh?”
“What are you talking about?” Dojima counters, spinning on his heel towards Yu and crossing his arms, accusatory.
“Nothing,” Yu deflects, sizing up the particular masquerade of ignorance Adachi’s worn today as he half-heartedly calculates his own. “Just a guess.”
It’s the truth, but when Dojima asks Adachi himself he denies it, of course. The detective laughs off the awkwardness with a weary sidelong glance, and Yu doesn’t miss the way their gazes linger for the rest of the brief, somewhat stilted visit, but it’s not any of his concern. It won’t matter come morning.
And it doesn’t.
He calls him ‘Tohru’ once, on the eighteenth run. He’s getting tired, sloppy, and he’s rapidly losing track of how many times he’s had Adachi in his home and when and why and for how long. He’s starting to blur the broad strokes and details, whether he’s supposed to press him against the fridge or wave from the porch this time to see him off. But he’s moved fast in this one, the desperation starting to wear at him soul and body, idly realizing in the back of his mind he’s eclipsed a real year in here. But to the rest of the world, it’s July, and they’re a tangled mess of sweat and teeth under the sheets, bleeding out summer heat.
It isn’t the first time he’s gotten him to bed. It’s easy, once Yu figures out the tricks. He thought age might be a deterrent, once, but that’s long out the window. If he pushes, Adachi relents with what Yu now recognizes might be, on anyone else, enthusiasm.
But it’s not anyone else. It’s Adachi, and no matter how much he pushes in other areas, the stench of Ameno-Sagiri still clings to him like the densest cloud. But it’s Adachi underneath, and that’s the problem. That’s why he’s wasted a year, tossing over and over in an endless, restless sleep getting nowhere.
But there are nice pit stops along the way, sometimes. In the ‘real’ world, whatever that counts for anymore, they never got to this part. Sometimes Yu wishes that they had, because he loses his virginity in the fifth (and longest) loop and it’s nothing like he was told it would be, devoid of real intimacy and hushed with a hand to avoid suspicion. No matter how much Adachi plays it up, that time or any other, it’s just a hollow imitation of what Yu is really chasing after, and despite himself, what he’s chasing after has always laced with this inexplicable desire. He’d love to say he’d be here even if it wasn’t, but this road was already being traversed, albeit slowly, long before he stepped into the Velvet Room that night in December.
It doesn’t make him feel better, but if everything is erased come the morning when he decides he wants it to be, even a shadow of it is better than nothing. He has no frame of reference for if it’s good or not, but the heat and skin is a great excuse to get up close, and a distraction from the ache of Adachi’s stubbornly lightless eyes when that closeness reveals the extent of Yu’s continued failure.
They never slept together in the real world, no, but Adachi said he could use his first name, once. If he wanted. He was half-drunk and more than half-asleep, one of those nights where he and Dojima both came home late and Adachi slept on the couch, almost blurred enough to be lucid. Yu was on the floor, TV on for pretense but long abandoned, consumed by the sensation of Adachi’s spindly fingers in his hair and his bony knee against the back of his shoulder.
You can use my first name, if you want, he’d said, slurred and muttered so low Yu barely made it out in time. Just not when others are around.
Yu tested it out on his tongue. Tohru.
He swears that just for a second he saw his real eyes then.
He never got the chance to try it again, and he’s been careful not to use it here, but sometimes, when he’s blurred into lucidity in his own way, it floats across his mind.
It’s late afternoon in the eighteenth loop and he’s sweating out the poison of a year in ruins, hopeless and aching and frustrated and pent up and heartbroken. Adachi finds the delicate skin between the bones of his neck and bites down, and he’s everything around Yu, everywhere above him, and he feels like a man possessed when he slings an arm around his narrow shoulders and moans, “Tohru.”
This loop had been going better than most. They were close, maybe just as close as they were the first time if not more, but all the hope that had built up shatters when Adachi peels back. For a foolish second, Yu allows it to swell, drinking in the sight of a blessedly real look of confusion and vulnerability, red lips parted and brows furrowed over brown irises, but a drop is nothing to a man in the desert, and when Adachi blinks, all he sees is grey, impersonal and cold as the fog.
“I didn’t say you could use that,” Adachi hisses, tightening his hold around one of Yu’s wrists until he feels the bruise that will form underneath. He opens his mouth again like he has more to say, but whatever it is, he thinks the better of it, crashing into Yu with a kiss that’s all teeth and feels more like a punch than anything else. The only word he mouths between Yu’s teeth is a strained, “Apologize.”
Yu doesn’t bother replying, because he’s already decided he’ll wake up back in April tomorrow, and his words don’t mean anything to him anyway. Not this time.
He’s starting to lose hope there is a time they will.
The real break is the twentieth, and it’s not even really Adachi that breaks. It’s Yu, and it’s a complete fracture.
It’s May this time, and Yu feels more tired than he’s ever felt in his life. Every step, every day drags at him like creeping inertia, and he’s never felt more alone in his life, even with Adachi close enough to touch under the kotatsu.
(They haven’t, yet, and Yu’s beginning to think it’s the wrong approach to take. He’s not sure if it’s a relief or not.)
It’s not just Adachi, though his glimmers of humanity still taunt Yu in his every waking moment. It’s missing Yosuke, Chie, the rest of his friends who can’t know him in the way he knows them, and he longs for the Yosuke that can read his mind with a glance so badly it rises bile in his throat. He misses his friends, all of them, together in a way they haven’t been this whole time. He misses the feeling of belonging somewhere, anywhere, other than in a fight he doesn’t know how to win, and he feels himself slipping out of control, hour by hour, day by day.
It’s late. Not past midnight, but late enough that Nanako is long asleep and Dojima still has hours left at the station, leaving Yu, as he so often is, alone in his living room with Tohru Adachi, making every drink of tea last longer than necessary until the liquid has chilled.
It drives him crazy how he won’t leave, how he won’t just throw the last of Yu’s belief in him out with the bathwater and finally end this charade, but he never does. He always lingers, always takes such gentle care of Nanako, always wastes time he doesn’t have. It itches under his skin something fierce.
There’s not even a specific trigger, really. He’s spent too many hours like this in undefined spaces of time, sending his glance back between the TV and Adachi’s casual slouch that when Adachi asks him if he wants more tea, easy and polite as anything, Yu just knows he can’t take it a second longer.
“I know who you are, you know.”
Adachi’s a good actor. A great one, even, but now Yu knows the signs. His weakness is feigning ignorance when confronted directly. Yu’s left it off the table until now for a reason. Adachi stops mid-turn to face him, still cross-legged on the ground below. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know who I am?” Yu presses. He leans his elbow on the table and stares up, ice in his eyes for a mask of his own. “I‘ve never been able to figure out when you put the pieces together. You’re not stupid, though, so I think you have to by now.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” Adachi dismisses, brows furrowed in a practiced mix of confusion and something not dissimilar to pity. It’s pristine. But Yu’s been around too long not to catch how his words spill faster than his normal drawl, or the slight tremor in his leg as Adachi turns back on his heel towards the kitchen before the sentence is allowed to hang in the air. Yu’s quicker, though, snatching his wrist with a bruising grip. It’s all bone and tendon underneath. Adachi’s slow to acknowledge him again, even as he freezes. “Seriously. You’re not making any sense.”
“I am,” Yu insists, firm. Adachi’s lips fall into a frown, but they don’t harden past the mask. Not quite. “And you know I am. You think you’re in control of this game, but you’re not.”
Something flashes in Adachi’s eyes, gears whirring behind the blackness. “What, you and I? I thought you were coming on a little strong, kid, but...”
“You could say that,” Yu cuts him off before he can think of any more bullshit to fill the silence. He tightens his fingers and uses Adachi’s limp arm to pull himself to his feet, staring straight into his eyes all the while. “But I’d appreciate it if you dropped the act. I know about the TV, I know about the girls, I know about your plan to use Namatame, I know about the fog, and I know what you are. I’m done playing around. So spare me.”
“That’s a lot of crazy words in a row,” Adachi begins, slowly, calculated, but before he can get any further, Yu tugs down hard on his arm and twists, digging his nails in with full strength. Not even Adachi’s fast enough to suppress a wince completely. “It’s a little suspicious.”
“You hate it here,” Yu continues, because now that he’s started, he’s not sure the floodgates will stop until he crashes headfirst into the end of this cycle. “You were sent out here as punishment, and you can’t stand this town. You hate me, too. Or at least you think you do.”
“Oh?” Adachi tries to wrench his hand back, mask slipping into stone when Yu doesn’t relent. His expression fixes itself, but the light doesn’t return to his eyes, dark and matte and empty. Good, just a little further to the edge. “What makes you think you know that about me?”
Yu considers for a second whether or not to say it. “Because I know you. I’ve known you for years.”
He doesn’t have to waste time wondering if that will throw Adachi off-balance as the only detail that doesn’t align with his own secrets. It shows with another crack, a sneer pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Come on, even you have to know how insane you sound.”
“I know how this all ends, too.” Yu takes another step forward into the detective’s personal space until they’re toe to toe, their faces close enough he’s sure Adachi can feel his words ghost across his face. “We catch up to Namatame in November and you in December. You’re going to prison because you murdered two people. So, yeah. I know you.”
Yu follows Adachi’s eyes down to the holster on his own hip, but whatever chill the sight of a gun would have once brought him is nothing but a dull roar in the back of his ears, barely a consideration over the rush of indiscernible emotion breaking over and over again in waves. Adachi licks his chapped lips, and in a low growl of a voice he mutters, “You really should shut your mouth right about now, you know.”
“Or what?” For all his talk, it’s almost too easy for Yu to reach over and take his other wrist, another step driving Adachi up against the couch. Yu puts a knee between his legs to keep him in place, but he doubts he’ll have to worry much about that. He’s gotten his attention, now. “You’ll kill me? You couldn’t do that the first time, but good luck.”
“If you’re right about me,” Adachi whispers, and when he blinks, there it is. There’s a grey cloud over his eyes, and his words are acrid and distorted, like static in a TV and only just loud enough for Yu to hear mere inches away. He swipes his nails, sharper than the look, against the skin of Yu’s own wrists. “I could take care of you right here and now. Not the smartest plan, Yu.”
“You won’t.” Yu waits just a second’s pause to drive home that it’s not from the pain before he drops his hands with a force that pushes Adachi back into the cushions, a foreign noise catching in his throat. He braces himself back up with a knee, wiping at the corners of his lips with the back of a hand. “Wanna know why?”
Adachi just glares at him, something feral in the way his lips curl that would have chilled him to the bone back around the first time. But he’s not scared of him anymore. Maybe he never really was. “Shut the fuck up.”
They’re the words everything in this conversation has been peaking towards, everything this entire year has been leading up to and more, but now that they’re on the tip of his tongue, he’s choking. They come out just as frayed and worn as he feels, something heavy strangling him on the way out. “Because you’re better than this.”
“Is that really what you think?” Yu doesn’t blink, after that. He’s not even sure if he breathes, too busy training every ounce of focus and knowledge he’s stored up to try and parse the effect of that, to try and make sense of something, anything happening deep inside. But it’s not his face or body that changes, this time. It’s his voice, and even with that twisted expression still plastered on, it’s impossibly small in comparison. All Yu can do is nod in reply. “Then you’re the dumbest fucking person I’ve ever met.”
He might not be wrong about that, at this point. “That’s not even the dumbest part.”
There’s a pause where he waits for Adachi to say something, to move, to even just react, but he doesn’t. He just stares at him like he wants to burn a hole right through his skin, and Yu feels himself slipping away. When he speaks, he hears his own voice as if in the wind. “I keep going back to April over and over again trying to find a way and prove it. You’ve already lost.”
“I said, shut—” Adachi reaches for his gun, just a tiny, almost certainly ceremonial flick of the wrist, but that means the conversation’s done. There’s nowhere to go from here. Over and over again, brick wall after brick wall, there’s nowhere to go from here, and something has to break.
He doesn’t have time to think about it, but he has time to spring forward, sprawl across Adachi’s hips, and grab hold of his wrist again, bracing Adachi down hard with his other elbow. He fumbles until he lines their hands up together, finger over finger. Yu can almost fool himself into thinking there’s something in Adachi then that’s so, so close to something real, but it must be his imagination. “What the fuck are you doing?”
"If only we could have met sooner," he says, because he won't remember it.
He knows Adachi won’t pull the trigger, so Yu closes his eyes, and takes the liberty of doing it himself.
April 12th doesn’t come again.
The last thing he sees is the shock on Adachi’s face, and not even long enough to properly appreciate its honesty before everything goes black. Well, black for a second before it fades into a familiar, glowing blue spreading out from underneath his feet.
He floats like falling in a dream, exhaling into his slow and heavy descent feet-first until he reaches the solid ground of the Velvet Room limousine floor. He’s standing as he always does, facing Igor with Margaret and that same new, uncomfortable empty space on either side of him like they’re Yu’s perpetually unimpressed judges panel, but it’s been so long since he’s been summoned to it against his will he’s as off-balance as he was back in the real April. He stumbles into his first step, a headache coming on from the residual ringing in his skull.
“Spinning our wheels a bit, are we?” Igor says, and if Yu knew any better, he’d be certain he was mocking him. “I sense some frustration.”
Yu just rubs at his temple with the heel of his hand and stares right back at his bloodshot eyes, clearing his throat. Margaret closes her book with a sidelong glance and sets it on the table, folding her hands in her lap. The silence is thick, but Igor rarely seems to have any interest in his questions being answered.
“You’ve tested a truly impressive array of strategies in attempting to best the machinations of fate,” Igor continues, spidery fingers spreading out across his jaw and tapping a slow and inscrutable rhythm. “I wonder, are you beginning to sense if there are limits to even your power and tenacity?”
The way Igor talks tires Yu out on even the best days, but with the aftershocks of his brain rattling around in his skull, it’s excruciating. He grinds down on closed eyes, and when he blinks them back open, there’s an extra extension onto the car’s booths that wasn’t there before, looping out and around the table to form a seat across from Igor at a more than appropriate professional distance. Igor gestures lazily in its direction, and before Yu can think better of it, his feet carry him into its velvet embrace. It’s more comfortable than it has any right to be.
The silence is such a relief that it takes longer than it should to realize they are, in fact, waiting for a response this time.
“What, are you here to tell me it’s too late?” Yu asks, not even trying to mask the annoyance. He expects it’s just another thing that’s a foregone conclusion in this place. “Really nice ride you sent me on, in that case.”
Igor seems to consider this for a moment, the pace of his tapping increasing incrementally. That eternal smile is even more unnerving up close. “I fear there are constraints around the circumstances of your arrival that may prove to be insurmountable.”
Something must show on Yu’s face, because Margaret straightens her shoulders and turns to Yu several degrees, blinking her gaze between the two briefly. “I believe what my master means to say,” she begins, pausing for a breath that might be meant for Igor to stop her. Either way, he doesn’t take it. “Is that April itself may be too late.”
“Much of your situation was decided long before our introduction,” Igor seems to agree, Margaret folding back into her seat. “Your presence in this town was simply a catalyst.”
“So is that it?” Yu asks, chest falling, the blood rushing to sink deep in his gut. It’s not like he didn’t expect this, didn’t brace himself for it nearly every time his eyes closed, but to hear it is another thing entirely. The unmistakable sting of failure spreads out through his limbs like an electrical shock that rattles his bones. He sighs, crossing his legs and arms as he leans back. “Did you already know that or did you just need me to test it?”
When Igor offers a hum instead of an immediate reply, Margaret takes the point again. “We had an inclination,” she hedges, even as her face remains as dispassionate as ever. “But it wasn’t a certainty. In truth, you’ve been buying us time to try to find a solution.”
“And it is, is what you’re saying,” Yu extrapolates, feeling the blood cool into something like numbness, tingling and uncanny. It’s welcome, in a way. “There’s nothing I could have done from here.”
“That’s correct,” Igor chirps, ever the stalwart bearer of bad news. “But, not all strands of fate are absolute. We have arranged… an alternate path forward, if rehabilitation is still what you desire most.”
Somehow, that does very little to abet his headache in receding. It does get his attention, though.
“You should be warned,” Margaret says, gold eyes flashing in the glow of the atmosphere passing by. “It cannot be undone. This sort of manipulation requires a delicate process, and even if you find you’d rather return to the current circumstances and decisions you’ve made thus far, it will prove impossible. Placing your arrival in Inaba before April will restart your journey in its entirety.”
Yu lets those words pass over him and linger in the air, and then nods, because it’s not really a question for him anymore. If it was, this would have been over a long time ago. Longer than he would care to admit. “How far back would I go?”
“January,” Margaret replies. “We cannot affect his fate. Only yours.”
Right. It’s so easy to forget Adachi came to Inaba before him, that their lives have somehow existed independently before the other. It seems like a fantasy now. “And you think that will be enough time?”
Margaret slides her index finger between the page she’d marked, pulling it back into her lap and running her thumb across the spine. “If you accept, it will have to be. Your current methods aren’t sustainable. This reversal isn’t something that can be performed as many times as necessary.”
“These conditions will provide a substantially higher probability for success than what you’ve encountered previously.” Before Yu can properly synthesize that, Igor starts up again, finally ceasing the tapping to fold his hands underneath his chin. His head cocks a little too far to the left to be natural. “But unlike here, even your most desperate of actions will prove permanent. Do you find this acceptable, Trickster?”
Now he’s certain Igor is mocking him. But even if he had reasonable objections, Yu is too far gone past the point of reasonability for it to matter. The time to care about being too far gone was twelve to fifteen loops ago, and right now, he’s so tired, he’ll take anything. Wasting the now permanent time he has on further consideration is pointless. “I do.”
Igor snaps his fingers and grows that piercing smile over the entire length of his hallowed face. “Very well.”
When Yu wakes up again, it’s on a train, mid-morning snow flurries gathering frost on the cabin window as the countryside rushes by.
He stirs with a shiver, cold from where his face was pressed up against the glass, and for the first few seconds, he feels caught in that space between dreaming and reality, trying to take stock of his surroundings. That sensation has always accompanied such a particular time and place that he almost forgets why it’s this empty cabin and not his bed that he’s waking up in, but any lingering static of doubt is washed away like the rainwater that coats this town when the announcement rings, “Now entering Yasoinaba Station.”
Yu rubs the sleep from his eyes, a kink in his neck and a tight squeeze in his chest from the journey here. It felt like just seconds, but it couldn’t have been. His legs are stiff, but quick to warm up once he grabs his bags and finds the exit. The cold chills his bones to the core the second he hits open air despite the winter jacket wrapped over his shoulders, the first concrete clue he has that something might, this time, in fact be different.
Part of him wonders if the Dojimas will show up at all or if Igor might find tying up such details unnecessary, but he swallows at least some of his prepared curses for the man at the sight of them past the ticket gate, Nanako bundled up and hiding behind her father’s legs. Her face doesn’t brighten at the sight of him; it only shrinks her back further into the shadows, but Yu smiles at her anyway, brighter than he ever could have managed the first time around.
“Damn, you’ve grown,” Dojima greets, jacket slung over his shoulder like it’s not well below freezing. Yu makes a face at it, but it’s not noticed, so he doesn’t bother following up. “The last time I saw you…”
“I was in diapers, yeah,” Yu finishes with a grin before tossing his bag in the backseat of Dojima’s off-duty car, because he knows how it goes from here.
For now, at least.
It’s not too long of a drive back, with no traffic to draw Yu from his reverie of making a paper crane for Nanako out of some brochure sheets in the glove box—a little token he’s discovered works magic in warming her shyness. Dojima is as clueless with small talk as he’s ever been, but it’s a dream for all Yu can feel. Despite how many times he’s traveled back to the start, it’s easy to forget just how difficult that first hour is, still filled with stilted silences not even Yu’s exceptional knowledge can quite fill. It’s only his second time replaying today, after all.
Dojima breaks the uneasy quiet with a sigh, rubbing his forehead as they pause at the only stoplight in town. “I don’t know what I was thinking, letting my sister send you today.”
“Why’s that?” Yu asks, strangely invigorated by a question he doesn’t already have the answer to.
“Sorry, it’s not your fault.” Dojima adjusts the mirror, giving a quick smile back to Nanako, who’s still nervously messing with her hands in the back seat. “It’s just… They’re dropping a transfer detective onto me. Some city hotshot, he gets in on the same train tomorrow. I told them to wait until Monday so I could help you get settled in, but no dice.”
Yu delicately folds another edge onto the wing of the paper crane, peering at Dojima from underneath his bangs. “I see.”
As discreetly as possible, he pulls out his phone to check the date, so deep in the sensation of newness that he’s completely forgotten until now. January 7th, 2011.
So, this is where it begins. He examines the crane one last time, smiles wide, and pivots in his seat to hand it to Nanako, getting her attention with a nod of his head. She doesn’t light up like she does over a gift from a Yu she knows, but her eyes brighten as if on command, a shy smile tugging at her face as she exclaims, “For me?”
Yu just nods in reply and places the crane gingerly in her hand, careful not to crush it when the car lurches to a halt in their driveway.
“Pain in the ass to drive to the station twice,” Dojima mutters as he puts it into park, dropping his voice down low so Nanako doesn’t hear. She hears all sorts of things she’s not supposed to, but Dojima will get that someday. “I won’t have to get up too early tomorrow though, so make yourself comfortable tonight.”
“We could go with you,” Yu offers, his mouth, for once in his life, moving just a step before his thoughts. He unbuckles his seatbelt, stretching his back against the seat before reaching for the door handle. “I don’t know about how Nanako feels about two car trips in two days, but.”
Yu has to hold back the wink when he looks to assess Nanako’s reaction to that, because he knows exactly how she feels about multiple car trips.
“Can we really?” She springs out of the car the second Dojima pulls the door open, her grip on the crane delicate despite her enthusiasm.
“That won’t be necessary.” Dojima puts a hand to the back of his head and furrows his brows, but there’s a look in his eyes that lets Yu know this subject is safe to push—it’s one that won’t take long to break, either. “It’s just work stuff, and you’ve had a long trip already, Yu.”
“I think it could be fun.” Yu shrugs, slinging one of his bags back over his shoulder while Dojima takes the remaining load. His mind is still racing faster than his words can catch, but now that he’s lining up the facts, he’s confident in his spontaneous plans. He smiles down at Nanako, closing the door behind her. “Plus, you wanna meet your Dad’s new partner, right?”
He’d feel bad about utilizing her, but she’s just such an effective weapon. Besides, that’s what the crane was for.
“Of course I do!” Nanako insists, enthusiastic and so nearly the girl he knows and loves. “It’s not fair if we don’t all come to his train too.”
Dojima folds easier than the brochure paper by a mile, and Yu checks off his first win in the column. He doesn’t make a habit of getting ahead of himself, but it’s a bit more fun not knowing the script. He hides a smile behind the curve of his hand, and follows the Dojimas inside.
'Not too early' by Dojima’s standards is still eight AM on a Saturday, and while that qualifies as criminal by Yu’s usual schedule, he’s up bright and early like he’s tossed back the entire pot of coffee in the kitchen. Nanako, ever the early riser, is parked by the TV, but she springs to her feet fast and is in a substantially better mood than her father, who does take the entire pot of coffee and still insists on a morning smoke before getting in the car.
Dojima makes him sit in the back seat, which is fine by him, especially when Nanako tentatively asks for a paper crane tutorial. And who is he to say no?
Meticulous folds provide an outlet for his hands while his mind works, trying to fill in the gaps of his knowledge of Adachi as he first arrived in this town. What he’d been able to get out of Dojima about the man before Yu’s own arrival had been perfunctory and not particularly revealing, painting a picture of a man whose sins were no more or less obvious than the glimpses Yu has gathered. Very well.
The man they find on the station platform at least looks exactly as the one he found in April, save for a missing red tie and a rumpled hoodie over his ill-fitting suit. He looks just as tired, slouched over in that horrible posture as always with eyes dark enough for Yu to see even through the windows of the car. He sets Nanako’s crane aside before letting them both out of the backseat. Dojima lingers for an extra second to sigh performatively into the rearview mirror and place an unlit cigarette between his lips.
It’s raining out by the station despite the season, because of course it is. Yu often feels like the clouds follow this man around, clinging to the grey in his aura and bringing the darkness out into the skies. He looks every bit the kicked stray he must feel he is: damp, pale, and wide-eyed at the sound of their approach, stupid grin stickered on his lips.
Yu has to wonder, not for the first time, where this mask was created. It’s cinematic to imagine him on the train car practicing putting on that air of boyish obliviousness, twisting his lips and eyebrows to perfection in the window reflection and reciting pleads of ignorance in character voice, but he tends to think it’s just a decision he made one day. He woke up, decided that was how he was going to protect himself here, and slipped it on. It’s professional, respectable in a way.
It’s not insignificantly pathetic as well. But he would hate that pity, and he’s not the only one who is skilled in the art of putting on a mask.
Despite himself, acting excited to see him isn’t quite that strenuous.
“What’s this?” Adachi asks as they approach, running a hand through his rain-sprinkled hair. It’s somehow shorter and more haphazardly cut than before. “You bring the whole family? Well, what an honor.”
“We wanted to greet you,” Nanako offers from somewhere behind Dojima’s legs, poking her head out to offer a quiet smile. “We picked him up yesterday.”
“You mentioned something about your nephew coming up,” Adachi gestures lazily with his shoulder, barely looking over at Yu. “Guess it’s a dual welcome, eh?”
Yu is positive no one else catches the bitter undertone. Dojima attempts his most professional smile and walks up the steps to shake his hand, cigarette still between his teeth. He lights it, speaking between puffs of smoke. “It probably doesn’t mean much, but welcome to Inaba.”
Adachi’s eyes say, no, it doesn’t, but his lips say, “You brought the whole brigade out for a real small-town welcome, so I can’t complain. It’s cold up here, though.”
“Both of you are underdressed,” Yu supplies as he follows up, well-covered in a light blue jacket. It occurs to him he’s never seen Adachi in winter appropriate attire in any timeline, and makes a note to follow up on that. “It’s a little different than Tokyo.”
“Kyoto,” Adachi corrects with a light snap of his jaw, and that’s a new one. It seems ridiculous he’s never specified before. “But same difference. Is it always this… wet?”
“Basically,” Dojima shrugs, leading him back down the steps. Adachi peels out from underneath the awning with a frown, shoving his hands deep in his jacket pockets like he’s an unruly teenager and not an assumedly respectable detective. “You get used to it. Kinda.”
He doesn’t look like he believes that even a little judging by the purse of his lips taking in the sleet-slicked streets, but he nods all the same. By the time he falls in line with Yu and Nanako around the car, his smile is so easy, it almost reaches his eyes.
“You must be Nananko-chan,” he greets the girl at his side. She takes up the shadow behind Yu’s legs, and although it’s probably reflexive, he counts it as a victory.
She nods and hums a little. “You’re working with Dad, right? You’ll probably be around a lot.”
“We’ll see,” Adachi shrugs beneath the smile, leaning against the car without opening it in a mimic of Dojima, who’s sucking down nicotine and awkwardly staring out into the mountains. “Not everyone’s keen on mixing work and life.”
Yu has to fight off a smile at that, because he still feels like he knows this version of him too. At least right now. “Of course you’ll be around.”
Adachi looks at him like he’s grown an unnatural limb, and Yu shouldn’t glow under it as much as he does. “Oh?”
“You’re partners,” Yu explains with a turn of his head, opening up the door for Nanako to slide into the backseat. As if to prove he’s still listening, Dojima gives an affirmative grunt around his smoke, taking one more long drag before snuffing it out on a nearby pole and pocketing the remains like a good samaritan. “I figure you’ll be spending more time with us than just about anyone.”
“Huh,” Adachi says, flat. He obscures his face behind his passenger side door just enough to hide whatever cracks across it as Dojima moves to deposit his bags in the trunk, smaller and sparer than even Yu’s own belongings from the day before. Yu follows him down, unsure if it’s a relief or not to have a barrier between their faces again. “Well. Wouldn’t that be nice.”
It would be, if he let it. Yu should know.
But it’s time to make him mean it.
Dojima puts his keys in the ignition, and the twenty-first cycle begins.