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If it weren’t for the steady crunch of gravel beneath his boots, Adam would almost think he’s come untethered.
It’s been nearly a decade now since his first excursion into space, but he still remembers how it had felt the first time he’d drifted. He remembers how the weightlessness had swallowed him whole, robbed him of his senses one by one as it rolled him around on its tongue, sucking the life out of him like a hard candy melting between its teeth. He remembers how it had felt to come undone.
When he’d reentered the ship, the artificial gravity hadn’t been enough to stitch him back together. It’s silly, he knows—the ship had been perfectly calibrated to 9.8 meters per second squared—but he could still feel the difference. It wasn’t Earth.
He’d collapsed into Takashi’s waiting arms, his legs shaking too violently to hold himself up, and he might’ve shaken apart right there if it weren’t for the laugh that had rumbled through Takashi’s body and into his own, reminding him as his bones vibrated that he exists. He has presence, form. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.
Takashi hadn’t understood; to him, the feeling of weightlessness was exhilarating, was proof that humans could accomplish impossible feats. He’d chased that high for years after that brief excursion, chased it all the way to Kerberos. But to Adam–
To Adam, the emptiness had sat bitter in his stomach, festered like an open wound. He’d requested a teaching role the moment his feet hit solid, authentic Earth dirt and never looked back, because he knew now what it felt like to be nothing, nonexistent, and he’d hated it.
Only now, he’s beginning to realize it’s entirely possible to float away even when gravity tethers your feet securely to the Earth. Somehow, the realization is not as terrible as he expects it should be.
He walks, and the gravel crunches beneath his boots, and slowly but surely, he begins to register more and more of his surroundings.
Buildings—packed close together like sardines on either side of the gravel road he’s walking along, caging him between their inescapable grasp. Every building is the same, the uniform white shingles and dusty brown roofing faded from sun exposure and peeling with age. They’re a little too bright to blend in completely with the warm, red tones of the desert—even though Adam knows that was the intention when they were built nearly forty years ago—and he squints and raises a hand to block the glare.
The sun is at its peak in the sky, and the buildings are short, so the shade in this neighborhood is practically nonexistent. The heat slips beneath Adam’s uniform, digs its sticky fingers into his skin and draws out the moisture from his pores, and that’s almost enough to remind him he’s still here, in a body, on Earth.
His brain kicks back into gear, albeit sluggishly. Slowly, he drifts to a stop and eyes the nearest building.
He’d lived in one of these once, he recalls suddenly; when cadets graduate to the rank of officer, the Garrison lets them move out of the dorms and into one of their officer housing neighborhoods. He hadn’t had much at the time, so he’d settled for one of their cheaper townhomes—one of these townhomes.
He doesn’t live in this neighborhood anymore. He doesn’t even live anywhere near it, so he’s not sure why his feet had guided him here on autopilot. He certainly hadn’t left the Garrison this afternoon with the intention to take a stroll down memory lane; he’s been ravaged enough by unbidden memories today.
But he sometimes thinks that every human being is, at their core, a masochist. In the same way we often find ourselves pressing almost absentmindedly on fresh bruises, the sharp pinch of pain satisfying in a way we can never explain, the body seeks out painful stimuli. Especially when it’s in danger of losing itself to numbing fog, if only to remind itself that it’s still capable of feeling anything at all.
Who is Adam to deny so desperate a cry for help?
Stiltedly, he spurs his feet back into motion and follows the familiar path to his old townhome.
It wasn’t solely his—god knows he couldn’t’ve afforded a place all his own at the time. He’d lived there with three other roommates, none of whom had been Takashi. Back then, Adam had convinced himself that Takashi was undeniably, irrevocably straight, and he hadn’t thought his heart was strong enough to handle living in the same house as him every day; the soft domesticity of it all would have driven him mad.
However, Takashi, Adam came to find out later, had been as smitten as a lovesick puppy at the time, and in the face of Adam seemingly pulling away, he’d panicked and promptly moved into the townhome immediately next door.
So they hadn’t lived together back then, but just as the townhomes themselves are so squashed together that they’ve practically fused into one big building, the two of them had somehow coalesced into a single beating heart all the same.
He needs to see it, he realizes; that’s why his feet brought him here. He needs some sort of proof that he existed, that they existed—whatever the hell they were before Takashi left—needs the sight of the buildings to tether him like gravity to the inescapable, crushing, tearing knowledge that Takashi existed once as an extension of his own soul, even if he’s since left it a mangled, splintered mess.
Desperation clawing at the empty space between his ribs, he breaks into a run. He barrels around the corner, his feet tracing the same path he followed every day for four years, and begins counting the buildings as they fly past on his right. Thirteen… fourteen… fifteen–
He lurches to a stop. As he squints up at the memories he came searching for, that freefalling weightlessness descends again, and he forces himself to focus on the sensation of dry air scraping against his raw throat as he fights to catch his breath.
He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.
The building confirms that for him, though; the seventeenth house down from the corner of Aster and South Rawhide had been his, once, and here it stands, more decrepit than it once had been but very much real.
The lot next to it, however–
It’s empty. The townhome— Takashi's townhome—is just… gone.
Adam stares at the vacant plot for a long moment, his brain buzzing in his skull. Logically, he knows that it was probably demolished; Takashi had complained about pretty much everything under the sun when he’d lived there, from leaking pipes to faulty wiring to some frankly concerning cracks in the building’s foundation and support beams.
But as he stares at the few sporadic desert weeds poking up out of the dirt in the old house’s stead, he can’t help but feel as if its absence exists only to mock him.
Takashi Shirogane was never here, it seems to taunt.
“That’s not true,” he croaks. The words burn as they’re ripped from his throat.
Takashi was here, he was real, what they had was real, but after everything—after Kerberos and Sam, the videos and now this—it feels as if the universe itself is trying its damned hardest to convince him that he was nothing, that they were nothing.
Adam shouts, the sting of it raw and blistering in his throat, and stumbles across the threshold and into the empty lot. All at once, the floating weightlessness in his limbs solidifies into something thick and heavy, smothers him like a shroud, and he can’t breathe.
His legs give out, and he drops to his knees, crumpling forward until his forehead presses into searing, solid earth. He splays his palms against the dirt, curls his fingers and digs his nails beneath the skin of this world as if his grip alone is the only thing holding him here, keeping him from falling off the surface as the world’s turned on its head.
It burns— god, does the desert burn like Hell—but he doesn’t pull away. He says curled like this with his bare skin pressed against the scorching earth for as long as he can bear it, and then longer still.
Finally, the pain gets to be too much, and he reluctantly pulls his face from the earth to glare up at his old townhome.
He’d tear it down himself if he could, he thinks bitterly; after all, what gives it the right to go on existing, unmarred and whole, as if it can be anything at all without its other half?
Then, Adam blinks, a frown pulling at his lips as he stares at the side of the building that used to be glued to Takashi’s.
It’s… not unmarred, he realizes. The entire side of the building is bare, the paint seemingly torn carelessly from the shingles. The rough, exposed wood left behind reminds him of a scar, one that forms after a closing wound has been repeatedly reopened by someone seemingly unable to stop themselves from picking at the scab that’s trying its best to stitch them back together.
The damage stops a few feet before the roof, the line clean-cut and precise. If he recalls correctly, Takashi’s house had been a few feet shorter than his, roughly the same height as the scar.
It’s something. It’s not proof, exactly, but it’s something.
Shakily, he climbs to his feet and approaches the scar. As he stretches a hand out to touch it, part of him wonders, a bit deliriously, if it’s even actually there. What if this is nothing but a figment of his imagination, a hallucination borne from the fractured pieces of his crumbling heart?
But when he brushes his palm against it, the wood is rough as a callous. Splinters dig themselves beneath his skin; when he peels his hand back, flecks of white paint cling to the sticky sweat on his palms.
The undeniable feel of it helps Adam to breathe just a little bit easier. Except…
As he traces his fingers along the corner of the building, along the place where scar meets unblemished wood, something sour begins to work its way up his throat like bile.
This is all he’ll ever have, isn’t it? A ghost, an echo, an imprint of what once was and what will never be again.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he digs his fingers beneath one of the shingles, tries to focus on the pinpricks of pain blooming on the tips of his fingers as he scrapes them raw in a desperate attempt to anchor his mind, keep it from wandering back to the events of this afternoon. The effort is futile.
They’re alive, Sam had said. The cadets, Lieutenant Shirogane, all of them.
Adam’s knees had nearly given out when he’d received the news. Five years. Five years he’d thought Takashi dead, and now Sam’s here, he’s alive, and he’s turning Adam’s entire world on its head with three simple words.
Takashi is alive.
Honestly, he hadn’t wanted to believe it, not after so long mourning the loss of him. His heart had been worn too thin over the last few years, and he feared that a single ounce of hope, no matter how precariously it’s balanced on the paper-thin membrane, might tear it completely.
Who would he be then, without his barely-scraping-by heart?
To corroborate his statement, however, Sam had offered video proof, and Adam’s heart had stopped beating in his chest altogether, right then and there.
To see Takashi’s face, to hear his voice—not just in an old recording, a memory he’s replayed so many times now, he knows every word by heart, but in something new, something that shows undeniably that Takashi isn’t frozen in time the way he is in Adam’s memories, the way Adam sometimes feels he himself is…
He felt sick. He felt simultaneously weightless and crushingly bound to this physical, inescapable form; his body trembled so violently he could barely see, his breaths rattled too loud in his ears, and he might as well have been drowning for how underwater everything around him turned.
The cadets’ faces swam in and out of focus as he watched. He only caught snatches of what they said; most of his energy was being funneled into keeping himself afloat long enough to see Takashi.
Adam grits his teeth and yanks his hand out from where it’s buried beneath the shingle, fighting desperately to pull his mind back to the present.
He can’t relive this; he can’t.
I can’t wait to be back home, the cadet called Hunk’s voice echoes through his mind.
He flinches, full-bodied, and balls his fingers into a shaking fist.
Lance’s tearful voice replaces Hunks. I miss you guys. I miss you guys a lot.
With a guttural shout, he rams his knuckles against the townhome’s ghost, hard. Pain explodes through his nerves like a firework.
I’m so sorry I left without saying goodbye. That was Sam’s daughter, Pidge.
He pulls his fist back and slams it against the wall again.
And again and again and again. For every moment he’d waited, in pure fucking agony, for a single glimpse of the man he loved, for every moment of static as the video had fizzled out into nothing after Pidge’s message, for every unspoken word, every unsaid apology, all the I love you s he never got to say or hear, he drives his fist into the splintered, damaged, ruined wood, and it’s as if a dam breaks, all the buried emotions flooding him all at once.
His throat closes up, so full of mucus he’s choking on it; he can’t see beyond the tears streaming down his face, mixing with the sweat and dust and grime until he’s caked in misery, can’t see anything but red, red, red.
Pain is a distant thing, but at some point, there’s a crack that splinters through his body like heartbreak, and then everything stops.
He stands on unsteady legs for a long moment, chest heaving and knuckles pulsing. Slowly, he tugs off his glasses and swipes at his eyes; there’s so much dirt and dust caked to his skin that it doesn’t do much, but when he finally puts his glasses back on, he can at least somewhat see clearly.
An ugly, blooming red stain greets him. Gradually, more and more awareness filters through the fog; the shooting pain rippling up his hand and arm becomes more pronounced, the drip drip drip of blood spattering against the dirt cracks through the air like gunshots, and he almost gags as the tangy smell of copper hits his nostrils.
He steps back from the wall and stares at the splotch for a long, long time. A small part of him supposes he should probably feel guilty about leaving a stain like this behind; this is someone’s house, after all, and he’s gone and turned it into something out of a horror movie.
But mostly, he feels satisfied. The violent patch of red makes the building’s wound look all the more real, he thinks. More than that, it makes the wound look unhealed, and–
That’s how it should look. A piece of its body was ripped from it, after all, violently and without mercy, and the grief that’s left behind to fill the absence—well.
Grief can shrink, and grief can change, but it will always be there. Sometimes it’s merely a shadow, a scar, a ghost, but sometimes–
Sometimes it’s as raw and oozing as the day you were eviscerated.