Chapter Text
Eiji had been home for two days when Max called him. He had been sitting on the porch when his sister came to get him, holding the phone. She said it was an American, asking for him. He expected Ash, but when he picked it up, it was Max.
The words out of his mouth made Eiji drop the phone, eyes filling up with tears.
“Ash is dead.”
He said no, because it can’t he true. Ash has to come back, he has to come get me.
He didn’t even get to say goodbye, he refused to say goodbye.
(“I am not saying sa-yo-na-ra to you, Ash.”)
(He’s been dead before. nobody believed it before, whats different this time? Why should it be real this time?)
So Eiji doesn’t believe it. And he keeps on not believing it, until Ash doesn’t come for a month, which turns into two, and then another and another and then a year has gone by. His twentieth birthday comes and goes.
(Ash will never get to turn twenty.)
Eiji spirals, slowly. First it’s drinking, in small amounts ‘just to take that pain off’ then its chain smoked cigarettes ‘just to take the pain off’, and suddenly its another year after he came home from America and he barely leaves his house. His sister worries and his mom blames Ibe, for taking him to ‘that awful place’. He talks in his sleep. Nobody here knows who Ash, or Skip, or Shorter are.
He talks to Sing on the phone sometimes. He just thinks Eiji needs time.
(Everyone needed time. Fuck, of course they did. But the world stopped waiting, didn’t hold its breath. Alex had to step up, Sing had to step up, people had to take care of people and nobody was there to make sure Eiji was okay. He knows it isn’t their fault. Fuck, he’s not their responsibility.)
God, it makes him so mad that the world didn’t stop when Ash’s did. When Eiji’s did, because god fucking knows that Ash was Eiji’s world.
It hits him, slowly, that it must his fault.
(He knows it isn’t. He wants somebody to blame.)
The letter. Max said that he was stabbed, that his body had been found next to a note. Eiji’s letter.
(It was Ash’s choice. He figured as much, but blaming himself is easier.)
Sing knows something is up. He doesn’t want to acknowledge it, but he can tell. Eiji hates knowing Ash would still be here if he didn’t love him, he hates halloween, hates thinking about the color green -just jade. He misses jade eyes staring at him like a drowning man misses air- and guns and grenades and Golzine and everything to do with America and the letter g. He barely eats, drinks mostly tea and liquor.
He flinches at fireworks and loud noises and cars honking. He walks so carefully, and shakes when he bumps into things.
His sister is worried but shes only a little kid. She’s barely twelve.
(She’s barely older than Skipper, a twisted voice in his mind whispers, it could have been her instead.)
His mother is worried but its not like he’ll listen. Sing is worried but hes across the world. Max is worried because he misses Ash so much, and he knows Eiji somehow misses Ash more. he doesn’t understand how someone can hold that much grief without breaking.
(Eiji is broken.)
The day Eiji really, truely accepts, that Ash isn’t coming, he doesn’t say anything. Not to the Ash out of the corner of his eye that smiles sadly when he cries, and not to anyone who calls. Before, he had been persnickety on the topic on calls to Sing, or on rare occasions when Ibe visited.
The spiral turns into a nosedive.
He moves out. Gets an apartment in tokyo.
(Its similar to New York. It’s a big city and it comforts him in ways he barely thinks about.)
He shadows his way through life rather than living it. Runs on tea and rice and whatever drugs he can get his hands on. Sing notices the changes when they call. His voice is empty and his eyes and cheeks are hollow.
(He hasnt cut his hair in almost two years. His sister used to braid it but now it just sits in a lonely, limp ponytail, aching with memories.)
The first time happens on a tuesday. He starts seeing Ash everywhere. It’s mid June. He’s tired, and he misses Ash so, so much. It’s a scar that keeps snagging, keeps getting torn open by mundane things- like a flash of blonde hair on a crowded street, a jade cat in a shop window, the warm weather, a green flannel, red shoes.
He contemplates going back to America. He wants to, wants to see Sing and Nadia, wants to see Alex and Kong and Bones and Cain. Hell, he wants to see Max and Charlie and Jessica, and Micheal. Wants to thank all of them. For taking care of him.
(He isn’t a child, they shouldn’t have had to take care of him. Ash shouldn’t have had to take care of him.)
He wants to go to new york. He needs to. Needs to see his absence to know that he’s actually gone.
It takes him by surprise how easy it would be to go back. He thought it would be hard. Gut wrenching. A douse of memories like ice cold water, deeper and deeper and deeper, drowning him slowly.
But he really wants to go back. To Chinatown, to see Nadia and Sing, to Downtown, to see Alex, Kong, Bones, anyone who knows him, anyone who remembers Ash. Anyone that remembers him.
Sing wasn’t expecting Eiji to call. Sure, he called often enough, but ‘often enough’ was barely one a moth at this point. But the news sent him further into confusion.
Eiji was coming to America.
Eiji was coming back to America. He wasn’t staying away anymore. He was coming to see Sing again.
He had to tell Alex.
Alex was shocked. Bones and Kong were shocked, everyone who knew Eiji was shocked.
(Happy shocked. They wanted Eiji to come back, of course they did. They just didn’t expect it.)
Plane tickits, visa, passport, packed bag.
‘Its only for a month, then I’m going home’ is the thing rolling in his mind. Oh, well. That’s what he said the first time.
He’s staying with Ibe, which means he’ll see Max and probably Jessica. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if someone brings up Ash. He doesn’t want to find out.
He doesn’t see Ibe, when he walks out of his gate. He sees Sing, waving and grinning, and it reminds him too fully of the last time he was in this airport.
(“Ash says see you later!” and a wheelchair and a letter. An unused plane ticket. A boy in a library. Sleeping, they said, he looked like he was sleeping. ‘I will not say sayonara’.)
He walks to Sing, who hugs him. Sing got taller. Not by much, but he isn’t fifteen anymore.
(He isn’t eighteen either. seventeen. Ash was seventeen.)
Eiji smiles, genuinely, because it is good to see Sing. He missed Sing.
Ibe is sitting on a bench. He hugs Eiji too, because nobody has seen Eiji in too long. They don’t feel like they know this boy with longer hair and a deeper, sadder face than anyone named Eiji Okumura that they’ve known ever had.
(Ibe reminds himself that Eiji isn’t nineteen anymore. He’s older, sadder, and he’s forgotten what being around people was like. It reminds Ibe of when Eiji had hurt his ankle. He shut everyone out, even at first in America. It hadn’t been until he had met Ash that he’d let people in again.)
Alex had wanted to let Eiji unpack, wanted to leave him be, but Eiji and Sing turned up outside of the base.
(Eiji tried not to remember the first time he went down these stairs. Skip was there. Ash was there.)
(“Is that a real gun?”)
Everyone was happy to see him, Sing thought, but the place looked so empty without Ash.
(Sing knows this feeling, this emptiness. It’s how Chinatown has felt without Shorter.)
They hadn’t filled the cracks left by Ash in the two years he’d been gone; nobody sat in the middle of the couch and the bed looked more or less unslept in.
(“Wake me up in two hours!”)
There are holes in the personality of the room, in the woodwork of the people. There are long, drawn spaces where people used to wait eagerly for orders or laugh and play.
(Eiji looked different, just like the room did. Emptier, sadder without Ash.)
It isn’t a happy thing, for Eiji to be back here, everybody knows. Its a lonely thing, the shadow over him, everyone feels it. Like a lone rock in the middle of a lake, or a tree in the desert.
At least he’s back, at least he’s alive, at least he doesn’t hate them.
That night, Eiji dreams. It’s less of a dream and more of a memory, of the time right after Shorter had died. They had gone to Chinatown. It was dangerous, going in with Shorter dead and Sing angry and out for blood, but Ash had muttered something about Chinese ceremonial rights and how its better than what Shorter had gotten.
They had gone to see Nadia, at the Chang Dai. She didn’t cry when she showed them the little table with his picture, and food he loved and the sunglasses Sing had saved.
(He looked so happy in the picture.)
She didn’t cry when Ash hugged her and whispered in her ear. She looked so sad, though, left alone in the apartment above the restaurant, with a table full of memories and the smell of incense.
Ash didn’t cry when he bought Shorter’s favorite soda from the corner store, and Ash didn’t cry when he took a printed out picture of shorter out of his pocket, and Ash didn’t cry when he sat on the roof of the apartment building with Eiji and took out a stick of incense.
(Eiji cried, a lot. He knew Ash would cry later, when he thought Eiji was asleep.)
Ash did shake, silently breathing while Eiji held him that night. They had sat until the incense had burned out into Ash’s fingertips and the picture had caught too, and the ashes flew away into the night.
(Ash had been remembering Skip as well as Shorter. It wasn’t right, any of it.)
The dream changed so suddenly it caught Eiji off guard. The images floated to a different night, a much happier one. Shorter had gone to bed, as had Ash’s gang, and they were huddled on thd roof under a blanket.
“Do you think I’m a monster?” Ash had asked. He was drunk, and it wasn’t the first time he had asked. What a silly question, thought Eiji, of course I don’t.
“I think you’re a stupid American.” Eiji had whispered back.
He woke up suddenly, face covered in tears. He wasn’t nineteen anymore, and Ash wasn’t here.
He was twenty one, he was alone, and he couldn’t even hide in his apartment because he was in stupid America.
God, Eiji hated America.
He hated the air and the violence. He hated guns, and gangs, and the stupid fucking food.
(He’s lying. He loves America because it’s where Ash is most prominently there. It feels like he’s still in every room, every empty space, every heart, out of the corner of every single eye. The man -boy, really, he was just a kid- who pulled everyone together and fixed them. Glue, that fixed something broken and filled the cracks with sunlight. Kintsugi.)