Throes of Retrograde

Or, the constancy of the conditions under which Akashi Seijuuro and Furihata Kouki meet.

Chapter Two: Road to Ruin

"They say it's what you make/
I say it's up to fate/
It's woven in my soul/
I need to let you go."

-imagine dragons, "demons"

[Even loops have their own beginnings.]

The only piece of advice that I can give to anybody on this planet is probably one that no one will ever need.

If you're given a chance to redo a part of your life, don't accept it. It might sound tempting, and it really, really is, but just don't. You'd think, heck, another opportunity to do something really dumb but exciting. Another time to experience what you're constantly trying to remember in fear that it might completely slip away from your mind. Another moment to visit somebody that you're missing or someone who's gone.

Maybe you'd take it as the second chance to make things right. You've screwed up before; now would be the perfect time to set things straight by turning the hour hand back to where you started. Maybe in the second time around, you'll save the person whom you never wanted to lose.

I used to think like that. Used to thank fate for trapping me in a loop because I'd be able to go back and avoid something that I would regret later on.

It doesn't work that way, okay? I got terrified that changing what I said or did would lead to an entirely different situation. Yeah, there's the hope that it might turn out differently or way better than it was before. But you can't blame me for being scared.

I have no idea how many times I've been frozen stiff, hanging on to the handle on the train while contemplating, should I talk to him or should I shut up and let it be. Should I change the course or shouldn't I. Should I take the risk or. Should I. Or shouldn't I.

It's an everyday battle between being opportunistic or being safe, which is pretty exhausting when you've done this for so long that you can't remember how old you really are.

I have to say, though, that I am aware of him noticing that I've always trained my gaze on him.

It's still the second day that he's on the train. We have a long way to go, and it won't be enough for me to count the days on my fingers. When I try to remember the chronology of it all, I'm pretty sure that I've always loved him, regardless of what time point we're currently in.

I wouldn't say the same for him, though. He still doesn't know who I am.

I'm right when I remembered the cough drops. Two days after the first time I see him again, it's still raining. As usual, I don't have an umbrella, and hell would freeze over before I use my textbooks as temporary protection. Books aren't cheap. If I managed to drench my books in saltwater every single day of this terrible season, I'd be left squawking at my notes and purchasing another set of materials. Then I'd go bankrupt. Then I'll die from starvation.

Anyway.

By the time I get to the station, I'm on the verge of throwing up on the pavement or holding the wheezes back just so I wouldn't infect anybody else with my misery. A lot of passersby are staring at me in pity, but it doesn't really help. It's just my wretched luck that I forgot my handkerchief of all days. It's cold in the train but it's warm inside of me. Typical fever, I'd say, but when you're the one who's experiencing it, it's nowhere near tolerable.

I currently don't have access to my reflection because there are passengers obstructing my view of the glass panes. Judging by the way they're inching away from me, I'm probably as good as a sack of flour –- white and flaccid. That's not really saying quite a lot, because I'm usually limp and pale. You could say that I was the perfect target for people who would rather oppress someone who doesn't have any clue about what's going on in his surroundings.

Today, I'm stumbling a lot and muttering apologies to strangers whom I accidentally make contact with. They throw me scorning glances, and I wouldn't really blame them for doing that. In this 9 degree weather, it's bad enough if you contract a flu from a college wimp who's not careful enough to even stand upright.

By this time, I'm coughing under my collar. I think it's safe to say that I'm pretty much dying, because it's so…awful. I can't even hear the announcements anymore, and I think I've missed my stop. Maybe. All I can listen to are the terrible wheezes that wrack my thoracic cavity. Every time I inhale, an abnormal noise creeps up my diaphragm and turns into a full-on irritant that makes me expel whatever there is to expel. My throat has never felt this coarse before. Try munching on sandpaper. Not that I've actually done that, but I bet that this sensation is ten times worse.

It seems like an eternity has passed –- the edges of my eyelids are wet, and my chest feels too hollow for my liking. For the whole train ride, it's just been me coughing and wheezing. I'm frankly surprised I haven't dropped to the floor yet. Those stamina training sessions back in high school did pay off, after all.

"I'm astounded by the fact that you haven't bothered to sit down."

Of course I cough again, but for an entirely different reason.

This time, I'm listening to a voice that I once knew so well but always forgot after every ending. If my coughing fit was horrible, this case is unmatched in terms of the intensity of its horrendousness. It's like a sharp pang of pain in my abdomen. It's like a kick to the gut. It's like someone screaming in my ear, Guess what, you have to hear his voice again. And again and again and again, but you'll always forget how it felt like.

And I can't…I can't freaking believe that it still hurts, after all this time.

I turn away from the floor and to his eyes. When you first look at the heavy contrast between red and gold, it somehow makes you terrified. He pierces right through me with a calculated gaze, as if he knows everything about me. In reality, he doesn't. I'm the one who has the memory of what's going to happen to him.

Sometimes, I want to beg him to remember. I want to tell him that we've always known each other and ridden this train, and for some reason we never get to be together. I want to change the course of history. I want to escape this cycle, but I want to do that with him.

I'm not sure if that's possible. When I see him with his indifference, I decide against making him recall the things we've gone through.

He'll probably tell me that I'm a lunatic.

I open my mouth and taste something sour. "I…ah, I'm sorry?"

"We're three stops away from the end of this line. I would presume that you can take the liberty to occupy a seat," he says, wrenching his briefcase open with the precise movement of his fingers. Graceful as always. "If I have timed it correctly, it's been three hours and twenty five minutes since you started your fit and stopped paying attention to whether or not the train has become empty."

I almost wish to ask him why he maintains his eloquence when he's around me –- but I remember that I'm nothing special to him as of late.

"I'm sorry," I tell him in an opposite tone. I might've croaked it out.

He looks at me thoroughly. "Apologize to yourself. And sit down."

I do as he says. It'd be fantastic if I could alter what I did and remain standing, but I won't hold out too much hope for myself enduring my fever. It doesn't really prove anything except for the fact that a high school kid like him would be more logical than a stubborn college guy.

What I don't do is look at him, because it would just make me helpless to know that we've been parallel lines for the past years –- so close but never quite meeting each other. It's obvious that I'm ignoring him yet watching his actions from the corner of my eye. He reaches into his briefcase and speaks. "Here," he hands me a packet of Halls. "They're triple-action, although I don't personally use them. Rest assured they'd improve your condition."

"Ah," I say, receiving the packet without touching his fingers. I tear the edge of the plastic off and pop one of the drops into my mouth, unable to resist soothing my throat for a while. I mumble, "Thanks."

He simply nods.

We stay silent for the rest of the journey, until the standard voice announcements blare over the speakers and he rises from his seat. There's no exchange of words between us - he turns his back on me and faces the doors, shoulders squared and posture perfect. He steps out onto the platform, and I restrain myself from calling out to him.

The train begins to move.

I'm convinced that I should make a countdown for this section of the loop. Maybe marking off calendars would help in staving off the dread of what's to come.

It's the opposite for other people, but in my opinion, it's better to drill into my head that I have to face the truth.

The day after is as tasteless as the rest of the days before it: the amount of rainfall hasn't lessened in the slightest bit, but thankfully the mysterious entity that made the back of my throat feel like hell disappeared. It's customary to thank the high school kid. Let's just call him that for now, because honestly, I don't think it's a good idea to name him my soulmate or weird stuff like that. Or darling. Or love. I'm too exhausted from reminding myself that at this point, my feelings are completely unreciprocated.

He still sits by the train doors with his briefcase, and I'm standing and hanging on. When we're three stops away from the line's termination, I grab onto the handles that lead to his spot, and he stares at me for the longest time. "Do you have room?" I ask him, feeling unsure of his acceptance but realizing that it would proceed the way I think it would.

If it were me, I would have said, there's plenty of room. It's only the two of us here.

Instead, he just scoots closer to the glass pane and lifts his briefcase to his lap.

I take that as a cue to sit beside him and unzip my backpack to fish the Halls packet out. It really relieves me to know that he hasn't changed. "Thanks for yesterday," I tell him, handing the open packet back. And I remember: well, his reaction wouldn't be what I call positive.

He maintains a relatively neutral expression, but I can tell that he's wincing inwardly. "It's impolite to return something that was given to you."

"Oh. Right."

Yeah, just shut up, Furihata Kouki. Initiating a conversation wouldn't do you any good.

I give credit to the high school kid, though. Even out of my lack of manners, he manages to find an icebreaker. He says, "Given that you're older than me, it's highly likely that you would be educated on conduct."

"Take it however you want, just don't blame my upbringing," I sheepishly reply while scratching the back of my neck. "And how do you know I'm older, anyway?"

Don't ask me how I know what to say and why I say it. It just drops from my mouth like it's natural. It's been predetermined, after all.

He turns to look at my shirt. "The slogan "Art college is artsy" is a dead giveaway. I would say that it's very unflattering. Pointless, more so."

"I had to wear it for a festival," I defend myself. I can't afford to look stupid. This is one of the moments when anybody who might've been in my position would've punched the guy in the face. That is, anybody who wasn't head over heels for him and who wasn't hindered by his temperament and charisma.

"Besides, I'm older than you, and there's an etiquette somewhere that tells you not to pick on your elders' stuff. Or something like that."

"Hm," he says in return.

An uneasy silence settles over the both of us until he gets to his stop. I stand aside to let him through, and he offers me a blink. "It was nice to meet you. How should I address you, then, if it irks you so much when I converse with you as if we're on the same ground?"

An infinite number of lifetimes later, and his question still gets me speechless. "It's fine. The way it is, I mean."

Although I'd prefer him calling me by my given name, I'll wait for the time it happens.

Before he steps out, he smiles at me –- scarlet and gold don't matter when his eyes crinkle and his lips tilt to reveal his teeth. "Well, then. I'll see you tomorrow, I suppose?"

I have to calm my nerves before I could stutter something I wasn't supposed to say.

See, this is one of the reasons I would blindly follow him through the playfulness and cruelty of time. I'm greedy when I say that it'll never be enough. Over and over again, I'd be willing to start on a new page and see him like this –- it's masochism on my part, really.

I can't stand it, but I'm the biggest hypocrite to have ever existed.

"Y-yeah," I say, attempting to smile as wholeheartedly as I could. "I'll see you."

I'm left with the image of his retreating back, and I wonder what would happen if he chose never to come back to this train.

Now that I think about it, I'm pretty much convinced that it's all going downhill from hereon.

.

And that's exactly the thing I hate about love:

You can't do anything
but fall.

"Oi," I wake up to an incredibly annoying pair of hands shaking my shoulders. My head's still lolling from the euphoria of sleep, and the magnitude of the shaking just increases.

I still have my eyes closed when I get shaken even more violently, and before I know it, the back of my head hits the board.

"Holy cow-"

"Eh," a yawn greets me.

I blink mostly from the pain, and Fukuda, my roommate, is sitting on my bed. His eyebrows are furrowed. I know he didn't intend to smash my cranium into something that would cause traumatic brain injury or something. But still. That hurt a lot, especially when I just woke up.

He sighs. "Sorry, man. You weren't waking up, and your alarm had been going off for the past thirty minutes."
"Yeah, thanks, I guess," I tell him, rubbing the corners of my eyelids. "What time is it anyway?" It's still dark in the room. Maybe I just put my alarm at an earlier time.

"Actually," Fukuda clears his throat, "I sort of remembered that you have a 7:30 class on Friday—which is hell for both of us, if you'd ask me—and I have to tell you that it's 7:18."

I nod absentmindedly. I've got to tell you, I've never been a morning person. Which is pretty much why none of what Fukuda was saying is making sense right now. "Okay. Y-wait, what?"

Fukuda puts a hand on my shoulder and looks at me solemnly. "You have twelve minutes to get to class."
For three minutes, I yell in the shower for Fukuda to lend me a pair of socks, and he repeats the mantra "Chill, chill, chill," over the noise of rustling clothes and slammed wardrobe doors. I'm not even sure if I grab the right notebooks, but heck. I'd save the worry for later.

On my way to the door, I trip over my shoelaces and land right on my face. Fukuda swears under his breath and hands me a box of tissues (did I ever tell you about his stash of Kleenex in his bedside drawer? I guess not.), patting my back and murmuring something about avoiding trouble. I nod while holding the tissue under my nose and send a wave at his direction. "Thank you," I blurt, but it sounds more like "schenchshoo". Nonetheless, he waves at me and shoves me to the hallway.

Thank God I live with somebody who's dependable, really.

I'm a half-decent runner, so I get to class heaving with a grumbling stomach at 7:49 (racing to the road is not easy, and taking the cab sure as heck isn't cheap). Surprisingly, the professor is a few steps behind me, and I straighten up and regain my composure. Tell you what—it's not that easy when you're out of breath. I don't usually jog in the mornings (and it'd be impossible with the presence of my long-term relationship with my bed), so stamina was an issue I've had to face several times. I still have the bloodied tissue stuck in my nostril.

"Well," Koganei, a guy in my Color Space class, grins at me from his seat. "It's great to see you sporting a nosebleed at 7:50."

"Knock it off," I tell him with a wry smile. "It's Friday. It's understandable for people to act like idiots."

Mitobe, one of the more taciturn people in the class, gestures at me with his eyebrows. I open my mouth to ask him what he's doing, but Koganei cuts me off with, "He says it's Color Space. You can't afford to be dumb on Fridays."
I look back and forth between them and finally say, "Dude, that's creepy."

Koganei just shrugs.

The professor sets his folders on the table and clears his throat before the beginning of the discussion. "I apologize for my tardiness, class. We're well into the semester for me to assign your project due in your finals week. You'll have plenty of time to do it, and I would expect that you will incorporate the things that you will learn in our future meetings."

Someone on my right shakes her head to keep herself awake. The professor says, "The project is worth half of your final grade."

Huh, that definitely stirs everybody up. The professor offers a sympathetic smile. "I've spent years feeling sorry for students who are overwhelmed by this project. You will find it reassuring when I tell you that the project is entirely based on your ability to understand what you learn in this class. There are no rules. You will be judged by your comprehension and application of the concepts of color."

"You mean the project can literally be anything?" a student beside the window inquires.

"Yes," the professor sighs. I can relate to his intolerance of people with no common sense. "Everything has color, yes? But the color has to have meaning, and you will learn how to effectively use symbolism in this class."

"So we can use charcoal, then?" the same student asks.

A girl with large square-rimmed glasses covers her eyes with a palm. "Jesus Christ."

"Why, yes," the professor laughs. "Don't you think black is a wonderful color?"

All I could think was, somebody needs gallons of caffeine right now.

Make that two people who are in dire need of coffee. Obviously, the morning abhorrence syndrome is beginning to settle, and I'm not that lucky to escape from it.

Clocks are probably the most terrifying objects ever created: whereas other living things are born and eventually die, a person sits, runs, does whatever he or she can do, all while under the guard of a ticking noise. I think it's wrong to quantify and measure everything, because we're just trapped in this finite set and taught that zero means the end.

I can't escape from the sound of the clock ticking down for us.

My nose has stopped bleeding by the time I arrive at the subway. It's a good thing, especially since I don't want to embarrass myself any further. It's still raining outside, so there's the petrichor drifting across the station and the footprints of mud leading to the platform. I have to say that I'm fond of the smell of the ground after being pelted by the rain that's been gone for too long-but I dislike the fact that the rain creates a mess only shortly after it has arrived.

Friday is the worst day for riding trains, mainly because everybody is hasty to get home in time for dinner or a well-deserved movie marathon after the long week. People will stride past you and take the last available seat. I don't blame them for it; if I were able to return home myself, I would squeeze through the thickest of crowds and count on my fingers until I reach my stop.

The crimson-haired boy is, again, sitting close to the train doors when I get shoved by other passengers. He pats the spot next to him and I oblige-it's not as if I can really turn his offers down at this point.

"Hi," I attempt to be as conversational as possible, and based on his non-verbal response, I can tell that a simple greeting won't make the cut. The boy only looks out the window until the train starts to move.

It is only then that I realize that he's trembling underneath his damp blazer.

"W-wait," I say, my fingertips closing in on the sleeve of his blazer, but I hesitate and draw my hands back. "You're cold."

He looks at me and studies my expression. "Yes. I don't think it was that difficult to figure out."

I purse my lips for a moment before saying, "Hold your arms out."

A question writes itself on the corners of his eyebrows, until I persist and take his blazer off of him. He instinctively jerks away, but his gaze softens when I remove my own jacket and wrap it around his shoulders, rubbing his sides to help him regain the warmth that he's previously lost.

I might've seemed like a big shot for forcibly aiding him in spite of our identities as strangers to each other. It doesn't surprise me anymore when I overhear other passengers talking about how great of a brother I am, or something along those lines. It would've been easier for me to be his sibling. There would be no complications, and I'll get to share a bond with him without ever having to sacrifice a linear chronology.

That's probably asking for too much, though.

"Better?" I ask, hopeful that he would at least nod. He only blinks at me and pries my hands off of his arms.

Sure, there's a small sting in my hollow chest. But I'm glad that he can still distinguish between gratitude and love when I've already blurred the lines between the two.

"Thank you," he murmurs, digging his fists into the pockets of the jacket I lent him. It's enough for me; we'll eventually reach the place where we'll be more than grateful for each other's existence. We have all the time in the world. It's cruel, but I still think that I couldn't have it any other way.

We're quiet until he reaches his stop. As always, he and I are the only ones left, but the only thing I can hear is the rattling of the train along the tracks and the rain vigorously dousing the window and obscuring the sight of the outside world.

He eventually stands up and excuses himself while treading his way out of the narrow space between our seat and the bars. His calves brush my knees, and I wish that he wouldn't notice that they're shaking.

Before he could return my jacket, I blurt, "Keep it."

The statement sounds like a command, so I add, "Uh, it may be cheap for your own taste, but it's better if you're warm." I also thrust my umbrella into his hands. "And take this. You wouldn't want to be as miserable as I was."

He breathes deeply and says, "Why are you this…nice to me?"

"Let's just say that I might need your help in the future," I reply, wary of what I might let slip. "It's purely hypothetical, but I'd better offer as much aid as I can while I'm still able to."

"And you're asking for something in return," he smiles, but he doesn't show his teeth. I bet they're still chattering.

I muse about it for a while and tell him, "It's a small favor, but you don't really have to answer."

He stares at me, and his eyes echo, Go ahead.

Something tells me that I really shouldn't have brought up this question, but then there's my fate urging me to go on and fulfill what's been written in the scrolls of destiny of whatever piece of paper that controls the tomorrow of the universe. I would retort, Screw that, but I die again and again only to live for moments like this.

.

"What's your name?"

.

The boy eyes me and says, his voice like the whisper of the wind that will never come again, "You're peculiar."

I know, I mouth at him.

.

The train doors open and let the last of the sunlight stream in. I catch a strong whiff of the rain again.

He opens his lips, and I have never been more arrested before.

.

Akashi Seijuuro.

.

Before I know it, the train doors close and he's no longer there. What resounds in my head, though, is his own question right before he stepped out.

I will never know how to answer him because this—this is the name that I would treasure for whatever time I have left. This is the name that has haunted me with its perfection and the tragedy that comes along with it. This is the name that I will call out in affection and despair. My mind is flooded by the memories in which I had called him Sei, and he had whispered Kouki back. It's too much for me to internalize. It's always too much.

My jaw is still hanging when I recall what he asked me, and I graze my own cheeks while asking myself the same thing.

.

.

"Why are you crying?"

.

chapter two end / to be continued

sorry for not having updated for 2 months, i was even semi-comatose while typing this trash haha