Author's Notes

Just a little snippet set before the Frontier series. Snippet specifically as it's more a photographic moment than a tale, if you get my meaning. Hence the length.

And I figured I'd get the short stuff out of the way first, or as best I could anyway, before tackling the rest of the incomplete stories. But don't worry, I'm updating them all this hols, and trying to finish off a few too.

By the way, for those of you not familiar with the term, an asymptote is an imaginary line that a graph only crosses in infinity (theoretically).

Asymptote

The one line he wouldn't cross to find his brother. Little did he know how close he would soon come to that line he had drawn for himself. Pre-frontier snippet.

Kouichi K & Kouji M

Genre/s: Family/Angst

Rating: T

There he was. Across the street. Just far enough so that sound would not carry due to the traffic and the softness of his own footsteps even if the traffic was lacking, but seconds away if he crossed.

If he dared.

Did he? Finding him, talking to him (even if at the time he had no clue what he would say), was important to be sure, both for his sake and his mother's. After all, every day he saw his mother's expression, happy, yet nostalgic as though half was missing. Then, he hadn't known the reason, so he simply focused what effort he could on making her as happy as possible, until his grandmother's final breaths revealed the cause.

...you have a brother...His name...is...Kouji...

He had a brother, a twin brother at that. And every time she saw his face, she also saw the one she had been forced to leave behind.

So (and because the prospect of a brother was so exciting to him) he found out more about him; after all, a given name was all he had been given to work with. And then, with the required information, he looked for him.

And there he was, across the street. And all that stood between the two was a busy road.

He could cross the street then and there, but with the speed by which the cars were zipping by, it was too much of a gamble that he would make it across alive and unscathed. And if he died, it would just make his mother sadder, with both her sons last.

So the question came again. Did he dare?

Death itself wasn't too frightening a thought. It was the loneliness in it, and the loneliness he would leave behind. A fear he always carried, born as a father he didn't remember remained beyond his reach and beyond his heart, and a grandmother who was now gone from him and his mother forever.

Two...how easily that could result in one, and it was inevitable. As was the loneliness that was fated to come with it. And the rationality that forced him to prevent that as far as he was able, attempting to tread the ties of a broken family together even as he knew it would never be a fairy-tale ending.

But he could try. Not, though, if it would lead to an ending worse than the beginning.

So did he dare carelessness at the cost of haste?

No, he did not. Though a foot had already stepped off the sanctuary of the pathway till his brain's rationale caught up with his body.

And so he pulled back, and waited until the traffic dispersed, by then Kouji having long disappeared. But he crossed anyway, and looked around in the hopes that he may at least be in close proximity, but to no avail.

Well...there was next time at least.

Better to be alive so he could try again another day...right?

He had drawn his line. Little did he know how close he would come to crossing that line next time. How desperation, emotion that denied all reason, drove logic past recklessness, how destiny would cloud his eyes in darkness...and death would peep out from behind a closed door.