Throes of Retrograde

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

Chapter One: Look How Far We've Come

"The day's last one-way ticket train pulls in/
We smile for the casual closure capturing/
There goes the downpour/
There goes my fare thee well."
- the fray, "vienna"

[I think. . .I think I just lost you.]

.

There's suffocation, and then there's not breathing.

Some days, some things just make me stand and stare while holding whatever I still have in my lungs. Sometimes it's an image so fleeting that I forget that the world is supposed to be moving along a line. There's no reason for me to gape. There are days when I have to stop in my steps and wait for the train doors to close. They're those days when I have to miss my stop and linger when everybody else is home and the light disappears in the horizon, until all I'm with are the noises on the tracks and the occasional public announcements stating that the train's arrived at the next station.

Then there are those times when people sit beside me, probably because they have nowhere else to go and it's a little bit warmer underground than up in the streets. I'm grateful for their presence, but at the same time I want to tell them that they shouldn't be sorry for me. They've got friends waiting in karaoke bars or fiances and fiancees holding their glasses over candles in a restaurant where they'll tell stories about their day.

And I remember: they're not there for me. It's never been about me.

Even if you're used to the silence of being alone, you've got to admit that you never really accept it. Not as your fault, anyway. I don't know why I'm here, but I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be here. I could go on a tangent and talk about something like destiny, and believe me, it's more than that. It's a gut feeling, but it haunts me. I try to remember something that I felt I forgot. I come up with nothing. It's kind of like knowing that a memento from your childhood had been stashed away from the attic for so long, yet you still have an idea of where exactly it's hiding. When you crawl up to the attic, you find emptiness instead.

Some days, it's almost as if there's a purpose for me staying behind in the train.

And one day, it hits.

It's a hurricane. It's destiny trying to screw us all up. It's destiny screwing us all up.

But it's not about me, because a thousand lifetimes would pass and I'd still find myself in this train going on for hours and hours. There'd be some days when I'm waiting until you're here.

I wish that I'd remember what happened before - because I always end up in the same train, watching your fleeting image on the platform. Sometimes you're smiling. Other times, you're impassive, but breathtaking all the same. One time, you're crying. I just saw a glimpse of it, and even then I wanted to forget that I ever saw that.

I'm sorry, love - you don't have to go through all of this. I'm asking someone to stop this. I - I can't. . .I can't even remember who you are. All I know is that it's supposed to happen again, and both of us know that it's impossible for it to end differently.

But I'm not sorry for those memories we have to relive. It's just. . .it would've been easier if it just ended right there, but no, we have to endure all of this. I wish you'd stop taking this train, so you could go on with life and we'd never have met and you would have had kids and your company and none of us would have been left alone on that day.

I guess it's not too bad, though, when I play back all the things we did.

.

.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, darling.

It's always been about you.

.

.

As it always was, in this lifetime, I don't know what your name is.

.

Yet.

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[This is a safety announcement. Due to today's inclement weather, please take extra care whilst on the station. Surfaces may be slippery.]

.

You never really remember something until a moment knocks the wind out of you for the second time.

Maybe rainy seasons are just good times for reminiscing things. Somehow, they're perfect for looking through obscured glass panes and wondering if someone out there was thinking about the same thing that I do. In spite of that, June really isn't my month. Everywhere smells salty like the ocean. There's this school girl with a printed umbrella - also a corporate worker with his black one, some brave people with just their coats on, and a few ones who are soaked to the bone. I'm one of them.

When you're an art major who barely has some bucks to spend on materials, umbrellas wouldn't be at the top of your priority list. I've had issues with skipping meals because I needed new brushes. Everybody tells me to apply for scholarships; I do, every single year. I just don't make the cut. I don't know why I even qualified for the university in the first place, if the quota's too high for me to reach.

Every now and then, I can't help but lapse into self-pity. I'm not angry that I can't be enough, that my roommate has his own car while I have to commute, that I starve myself just so I can purchase the materials that I need, that I keep telling my mom that everything's fine in college. Not all of us can always lie to ourselves. It'd be better to inflict everything inwardly rather than on someone else.

So it's June, and the downpour isn't getting lighter by the moment. Shivering would be an understatement for what I'm currently doing, trying to prevent the warmth from escaping. It doesn't really help that the train is packed and there are a number of people who are dripping. I've given up my seat a few times - once for an old lady with groceries, another for an impaired kid, and another for a guy who felt just as cold as I did. He actually looked like he was going to pass out, and I figured that getting away with a cold would probably be better than freaking out about someone fainting in a crowded vehicle.

Before my nose starts dripping, I sniff and hold my finger under my septum. It's bad enough that I didn't bring my handkerchief, much less the box of tissue paper that always lived in the bottom of my backpack until graduation. In my defense, things always got pretty messy in my previous art classes. I've always hated acrylic paint more than I disliked charcoal, and that consequently led to the acrylic returning the favor. There were awful stains everywhere - and by everywhere, I literally mean everywhere. I once panicked that I would become blind because I accidentally smeared acrylic across my eyeball, which is a rare occurrence if ever I had to fact-check.

It's funny when you think about how I ended up in an art college. I wasn't fond of putting my ideas onto paper and showing them to people who wouldn't even blink at me. I didn't want to pour my time, effort - everything I had - to a piece that probably rightfully belongs to the gutter. I don't want to fail myself. I know people won't spare a glance, so why should I bother?

See, there's a gallery downtown that my father used to take me to. He showed me around in the abstract section, and being the kid that I was, I didn't understand any of it. I was compelled to say they're ugly because I had no clue what the pieces were supposed to mean. There's this thing that basically looked like trash, and my dad told me that it cost 2 million dollars. I couldn't do the math to convert to yen, but you get the gist. I mean, I could just spit on asphalt and call it this great and awesome artwork and people would fall for the trap.

It's dumb, and my dad agreed. "Looks like garbage, doesn't it?"

"Y...eah," I murmured, hoping not to offend anyone. Curators were pretty horrible if stimulated.

Dad just nodded and looked me square in the eye. "What do you think it is?"

"I don't know," I said. "It's not even art."

"It is," he replied, placing the weight of his palm on my head. "For some people, at the least. We have very different interpretations of the same thing."

"Doesn't make it any less ugly."

Dad flicked my forehead, probably in annoyance that his point didn't come across. I rubbed at the spot and winced. "The artist doesn't care about what you think. It's his or her art. Even if you put up a sign that says that it's the most unattractive object in the universe, your opinion doesn't matter. We're our own person, and if you think you're worth it, then so be it."

.

That stuck with me for the rest of high school. While everybody else was taking business or chemistry classes, I was saving up for a canvas and a set of pencils.

I'm worth it, I think.

Knowing your value is probably an optimistic thing to do, but it doesn't help you when you're trying hold back a sneeze in a train that's rattling along the tracks. I still haven't familiarized myself with every twist and turn, which is why I occasionally lose my grip on the overhead handle and collide against a stranger.

I'm inhaling as much as I can to prevent my reflex from kicking in and making me launch more germs into the compressed atmosphere.

When you've used the subway for pretty much your whole life, you remember most of the faces at certain times of the day. Everybody fills the space they're comfortable with, the same way I have my go-to seat in any classroom I have to be in. Within a three-meter radius, I can tell who would be there. There's a bunch of high school students passing around an mp3. There are some people dressed in corporate attires. There are tourists who point to maps and frown, because the place they thought they were going to wasn't actually one of the destinations of the line we were on.

I'm convinced that that I can trust my memory, and believe me when I say there's a new guy by the doors.

It's only when the train nears the end of the line that I get the chance to look at him. The swarm of people has thinned by now, and I'm the only one left hanging on to the handles.

The new kid - I'd assume that he's younger, because I think I can recognize his uniform from one of the nearby high schools in the district - is looking out the window. He has his briefcase by his side, and he doesn't look bothered by the fact that he's alone in a public transportation. If you ask me what my opinion was of him, I'd say it doesn't matter. Time to take my dad's lesson to heart, after all.

But there's this nagging feeling that he's supposed to be here, and at the same time he's not. His composure rivals those of the businessmen that I encountered in the district, and I could safely say that maybe his composure is much more stable than theirs. I can't describe it in the best way possible - it's too stereotypical to say that he's too rich to be here, but he has an aura of a wealthy boy. Spoiled, maybe, but definitely wealthy.

Have I started talking about his hair? There's only a few people in Japan who would dye their hair in an odd scarlet hue, and I'd doubt that this boy is the type of person who likes to experiment in salons. I recall the photograph of a red-headed family on the newspaper the other day. That leads to the same question: why is he here?

I don't know, and it's not my business to know.

I could've run a relatively normal life if I chose to look away in that moment. 'That moment' being the second that the train darted out of the tunnel and into the clear, where the rain pelted the roof and staring out of the huge glass panes didn't guarantee an image of the outside world. It's the same time that I think that the weather is nasty and the thought, Gimme a breaaaaak, reverberates in my head.

I swear it's not my fault that I forget to breathe when the boy turns away from the window and looks right through me.

The first thing that comes to mind is, whoa, his eyes have different colors.

Second, I think I know him from somewhere.

Third,

Shit.

Which is a huge deal, because I almost never cuss.

.

And fourth:

I do know who he is.

I know who he is and what we're going to become, even though I've never met him before.

The thing is, we have met before. Countless times. I've learned not to keep track of how long this loop has been going. He looks exactly like he did the first time I saw him: red-headed, has heterochromatic irises, and is indifferent. His expression doesn't change when he should probably raise his eyebrow at me gaping at him.

In an instant, I remember that this is the boy who'll give me cough drops two days from now. He'll shake my hand and introduce himself. We'll go to the gallery where my father taught me all that I needed to know to survive. He knows how to play basketball - he's a pro at it, even. He's the heir of a conglomerate. I vaguely remember the time when I'll realize that I'm smitten with him, but that will come later.

It's terrifying to realize that I know so much about him and what's going to happen. It's painful to come to terms with being stuck in this fragment of time.

When you're looking at the big picture, though, you could say that it's funny.

.

I have all of these memories in my head, but I still don't know what his name is.

.

.

Well.

Here we go again.

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chapter one end / to be continued

more readable version on ao3.

furihata's pov, fluctuating pronouns, incoherence, ooc, run-on sentences, confusing plot, wanted to try a new writing style and utterly failed, etc. (aka nobody's got time for proofreading)

written mostly to change furihata's characterization. . .honestly, i'm so tired of him being the weak and inhibited character in fics (though i'm guilty of writing him as such sometimes). i also don't know anything about the mechanics of art college haha i should probably write something closer to my major

anyhow, this is for the followers who stayed with me through thick and thin, through days of queue, senseless posts and shitty fics. thanks for the encouragement and for convincing me to keep writing, although inspiration has been sparse lately! all of you are dear for simply reading this xxx

(this is also the fic where you discover my peculiar music taste harhar)