Hey!

It's been ages since I've posted something!

Anyway, this is just my opinion on how Ayase must have been feeling throughout the series about his condition and how everyone else reacted to it. Seriously, Ayase is one of my favourite characters because despite being terminally ill, he puts everyone's safety and well-being before his own, and has accepted the idea that he will die soon. Comparing him to Ryuuya, who tries to prevent his own death by putting Naoto in his role, you really see the two different extremes of someone reacting to the fact that they're going to die soon. Ryuuya had another person killed to try and save himself, while Ayase just did his best to make the rest of his life worth something.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Ayase or anything from Timeranger

WORD COUNT: 1879

It's strange, really, how easily you can take your life for granted, until it's almost taken away from you. Ayase certainly hadn't seen it coming. It was just a routine medical exam before entering the pro circuits. Nothing life-altering was supposed to come out of it.

But it did, and he'd been left half-collapsed in the waiting room chair, holding the data tablet that proclaimed the condemning diagnosis.

Osiris Syndrome. The last two words anyone wanted to hear. The disease that killed with very little warning was eating away at his heart. It had to be some sort of mistake. He wasn't supposed to die so early in life. He was supposed to become a pro racer, do what he loved for years and years until he was old and gray. Now he wouldn't even be able to do that for whatever time he had left. He supposed it was logical; if he were to have an attack in the middle of a race, he could easily crash, and that would put not just his life, but the lives of others on the line.

After that fateful day, he'd sort of gone off the radar, just looking for a fight. Life hadn't mattered at that point. Ayase's father had always told him and his siblings how their ancestors had all died fighting, that it was by humans they were born and at human hands they would die. So he went after the toughest, meanest guys he could find, and did anything he could think of to piss them off. If insulting them and/or their mother didn't work, decking them sure did. Somehow, no matter how hard he'd tried, he'd survived every fight, he'd failed to die every time. The primal survival instinct kept getting the best of him, and he'd found himself more often than not becoming the victor, his frustration channelling itself into his fists and driving him forward.

It wasn't until he'd sat to nurse his injuries after another fight and saw the sun rise that he'd realised that maybe he did want to live after all. He still didn't know how a daily occurrence like a sunrise had managed to change his mind. Maybe it was the fact that he felt the warmth on his face and wanted to feel it again, as many times as he could. Who knew? But either way, he was done with this nightly routine of wishing for a dramatic death, going out in a blaze of glory, if you could call getting knifed by some gangbanger glorious.

As Ayase got up, holding his bleeding side (for he had gotten caught by a gangbanger's knife that night), he thought about what he was supposed to do for whatever life he had left. Looking back, his past existence hadn't added up to much. Aside from Baron's trial, when had he ever contributed anything to the world around him? When had he ever made a difference? That had to change. If he didn't have much time left, Ayase swore that he'd at least make it count.

And it was that drive that had led him to join the Time Police, of all things. He was fit enough that he'd passed all the physical tests, and a full medical exam hadn't been included, nor his old records double-checked, so nobody knew about his condition. Personally, Ayase thought it was rather sloppy of them, but it worked to his advantage, so he didn't say anything.

Why didn't he tell them? Well, for one thing, his family wouldn't let him do anything for himself anymore. He knew what happened when people were found to be terminally ill. Hospital beds and doctors and treatments that did squat while everyone looked at you like you were already on your damn deathbed. He wasn't going out like that. The symptoms hadn't even shown up yet; the countdown hadn't yet started. He still had some time left, and he wasn't going to spend it being coddled like some helpless, frail child.

It was two months after he'd joined the Time Police that he'd had his first attack. Luckily, he'd been alone in his apartment at the time. He'd just been getting home from work when a sudden crippling pain had shot through his chest, making him drop his bag and double over. He was lucky enough to have made it over to the couch before his legs gave out and he'd collapsed on top, clenching his teeth to prevent the shouts of pain that would surely alert the other tenants. So Ayase had just laid there, clutching at his chest as if that could somehow make it stop.

It'd stopped after less than a minute, and he'd been left half-sprawled on the couch, gasping for air and shaking all over, a residual dull ache and the overall shock keeping him there. The doctor had told him it'd be painful, but he hadn't expected it to be this bad.

Two more attacks were to follow before his assignment to the year 2000. Each was even more painful than the first, and he'd been lucky that nobody clued in, that he'd been alone both times. Admittedly, the last had been a close call, as his brother had come to call less than a minute after it ended.

Meeting Asami Tatsuya had been interesting, to say the least. The guy Ayase had assumed to be a somewhat dense, naïve rich kid had turned out to have a surprisingly deep philosophy about 'changing tomorrow'. Ayase rather liked that concept. The idea that you might not be able to change the future in a way that'll affect the world a century from now, but that you could still make a difference, no matter how small it might be. It gave him even more hope that he could make something out of what short life he had left.

Tatsuya also proved to be annoyingly compassionate; once he noticed that something was wrong with Ayase, he was rather persistent in trying to figure it out. To Ayase's relief, he kept his concerns from the others, and continued to keep that secret once the Blue Warrior had told him. Though he seemed to be compensating by acting like a damn mother hen sometimes, panicking whenever he got the slightest inclination that Ayase might have just dropped dead. It was annoying, yeah, but at least he was respecting Ayase's wishes to keep his condition private. They would send him home in some noble attempt to save him if they knew, away from this time and place where he actually had a purpose.

The Reda Virus incident struck him hard, not that the others really noticed. To be dying and having no chance of recovery… he knew exactly how that felt. He'd come to terms with the fact that he was going to die. But that didn't mean that those hundreds of people had to make that choice. Dammit, he was going to do whatever it took to help them, to save them. Screw the effects this could have on history later. People needed that cure now.

So yeah, when Naoto endangered the trade with Dolnero, of course Ayase decked him. Hundreds of people were dying, and he decided to risk their only hope just to get the glory of capturing one criminal! His selfishness had nearly cost them all so much, and Ayase was disgusted. Had he forgotten what Ayase had said earlier, that you can't live on simply one-upping someone else? Especially someone who had no interest in the so-called 'competition' anyway.

It figured that, with his luck, Ayase would have an attack minutes later. This one was much worse, the pain causing him to pass out. When he woke up in the hospital, he only hoped that some stranger had found him, not his teammates, who would undoubtably ask why he dropped like that. Checking out of the hospital was easy; there was no sign that he was having any problems anymore, and there were so many other patients that his empty bed was nothing short of relief to the staff.

When he came back to the apartment, the Domon was berating Tatsuya for not telling them. "What if Ayase had died that way?!"

"Tatsuya said nothing, because I asked him to," he stated as he entered, surprising them all. They all converged on him, demanding to know why he wasn't still at the hospital, and why he would put his life in such danger.

Even though he'd expected it, their questions quickly began to tick him off. When told he would be sent back (forward?) to the year 3000, he decided that he'd had enough and retreated to the room he shared with Tatsuya and Domon, locking the door behind him.

They had no right to make that decision. Okay, so a small part of him was whispering that they were his friends and only trying to do right by him, but it still angered him. Why couldn't they see that sending him home was going to do nothing for him? They still didn't have a cure or even basic treatment in the thirtieth century, so what was the point?

It had taken his nearly single-handed defeat of the next Londarz prisoner to convince them that the revelation of his condition didn't suddenly make him a weakling or liability. They'd generally accepted that he was better off in a time where he could make a difference, like he wanted. And Ayase'd had no idea that Domon cared so much, that the big guy was so freaked that this wasn't a problem he could just make go away.

With his darkest secret now out in the open, Ayase found himself a lot more comfortable with his teammates, his friends. They didn't treat him like he was helpless or constantly pester him with inquiries on how he was feeling. There was the occasional reminder to let them know if he was feeling any pain, but nothing had really changed in their behaviour towards him.

Captain Ryūya's offer had definitely been enticing. To return to an era that he not only knew, but would be able to live on in. What dying man would not be interested in a chance to keep on living? It wasn't like Ayase had been looking forward to death. But in the year 2000… Ayase had found something: a purpose. The people in this century, for all their ignorance of what was considered basic technology in his era, were more… alive. Life in 3000 was about getting through life, moving forward, but never actually stopping and just living.

So he'd turned it down. And when he was forcefully returned to 3000 anyway, he went back to make sure that, at the very least, people in the twentieth century would keep on living.

THE END