AN: This one is pretty much what it says on the tin: a prologue for a chaptered fic set some years after the series. Overall there is a larger plot, but most of what happens in this story is driven by the characters, of whom there are a few. There's an OC that figures a bit prominently in the first few chapters but, don't worry, she's there in a purely ancillary role, though hopefully she's interesting enough with her own quick sub-plot.
Anyway, all comments are very much welcome and appreciated. If there's a problem or question, I invite those kinds of responses, too.
When the gust of wind from the greying sea dies down, Johan lets his hand return to his side. His fingers brush over his nose on the way down to check that a slight itch his right nostril is just that, and not something that has been blown onto his face, like a speck of Baltic brine, or an insect that might want something from him. The lattice of calluses on his joints is enough to ease the itching. He hums a satisfied note, and blinks, and he rests his thumb in the belt loop closest to the deck snug against his back.
Johan takes a set of steps to his right to position himself behind a black, railed fence. He leans on it and the metal is quite chilly, he feels it pressing against him even through the layers of his jacket, waistcoat, and shirt. His elbows rest on the rounded top of the railing. His hands he folds under his chin. The softest part of it, the plain of flesh under his jaw, hardly ever touched, feels cold on his palms. His face, he gathers, must have been more numbed by the wind than he thought.
Maybe he shouldn't be staring out so far, he thinks. It's too far for too long. The feeling haunting him hasn't left him—this vague oppression, this meaninglessly meaningful gloom that can't be examined, budged, or reasoned with. He can sense it in him all the way down to his toes that feel sluggish as he wiggles them inside woollen socks and brown, round-toed boots. He can imagine something congealing and thickening in his veins and tongue, something bloated and malformed and disturbing like a gas mask. Something that crowds into secret spaces rubbed against but never before violated, welling there until it settles over everything a dark red shade—the world would be bleeding.
What could possibly be so invasive?
It must be something he's doing. If it was something external and threatening he knows that his family would be involved by now. Vigilant as they are, and as serious as they take their roles as guardians so that they might never fail him again, the Gem Beasts are always on top of this sort of thing. Outside factors being eliminated leaves only one possible source. So, he should know what's wrong. Should be able to describe the first moment he realised there was this cloying sense of something.
What he does recognise is that it isn't fear. Nor it is dread, but a thing tinged with resignation and a kind of certainy that comes with knowing what will happen and when, just as when a celestial body has flung itself into the trajectory of the Earth and their meeting is imminent, and then the ending could not possibly be in doubt. At this time why would you bother yourself worrying about the end when there are so many other things you suddenly need to concern yourself with: whom do you need to fix things with, whom do you need to finally, finally spout pent-up rages at, whom do you wish to die beside? Like reading the last page of a novel before it ought to be, so many nerves are spared over the course of the story by knowing what will be. This leaves more space and capicities for things that matter, like trying to figure out what free will is, and how to exerise it in these situations.
There's a gull that cries, and a bit of sunlight filtering through a thinning in the clouds onto Johan. Then it's gone. It's sudden absence leaves his back cold. "Ah, it has gotten a bit chilly," he says, and thinks he ought to go inside, and that's what makes him remember.
His first semi-final duel is soon.
He looks down, fidgets with the sleeve of his sports jacket until it's up past his wrist, and checks the time. It's a quarter over the hour if his watch his correct, and he paid what he considers good money to ensure that it always would be. It's also a Friday.
Johan nods a little to himself. His chin he tucks down and into the recess of his scarf and upturned collar, eyes closed as he thinks. After a while of nothing he begins to walk to help himself mentally reconstruct the path he has taken to get to this point. There are bicyclists, cross walks with bodies and shapes moving in them, cars of all colours, an out-of-order fountain, an array of cafés in stylish buildings cramped with too much history—all bright flashes of interest in the dim and chaotic jumble of his afternoon. All are just details.
Opening his eyes, he finds himself next to a row of fun and eclectic and unhelpful houseboats.
At that admission Ruby materialises in the crook of his arm. She speaks to him.
"Hah, just a little, yeah, but you know me! Can you get me back, Ruby?"
She mewls once, twice, and his smiles crumples a bit. His laugh lines are gone.
"Well, that's definitely a problem," he admits. "I hadn't realised I walked so far. But, well, I guess I could look at it like this: I'm a professional. I'm not late, everyone else is just early."
He laughs. Then Ruby moves up to his shoulder, he untucks his arms from his body, and together they set off for the Arena. He's in no doubt that he will be late. Though it is a bit of a problem, he knows, not to mention rude, which he doesn't generally like to be, so he will hurry, will do his best, will get there with Ruby's help to sure he goes where he needs to be.
He wants to duel, too. His opponent is a rising Croatian star who'll be his first Eastern European opponent in a while. This's a prospect that now motivates him even further and brings a marked urgency to his steps. At the end of this canal, things begin to strike him as looking more and more familiar.
He's thinking he recognises that Moroccan café, surely, with its notable Mahgrebian ambiance in this Germanic city, and his destination suddenly seems all the more close—when a motorbike captures his attention.
Apparently he has the driver's attention, too, for the familiar silver vehicle comes ripping in his direction. It stops at the pavement just centimetres from the ledge—a testament to skill and focus and concentration—but the bike's droning does not stop for they will soon need to be off.
The driver removes her helmet. The next thing she does is toss him it and reach for a second, less protective one for herself.
"What are you doing?" She levels her gaze at him, her strikingly blue eyes.
"I'm trying to get back to the tournament."
"Come one, Johan, we've got twenty minutes."
In a synchronised set of actions she scoots to the back of the seat, he gets on and takes over balancing the bike, they put on their helmets.
She leans forward. "Take Amayer, okay? It will get you to H. C. Andersen and past Tivoli."
"Northwest, then?"
She nods into his shoulder, once, because the passenger's helmet does not have a visor that will dig into him, and then sits back and reinforces her grip on the sides of the black leather seat. The tips of her fingers are already going numb.
Lovisa, who hates the wind on her face, scrunches her eyes and begins to count down the seconds.
They may be on time, if they are lucky.
. . .
After his victory, they go to a beer garden with hours extended to take advantage of the tournament's large international crowd. By this time of the year some of the gardens are already closed for the season. But here Johan knows the owner, and the alcohol is munificent and more than enough to deflect any autumnal chill.
It helps, too, that both his face and his pride are currently glowing.
While he socialises with another new crowd, she alternates running numbers on a tablet, checking social media, responding to social media, and nursing a beer. She's somewhere between none and her first one. She's fairly certain that she hasn't actually finish a whole bottle yet. Rather someone mistook her first half-empty one as their own and walked off with it; this second one was given to her by someone who asked her about hygge in an attempt to pick her up so bad, the attempt's blatantness would have killed it had his advances had any chance of success in the first place.
To him she responded that hygge was a thing she knew about, yes, but it was something she only cared to share with other girls. But there was no harm done, she'd said, if he left her alone then.
No more harm than some some eighteen year old with a free microblog was trying to do to her mentor. To the accusations of fraud that have been sitting on her tablet for minutes, she replies,
Obviously you have never truly cared about something or you would know that Johan Andersen would never be able to hurt his family like that. Cheating. Honestly. You could not understand that credibility and incentives are much more complex than you think they are.
She's almost too righteous and riled in the moment to check her English before sending her response out into the world's digital aether.
But she has a responsibility.
Over her shoulder Johan's crowd has dwindled down to a small handful. Clusters that have broken off are tending towards the exit of the garden, for after coming away from the influence of Johan's gravity, the realisation how of late it really is, is like a wave of cold water splashed upon the face. The amount of time he can take away from others is titanic. That's how good at this he's become.
Then the only lights left are the Chinese lanterns with their cheerful, but shaded, glow.
After dealing with a particular barrage of jargon that needed to be run through several downloaded dictionaries—one day soon she will finish that translator—she looks up again. The two of them are mostly alone in the coloured gloom now. Johans scoots over to her once he's aware of her gaze. He brings nothing him with him.
Then he smiles at her, earnest, but he knows immediately that she will see through it. Lovisa has been his intern—and his proxy manager—too long now not to notice the things he doesn't want anyone to. Try as he might, lying by omissions in body language is an art he has yet to master.
But then, she smiles, too. "You're not nearly drunk enough to look like that."
"Bah. I'm tired."
She nods, looks around at the long table where they are seated. Out of the scores of bottles crowded around empty plates, she'd guess that maybe five of them were his. Six, if he'd been asked to autograph something for his entire family.
"Thanks," he offers after stretching his arms across his torso. His shoulder pops.
"For...?"
"Picking me up. I know how much you hate driving that thing. I kinda hate it, too. Way too noisy."
"Don't mention it," she says with a shrug as she looks past him. The real issue she doesn't want to bring up, she can't sound it out around the knot in her throat.
Why are you wandering? Where are you going?
"Just pay more attention, yeah? This duel was for a sponsor who's, as they say, looking at younger bucks."
"I'm only twenty-five!" He exclaims, and laughs.
"Yeah, but with the work you've done in your career already, the rates he'd have to pay may be too high for him to want to risk locking into a ten or twenty year contract with you."
To Johan this sounds absurd. And he laughs again. But he nor she set the rates, he knows that, they're the result of something people call "the market". He burns a little with his dislike for business, going over some well-memorised refrains from the ongoing spiel he's composed in his head about privatised duelling. He feels charged for a moment.
And then returns the fatigue. Now he's so cold.
Pulling himself up, he sighs and the night's breezes rustle things around them.
They agree that it's time to head back to his flat. Usually it's leased out and a headache to him because of it, but occasionally he's glad that he has somewhere of his own here in Copenhagen that's not constantly subjected to some kind of attention.
No-one in this building knows who their neighbour is.
So that's why it's even stranger when they receive a knock on the door a few minutes after the modern grandfather clock has chimed three. Johan answers the door as Lovisa, a hand fidgeting in her white-blonde hair, watches from her bed made up on one of the two identical sofas placed in the flat's living room. The moon has long since sunk out of the sky.
He doesn't look back.
Nor does he move, so all she can do is hear their exchange—the person at the door is loud, and then Johan responds in a hushed but excited tone. Uncomfortable, she swallows at her realisation: they are speaking Japanese. For a while things are a bit filmy.
Then, movement.
Johan steps aside. He doesn't need to say what he says next. "We've got a visitor."
She doesn't ask whom. She simply stands up. Lost in a fog, wandering in an endless swell of unfathomable power, she experiences the utterly human feeling of awe in the presence of something she knows will still be long after she is gone, long after own atoms have been diffused throughout the multiverse.
"You're Yuuki Juudai," she says to the brown-haired streak of red.. She reaches out and shakes his hand.
They all look at each other.