.
.
The memories feel like dark black ink submerged in water — thinned and pulling apart, fading.
Eiji would frantically scoop them out if he could, holding them into the scatter of dawn's light and against his mouth in a lover's kiss. He did remember the important bits. Ash.
I felt him.
He cried for most of the flight back to Japan, startling the nearby passengers into whispering for Ibe and then exhausting himself. Something was wrong. Eiji felt it burning and throbbing inside him, between his ribs, growing stronger and stronger until he whined out helplessly, feebly, rubbing his chest.
When it happened.
Ash told him that he had been born on a sunrise. He died at sunset. Or so that's what Max said to Eiji over a phone connection around six years ago. He died, apparently on his own with the infection from a new wound. Losing too much blood. Forgotten. Discarded. Eiji couldn't tell at the time it was a lie or not, and gave up on wondering. He didn't want to, no — but eventually Eiji had to live on.
But not without clinging to the memories. Not without all of them he can keep.
Graduating university, and earning his occupation as a photographer, leaves Eiji with the freedom to take work as he pleases, traveling out of Japan to locations such as Moscow and Paris and Sicily.
There are more dangerous areas, where his clients wouldn't even venture themselves and offer up a hefty amount of money for his troubles. Eiji marches into them with his head raised high. It's what Ash would do. He has only been shot at a few times, pegged last than that, and thankfully no bullets find his vitals.
Amsterdam smells like flavored-mint smoke and urine. Eiji passes by the downtown section painted in the colors of the pinkish-golden sunrise, looking around, stuffing his hands in his dark grey overcoat.
He's supposed to be meeting a Lavi with details about a top-tier and private event needing assistance. Professional camerawork. One of the guards outside the bar sizes Eiji up, narrowing his deep-set eyes, before grunting and stepping aside. Eiji makes his way down a compact, spiraling set of steps illuminated in raspberry-blue neon to the lower level. Candy pink and lemon yellow highlight the handful of patrons chatting and dancing, and some of them lounge on furnished sitting-stools, but ignore him.
Eiji heads right to the bartender who doesn't look up from measuring some whiskey in a glass.
"Did Lavi show up here?" he asks, firmly.
The bartender nods without any particular expression, jabbing his forefinger to the left-side corner.
A man dressed in a starry-blue, long turtleneck circles the pool table with his back to Eiji. He gauges his angle for a whole minute before neatly hitting the cue ball, sinking the orange 3 and the red 5. Eiji scrutinizes him, growing impatient, before he approaches him and fiddles open with his bag.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," the man announces, not looking up from the pool-table. Ash's lips curl up — and Eiji feels like the ground has fallen away. "They all might think you're packing heat."
It can't be. Dark, shortly cropped hair and dark brown eyes. But it's… it's Ash's face.
Eiji only gawks at him, motionless.
The man — he feels like Ash — offers a nonchalant shrug towards Eiji's half-exposed camera. "So then, you any good with that?" The question barely processes as Eiji pulls himself out of his stupor, wildly ducking his head and mumbling, his fingers tugging around the strap to his expensively high-quality camera.
"I… do you mind if I…?"
What's… …
"Not the face," Ash says blandly, but his mouth cracks a familiar, gleeful smile.
Eiji's throat clenches up. "Sure…" he mumbles again, letting the object dangle haphazardly from his wrist and forgetting everything else up to this point. It feels like moving within deep, slow-churning waters. Eiji's fingers clutch tightly over Ash's hand leaning to the table's wooden, beer-stained edge.
That's when the pool-stick rattles, dropped, as Ash leads them, yanking Eiji out of sight to a corridor.
All of Eiji's grief and regret built up comes out like a silent, emotional tantrum. Every line on his face deepens. He twists his lips together and glares, watery-eyed and shivering in the kind of rage that melts blood and bone, throttling Ash's shirt until Eiji has fistfuls of it. The other man does nothing, watching with a now overly compassionate gaze, allowing Eiji to have this, this moment.
And just like that — it's like his strings are cut. Eiji lurches into Ash's throat, sobbing out, hugging him so fiercely that it physically aches. Fingers pushing into dark, dyed strands of hair.
"Mm'here," Ash whispers, rubbing Eiji's sides and turning his head, mouthing against his ear.
His leopard on top of a snowy, isolated mountain. Bleeding out. Dying.
Eiji glimpses a tear roll down Ash's face, and one of the brown eye-contacts loosens to Ash's thumb. He explains. Max had lied, as Eiji may or may not have suspected, but the injuries and the violent alteration with Lao had been enough to reconsider what Ash needed to do to keep all of this fighting at bay.
He left New York and his own birth country, giving everything he had to Sing and Alex. Planning on a complete escape.
"Lao's guys deserted, wanting to track me down." Ash's voice rises, and descends into in a softer and knowing murmur. The hotel room dims with shadows and bright, cascading aqua-green lighting from the poster stands. Eiji listens, tracing his fingertips over the patch of scarring on Ash's lower back. He hunches over, gazing sideways at him and Eiji hasn't felt… this okay in a while. So full of awe and heavy and comforted. "It wasn't safe to reach you, Eiji… not then. I had to be sure."
They've been drifting, without each other, for too long.
"… do you regret it?"
Eiji doesn't mean to make this harder, frowning a little as the other man scoots out of Eiji's touch.
"I regret… not getting on the plane sooner. With you." Ash then groans in frustration, dragging his freshly bandaged arm over his eyelids and nose. "I should have. Can you forgive mmmmfm?—" he croaks out, green eyes widening when Eiji sternly covers his hand over Ash's lips, applying rigid pressure.
And just like that, he grins, childishly-big, kneeling up to smack his lips exaggeratedly, wetly to the space of Eiji's own knuckles hiding Ash's mouth.
"Have tofu with me again, and I'll consider it."
Ash's eyebrows droop.
.
.
Banana Fish isn't mine. WE'RE GONNA JUST. SAY. THIS. IS ONE OF THE ENDINGS. FOR THE ANIME. THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT.