A/N: I don't know why I do this to my [DRR!] OTP. My brain randomly spawned this today... it was about time I wrote something for this series, anyhow.
He is an old man now.
He sits in his living room and stares out his walls of glass, listening to the lack of noise. He wears dusty lab coats because they're all he can think to put on. He likes to be enveloped by the heaviness of silence, because then he can close his eyes dream that he is young.
i.
He forgot her less quickly than Ikebukuro did. The city stopped needing her the day she left, but he never did.
When he was still young, he closed wounds illegally and evaded the questions of men in nice suits. Sometimes it was hard to remember that she was gone, and when he came home he'd throw open the door and yell her name, already hard from thinking of her. And then the silence greeted him and he would drop his briefcase and sob into her pillow. His only comfort was his right hand, although it usually made him lonelier than ever.
He would listen for news of motorcycles and dark figures and gather information not as subtly as other men had. Times had changed, and the buying and selling of information had disappeared with the man who mastered it.
If he found a lead, he would drop everything and race to wherever, garnering strange looks for his lab coat and half-excited, mostly desperate expression. The only thing he ever found was groups of thugs, men in torn leather and black boots.
He would have died several times, had not the strongest man in the world always been there as well, taking out the men with a few punches and vending machines, never speaking a word.
After the thugs were bleeding enough, the two would walk to Russian Sushi, no matter what time of night, and eat in silence. It didn't matter how loudly they might have spoken. They communicated their mutual longing best through nothing at all.
ii.
His favorite thing that makes him cry is the memory of the night they first made love.
He remembers how he took her in his arms and kissed her shoulder in place of her lips. Somehow, he knows, they made it onto the bed, sans clothing, and he was trying to analyze her body as a man and not as a scientist.
He pressed into her and waited for the noise that he knew would never come. Maybe that's why he was so loud. She teased him about it for the longest time. He didn't mind.
So he screamed things and made all the right sounds, just to fill the silence brought on by her lack of vocal cords. He could tell that she wanted to join in the cacophony by the way she moved beneath him. He had become a master at reading her like that.
And when it was over he held her against his chest, listening to her heart thrum under his fingers. There was the silence that surrounded them and bore into them, connecting their souls as they had been minutes ago.
He heard the tap of her slender fingers on keys, and she held her PDA up to him with one arm.
[I love you.]
He told her the same and kissed her shoulder again. He felt the excitement ball up inside his chest, right near his small intestine, and he knew he should want to shout it to the entire world, that he loved her so, so much.
But he didn't need to, since he was holding his entire world in his arms.
iii.
They had never feared for Ikebukuro. After all, they were up against one man and had the most powerful allies. The man's secretary let them in, and they were only scared for a moment as he turned around in his spinny chair and laughed.
The strongest man in the world threw the bookshelves at their enemy, who leapt up and danced around the room, waving a switchblade and laughing, laughing, laughing.
The fight didn't last long – long enough to restrain the man and steal back the one thing that mattered.
He remembers standing on the edge of the room with the secretary, hands shoved into the pockets of his lab coat and teeth drawing blood from his lips. He was terrified of any outcome. He wondered why things could never stay the same.
He took her home and bandaged her few wounds. She didn't notice. She was sitting on his living room floor, looking blankly out of the dark windows, her head resting on its side in front of her.
She stayed that way for hours. He sat behind her, arms wrapped around her waist and chin resting on her shoulder. At midnight he got up and told her he was going to bed. He pressed a kiss to her shoulder, even though her lips were so close.
He didn't lie up waiting for her. She was in his living room performing ancient magic, and he knew she wouldn't sleep.
What he didn't know was that when he woke up, she'd be gone.
That was when the sound left his world.
iv.
When he was still young, he would fix bodies and eat sushi, although he never spoke. No one seemed to mind. No one seemed to notice, really.
But as the life drained out of him as the years crept on, he watched the city change and realized that he hadn't. It was when the strongest man in the world finally met the one enemy no one can conquer that he paused life.
He stayed in his apartment, the one he had once lived and loved in. He sat on his living room floor and tried to see if he could feel her warmth through the floorboards she had last sat upon. He slept with his face in her pillow, although half a century had faded the scent.
He never went out, except once a month when he traveled to a 24- hour store and bought enough supplies to last until the next trip.
All other times, as he stares through his windows and into his past, he wraps himself in silence like he did years before on the night he loved her supremely. He likes to see if the silence can connect them again and find him the other end of his red string.
v.
The doorbell rings, shredding his silence. He ignores it. No one visits anymore. They're all dead or gone or maybe both.
But as the noise becomes incessant, he forces his old man bones to leave the floor. He walks to the door and lets his hand hover above the knob before he seizes it and wrenches it open.
The woman before him is wearing a gown, the kind he has only seen in pictures. It is dark and ornate and looks as if it were plucked from another reality. It is beautiful and somehow grotesque, although it should seem perfectly normal.
He thinks that he should be terrified, but he is not. His eyes travel up her body and he gets a sense of déjà vu. They stop at her headless neck and shoot straight down to her head, held in the crook of her right arm.
It is a face he has seen only once, half a century ago. He hates that face. He knows it was the one that ruined him.
He wants to hold her. Perhaps it is his past shining through. Something holds him back, though. Something tells him that it would not be a good idea, that maybe that face changed her.
It is silent as he feels the blood wash over him. Perhaps he should be terrified, but it is the first time in fifty years that he has felt alive.