Caesar was fourty-seven years old, 5'7", and wore glassess with thick lenses. When he climbed over the railing, he took off his business tie, folded, and sat it next to a pair of glossy brown penny loafers; he gripped the rails of the bridge tight under his palms while his unkept suit rustled in a faint nighttime breeze, the kind in summer that had no coolness to it. He licked his dry lips, heart pounding, mind welling up with thoughts he had never considered decades prior.
Just get it over with, you worthless pile of shit.
He leaned, and he would look so eager like a track runner, if not for the terror behind his eyes. This was good. This was okay. He told himself this sort of pep talk in many different ways, on his walk to his last scheduled destination. Everything would be easier. Everything would end. He had no belief system; the idea of religion never appealed. He wishes he could invest in an afterlife now, the peaceful kind with billowy clouds rest... but he's not so sure the odds would have ever been in his favor to reach those shores, anyway.
Just as he swallowed the lump in his throat, graying hair rustling against the vortex of air swooping down against the edge, there was a voice; he didn't notice the rushing footsteps. He didn't notice much of anything, while he was standing there for what seemed like seconds—what was fleeting minutes, in reality.
Out of breath, panicked, crumbly with age:
"Have you ever tried Sarah's Steak Shop?"
... It was the last thing he ever considered to hear. His hands still clamped into white-knuckled messes on the support rail, he looked over his shoulder, flummoxed. The breathless figure behind him was hunched over with his hands on his knees, a paperboy's hat nearly falling off a mess of brown hair. And this stranger had somehow found him. Here, in this inky little spot of darkness, where the streetlamps scarcely lit the bridge. He was almost nothing more than a shadow here. They both were.
"... What?" Caesar asked, drawn long and taut.
Another needy pause for breath, as the vested figure slapped a hand on his chest, eyes brimmed with desperation. "Sarah's Steak Shop. It's... it's a place down by Apollon Media; that big place, eh? It's pretty good. Have you tried it?"
"No. No, I haven't. What do you want? Get the hell out of here—"
"Oi, come on, I'll treat you. How about it?"
The middle-aged businessman looked down to the waters below. He'd be more unimpressed with the other man if it wasn't for the fact that he was angry at the world and himself. Mainly himself. Mostly himself. "Get the hell away from me. You've seen the movies, haven't you? You know all the questions. 'What's the point', 'I got nothing to live for', all that jazz. Can't you let someone go in fucking peace?"
He woke up every day with things to cry about and found solace in a handful of happy things. And then there just came a point where you were weary and you didn't exactly know why, couldn't exactly pinpoint where it broke you down like it did. Maybe it was the bills, or the estrangements, or the fuck-up you'd done that had been so painful that you just wanted to sink into the earth and hit the core, sizzle out of existance in some big bubbly pyre. It was a lot of things, but for the life of him, he couldn't label the exact moment where he realized he was alone, dark, cynical, bleak, all those things. Meek to the point where you're thinking how good you have it—feeling like shit for having it—
Money didn't buy happiness. It surely didn't stop a man from burning himself to the ground.
"Not yet," the stranger replied, fanning a hand out in a sweeping gesture, "Wait, okay? Just wait!"
Caesar's palms were sweaty, and for a second it scared him, until he realized it was okay. If he slipped, it made listening meaningless. That was the plan he had in his mind, if his heart would begrudgingly follow.
The stranger continued, words falling out in a jumbled pile, "What's your favorite kind of movie? I like superhero movies; the old ones are my favorites, but I guess the new stuff isn't so bad, right? After we eat at Sarah's, we can go see a movie. Any you want!" Caesar caught a shimmer of a ring on a finger slipping into the man's pocket, as he dragged out a couple rumpled tens, holding them up in the mustard yellow light. "Anything you want to see–"
"I don't want to see anything!"
"You should see everything!" The voice was sharp and full of some sort of rasped authority that didn't fit his sillouhette. "What's your name? Where're you from? Tell me about yourself. Talk to me, huh?" Again, with the gestures, concerned wild gestures, all over the place. Caesar turned quiet, swiveling back to face the expanse of darkness beyond him.
Which only scared the other man, it seemed, because he continued with desperation, "Please—! Who're you? What's something you want to do?"
"What's it matter?"
"It matters! That's all that I need to know, isn't it? That it matters?"
"Everything's gone."
"For now, maybe it is...!" The figure removed his hat with a breath and held it close to his breast. "I know someone who didn't have anything. Maa, he was pretty much alone. Didn't have a family, no friends, no real idea about a future... Even though he could have anything, he had nothing. You know?"
Caesar shot a glance in his direction. A mess of brown hair, eyebrows bent, legs casting the longest thinnest shadows he'd seen. His face felt hot with bitterness. He wanted to die without doubt. He wanted to go into the waters below without anything holding him back. God forbid he ended up a ghost on the fucking harbor because some moron decided to seatbelt him onto the world with clawing metaphorical fingers.
Taking the business man's silence as a cue, the stranger continued, "It's gone now, but what's wrong with finding more things?" He gripped his hat tight in his hand, until it was just an indistinguishable ball in his hand. "We all lose things, but we all gotta find more things, or else we end up a mess on the side of the road. Don't we?"
There was a pause, a long one, and he repeated hopefully, "Don't we?"
"..."
"Come on. Let's go. Get the heck outta' here. You like movies, right? Let's watch something. Hell, let's sneak around and watch two or three things. And then we'll figure out something to do on Friday."
"It is Friday."
"... A-aa, it is! Then next Friday, too!"
Caesar ran his fingers over his face, heart beating wildly in his chest. This was... ridiculous. But the brown-haired man put a hand out in front of him, then, like he were demanding a cab of robbers stop: a hand with a single ring, a bracelet of beads, a hefty watch on leather. He reached out, lips drawn into a tight, determined line.
"I'm Kotetsu. Kotetsu Kaburagi. Don't go yet. Not yet, because you still have a lot of things to find. You can't find 'em in a place so dark. It'd be too hard to see."
The fourty-seven year old stared at that hand, mind swarming him with thoughts as angry as startled bees. But... he took the extended digits after the silence did its part, unsure if it was the wind or the maelstrom in the pit of his stomach that made his eyes glisten with tears he'd never allow to further. How did this happen, why did it happen, how did it come to this. The entire walk here had been numb. He'd been okay with that, he was okay with this. He didn't have a single reason that made him want to turn around and go home, and that was okay—
Because that's life. That's how it threw its punches. But even then, all he wanted was the few things he'd lost... that he couldn't buy back.
For some reason, in just a few minutes (an hour? they talked longer than that, maybe, he wasn't sure), he swung his leg back around to safety, wiping his face with the back of his sleeve. Choking on a sort of sob-turned-laugh, feeling like he'd failed something, or maybe won something, or maybe he just didn't care anymore and he wanted to give this guy some sliver of victory.
"I'm Caesar. You're... You're a weird fuck, Kotetsu."
"Any movie." Kotetsu prodded over the man's heart with a stern index finger. "Anything on the menu... Under 15 bucks. We're working on a budget, okay?"
"That's fine. I got hundreds in my wallet anyway."
The hero's gaze turned half-lidded in annoyance. "... Oi, oi, I'm doing my best here."
Weird. A weird, weird guy. But he ended up walking back down the same sidewalk he'd came from, his shoes hanging in his hands and his tie draped over his skinny shoulders. All the while, a tanned hand kept patting his back. He hadn't seen such relief on another person's face for a long, long time. Kotetsu had admitted later, with some sheepishness—a forkful of steak in his mouth—that he wasn't sure if he'd had enough time remaining anymore to swoop after him and save him.
"Five seconds isn't much these days, y'know."
Caesar still didn't know what that meant, even all these years later.
a/n:
Luka: Thank you! I always figured Kotetsu would keep being a hero without his powers. He's just got that kind of personality.
anon: That's a fabulous point you raise, and I admit I considered it (and still do, in writing post-series stuff). But in this case, we'll have to suspend some questions and make up some reasons; Caesar could have been uninterested in Heroes? A new resident of Sternbild since the incident? Perhaps Apollon Media covered everything up for Tiger. It's a mystery.
LiquidConfidence: Yeaaah, writing for an emotionally hurt and suicidal person isn't the easiest thing; I can only hope I did them some sort of justice, narration-wise.
And to the rest of you, I'd just sound like a broken record with all the big happy thank yous, so thank you all so much for the reviews!