Authorly preamble or something: I'm always lagging behind when it comes to Loveless, so please be forgiving if I don't conform precisely to recent chapters. Set around the very beginning of the series, or perhaps slightly before.
A Million Dead End Streets
Things are moving, shifting, changing, always are, always have been, and hell, they knew what they were in for from the start. But things are changing, now more than ever, waiting to start, and they can feel it in the air — everyone can — thick and oppressive like fog and above all urgent. Like watching a clock, hands ticking off seconds at an impossible pace, they're almost painfully aware that they're running out of time, time to be together, to go slow, to do things on their own terms.
So it's 3 a.m. on a school night, and they're lying on her bedroom floor, wishing the morning would never come. They talk, quietly so as to not wake her parents, about the past or the future or anything. Or they don't talk at all, just listen to the gentle breeze that comes in through the window he climbed in through, hands clasped tightly. Or they'd cling to each other, fingers twined in hair, limbs tangled, wanting nothing more than to be close while time still allowed, just listening to each other breathe.
"It starts tomorrow," Midori says; time with Ai has made him sensitive to subtle changes. "They've found him."
"He's found him, and they've found them both," Ai replies, the line between correction and agreement so blurred the difference is negligible.
No more is said — no more need be said — they both know what it means. Tomorrow things change, tomorrow they're forced into action, their time together only for a purpose, for fighting or training.
They lie like that, quiet, still, eventually falling asleep there, only for Midori's watch alarm to wake him a few hours later, in time for him to see a pink glow on the horizon while stars still hang in the sky. He kisses Ai once, light enough not to wake her, and is out the window and on his way. The sun is coming up, irritating his eyes, as he gets home, moving too fast to bother making sure the door shuts quietly, his father pretending not to see him on the other side of his newspaper at the breakfast table.
Things change tomorrow, and change means things ending. But when things end, new things begin. Midori looks down at his palm, at the word there, at their connection. Things would change, he knew, but at the end of things, if they had each other, it would all work out. Somehow.
(The rest is just details.)
