- technically it's written in chronological order.
- but it'll probably make the most sense to follow the numbers.
- in whatever order you wish to read, enjoy!
1.
Before snow falls for the first time that year, she kisses him swiftly, and his tongue goes lead-heavy when he tries to ask why. As usual, she's the quickest to speak.
"For sharing this bridge with me."
And then she laughs away from him; she is copper sunlight and the wild rush of cold air in his face, and what kind of answer is that anyway?
2.
On a weekend evening, at the place under the bridge that has always been theirs:
"Airi."
"Nice to hear from you again!"
"Ha, ha."
A stretching silence. He has something to say, and she'll let him say it—all the way—even though it's taken this long. Longer than she'd be able to grasp.
I'll stay with you. I can't let myself lose you.
More moments pass. How much of that did he say out loud? His mouth goes on before he can stop it.
"If you want, that is."
Her slow smile butterflies its way across the space to him.
"Are you stupid?"
The childlike chastisement breaks his serious aspect.
"…Probably."
"Then I'll see you tomorrow, Satoru."
3.
The next day, he watches her for the long seconds it takes to cross the street on her way toward him, and out of the corner of his eye there's a negative space. A man in a green coat, with a camera strap around his neck, who smells like the chill of iron in the midst of the rushing air.
4.
Snow arrives early that winter, so he slings his coat around her shoulders as they walk together underneath the bridge.
"Let's go someplace warmer."
Her apartment is small, and everything inside it is bright, which makes it smaller. A bright space, a young space, for a springtime presence. His autumn experience casts a long brown shadow inside it.
"This is…nice."
"Shut up. You hate it."
He's growing accustomed to hearing her laugh at him.
5.
She makes them both tea, and he memorizes the sunlight pouring over her hair as she fills his cup. She sits down, sips it, and grimaces.
"It's weak."
He tastes.
"It's perfect."
She looks at him for long seconds, and a different tension spills over between them, warmer than the one that's been growing in spider-threads for weeks. It's heavy, and hot, and smells like tea leaves.
He suddenly remembers how young she is. A scant two decades, and he carries more than twice that on his shoulders. And then, the strange heaviness of his hands, and the way his throat blocks off when her hand brushes his, turns him eleven again.
6.
She kisses him another time, much harder and much longer; they tangle up in each other's hands.
"You can't really like me," he whispers to her bottom lip, and instantly wishes he could take it back.
"Are you trying to get rid of me?" There's always a curve of laughter behind her questions, and this one is no different.
"No, I just—"
Her fingers gather under his chin.
"Don't go inside yourself to be safe, Satoru. Stay here."
She is impossible to ignore. She is more than he ever bargained on. And he has lost enough by taking risks to be scared by that.
7.
"You've always felt a little too familiar to me, Satoru."
Red alert, back off, back off.
"Not that way. Not in a bad way. I just feel like we started in the middle with each other."
How could she have known that?
Because she is the same Airi, always the same Airi, in this life as she was in his last. She sees more of him than he thought was visible, and says the things that he never knew how to string together.
8.
There are deep gray footprints in the snow outside her doorway, but he doesn't see them. He only sees the reddened imprint of her palm in his, and the discs of color that steal through her curtains.
He sees his future kaleidoscoping around her. For a moment, he forgets that, thanks to him, the lovely glass pattern of their new beginning still has sharp edges.
14.
When am I?
He's on her doorstep, and catches a whiff of weak tea, and camera film, and frozen iron.
He finds the wrongness in the environment, and follows the footprints and the stench left by the man whose future he must end. It doesn't seem like a long walk that takes him to the dark road where the footprints stop—it's just a few blocks, but the street is rough and unfriendly. He breaks a window to get inside the right house; formalities aren't important. It's dark inside, stained with grease and sweat, and through it all that edge of metal knifing through the winter air.
Satoru suddenly feels the damp ends of Airi's hair through his fingers, and the smell of tea and new paper overwhelmed by the rust-thick odor of blood, and it makes him even more reckless.
He didn't protect her present, but he can make sure she has a future.
Satoru finds the man in a back room, and his insides churn. Photos—many, many photos—all of them of Airi. Spread out across the table and covered in fingerprints. Some are street photos, but others are through windows—the building where she works, her apartment. Repulsed and shaking with hatred, Satoru looks away from one taken at a close range from Airi's bedroom window as she was in the process of undressing.
"Who the fuck—?"
The man's pupils constrict as he recognizes Satoru from the photos stolen out of Airi's life. That's right. You should be afraid of me.
9.
There's a flash of electric blue in his periphery, and he finds himself expecting it: the sudden tightness of the air as he's pulled back through the tunnel. But when he turns his head, it's just a bottle shard poking out of an alleyway dustbin. He's more relieved than he wants to admit.
He doesn't need Revival anymore.
15.
He shows up at her apartment again, and she's obviously surprised to see him. More than surprised, because he's out of breath and red with cold and anger and above all he's absorbing her presence because she's alive, alive, alive.
"Hi," he says, because he can't think of anything else.
"Hi! Did you forget something—?"
Her question cuts off in a gasp and her face turns pink as he yanks her in to his chest.
"I'm going to stay here for a while."
He says it out loud, even though he meant to phrase it more politely. She should probably kick him out. But she doesn't.
"Okay," she squeaks, and pushes her door all the way open with one foot.
10.
He's staggering through this phone call—one that he never anticipated—because he's met her in each life, and that had to have meant something. Time hasn't always been kind to him, but up till now it's let him preserve what must be saved.
Now, he second-guesses. Because she calls him later that afternoon, her voice bent around a knot of pain.
"I'm sorry, Satoru. I can't stay with you."
"Why?" Airi. Why.
She sounds strange, like her breath is rattling around between them on the phone line.
Something isn't right here. The kaleidoscope shows him only one color—electric blue. And he goes to her at once, forcing his legs to unlock against the terrible limits of seconds, minutes.
16.
"I can make better tea than that, I promise."
"You really don't have to convince me."
She does anyway, and he can hear her mind humming with questions. Why he keeps glancing out the window, down the street. Why he makes sure her door stays all the way locked. Why he shadows her steps, even when she's just in the kitchen, and why, above all, he isn't running away like he's so often tried to do.
Electric blue, winging across his peripheral vision.
Then, the door rattles hard in its hinges, and he nearly jumps on top of her.
"Satoru—!"
"Shh." He begins to pull her into the recesses of the apartment, just in case.
The man on the other side of the door smashes the lock, careening the door off one hinge. "I know you're in here, motherfucker!"
Oh, I just made him angrier.
Satoru had hoped fate could be averted, that the deliverer of the deathstroke would stay away from Airi now that she has a protector. But instead, he presses a button on his phone and sounds the alarm. Sirens erupt from down the street.
11.
Like he's been punched, memories from that other life hit him: how some men would look at Airi as she walked out with the next delivery, their half-lidded eyes roaming the gentle dip of her collarbones, lower, across her chest and down her legs. They would glance at Satoru, claiming some private joke that he was supposed to share. He never laughed.
He remembers the man in the green jacket, and the air around him constricts. The same eyes: half-lidded, roaming, with an edge of deranged sickness that always seems to fixate on the pure, the incorruptible.
This is no private joke.
17.
"You knew."
After the police leave, and the commotion dies down, she doesn't bother putting it as a question.
"Somehow, you already knew."
Can he lie?
She walks up to him, and even though he's the one who knew her future, she's already proving to be more well-adjusted than he is. His hands shake, and hers are perfectly steady when she reaches for them.
"I don't care how you did it, but thank you."
She is copper sunlight and wild wind, and she kisses him again.
12.
Her apartment isn't locked, and the door swings crazily on a single hinge when he bursts in. The scent of rust and cold iron doubles him over, racking.
"Airi!"
Sirens pulse in the city's distance, wailing like mourners. Not again, oh, not this again.
He finds her, a ragdoll imitation of herself tossed to the ground. Somehow, he's on the ground too, his knees slipping on the polished floor. She's heavier than a doll, and colder, and the way her joints flop loosely is wrong. The cell phone she managed to reach clatters out of one limp hand. But her eyes are still bright and soft as he holds her.
"I punched him," she explains weakly, wearing a ghost-smile. Yes, keep smiling. You'll be fine.
Satoru looks down at the knuckles of her right hand, and they're bruised nearly black.
"Stay with me?" She pats his hand with her soft, shivering one, and he presses both of them to his cheek.
I'll stay with you. The sirens climb, they're only a few blocks away by now. He pulls her against him, and waits for the strange feeling of narrowness that precedes Revival. Soon. I can fix this. Soon. Hang on, please.
He thinks. His stomach tries to climb up his throat, but he has to think.
The man in the green jacket.
Satoru knows what he must do, how he can piece the fractured edges together until—
He's always said Revival gets him into trouble, but this time…this time he prays to whatever controls his strange, complicated fate.
"Airi, look at me."
She's soft, and pale, and shallow, and he feels like he's drying up as her chest collapses with the effort of breathing.
Any second now.
"Thanks, Satoru…for staying."
There are car doors slamming on the street, and heavy footfalls on the stairs; the sound of them gets lost in the fuzz between his ears.
"Don't be silly."
Airi.
"Hey! Stay here!"
Stay here. I need you here.
18.
"Stay here. I want you here."
So he says he will, and only reddens a little when it becomes clear that she means overnight. He'd be lying if he said he weren't still uneasy leaving her alone, so they stay close to each other. Close, closer, fingers frantically twisting in each other's hair as if their brush with death has floored the accelerator. He finally stops blushing and stammering when she pulls her clothes off and encourages him to do the same.
If she were anything but disarmingly straightforward—with this, with the golden, tumbling pressure of their bodies together, with the chaotic spiral of both toward the heavens—she wouldn't be his Airi.
He watches her sleeping face, that same special ghost-smile on it—except now her lips are petal, not ash. In the hour of softness, between midnight and sunrise, he finds the last sharp edges of his past—his future? Does it matter?—and files them down into silk.
He'll stay.
13.
His head feels like it's underwater, because everything is slow—the people pouring through the open doorway, shouting at him, pulling him away from her. It takes him a second to realize his hands are dark red. But now, at any moment, his eyes will reopen under a different day, and he'll have time to fix this. The monstrous familiarity of the wrist shackles pushes him out of his stupor.
"I need one more."
There are voices pounding on the inside of his ears. Accusing, searching, frightful voices that he blocks out.
"One more. Please."
How long has it been? Less than a minute? Less than five? His mind scatters the details from before, and an awful realization freezes his blood. Maybe he was allowed his last successful Revival because more people would have died. Maybe the scale of his effect somehow determines whether or not he can rerun at all.
"I just need one more!"
Maybe Airi isn't enough.
No, of course she's enough. She's more than enough.
He can't hang onto any doubts, not for even a fraction of a second. Because before he can be a hero again, he must believe that the future will be better with Airi in it.
And with that certainty, the air closes in tight around him, and he's Revived.