Time travel AU.

Machinery hummed in an ever increasing cacophony of buzzes and creaks. One year. Toki started making a list of all of the things that he hated about Yuuki. One: He couldn't hold on to the same wallet for more than a week at a time. Two: He managed to sound monotone even when he sang.

Somewhere off to his left something beeped. A make-shift seat belt dug into his chest. Five years. Three: He snored in his sleep. He was loud enough to wake not just the dead but the inanimate. Four: How he rolled places instead of walked.

There was a clang and the entire capsule began to vibrate. They were speeding up. Fifty years. Why had he agreed to do this again? Five: How persuasive he was when he wanted to be. Six: The way he looked about six inches to your left when he spoke to you and never met your eyes unless you desperately wished that he wouldn't.

Yuuki hopped up from his chair and started pulling levers, tugging nobs, pressing keys, and guiding cursors around the many interconnected screens. One hundred years. Seven: How all he had to do to get ready in the morning was shake out his hair. Eight: How, three nights out of every week, he left his dorm room to find Yuuki napping in front of his door.

The noise was becoming almost unbearable; he wasn't sure how Yuuki could handle it, what with his naturally sensitive hearing. Maybe he'd grabbed some earplugs or something before they'd 'left'. Five hundred years. Nine: How he hadn't offered him some of the ear plugs he must have had. Ten: Yuuki was smarter than him.

Ten was the reason that pissed him off the most. It was the root of most of his other beefs with the kid. Toki liked being the best at everything and, when he came out second best, he couldn't help but feel rage. This exercise had been one of his many attempts to make Yuuki fail at something for once in his infuriatingly talented life. He'd bet that he could not build a time machine in a week. Of course, time travel was theoretically impossible but, since it was Yuuki trying, he'd felt the need to add in an extra condition to make success impossible.

But three days later he'd tried to push open the door to his apartment only to find a manchild-shaped doorstop blocking his progress. After several ill-advised attempts to wake him, and riding out the terror that followed rousing Yuuki from a nap, he found himself getting pushed, tugged, and prodded down to the parking lot of his apartment complex. A giant heap of welded metal and melted plastic was waiting for him.

He'd let himself be strapped into the strange contraption on the vague and ill-defined hope that, for once in his life, Yuuki had failed. But now, simultaneously three minutes and six hundred years away from that moment, the machine was beeping and humming its way to what he assumed was some sort of halt and Yuuki was staring expectantly at the cobbled mess that he liked to call a door.

Several more seconds passed and the inventor of the first time machine in history, Dr. Yuuki Tenpouin, age fifteen, yanked the portal open to the past. He hopped out without ceremony or sound bites and looked back to see if Toki would follow. Now five hundred dollars in debt due to a bet that he should have known better than to make, Toki took a step outside and pulled in a deep breath of battlefield.