jida | (no subject)

It starts off with a pair of gloves.

Or rather, it starts off with a singular glove, one missing its mate. Mid June of his second year of university finds Akechi in the middle of packing up his meager belongings in order to move out of his current apartment and into a a significant upgrade. The new place is closer to his university that actually has a bedroom, rather than simply being a studio. It turns out that freelance work, while rarely as interesting as assisting Sae and the police, is a lot more lucrative even without the regular stream of interviews and appearance fees to keep him afloat. The ad and affiliation revenue from his blog helps out.

It also turns out that most of what he has to pack is clothing, and it's in the middle of shuffling through the closet that he finds the lonely glove. He goes looking for the other one for a moment before he remembers, oh yeah. He gave it to (threw it at) Akira, who never got a chance to give it back.

If thoughts can be derailed then surely they can also collide, and a veritable train wreck occurs in the wake of that realization. Akira 'never got a chance' to give it back? No, that doesn't make sense. Akira 'had chosen not' to give it back. Right?

Right...?

It doesn't feel right. Akechi picks up the glove and wanders away from his task, turning the it over in his hands and his thoughts over in his head. Half of him is going over the many logical reasons Akira still had the other glove. The challenge had never been settled, not really. Even if they're dating now it's not over yet, and likely never real be. It was a symbol, a promise, a reminder, and Akechi expected Akira to hold on to it for the rest of his life.

But the other half of him just can't get past his earlier assumption.

'Never had a chance'.

He finishes packing, moving, and unpacking by the end of the day, and collapses into bed alongside Akira as soon as the bed is in a position to be collapsed into. He's in the middle of drifting off, content to slip into unconsciousness almost immediately, when a sudden compulsion grabs him. Without thinking, he speaks.

"Do you still have my glove?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Akira has not yet drifted off to sleep (the arrival of which is usually marked by the quiet thud of his phone falling from his listless hand onto the floor), so the question doesn't have to travel too far to make itself known. It still takes a second: he hasn't thought of the glove or the conversation preceding it in quite awhile, and he's caught off guard. Of course he still has it, he's absolutely certain of that. He has so few belongings he virtually never needs to get rid of anything, and he wouldn't have gotten rid of something from Akechi regardless.

"Yeah," Akira says, after a second. "It's at Leblanc." Which is to say, it's enshrined on the shelf of other mementos from his first year here, gifts from friends and others combined to make a wall of proof that he'd made a difference.

It strikes him as odd, for a second: why had he never given it back? Akechi was right there, and the promise--

"Huh," Akira says, after a moment of feeling like his brain was a television that had been turned to a static channel.

The hesitation makes Akechi wonder for a moment if Akira even still has the glove. Him not having it would be about as strange as him still having it, so he's genuinely not certain what answer to expect.

The one he gets doesn't really clear anything up. That he hasn't gotten rid of it isn't a shock, exactly, but it feels off. Like a puzzle piece that fits even though the image doesn't quite line up. Akechi rolls from his side onto his back. For a long moment he's still and silent.

"Why?" His tone comes out flatter than he means for it to. It's pointed, and there's an air of mild agitation in his movements when he reaches up to brush his hair out of his face. Something is wrong, but he can't figure out what. "Shouldn't you have given that back a while ago?"

"You gave it to me," Akira answers, automatically, which is the truth: he remembers the challenge, remembers the glove, remembers... something he can't quite remember, actually, but he has the idea that it made him emotionally conflicted, at the time.

"Back before we were dating... it's like a memento?" Akira guesses, a little. Like a ticket stub, or something. That doesn't quite fit right in his head, like trying to put on clothes you remember wearing but are too small for you now. He frowns a little, pushing himself up onto his elbow to look at Akechi.

"Do you want it back?" Akira will give it back, he doesn't mind that -- but something about that feels wrong in a way he can't quite quantify. He's not supposed to give it back, because the challenge was never settled, and now that he's thinking about it, it's weird that two people as competitive as they both can get have never really tried to settle it. Sure, it was an immature high school challenge, but wouldn't it have been important back then?

So why had they never...

"I don't want it back." Akechi's response is immediate, unhesitating, and tinged with frustration. He slides his gaze towards Akira, though he can only sort of make out his expression and features in the dark. The offer to just return the glove kind of annoys him, though it takes a long moment to identify why.

"You're not supposed to just give it back." Akechi pushes himself up as he speaks, frustration giving way to steady certainty. "There's something we have to do first. We need to..."

But he trails off and uncertainty grips him once again. If he was alone he might be able to shake it off, but Akira clearly notices something is wrong, too. They were supposed to settle their challenge but how was that supposed to happen?

"Something happened," Akechi suddenly insists. "The winter before I graduated, during that first year you were here. I was..." He frowns, gaze going far off and hazy. "Gone?"

But where was he?

Akira falls silent for a long moment. He feels like this is something they shouldn't be talking about. He feels like they shouldn't even be thinking about it, but -- Akira isn't a rebellious spirit for nothing. He isn't going to let that stop him from thinking about it.

It does feel like it's going to give him a headache.

"I thought you were gone," Akira agrees, but gone doesn't quite convey the finality of the feeling. It felt like Akechi had broken up with him, but they hadn't been dating yet. It was that kind of a loneliness.

Vaguely, Akira reaches out in the dark, sliding his hand across Akechi's chin. He suddenly feels the need to remember that Akechi is there, that he's real and alive and ... alive?

"You were somewhere I couldn't get to you," Akira says, vaguely. "Right? That's why..."

Akira reaches out to touch him and Akechi allows it, lifting a hand to rest it over Akira's. Touch is something he had resisted at first, almost resented, but Akira is a tactile creature and Akechi an entirely touch-starved one. It hadn't taken him long to cave and the tension of the moment doesn't dissuade him now.

Somewhere Akira couldn't get to, though...

"That's right," he agrees, sounding more certain of this than anything else they've discussed so far. "Somewhere I... somewhere I can't remember. I think.."

He trails off, rolling the thought around in his head for a moment. He finds himself shying away from the idea of vocalizing it, afraid, and that sparks something stubborn and resentful in him. So he presses on.

"I didn't mean to come back. I was supposed to stay there."

There's something there. It feels like stepping on half-thawed ice: if Akira pushes too hard, it's going to shatter entirely under his weight, and he doesn't know if he's going to like what comes out of it.

Akirt skirts around it, instead. He can feel the parts he isn't supposed to think about, like part of his mind has been carefully layered out with white out, so he moves around those parts, cautiously. Is there something he made himself forget?

"You gave me your glove," Akira says, carefully, lining the events up, "but I didn't give it back, because after that was the casino, and I was arrested, and you..."

Akira trails off.

"How did you know I was alive?"

Something is breaking, whether Akira likes it or not.