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vanitashazeReposted for posterity, and because ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
heroes_exchange has a bloody age filter. To be honest, I'd rather avoid debate about the effectiveness and purpose of those things - it comes too close to morals for me - but on a purely practical level, it's annoying as hell. And yes, I realize that every system has its flaws, but does it not seem a little ridiculous when the author is locked out of her own fic?
Also, I missed the Sekrit Cabal Ficlet Battle 4.0. I am rather disappointed about this.
Housekeeping: 'twas written on the prompt "ghosts", for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
themollyedge. Title from Secret Garden's "Sleepsong".
with diamonds and pearls at your head and your feet
adam / hiro / ando, adam / yaeko, hiro / yaeko, ando / oc
heroes; r-whateva. au past 2.11 Powerless.
oh, can't anybody see? we've got a war to fight.
never found our way, regardless of what they say.
i. As an old man, Ando lives on an island in the north Atlantic, in a clapboard house with blue shutters. By this time, his wife has been dead for many years, and he is left alone; the island people have learned to ignore the elderly Japanese gentleman whose polite ghost haunts their pebbled shores, simply one more oddity in a land where the sky dips into the sea. On the island, the days slide under his bones with the sort of unreality unique to retirement. He walks. He sleeps. He feeds the birds: the gulls and the sparrows, the tribe of wild parakeets that escaped from the zoo his first year on the island, since turned hardy and cruel, as wild things must. Sometimes he listens to music from home - min'yo ballads, floating eerie over the surf - and thinks that he has not magically grown any more fucking patient in his old age.
Mostly, though, he sits in front of his Dell laptop and reads, about: treaties and wars. Computer programming. Erotica. How his body is eighty-percent saltwater and his bones thirty-two percent calcium and how he is not so different from this land he inhabits, when every wave is a heartbeat and his starfish have long since been washed back into the sea.
There is something comforting about the thought of dying here, of being buried here. Giving his arthritic bones back to the land and crumpled skin to the soil - knowing that in some small way, he will last forever. In some small way, he is eternal.
ii. In the beginning, there is Hiro, and Ando, and across the planet is New York, still as whole and beautiful and fucked up as ever. It's Kimiko, strangely enough - Type A, Japanese, CEO Kimiko - who persuades them to take a vacation. "Go see the city you tried so hard to save," she says with a slight tilt of her head and an ironic twist in her lips, though her eyes linger on Ando.
Hiro's sister is attractive, he'll give her that. Slender, deceivingly delicate, with those soft hands and thin, ruthless lips. Ando tends to like his women more easily saved, but once he would have savored the thought of having those legs wrapped around his waist, and would have been all over her, had she given any indication she was remotely interested. But Hiro is soft and miserable at his side, so Ando bows and says "Thank you, Kimiko-san," kind and just this side of flat, and this is how he knows he is changing, though he has no idea into what.
After assuring her they don't need plane tickets - even first-class ones, though Ando does sigh a little at the thought of stewardesses - Hiro teleports them home to pack. Initially, Ando goes to his own apartment and Hiro to his, but by the end Hiro is jumping back and forth, carrying armfuls of comic books and shoes and crinkling pull-overs, because they've been in each others lives so long that things began to migrate and blur until his, mine became ours and even his body seems not entirely his own, because parts of it should belong to Hiro, too, when Hiro has given so much of himself to Ando already.
*
New York is loud and dirty, with flashes of blue sky like a wedding canopy; Ando sometimes wished Hiro had learned to fly instead of jump (an ability more transitionary, something that seemed more accepting of the fact that life was not point A and point B but the line that lay between). He has never gotten over the idea of going through clouds. As a child, his mother told him stories of wise dragons winging through cirrus clouds, light and fluffy like whispers of smoke on the horizon. He has since learned the truth about such matters, and it is cold and crystal-sharp, but he has not yet managed to silence the echo in his chest whenever he sees the sky.
Ando is no scientist. He does not find beauty in the knowing of things, or see how knowing can do anything but build a bigger ignorance. His is a small world, but well-loved, worn soft and content at the edges. Even as a child, he was never one for exploring.
"Two hot dogs," he says to a vendor, accented and throaty, "everything on them." Beside him, Hiro winces, but says nothing, and that is strange but not unexpected. This is, after all, how their relationship has been working as of late: Ando makes the small decisions, but when there is any chance of it actually mattering, Hiro whisks control right out of his hands.
Despite what some girls may say, Ando Masahashi is not a bad man. He tries not to feel too resentful of this.
They trudge around the downtown for the time that it takes them to eat - ketchup on Hiro's little white teeth, the sauerkraut bursting rich and bitter in Ando's mouth. He watches Hiro squint up at the skyscrapers and thinks about what Japan was like six hundred years ago, remembers his semester in California and the types of things that people don't write home about.
"Ready?" he asks Hiro.
Hiro gives him a sideways look, the afternoon sun glancing off his glasses. "Yes", he says, after a moment, and they walk into a nearby office-building, down the hall and into the stairwell. He steps forward, ready for the hand on his shoulder, but Hiro grabs his wrists instead, thumbs at the veins there.
"You are a very good friend, Ando-chan," he says, earnest and sad, and then: point B.
*
They are staying with Mohinder, because when one can bend time and space it's easy to forget to do things like make hotel reservations. Perhaps, too, it has a something to do with the fact that broken things tend to gather together. Ando understands this quite well. It's why he likes his women a little fallen, a little wrecked: more edges to catch on. So much easier to take hold of; so much easier to keep.
When they appear, Matt and Molly are making quiet conversation in the kitchen, something to do with decimals. M'n'Ms pass between their hands like daubs of paint. Mohinder notices them looking and smiles, rueful, unsure.
"Last week he tried to teach her about fractions with pizza," he says. Brown fingers stroking lightly over another genetic sample, the microscope slide glinting blue in the jewel-box apartment.
It's not just Hiro and Ando who always end up back here. There's a steady stream of evolved flowing in and out of the doors (sometimes literally), and they bring all sorts of things with them: dreams and hastily-packed backpacks, photographs and fluid samples. The newly awakened, the frightened, the paranoid-and-rightly-so - they all pass through here, as if Mohinder's apartment is the checkpoint between home and a land new and strange, and he the guard, or perhaps the guardian.
The thing about Mohinder, though - and there is a thing - is that he understands. Not much, not always, but he knows, because he's being actively hunted by the monster that used to live under the bed and now has superpowers, stole a kiss in Montana and never gave it back.
It is, of course, no surprise to anyone that Maya is here too.
*
(No one ever remarks how similar Maya and Mohinder look, dark-eyed beauties both, especially when they take the double bed in the back, and Ando knows they're trying to be selfless, but perhaps a bit selfish too, because when He comes He will come upon them first, and their death will be easy, painless, or will not come at all.)
*
Hiro takes him to the Statue of Liberty; Hiro takes him on the Staten Island ferry. Hiro teleports into Macy's from the sidewalk outside, just to prove he can, and ends up in the (occupied) women's restroom. They go FAO Schwarz, where Ando teases Hiro about looking like a teddy bear, and to Ground Zero, where neither of them says anything at all. Ando thinks his plan (read: distraction, distraction, distraction) is going well until Hiro picks up the phone one day when Mohinder's out. He listens for a moment, and then, very politely, says:
"No thank you, I already have insurance," but when he puts down the phone, his hands shake, and he is far, far away, in a place Ando can never touch.
*
"I defeated my villain," flat, dull. "I now understand why Professor X regretted brain-wiping Magneto, but like Professor X, I know it was right thing to do. He can do no more harm."
"But Hiro," Ando says, "he is doing harm. He's hurting you."
Hiro swallows. "I will go to the future and bring him back," he says, and what Ando hears is: he will suffer.
"Dig him up, Hiro," he says. "Now."
*
On his island on the sea, Ando thinks that he would have liked to have met Yaeko. Just once - not fall in love with or fuck, but just meet. Perhaps say hello. Share some tea, feel her breath puff onto his face; ask if Adam was always this evil, or if it was more of a recent development. Maybe one kiss. He deserves that much, he thinks, to know more than the shadow of her. More than whispers still echoing in the curve of Hiro's ear, or the taste that lingers on six hundred-year-old lips.
(It's only polite, really - it's not as if she's a whore, and she has been in bed with them all this time. At first, he thought that he was the only one of them she hadn't touched, but now it occurs to him that perhaps this is not as true as he once thought. Perhaps he bears the weight of her finger-tip bruises more than anyone.)
*
It's nighttime when they unbury him, stars hanging like pearls against the throat of the sky, the dip of horizon a cocked hip. Hiro insisted on this time, a little petulant - there is, after all, a sort of tradition about these things - and though his breath clouds the air in front of his face, something inside Ando glows with warmth.
"Ready?" he asks. Hiro nods.
"One-" Ando starts, and Hiro is gone on two.
Back on three.
(A glimpse of wild eyes and gaunt cheeks-)
All away on four.
And then it is all noise and movement, back in Hiro's apartment with sharp, thin hands around his throat - he can feel the bones pressing underneath the skin - and Ando's all for defeating the villain but being back-to-chest with Hiro's cruelty, Adam's breath puffing stale behind his ear, is hard for even him to bear. Because Adam's skin and bones, all non-essential body mass gone, and for one crazy moment he thinks they've unearthed a skeleton, but then Hiro's talking, and Adam's talking, talking talking talking, Ando's vision is starting to grey at the edges -
"Let him go, Kensei," Hiro shouts, and
"Not on your life," Adam hisses, shaking Ando a little, "not on his-"
- but there's something strange about the way Adam is holding him, pressed flush against his back, not at all the proper stance - too close, too close - but instead Adam's hips are shaking, almost grinding, jerking against his ass, god his skin is freezing, and now Ando figures it out, oh, twists away from Hiro's voice to fold his arms around Adam, pulls him tight and safe to his chest, and suddenly the whole thing... shifts.
*
They kiss only once, sloppy and vicious, Adam biting Ando's lower lip as he goes.
Hiro doesn't kiss either one of them, not then. Not the first time.
*
Ando sprawls against the edge of the bed, sweaty and red-faced, blood running fast and wild under the skin. Beside him, Adam picks at the mess on his belly. Adam's mouldering clothes are even more torn, now, tiny pink nipples and a swirl of pale chest hair showing through, and when Ando presses his mouth to Adam's neck, he tastes salt and decay, earthy and sour like temple incense. His own t-shirt is still bunched up around his armpits.
Adam's still wearing the Italian leather shoes he was buried in, Ando notices. They're flapping open at the sides; still laced up tight. Hiro's glasses are almost hanging off his face, frame twisted, one lens cracked into a tiny, miraculous spiderweb. Wrecked, all of them, and Ando doesn't know how he got here, now; hasn't got a fucking clue, if time is linear and events are bam-bam-bam, a single twisted thread, because he certainly didn't see this coming, somewhere around here he had to have turned a fucking corner.
*
Afterwards, Adam smirks, a little shaky.
"Nice posters," he says, and Hiro touches his arm and frowns, like he's trying to figure something out, soft dark eyes squinting through spiderweb glass. It's as if he sees a ripple in the warp and weft where it wasn't before, Ando notices with a shiver of unease, and perhaps, perhaps that is when it starts, because for once, Hiro doesn't say anything at all.
iii. Hiro speaks of time as if it is fabric, the warp and weft of a hundred-thousand threads that he can wrap around himself, or throw at his feet; something that he can cut, shape, and in some essential way, change. He resembles none so much as a tailor of history - a dart here, tuck there, fold, loosen, lengthen. Wielding his sword as delicately as a pair of needle-nosed scissors, cutting out what does not fit.
This is perhaps how Ando will remember him: not soft or happy, but hunched and quiet, working late into the night to shape the cloth to fit the curves of a woman he will never run his hands over, will never laugh with, cry with, kiss, but yet knows, intimately. Trapped to her design, even as he is the designer. Sometimes, in the Tokyo night, Ando will run his hands over Hiro's back and wonder if his friend knows this, if he ever will.
He suspects not.
*
"Well, that's rather egotistical of you," Adam says, "not to mention, highly improbable." He raps his chopsticks against the edge of the table. Adam speaks Japanese like a foreigner, passionate and sharp, each syllable a bite torn off and spit back out. In his mouth, every word is a declaration of war. He may have gotten past using piles of pronouns like most Westerners, but his pronunciation teeters on the obnoxious, random intonation everywhere, suffused with a blue-eyed anger. It's almost endearing how little he's learned over six hundred years.
"After all," he continues, "there are 100,000,000,000 other stars in the Milky Way."
"I know," Hiro says. "I was there when last one went out."
This, too, is strange, the sharing of adventures. Hiro makes a jump every few days, tromping off into time with his sword strapped to his back; he never takes Adam - if it were any other person, Ando would think Hiro delights in leaving him behind - but sometimes he takes Ando along, if he's going into the past. Last week they went to the premier of The Wrath of Khan. He never brings Ando far into the future, though, and won't talk to him about it. "A wise man would not wish to know," he says. Be content.
He talks to Adam, though. Tells him everything. After all, Adam is what remains - after Hiro, after everything - the ruthless constant, the stable point on the compass. Adam is magnetic north. Adam is the equals sign in the equation, there even when he's not, steady as the numbers dance and die around him.
"I didn't say they weren't out there -" Ando argues.
Adam takes a long pull from his beer, pale throat bobbing in the halo of light surrounding them. He brings a tiny lantern with him everywhere, now. Walking into the fashionably dim restaurant, he had fumbled the switch on in a panic and clutched it as he walked, only setting it down when he needed his hands to eat. It's battery-powered and harsh, sending a dart-board of light across the table, and in its light Adam's skin shines like bone.
"- but Spock?"
"Perhaps not," Adam admits. Ando smiles, and reaches again for his beer.
"I come in peace," Hiro intones, solemn.
(Ando knocks back the rest of the bottle.)
"That I very much doubt," says Adam.
*
Adam carries time within himself like an oyster carries a pearl, something precious built up around irritation. It's an appealing image: all of his six hundred years compacted into a ball of what we dream moonlight is like and what it never is (cold, white, tangible); cushioned by his soft parts, his inner parts, the ones you'd have to kill the oyster to see. There is something enduringly sexy about an oyster, its wet mounds of flesh. But as Adam could tell you, it's the itch and suffering we call beautiful, it's the pearl hung 'round our necks.
*
"God," Ando says, or tries to, "God, God, God, oh God -"
*
Adam is a fun lover, inventive and enthusiastic even with Ando's well-meaning blunders, though those grow less and less with time. Hiro, by contrast, is never unappreciative, but always slightly removed from this side of proceedings, just this side of distasteful. It's surreal, the first few times, but Ando gets used to the fact that Hiro, kind sweet Hiro, is more of a voyeur than God itself. Hiro gets off by watching them grind and suckle and bite, and when they come, he always smiles proudly, as one would to a small child who had done something worth praise. But what Hiro seems to really like best is the sleeping afterward: curled between them with their hands on his hip or touching the worn Star Trek t-shirt he wears to bed, his ear pressed to Ando's steady heartbeat, and later, as the years pass, Adam's.
*
Adam gives him one last, slow lick, finishing off with an indecent slurp, and then swallows him down again.
"Not God," he says later, his breath thick and sour against Ando's face. "Not God, me."
*
When he was a child, Ando was looking forward to being an old man. He would be powerful by then, he assumed - revered, like his grandfather, like Nakamura Kaito. He would walk around Tokyo with his long white beard and his cane, and people would scatter in front of his steps like birds, schoolchildren following to hear the pearls of wisdom he dropped into their little hands. He did not consider the possibility of arthritis or prostate cancer - the fact that his body would be breaking down, slowly, with every step he took - because like many children, he believed he was invincible and would live forever.
*
In the blue light of the bathroom mirror, Ando's face is lined and craggy, weary sandstone marred by tiny patches of sun-veins. The trenches sloping down towards his mouth have gotten deeper; more are being dug in his forehead. His eyes look permanently clenched. His jowls are hanging looser. He looks like a statue, and feels ready to crumble to dust. The only thing that hasn't changed is his hair, still as coarse and wild as ever, but that is a small comfort, at best. Ando keeps his short, but with every solitary jump, Hiro's has been getting longer, his face getting grimmer.
(Ando wants to ask him to stop jumping, stop meddling, even though he knows for Hiro it would be like trying to stop breathing. Which is not the same as impossible; in fact, one of these days, Ando's going to end up having to do that too.)
Soft footsteps break through all the night-noises - Hiro's soft snores, the cars outside, the hum and whine of the fluorescent light - that numb this moment, section it off into laughable non-time.
Adam comes up behind him, carrying his lantern.
"You're old," he says, and there is something like horror in his voice, and something like wonder.
*
Of the three of them, Ando thinks he understands time the best.
iv. They schedule his operation for the beginning of the whale-watching season. "Really," his doctor says, "you've waited too long as it is," and Ando understands, but is not sorry, because these days his heart spasms like the arch and slap of a humpback's barnacled tail, one-onetwo, one-onetwo, and sometimes, if he times it right, he can look through his binoculars and find one moving in tandem with him, strange feedback looping over the waves.
Lately, he has been feeling more empathy for animals. There's a cat he feeds, now, an old fighting tom, blind in one eye but still sharp and cunning in the other. It eats his kitchen scraps and hunts down the house-mice, as regal and ruthless as an emperor, and allows Ando to pet him occasionally - coat brittle with brine under Ando's shaking, arthritic hand, torn ear curled into itself like a question mark.
Perhaps this is all because he is old, and breaking-down, never before as aware of his component parts as he is now. Perhaps it has taken him this long to understand that, as innovative and far-reaching as humans are, he will leave no more mark on the world than a whale, and possibly less of one. Certainly, he is less beautiful, and he feels a stranger wherever he goes. He is not animal, savage and instinctual and full of mindless grace, but neither is he human, or fit to be in the company of them, when his body and its needs are too biological, rude and real. To them, he is a bipedal mammal with opposable thumbs, homo sapiens sapiens, and if he were any more of an animal he could smell the fear in their pity.
*
A neighbor picks him up in her car - a solid, dependable jeep, the powder-blue of his cat's clouded eye - and drives him down to the docks, where she parks with one wheel up on the curb and tells him to stay put, disappearing into the fog. The car smells like oilcloth; woodsmoke and wet wool, and someone, probably a child, has scrawled a crayon lighthouse on the dash. Ando leans tiredly against the window and sighs, watching the hot clouds of his breath bloom and skitter across the glass. When his neighbor returns, she insists she pay at least half of his ticket, but then counts her share down to the pennies, $13.49 in copper and crumpled, weary bills.
Her sister-in-law is waiting for him on the other side, she assures him, and spends the rest of the time until the ferry comes asking him about Okinawa, where her younger brother is apparently stationed. He has become quite duplicitous in his old age, Ando thinks, because he spins tales of pineapple groves and glittering coral beaches - air so wet and warm that the natives bathe by just stepping outside their apartments - and not once does he mention that he's never even set foot there.
v. Ando marries his wife for the first time in the early spring. They meet on a weekend excursion outside Tokyo, an offhand move on both their parts. The city may be same as ever - dirty and loud - but out in the country, the land rises like a pair of waking lovers, soft and shuddering, rain dripping off the black branches. Everything opening. It is a good time for falling in love, and their wedding is quick - her borrowed dress and peep-toed sandals, mist kissing their feet - so she can catch her flight back tomorrow morning.
(His new wife is an American - a Mainer, to be exact - who currently goes by the name of Ariel, born Cheryl, born again Rei. A big redhead, hips like shovels and a wise face, with a tiny half-moon scar under her left eye and a koi tattoo on her inner ankle. She always wanted to be a showgirl, but instead became a librarian. After the ceremony, they sit on the steps of the municipal government office and lean against each other, her warm, pulsing body folded into his.
"You are very beautiful," Ando says, earnest and true, and she smiles shyly, showing dimples and crooked teeth.)
The second time they marry, it is back in her hometown of South China, Maine, with her ecstatic (though suspicious) sister acting as master of ceremonies. They are more sober than the first time, but summer-drunk, and the lines around her eyes crinkle when he slips the ring - a little too loose - around her finger.
It's a real wedding, with cake and presents and a dizzying amount of fair-haired relatives. Ando thinks Hiro and Adam may have been there, for a while at least. He keeps catching glimpses of blonde hair out of the corner of his eye, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. His new wife has many, many cousins.
*
The newlyweds move to an island off the coast, into a clapboard house with lurid orange shutters and a spare room big enough to be a nursery, should a baby come. None does, and Ando repaints the shutters a deep, soothing blue. Ariel takes a job at the tiny lending library and fills their house with books, so that every move they make sets a hundred yellowed pages fluttering. They hang their white sheets out to dry in the ocean breeze and then make love in them, night after night, until their skin tastes of salt.
They are happy, for a time.
*
After the winter, the other librarian quits and Ariel starts working late. Life here is as life everywhere: fragile, precious, expensive. Ando buys another laptop, starts taking in contracting work. Sometimes he travels. His wife worries for him on the road, for his middle-aged body and lonely heart. She will never stop believing that she is lucky, and will always secretly worry, as if Ando did not know there were better out there, and married her nonetheless.
He has not seen either of his lovers, nor anything of his old life, since before the wedding - no cheerleaders or monsters, and the sky has been quiet and strange. Whatever fairy-tale these people came from, they've since vanished back into, and it's as if it never happened, never could have. Part of him thinks it's over with - a dream of waking, and he has now woken up - but sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Hiro. He never turns to look, but he knows that when he's ready, Hiro will be there, smiling and pushing his glasses up - standing right next to Ando, as if he always had been.
*
Six months later, walking in Central Park, he swallows and closes his eyes.
"Hiro," he says, and when the crowds part, he sees Hiro and Adam, sitting on the edge of a fountain. Adam is eating a strawberry ice cream cone. Hiro is waving to him.
"Are you ready to come home, Ando-chan?" Hiro asks him when he approaches. Hiro's voice is very serious, and Adam wags his sticky fingers at Ando and then sticks them in his mouth, one by one, sucking off liquid that's vaguely the color of intestines, inner organs and the lining of a skull, heads opened up like burial urns.
They are sitting, Ando notices, in the brightest circle of sunlight.
*
(These hands that are touching him, here, gripping his hips, these hands have touched blood, spilled it, painted with it perhaps. And this mouth, here, this mouth that surrounds him, this mouth has kissed the dead.)
*
"How was your trip?" Ariel asks.
"Good," Ando says. "It was very good."
*
(That night, he looks up Nakamura Industries on the web. Kimiko-san seems to be doing very well for herself; stocks are up, despite market instability, and from the photos, she has either aged well or has a very, very good plastic surgeon, possibly both. There is no mention of Hiro, but when he hacks into the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department database, he finds stories of witnesses who vanish in a moment's inattention, gaijin who are shot but do not die.)
*
Years pass, as they do. Ariel lobbies for renovating the library, stops wearing makeup, buys a dryer. The paint on the shutters cracks and peels. Hiro and Ando send each other postcards with old Trekkie quotes converted into haiku. Every second Sunday Ando walks to the library to stand under the color-splashed leaves of the maple tree there, and Hiro will come out from behind the building, and lay hands on his shoulders, whisk him away to Hiro's old apartment. The posters are still there, but dust-covered, and Ando sneezes when they hit the bed. It's an old building, by now, wiring faulty, and sometimes the lights will cut off. When that happens Adam whimpers, high and terrified; wedges himself between their warm bodies, and hates them a little when the lights come back on.
Other times, Adam is not there, and the awkwardness between Ando and Hiro is sharp, splinter-edged, worse than nothing at all. These are the times when Ando hates Adam a little, or perhaps just more than usual, but whatever Adam is doing - saving babies, heading up the Tokyo chapter of Villains'R'Us - he cannot fault him for it, because Ando understands, he really does. Neither of them are really the type for sticking around, only for being stuck.
Only twice, so strange and rare he thinks he might have dreamed it, does Hiro bring Ando and then vanish himself. The first time he fucks Adam from behind, sharp hipbones catching on minimal curves, and when he wakes, Hiro is there. The second, Adam makes him tea and talks, and Ando realizes that perhaps he is not the only one with two weeks between visits, sips of water in a desert.
"Mostly he just locks me in the apartment," Adam says, when Ando asks about saving the world.
He shrugs. Ando kisses him with a mouth that tastes like cloves, sloppy and sad.
(The next day, Ando goes to a pet shop on the mainland and buys Adam a fish - a carp, so that Adam will recognize the gesture, because his brand of kindness has something cruel about it. "Koi, koi," Adam murmurs now the nights they make love, the only words he will say, and no one can tell if its a name or a prayer.)
*
And then one day, Ando stands under the falling-red leaves for hours, and Hiro doesn't come. The postcard, postmarked three weeks ago, comes two days later:
a dream that became
a reality and spread
throughout the stars
It's missing one syllable.
*
"You okay, hon?" Ariel asks him later.
"Yes," he says, short and careful. After months of her reminiscing about watching The Christmas Carol as a little girl, they've finally found the time to watch it - curled on the couch, her crooked toes tucked under his thighs - and he does not want to ruin this for her. Does not want to take this away from her, when he has taken so much without her even knowing, wouldn't have been able to guess even at the possibility of it. He's always felt bad for cheating on her, but told himself she would understand, even when he knew she would not.
But now she pauses it, turns to him. Ando does not know what she sees in his eyes, but she nods, once, and burrows closer to his side, arms wrapping around his waist.
"What about the movie?" he asks, after the silence has gone on too long.
Ariel sighs, a short staccato of breath. Rueful.
"It isn't as good as I remembered," she says.
*
Ando and his wife have many happy years together. At night he dreams of them.
vi. No more are the winter storms; these nights, the surf courts the sand with such tenderness that the whole world is sweet with lovemaking - wind kissing the rocks, moon nestled in the trees' thin, dark arms. Most days, Ando stays home and overfeeds the cat. Sometimes he just sits by the window, watching the whales, by turns marveling and saddened by the strong, steady beat of his heart.
The pacemaker is not what he expected. It's not heavy, doesn't hang like a second heart; doesn't jolt him as he were the monster Frakenstein built. Rather, like many things, it is just there, and the knowledge that it must exist is more of an irritant than it actually existing. It makes Ando feel very old, even though he cannot imagine his grandfather consenting to this tiny computer being put into his shoulder, taking his proud life and settling it in the hands of machinery. Ando, though, is a child of the digital age; an old man, but an old man who can build a computer from parts. On this account, at least, the thing does not bother him.
This is how he counts his days now: his steady heartbeat, so strange after all the time spent crooked and soaring; the slap of waves on the rock; the rattle of pills into withered hand. By the end, he thinks, he will have consumed enough medication to measure up to Adam's life, each year a bitter pill. His throat is chalky and constantly sore. His doctor is a little concerned about this, and wants him to come in each month for a check-up, but he refuses. Even bloated and decrepit he still has a weakness for beautiful women, and he hates how flustered he gets around her.
"I don't think you're concerned enough for your own health, Mr. Masahashi," she says over the phone, tired and sharp.
"I'm okay," he says. "I'm waiting."
She's quiet for a long time.
*
(After the operation, lying in the hospital bed with the blankets tucked 'round his legs and nothing else to do, Ando thinks, about: everything. Or, not everything, but fairly close. Galaxies and planetoids and the feel of Adam under his hands, rough at the elbows and feet. It's then that he wonders about Niki, for the first time in years. When he gets home, he digs out some of his old webcam recordings. (The video feed had been encrypted, he remembered, but Hiro had fixed so it could save, sighing at Ando all the while.) He watches for a long time, but he can't get it up, and there's something shaming about this, anyway, sitting in the grey island light watching a long-dead woman strip and pout at the cameras.
The islanders think it's odd that he names his cat Jesse - proud, ruthless, battle-scarred Jesse, called to table by Ando's guttural voice and unfamiliar pronunciation. Perhaps they sense the irony. More likely, they expected something less American.)
*
One day, Adam shows up at his door.
"Surprise," he says.
Adam looks good - all white smiles and pink skin, his face filled out in the ways that it never really was before, the collar of his black peacoat pulled tight against the wind. Ando does not ask how Adam got out of the apartment. Instead, Adam sits at the creaking kitchen table while Ando makes tea and small talk, hands shaking but sure on the kettle.
"How's life?" Ando asks.
"Oh, you know," Adam says, reaching for his cup. "Unbearable as ever."
The sun sets over the dunes, evening-light streaming in through the big wooden-framed windows, forming a halo of light forming around Adam's face as he sips.
"Once, I would have married you, you know," Adam says, his eyes tracing patterns in the wood-grain. "I don't know why I didn't."
"I'm Japanese," Ando says. "You couldn't have."
Adam looks up then, something manic skittering under the surface. "I'd have changed it," he insists, "I would have changed it all, changed everything," and Ando smiles, sadly, because Adam Monroe may be six hundred years old but compared to Ando he is young and earnest and so, so very stupid.
*
After Adam leaves, Ando lights a stick of incense in front of the Buddha he keeps mostly for appearances and settles into his favorite chair, cat deigning to sprawl over his lap. The night passes in quiet waiting and tandem breath. Nothing less than a vigil kept, with the ring of shadows that haunt his very step, seep in through his cold feet to steal through his body, heart, lungs, liver. He's lived his past; he's old, weary, done. Now Adam has come, and gone, back into his eternal present with a shard of sea-glass strung on the ring-chain 'round his neck, and it is time.
Ando's seen The Christmas Carol. He knows what ghost comes next.
*
Hiro brings the morning, the ancient edge of the sun slivering the horizon as he appears in the garden, landing in a pile of old flowerpots. Ando watches through the window as Hiro shakes pottery shards off his feet and squints towards the house, fumbling with glasses newly cracked. He is young, painfully so, and when he starts to march up to the porch, Ando moves faster than he thought was possible, anymore, away from the window and to the big oak door, flinging it open on the first knock.
"I come in peace?" Hiro says, and shoves his v-ed fingers forward.
Ando fights back sudden tears. "Hiro, Hiro, Hiro," he chants, and covers Hiro's hand with his own. Ando is suddenly aware of how this must look to him - old Ando, the wrinkles in his eyes and the shake in his hands, the desperation that overwrites every tremor and liver spot. And he understands, he knows why Hiro's here and why he's here and why they're very different reasons, question and answer, lock and key, but - still. Still, he is human, and selfish, and cannot help but take a moment for the love in his heart.
"I've been waiting for you," he says, soft, and then, softer: "This is how it ends, Hiro-chan."
Hiro purses his small mouth until it looks lost in his face. "I can change it," he says.
"Hiro, promise me," Ando says. "Promise you will not tell past-me. Promise you will not change it."
Hiro frowns, but does not say a thing. Instead, he turns to the window, and Ando can see the familiar expanse beyond as if he's seeing it for the first time, through Hiro's eyes - the grey rocks and sky and water, the scrub-plants that cling like stubble to the coastline. Blue shutters stiff in the wind; his old tom, shot out when he opened the door, now a flash of red-gold playing on the coastline. The sun is rising now, and now he's rising with it, above sea and sand and curve of shore, above Hiro's shocked face, and from this height, Ando thinks, the world is very young and beautiful.
heroes_exchange has a bloody age filter. To be honest, I'd rather avoid debate about the effectiveness and purpose of those things - it comes too close to morals for me - but on a purely practical level, it's annoying as hell. And yes, I realize that every system has its flaws, but does it not seem a little ridiculous when the author is locked out of her own fic?Also, I missed the Sekrit Cabal Ficlet Battle 4.0. I am rather disappointed about this.
Housekeeping: 'twas written on the prompt "ghosts", for
themollyedge. Title from Secret Garden's "Sleepsong".with diamonds and pearls at your head and your feet
adam / hiro / ando, adam / yaeko, hiro / yaeko, ando / oc
heroes; r-whateva. au past 2.11 Powerless.
never found our way, regardless of what they say.
i. As an old man, Ando lives on an island in the north Atlantic, in a clapboard house with blue shutters. By this time, his wife has been dead for many years, and he is left alone; the island people have learned to ignore the elderly Japanese gentleman whose polite ghost haunts their pebbled shores, simply one more oddity in a land where the sky dips into the sea. On the island, the days slide under his bones with the sort of unreality unique to retirement. He walks. He sleeps. He feeds the birds: the gulls and the sparrows, the tribe of wild parakeets that escaped from the zoo his first year on the island, since turned hardy and cruel, as wild things must. Sometimes he listens to music from home - min'yo ballads, floating eerie over the surf - and thinks that he has not magically grown any more fucking patient in his old age.
Mostly, though, he sits in front of his Dell laptop and reads, about: treaties and wars. Computer programming. Erotica. How his body is eighty-percent saltwater and his bones thirty-two percent calcium and how he is not so different from this land he inhabits, when every wave is a heartbeat and his starfish have long since been washed back into the sea.
There is something comforting about the thought of dying here, of being buried here. Giving his arthritic bones back to the land and crumpled skin to the soil - knowing that in some small way, he will last forever. In some small way, he is eternal.
ii. In the beginning, there is Hiro, and Ando, and across the planet is New York, still as whole and beautiful and fucked up as ever. It's Kimiko, strangely enough - Type A, Japanese, CEO Kimiko - who persuades them to take a vacation. "Go see the city you tried so hard to save," she says with a slight tilt of her head and an ironic twist in her lips, though her eyes linger on Ando.
Hiro's sister is attractive, he'll give her that. Slender, deceivingly delicate, with those soft hands and thin, ruthless lips. Ando tends to like his women more easily saved, but once he would have savored the thought of having those legs wrapped around his waist, and would have been all over her, had she given any indication she was remotely interested. But Hiro is soft and miserable at his side, so Ando bows and says "Thank you, Kimiko-san," kind and just this side of flat, and this is how he knows he is changing, though he has no idea into what.
After assuring her they don't need plane tickets - even first-class ones, though Ando does sigh a little at the thought of stewardesses - Hiro teleports them home to pack. Initially, Ando goes to his own apartment and Hiro to his, but by the end Hiro is jumping back and forth, carrying armfuls of comic books and shoes and crinkling pull-overs, because they've been in each others lives so long that things began to migrate and blur until his, mine became ours and even his body seems not entirely his own, because parts of it should belong to Hiro, too, when Hiro has given so much of himself to Ando already.
*
New York is loud and dirty, with flashes of blue sky like a wedding canopy; Ando sometimes wished Hiro had learned to fly instead of jump (an ability more transitionary, something that seemed more accepting of the fact that life was not point A and point B but the line that lay between). He has never gotten over the idea of going through clouds. As a child, his mother told him stories of wise dragons winging through cirrus clouds, light and fluffy like whispers of smoke on the horizon. He has since learned the truth about such matters, and it is cold and crystal-sharp, but he has not yet managed to silence the echo in his chest whenever he sees the sky.
Ando is no scientist. He does not find beauty in the knowing of things, or see how knowing can do anything but build a bigger ignorance. His is a small world, but well-loved, worn soft and content at the edges. Even as a child, he was never one for exploring.
"Two hot dogs," he says to a vendor, accented and throaty, "everything on them." Beside him, Hiro winces, but says nothing, and that is strange but not unexpected. This is, after all, how their relationship has been working as of late: Ando makes the small decisions, but when there is any chance of it actually mattering, Hiro whisks control right out of his hands.
Despite what some girls may say, Ando Masahashi is not a bad man. He tries not to feel too resentful of this.
They trudge around the downtown for the time that it takes them to eat - ketchup on Hiro's little white teeth, the sauerkraut bursting rich and bitter in Ando's mouth. He watches Hiro squint up at the skyscrapers and thinks about what Japan was like six hundred years ago, remembers his semester in California and the types of things that people don't write home about.
"Ready?" he asks Hiro.
Hiro gives him a sideways look, the afternoon sun glancing off his glasses. "Yes", he says, after a moment, and they walk into a nearby office-building, down the hall and into the stairwell. He steps forward, ready for the hand on his shoulder, but Hiro grabs his wrists instead, thumbs at the veins there.
"You are a very good friend, Ando-chan," he says, earnest and sad, and then: point B.
*
They are staying with Mohinder, because when one can bend time and space it's easy to forget to do things like make hotel reservations. Perhaps, too, it has a something to do with the fact that broken things tend to gather together. Ando understands this quite well. It's why he likes his women a little fallen, a little wrecked: more edges to catch on. So much easier to take hold of; so much easier to keep.
When they appear, Matt and Molly are making quiet conversation in the kitchen, something to do with decimals. M'n'Ms pass between their hands like daubs of paint. Mohinder notices them looking and smiles, rueful, unsure.
"Last week he tried to teach her about fractions with pizza," he says. Brown fingers stroking lightly over another genetic sample, the microscope slide glinting blue in the jewel-box apartment.
It's not just Hiro and Ando who always end up back here. There's a steady stream of evolved flowing in and out of the doors (sometimes literally), and they bring all sorts of things with them: dreams and hastily-packed backpacks, photographs and fluid samples. The newly awakened, the frightened, the paranoid-and-rightly-so - they all pass through here, as if Mohinder's apartment is the checkpoint between home and a land new and strange, and he the guard, or perhaps the guardian.
The thing about Mohinder, though - and there is a thing - is that he understands. Not much, not always, but he knows, because he's being actively hunted by the monster that used to live under the bed and now has superpowers, stole a kiss in Montana and never gave it back.
It is, of course, no surprise to anyone that Maya is here too.
*
(No one ever remarks how similar Maya and Mohinder look, dark-eyed beauties both, especially when they take the double bed in the back, and Ando knows they're trying to be selfless, but perhaps a bit selfish too, because when He comes He will come upon them first, and their death will be easy, painless, or will not come at all.)
*
Hiro takes him to the Statue of Liberty; Hiro takes him on the Staten Island ferry. Hiro teleports into Macy's from the sidewalk outside, just to prove he can, and ends up in the (occupied) women's restroom. They go FAO Schwarz, where Ando teases Hiro about looking like a teddy bear, and to Ground Zero, where neither of them says anything at all. Ando thinks his plan (read: distraction, distraction, distraction) is going well until Hiro picks up the phone one day when Mohinder's out. He listens for a moment, and then, very politely, says:
"No thank you, I already have insurance," but when he puts down the phone, his hands shake, and he is far, far away, in a place Ando can never touch.
*
"I defeated my villain," flat, dull. "I now understand why Professor X regretted brain-wiping Magneto, but like Professor X, I know it was right thing to do. He can do no more harm."
"But Hiro," Ando says, "he is doing harm. He's hurting you."
Hiro swallows. "I will go to the future and bring him back," he says, and what Ando hears is: he will suffer.
"Dig him up, Hiro," he says. "Now."
*
On his island on the sea, Ando thinks that he would have liked to have met Yaeko. Just once - not fall in love with or fuck, but just meet. Perhaps say hello. Share some tea, feel her breath puff onto his face; ask if Adam was always this evil, or if it was more of a recent development. Maybe one kiss. He deserves that much, he thinks, to know more than the shadow of her. More than whispers still echoing in the curve of Hiro's ear, or the taste that lingers on six hundred-year-old lips.
(It's only polite, really - it's not as if she's a whore, and she has been in bed with them all this time. At first, he thought that he was the only one of them she hadn't touched, but now it occurs to him that perhaps this is not as true as he once thought. Perhaps he bears the weight of her finger-tip bruises more than anyone.)
*
It's nighttime when they unbury him, stars hanging like pearls against the throat of the sky, the dip of horizon a cocked hip. Hiro insisted on this time, a little petulant - there is, after all, a sort of tradition about these things - and though his breath clouds the air in front of his face, something inside Ando glows with warmth.
"Ready?" he asks. Hiro nods.
"One-" Ando starts, and Hiro is gone on two.
Back on three.
(A glimpse of wild eyes and gaunt cheeks-)
All away on four.
And then it is all noise and movement, back in Hiro's apartment with sharp, thin hands around his throat - he can feel the bones pressing underneath the skin - and Ando's all for defeating the villain but being back-to-chest with Hiro's cruelty, Adam's breath puffing stale behind his ear, is hard for even him to bear. Because Adam's skin and bones, all non-essential body mass gone, and for one crazy moment he thinks they've unearthed a skeleton, but then Hiro's talking, and Adam's talking, talking talking talking, Ando's vision is starting to grey at the edges -
"Let him go, Kensei," Hiro shouts, and
"Not on your life," Adam hisses, shaking Ando a little, "not on his-"
- but there's something strange about the way Adam is holding him, pressed flush against his back, not at all the proper stance - too close, too close - but instead Adam's hips are shaking, almost grinding, jerking against his ass, god his skin is freezing, and now Ando figures it out, oh, twists away from Hiro's voice to fold his arms around Adam, pulls him tight and safe to his chest, and suddenly the whole thing... shifts.
*
They kiss only once, sloppy and vicious, Adam biting Ando's lower lip as he goes.
Hiro doesn't kiss either one of them, not then. Not the first time.
*
Ando sprawls against the edge of the bed, sweaty and red-faced, blood running fast and wild under the skin. Beside him, Adam picks at the mess on his belly. Adam's mouldering clothes are even more torn, now, tiny pink nipples and a swirl of pale chest hair showing through, and when Ando presses his mouth to Adam's neck, he tastes salt and decay, earthy and sour like temple incense. His own t-shirt is still bunched up around his armpits.
Adam's still wearing the Italian leather shoes he was buried in, Ando notices. They're flapping open at the sides; still laced up tight. Hiro's glasses are almost hanging off his face, frame twisted, one lens cracked into a tiny, miraculous spiderweb. Wrecked, all of them, and Ando doesn't know how he got here, now; hasn't got a fucking clue, if time is linear and events are bam-bam-bam, a single twisted thread, because he certainly didn't see this coming, somewhere around here he had to have turned a fucking corner.
*
Afterwards, Adam smirks, a little shaky.
"Nice posters," he says, and Hiro touches his arm and frowns, like he's trying to figure something out, soft dark eyes squinting through spiderweb glass. It's as if he sees a ripple in the warp and weft where it wasn't before, Ando notices with a shiver of unease, and perhaps, perhaps that is when it starts, because for once, Hiro doesn't say anything at all.
iii. Hiro speaks of time as if it is fabric, the warp and weft of a hundred-thousand threads that he can wrap around himself, or throw at his feet; something that he can cut, shape, and in some essential way, change. He resembles none so much as a tailor of history - a dart here, tuck there, fold, loosen, lengthen. Wielding his sword as delicately as a pair of needle-nosed scissors, cutting out what does not fit.
This is perhaps how Ando will remember him: not soft or happy, but hunched and quiet, working late into the night to shape the cloth to fit the curves of a woman he will never run his hands over, will never laugh with, cry with, kiss, but yet knows, intimately. Trapped to her design, even as he is the designer. Sometimes, in the Tokyo night, Ando will run his hands over Hiro's back and wonder if his friend knows this, if he ever will.
He suspects not.
*
"Well, that's rather egotistical of you," Adam says, "not to mention, highly improbable." He raps his chopsticks against the edge of the table. Adam speaks Japanese like a foreigner, passionate and sharp, each syllable a bite torn off and spit back out. In his mouth, every word is a declaration of war. He may have gotten past using piles of pronouns like most Westerners, but his pronunciation teeters on the obnoxious, random intonation everywhere, suffused with a blue-eyed anger. It's almost endearing how little he's learned over six hundred years.
"After all," he continues, "there are 100,000,000,000 other stars in the Milky Way."
"I know," Hiro says. "I was there when last one went out."
This, too, is strange, the sharing of adventures. Hiro makes a jump every few days, tromping off into time with his sword strapped to his back; he never takes Adam - if it were any other person, Ando would think Hiro delights in leaving him behind - but sometimes he takes Ando along, if he's going into the past. Last week they went to the premier of The Wrath of Khan. He never brings Ando far into the future, though, and won't talk to him about it. "A wise man would not wish to know," he says. Be content.
He talks to Adam, though. Tells him everything. After all, Adam is what remains - after Hiro, after everything - the ruthless constant, the stable point on the compass. Adam is magnetic north. Adam is the equals sign in the equation, there even when he's not, steady as the numbers dance and die around him.
"I didn't say they weren't out there -" Ando argues.
Adam takes a long pull from his beer, pale throat bobbing in the halo of light surrounding them. He brings a tiny lantern with him everywhere, now. Walking into the fashionably dim restaurant, he had fumbled the switch on in a panic and clutched it as he walked, only setting it down when he needed his hands to eat. It's battery-powered and harsh, sending a dart-board of light across the table, and in its light Adam's skin shines like bone.
"- but Spock?"
"Perhaps not," Adam admits. Ando smiles, and reaches again for his beer.
"I come in peace," Hiro intones, solemn.
(Ando knocks back the rest of the bottle.)
"That I very much doubt," says Adam.
*
Adam carries time within himself like an oyster carries a pearl, something precious built up around irritation. It's an appealing image: all of his six hundred years compacted into a ball of what we dream moonlight is like and what it never is (cold, white, tangible); cushioned by his soft parts, his inner parts, the ones you'd have to kill the oyster to see. There is something enduringly sexy about an oyster, its wet mounds of flesh. But as Adam could tell you, it's the itch and suffering we call beautiful, it's the pearl hung 'round our necks.
*
"God," Ando says, or tries to, "God, God, God, oh God -"
*
Adam is a fun lover, inventive and enthusiastic even with Ando's well-meaning blunders, though those grow less and less with time. Hiro, by contrast, is never unappreciative, but always slightly removed from this side of proceedings, just this side of distasteful. It's surreal, the first few times, but Ando gets used to the fact that Hiro, kind sweet Hiro, is more of a voyeur than God itself. Hiro gets off by watching them grind and suckle and bite, and when they come, he always smiles proudly, as one would to a small child who had done something worth praise. But what Hiro seems to really like best is the sleeping afterward: curled between them with their hands on his hip or touching the worn Star Trek t-shirt he wears to bed, his ear pressed to Ando's steady heartbeat, and later, as the years pass, Adam's.
*
Adam gives him one last, slow lick, finishing off with an indecent slurp, and then swallows him down again.
"Not God," he says later, his breath thick and sour against Ando's face. "Not God, me."
*
When he was a child, Ando was looking forward to being an old man. He would be powerful by then, he assumed - revered, like his grandfather, like Nakamura Kaito. He would walk around Tokyo with his long white beard and his cane, and people would scatter in front of his steps like birds, schoolchildren following to hear the pearls of wisdom he dropped into their little hands. He did not consider the possibility of arthritis or prostate cancer - the fact that his body would be breaking down, slowly, with every step he took - because like many children, he believed he was invincible and would live forever.
*
In the blue light of the bathroom mirror, Ando's face is lined and craggy, weary sandstone marred by tiny patches of sun-veins. The trenches sloping down towards his mouth have gotten deeper; more are being dug in his forehead. His eyes look permanently clenched. His jowls are hanging looser. He looks like a statue, and feels ready to crumble to dust. The only thing that hasn't changed is his hair, still as coarse and wild as ever, but that is a small comfort, at best. Ando keeps his short, but with every solitary jump, Hiro's has been getting longer, his face getting grimmer.
(Ando wants to ask him to stop jumping, stop meddling, even though he knows for Hiro it would be like trying to stop breathing. Which is not the same as impossible; in fact, one of these days, Ando's going to end up having to do that too.)
Soft footsteps break through all the night-noises - Hiro's soft snores, the cars outside, the hum and whine of the fluorescent light - that numb this moment, section it off into laughable non-time.
Adam comes up behind him, carrying his lantern.
"You're old," he says, and there is something like horror in his voice, and something like wonder.
*
Of the three of them, Ando thinks he understands time the best.
iv. They schedule his operation for the beginning of the whale-watching season. "Really," his doctor says, "you've waited too long as it is," and Ando understands, but is not sorry, because these days his heart spasms like the arch and slap of a humpback's barnacled tail, one-onetwo, one-onetwo, and sometimes, if he times it right, he can look through his binoculars and find one moving in tandem with him, strange feedback looping over the waves.
Lately, he has been feeling more empathy for animals. There's a cat he feeds, now, an old fighting tom, blind in one eye but still sharp and cunning in the other. It eats his kitchen scraps and hunts down the house-mice, as regal and ruthless as an emperor, and allows Ando to pet him occasionally - coat brittle with brine under Ando's shaking, arthritic hand, torn ear curled into itself like a question mark.
Perhaps this is all because he is old, and breaking-down, never before as aware of his component parts as he is now. Perhaps it has taken him this long to understand that, as innovative and far-reaching as humans are, he will leave no more mark on the world than a whale, and possibly less of one. Certainly, he is less beautiful, and he feels a stranger wherever he goes. He is not animal, savage and instinctual and full of mindless grace, but neither is he human, or fit to be in the company of them, when his body and its needs are too biological, rude and real. To them, he is a bipedal mammal with opposable thumbs, homo sapiens sapiens, and if he were any more of an animal he could smell the fear in their pity.
*
A neighbor picks him up in her car - a solid, dependable jeep, the powder-blue of his cat's clouded eye - and drives him down to the docks, where she parks with one wheel up on the curb and tells him to stay put, disappearing into the fog. The car smells like oilcloth; woodsmoke and wet wool, and someone, probably a child, has scrawled a crayon lighthouse on the dash. Ando leans tiredly against the window and sighs, watching the hot clouds of his breath bloom and skitter across the glass. When his neighbor returns, she insists she pay at least half of his ticket, but then counts her share down to the pennies, $13.49 in copper and crumpled, weary bills.
Her sister-in-law is waiting for him on the other side, she assures him, and spends the rest of the time until the ferry comes asking him about Okinawa, where her younger brother is apparently stationed. He has become quite duplicitous in his old age, Ando thinks, because he spins tales of pineapple groves and glittering coral beaches - air so wet and warm that the natives bathe by just stepping outside their apartments - and not once does he mention that he's never even set foot there.
v. Ando marries his wife for the first time in the early spring. They meet on a weekend excursion outside Tokyo, an offhand move on both their parts. The city may be same as ever - dirty and loud - but out in the country, the land rises like a pair of waking lovers, soft and shuddering, rain dripping off the black branches. Everything opening. It is a good time for falling in love, and their wedding is quick - her borrowed dress and peep-toed sandals, mist kissing their feet - so she can catch her flight back tomorrow morning.
(His new wife is an American - a Mainer, to be exact - who currently goes by the name of Ariel, born Cheryl, born again Rei. A big redhead, hips like shovels and a wise face, with a tiny half-moon scar under her left eye and a koi tattoo on her inner ankle. She always wanted to be a showgirl, but instead became a librarian. After the ceremony, they sit on the steps of the municipal government office and lean against each other, her warm, pulsing body folded into his.
"You are very beautiful," Ando says, earnest and true, and she smiles shyly, showing dimples and crooked teeth.)
The second time they marry, it is back in her hometown of South China, Maine, with her ecstatic (though suspicious) sister acting as master of ceremonies. They are more sober than the first time, but summer-drunk, and the lines around her eyes crinkle when he slips the ring - a little too loose - around her finger.
It's a real wedding, with cake and presents and a dizzying amount of fair-haired relatives. Ando thinks Hiro and Adam may have been there, for a while at least. He keeps catching glimpses of blonde hair out of the corner of his eye, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. His new wife has many, many cousins.
*
The newlyweds move to an island off the coast, into a clapboard house with lurid orange shutters and a spare room big enough to be a nursery, should a baby come. None does, and Ando repaints the shutters a deep, soothing blue. Ariel takes a job at the tiny lending library and fills their house with books, so that every move they make sets a hundred yellowed pages fluttering. They hang their white sheets out to dry in the ocean breeze and then make love in them, night after night, until their skin tastes of salt.
They are happy, for a time.
*
After the winter, the other librarian quits and Ariel starts working late. Life here is as life everywhere: fragile, precious, expensive. Ando buys another laptop, starts taking in contracting work. Sometimes he travels. His wife worries for him on the road, for his middle-aged body and lonely heart. She will never stop believing that she is lucky, and will always secretly worry, as if Ando did not know there were better out there, and married her nonetheless.
He has not seen either of his lovers, nor anything of his old life, since before the wedding - no cheerleaders or monsters, and the sky has been quiet and strange. Whatever fairy-tale these people came from, they've since vanished back into, and it's as if it never happened, never could have. Part of him thinks it's over with - a dream of waking, and he has now woken up - but sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Hiro. He never turns to look, but he knows that when he's ready, Hiro will be there, smiling and pushing his glasses up - standing right next to Ando, as if he always had been.
*
Six months later, walking in Central Park, he swallows and closes his eyes.
"Hiro," he says, and when the crowds part, he sees Hiro and Adam, sitting on the edge of a fountain. Adam is eating a strawberry ice cream cone. Hiro is waving to him.
"Are you ready to come home, Ando-chan?" Hiro asks him when he approaches. Hiro's voice is very serious, and Adam wags his sticky fingers at Ando and then sticks them in his mouth, one by one, sucking off liquid that's vaguely the color of intestines, inner organs and the lining of a skull, heads opened up like burial urns.
They are sitting, Ando notices, in the brightest circle of sunlight.
*
(These hands that are touching him, here, gripping his hips, these hands have touched blood, spilled it, painted with it perhaps. And this mouth, here, this mouth that surrounds him, this mouth has kissed the dead.)
*
"How was your trip?" Ariel asks.
"Good," Ando says. "It was very good."
*
(That night, he looks up Nakamura Industries on the web. Kimiko-san seems to be doing very well for herself; stocks are up, despite market instability, and from the photos, she has either aged well or has a very, very good plastic surgeon, possibly both. There is no mention of Hiro, but when he hacks into the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department database, he finds stories of witnesses who vanish in a moment's inattention, gaijin who are shot but do not die.)
*
Years pass, as they do. Ariel lobbies for renovating the library, stops wearing makeup, buys a dryer. The paint on the shutters cracks and peels. Hiro and Ando send each other postcards with old Trekkie quotes converted into haiku. Every second Sunday Ando walks to the library to stand under the color-splashed leaves of the maple tree there, and Hiro will come out from behind the building, and lay hands on his shoulders, whisk him away to Hiro's old apartment. The posters are still there, but dust-covered, and Ando sneezes when they hit the bed. It's an old building, by now, wiring faulty, and sometimes the lights will cut off. When that happens Adam whimpers, high and terrified; wedges himself between their warm bodies, and hates them a little when the lights come back on.
Other times, Adam is not there, and the awkwardness between Ando and Hiro is sharp, splinter-edged, worse than nothing at all. These are the times when Ando hates Adam a little, or perhaps just more than usual, but whatever Adam is doing - saving babies, heading up the Tokyo chapter of Villains'R'Us - he cannot fault him for it, because Ando understands, he really does. Neither of them are really the type for sticking around, only for being stuck.
Only twice, so strange and rare he thinks he might have dreamed it, does Hiro bring Ando and then vanish himself. The first time he fucks Adam from behind, sharp hipbones catching on minimal curves, and when he wakes, Hiro is there. The second, Adam makes him tea and talks, and Ando realizes that perhaps he is not the only one with two weeks between visits, sips of water in a desert.
"Mostly he just locks me in the apartment," Adam says, when Ando asks about saving the world.
He shrugs. Ando kisses him with a mouth that tastes like cloves, sloppy and sad.
(The next day, Ando goes to a pet shop on the mainland and buys Adam a fish - a carp, so that Adam will recognize the gesture, because his brand of kindness has something cruel about it. "Koi, koi," Adam murmurs now the nights they make love, the only words he will say, and no one can tell if its a name or a prayer.)
*
And then one day, Ando stands under the falling-red leaves for hours, and Hiro doesn't come. The postcard, postmarked three weeks ago, comes two days later:
a reality and spread
throughout the stars
It's missing one syllable.
*
"You okay, hon?" Ariel asks him later.
"Yes," he says, short and careful. After months of her reminiscing about watching The Christmas Carol as a little girl, they've finally found the time to watch it - curled on the couch, her crooked toes tucked under his thighs - and he does not want to ruin this for her. Does not want to take this away from her, when he has taken so much without her even knowing, wouldn't have been able to guess even at the possibility of it. He's always felt bad for cheating on her, but told himself she would understand, even when he knew she would not.
But now she pauses it, turns to him. Ando does not know what she sees in his eyes, but she nods, once, and burrows closer to his side, arms wrapping around his waist.
"What about the movie?" he asks, after the silence has gone on too long.
Ariel sighs, a short staccato of breath. Rueful.
"It isn't as good as I remembered," she says.
*
Ando and his wife have many happy years together. At night he dreams of them.
vi. No more are the winter storms; these nights, the surf courts the sand with such tenderness that the whole world is sweet with lovemaking - wind kissing the rocks, moon nestled in the trees' thin, dark arms. Most days, Ando stays home and overfeeds the cat. Sometimes he just sits by the window, watching the whales, by turns marveling and saddened by the strong, steady beat of his heart.
The pacemaker is not what he expected. It's not heavy, doesn't hang like a second heart; doesn't jolt him as he were the monster Frakenstein built. Rather, like many things, it is just there, and the knowledge that it must exist is more of an irritant than it actually existing. It makes Ando feel very old, even though he cannot imagine his grandfather consenting to this tiny computer being put into his shoulder, taking his proud life and settling it in the hands of machinery. Ando, though, is a child of the digital age; an old man, but an old man who can build a computer from parts. On this account, at least, the thing does not bother him.
This is how he counts his days now: his steady heartbeat, so strange after all the time spent crooked and soaring; the slap of waves on the rock; the rattle of pills into withered hand. By the end, he thinks, he will have consumed enough medication to measure up to Adam's life, each year a bitter pill. His throat is chalky and constantly sore. His doctor is a little concerned about this, and wants him to come in each month for a check-up, but he refuses. Even bloated and decrepit he still has a weakness for beautiful women, and he hates how flustered he gets around her.
"I don't think you're concerned enough for your own health, Mr. Masahashi," she says over the phone, tired and sharp.
"I'm okay," he says. "I'm waiting."
She's quiet for a long time.
*
(After the operation, lying in the hospital bed with the blankets tucked 'round his legs and nothing else to do, Ando thinks, about: everything. Or, not everything, but fairly close. Galaxies and planetoids and the feel of Adam under his hands, rough at the elbows and feet. It's then that he wonders about Niki, for the first time in years. When he gets home, he digs out some of his old webcam recordings. (The video feed had been encrypted, he remembered, but Hiro had fixed so it could save, sighing at Ando all the while.) He watches for a long time, but he can't get it up, and there's something shaming about this, anyway, sitting in the grey island light watching a long-dead woman strip and pout at the cameras.
The islanders think it's odd that he names his cat Jesse - proud, ruthless, battle-scarred Jesse, called to table by Ando's guttural voice and unfamiliar pronunciation. Perhaps they sense the irony. More likely, they expected something less American.)
*
One day, Adam shows up at his door.
"Surprise," he says.
Adam looks good - all white smiles and pink skin, his face filled out in the ways that it never really was before, the collar of his black peacoat pulled tight against the wind. Ando does not ask how Adam got out of the apartment. Instead, Adam sits at the creaking kitchen table while Ando makes tea and small talk, hands shaking but sure on the kettle.
"How's life?" Ando asks.
"Oh, you know," Adam says, reaching for his cup. "Unbearable as ever."
The sun sets over the dunes, evening-light streaming in through the big wooden-framed windows, forming a halo of light forming around Adam's face as he sips.
"Once, I would have married you, you know," Adam says, his eyes tracing patterns in the wood-grain. "I don't know why I didn't."
"I'm Japanese," Ando says. "You couldn't have."
Adam looks up then, something manic skittering under the surface. "I'd have changed it," he insists, "I would have changed it all, changed everything," and Ando smiles, sadly, because Adam Monroe may be six hundred years old but compared to Ando he is young and earnest and so, so very stupid.
*
After Adam leaves, Ando lights a stick of incense in front of the Buddha he keeps mostly for appearances and settles into his favorite chair, cat deigning to sprawl over his lap. The night passes in quiet waiting and tandem breath. Nothing less than a vigil kept, with the ring of shadows that haunt his very step, seep in through his cold feet to steal through his body, heart, lungs, liver. He's lived his past; he's old, weary, done. Now Adam has come, and gone, back into his eternal present with a shard of sea-glass strung on the ring-chain 'round his neck, and it is time.
Ando's seen The Christmas Carol. He knows what ghost comes next.
*
Hiro brings the morning, the ancient edge of the sun slivering the horizon as he appears in the garden, landing in a pile of old flowerpots. Ando watches through the window as Hiro shakes pottery shards off his feet and squints towards the house, fumbling with glasses newly cracked. He is young, painfully so, and when he starts to march up to the porch, Ando moves faster than he thought was possible, anymore, away from the window and to the big oak door, flinging it open on the first knock.
"I come in peace?" Hiro says, and shoves his v-ed fingers forward.
Ando fights back sudden tears. "Hiro, Hiro, Hiro," he chants, and covers Hiro's hand with his own. Ando is suddenly aware of how this must look to him - old Ando, the wrinkles in his eyes and the shake in his hands, the desperation that overwrites every tremor and liver spot. And he understands, he knows why Hiro's here and why he's here and why they're very different reasons, question and answer, lock and key, but - still. Still, he is human, and selfish, and cannot help but take a moment for the love in his heart.
"I've been waiting for you," he says, soft, and then, softer: "This is how it ends, Hiro-chan."
Hiro purses his small mouth until it looks lost in his face. "I can change it," he says.
"Hiro, promise me," Ando says. "Promise you will not tell past-me. Promise you will not change it."
Hiro frowns, but does not say a thing. Instead, he turns to the window, and Ando can see the familiar expanse beyond as if he's seeing it for the first time, through Hiro's eyes - the grey rocks and sky and water, the scrub-plants that cling like stubble to the coastline. Blue shutters stiff in the wind; his old tom, shot out when he opened the door, now a flash of red-gold playing on the coastline. The sun is rising now, and now he's rising with it, above sea and sand and curve of shore, above Hiro's shocked face, and from this height, Ando thinks, the world is very young and beautiful.
