Work Text:
It was him.
It had to be him.
No one else had ever shown quite that same expression before.
No one else could exude this feeling of warmth and comfort.
No one else had that voice.
As strange as it sounded, as impossible as it seemed…
“I heard your voice, so I came.”
The infant’s wails ceased.
Ren-san wasn’t quite as convinced at first, but after a few months he understood. That’s him, Clear had insisted. Once, twice, four hundred times. It didn’t make sense, and that was why Ren-san didn’t really get it for awhile. He didn’t quite look the way they were accustomed to. He was all unformed and squishy, as frail as the last time they’d seen him but in a completely opposite way. His hair was too dark, his eyes slightly the wrong color, his face without all the features that they had come to identify as him.
But it was. Somehow Clear could tell. It was something in the shine in his eyes, in the way that he smiled, in his loud wails and his happy giggles. Ren-san eventually came to agree because he started to see it too: the expressions, the movements, the tone in his undeveloped voice. Before long it was so evident that it was difficult to imagine him as anyone else.
What now? was the question.
The parents were tender and loving and undeniably his in a way that he hadn’t had the experience of before. And yet they couldn’t shake the eerie notion that he wasn’t entirely theirs. Though he had come from them, they hadn't created him, or so insisted some strange knowledge in the back of their minds. They were at first wary of the smiling man and the small dog that seemed to be present in every doorway, behind every tree and around every corner they turned. But there was nothing to fear, they soon learned, not from the man or his dog. Both somehow cared for the child more than they cared for themselves, and this seemed to be just a simple fact that could not be questioned nor explained. It felt more natural than gravity and simpler than fresh water.
“What did he say?” his father asked his mother, freezing in place.
His mother frowned. The child appeared to be a late bloomer, having not yet even called for her in the unconscious babble expected of those at his age. But his full pink lips now formed a definitive, if seemingly nonsensical, word.
“Ku…ri…a.”
Despite Ren-san’s warnings not to, on the morning of his first birthday, Clear left a pile of warm delicious doughnuts outside his doorway. The recipe was one he held dear because it had been given to him by an old friend he had known long ago, someone to whom he owed his life. The child ate all the tiny bits of fried dough his parents carefully fed him, and then cried loudly afterwards as though demanding more.
Long nights were spent outside his window, thinking and wondering and humming lullabies.
When he could walk, his mother brought him to the park. He laughed uncontrollably as he went down the slide. He waddled as fast as his dumpy legs could carry him out into the grass, lost his balance, and fell back onto his butt. When he popped back to his feet, he was holding a mottled yellow dandelion, which he proceeded to present to the man on the bench with a dog.
Later that day, Clear stood on a hill before a slab of stone and cried a little, looking out at the empty expanse of the cold blue sea. Ren-san was silent.
At four the child started going to school. He was learning about the world and learning about himself, still stuck in the age where nothing works adequately quite yet and everything is simultaneously wondrous and terrible. He went to the aquarium and pointed at the jellyfish and watched their phantom-like bodies float by with wide eyes. He stubbornly resisted when his father tried to pull him from the room.
Clear wondered out loud if he could remember anything. Ren-san thought it was unlikely. Perhaps somewhere in his subconscious he knew, said Ren-san, but he couldn’t truly remember.
If there were any remaining doubts about his identity, they were gone by the age of ten. He was a happy child with a happy childhood, but it wasn’t without its problems. He quickly gained the ability to challenge his bullies on the playground, and for the first time in a long time, Clear’s notion of him as fragile began to wither away.
Ren-san said they shouldn’t talk to him. This was disappointing. Clear wanted nothing more than to be at his side. But Ren-san said that talking to him would be probably even more disappointing. Even if it was him, it wasn’t the same him they had known. He was a different one, living a different life. Just a child, with different experiences and many more events in his life yet to come that would make him someone separate from the one they’d shared their lives with.
Though it wasn’t without its similarities. His family life began to grow difficult as his sweet mother and loving father became less sweet and less loving towards him when they became less sweet and less loving towards each other. He took it out on the kids in the schoolyard or down the block where they were playing in the street. Ren-san had seen it all before, he told Clear. This was a part of him he hadn’t seen in a long time, but a part of him he had seen indeed.
It was after a fight during his parents’ separation that he glanced up, almost instinctively. The side of his face was purple and bruised, but it didn’t hide the small features that gave him away: the long hair, the familiar set of his mouth, his challenging glare. His eyes were physically unfamiliar as they caught sight of Clear sitting far above on the rooftop, but held a glimmer that made Clear’s chest feel tight and sent his circuits into a frenzy. There was no recognition in his eyes as they stared at each other. That was a painful thing to realize. But he was in there. There was him.
Ren-san was getting impatient with Clear. He wanted to be with him too, of course, but he still wasn’t the same person. They couldn’t just barge into his life. He was a stranger now.
Would there ever be a time when they could?
It was unlikely.
Why?
He was living a new life.
So they could only just watch him?
Yes.
The adolescent stopped to look at umbrellas sometimes, even when it wasn’t raining. He would see them through the store window and his footsteps would slow to a halt, and with his hands shoved deep into his pockets he would stare at the ones with transparent plastic and white handles. Then, without even wondering why he had stopped, he would continue on with his day.
He was somewhat good with robotics. Not the best, but he had a casual interest and knew a thing or two about machines. When he dropped out of school he did nothing for awhile, but eventually found he worked well with vintage computers. Coils, Allmates, things like that. He salvaged them, fixed them up, and sold them off to the kind of bored rich people who liked functional old-fashioned stuff.
Ren-san said that perhaps it would be healthier to stop watching him. Clear didn’t want to.
Despite this, for the second time in his life, Clear contemplated the end of his existence. It wasn’t as warm a thought as last time.
He looked more like he used to now. Physically. Though he couldn’t fight the genetics of the body he was in, Clear could see the man he knew. When Clear looked at all the old photographs glinting and smiling in their frames, it was hard to remember him that way, because he didn’t exist in that form anymore. And yet it was also hard to acknowledge the new, unattainable form.
Clear was tired. He thought about going to sleep. Ren-san slept a lot these days. Maybe he should too.
Sometimes he saw Clear. In a store, through a window, across the street. Their eyes met, but he never so much as smiled at him. That hurt a lot more than dying, thought Clear. It hurt more than dying and it hurt more than watching the one you love die.
It was okay as long as he knew happiness. Things were getting better for him. He was at a more solid place in his life now, and that made Clear joyful. At least superficially, though he liked to pretend that his vicarious happiness ran deeper than that. It didn’t change the fact that most of his body felt like a gaping chasm, devoid of much of anything except loneliness. But when he saw him smile, it was easy enough to pretend to himself.
Clear told Ren-san that he wanted to sleep for a little while. Ren-san couldn't hear him because he was already sleeping. There really wasn’t very much of a point in being awake. There hadn’t been for quite awhile. The dark fur had somehow gotten matted in places. When was the last time he had woken up? Clear couldn’t remember, and so he figured that it must be time for him to sleep, too.
Would he ever wake up again? He didn't quite know.
He didn’t quite know if he wanted to, either.
Clear dug a long hole. It was on a hill, near the sea. He laid Ren-san in it first, making sure he was curled up nicely and comfortably. Then he went to climb in himself.
He heard something. There was a figure climbing up the hill.
It was someone he knew.
Clear asked him why he was there, and his response was that he didn’t really know. He had started walking and came here. He wanted to know if this was a cemetery, and if so whom the new hole was for.
It was both exciting and sad to talk to him. Exciting because in his words he could hear the voice of someone who made his mechanical heart tremble. For the first time in a very long time. Clear had almost forgotten the feeling, but there it was again, the pull as undeniable as a human’s need for warmth and comfort. But also sad, because he was alone in this emotion. The days of caring for and being cared for in return were over.
Clear explained that it was cemetery, that his grandfather was buried here, and so was someone else very important to him. As for the hole, it was for himself. He was going to sleep now and wanted to be with the people he loved.
The young man seemed slightly alarmed at first, perhaps thinking that there was some suicidal intent behind those words, but it wasn’t like that. Not exactly. The situation was very complicated. Clear thought about it, but he wasn’t sure how to go about explaining. So he did something else instead.
To fulfill a dying wish.
“I love you, Aoba-san.”
The kiss was as short but heartfelt as their first.
Clear turned to walk back to his hole, and sat inside beside Ren-san. As the young man continued to stand there, his eyes wide and his lips slightly parted in surprise, Clear began to pull piles of dirt down on top of him, starting with his legs. Once he had his feet packed in he moved to his calves, his knees, his thighs…up past his waist so he had to lay down…as he began to reach his torso his job became more and more difficult…it was harder to move….
“Clear.”
He stopped what he was doing.
His voice.
“Clear!”
Clear sat up in time to be knocked back down again by the full weight of Aoba-san’s body, the two of them landing in the loose soil with their arms around each other. Shocked, Clear tensed and resisted the sudden embrace. Aoba-san was crying.
“I remember everything now,” he said. “I came back…for you.”
Clear couldn’t have said much in response to that. He shut his eyes and noted the sudden overwhelming warmth that radiated from something almost organic inside of him. “Welcome back, Aoba-san.”
“Yes,” said Aoba-san. “I’m back now, Clear.”
Though mortal and with a body that was doomed to fail from the start, he couldn’t have left Clear alone. He held the desire to come back to Clear the same way that Clear had once come back to him. And also in the same way, he had wanted to come back so much that those feelings materialized. Though he would eventually die again, Aoba-san would wish, and Clear would wait, and their love would exist regardless of lifetime and mortality.