Chapter Text
When Kerim Noor is twenty-four, everything he ever thought he might be comes apart in a dream. In the span of a single night, he lives a childhood in a place that looks almost like Turkey, only wilder, void of cities. He runs across great promenades that overlook the sea, sleeps in the lap of someone who is but is not his mother, cries in her arms, but can't explain what brings on the tears—he wants to go home. You're right here already, little moon, she whispers.
This boy grows: Learns a language unlike any Kerim has heard before, spars with a stranger he knows is his father, goes over and over again an elaborate dance meant for the goddess of the moon. He daydreams of walking spirals into her heart, the sea at his heels, and offering her a prayer that someone wrote long ago, made new on his tongue into something like love or longing. He wonders if it will please her, if he could change some word to call himself more closely to her. In between these lessons, he hears word of some foreign prince that everyone hopes will save humanity—from what? The world is calm and wonderful. He is skeptical.
His father comes and goes, bringing with him tales of heroes braving the sea, vanquishing dragons, falling under the bewitchment of sorceresses from far away lands, spun of spells and spirits and wanting. His father speaks of the boy sometimes, too, the one meant to save them all. He learns to ignore it.
Then: The boy is newly a man, bowing down to that boy from long ago, contempt hanging in the air behind a mask of dignified resignation. His time passes in lessons and spars and negotiations; a year away, a year spent escaping silence to cavort with common folk far from responsibility. His happiness ebbs and flows, tinged with irritation, with moments of pure joy wrestling in the grass or trading particularly satisfying barbs with his tutors, his generals, the boy. Anxiety floods in when the moon comes to Earth and stays.
There is a woman, though—endless warmth, a bright flash of something gotten, even more overwhelming than the sea, that boy. She brings with her a wanting cut through with the bitter taste of fear—his own, buried deep in his gut, ringing out as he reaches across space to brush her hair from her face, as they press their lips and bodies into one. She overwhelms him, a riptide, sweeps him into infinitude even in dreaming. Finally, there is darkness and pain. Endlessly.
Kerim wakes up gasping for breath, sees in the glass of the window that his hair has gone white overnight. As the body beside him stirs awake, he stumbles to the bathroom to clutch at the strands, and then to freeze in front of his reflection, paralyzed by how much like that dream boy he now appears. That boy’s name stabs like a wound behind Kerim’s eyes, driving in again and again as if to erase the fact anyone else ever existed: Kunzite.
His fiancée paces the hall outside the bathroom as she phones his mother—his mother now, something says, and Kerim clutches the sink, because he does not know what to make of this other woman who some part of him feels compelled to call the same—who drives immediately over despite the hour, who says prayers and drags him to the imam, to doctors after that, but no one can explain it. Kerim does not speak of the dream and the pit of loss it left behind. He does not tell anyone that he remembers its every second like another life. Impossible, to fit two and a half decades into the length of a night. And yet.
Kerim leaves Turkey soon after, abandons one life and takes his architecture degree to study light and divine spaces across the world, to try and puzzle out some meaning to a loss he cannot name. No matter where he seeks refuge—the ethereal glow of a church in the suburbs of Copenhagen; the unreachable pinnacles of color that break through the cut rose windows of Notre Dame d'Amiens; the threshold of chaos and other that runs along Varanasi's ghats; the Quranic calligraphy of an Iranian mosque set aflame by the rising sun during first prayer—no matter where he dwells, Kerim cannot find comfort.
Until he goes to Tokyo, to dwell in its temples and shrines, which fall so quickly from sunlight to shadow. He feels at home in that darkness, and it pains him—the other him, this other thing who thinks to be him—to think why.
Life in the city feels like as much of a dream as the one that follows him each day. Kerim enrolls at a university, spends two years grappling with the impossible language and eventually learns how to cut through the suspicious looks he gets around every new corner with enough politeness and charm to deceive. An international firm hires him, lets him speak blessed English, sets him up in an apartment on a hill with one of the city’s last remaining views of Mt. Fuji, though only on the clearest of days. Not bad, he tells himself, smoking on its balcony. Not bad at all.
He avoids Azabu-Juban like the plague, remembering an address on a piece of mail in a dream-distant memory, but even then it happens: One Thursday afternoon, he is walking across campus, where he still takes Japanese classes at night, and there, sitting outside in one of the cafes, are the four of them. The three generals—what are their names, now?—clustered around Mamoru, whose name he knows from his time trapped in stone. They are impossibly alive.
Kerim’s breath catches in his throat, and he pulls behind a tree to watch them through his sunglasses. Do they go here? They’d be the age for it, if all has remained the same. Still young, then. Still prone to ruckus, by the scene they make—teasing Mamoru over something or other, waving their drinks in his face. Sarcastic drawls. Laughter. Something said loudly, in what he thinks is accented Japanese—you hopeless dolt.
When he lifts up his glasses to rub at his eyes, his hand comes back wet. He retreats then, hastily, taking the long way across campus to his class.
---
The group is there almost every Thursday. He learns to get there early, to sit in the corner of the shop with a clear view of the window, away from the toilets. He wears a baseball cap to hide his hair—though his perceived support of the Seibu Lions, arbitrarily chosen, almost earns him more recognition than anything—and always brings a book to stick his face into in case one of them comes close.
A better person wouldn’t slink in the shadows, he knows. But hasn’t this past man proven, time and again, that he is the exact opposite?
They are more pure than he ever remembers them being—not sheltered, their language makes that clear, the way they joke about any marginally attractive person who passes, the amount they seem to drink. But the edge is gone. That darkness that always crept in from the corners. They are happy, he realizes, they don’t feel the nagging lightness of everything once given up, don’t have a reason to look over their shoulders—no reason to notice the man who sits in the corner and watches them. To protect Endymion. Kerim well knows he can protect himself, now.
Do they know, about their pasts? Surely. He could ask. But how? Kerim walks through a million iterations of the same scene: Sidling up to their table. Waiting for a reaction. No. Saying something—probably a better choice. But what? Hello—I might be the reincarnation of the incompetent leader who failed to save you from your downfall. Or, Hi, there, nice day to catch up with someone else potentially resurrected from your past, eh? Maybe something softer: Oh, long time, no see. Since, you know, I dreamed our spirits were trapped in tiny stones for god knows how long.
Kunzite—who Kerim long ago decided not to think of as himself—would think this ridiculous. Kerim sorts through the scenes of another life, comes up short on moments when Kunzite was left speechless by anyone but—he lets out a shaky breath and bends his face into his palms. He refuses to look into the face of the sun, in memory or in daylight.
Kerim tells himself over and over: He is not the same. After all, he has the evidence: Kunzite’s fears then were of the stars. Not the men in front of him. Not the things that lurked inside himself.
---
After six weeks of this, Kerim’s Japanese class ends and he doesn’t have a reason to take the train three stops in the opposite direction to the university. When Thursday comes, though, he goes, and sits, and waits. The four of them pass through, but this time they do not stay. They get their coffees to go, huddle around the warm drinks as they walk through the crisp fall air.
Kerim follows them as far as the train station entrance. They do not immediately go in, though—they stand and talk and wait, for what he does not know. Jadeite—Kerim has never quite caught their new names, can’t think of them in terms of anything but the dream—kicks the ground, while Zoisite has abandoned his coffee to idly braid his hair into a plait. Nephrite and Mamoru are debating something, holding invisible objects in their hands as if they can grasp their points, bumping shoulders in good humor when one gets the upper hand. The thought that comes to Kerim does not feel like his own: They’re beautiful, and finally alive in a world safe from disaster. Finally able to just be boys, free from expectations.
He is about to turn and leave when the group of four suddenly stops gesticulating and fidgeting. Jadeite and Mamoru raise their hand in greeting, Zoisite punches Nephrite’s arm in some kind of tease, and Kerim follows each of their gazes to a group of long-legged women rounding the corner. In the span of a moment, his dream has come to life: All of them there, in the flesh, talking as if they have never been bloodied and dead.
The girls are no different than before, a cluster of light and color against the drab station entrance, throwing bright sweatered arms around broad shoulders and standing on patent leather toes to whisper in ears. Hands wrap around waists, tangle with each other, but Kerim turns and walk quickly away before he can see any more of them.
He doesn’t go home, though. He knows he couldn’t bear the solitude. He could call someone—but no, that would be just as bad. A wall of incomprehension, outside of himself instead. So he ducks into a bar and stares into glasses of bubbling gold. He thinks he will have to face them—but why? He had been drawn to Tokyo for a reason. Those shadows, in the eaves, before the altars. The group of them is just as much a shadow. Just as much a holy place.
Kerim bristles at the inevitability. He has never been one to lie down and take a fate. He has never believed in fate to begin with. This other man may have. Kunzite met everything with a sickening calm, let his difficulties and challenges build up in him like a tide until he had no choice but to adjust to conditions. An architect, though, is not satisfied with nature’s course. He does well to familiarize himself with the materials he will use to build his building, much less his own prison.
With a nod to the bartender, Kerim downs the rest of his beer and slides his money on the table. On the train ride home, his phone vibrates for the first time in hours. A notification chastises him: Call your mother! He sends it into the abyss, and becomes engrossed in the mundane life he has built, scrolling through texts and emails and news, sliding through the cards on a dating app, forgetting again, that he had ever lived any life other than this.
---
For the next six months, Kerim speaks an agreement to the city that lies outside his balcony each morning: Let’s be kind to each other. He does not know, though, how to be kind to a city, so he winds up existing in a not-quite-tense state of denial with the entirety of it, regarding every corner with distrust, tamping down unease any time he walks into a new space. He is afraid to see them all, happy and wrapped up in themselves like any other group of young people on the street. No—that’s not it. He is afraid his presence will break that spell of joy and comfort.
The anxiety wears on him during the first month, but then he accepts it. If he wants to be free of it, he’ll have to move—to Sapporo, maybe, or Okinawa, where the firm has offices and the architecture varies just enough to be interesting. Each month, he tells himself he’ll put in the request for transfer. Each month, he doesn’t.
At the beginning of summer, he is pulled away from his drafting board and given an odd assignment: The firm has been hired out by some American director—the friend of a friend of the principal’s—to scout inspiration for a film—specifically, a shrine, ideally set on a hill, both of the city and apart from it. Not hard to find in Tokyo, except this director insists it be run by a woman. A true-to-life shrine maiden, red hakama, white kimono, the whole nine yards. She needs to have, in the words of the director, who is actually quite insufferable, “a certain je ne sais quois, a certain unknowable Japaneseness, concealed under terrible beauty.” Since Kerim’s English is best and his formal Japanese is now more than passable and he has, in more of the director’s words, “the foreign eye,” he is sent to scout and report back on possible locations.
The perfect shrine is like most others in Tokyo: A bewildering pocket of introspection amidst the dense buildings and gaudy signs in the streets surrounding it. It is on a hill, both of the city and apart from it. And of course, it is in Azabu-Juban.
Kerim bows briefly before walking under the shimenawa draped over the gate and to the fountain bubbling in the corner of Hikawa Shrine’s yard. He picks up a ladle, fills it, and washes his hand in the water. When he steps into the shadow of the altar room, he claps, bows, and claps again, prays for
“Can I help you?”
He turns and is surprised, but not surprised, to recognize the woman approaching him. She is exactly what the director wants—red pants, white jacket, beautifully Japanese, while at the same time completely other. Mars looks as fierce as she ever did, even when she’s gripping a broom instead of a bow.
“I hope I didn’t disturb you,” he says. “I have some time to kill before a meeting in the neighborhood, and I’ve been thinking about the spiritual realm more than usual lately, so I thought I would stop by and offer a prayer.”
“I saw you, in the fire,” she says. “A man made of white stone, cracked almost in half down the center, hidden in shadow.”
“What do you know of people who remember their past lives?”
She doesn't flinch, keeps holding him in a steady gaze. Her guard is up, she’s drawn the broom closer to her breast and braced herself by moving one foot slightly behind her.
“The Buddhists are better equipped to help you on that one. There’s a temple down the road, you probably passed it coming in. You can tell them Rei Hina sent you.”
Her name is an olive branch. She could walk away, insist the shrine is closed, that she has something better to do, but she stays facing him.
“I knew that would be the case, but my feet took me here,” he sighs.
“Then I suppose whatever you need to work out is between you and some god.”
“I suppose that’s true,” he hums.
“You’re welcome to stay, but we close in a half hour.”
He sits on a bench near the shrine’s edge and holds his head in his hands. He knew this would happen the minute he stepped foot into this part of Tokyo. Azabu-Juban already feels like going back to a million places in time—the cobbled streets, the smells drifting from Western restaurants, the trendy shops filled with kids fresh from picking up paychecks from part time jobs.
When he checks his watch, the half hour has passed. He rises, dusts off his pants, and moves to walk out of the shrine. Just as he is about to exit the gates, though, someone rounds the corner fast, hits into him hard, until he’s falling backward right onto his ass on the pavement.
“You,” accuses the woman standing above him. His heart sinks to the pit of his stomach, just as it sprouts wings. “Rei didn’t lie. It’s really fucking you, isn’t it?”
She reaches out and he thinks she is going to haul him up by the collar—a vision of a moonlit night flashes through his mind—but instead she holds out her hand. Her nails are long and impeccably manicured into midnight blue.
“I didn’t mean to knock you over.”
He warily takes the hand.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it, Kunzite?”