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The man is collapsed against a tree along the side path, a hand on a section of his magenta shirt, but his look is still incredibly dangerous when he sees her.
“I wouldn’t,” he says. “Even like this, I can… I can do something.”
His eyes are hazy, and his body is tense. It’s almost as though his form flickers, for a moment, to something monstrous.
She somehow can tell this man is dangerous. And yet he’s hurt.
“Can I call the hospital?” She asks. “I should still have cell phone range from here.”
The man shakes his head, glare deepening.
“No hospitals,” he says. “Too many worlds would notice…”
He trails off.
“What are you talking about?” Natsumi asks.
“I don’t know.”
The man forces himself up to standing, quite obviously leaning mostly on the tree. He blinks. His eyes are hazier Han before.
“Where am I?” He asks.
He clutches a camera around his neck. Looks at her.
“Who… who are you?”
His eyes still look hazy, but at least the flickering is gone. He’s hurt, and he seems to be some kind of confused.
“I’m Natsumi,” Natsumi replies.
He leans further into the tree.
“And… what do… you want from… me?” He asks.
“What?”
“Everyone… wants something,” the man replies. “Or else… or else we would have… no alliances.”
…what kind of messed up logic is that?
“Well I just want to help you,” Natsumi says, simply. “And you said no hospital.”
“I did?” The man mutters, so quietly that Natsumi almost wonders if she imagined it.
“We have bandages at home,” she continues. “It’s not far from here. Can you walk?”
“Of course I can,” the man says. He grips his injury tightly and pushes off from the tree.
He refuses a helping hand, and collapses in the doorway of the photo studio.
Natsumi doesn’t know how her grandfather is so efficient at cleaning and wrapping what turns out to be a patchwork of deep cuts and ugly colored bruises, but he is.
“Heal right up,” he mutters. “Born types like him. Oh did I say something?”
The man doesn’t wake up until the next day, and this time he’s even less clear than before.
“Who are you?” He asks again. He’s injured enough that he could only walk half a mile in 30 minutes, and only that out of an instantly recognizable level of sheer stubbornness, and yet he sits in the guest bed as though it’s a throne. It’s as frustrating as it is impressive.
“I introduced myself yesterday,” Natsumi says.
“I don’t remember,” the man says. Then he blinks, powerful stature instantly broken with one blink of suddenly wide, confused (but no longer nearly as blurry as the day before) eyes. “Do we know each other?”
Oh.
The man blinks again, and then, quieter, he murmurs.
“I don’t remember.”
Natsumi brings their guest food, a little bit later, finding the man sitting there, staring at nothing.
“My name is Kadoya Tsukasa,” he says. “I don’t know how I know that.”
“Okay,” Natsumi replies. “Does Tsukasa like soup?”
Tsukasa turns to her.
“I don’t remember,” he says.
He swings his legs to the side of the bed facing her.
“I don’t know,” he says.
He eats, regardless.
(“Where am I?” He asks again, half way through eating. “Who are you?”)
Her grandfather develops the photos in Tsukasa’s camera. Most of them are somewhere between terrible and strange, some border on impossible.
One isn’t, a picture of a simple doorway.
Her grandfather hangs it up.
“Do you think he’s a photographer?” He asks. Natsumi thinks about the way Tsukasa’s eyes were just a little bit clearer when she returned the camera.
He doesn’t remember.
She doesn’t know.
He wakes up from nightmares that he never remembers, at least three times. She doesn’t know whether then or when his eyes go glassy and his form flickers make her more worried.
A week after she found Tsukasa, she wakes up to the sound of a thump and a groan of pain, and she runs into the hallway. Tsukasa is on the ground, but he’s already pulling himself back to standing.
“Tsukasa?” She asks. He turns to her, and, even in the darkness of the hallway, she can recognize the way his eyes go glassy and his form seems off, right after his memories scatter again. Those first few moments where she can almost figure out something about him.
“I have to go somewhere,” he says.
“Where?”
He’s swaying where he stands, likely because his right foot and leg is still one giant purple bruise that she almost wonders if it might have been broken, even though that wouldn’t heal nearly as fast as his leg has been. Natsumi moves with almost practiced ease to help him balance.
“I don’t remember,” he says. He looks at her. “I know you. Tell me your name.”
“Natsumi,” she says, for the tenth time. He hmms.
“Natsumikan,” he says. “It fits you.”
That’s the third time he’s said that. She rolls her eyes.
“Let’s go back to bed, Tsukasa,” she says. “You’re staying here until you know where you’re going. And when you can walk there.”
“Lead the way, then.”
That’s the last time his memories scatter.
When he isn’t constantly confused, turns out that Kadoya Tsukasa is a conceited asshole.
“Do I have any photographs to go with this camera?” He asks. He’s lounging, draped across the couch like a very large cat, examining his camera.
“They suck,” Natsumi says.
“I doubt it,” he says, turning the camera to face her.
It does in fact turn out terrible.
(“I think it’s quite artistic,” her grandfather says. Tsukasa hmms.
“It’s this world that rejects me,” he says.
“What are you talking about?” Natsumi asks. Tsukasa looks away.”
“I can’t remember,” he says. “I just know.”)
He heals, and he sells photo ops to people who come to yell at her poor grandfather over their quality, and he’s an asshole, and yet…
And yet she knows she’s grown to care about him. Because she can see that under those layers he’s still confused by his own actions sometimes, and that he wants to help others sometimes but simply doesn’t seem to know how.
Now if he could stop selling his shitty photography skills, it would be much easier to actually like him.
(A little over half a year after she first met him, her world collapses to ruin.)