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At first, he was actually dead.
He knew this like he knew the taste of rain, fresh and supple on the air. It wasn't that he saw the gray clouds, though he knew they were there; it wasn't that he felt the water roaring down, though he was dancing in it; it wasn't that he felt the cold, though it was chilly enough for hot chocolate. He just knew there was rain. Or, in this case, that he was dead.
Time, which had seemed to move inexorably forward when he was alive, spiraled and spun and from this angle, he could see he'd been wrong. In the same breath he was in a room with his mother the day his father had passed away, standing at the edge of a cliff over the ocean with Tomoe, catcalling up at the sky and here, here where his body lay discarded and unneeded, surrounded by people who were weeping for him. He felt free, but also a very distant melancholy. There were so many things he'd meant to do with himself and never gotten around to doing. In a way, he regretted that. But he could feel the pull of another place calling, and it was hard to really feel anything anymore, and for an instant he let go and felt the earth itself, far distant and cold beneath this metal beast, breathing beneath the ocean's cool touch.
A creeping curiosity sank down his spine, reminding him of what it'd felt like to have one, and he coalesced again in the room with the people who loved him, wept over him, watching in detached fascination as the scene played. The man who'd engineered it all, masterminded Kotetsu Kaburagi's death and the replacement of the Heroes, was now holding a familiar little girl, leading her off to a helicopter.
He watched, in fascination, as the Heroes stood powerless to stop that man, and the little girl in his hands grit her teeth, furious and ferocious, struggling even with a gun to her head.
Anger was slow to come to him, but as he focused on the girl he saw her future laid out like a strip of patterned cloth. The memories that would be stolen from her, turning her from the old man's enemy into his unwitting ally. Through her innocent face, the people who would be tricked into trying to save her, only to be attacked by her as the old man planned.
It wouldn't last long. After she had outlived her immediate usefulness, he would kill her, knowing his illusion could not hold up forever around her, knowing her to be too suspicious of him not to wonder if he had tampered with her memories, too.
This future was not, Kotetsu began to think, something he could accept.
And he felt anger, even though he had nothing left to feel it with; a sizzling, simmering anger that dragged him down away from the memory of his body and the people still standing there, frozen just as the old man first grabbed the little girl. In life, he'd always felt buoyed by his emotions, empowered by them. Even anger could be sharpened and honed to use as a tool, to cut away at the source of pain or unhappiness and fix it, set it all to rights.
In death, he found that strong emotion destroyed his focus. He sank down, and down and down, and the further he sank, the angrier he felt, until he was blazing with a pure white hot rage and the earth drank him down into the dark depths of a solitary cave. Here, he discovered he was not the only one.
Lacking hands, they could not be chained, but he and others like him were crowded into this tiny cave, crammed together like the festering fruit of a dessicated and vermin-ridden gray-barked tree, skittering and scratching as they tried to break free and spiraled deeper, ever deeper into their emotions. He sensed others like him, choking on the wellspring of an incurably pure hatred, but also those wrought with grief, dull and almost impossibly dark, sinking in the mud of their own sadness. At the bottom of the well of sea-water that coated the floor of the cave there lay a massive serpentine head, mouth sprung wide and tongue licking the air, snatching up the balls of emotion all around him one by one and swallowing them down.
Across the line of the snake's jaws lay a coil of its own massive body, looped back in on itself again and again, just like time.
Seeing it, he lost the incandescent furor of his rage all in an instant, flooded with thoughts: the wyrm and not like this and Kaede! foremost among them. He thought desperately of the surface, of the world above and fought to find his way back up again, but the fear blazing through his entire being, now, was much stronger than the rage had been, and it consumed him completely, disorienting him. He could not remember which way was up, nor see the beast, though he sensed it close, very close, sensed its questing tongue and was petrified by the fear that it might next find him and swallow him down, and end him for real, forever.
And then he knew desire again, crisp against the melting cowardice that he was becoming.
One thing.
"I don't want Kaede to die."
And then, another thing.
"I don't want Bunny to forget me."
And he prayed all his desires out, crawling and struggling against slippery, slimey walls, being dragged down all the same no matter how he fought it. I want to stop Maverick. I want to see Karina graduate from High School like I promised. I want to see Antonio get together with Nathan, finally. I want to eat with mom. I want to see the garden in spring again. He dangled off the edge of what felt like a cliffside, and didn't dare look back over his shoulder to see what lay beneath.
"I want to live," he breathed into the stone, clutching it with shaking, bruised fingers that didn't feel like they could take much more. He wept and felt hot tears on his face again. He sobbed, as pain spread through his whole body, warning him of what he was asking. Life was not pleasant. Life was cruel. Life would hurt.
He didn't care.
"Please, I want to live," Kotetsu begged, and sat up, startled, shocked to find himself in a body (his body?), laying on the ground beside, of all people, Tomoe.
She only stared at him impassively, and tipped her head to the side when he hesitated. If he lived, he could not have her. That had, for him, already happened, though when he'd been first dead time had seemed so malleable. Life for Kotetsu Kaburagi no longer held Tomoe in it. That would not be something he could get back.
However.
Kaede was not yet dead. And Kotetsu wondered if he was, really, either. "I want to live," he said, and Tomoe shrugged, answering tiredly,
"Why are you telling me?"
Then he was in his real body, struggling to come back, struggling to breathe through a mouth that had shut and lungs that had locked up. His fingers twitched and stung, scrabbling against an unforgivingly hard floor. Every single second was incredible pain, a lingering creeping burn in his stomach that made him want to scream for mercy, scratches and bruises and welts from the fight earlier. Dislocated shoulders, a twisted and sore knee. It was so bad he felt nauseous, that having his eyes open made him dizzy.
He didn't care. He didn't want to die. He wanted to live, and as he pushed himself up, he could see that he'd cut it close, that a second more would have seen his daughter the captive of Albert Maverick, and Kotetsu and all the other heroes dead. He tasted blood, and smelled the sea, far off and not at all calling to him, and felt his stomach drop, but not too far, as he staggered to his feet.
And then he was alive again, and nobody could tell him different.