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It always starts the same.
Cape Cod, summertime. He’s driving a beat-up pickup truck, the same one they’d commandeered that first summer they’d driven to the coast. A singer on the radio croons about missing a lover; Eiji props his elbow on the door where the window’s rolled down and enjoys the salty-sharp tang of the sea air ruffling his bangs. He recognizes the song but doesn’t know the words, so he hums along under his breath, at peace.
He doesn’t know where he’s coming from, but he knows where he’s headed. The route is the same, gravel kicking up dust as he rumbles down the single-lane road that leads home.
Home, because something in him knows Ash is where he’s headed.
He’s waiting on the porch when Eiji rolls to a stop. All the hollow places scraped raw by absence refill at the gold-soaked streaks of sunshine filtering through his straw-blond hair, topped off to last Eiji just long enough until the next time the missing-him grows too great a burden to bear. Ash is rocking onto the toes of his red Chucks, hands tucked behind his back the way he always does when he’s feeling antsy. Eiji takes a moment, a split second to drink him in, knowing somewhere deep he will need the memory later.
Later, when Ash is gone.
He half-forgets to throw the truck in park before he tumbles out the driver’s side door and races to meet Ash halfway. Ash, whose jade-green eyes are bright with joy, who skips gracefully down the rickety busted-in steps of the porch to greet him, who sweeps Eiji clean off his feet and clings like a peach to a pit: delicately bruised, terrified, messy-wet from the happy tears spilling down his cheeks. The collision aches, sweetly melancholic and oh-so familiar: the press of Ash’s collarbone against his cheek, the wiry strength gripping him by the waist, the huff of disbelieving laughter against the crown of his head.
The pain is worth it, always.
Eiji can smell Ash, the scent comforting in its familiarity: sweat and gunmetal and the cheap ocean breeze scented shampoo they bought at the corner store before holing up here, even though Eiji doesn’t think it smells anything like the ocean.
“Took you long enough,” Ash mutters into Eiji’s hair. He steps back and looks Eiji over, mouth ticking upwards into that secretly pleased expression he wears so often around him. He fingers at the loose threads of the bun tied at the nape of Eiji’s neck. “It’s gotten longer again. Why haven’t you cut it?”
Eiji doesn’t answer for a moment. He’s too busy looking Ash over, checking to make sure he’s still the same as always. He’s not grown taller since the last time they saw each other; there are no new scars or marks or wrinkles—not like Eiji, who has a set of permanent lines between his brows from frowning too often and smiling too little.
Ash doesn’t look like he’s aged a day past eighteen, and the thought makes Eiji feel incredibly old standing in front of him. Ash is ageless and always has been.
“I can’t,” he says. He reaches for Ash’s hand and folds it in his own. “You know why I can’t.”
The reasoning for his long hair is lost to Eiji now but somewhere deep inside, he knows. He can’t cut his hair. He hasn’t for years, and he never will.
“I wish you would.”
Ash twists his hand in Eiji’s grasp so their fingers slot together. It’s a perfect fit, calluses from years of fighting scraping against the delicate skin of his own palms. He drags him deeper into the house, screen door slapping at their backs. He tracks through a pattern across the aged hardwood floors of the hall so his steps are silent, a habit long-ingrained from a life of treading softly, of never leaving a trace unless it is intentional.
Eiji mirrors him more on instinct than fear of being found or ambushed. Here, now, he knows they’re safe in a way they’ve never truly been.
“Why?”
A smirk flashes back at him, then: “If it gets much longer you’ll look like Yut-Lung.”
Ash ducks without looking to see the swat Eiji aims at his arm. He laughs, the sound pealing: clear and happy, carefree as Eiji’s ever heard him.
“I will not,” Eiji protests, affronted.
“I could cut it for you, you know,” he offers, not entirely innocently.
For a moment they’re propelled backwards in time, to years-ago New York when Eiji, in his infinite wisdom, decided to cut Ash’s hair. It’s a flashback snapshot, remembering that moment. Sunlight filtering through the dusty-paned window in the bathroom, one of Cain’s oversized button-downs doubling as an apron, the soft snip of kitchen scissors as Eiji carefully clipped the hair from Ash’s nape.
It hadn’t been a bad haircut, all things considered.
“No way. I’ve seen what you can do to a man with nothing but sheer willpower; I’m not arming you with a pair of scissors.”
When Ash drops onto the couch and stretches his arms across the back, Eiji curls in next to him. He’s warm, body heat leaking into Eiji; his heartbeat is strong and sure in his chest. Ash brings a hand to cradle the back of Eiji’s head. His fingertips scratch gently at his scalp, reassurance bleeding through the gesture. “Besides you needing a haircut—” and here he laughs, vibrations of it tickling across Eiji’s temple, “—things are good?”
“I guess so.” Eiji tips his face up to peer at Ash. He’s already gazing down at him: gentle, fond, expression relaxed in a way Eiji only sees in slumber. “But I miss you,” he says. “All the time.”
“I know,” Ash responds, soft.
It’s the reality of his life. He wakes up and Ash is not there: not in the next room over, not on the phone when he calls, not on the streets of the city they once walked together. He can find Ash in the archives of the New York Public Library, splashed across old news columns, in the pages of his first-published book of photography.
And then there is the obvious: he can find Ash in the Forest Hills Cemetery of Boston, a granite-gray slab beneath a tree that blushes pink in the springtime.
Ash is dead, Eiji realizes—remembers. Ash is dead, has been for ten years, and it’s a blow to the solar plexus. It has never stopped hurting because he has never let the wound heal, electing instead to pick at the scabbed-over crater of loss until it bled fresh, until moving on ceased to ever exist as a possibility. Eiji is frozen in time, trapped in a life lived ten years prior to the moments he moves through now, and he cannot help but wish he’d died on the street that day with Ash.
Ash sees the moment recognition dawns across Eiji’s face, still tipped to his like a flower to the sun. The crow’s-feet wrinkles around his eyes relax and disappear, leaving something stricken in their wake; his hold on Eiji tightens, turns desperate.
Their time, as always, is limited.
Eiji knows now why he hasn’t cut his hair.
The question drops between them, heavy as a sinking stone. It settles, stirs the sand at the bottom of the pool. A shiver of sediment rises to the top, grates at Eiji’s eyes so they burn with unshed tears. “This is going to end, isn’t it?”
“It is. But I’ll come back,” Ash promises. He traces a thumb along Eiji’s jaw, tucks Eiji’s face against the crook of his neck and holds him. His shoulders tremble; it is an unspoken agreement to leave the tears dampening the crown of his head unaddressed. Eiji knows this is it. Soon Ash will go as he always does, leaving Eiji behind, and there’s no guarantee of when they’ll see each other next. They will both be alone again.
“Do you think,” Eiji asks, voice wavering beneath the weight of his grief, “we would have been happy?”
“Oh, Eiji,” Ash sighs, smile heartbreakingly gentle. “We were.”
And perhaps that is the most unfair part of it all: that they were happy, that the whirlwind of their time together lasted but a season. That the universe saw fit to take Ash Lynx after a single taste of happiness, rather than allow him the lifetime he deserved.
It will never be fair, and Eiji will forever be doomed to live with it—alone.
Loving Ash Lynx is like clinging to the tail of a comet: burning, blistering, both in its presence and in its wake. It comes with a price, flying this close to the sun, and though Eiji has long spent the last of his pennies paying it, he will continue to soar.
He’s never known anything else.
He doesn’t want to.