Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s only after the dream coalesces around him for a second time that he realises that it’s not a big, exhaustion-driven delusion. 

There’s a soft sort of haziness to it. As his head swivels around, Shu’s vision’s a little blurry, and the consistent throbbing in his wrist- which he’s bent and popped every couple hours in an attempt to remedy- is mysteriously absent. This could easily pass as a dream if it wasn’t so familiar.

His pockets are empty. The air is quiet save for the rush of something which is more than just blood running through his ears, like he’d initially assumed. 

It’s a kitchen. Shu’s managed to blink into a kitchen with the faucet still running, and there’s a knife by his large, tattooed hands. He’s not exactly sure how much larger they are, but they’re certainly larger than his hands should be. Beside him, there’s a bundle of spring onions bobbing in the water, and they look positively tiny in his grasp.

It’s not that uncommon for Shu to dream of un-realities. The context changes, perhaps, but the familiar parts remain the same– flashes of training and experiments and late dinners of half-cold noodles that end up glued into one big, chewy mass that all blend together into something that’s grounded by its sheer incomprehensibility. Whenever he wakes up, it's a bit like falling through the sky, warm and strange and buzzing with adrenaline. 

Once, he dreamed of brushing his teeth and blinked in confusion as he found himself horizontal in his sheets, covered in drool after spitting into the air. Gross, unsanitary, unpleasant, sure, but the point is that he’s certainly been pulled back and forth through stranger worlds than this.

And really, who dreams of mundane things like cutting vegetables without some horrible twist that should have already shown itself already, if this was just a dream, so when it happens a second time and he’s suddenly taking in the sight of a pressed block of tofu, Shu just takes a deep breath. 

Hair tickles at the nape of his neck. Shu rubs his eyes a few times, but the strange kitchen doesn’t go away. The walls look nothing like his own. The sink’s on the wrong side, slotted inside the counter in the left-hand corner. 

It’s weird, but it’s not unusual. And it’s not like him to dream of the same thing twice. 

This is definitely the same body as last time. too His hands, his hair, it feels too familiar to be anything else.

The knife wobbles back and forth in his hands, quivering as it hacks up the block of tofu into somewhat presentable cubes. They’re not exactly his hands per se, but they’re his for the time being. They may as well be his hands in the same way this may as well be his body.

Besides, what else is he supposed to do? Run away? Pretend like he can find his real body when he doesn’t even know where this one’s stationed?

Tofu’s not that high up on his list of favoured foods, but maybe this guy happens to adore it, so what else can he do? Eat is what he eventually settles on, on the offhand chance he interrupted the other man’s dinner plans. Eat and then figure out what the heck is going on here and how long it’ll take to get back home. 

If it were him, then he’d certainly appreciate that. If someone’s in his body right now, they better be taking good care of it. Eating’s about all he can really do anyway, seeing as any clever attempts at reconnaissance would invite him under the scrutiny of people who can definitely tell he's not the person they’re all familiar with. 

A quick glance in the glossy surface of the metal-panelled fridge confirms his suspicions. The reflection is a familiar one. It’s the same one that greeted him last time this happened.

It’s not the kind of face you’d easily forget, and it’s certainly not his own.

That’s not his hair that’s been roughly pinned to the sides of his head, cinched in place with little metal barrettes. (It’s cute, but that’s less important.) These are not his eyes or his clothes or his kitchenette surrounding him– which is right beside the bedroom it turns out, upon a tentative peek through the nearest open door– and it would be incredibly overwhelming if he wasn’t so curious about what the rest of the world looked like. The two feelings sorta cancel each other out. There’s no room to debate the semantics of piloting someone else’s body when there are more important things to do.

Shu’s only curious in a conceptual way, of course. He’s not going to chance things by actually going outside, burning curiosity or not. His room will just have to be good enough. This time, he’ll even turn the lights on, or, more realistically, he’ll just bank on the fact that it’s early enough that ‘Mr. Tall and Pretty’ over here left them on before popping into the kitchen.

Shu whispers an apology before turning into the bedroom. A little taste, that's all. Just a little hint at what kind of strange life this guy must live. Sure, vegetables are vegetables, virtually the same from place to place, but the rest of it isn’t. The pearly sheen of the floor alone screams high-falutin and futuristic.

And if this isn’t a dream, then there’s so much he can learn from being here– or at the very least, there are so many things he can do now that he isn’t going to spend the whole trip trying to keep his eyes shut until he finally wakes up in his own bed once more. And yeah, maybe this guy didn’t exactly leave his door open to invite this kind of scrutiny, but it’s there. It’s open. Shu’s been there before. There’s no harm in taking a little peek or two.

So, yeah, knowledge. Shu can do knowledge. That’s like his main thing back home. He lives for that stuff. Freaky, transformative, unknown knowledge.

All he has to do is take a deep breath, walk inside, and begin his journey.

Any scientist worth their salt knows the basics to that. Step one: carefully observe the unknown. So that’s what he’s going to do. Observe. Carefully.

This man, the guy whose body he’s gracefully co-opting, seems to live a pretty simple life. His walls are relatively bare– blank save for a large swathe of canvas bombarded by notes and diagrams and a strange sort of snaking timeline– and the furniture is stark and minimal. It’s a weird mix of homely and clinical, with crisp corners nestled around crumbling edges, with new books next to manuscripts that have been stapled and restapled ten times over. His writing isn't hard to parse through, but much of the specifics are lost on him. There are too many terms that he’s never seen before, but they're all in some form of English, so that narrows down the field a little.

The air’s crisp, slightly too cold for Shu’s taste, but he gets the sinking feeling that this guy might run hot and like it that way, which means Shu will have to learn to like it too. His closet’s full of thin layers, mostly shirts in earthy shades of brown and grey with all the pilling, hole-ridden sweaters shoved in the back. They’re all soft to the touch, and he’s certain that they’d normally reach past his thighs. It's almost funny. This guy seems to be a connoisseur in the tried and true ‘it doesn't exist if it’s out of sight’ school of thought, judging by the sheer number of particularly unsalvageable ones stowed in the corners.

The clothes he's wearing today are relatively simple too, a black shirt with crisp grey pants, clearly tailored. He’s got a few rings on seemingly random fingers, a bracelet wrapped around his left wrist, and there’s a long coat draped across a chair in the corner. Other than that, there's nothing super identifying. There are no ID badges tucked into his pockets, no wallet, no phone, nothing. 

It’s certainly a different experience, watching his whole body move through the mirror rather than from his fixed downward perspective. The outsider point of view highlights the cut of the pants, the way his shirt clings to his chest. Sometimes his rings warp as the light bounces off them.

Shu only stares a little before moving on. For scientific reasons, of course. He’s just cataloguing. He’s being thorough.

Best to get all the details right, and if he can count down the hours until his return quicker by wasting a few seconds appreciating the male form, then that's not his fault at all. No one could blame him for that.

On the opposite wall, right beside his tidy bed, is what likely passes as a window. It’s nothing more than a boxy cutout in the wall that’s covered in some sort of waxy, plasticky panel that he cannot prise up with these borrowed fingers, but it's semantically the same. A skeuomorphic window and a big, fluffy comforter, that’s all he seems to have here. Most of his personal effects are confined to a tiny corner of his desk, upon which stands a little framed photo and a figure of a lion. 

Shu doesn’t try any of the cabinets. That’s just a little too much for comfort.

After a couple circuits and a few more trips to the two landmarks of note– the desk and the closet– Shu pauses, confused. This guy doesn’t even have any clocks! He has space for twenty rings and chains and absolutely zero watches or timetellers or alarms of any kind. Shu might not have a watch, but at least he has his phone. He has something.

It’s a little unfair. How else is he supposed to tell how long it’s been since he’s popped into existence?

It’s probably been an hour, maybe more.

With the absence of anything else to look at that won't leave him feeling too guilty, Shu eventually starts picking through a few of his notes, tracing through his thoughts as he reads and re-pins each little scrap of paper. It’s like a mosaic, lush with pins and shorthand descriptions. He’s got to be some sort of engineer then, mapping out the frequency and timing of some sort of event. Each blip is a colourful pin on a digital map, projected softly against the wall.

The intersecting lines remind him of an atlas, flickering. The shape’s a little weird though. It spirals a bit at the corner, turning tighter at one side than the other.

There’s a couple doodles mixed in with the paper, with little faces and caricatures of people he can only assume work with the man alternating notes that reference a bunch of bagged artefacts. Magazines. A casket of pencils. Morse code spelled out in punches of clumsily cut cardstock.

That last one makes him freeze in his tracks. The floor feels slick beneath his feet as if suddenly covered in rain.

Shu stumbles a bit as he leans into the wall. That one– no, it can't be right. There’s got to be some other explanation for this. Wish fulfillment, probably, because if it's not a dream, then that means this is real. It means he was right.

Is he really seeing this right now? In a stranger’s bedroom?

Upon a second glance, a lot of these objects are frighteningly familiar.

The morse code, for example, spells out ‘hello world.’ It was supposed to say something clever and cute instead, but they eventually decided the classic was the best first choice.

Shu doesn't even need to read it to know for certain. It’s got the same half-punched outline from when Elira lost count and almost added a fifth dot to the ‘h,’ and Shu traces over it with clammy hands.

That one’s marked with a cheery yellow sticker, slightly wrinkled in the middle, with brown ink spelling out ‘2.1’ and some sort of ID.

He's seen this before, and that's not the only one.

Shu’s heart races as he reaches another stack of papers, creased and covered in a familiar set of equations. That leaves even less room for doubt.

He could recognise these with his eyes closed. It’s not like those words that he pretends he can read, guessing ‘ob’ stands for observation and each number is the number of times they saw whatever it is that they're so interested in. No, these are his numbers. They may as well be his numbers given how often he’s referenced them.

If breathing was hard before, it’s an outright struggle now, with each heave of his chest taking twice as much effort as before. This, he truly understands. Unlike the notes that he can vaguely stumble through with his shoddy assumptions, these are the core tenets of his own research. They’ve practically been sewn onto the other side of his eyelids with how much he’s seen them.

Shu barely even registers the cold as he keeps lifting up page after page of familiar precepts. There's a diagram of the Earth on one of them. Beside that is a string of numbers, dates and distances and potential points of interest. It’s like he’s found a home for himself amidst all this strangeness. It’s not only the objects but also the theory.

And all of this, it can only mean one thing.

It’s fate. It’s his break from the universe when he finally needs it, and in retrospect, it all makes sense. Maybe the people from this time period just have a strange taste for decor. 

And, well, if he’s gotten this far on his own, if he’s found and followed the things Shu’s tried to send to the future, then he might have some insight on how to calibrate it. He might know things Shu can’t. After all, all he can ever do is watch when his samples successfully vanish. The follow-up measurements never yield anything but gibberish, and he’s never had a way to check where they end up, but it seems like certainly, some of them could be here or, at the very least, were discovered somewhere adjacent to here. It's the closest he’ll ever get to tracing them.

This man, he could be the answer to everything! And if they’ve both accomplished so much on their own, then it’s only natural that they’d be able to do more together. No one’s interested in a one-way ticket. If you can’t come back, it may as well be a death sentence, trading one life in one time for another entirely.

Time travel is such a niche field anyway, so he could use the collaborator. It’s any self-respecting lab's white whale, but it's also a death sentence. Only dreamers and ingénues still cling onto the pearly vision of effortless leaps through time. Even the brightest, most starry-eyed among them began to shed their constellations after the incremental, atom-by-atom theory got debunked.

Worn and weary, no one wants to admit that they’re still trying to figure it out, bogged down by years and years of hoaxes and false hope and charlatans claiming that any old incinerator is just as good as a time machine because you'll never see the input again anyway. Even in his lab, they’ve folded their tiny team into the vaguely labelled ‘speculative studies’ branch of the optics department, saddling Shu with the heavy role of chief scientist– the leader of the failures, the root, the cause, the one who must weather all the hardship should they be deemed a lost cause, which they inevitably will, since progress has been slower and slower.

No one dares to even acknowledge their existence until they can bring some real proof of something monumental, and Shu’s got no pearlescent dreams left to covet about being the one to figure it out. It isn’t a simple problem, but there are ways it could be easier. 

The naysayers are wrong. That much, he now knows for certain.

This place, this bizarre room with the beautiful yet strange man who seems to own nothing but an exhaustive set of notes, is proof that he isn’t alone. 

Someone else is trying to find him. Maybe they're not looking for him specifically, but it’s him as a concept. It’s humanity. It’s fellow people separated by nothing but the thin barrier of time. 

Shu’s not alone, and maybe he never was. It’s more than he ever imagined discovering, but it’s still not enough. Getting to the future is the easy half of the equation.

Still, the mere sight of that proof is enough to buoy his spirits. Surely, if they tackle the problem from both ends, then they can figure something out, together.

That must be it!

Of course, what else could this be but some misaligned form of time travel, sending minds instead of bodies? If it’s not a dream, then it must be something else, something improbable and beautiful and exciting, and clearly this guy’s working on it too, so what else could it be?

Temporal displacement? He can work with that. Now, all they have to do is figure out how to send more than a mind across the barrier, and maybe, if they can manage that, they can even figure out how to control it. It would be so nice if they could choose a more convenient time to switch places– not that he has any issues with chopping vegetables, of course.

It would be better if they could coexist, but he’ll take it one step at a time. Even a quick chance to swap notes would be nice. Nothing earth-shattering. Nothing that would doom the future of humanity- though someone will have to work on that, once they succeed. There’s got to be all sorts of ethical concerns when it comes to screwing with the past.

Shu’s dreams aren’t anywhere close to that grand. Companionship and answers, that's all he wants. A time-bending cosmic handshake that stretches an unknown number of years.

Shu’s excitement sparks into a bolder, brighter sort of flame, fuelled by the potential of it all. A firework springs from his chest. Suddenly, he’s rifling through these papers with little caution for propriety. His body laughs a little as he scrambles for a pen, a pencil, anything to write with, to share all his current progress, and the sound is much richer than he’s used to. It’s warm and full in the places where he tends to be soft. It’s the kind of sound that haloes a summer sky. 

His joy makes him even clumsier, still unused to being taller than he expects. Shu nearly crashes his forearm against the edge of the desk as he runs toward the shelf, plucking a pen from a cup in the corner.

He’s got to share it all– the failure from last Tuesday’s attempt to send out a newspaper, something dated, something obviously traceable should anyone actually be listening; the way he’s gotten around leaking batteries and burnt out wiring; the insufferable heat in that room as they tweaked and tweaked and blanketed it in a hazy sort of steam. They’re all stepping stones lining this journey. The mere memory of it makes him burn even fiercer than before, and the whiplash hits harder when he’s suddenly hurtled back into his bed, dizzy and disoriented and thrown carelessly off orbit.

Clutched in his hand is a scrap of paper, crumpled into a ball. It’s blank, and his room is otherwise precisely how he left it.

But still, there was no way that was all some crazy dream. One time, sure, maybe that’s just wishful thinking, but twice? 

He was here. He was just here, that man, the one with the pretty hands and bizarre ornaments. 

He was just here and Shu was nestled inside his soul. Shu could feel every bit of what it was like to be inside his body. It was hot, warmth shooting off his skin no matter how chilly the surrounding air may have been, and everything was so beautiful and exciting and fresh and real.

It was not a dream. Certainly not. No dream like that would fall on him twice, vivid and painful and so very real.

And honestly, who eats tofu inside their dreams!? Who feels the phantom burn from dropping it into blistering oil, still slightly damp and craggly from being inexpertly prepared by shaking hands? Those feelings were too raw to be anything but the truth, and it would be too cruel to dangle such a beautiful thing so close to his grasp.

It can’t be a dream.

Someone who understood him, someone he could collaborate with. So much knowledge of the unknown, all of it was there, somewhere so distant and bright.

The panic swirling inside him mirrors that which sprung up the first time this happened, waking up in someone’s body unsure of what was happening. 

In the dark, Shu bangs his arm into his chair as he fumbles with his drawers– all shut, with nothing out of place. His pen slips out of his fingers. Papers fly. His elbows slam into the table as he tears off a note.

It’s more like mania than panic, actually, or maybe an itch. He needs to understand it.

It’ll happen again. Surely, if it’s happened twice, then it will happen again. Something will trigger it.

They will definitely find each other again.

Armed with a hastily scrawled message that he barely manages to peel off, Shu takes in his room with new eyes. Where can he put it? How can he make sure it’ll definitely be seen?

His ceiling? The back of his front door? His wallet, maybe, should the other man get nervous and curious and just as eager for information as he was? He didn’t have anything in his pockets, but Shu always does, so it’s a good place to put something, isn't it?

If it were him, he’d want it somewhere out in the open. He might feel shy, after all, searching the place with hungry eyes as he tries to make a discovery out of nothing in particular.

After a few passes through his room, going back and forth in a cycle of finding a mildly appropriate location, changing his mind, finding somewhere better, and then crumpling and rewriting it each time it loses too much adhesive to stay anywhere for long, Shu eventually finds the optimal spot- somewhere relatively private with just enough space for a longer exchange, if necessary. 

The purple square grins up at him from its home beside his desk. Surely his comrade in arms will get curious too. He’ll definitely find it, seeing how much he enjoys displaying stuff on his walls.

And to his credit, Shu only fusses over it twice before getting back under the covers. Once he’s finally satisfied, he slumps into bed, trying to recall every little detail, but the bulk of it slips through his fingers. All he can truly recall are the polished walls, the artificial light that blanketed the hallway, and the way his eyes widened as he finally looked in the mirror. His pale, bright eyes crinkled at the very sight of him. His smile stretched across his cheeks. 

His mere existence is a triumph, so remembering that much is enough for now.

And surely, if he's being sent out there, then the other man must be here. It’s not that much of a reach. It’s got to be some strange sort of reciprocal exchange, conservation of momentum or something like that. 

He’ll come back. Somehow. He’ll surely make it back. 

Tonight would be ideal. Tomorrow, maybe, if it has to wait. Shu could live with that, but the sooner the better.

Despite his conviction though, that night, no matter how hard he tries, Shu does not launch into another dream with a handsome stranger and blinking lights. No, instead he merely ends up trapped on a beach in his dreams– a real dream this time, rather than a miracle disguised as one– watching the water bubble against the sand as he tries to cover his knees from the heat of the sun.

The beach or island or wherever he ends up is deserted, pristine and perfect and a constant distance from the horizon no matter how far he walks. There’s some sort of palace looming out in the distance, but the sun forms no shadows at all.

There are no shadows, and yet, as he waits, somehow it still burns.

-

-

The first time it happened, Shu barely even realised something was amiss, chalking up all the idiosyncrasies to some sort of unusually vivid dream. It happened sometimes, amplified by stress and bad habits, and he was too tired to ascribe it any higher meaning. Sometimes he dreams about drowning and he can feel the ice crawl down his lungs. This wasn’t that strange, all things considered. 

Fresh off a session of calibrations and tests and new calibrations to verify those new tests, sixteen hours passed by much faster than it had any right to. Shu barely managed to toss some comfortable clothes on before collapsing into bed for his mandated three hour rest. Time always outran him whenever he wanted to hold onto it.

So, yeah, his body was heavy as he curled deeper into his blankets, a bit heavier than he’s used to, but everything’s heavier when you’re tired. It wasn’t anything too unusual. Even his eyes were heavy, so he didn’t plan to open them any time soon. 

As he attempted to melt into his mattress, someone knocked on the door, but Shu pretended not to hear. 

Then it happened again. And again.

None of it mattered. If he didn’t get any sleep, then they’d force him out of the lab again, and he’s finally been making some decent progress, so no, he wasn’t going to shuck off the covers of the creaky little cot that he’s co-opted for sleep during the long, overnight sessions just to address whatever nightmare Petra’s probably run into down in optics. He could deal with it in the morning.

Still, they didn’t give up.

“Petra!” Shu eventually called out, pausing at the sound of his voice. It was brighter than he’s used to in a way that’s hard to explain. The tone was similar but rounder at the edges. “Come back in the morning!”

Eventually, the pounding sound stopped, but the thought refused to go away. Exhaustion alone wasn’t enough to explain away the difference in pitch. 

What was going on? 

The difference was even more noticeable without the haze of sleep to cloud his senses. It wasn't just his voice that was a little out of place.

Something was very, very wrong. This whole picture was off.

Once Shu regained his bearings, still cocooned in his blanket, he barely managed to shuffle a few feet towards the sink before walking straight into a chair that shouldn’t have been there. So much for splashing water on his face. Shu winced as it scraped across the floor, belatedly reaching out a hand to try to steady it, but he somehow pushed with too much force, and it clattered to the ground with a thud.

Shu sighed, levelling an admonishing look in their direction, but his hands offered no apologies for their continual failure. It was terrible. His body was clumsy; his voice wasn't working, and he couldn’t even make it to the next room over without causing a mess.

Not even a consoling self-handshake could cheer him up. If anything, it made him feel more pitiful, staring down at his hands as if that made it all–

Wait.

Was that a tattoo?

It wasn’t just his voice that sounded different– not just rough from disuse, but genuinely different– but his clothes too. His sleeves pooled around his arms. His pants were an inch too long, dragging along the floor with every little step.

His clothes, the room, all of it wasn’t quite as it should have been, and a look in the mirror confirmed his suspicions. This looks nothing like their little sickbay in the lab.

The room wasn't the only thing that was a little different. 

Pale purple eyes stared back at him, and after a moment of merely staring back, they squeezed shut with stubborn desperation, eager to see him returned to his familiar form, but it wasn’t that simple. Of course it wasn't. Nothing's simple for Shu nowadays. No matter how much time he spent there, staring pitifully into that offending slab of metal, he was still blonde with brighter eyes than he’s used to. Nothing changed.

Shu spent an embarrassing amount of time simply staring at the mirror, watching a stranger’s body copy his movements like a stringless marionette. He’d put his hands on his cheeks and watch broad palms cover strong cheekbones, drawing out little shivers from the press of cold metal against flushed cheeks. 

It felt a little weird.

He’s not used to having rings on his fingers.

He's not used to feeling things this strongly inside his dreams, often left with half sensations at most.

He’s not used to being so… tall. 

There were plenty of worse bodies to be temporarily inhabiting. Tall, broad, and blonde, this one wore a smile like it belonged on his lips. And he’s got to admit, the man's got nice bone structure. He’s certainly worthy of starring in one of his dreams, but it still didn't feel right.

Weird was the best way to put it. It wasn't bad, just a little bizarre. Not hostile nor horrifying, just bizarre.

The body was fine, the room perfectly suitable, but he did not want to be trapped here. It just wasn’t him. Shu did not belong here. No, he belonged in his little cot that he had to fold himself into to manage any genuine rest, surrounded by his familiar fragments of failing machinery. Back then, he had no reason to breach these walls and discover more reasons why he shouldn't be there. There was no way he’d invite more thoughts of all the reasons why he didn’t fit into this dream world. He did enough of that without prompting.

Having a body was interesting enough. He’s usually faceless if he’s not himself, so it’s his first time breathing someone else’s air. 

In the end, Shu spent more time investigating his face than his bedroom, picking at stray threads and twirling the rings on his fingers. And it was a bedroom that he ended up in. Ostensibly. There was a bed, after all, and a chair.

Even his dreams lack a creative spark, trading one bedroom for another.

The bed barely sank as he flopped across the surface, returning to his rightful place beneath the covers. The bed was probably the most important fixture of the whole darkened room, and even that was relegated to a sad spot in the corner. He must live a sad, ascetic sort of life.

The specifics of the room didn't really matter. It was too dark to make out most of it, and he didn't really want to be here anyway. All he wanted was a brief moment of rest, but it seemed like even in his dreams, he was left with nothing to do but to marinate in his most recent string of failures, repeating the exercise of being unable to sleep once more. Restlessness within a pit of restlessness. That’s his fate.

Maybe he should have gone into optics after all, instead of taking on this foolish mission. Soon it won't matter anyway, seeing as they’ve made no progress since last month’s semi-promising dispatch. They’ll all rejoin optics once more, branded by the familiar mark of failure, or worse, get cut off entirely.

As Shu sat in silence, sitting with a mind that was his and a body that wasn't, he wasn’t quite sure what to do or say. Memory has no mercy, and his body didn’t seem very apt to rest either.

And what else was he supposed to do? Count sheep? Walking around would just tire him even further, and the whole point of sleeping is to get some rest, so the two don't really mix. It’s easier to quash the feeling that he isn’t quite the person he wanted to be when he doesn't have the literal fabric of the universe reminding him of how legitimately true that is. He’s not, and he won't be, maybe ever. 

It could be worse though. He supposes his mind could have launched him into a compilation of all his greatest embarrassments and errors instead of bringing him to some weird limbo, so it’s not like it’s as bad as it could be.

It was a strange sort of dream, he decided, or maybe it wasn’t much of a dream at all, but still he sat, inhaling history and exhaling some sort of strange un-reality. His lips felt dry, but the rest of the world remained an intentional mystery, and the air tasted of nothing but silence.

No one else came to the door. Maybe he would have answered if they did.

Nothing happened at all. Shu kept waiting for sleep or wakefulness or both to crash onto him. For what felt like hours, he was just waiting, wondering when the dream would end. And it did end, eventually. 

In the most unsatisfying way to end an unsatisfying night, right when he finally managed to fall asleep in that stranger’s bed, he was thrown into his real body once more, consoled solely by the familiar sight of his gloved hands.

His back ached as soon as he tried to get up. It turned out that he never even made it to bed, having fallen asleep at his desk, so rather than continue, he slowly packed up his things, heading off to get some actual rest. In fact, he was so tired that he budgeted himself four hours instead of the usual three, crashing into his pillow with a hefty thump.

If he'd been paying more attention, he might have noticed the blanket was still mussed up and crumpled in the corner of his bed, which was certainly not how he left it, but he didn't, grimacing at strange happenings as he brought it up to his chin and closed his eyes for the third time that night.

-

-

Twice in one week. Two strange encounters in the same world with the same body, with just enough unfathomably real details peppered in that he could never have remembered on his own. The evidence points to only one logical conclusion.

There was a magazine in his room, one released last summer with ‘By the Beat’ written in bright bubble letters. It’s not one Shu ever remembers seeing himself, but a quick search confirms it was real. Not only was it real, but it was something they had sent, bundled with a bag of chips. He didn’t see those, but it may be a coincidence. Food’s not really the kind of thing that lasts.

There were other things too– a hat, a worn-out pair of leather shoes, some with dates and some without– so it's not exactly set in stone, but the rhythm of suspicion is enough to keep him repeating the thought. Luca must be receiving some of their samples.

The first thing Shu did when he made it back, aside from trying to wrack his brain for more details, was open his phone to double-check the date. The blurry little number refused to change no matter how much he rubbed at it, waiting to see if it would backstep into its rightful value.

If it was nothing but a dream of a dream, then he should have woken up to the familiar sight of a little 12 in the corner, but he’s evidently leapfrogged straight into the 13th, so the dream theory’s mostly been debunked. Not even Elira would go that far to mess with him. It’s just not worth the effort of changing the date when there are smaller, easier ways to get a rise out of him, things that don’t require faking an unofficial breakthrough.

Shu lumbered clumsily through the first day back, half-occupied with the puzzle of it all. There’s so much he could learn if it really happened, which he’s increasingly convinced of. There’s so much research that he could do and so many advances he could pioneer! How far apart are they anyway? How did he get hold of some of their artefacts? Would he be willing to take on the hard part, trying to send something into the past? 

Is his reiteration of a reiteration of a machine actually working?

Is there really someone out there listening?

He should have tried saying something last night just to hear his voice again. Just to confirm he wasn’t crazy.

For the first couple swaps, it was just like learning how to ride a bike. What kind of person is Luca? What does he like? And then, to match the other end of the spectrum, what does he desperately hate? When does he work? If he really is from the future– and it certainly seems like it considering all the oddities in his room alone– then how much is Shu allowed to know without screwing it all up?

How can they carry over information when most of it seems to slip through his fingers? The thing is, shooting for a target is very different from trying to find any random hint of success. He’s never had to think about accuracy before. Accuracy, scale, scope, there are too many unknowns to sift through, and every day seems contradictorily less productive than before, like he’s got to learn how to walk all over again.

It’s hard to guess when they’re set to switch places, so he can’t even prepare in advance. While the first few were slow, maybe once every two weeks at most, they’ve grown longer and less predictable. Entire nights could pass in each other’s bodies. And on a day like today, fresh off what feels like a double triple shift, Shu’s exhaustion is certainly more than what coffee can feasibly deal with, but that doesn’t stop him from grabbing an extra large cup on his way out, holding it out near his face in a poor attempt to melt into it. If he were a cup, he could be warm and treated carefully and not be stuck trying to figure out how to configure it all.

His body’s rested enough, he supposes, since Luca slept in it, but that’s little consolation. His drink will just have to be his shield, billowing with steam and a scent that washes over him, covering his footsteps.

Honestly, Shu still expected disappointment as he got closer and closer to the lab. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten ahead of himself. 

He’s used to it. 

It could still be a huge, perfectly orchestrated prank, the first that actually got him. It’s not like someone’s actually going to drop the answer to his problems into his lap.

That’s what he’s waiting for, honestly. When Vox pokes his head in the door an hour later, chuckling softly at his misery, he almost expects him to reveal their collective effort to get one over him. 

The last month? Yeah, it’s actually been one huge, sleep-deprivation-fuelled fantasy. It would be easier that way, if it wasn’t quite real. If he lets go of his skepticism, then it’ll all become real in a way he can’t take back, so it’s better to leave it a little ambiguous.

Shu waves at Vox as he passes, but he doesn’t pay him much mind. He doesn’t even spare a glance at him and his wolfish grin and the way he laughs a little louder as he points at his mug. Nope. Shu doesn’t do anything but set up his station since Luca’s bound to have left his notes somewhere. He claimed he didn’t want to mix them into Shu’s in case anyone came sniffing around, but it’s not that useful if he can’t find them either.

You’d think two tidy people could find a reasonable way to organise their unexpectedly shared workspace, but maybe their cleanliness manifests in different ways. What he’d file under nuts, for example, are things Luca might associate with peanuts, even if he’s wrong, which he is. The subcategory can’t become the parent category. That’s just not how it works! And what about almonds? Those grow in trees! They’re called tree nuts! It’s totally different. 

There’s a lot Luca knows nothing about, but his confidence makes him stubborn.

Midway through his botanical tirade, Shu finally catches sight of it, a little spiral notebook tucked beneath all of the draft reports that have become scrap paper at this point. He slips it into his jacket right before Vox comes back his way, folder in hand, with the kind of expectant smile that just screams trouble– usually for him. 

Shu sighs, closing his laptop. “Any luck with the muxing? Do you still need an extra pair of eyes?”

“Oh, that? Nah, I’ll cover it in my update,” he replies, thumbing through his papers. “I’ve got it under control.”

Shu expects that to be all, but Vox doesn't move any closer to the door. Instead, the grin returns full force as he leans down conspiratorially.

“What now? Is there something on my face?” Shu looks down at his shirt, expecting something drastic, but it isn’t stained nor turned inside out nor worn front to back– which only happened once by the way! It's not his fault they look the same in the dark.

“It’s nothing. Just, well, no ‘hey man’ today? I dunno, I thought it kinda worked for you.”

“Did I–”

“Yep. If it makes you feel any better, only about twenty people heard it before I broke things up.”

Shu’s forehead bounces off his desk as he groans, and he watches Vox laugh his way out the door through a curtain of hair. Each of his steps spans the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 

Of course it’s not going to be that easy.

Perfect ruses don’t exist. It’s more of a matter of how willing you are to lie and how willing the other person is to pretend they can’t see a thing. The only upside is that when the mistakes are funny, they can become jokes instead of points of contention. 

He can’t exactly blame Luca. It’s not really his fault that every fifth person he meets wants to chat about this theory or that idea and suddenly he’s being launched into conversation with more people than he could have possibly been briefed on.

He should have accounted for the inevitable reality that is conversation in each other’s bodies. He should have thought it through. It’s just that he’s been so focused on verification and double triple checking and waiting for the universe to laugh at him for trying and being a passable (at best) scientist that’s trying to unfurl the literal fabric of spacetime while building some sort of rapport with his partner in crime (which is honestly the easiest of all of the herculean tasks on his plate), so he hasn’t really thought everything through yet. He has, but he hasn’t. He’s managed to chew his way through all the useless things and none of the important ones. 

It’s fine though. Now’s not the time to fall into his shortcomings. Anger impedes progress.

Some things are bound to fall through the cracks, and they’re small cracks.

After a week of chipping away at it, he’s finally finished his review of all of their records against Luca’s receipts. Not all of them seemed to have made it, but there’s enough that does line up to make a real case for it. And if it does work out, then he can slowly discover what makes it work and how to improve it, so he’s close to a real breakthrough.

That’s what Shu’s currently gnawing on– the best next steps, the parameters he’d like to try, the exact time point they need to be targeting– when his foot catches onto a patch of carpet. His papers narrowly escape a brush with the floor as he stumbles forward, correcting his stance, but none of it distracts him from the true task at hand.

Why did some make it and not the rest? How did Luca find out? Should he try again first, to really establish a baseline, or should he get deep into it and start hashing out the permutations?

As he turns towards his building, Shu narrowly avoids a reunion between his face and the still-closed door.

Okay, so maybe he’s being a little single-minded, but can anyone blame him? Now that they’re on the same page, he can focus on progress. And progress is good.

Progress doesn’t care if everything’s moving much slower than you expected. Progress doesn’t mind if your theory’s just a little out of whack since there’s no way things headed for 80 and 180 years out should both make it when everything between them slipped through the cracks. Progress is a sliding scale, easy to measure and easy to see. It doesn’t judge; it just smiles at the end of the day once you’ve finally bored through its gnarled surface.

Verification is still progress, and he notes as much for Luca’s sake before his notebook leaps back into his pocket.

Nothing is easy for men named Shu Yamino.

A solitary grumble of, “Hey, man,” is what greets him when he finally slumps into his chair again, pitched even lower than usual. That, he probably should have expected. His exploits never seem to stay a secret for long.

Shu deepens his voice too. “Peter, he says, “Nice seeing you.”

Petra laughs a little, but her heart’s not in it. She’s still got this distant sort of look in her eyes like she’s trying to figure something out. After a second, she swipes a pen to scribble something on the corner of her hand. Then she stares at it again, frowning as she scribbles it out, redoes it, and admires her handiwork.

Maybe it’s not a pen after all, but it bounces off his desk with a plasticky click as she tries to toss it over his shoulder. It looks like he’s not the only one struggling with targets today. To narrow things down, he’ll have to send some new things out to see which ones actually cross over properly. Then, hopefully, Luca can figure out a pattern in it.

Petra coughs. “You’re coming to the retreat, right? I need you to bail me out if it comes down to it. You’re like my backup backup plan.”

“Sure. No problem.” Shu looks up again, confused. “Isn’t it on Thursday though?”

“Today is Thursday.” Petra stills, leaning towards him with a wandering eye. “Are you feeling okay? You’ve been a little… you know.”

When she says it, it has the shape and rhythm of a joke but none of the usual humour. Life never fails to compensate him for everything that falls through the cracks. Has it really been that long? He could have sworn it was only Tuesday at the latest, even after factoring in the nights inevitably lost to Luca’s sheets.

“Never better,” he replies, swatting her hands away before they can get close to his forehead. Sure, there’s no harm in letting her do it seeing as he’s perfectly fine, but there’s no harm in not letting her either, and this way, he can add in a little quip about her height. Her arms are just short. He’s average height, so she’s just small. “It’s fine,” Shu repeats, “I’ll be there.”

Petra is momentarily pacified, but it’s not enough. Her eyes remain slightly narrowed, arms crossed in front of her chest as she stares him down. He knows that it isn't enough to satisfy her, but he also knows that he isn't ready to talk about it. He’s still coming to terms with it himself, so that’s all she’s going to get.

Luca is… different. What they have, it’s hard to describe. It's not like they're regular colleagues or friends or anything in between. They’ve hardly even met, and maybe they never will, and yet each meeting feels heavier than the last, weighed down by its importance. The butterflies have yet to dissipate. Sometimes he feels them just by thinking too much about Luca and all they’re going to accomplish.

“I’ve just been busy,” Shu insists, ignoring whatever twists in his stomach as he drops his hands. “So, tonight? At 7? I’ll be there.”

“Fine. But you better go home first! I can see your lights on every time I walk past! Go home. Stop rotting away in here every day.”

It takes a few more promises to get Petra off his back, but she eventually acquiesces, and in the ensuing silence, he considers it. 

How would he even begin to tell someone? It’s not like he's being coy for no reason. He hardly understands it himself, so he’d probably do a pretty lousy job explaining it to anyone else. He's just not ready yet. He doesn’t want to be wrong. The mechanism, the reason, so much remains unclear, and nothing stings more than the moment you’re proven wrong. 

Sometimes he really wishes he could talk to Luca about it. It's the kind of weird shared experience that needs too many additional explanations that he’s not keen to get into. Sometimes he wishes he could talk to him for other reasons too, but he doesn't like to dwell on that part.

When they finally figure out how their travel works, they’ll be able to establish a link to anywhere at any time, including their own.

There’ll always be time for it someday, so it’s fine if it takes a month or two or however many it will take at the rate they’re going. It’s not like time is going to vanish from beneath their feet.

He’ll find a way to talk about it eventually, but for now, there’s no need to rush, so Shu just tries his best to communicate his sincerity with his eyes, laughing as Petra jumps to swipe at his face again.

For now, this is good enough.

- 

-

Their next swap catches him completely off guard. Each time he thinks he’s figured it out, something proves him wrong. So much for the ‘once a week from sundown to sun up’ theory.

It’s midday when it finally happens, and his legs are shaky, addled from the feeling of blinking and being met with entirely different surroundings. It’s completely different from sleeping through it. There’s no refractory period when he can watch everything flip, getting launched from one place to another. It’s worse, actually, because it still doesn’t feel like he moved at all, and yet his eyes disagree. 

It’s way too bright in here. Shu groans as he squeezes his eyes shut.

Luca’s hard at work too, it seems.

Every night, it seems like he’s spent the last few nights squeezing his eyes shut and hoping it would miraculously happen if he just wanted it badly enough, but nothing really came to light. It would be too easy if he could control it, if he could come and go whenever it’s convenient and not be randomly dropped here, stuck straining his eyes on a random Tuesday afternoon.

In the past, even though the exact duration has varied, each swap started when he was in bed, and often Luca was too, so it was easy to navigate. It made the transition a little easier to deal with, burrowing deeper into his sheets for a few minutes until he could regain his bearings. After a while, Shu slowly let go of the part of himself that chalked it up to good luck or a freaky coincidence or some weird condition that neither of them understood yet, so he began to expect that he’d always start things in Luca's bedroom. He accepted that reality, and he could live with it. It was predictable despite the blanket unpredictability, and it gave him space to think and work and prepare himself.

Evidently, that theory’s been thoroughly disproven since this certainly isn't Luca’s room. The walls are a similar sort of material, all white and simultaneously glossy yet matte in an artificial plasticine sort of way, but the vibe is completely different. 

It’s much louder, for one. The air is filled with the sound of intermittent beeps, and sometimes he can catch the clunk of heavy footfalls coming from the space where a door should be. A gleaming set of tools rests in front of him, each delicately labelled with their exact place and purpose. Instead of walls, each space is divided by a strange curtain-like thing that seems to ripple like the ocean. It’s probably some kind of screen, and Luca has some notes spread across his with a sparse calendar in the corner. Today’s square’s blocked out under the nondescript label of ‘Modifications.’

Still, Shu tries his best not to stare. With a hum, he fishes around his pockets, looking for his notebook. It's not like his hands are particularly small, but they're certainly not the same as Luca’s, so he still has to readjust his typical habits. Only half of his thoughts can be spared for work at once, sacrificing progress if it means that the progress he does make is indistinguishable from Luca’s. The rest inevitably goes towards blending in.

Anyway, the point is that this room’s almost certainly a lab, which means their transfers aren't limited by space. There's no real difference between waking up in bed and waking up here– aside from the lights and the wattage– and that revelation alone is plenty interesting. There are things he can learn from that, so there's no use wasting time ogling his tools and walls when there's real science to be done.

This corner is Luca’s space for sure. The bones of his node are here, mirroring the one back on his bench. It’s only half finished, but everything's roughly in the right spot. Luca’s contributions are always top class. The mirrors look a little bit off, but that’s the worst of it, so Shu merely jots down the correction before tweaking the angle a little.

He’s never doubted that Luca’s from the future, but that notion’s inescapable here. The windows aren’t real. The weather’s always cloudy. The light seems to erupt out of nowhere, vanquishing all shadows. 

It’s definitely the future, but it’s the future in a clinical, detached sort of way, all crisp lines and stark, white corners. It’s efficiency baked into everything, with overhead lights that never flicker and bright rings haloing corridors and booming announcements that seem to surround them and Luca’s unending promises that he will teach him how to navigate it all eventually.

For now, they make do with stopgaps. 

These are the essentials, according to Luca:

• a way to communicate– something coded would be better, but he’ll accept plaintext so long as it’s hidden;
• a rundown of each place he’ll have to go to and when, should they fail to switch back in the morning;
• a list of all the places and people he absolutely should NOT visit no matter what;
• a dented, aluminum bottle that’s full of water, so Shu doesn’t have to wander;
• a list of his usual set of jokes and japes, inked in thick, blocky letters;
• a patchwork sweater that smells faintly of cinnamon and something else, kept in case he gets cold, but it’s made of the same thin material as everything else, so it never really helps at all.

In fact, the very first thing Luca left for him was a request for a 4-digit passcode for his bedroom, claiming he’d set it up next time. Their locks are a little weird, validated with a combination of biometrics and a number you’ve got to place on a grid of empty squares, one for each corner. It would blow any notion of discretion out of the water if he had to ask someone how to get out of his own room, so, yeah, definitely one of the essentials. 

To Shu’s credit, it only took him two tries to get it open once everything was in place. And he didn’t even ask what the old code was, just thanked Luca for learning to live with it. He’s allowed to have what few secrets he can.

The point is that they’re trying their best to live in each other’s shoes, so when Gusty– who Shu has only ever known as such despite the numerous times they’ve met so far– comes up to his station with poorly disguised excitement, Shu tries his best to humour him, to channel his inner Luca. As far as he’s aware, no one knows his real name, so the nickname is good enough.

“Morning boss!” 

The other thing about Gusty is that he punches above his weight, and for that, Shu’s not supposed to like him as much as he does. He’s got these dangerous ideas about becoming an enforcer– which isn’t, if Luca is to be believed, a grim peek at their militaristic future and is actually more about ‘keeping peace around the station’ or whatever that means– and he’s set his eyes on Luca as his prospective mentor. Apparently, it was some sort of accident turned gratitude turned hero worship, so he's been trying his best to let him down easy, but he's a good kid, so there's no need to be cruel about it.

“Morning.”

Shu doesn’t really feel comfortable around any of the enforcers, MP types who would probably relish in picking him and Luca apart as soon as they let something slip, but Gusty’s harmless. He’s so harmless that there’s no way he’ll ever be an issue in the first place. 

“So,” he asks, “What’s on the docket today?”

Shu shrugs. “Just doing some modifications. I’m around halfway done.”

“Oh. Do you need any help? I could lift things for you?”

“I’ll be alright.”

The truth is that he doesn't hate him– doesn’t even dislike him, in fact– and he's pretty sure Luca doesn't either, no matter what he says. 

He's too much sometimes, always nattering about how he's going to be the best enforcer they’ve ever seen, how he's going to be just like Luca some day– strong in the way that counts. He's too overinvolved in the things that shouldn't concern him and underdeveloped in the areas that do. He'll make a lousy enforcer, if he even gets that far, and he's almost certainly going to wash out a few months in, realising just how much it didn't fit. He's a liability. He's always sniffing around Shu's experiments, lobbing clumsy questions like grenades that he shouldn’t be entertaining when he’s supposed to shake off any scrutiny, but he does. 

Gusty’s ambition and his persona are like pieces of two different puzzles, but that’s not going to make any hatred stick, so he always chooses to entertain him. Every time he traipses over to Luca’s bench, he simply tries his best to be kind. That’s what Luca would do anyway, even if he claims he wouldn’t.

“Sure thing, boss! I’ll check next door and report back later.”

Shu straightens his back as he offers a salute, but he can’t help but watch him go. Setting down his tools, he turns his chair towards the door, smiling as Gusty mingles with the robotics team. Sometimes he’ll carry their toolboxes or hold open doors or offer what little advice he can cobble together, and he does all of it with a huge grin. 

How can anyone hate someone who acts like that?

After a few minutes, Vanta comes by with a jar in each hand, walking closer to their station rather than further away. It must be some sort of experiment. Something is certainly going on there.

Still, it’s strange. Can a robot eat pickles? He imagines the acid and the fermentation wouldn't agree with the whole metallic stomach thing, but the whole point is that they're supposed to be resilient, so maybe that’s it. Vinegar’s fermented too though. As is yogurt and some types of cheese. Are they supposed to just stick to dry toast and water? It must be boring, being a robot, though he supposes the resilience would be nice. His foot still hurts a little from a scuffle with a shelf this morning. 

He’s mostly gotten the hang of it, existing as Luca. Mostly.

It’s close enough, anyway.

Eventually, Shu goes back to his screwdrivers. He manages to bring around half of his focus back to the task at hand, which is plenty. Every once in a while, he’ll check his notes against Luca’s, but it’s not so much correcting errors as it is addressing misconceptions. Everything he shares is pretty darn good.

By lunchtime, the neighbouring chaos has spilled into the common space, a chorus of voices offering suggestions with varying degrees of credence. Their little pickle fiasco must have become more of a pickle conundrum of sorts.

“It’s not the wiring,” is what he hears, “I just checked it last Friday!” It’s a claim that would be a little more convincing if the delivery wasn’t quite so high-pitched and shaky. 

There’s a moment where Shu considers looking away, but Luca’s probably the curious type. When he peeks around the screen, he’s greeted by the sight of the crisis– or Krisis, if Luca’s notes are correct, but surely he just misread it– team staring at a heap of mechanical limbs. They occasionally circle around it as if a new vantage point will offer some until-then-hidden insight and unveil the solution to all their problems.

“I bet it's the catalytic converter!” Millie suggests, slapping a hand onto Wilson’s back. She's not even a part of the robotics department; she just spends her breaks there whenever she feels like messing with Fulgur.

“That’s literally impossible. This isn't even a car.”

“Okay, and? Did you even try looking?”

“It’s not a car! There’s no exhaust! There’s nothing to convert!”

“I dunno,” she says with a laugh, punctuating it with an exaggerated shrug. “Seems like someone’s plenty exhausted over here.”

“Wow. I wonder why.”

As she continues, Wilson’s eyes seem to plead with anyone who passes to rescue him, but he doesn't actually take any steps to remediate things, so he clearly can't be that desperate. It must be some sort of weird game they play. He pretends to hate it; she pretends she cares.

When his gaze finally lands on him, Shu can’t help but laugh, and he’s momentarily taken aback by the sound. There’s something nice about it, warm in a way that fights off the cold. It’s a bit lower than he expected, but it’s nice all the same.

“Luca!” Wilson’s arms flail like he’s waving a giant flag. “You’ve got to stop her. She’s been cracking jokes all morning!”

Millie’s undeterred. “You don't have to mention it in front of everyone, but you love my jokes.”

“I hate them.”

Shu offers an apology with an exaggerated sigh, and whether they believe him or not, they quickly head back to their posts. He just can’t afford to be needled yet. Humour’s one of the fastest ways he’ll be outed as an imposter.

Back to work it is, then. One of the pages in his notebook has a ribbon sticking out of it, and Shu’s fingers inadvertently stop at it each time he touches it. It's one of his quirks. Luca’s got a habit of leaving physical reminders behind, so Shu’s gotten pretty good at spotting them. If there's something they both need to see, it has to go somewhere Luca will inevitably stumble across it.

There’s this unexpectedly cute side to him though. That little bookmark is not pointing to his most recent entry, which is what Shu was expecting the first time he cracked it open. No, instead it’s sandwiched between a mostly normal spread, pages filled with half a protocol and a couple odd numbers, but there's this doodle on the lower left of a face with two prongs of grass growing out of it. Next to that are a couple of fuzzy blobs that look a bit like boules of fire.

If you asked Shu, he’d say it doesn't look anything like him, but it’s close enough in a way that lingers. It's a refraction of a memory, and the ink doesn't smudge when he squishes his face beneath his finger. The ribbon’s unnecessary. Luca's notebook naturally turns to that page if left open for long. There's a crease on the spine right around where it’s been visited and revisited and revisited again; the frayed, purple ribbon serves no real purpose, but that tiny ornament might be the nicest thing he’s ever seen.

It makes his heart race a little, the thought that Luca cared enough to try to bring him into his world, the thought that he wanted to remember him and cared enough to keep turning back to it. 

With a grin, Shu adds a little drawing of his own beneath it, one with both of their faces staring up at Luca’s contribution like it’s an eclipse, proceeding despite knowing full well that it’s an awful idea to stare into the sun. It doesn’t really matter. Little Shu and Little Luca don't care about the moon or the stars. They're just happy to be there. They're just happy to be together.

There’s something touching about seeing them beside each other. They can't control time, but this? This much they can manage. In little ways, they can almost be together.

Even the way they hold their pens must differ to some extent. Shu’s suddenly in command of more strength than he’s used to and it makes his strokes a little heavy and clumsy, feathering at the ends. Luca’s hair turns into more of a blob than a bob, and Shu can feel the heat that’s coming off his body, burning him up from the inside out.

It still makes him smile. All of it does– the progress, the new takeaways, the fact that they're getting closer. And Luca’s definitely a smiler, so he makes no moves to stop it. He’s allowed to be happy and show it, and, honestly, he wouldn’t be able to erase that smile if he tried.

The bed theory's all but burned to the ground. It was interesting, though, taking their theory to practice.

You see, Luca deserved to wake up well-rested when they eventually switched back, and as a responsible pilot for the day, Shu had just about wandered back to Luca’s door to put him to bed when he suddenly felt the world rotate on itself. He didn't even make it back to his room! That meant they didn't have to start or finish in the same place, not really. 

As he blinks and tries to regain his bearings, Shu can't see, but he doesn't have to. The lights are off around him, and his body is warm and entirely sideways, wrapped up tightly in his blankets.

It’s almost frightening how well they get along, how similar they are in spite of the obvious differences, and even after he kicks off the covers, some warmth lingers for the rest of the night.

As he drifts off, he hopes Luca rests well too. He deserves it.

-

-

Life’s not all bolts and bizarre bits of reconnaissance. In fact, Saturdays are supposed to be Shu’s days off. He’s got the seniority to pull for at least part of the weekend and gladly takes it, but realistically, someone’s always got to be in the lab just in case. Fridays are too– technically they both are– but it’s never that simple. There’s always something to tweak or tinker with, always someone with some question trying to see if they can’t just schedule their meeting a little sooner to move things a little further along, so in reality, the days he spends without any work are very few and far between. 

It’s been worse recently. It’s like a new, unfortunate obsession, discovering just how much he can tease out of their tenuous bond. 

Sometimes he’ll send wads of paper through his machine just to see if Luca gets anything. Realistically, the results won’t matter until it’s done under controlled conditions, but why wait? Magazines, books, some of it makes it ad nauseum, but the excitement slowly deflates in his chest. None of his notes have made it, all lost to time and space. They're still a little off.

There’s something grounding about feeling the same creased pages through an entirely different set of hands, so he hoped and he hoped, but it simply wasn’t meant to be. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe there’s a shortcut just waiting to be discovered.

And Luca finally finished his counterpart node last night, apparently. That’s what he reported, anyway, among other, less earthshaking reports of crab being pretty cool but a little overhyped when compared to the image he built up in his mind, so they can finally start working backwards. Maybe he can even set it up next time.

Does Luca have any other allergies? He should have asked at some point. That’s the kind of thing he should really know, but they’ve just been so busy, and it all finds a way to slip through the cracks. There’s a lot that he should ask, but dalliances like getting to know each other the slow and natural way will just have to wait.

In front of him, obscured slightly by the sun, there’s a pair of students holding plushies against the sea with outstretched arms. For once, he can almost relate. It’s not really his thing, photography. Today will probably be his last free day in a while for many reasons, and yet he’s going to spend it like this, milling among a crowd that’s plastered in smiles.

It’s not just about capturing the sights; there will always be more of those.

It’s about the whole experience. Photography is about capturing time itself, and he’s suddenly found a reason to do that.

The sun is high and the road seems to glitter as it stretches in front of him. The clouds above them part like fronds of long and wild grass, wispy and pale like the final frost. Ten kinds of birds each seem to sing a slightly different song in a round, and the air is sweetened by falling flowers. The petals are soft beneath his fingers as Shu snaps a quick picture of each little morsel that captures his interest, twirling his phone around like it’s a precious jewel. Then, because he can, he gets a shot of himself, head tipped back as he reaches for the branches that carpet the sky.

It’s really quite unfair. Unlike him, Luca probably had no issues the first time they swapped. He seems familiar enough with the foibles of the 21st century, and he didn’t even need to know a thing about him! Simply pointing his phone at his face would be enough to unlock it. Even accidentally, he could easily manage that! There's no gridlock of numbers or magical doors that open without handles or (supposedly friendly) military police that breathe down your neck. 

Now, he supposes, the issues have trickled onto both of their backs. Maybe he’ll save a few flowers. He could press them flat before sending them over to preserve some of the pinkness. That would be nice. Useful too, honestly, since they’ve yet to try any biologics.

It’s not being forward if it's for the sake of science. Flowers are small, easy to hide, and will make a good litmus test. And they’ll never wilt if he dries them out beforehand. They could last forever.

That’s the big question, isn’t it? Once they finally nail down the mechanics, what else is left to explore?

And besides, Luca doesn’t have many flowers. None of them do. It makes him wonder sometimes just how much of it is their fault, if they’ve irrevocably screwed up the environment and lived up to their fate of destroying everything that’s beautiful and good, but he's not allowed to ask. 

There are some questions that Luca never gives him answers to. 

Along the street, there are blinking displays of cats carved into buildings, and hedges that spill into the edge of the sidewalk, and a stall that smells like roasting almonds next to another boasting the best egg bread for miles, but none of them are quite what he’s looking for. They’re all merely pleasant distractions, ornaments peppered along the road.

As he rounds the corner, Shu has to stop himself from tripping into someone who’s walking much like he is, head down with their phone in their hand. You see, he knows Luca. If Shu’s bound by any sort of responsibility, then Luca’s going to do his best to take care of as much as he can. They’re both too busy to waste time on less important endeavours. 

Luca’s not a bundle of jokes squished into a lab coat or a dog that got recruited because it somehow learned to shoot hoops. He does try, honestly, to bring humour into things, but that's just a byproduct of his personality. It’s an intrinsic part of him. It’s the crystal inset into steel blades. 

Luca’s never going to tell him what he wants because he weighs Shu’s time too heavily, and he’s got all these beliefs about how much is too much.

This day– this journey is not just for him. These flowers are not merely for his eyes or his nose or even his heart, so while he can't exactly plan things for them to do together, he can try his best to approximate them.

A sudden shyness plagues him as he reaches the door. Here it is, the chance he’s been after. It’s easy to be brave when you have no one to show it to and infinitely harder in every other circumstance.

Shu’s fingers shake when he finally finds it, when he finally touches it, when it finally becomes real. Peeking out of his basket is a box of mandarins. They’re quickly joined by mandarin jelly, monaka, and a slice of cake whose cross-section resembles the sun. In leaps some strawberry daifuku just because he’s there, and it’s there, and honestly, why not? Orange season’s already over, so it’s the last week they’ll still be available, and before he can stop himself, he’s snapped another picture of his spoils before he’s even lined up, waiting no more than two minutes before setting it as his wallpaper. There’s no way Luca will miss that.

How will he react? Will he like it?

Just how much will it make him smile?

Luca never stated that he wanted to try it, but he didn’t have to– and besides, they get so few chances to talk. Even if they were to swap every day, it would never be enough.  

Even if he didn’t mean to, Luca left plenty of clues along the way– half-filled queries on his phone, portions of new things left in his fridge, the bits that he’s rifled through, tastes that Shu’s learned just by living his life. It’s been obvious for a while; he just hasn’t had time to do anything about it until now. And this way, it’ll definitely be a surprise. The mere thought of Luca’s reaction is enough to send his nerves into the stratosphere.

There's this certain kind of closeness that’s fostered by sharing a secret. It still counts as a secret to him, anyway, even if other people probably suspect something’s up, because they’re the only people on Earth who can understand just how crazy it feels to be swept up and dropped into someone's body with the softness and grace of melting snow. And it is soft. It’s dizzying and exhilarating and so, so soft. 

Sometimes, when he’s launched into the future, Shu smiles at himself in the mirror to get a sense of how it’d feel, but it’s not the same. In his imagination, it would go differently. There’s more weight to it when Luca’s there. His cheeks would dimple heavier. He’d move with larger, sweeping motions as he ran towards him. They just don’t carry themselves the same way, so his attempt is nothing but a flimsy imitation.

It's like Shu's slowly holed himself up inside their secret. It's warm in there, warm and safe and with enough space for two. He's too excited to be sad about any setbacks, of which there are plenty. It feels like they swap every other day now, certainly more than once a week at the very least, and sure, progress has been middling, but that just means there’s lots of room to improve. There’s still plenty to celebrate.

So, yeah. Oranges. In the summer, they can give mangoes a try. In the fall, maybe it’ll be chestnuts and sweet potatoes– the good, roasted kind with purpling skin and warmth that seeps into your skin. 

The day's not all about fruit though. While he’s out, Shu also picks up another pair of pants and a new pad of paper, but that’s easily the most important thing. It’s so important that it quashes his latent perfectionism. Most of his pictures are passable at best– blurry, horrendously off-center, or plainly unflattering– but he still keeps them all. He won’t tamper with them until after Luca’s been around to look.

It feels good, walking home and staring at his phone in the train, at the lab, beneath his covers. Shu gets to carry that little reminder with him wherever he goes. 

In a way, it still feels like they’ve always been together, even if they never have been. He knows they will be someday, so there’s no reason to sweat it, imperfections or not. 

Life has never been perfect anyway. It would be too boring if it was, much like an orange with none of the acid. That’s what Shu tells himself anyway, silent as the candied juice of one carves a trail down his wrist. For now, they should celebrate all that they do have.

In plaintext, that means, ‘I want it all, even if it’s hard.’

-

-

Sometime in mid-May, the whole lab spills out into the nearest, most agreeable restaurant for their one allotted celebration for the month. It’s the Italian place this time– since Shu doesn't particularly fancy stewing in a bus tonight and it’s his choice, partially. Last month, it was the Thai place a few bus stops over, and, if they're feeling extravagant, maybe June’s will be yakiniku instead. They always shoot for something grander for the bigger ones. 

Sometime in mid-May, he decides it’s just about time to be a little honest.

Their parties are always held under the guise of some sort of group bonding activity, an easy chance to get everyone's birthdays dealt with all at once, even though he's barely talked to Seraph these days, and he doubts they have enough in common to be grouped together like that. If you ask him, he’d say that it's just an excuse to reinstate some form of festivity when their once weekly team dinners got stuck in the familiar purgatory of ‘maybe next week’ as they fell under the constant pressure of ongoing, much-longer-than-expected progress reports, experiments, and meetings that no one ever caught up on for good. One day a month isn't too hard to make room for, and it's hard to turn down a little lighthearted celebration without coming off like a spoilsport, so for now, the tradition still holds its ground.

Shu's not one to complain. The food is good. When he holds the menu in hands, it’s like he’s holding a map to the world, colourful and vast, and the normalcy eases him into it. Spirits are still high when Petra brings out a cake in a half-squished box and tucks three candles into it, one for each of them, and she doesn’t stare at him as she waves the lighter around, and she doesn’t push his face into his slice, and she’s finally stopped colluding with Elira to figure out what's wrong with him, which is a victory of its own. It’s progress! It’s progress too late, but it’s progress nonetheless.

The stage has been set, and nothing is wrong with him. Shu’s fine. He’s great, honestly. And tonight, bolstered by the excuse of booze in his veins, he’s finally going to tell them the truth.

It wouldn’t have stayed a secret for long anyway. They're all going to have to find out when they start making successful transfers and prove their situation to everyone else. Soon, Luca’s going to try sending something back to him, and once that goes through, they’ll have conquered the past and the future and finally be able to nail down some real data. He’ll finally shake the habit of hardly even changing out of his work clothes before he’s back out the door again, dabbing a touch of perfume behind his ears as he goes so he can smell nice for absolutely no one in particular.

Soon, there won’t be a need to spend more time working than not, and tonight is the first piece of that puzzle. Tonight, he can finally release a bit of that pressure. This is his specialty, after all: choosing the best place to ease into the inevitable. He was always going to have to breach the topic someday, so why not now, when everyone’s moods are already so warm and pliable?

After the makeshift party of sorts (read: normal team dinner with an embarrassingly long detour to sing as loudly as possible), the group splintered off, with some heading to a cafe and others to a bar. Shu could feel the steam churning through his stomach as Elira openly balked at his choice (the bar, of course, for optimal deniability), but no one had the authority to stop him. He always finds himself instated as their chief organiser anyway, so it's not like anyone could, even if they wanted to, but it's good that they don't. It’s like a broad endorsement, a clap on the back, and it's too early to argue about things that don't matter.

There’s this old, beat-up lighter in his coat pocket which Shu hangs onto out of habit, not because he ever needs to start fires but because the plastic surface is durable enough that he can always scrape his nails against it where no one can see. The butane’s all but evaporated, so there’s no real harm in it. It’s like a contingency-slash-stress-ball of sorts, just smaller and easier to replace or get rid of should it come down to it.

Shu manages to smile a little as he looks down at his drink. The lights roil through the surface as he moves it back and forth in his hand, distorted. After a moment, he pauses to rub his shoes against the carpet. The remnants of rain stain the back of his heels. 

Luca told him this story about one of the few mishaps he ran into when they were still settling into the rhythm of things, about how he once drank a full glass of wine at dinner with one of Shu’s collaborators and passed out cold in the train afterwards, only waking up when he reached the terminal station on the other end. Apparently, he concentrated so much on getting through the meal part of the day that he assumed it was a regular wave of exhaustion passing by, and he left a tome’s worth of apologies on Shu’s nightstand for when he finally came back and saw it.

It’s not his fault that Shu’s tolerance is so low. He had no way of knowing. And Shu wouldn't have been mad anyway, apology or not. He was just glad to hear that Luca made it back safe.

Watching the crowd keeps him grounded. It’s not so intimidating when he gives himself time to take it all in. These are the same people he’s known for so long, chatting and shimmying to the twangy hits of the bass and grasping onto each other's shoulders for support after someone shouts a particularly funny joke.

It might be his party, but that's just their excuse. The real motivator is this sense of camaraderie, of melting into a sea of common emotion and experience, and he’s not here to ruin it. That’s why, when the scent of springtime and salt starts to swirl too strongly through his bones, Shu opts to take a few steps towards the edge of the room. 

It’ll just have to be a one-by-one sort of affair. 

Besides, they do have a rule at these things. After the first hour, there’s no work talk allowed. They're supposed to leave it all behind with the glassware and gloves to make up for the 99 other days in a week when they practically fuse to their skin.

Usually, Shu has no problem with that. It’s just this one work-related thing is a little harder to let go of. As he takes a deep breath, he clutches his necklace– something simple, just a little chain, to balance out the ethics of using Shu’s money for his own present– like a vice. It was a belated gift from Luca, who was full of nothing but complaints that their weird situationship with time didn’t give him a chance to buy a proper gift until a couple days after the fact. Shu likes it all the same, enjoys the way it indents his palm whenever he squeezes it.

“Shu!” Petra waddles over when he eventually forces himself to wave her over, some twenty minutes after he finally decided it was time. “Happy birthday!”

“Thanks.”

“I thought you’d protest more, you know, all ‘my birthday was two weeks ago, Petra. You're late, Petra. You’re embarrassing me, Petra. You’re my coolest friend, Petra, like, way better than Doppio ‘Pio-chan’ Dropscythe.’”

“I do not sound like that.”

“How would you know? Maybe that's what you sound like to everyone else.”

Shu’s shoulders sink as he goes back and forth with her. Sure, he doesn’t have to bite back, but the familiarity is calming. It’s not his birthday if he spends it like this; it’s just a normal Wednesday on the tail end of spring, and he can breach the subject of his recent exploits without making it a huge deal. 

It’s going to be fine. 

As he starts, Shu sketches the scene with hypotheticals, drafting a vague picture of how weird it would be if you started switching bodies with someone, and what if you realised that it wasn’t any random person but the same person each time, happening more and more often until you learn how to live a whole different life. What if it changes your current life too, even though it’s mostly the same? It’s all normal hypotheticals like that, offered up like each is a wilder and weirder dream.

“Wouldn’t it be weird?” Shu asks, sinking his nails into his jacket. “Like imagine if you kept dreaming about some dude and then he was real, actually. And sometimes it goes both ways. I think it’d be weird.”

“So you’re him? And he’s you?”

“Yeah. Like what if you dream about living in some other world? And it’s boring stuff too, laundry, cooking, stuff like that. But it’s kinda cool too. Even the boring stuff is cool. I keep having dreams like that. Just makes you think… like what would you do if it was real?”

“Yeah, reciprocal swapping would be pretty weird.” Petra nods before going silent for a second like she’s joined some sort of staring contest with her drink. “So, do you sometimes dream about him being you or like… because how would you– Are you sure this isn’t some kind of freaky soulmate thing?”

Shu sighs, grateful for the chance to deflect a little. “Of course not! You just play way too many otome games. They’re totally skewing your expectations.”

“Oh yeah? Name one guy I like then!”

“Riku.”

“Wrong genre. He doesn’t count.”

“Ainana this, ainana that–”

“Shut up!”

“–And don’t get me started on Bustafellows.”

“So you do get it! Bodyswap, time travel, blah blah blah– Anyway, do you like him? The guy? There’s nothing wrong with a good soulmate story, if that's what you want it to be.”

“Well, I– I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

Petra shrugs. “Maybe you’re enemies to lovers then.”

“I don’t think that’s how this works.”

“Well, I think you’d like him. And that’s ok.”

Everyone always seems to think it's a soulmate thing, but it's not. There's no way. 

It's not a terrible conclusion to reach, given what he’s willing to share, but it’s nothing he wants to entertain. There are too many details he hasn't revealed about him, the man whose body he often hides inside. It's just so intoxicating, imagining a future where everything works out and his life's work finally comes to light, imagining all the things they can do when he and Luca can finally meet, but it’s also a secret. It’s a desire he can’t have until it’s real.

He doesn’t really know when this all became more about a reunion than the pure proof of concept. 

Shu laughs, wiping the condensation off his fingers. He's been nursing the same drink all night. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. But what would you do about it? Hypothetically speaking.”

Petra shrugs, setting her glass down on the bar. “Hypothetically? I dunno. Confess? Walk to the edge of the world to test our limits?”

“It’s not that easy. It’s not like there’s a big fence at the edge to leap over.”

“Of course not! If everything was easy, then we’d all be out of jobs. You should just do what makes you happy, Shu. Are you sure you’re not sick? Your voice has been a little iffy lately. I can tell! I can hear it! I can always tell!”

This time, he even bends down so Petra can press an icy hand against his forehead. He doesn’t even flinch as the chill slides through his neck, into his back, and all the way out of his legs. He’s been warm all night, but certainly not warm enough to come across as feverish, so it’s fine. It’s nice.

Petra’s hand’s bathed in the light as it returns to her side. It faintly reminds Shu of a lighthouse, of sincerity, of two ships passing in the night.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks, Petra.”

It’s placating more than anything. He still has to deal with the little upturn in her mouth whenever he orders food for two at breakfast so he can cop the leftovers (maybe he was just hungry! how would she know?). He still has to deal with her new line of questions, heavy with the weight of these new assumptions he’s planted, but approaching the truth lessens the worst of it.

It’s a thick sort of night, soupy and starless. With each retelling, Shu’s become a regular Kilgore Trout. It's always more fun to hear about the story than it is to live it all out. There's so much romance in the fantasy of it all, dreaming up all of the good and none of the bad.

She’s right though. Confessing does make him feel a little bit lighter. Breathing comes a little easier as he presses his back to the wall. Faces are friendlier as they freckle his periphery, and no one is chasing him for some explanation he’s not ready to give up yet.

There’s nothing to be afraid of, even if they can’t understand each other perfectly, so even if Petra doesn’t get it yet, it’s fine.

Even if two people miscommunicate sometimes, they can still care about each other. 

That part’s always been true. It’s something he knows now more than ever.

-

-

Is it having too much self-importance if he comes to believe that the world is rewarding him for something as small as being vulnerable?

The day after the party, Shu finally receives something from the future. It’s a little worse for wear, and the aim’s a little off, arriving a few hours later than they planned, but arrive it does, tumbling cleanly off the edge of his bench. 

It appears with little flourish and it’s less than impressive, just a handful of paper that's barely held together. There’s no fanfare, no applause, and certainly no ceremony, but it’s real. It’s more than he ever could have gotten on his own.

Shu laughs high and bright as he lifts it with gloved hands, tracing over each crinkled edge of the book– handwritten and bound with staples and pink-and-purple patterned tape– as he marvels in it. It’s more than just a book to him. This, more than anything else, is the proof they’ve been looking for. 

Time is not an obstinate scroll of velvet, immobile and chalk-like despite their attempts to chip into it. Instead, time is like a fine set of chainmail, delicate and beautiful and full of little pockets that let in wind and the summer sky. It’s something to work within rather than something to break through, and they’ve finally found a path forward. 

After a couple setbacks, they’ve finally done it. It’s not a mere one-way connection. Luca’s gotten back to him, and nothing is impossible. And for them to succeed at their first real whack at it? It's just too much. Who cares about a couple of hours of waiting when they’ve finally made it? That’s nothing in the grand scheme of things.

After a few loops of picking it up and setting it down and picking it right back up again, Shu looks around, but there’s no one left in the building. The rest of the lights are off, drawers closed, and it seems like this moment has been constructed just for him– their first victory, visible with his own eyes. Emboldened, Shu lets out an enormous whoop as he squeezes that little bundle of paper, floored by the sheer size of what comes out. He didn’t know such a huge sound could have found a home somewhere inside him, watered by days and days of dashed and reignited hopes.

This is what he’s worked his whole life to prove right here, held aloft in his hands. Because sure, in theory, he knew that it worked, but that knowledge was something that only existed inside his head. This is providential, linking him to the one person who’s been receiving all of his pitiful, past attempts, but it’s also more than that. This is a two-way connection that’s finally been fulfilled.

It’s one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen. Everything is beautiful in a way that’s both old and new, and it’s hard to resist the feeling that the world itself wants them to succeed. If it didn’t, then why would it bring them together in the first place?

Shu’s elation swirls around him like it’s a gleaming set of robes. His joy crystallises into something solid, something he can keep by his side. The only wrinkle is that he didn’t realise that his priorities slowly began to drift– or perhaps he didn’t want to acknowledge it. Maybe it was always there.

This is all he’s worked towards for years, and yet he finds himself wanting more. It is not enough to know the theory checks out. Surely, there’s more they can do.

Surrounded by the sparkling remnants of a field of dreams, Shu suddenly finds a door within him, a mirror. He’d laugh if it wasn’t so damning.

The thing is, Shu used to scoff at people who desperately search for sentient aliens– bacteria, sure, he can believe that, but humanoid aliens just seem a little too unlikely– but does he really have the right to judge them? Every year, he reviews a proposal or two about how someone plans to find them, and it's always an easy dismissal. There’s no point wasting their limited budget on that, not for something that will never happen. But he has to admit, there is a romanticism in searching beyond the stars.

They're not that different from each other. In the end, they're both looking for something. Humanity's fascination with time travel is only tangentially related to its burning desire to transcend nature's limits, but it's not the godhood that draws the bulk of his interest. Most people, he imagines, just want to talk to someone. They just want to understand the world better, and maybe they think it's the aliens that would be the interesting case study. Maybe they both feel the same way. Time travel hopefuls just want to make life better for the people they care about, and most alien believers probably feel the same in some strange, warped way, so no, he can't really judge them. He doesn't really have the right. 

Besides, if time travel really is real (and it is! they've finally proven it), then maybe aliens are too. Maybe they'll touch down one day, just as eager to talk to their longtime believers. Maybe they'll smile and everyone will realise that it wasn't the aliens that were scary; it was not knowing what would happen after they finally get to meet– because that one meeting could change everything. Because meeting is something they assumed would never happen, and suddenly it can, and it's just as scary as it is exhilarating.

In a way, Shu understands them perfectly.

He hopes this success will be one of many, but it comes with other feelings too.

What comes next?

-

-

In the days that follow that first, monumental experiment, the first of their public victories, they try their best to recreate it with hands that flit around like a warbler’s wings. Shu sends a book of his own back, and Luca, after a couple more attempts, manages something larger this time– a dictionary at first, which is followed by an empty vase, one of his old sweaters, and the leg of a broken chair.

The flowers don’t make it, lost somewhere in the land between the stars, but it’s a good start. It’s not some one-off fluke, and there will always be time for new triumphs. And besides, he can always try it again. 

There will always be more flowers.

Time itself begins to slow when it’s filtered through his newfound enthusiasm, so it matters little if they seem to change places less and less often. The world is prettier, the days last longer, and the summer stretches into infinity, so it only makes sense that their time apart feels longer too. Everything is brighter. Monsoon season stays for a while. Rain stops and starts and stops again. Even plain water itself tastes sweeter, and when he’s in the lab, it could be freezing and he’d still feel like the summer is eternal, arcing like a ribbon that’s wrapped around his wrists.

Whenever Shu takes a break against the slats of billowing shelves, each filled with dated boxes and their corresponding documentation, it reminds him of a great many things. His hands come away hot. There’s nothing special around him, no pale sunshine, no plumes of vegetation, and yet there’s warmth all around, unseen. 

He needs time to keep to himself anyway, time to log and to tinker and to tease out whatever pattern lies within the slight discrepancies on his end, so whether it drips like sap or rushes like seawater means very little. From Luca’s end, their last batch seemed to be a little more on target, but everything’s still getting jostled around in transit, and the travel part is always a bit of a black box. It’s not something they can learn about until they throw caution into the wind and hop into the machine themselves, and it’s way too soon for that. There’s too much that can go wrong.

For now, the only thing to do is to try, and to try, and to try. To improve.

The sky remains largely indifferent to his joy. It’s much bigger than his joy, so it has no reason to contort itself, proudly displaying both its brightest marigolds and dingiest lavenders at random. 

That fact is a constant, it seems. When he ends up in Luca’s body again– this time in the library– Shu admires the clouds that unfurl across the screens plastered against the wall, even if he knows they aren’t real. This room is a nice one, with high, framed windows and ladders that seem much too high to safely mount. It’s the kind of space he had no reason to wander towards, but he’s certainly not sorry he managed to appear here. Surrounded by knowledge and cloud cover from all sides, it certainly presents an interesting conundrum.

What’s the limit, vertically, for their little machine? A ladder? A story? 

Would standing something up yield different results than leaving it flat?

For Luca, their day is another cloudy one. As Shu puts on his most intrigued expression, his shadow lingers beside the door.

Luca’s body is like another home in a way. Just like how homes have doors that can be opened and closed, sometimes it feels like he opens himself to something whenever he comes here. Sometimes it feels like he’s inviting something inside which is different from everything else caught outside of it.

Keeping one eye on the windows, Shu pretends to be engrossed in poking through the titles, touching each spine with his finger. There are countless shelves on geology alone. Sometimes he’ll pick one at random to pull out before placing it back, but it’s all a show. His head’s still somewhere in the clouds.

“Don’t you wish it was sunny?” Shu eventually asks, hugging a book to his chest. It’s some manual on circuitry or lighting or something. He wasn’t really paying attention. He just needs a plausible excuse to be here in case anyone asks why he left. “The windows are so big. I bet they'd look pretty cool all lit up and stuff.”

“Huh? You want me to get Sonny?” Gusty asks, glancing at the hall. He waves at an enforcer that marches past, but they hardly acknowledge him as they whizz by.

Shu shakes his head with a wheeze. “No, it's just– Ignore me. I’m just talking to myself.”

“Okay! But boss, what are you doing here anyway? Weren’t you supposed to check on some… something? ”

“Just felt like going for a walk, I guess.”

“Oh. Okay. Walking’s pretty cool.”

Shu sounds the most like Luca when he laughs. There’s something familiar about the sound and the way it erupts from somewhere deep inside of him. It’s almost like a hug with the way it wraps around his chest. 

Maybe it’s not similar at all, but that sound is definitely his favourite.

“Yeah, it is.”

Gusty’s truly too harmless for his own good, taking any excuse as fact. He’s a pretty lousy tail too, willingly shaking off whenever Shu politely requests him to give him some space. Why he latched onto Luca as his tough mentor figure is beyond him. They're just as bad as each other, so in a way, they're perfectly suited as mentor and mentee, even if neither are particularly menacing.

It's only when Shu finally makes it back to the lab that he realises that nothing’s stopping him from conducting tests himself, from working both ends of the process. It’s the results and the documentation that matter, not the specifics, and don't they need as much data as possible? 

What’s the harm in doing one solo?

Sure, Luca’s never brought it up yet, but he's never shot down the idea either.

It’s fine. He can probably manage one– maybe two at most– full go at it before they swap back anyway, so Luca won’t be missing much. The timing’s been so random nowadays, so it could easily be sooner depending on how the universe is feeling. And Luca will be able to tell what he started, so he can just finish it if he comes back early.

Isn't it better to get going as fast as possible? To iron out all the kinks? They’ve got to make sure this isn't a lightning-in-a-bottle sort of round of successes.

They’ve got to make sure it can scale properly. A book and a few random odds and ends are a good first step, but they’re not trying to build a library here. They can’t lose sight of the real goal, the one that’s been obscured by the allure of making it just a little bit better. It’s got to be safe and scalable and consistent.

It’s got to be reproducible like all good, self-respecting science. It’s a bit like baking a cake. If you get another tin of flour and a few more eggs, then you should be able to make it again if your recipe’s right, assuming the oven still works. And the only wrinkle is that their oven, metaphorically speaking, is a horrendously unstable one. They’re like the guys who first tried to switch from hot coals and embers to an open flame. In all likelihood, the mechanics are going to need a little experimentation, so he’ll just have to do it on his own time. 

It’s hardly a sacrifice in the grand scheme of things.

Luca’s as tidy as he is predictable, so his supplies are never hard to find. (Or maybe it has more to do with the fact that he knows Luca by now, which pleases him just as much.) Thumbing through his logs with one hand, Shu makes quick work of it. Even the supposedly hidden things are exactly where he imagined they’d be, placed neatly behind a poster in a cabinet or lodged between two dusty looking tomes against the wall.

His transport logs, unlike his transport notes, aren’t mixed in his usual booklet– not even in the empty spaces he’s saved for Shu’s use– but those won’t be hard to find. They have to be somewhere small and easy to reach, somewhere that isn’t strange to be walking near half the time, which only leaves so many places.

Simple.

There's a little pink notepad tucked beneath one of his drawers, and when Shu yanks it a few times, stumbling backwards from the recoil, it finally comes loose. A few pens go flying in retaliation, but he can deal with those later. They're not important right now.

The pink one has got to be the log, unlabeled and unassuming. As for what exactly he’ll send back, Luca’s nicked a few mugs recently, so one of them will just have to do. It’s white with ribbed edges rippling down the sides, and there’s a poorly disguised chip in the base of it. It’s smaller than the book, but it’s definitely more delicate, so it’d be great if they could figure out the durability scaling. 

Luca’s a hider by nature, so it doesn’t really surprise him either. It's mostly a habit he imagines, kinda like the way Finana sometimes reaches into her pocket for her phone whenever there's a lull in conversation, even if she doesn't mean to actually take it out. It’s not malicious or misguided or a verdict on her feelings; it’s just a habit and nothing more. For Luca, his quirk is the way he squirrels away his more sensitive documents from prying eyes. He does the same with Shu’s correspondences, shoving them into his lunch bag whenever they come loose, and sometimes Shu enjoys that side of him, adding an extra note or two for him to discover later. It’s probably about control for him. It’s about control and protecting the things that matter.

That was just another one of the games they played together. It's something only they would find fun in, after all. There’s not much to hide when you can just watch the other person do it, so it’s unique to them. And Luca’s lives for the spark of discovery, for the cheeky little smile that anticipation fosters, for the gratification of seeing surprise bloom across reddened cheeks.

So, yeah, it's certainly not out of the question for him to hide his notes. 

That’s not the weird part about this whole thing.

“This is– There’s no way,” Shu says, mostly to himself. The words are like oil on his lips. He can't suppress the sound that naturally slips out as he stares down at the pages. 

They’re full of writing. By now, Shu could pick Luca’s handwriting out of a blind lineup of similar looping letters. No one’s hands have touched this except his own, and yet it can't be. Because he wouldn't lie, would he? Not to him. Not when he would understand. 

Not when he should have known.

For a while, Shu stands in shock as the chill crawls up his neck. It's like his legs have suddenly plunged into the depths of the ocean, rendered sluggish and slow. There’s an entry on the first page dated May 2nd, dedicated solely to his birthday. There are entries that pre-date Luca’s supposed first success, ones he never knew about.

Did he think he would care? Did he think it would matter that they’ve failed more than they’ve succeeded?

It doesn’t. It only matters because he lied.

Part of him is still endeared by it. Part of him is touched by what he can only assume is an act of goodwill. But then again, speculation is the widower of dreams. The only thing that’s certain is that Luca hasn’t been entirely honest with him– assuming this is right, which it must be.

Eventually, the ice starts to melt. Shu takes one step and then two, slowly, even though he wants nothing more but to melt into a puddle himself. He’s not going to let this stop him now.

In the end, Shu still sets up that experiment because he's nothing if not stubborn, heedless of the frost in his veins. He places and re-places and fixes that broken little cup until it's perfectly centered, and his pen digs into the flesh of that little pink book with each step, etching the exact details of this transport inside. Luca will just have to know he found out too. 

It's the third entry on that page and several pages in. First try, first success whatever. So what if it wasn’t? So what if he lied? Their record’s never been perfect, but he can still find a way to salvage it. And the upside– since yeah, he’d like to extract an upside if he can– is that he can figure out precisely how far this one will deviate. Luca might not even find it when it appears– considering he’s never found any of the things mentioned here– so there’s a chance he’ll be able to handle both ends regardless.

It’s not even the failure that bothers him– though it does, in its own way. Failure is a minor sting at best, the kind that itches like bug bites in the summer. It’s an expected sort of wound. It’s manageable. It’s something Shu can learn to live with, even if it’s starting to feel like they could run out of time, even if it feels like the universe is taking time from them to fuel their meagre success in some sort of cruel reciprocal exchange. The thing is, Shu’s fine if time starts to fail them as long as they can find a way through it.

Trust is the big thing– trust and priorities and how much they truly align with each other because failure’s not something he particularly wants to think about.

What if they never reach a level where they can send things back and forth through time? What if they’ve wasted all of this energy on a project that can only manage a few paltry saucers, and in the end, they never reach a point that counts?

What if they could have been happy all along instead of sacrificing and sacrificing and sacrificing?

There is some sadness dissolved in the hurt, but most of it is just noise. Complicated, confusing, there’s too much to put a clean label on it. 

It’s hard to admit that the end goal, for him, isn’t a mere proof of concept. He doesn’t care about books and bread and bits of wood and straw that can cross through the galaxy. 

It’s hard to want coexistence after realising they’re further away than he realised. It’s still a want, but it’s a weighty desire that swirls through his lungs as he ships off that stupid cup. It weakens each of his stilted breaths.

Being hurtled through time is never a particularly pleasant experience, which certainly doesn’t help. It often ends with a moment spent propped against the nearest wall, clutching at his head and roaring heart until his vision finally clears up, and this time, there’s none of the usual excitement to gild the dizziness, so it’s almost entirely unpleasant. 

This time, the first thing Shu does is look for that cup, but it’s hardly a distracting quest. By the time he finally reaches his station, he can already see it rolling around the floor. The chip’s become more of a fissure, but it’s still in one piece, and it’s close enough to the target. 

It’s not enough to distract him. And because he’s already gone through the effort of coming into the lab, the curious, gnarled part of him takes over. It wants proof. It wants irrefutable evidence to justify his pain. 

There’s this thing Luca does that Shu usually enjoys where he has a superhuman penchant for figuring things out. It makes him ruthlessly independent and dedicated. He probably could have figured out time travel all on his own if he truly wanted to, but he always struck Shu as more of a historian than a scientist, so it’s no surprise that he didn’t. He’s sentimental. He’s an archivist by heart, and he enjoys giving permanence to the fleeting. Luca’s exactly the kind of person who would try to pull something like that, confident it’ll all work out. And he couldn’t just tell him he failed without admitting what he tried to do, but he should have. He should have said it anyway. 

He must think that Shu’s better off not knowing. He must think that he’d be happier that way. Or maybe not, maybe he’s giving Luca too much credit. Maybe he was ashamed of himself and his failure.

It’s still a surprise; it’s just a lousy one. If he knew beforehand, Shu probably would have been disappointed, but he wouldn’t have been sad. He wouldn’t have been upset.

He wouldn’t have felt like this. Nothing Luca hides stays hidden for long, so of course he finds it. Once he knows to look, it’s easy to spot, and just like that, his brief stint of world-consuming joy crumbles to dust. He is not overreacting, and he certainly wasn’t mistaken.

In the next building over, wrapped in a plastic bag, is a blue plastic box that’s been tagged since last month. When he manages to pry it open, a cloud of dust or spores or something of the sort that he doesn’t particularly fancy touching springs forth. Beneath that mess is a blob that looks a bit like a cloud or an explosion of a shock of fluffy hair. It probably once had an intentional shape and colour to it, but now it just sits dry and dreary, leached of any identifying features. Taped to the inside of the lid, as if he didn’t need another clue amidst a hundred of them, is a picture of an ice cream cake because of course there is. Of course he’d include everything he can think of.

Shu still remembers what Luca wrote, proudly displayed on the log that he didn’t even know he had. Even for his birthday, it still overshot, landing sometime in April. Luca missed it by a mile and then some and had the gall to lie about it for who knows how long. He lied and acted like he didn’t. That’s what stings the most.

It’s not just a problem of calibration. The machine’s not the only issue here.

Maybe Gusty was right. Maybe he’s the strange one, always seeking the sun when the sky’s far outnumbered by clouds. 

He’s the one that doesn’t belong there, and he never will. That’s always been true. It’s just easy to forget minor inconveniences like that when you spend all your time focused on what you want to see, success after success bricked together into a set of stairs that stretch along that insurmountable wall.

Shu never asked to belong. He just wanted a chance to try.

So what? Maybe they don’t feel the same way. Maybe it was wrong of him to assume they would be on the same page simply because they’ve never had to communicate which book to read from. 

Like a punishment, like a cosmic counterweight to all their newfound success, as soon as he lands back in his body, it takes another week before they swap places again, but this time, Shu finds he doesn’t really mind. The time apart is good. 

For the first time in ages, that’s exactly what he wants, so he can’t be upset. Less time. Fewer reminders. No more lies.

Shu’s journey home is shrouded in darkness. The lamps flicker above him whenever he needs to cross the street, the ground seems to crumble beneath his feet, and the station’s emptier than he’s ever seen it before. The moon is a sliver in the sky, and sleep does not arrive on his doorstep for a very long time.

He never expected Luca to tell him everything, but it’s not too much to ask for a little transparency for their project. It’s one thing to deflect and another entirely to lie, to pretend like things are better than they are. And yes, maybe he’s been pushing for them to proceed as quickly as possible, but that didn’t mean that he wanted this. He didn’t need Luca to run off, testing wildly on his own to try to speed it all up.

If Luca was as brave and honest as Shu thought he was, then he would have done more than save face like this, but because he’s only brave enough to be kind and not particularly honest about any of their flaws, he’s been hunkered down working whenever Shu hasn't been around to watch, trying to reach his half of their milestone on his own. 

It doesn’t really matter why he did it. It does, but it doesn’t. 

Knowing wouldn’t change anything.

In the morning, Shu stares at their wall of purple and yellow notes. Surging forward, he takes his intended reply and crushes it in his fist. The little purple ball plunges into the depths of his wastebasket.

If Luca doesn’t want to tell him the truth, then what’s the point in getting ahead of himself anyway?

-

-

Without anything to gloss over his suspicion, it’s hard to avoid the truth. At its peak, they seemed to swap places every single day for random periods of time, some short and some quite long, sometimes only for a couple of minutes. Now they’re running blind, picking up speed as the mountain looms behind them some immeasurable distance away. 

Last week, when Luca showed up, he ended up resurfacing in the grocery store down the block and Shu in the armory, both quite far from where they’d like to be. It was good, and it was interesting, but it took time to get back, and lately, it seems like they're losing hold of it. They’re in a worse state than he thought, and as they hurtle towards the end, it’s unclear if they’ll make it.

Right now, he’s too busy to be upset. It's easy to forgive Luca, but it’s not that easy to let go of the rest of his emotions. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t matter in the end because everything’s so close to working out anyway, but it’s not. He’s wrong.

The first thing Shu did when he appeared was reexamine that log, to ground himself, to remind himself, only to realise that it was not just page after page of secret tests, like he had initially thought. A lot of it was brainstorming for things Luca would like to try some day, mostly regarding ideas for Shu’s birthday. And it’s not like a smaller scope makes the lie easier to bear, but in a small way, it does. It’s easier to make peace with.

The first thing Shu did when he first found out was quite different. He eventually fell asleep. Then he slept again and again and again, despite never feeling tired at all. Sometimes pain wears the mask of anger. Sometimes being hurt and being angry happen to look the same, even if they taste different coming out.

It doesn’t erase the bruise, but it softens it a little. Luca tends to switch between being too light and too heavy-handed, so it’s not totally unlike him to plan something like that. It’s usually one of his charms.

Time is not the cure for all wounds. It's given him room to make amends with Luca on his own terms, but it's done them no favours where it truly counts. It caused their situation in the first place. Even a simple mechanical tweak can take weeks to hammer down, and there are so many things that could somehow be the limiter.

In the end, Luca wasn’t wrong. They do have to do more, test more, try more. They have to be greedy and hungry and not care about the implications.

Despite heaps of success here and there, none of their biologics have made it through unscathed. Not even the cactus made it, which he really believed in, so it’s not the water content that’s screwing things up. Shu could easily recite each of the few things they've transferred and the many, many ones they have not. 

Did he say the armony was good? It wasn't. Guns still freak him out, high-tech or not. It wasn't fun at all, but it was still interesting. Merely existing in Luca’s body offers him all this knowledge that he never had and only occasionally wanted, and that part’s never tarnished. It’s good enough to want forever.

They’re so close. He can feel it in his (Luca’s?) bones. Their bones. Their heart.

The event horizon. It’s approaching. Each failure is a stepping stone that brings them closer and closer to the edge of the ocean, so if their pace needs to quicken, then he will sprint, spinning his wheels until they leap across the canyon between them.

This is way more important than a petty spat or his feelings or frustration or the impulse that sometimes locks his feet in place by the door, wondering if it’d be better to spend what little time they have doing something more permanent.

There’s no way he’s leaving any room for regrets. 

Not yet. 

-

-

In the middle of the summer, Shu buys a bag full of mangoes, and each successive day thereafter, he sticks his face in the fridge, letting the frost crawl all the way down to his feet. There’s this naïve part of him that hopes he’ll open it up one day and they’ll all be gone without him realising and the sky will smile back at him in the shape of a half-gnawed mango pit.

So far, it hasn't happened, but that hasn't stopped him yet.

Just like how he got used to having Luca in excess, Shu slowly grew used to waiting. It’s just one more experiment. They’re one tweak, one breakthrough, one success away from showing the world what they can do. He’s allowed to be a little worked up sometimes, baking in the summer sun, so the frost keeps him regular. He’s allowed to be mad and yet want to see him more than anything. Feelings aren’t experimental. There’s no need to explain how or why they work. 

Luca finds his own way to try to stretch out their reunions. 

There’s this game he’s started where he makes Shu guess what he’s thinking about from whatever little clues he leaves behind. It’ll be a picture sometimes, maybe a note on the wall or some half-finished search on his phone. It’s the kind of low stakes mystery they can both safely enjoy. Luca sets the pace, and Shu always finds him.

Last time, it was half a picture of some sign and a cloud, with both mostly covered by his smile. He was trying to point him towards a cafe on the roof of the tallest building in the city, a place where the air thins as clouds begin to season the foam. Luca always tends to gravitate towards places like that, towards bridges and towers and arrays of glass where anyone can taste the sky. He must delight in making friends with the sun, in feeling the whole breadth of it shine on his face.

In every single picture he’s seen, there’s this thing Luca manages to do with his mouth that’s utterly foreign to him. He’s like a whetstone, sharpening some edges of Shu’s face while softening others. His eyes seem wider, crinkled and full of something he can’t quite put his finger on, something adjacent to mirth. He wears happiness in a different way than Shu does, even if it’s still his body doing most of the work, and the difference never fails to captivate him.

People are going to start thinking Shu’s a narcissist, always staring at pictures of himself. 

Luca probably likes being cryptic. He enjoys the chase, picking just what details he can safely reveal without giving the whole game away.

It’s like he’s making up for it somehow, like he needs to give them both something to linger on as they wait for the next time they’ll swap. With one little mystery, he can extend minutes into hours and hours into days.

Sometimes he’ll leave behind clues like he’s got a treasure map in the making, and Shu can almost hear his laugh in his ears as he traces his curling letters. It would be low and soft and sound a bit like a hum, and he’d jump back at the unexpected puff of air in his ear, and Luca would laugh even harder at his reaction. Maybe he’d force them outside and tap his shoulders whenever he wants him to turn, foregoing clues and directions entirely.

They would both laugh, probably, if they could be together right now, and if he correctly guessed their destination early enough, then Luca would smile wide before whining about his smarts and how they obviously have to divert and celebrate. Maybe he’d buy him a coffee or a pen or something, something small. Or maybe he’d pretend like he didn't know where they were going so he could watch Luca grin as he unveils his treasure of the day.

Their life together would probably be full of things like that.

Eventually, his annoyance dwindles into a mild simmer before dissipating completely. They’re both allowed to have secrets, and Luca’s always been like that, choosing which parts to show and which are too dangerous to even acknowledge, so why should he be upset about it now? 

He’s always been the one that cared most about keeping up appearances, so it makes sense, in retrospect, that he has the most to hide. It doesn't make it better, but it does make sense.

Something new eventually sprouts in its place. His life’s like a revolving door, first in first out. Anxiety. Nerves. Fear.

Why did it have to turn out like this? 

This whole thing was supposed to be clinical and easy. He wasn't supposed to care so much.

At the end of the month, Shu pulls out his drawers and deep-cleans the kitchen. It’s something he’s put off for far too long. It’s something he didn't think he would actually have to do because their next chance would clearly be a mere second, hour, day, or week away. 

He starts with the easy things– the table, once cleared, gets scoured with ease. Next comes the laundry, changing out the tablecloth and all of the towels, mopping under the cabinets, rearranging those cabinets, and bringing out the hammer to clobber those stubborn nails that always start to poke out in the heat. 

Before he’s even realised it, he’s worked his way from the inside out until he reaches the final boss: the fridge.

The uneaten mangoes get banished into a bag inside a bag to contain the smell that’s already started to seep into the first one, tossed half-rotten and slippery into the trash, and just like that, the season’s over. 

He doubts the one he tried sending directly made it over either.

Summer rolls off his back and dances out the door, and the birds slowly stop their songs. Summer sleeps in the divet of the moon, and sometimes, when he looks up at it, he imagines Laika is perched on the edge of it too. He imagines Laika’s watching both him and Luca, and when they finally master time, they’ll start conquering space, shooting up to the moon just to play with her in orbit. That even when they’re living on different Earths in different times, they’re both an arm’s reach away from the moon, so in a way, they’re still as close as ever.

And Luca’s a bit like a dog too– that's why she’d like them. Luca isn't cute. It’s something else about him, his aura, his energy. He's not cute, but he is funny and charming and he cares and that's infinitely worse.

To say it crushes him would be a massive understatement. It also burns, their long trip around the sun, and no treasure hunt is going to distract him from that. He hopes there never comes a last time, but if there has to be one, then he hopes it comes in peace. 

Don't they deserve that much after putting up with all of this nonsense?

-

-

For the next month, Shu throws everything he can at their experiment, and he apologises, and none of it ever feels like enough. He sends flowers, fruits, ferns, fronds, and branches out further, trying mushrooms, extracts, powders, dried shrivelled husks, a can of soup, and a pot of soil.

Shu can count the number of times they see each other on one hand. It’s five. Five times in the span of two months, and it’s all for naught.

It still doesn't work.

The question lingers like a shroud. It’s no small feat, of course, but that fact doesn't do anything to soften the blow. Theirs is a distance that takes years to travel, and if none of the minor biologics can safely cross that little tributary, then what hope do they have of accomplishing something grander? 

What hope do they ever have of crossing that ocean themselves?

-

-

By the middle of autumn, Shu can often be found with his phone in his hand. It’s become another part of him, a real organ born from a vestigial one that pulses in his hand with each long and laboured breath. In absence of anything else, it’s the one thing he can rely on to keep his spirits high. Each time he digs his fingers into the scratched button on the side, it comes to life again like a temporary heart, the bright screen flashing the now-familiar sight of Luca’s smile.

Because of his photos, Luca’s face has been given permanence. Even when it ceases to exist and phones and fears become a thing of the past, it will live on in Shu’s memory, thus essentially achieving immortality. 

He’s got absolutely no basis for it, but Shu likes to imagine that the lens can never fully capture his eyes. This picture will never do him justice, and neither do any of the others, but they’re a decent approximation, showing his face bathed in pastel pinks and blues, all the colours that manage to pass through the crowd on their ‘delayed action date.’

They've never really spoken about it. Luca doesn't really mean half the things he says and doesn't really say half the things he means, so if that’s what he wants to call it, then that’s what it’ll be. 

He probably would’ve gone to the same place to matter what number Shu chose, but the illusion of choice adds to the mystique. It makes it feel more like one of their games than a necessity, or worse, a consolation.

Luca left more than a couple pictures, but that’s easily the best one. It may be more than a little crooked, and his face may be slightly cut off at the bottom, but it’s got character. There’s joy resting on his shoulders, and in the background, he can still make out the ferris wheel. Bright, bathed in swathes of colour from each gondola’s lights, it looms above Luca, accentuating his grin.

Luca’s a bit like that. Bright. Colourful. Full of wonder and promise.

It only takes a day for his curiosity to get the better of him. 

It’s not a date if he doesn’t do his half of it.

Among his leftover memorabilia– a plushie, one half of a long-since-cold sweet potato, a faux polaroid from the top of the wheel where he’s leaning right into the lens– Luca also left him a video. It’s shaky. It’s hardly professional, switching back and forth from showing the skyline to showing his face. Most importantly, however, it starts with a request, and Luca never takes promises lightly.

While he’s panning down to his shoes, giggling a little as he ties up his laces, Luca asks him to follow in his footsteps. Technically, he asks him to wait for next Friday or Saturday before he does it, but all this waiting’s starting to fray at Shu’s nerves. So, even though he’s early, Shu decides he won't care, packing himself tightly into the train. Instead of taking refuge at his station for the better part of the night, Shu leaves on time for once, ignoring the bristling feeling that gets worse the further he gets. If it was up to him, he probably would have chosen the bus– or more likely avoided going out so far altogether– but that’s why it’s going to be an adventure. 

As he finally slides into an open seat, Shu smothers his embarrassment with a thick, wooly scarf. There’s no need to be shy. Luca’s going to be with him the whole time, so really it’s more of a group thing. It’s fine. And if he angles his phone down, shoving it deep into his pocket whenever anyone approaches, it’s not because he’s shy. They just won’t understand why some video of himself is worth getting lost in, so it’s better to hide it from prying eyes. 

In a way, it pleases him too, knowing no one can see. While Shu would love nothing more than letting the whole universe acquaint itself with Luca, the thought of him being his in some small way still makes his heart jump a little– or maybe that’s just the train jostling his heart and his bones until they knock against each other like dominoes.

How can Luca be so fearless all the time?

The first part is calming, an hour of stories and anecdotes as the train chugs towards the bay. Whenever the train slows, Shu feels his phone gravitate towards his ribs, and it’s like they’re being pressed together. Luca’s mouth runs circles around the skyline, picking out views and people he’s seen, much of which Shu has no way of checking. Apparently, the robotics team’s been totally stealing the spotlight lately; they’ve got fine motor controls down much better than before and those strange, double-walled jars he saw were there for testing grip and controlled strength. He's heard Gusty’s put himself under Sonny’s wing in the wake of Luca’s ongoing predicament, but he’s probably never going to be an enforcer either way, which isn’t really his fault. Shu’s not sure Sonny’s any better than Luca is in that department, but he's still tempted to root for him.

Luca must have taken some sort of local service since he’s still leaning against a pole when Shu arrives, fishing his phone out of his pocket to check the time. They’ve got to match up, so Shu ambles over to a bench for a while, drinking in the sight. Luca’s stories are still going, but they’re few and far between, muffled by common courtesy to nothing more than a whisper. During the longer pauses, Shu imagines sharing some of his own.

When Shu finally follows him to the park, the lights are opaque, coating the landscape like ink. Each one seems to bubble and overflow, coating everything in a criss-crossed pattern like a swarm of fireflies whose outlines have lost their shapes, and the metal bars loom above him.

The wheel awaits.

Shu’s hair stands on end. His back is on fire, aching from whatever position he contorted himself into on the ride over, and for a second, his hands meander through his pockets, searching for a ticket he doesn’t have. Simply strolling through the gates feels like a criminal offense, but he manages to put one foot in front of the other, wading through the crowd.

His best instincts tell him he should have left this behind when it was still just a dream, but he can’t. He's here now, greeted by giants, so he has no choice but to say hello.

Some of the people he passes are bundled tightly in coats, but some are not. In the winter, he supposes they all would, hiding school bags and purses beneath pea coats and scarves that flap in the wind, but the half-heat-half-chill of autumn gives them enough leeway to pick fashion first, if that's what they want. Shu feels tight enough in his own skin, so he can hardly imagine it. It’s ill-fitting and itchy whenever he stalls in place, warm and red like he needs to claw out of it, and Luca’s words flit in and out like the waves behind them. 

In hushed tones, he spills praises for the sky and the city, for the children in their yellow hats and the cold zing of spatulas against marble slabs. He conjures the frost and the foam, the feeling of ice cream melting down your lips, the shrieking laughter rippling out in the distance. As he walks through the cobbled streets, Luca has no need for pretense or mystery. Much of him is honest and stark, dampened like the moon. 

Shu nearly trips when he sticks to his guns, proudly charging towards the neon scene of their supposed date. He nearly chokes on his roasted sweet potato, tossing it back and forth between his bare hands, and for a moment, everything seems to freeze as Luca suddenly lets out a louder laugh, like he’s there to witness it all.

The wheel does not, contrary to popular belief, get less intimidating the closer he gets. Familiarity does not endear him to it. It is a metal mountain, a dragon, a hulking sculpture of spoked, shimmering metal. Each car looks like a pinprick dangling from a needle.

For a moment, Shu forgets that he’s alone. He looks to the right for a second, then to the left, as if waiting for someone to speak up first. 

“Can I ride the clear one?” he eventually asks, coughing in the wind. “The one with the glass floor.”

The attendant nods as he hands over his fee, pointing at the shorter of two lines. They’re both filled with couples, and as he watches them holding hands, whispering at each other with glassy eyes, Shu puts his hand in his pocket to rub the lip of his phone case. 

If Luca were here, he’d probably sit beside him rather than across from him. Shu would protest, but he wouldn’t complain. He’d want to see him, to watch Luca’s face light up as gravity escapes them, but Luca would prefer the contact, the ability to transmit his thoughts directly into his ear, so he’d let him. Shu wouldn’t want to be separated either, even if Luca would make a dangerous game out of it, seeing how much they could angle the chassis by shifting around their weight.

Outside, the ground starts to move. From here, it doesn’t feel like he’s the one moving. The earth is the one that’s shifting below his feet, suddenly repelled away from him. It’s like he has never moved at all, always overlapping with the same point in space as everything else rebels against his stasis. All he can see is his shoes, and as the light starts to blur, they start to look hazy too. 

It’s like he’s been tossed into the void. It’s like he and Luca are the only two people in the world and every other snippet of life is somewhere beneath his feet. 

It’s mesmerising, rather than terrifying.

The carriage is just as clear as advertised, and whenever he looks down, Shu can see straight into the crowd below. Each person is nothing but a speck floating in a neon basin, and even they, too, begin to fade into the background as Shu hones in on Luca’s voice. The whole car shifts as his back slumps into the window; it’s hard to tell how long it takes before balance returns to him. As long as Luca’s still here, he may never be fully on the ground.

Shu shoves his hands in his pockets as they keep climbing. They’re empty for the first time all night. It’s a bit like his face, he decides. His voice always sounds slightly different whenever Luca’s the one speaking.

Even if he doesn’t, if it doesn't mean a thing, there’s still something comforting about hearing his voice.

In the video, Luca’s eyes turn soft, and he breathes like he's got something new to say. Shu has to throw the volume to max to make out his words over the howling wind. Behind him, he can almost make out the blinking red light of a passing plane.

It turns out that Luca agrees with him. He thinks it feels like the world is the one moving away, rather than the gondola. The only thing they don't share is the creak of cold metal, which crops up at random, sometimes on his end and sometimes on Luca’s. 

“There’s a boat down there,” Luca muses, pointing somewhere offscreen. “You can’t see it, but there probably is one. It’s not gonna disappear just ‘cause the sun’s asleep for the day. I mean, what good’s a bay without any boats?”

At the edge of the park are two bridges, one of which is occasionally open to foot traffic. It’s got a steep arch, big enough to fit a decent mast and smokestack beneath it, and as Shu looks down in that direction, he can almost make out a light moving towards what he assumes is the ocean. It’s hard to tell for sure.

“Are you afraid of heights, Shu?”

No, not really. Is Luca? Is he even afraid of anything? 

He’s rarely had time to explore when he’s in Luca’s body. At first, he wasn’t allowed to, and then, he didn’t really want to shatter the illusion that they’re exactly the same beneath the obvious, that maybe one day, he’d wake up and realise it was all just a dream after all but that there’s still a very real Luca Kaneshiro waiting somewhere in the city if only he went out and found him.

“–well, if you are or you aren’t, it doesn’t matter. I’ll still protect you.”

At this elevation, the cars above and below look like keychains dangling off minuscule chains. They’ve become keepsakes dangling in the pocket of the universe– or maybe the Earth itself is more like cosmic pocket lint. Maybe that’s why it isn’t working. Maybe the universe doesn’t want them to be able to jump into another pair of jeans just to say hi to another clump of dust bunnies. 

Maybe it never did.

Sometimes, in the middle of his rambling, Luca blushes. It’s easy to tell under the fluorescent lights. His whole face gets a shade pinker all the way down to his neck, and the blur below ceases to matter again. The stars and the sky, the sea, the smudge of cars and trains and caravans of people scattered somewhere along the horizon, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is the sight of Luca and his eyes. He turns the universe into nothing but a pinhole, the eye of a needle, as his voice gets impossibly softer. 

Luca’s words crystalise in front of him. They come out through his breath, clouding the glass. When Shu closes his eyes, he can picture Luca in front of him. He would grab his hands and squeeze them once, maybe twice, before letting go. What would he smell like? What would he–

“–It’s not your fault,” Luca finally says, eyes shining. He is still climbing. The skyline is still recoiling from them in their metal cage. “It’s not your fault or mine, so I hope you know that. We’re doing everything we can, and maybe… maybe our best isn’t good enough sometimes. Maybe it will be someday, but not yet.”

There’s more, but it all becomes music to his ears, vaguely recognisable. Lyrical. It becomes half-chewed logs floating on the surface of a river and grains of sand swirling through the ocean. There’s something familiar to it, but Shu can hardly process the rest. 

Luca is kind but cruel.

“It’s not your fault,” he hears again, but Shu is lost inside the lights. 

He sounds resigned to it. Don't they just need more time? They’re so, so close.

The earth pulls further and further away from him. The sky separates from the clouds. It peels away in blue and purple ribbons, and Shu barely resists the urge to bang his palm against the glass to chase after them. 

Are you really leaving me behind?

Shu’s heart runs like a rabbit all on its own, and he can’t bear to keep watching. Even when they’re together, Shu still feels a hole in himself. There’s something empty in him, a void that pulses and cries like another form of hunger. It becomes a furnace when he sees Luca like this– when the world twirls around them and his voice is shaking, and he just prays and prays that this isn’t and never will be a goodbye. How could it be? How could it be with everything that’s happened?

Barricaded by this metal cage, nothing is real. If he broke out the glass, he could easily walk amidst the clouds. Each swell of wind would be a rung that swings through the sky, bringing him up or down or whatever direction he needs to go in to get to Luca. 

That's all it is. There must be something they’re missing, some variable they're not quite getting. 

It’s hard to escape the feeling that gaining steps, that getting closer and closer only gives him more to lose. The city is gorgeous and brilliant and small and claustrophobic, much too small actually, appropriately small as he crests the horizon and squeezes it between his fingers. Shu loves it as much as he wishes to break free from it.

In a hundred, thousand, ten thousand years, even metal will corrode into dust.

“I’m not mad that it’s been like this. There’s just so much I wish I could say to you, Shu, but I can’t.” Luca’s eyes engulf the moon as he leans into the camera. He’s suddenly framed by the familiar blotches of yellow and blue. “We should be nice and give some other kids a chance. They’ve been out there forever by now, and it’s chilly. You should bundle up too.”

At that, Shu stumbles into the railing, looking up with a jolt as he becomes a meteor. The ground comes up to kiss his feet and the darkness escapes to the other side of the sky. A garbled half-gasp-half-cry leaps after it as he leans against the door.

The pinnacle. The apex. The crest of the ride came and went without him even noticing. 

The camera. He was probably posing for the camera. He did, distantly, see Luca pause and stare roughly eye-level at the bench on the other side while talking, but he never realised what he was doing. 

Shu knows exactly what kind of unflattering sight his tacky polaroid is going to show when he goes up to pay for it, but he still does it anyway, sighing at the sight of himself, back hunched, staring maddening softly at his lap. 

It's probably because of the cold, but on the walk through the rest of the park, his left earbud dies, and every sound has a bit of a tinny tone to it. Whenever Luca gets a little loud, it spikes extra, and now that he's got one ear in both worlds, it really is a bit like Luca’s out there beside him. Sometimes he can make out the jingle of metal, his keys clink-clink-clinking together as they arc through the air. There’s a trick to it, apparently, kinda like rolling a coin over your knuckles. He’d teach Shu if he wanted to learn. Each time he throws them, they flip exactly three times before dropping right into his palm. He only misses once, metal skidding and bouncing along the concrete when he gets deep into his story about the girlfriend conspiracy. Apparently, Millie would point at anyone that passed and start spinning tales about how they could be, and are, the one, and he gets nervous despite himself.

Shu notices people too. Flashes of blonde hair or shadows that coat him whenever someone taller than him stands behind him for a moment, it always makes him pause a little longer than he’d like. He is always searching for something.

“So, did you have fun?” Luca asks, chuckling as he bumps into the door. Shu can faintly hear the thump as his knuckles make contact. He uses the key, of course, since those fancy door locks don't exist yet, and in his other hand is the bright paper bag that now resides on Shu’s desk. “I did. You better not be listening through all of this at home! That’s cheating.”

Inside the bag was the plushie, and even though he knows it isn’t in there anymore, Shu still pauses to look inside it as he walks in. It was never much of a mystery. He watched Luca win with ease: two tosses, one bullseye.

At the end of the night, Shu prints out that photo of Luca in front of the wheel, if only to remember that it’s not a dream. Every time he passes, Luca’s there to greet him.

Sometimes Shu imagines how he’d answer if people ask why he carries his own photograph around.

“Oh, that?” he’d say, “That picture was taken by somebody that I loved.”

Technically, he wouldn’t be lying.

-

-

Slowly, things began to change, and change isn’t always a good thing. Time passes faster, and correspondence dims, and Shu spends many days alone.

Shu has always enjoyed spending time alone. It’s not like he prefers solitude, but it’s never been something he can’t handle. He can easily do both. He’s the type who’d happily jump onto any passing train that captures his attention, whether that means presenting in front of hundreds or people or holing up in his room until he masters this one card trick that would be pretty cool, if he could do it too.

Shu’s not mysterious. He’s not locked into being one way or another. All he does is run through life one day at a time. 

Now, though, he supposes he carries more than before. Strapped to his back are a fleet of dreams. The whole sky is buried there somewhere, as are clouds that go on forever, sets of numbers, and a sense of brightness that engulfs the world. Everything he does has this second set of gravity pinned to it.

If you live day by day, then after 30 days of little to no progress, then you’ve gone through 30 lives with nothing to show for it.

Time machines should come with some sort of comedic cosmic error message. Then, at least, failure could be a little bit fun. Error: destination not found. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. Relevant details attached below.

Luca hasn’t come back yet, and he hasn’t sent anything either– or when he does, it’s random. It’s messy and nonsensical. It’s mottled pages out of order. It’s a recipe with half of the ingredients. It’s one sock on Monday and the second a week later, crumpled like it’s been chewed up first.

At some point, Shu stops tacking new things onto his wall. It’s a little too much, watching it bloom bit by bit into a field of violets that choke out the daffodils.

Maybe if it was warmer– maybe if the conditions were right and the sun visited as it often fails to do, then he could force their growing seasons to overlap, but he can’t. It’s endlessly embarrassing. It makes him selfish, which embarasses him, which makes him retreat further into his selfishness. 

It sucks. It sucks so much. 

They’re so close. He just knows it. Maybe not close in the traditional sense, but they’ve gotten much further than anyone ever has before! And Shu’s not the type of person who’d simply give up. He didn’t give up on his first or second or third attempt at making latte art (it’s way harder than it appears!), or on his still-in-progress garden (all weeds), or even on his hare-brained scheme to unravel the very fabric of time, so why should he give up now?

Usually, he tells himself that he’s only worried because it’s hindering the reproducibility of it. All good science, all published literature, must be inherently reproducible. So really, all of this is for naught if they can’t establish something permanent. 

Sometimes he’ll admit there’s something more to it, but even the slightest admission makes the loss infinitely harder to bear, so he tries to avoid it as much as he can.

But isn't that just how life works? The things you want the most are often the hardest to keep. The brightest, best, most beautiful parts of life are always the first to go. Frost. Flower petals in the April sky. Shards of dreams that you tether to your chest.

Last time they swapped, Shu could barely bring himself to sleep. He didn’t sleep, actually. No, all he did was stare down at Luca’s hands and wrap them tight around his back in a pitiful self-hug of sorts, desperate to stay awake for as long as possible in a world where they can both exist and prove it. 

Whatever they missed, whatever they have is still real somewhere. In his memories, in the past he cannot reach, it is still just as real as it ever was. 

Reminiscing sometimes fills him with the desire to walk through the busy streets and the scintillating lights and the ocean and everything he can possibly grab in the palm of his hand as he soars above it all, straight to the edge of the world, which must be nearby, to find the bridge that connects them.

Sometimes he wonders if, to Luca, this whole world, this soundscape, this wispy thing that curls around his heels, is nothing but a relic of the past century, if he can taste the ichor of history in a world he’ll never quite exist in. 

To know what he knows and to feel it a hundred times stronger, that is Shu’s burden to bear. To cobble together conclusions, to calibrate, to choose courage and ship off part of himself again and again and again in the form of weather-worn hopes, that is his responsibility alone. 

It just gets hard, dispatching smaller and smaller things, doing it every day while knowing each takes a part of him with it.

He's not sad, and there's nothing to cry about, but it's like the first tear that slips out sets off a torrent, a leak that fails to dry until a whole day has passed, a day sent burying his cheeks into saturated hands. The water lingers like winter, lying there until it’s old, until it’s stale, until it’s desperately unwanted. It lingers like the rain they never got to see because he just had to spend each day inside, tinkering.

One body is not enough to fit two people. It's lonely. His internal voice always carries some of the cadence of his usual monologue, so it used to startle him a bit whenever he opened his mouth and Luca's voice tumbled out. Now, he’s more startled when he realises that it hasn't been happening. It’s too quiet without Luca’s random machinery to occasionally interrupt his sleep.

Shu got used to it, cohabitating with him.

He got used to finding new ways to connect with him, got used to penning different phrases in an amalgam of different books.

He enjoyed having chances to be a little foolish and foolhardy, liked steeping in that freeing sort of feeling.

It’s little things like that that linger in the air.

They should have done more. They should have done more of everything but especially more of the fun things. If it’s the same either way, then they should have seen more of the summer and leaped through the cold rain. They should have walked through the streets in the heat, in the snow, in the regard of thousands of stars that they just can’t see through the haze of light pollution. They should have spent more time just laughing, just spinning cloth out of threads of nonsense and burying smiles into each other’s hair. 

Time was never conquered, only momentarily tamed.

One year or ten, ten thousand, one million, it’s no different from forever.

One night, after a day of tests he still has no way of verifying, Shu pushes a chair against the door, glancing back twice before he brings out his hidden treasure. It’s another photo, folded into quarters, of Luca from his last big excursion in Shu’s body. It’s a screenshot of the video, really, so it’s a record of a record of a record. His grin is big and wide as he points towards the wheel, covered in lights. His eyes, too, are contorted, carved into the shape of smiles; his cheeks are stained pink and purple from the neon stars strewn behind him; and there’s a white crease mark running down the middle that splits him cleanly in two.

It’s not an expression that he’ll ever reproduce on his own, and that thought alone makes his heart stall in his chest. While the body is certainly his, the spirit is 100% Luca, Luca in the only way it’s possible to see him, and steeled by the certainty that no one can break into his twice-fortified room, Shu tapes it briefly to their note-covered wall.

He's real. He’s here with him in some tiny way, stored in all the things he’s left behind. He’ll stay here even if Shu has to run his fingers over the tape each day, slapping on more and more until finally it stops peeling off the wall.

Luca likes to remind him to take it easy, but letting go to any degree is a bit like giving up. 

Shu does not go so far as to kiss it, even if no one is watching, certain that that would be crossing the line, but he certainly spends a long time looking at it, tracing his fingers around the edges of his silhouette and hoping they’ll find something soon. At the very least, it would be nice to go back to when it happened every day, to conquer the past by reclaiming it.

It won’t be Luca-but-not-really and Shu-but-as-Luca carrying two bilging lots of emotion across two different timelines. No, it’s got to be Shu and Luca, bridging time and space in a way that lets them exist together in whatever place they choose.

Delayed action dates are fun, sure, but they’re a temporary solution, a bandage at best. Everything leaves him wanting more.

They must be close to a breakthrough. He just knows it. He just has to work even harder to get there. They got a flowerpot across, didn't they? That’s progress! It's not nothing. It's just enough success that he has to see this through, no matter what.

They must be close because if they aren’t, then what else is he left with?

-

-

No one likes to be around him anymore. Sometimes Petra recruits Vox and this other girl, impossibly strong despite her height, to drag him out the door. Sometimes she doesn't do anything more than linger at his desk with a duster like he’s some sort of permanent fixture that needs attention.

So what if he’s been there through the night again? 

It’s not like Shu wants to be there, doing this and that again and again in a hundred permutations, but someone has to. If they don't do it, then no one will know. No one will see or feel or understand how different it is. This feeling gets so much stronger, much grander than anything mere ambition or empathy can produce, when it happens to you directly.

At some point, it became more about the chain than the anchor. It became going through the motions and mounting a comprehensive onslaught and praying that each time wouldn't be the last. 

Over a week ago, Luca finally got to see the snow– maybe for the first time ever. It's hard to tell whether his excitement comes from novelty or from his innate wellspring of it. 

While he ran around the sleet, Shu got to check his logs– filled with far fewer successes than even the week before– and tried his best to piece it together. 

It shouldn't be like that. They should be getting more accurate, rather than less, with all of this data. Instead, time seems to make everything a little more fragile, like frost, like the river separating them has been continually overflowing.

To be more precise, Luca only managed to see the snow through fogged windows on the train over, but he told him as much in as few words as he could manage. The picture he leaves behind looks like a blur of whites and greys like he tried to take it mid-sprint.

It’s too short to be called a date, but Shu still likes the sound of it. It feels hopeful in a general absence of it.

Maybe they should have played into it more. There are all sorts of recordings of people walking down busy streets. Maybe they should have pretended like that was them since that sight is something the both could see, even if it belongs to someone else. There's no way Luca would have agreed though. He would’ve pouted and insisted that it won't count unless one of them is behind the wheel, even if their wheel renders nothing but the occasional blur of lights.

Still, there’s something romantic about assigning meaning to things. He could lay in Luca’s bed, surrounded by the same divots made by him, cradled by his body, and he can imagine that the warmth pooling against the duvet came directly from him, that the sun and the moon are both strangers, cold and distant compared to the warmth that lingers from his touch. With each chance a rarity, Shu no longer forces himself to crawl out of bed. A couple extra minutes can’t hurt. To miss him deeply would be to admit that their eternity has shortened, so while he can freely entomb himself in Luca’s blankets, he won't do anything more than that.

It’s impossible to lie to yourself once you stumble into the truth. You can’t un-fall. You can’t erase the bruises that litter the sky.

A month passes like that. If only he could become a blanket, a jacket, a pen that sits between Luca’s fingers, so that even if he couldn’t speak, he’d be able to feel his touch every once in a while.

The snow comes and goes. The winter wind sinks its fangs into his cheeks. The crowds feel colder too, the same and yet not, like something important has been sucked out of them, The winter flows past like a river while the sun hides from view, and Shu slowly stops hoping even if he doesn't stop trying.

A month passes with no word.

The last thing he sends over before it all ends, silly as it may be, is a compass because a compass is shaped a bit like a star. Bundled inside is a belief in magnetism, in guiding light, in a way out.

Shu’s got his palm pressed against the window when they finally swap again, just searching, and he almost can't believe it. It’s got to be another one of his exhaustion-fuelled dreams again, the kind of thing that leaves him with nothing but a sore neck and questions of why they can’t be real. 

Right now, Luca must be watching the snow beat against the skyline. He must be confused. His feet must be frozen, bare against the heated floor.

What should he do if it's his last night on earth? That used to be a fun, hypothetical reality, a conversation starter, but now, it's more like each night truly is the last. 

When he opens his eyes, Shu’s in bed– probably for the first time in months– which hardly eases the unrealness of it all. They never start and end in bed anymore. There’s just no time for niceties like that. His body is heavy; blood pools in his feet as soon as he peels himself out of the covers, and he stumbles against the nearest door, searching for a handle that doesn't exist.

He can't move. The world twists in front of him in darkened shapes. His body burns. The woolen sweater gets pulled off his body, and his hands come up to shield his eyes.

Maybe Luca isn't invincible either. His hands come away wet, and his eyes are red, rubbed raw, and watery. 

Instinct takes over. They're not quite compresses, but his sister taught him a neat trick to deal with it, so Shu grabs a towel and runs it under the faucet. A drink would be nice too, maybe some tea to settle his stomach, but an obstacle soon presents itself. The door is shut. All of them are except for the bathroom’s, which has always creaked open of its own accord.

The code to the door isn’t working either. Four numbers, one for each corner, the first thing they worked out. Shu punches it in again and again, and each successive failure is another punch to the throat. There are no notes beside it, no objects out of place, so it can only mean one thing.

Luca chose not to tell him. Again.

Shu can't accept it, but he has no choice. He bangs and bangs and bangs his fist against the walls, but no one seems to notice. He shouts, but no one comes.

He supposes maybe Luca wanted to be alone, alone in a way that can't be interfered with, so rather than fight it, Shu climbs back into bed to steep in his phantom embrace.

It’s nothing new. It’s all a veneer or sorts, isn’t it? Luca constantly placates him with the most palatable version of their circumstances.The target’s smaller. That’s why success has been dwindling. It’s not because their target is small but because their fault tolerance is lower. Nothing is his fault, and he’s not allowed to know why, but if he’s not the point of failure, then that only leaves one possibility. It’s a closed system no matter how much he pretends like it’s not.

Instead of fighting, Shu supposes he may as well enjoy his last chance to dream.

He should have gone to more bakeries, pointing at the piles of bread that poke through enormous windows as he imagined buying more than they could possibly consume. He should have ran through the streets and bought cans of bland, almost burnt tasting coffee just to keep his hands warm for a little longer. They should have laughed at the cacti that sprouted in place of benches and worn fashionable clothes that were ill-suited for the weather and gotten lost more times than they can count.

They should have talked more.

They should have tried harder to make talking a priority, even if it meant shattering the illusion faster.

There's a room back home, back in his lab, cordoned off exclusively for samples he planned to send and those he received in return. What should he do with them now?

The feeling’s hard to escape, even without sight. The not-so-cold compresses rewet themselves from their place above his eyes.

This isn’t some kind of benign misunderstanding. Luca knew that it was going to end.

This time will surely be the last. 

-

-

When Shu finally made it back, there was a letter taped to his wall and a video, long and slow, that pointed right at it. It cemented it even further. All this time, Luca probably knew. He always knew more than he let on, but that's all he would give him– the truth but only a taste of it.

In the end, Shu never did get to present his research. 

With a lack of tangible success, funding slowly began to dry up, and thus he had to close the chapter of the story tentatively titled ‘The Greatest of All Dreams.’ Sometimes he passes by it, his old bench, and he contents himself with the knowledge that they’re still using it for something. The speculative studies department dissolves overnight.

Their time can still come someday. It’s just that their roles have now reversed. They never needed two machines to receive things, just one to dispatch them, so it's become waiting with no way to intervene.

He supposes he should have expected it, and maybe he did, but maybe he should have pushed harder. Maybe he should have asked the hard questions and looked for all the answers he wouldn't have gotten, but then again, why?

Would he have accepted it, had he known the truth? Maybe, but maybe not. It was a calculated risk, drawn out long before emotions came into play. Then it became a necessity. It superseded reality.

Time travel is real, but it’s complicated, even without the additional obfuscation.

For now, Luca lives on inside of him. In each adventure, there’s a thread of his spirit weaved inside. Friday, Saturday, they all become open days, days to fill with whatever he pleases. The stars are set to line up eventually. 

Up there, Luca’s somewhere, waiting. Studying.

A week after Shu’s birthday, a shirt appears in his bed, bundled in twine with a familiar swatch of handwriting. It doesn't quite land on his bed, but it's close, hanging halfway off the frame in the back. His aim’s still not perfect.

In the summer, it’s not a mango, but it’s close. It’s a book on horticulture, bundled with a set of notes about all the ways they tried to emulate the right sort of climate for them. In the autumn, he sends a sweater with a worn-out neck (he told Luca to stop pulling them off like that, but he never listened) and a packet of kabocha seeds. It’s a promise in a way. They’re getting closer. They haven’t flown too off course yet.

And winter comes eventually, as it does every year. 

This time, it comes like bells.

His heart is loud, an aching drum ballooned to the size of the sky, but Shu lets it beat. He lets it be loud, loud enough that everyone can hear it. And as he walks and walks through a clear night, and none of it hurts. No matter where he goes, they'll never be any closer, torn apart by the earth and the stars and the grand movement of galaxies, but it still feels right. He could walk until the soles of his shoes wear out and never get closer in a meaningful way, and yet it would still be okay. 

Shu is not happy because he deserves to be or because his happiness is measured by his success. He merely is. He has found it– happiness. Happiness is the sound of bells. It’s knowing that there’s beauty somewhere far out of reach. It’s the passage of time and water and chasing after planets that could easily be home someday.

Happiness is knowing love.

The night grows quiet around him after a while, and after taking a deep breath, Shu glances up into the distance toward the far-off light, his head tipped up, squinting.

The universe is so big and beautiful and vast, far vaster than he ever realised.

But if they’ve found it once, then they can find it again, their little overlap in the grand scheme of time and space. Luca’s getting better at it, compensating for their distance.

As his boots crunch in the snow, Shu points up at a star and imagines it is another place to call home, and somewhere, Luca must be doing the same thing as he traces the celestial arc they leave behind. And on that night, like so many nights before, as Shu breathed in the dust of long-forgotten stars, he didn't feel like he was alone.

Even if it's a common, paltry sort of wish, he hopes Luca is happy. He hopes they meet again some day, but more than that, he wishes that he’s happy up there, following in the footsteps of giants. 

That would be the greatest joy of them all.

-