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He doesn’t notice immediately when his surroundings change.
He’s too busy arguing with Kaiser, whose arms are full with all of the shopping bags and gifts they’ve bought for their friends this season. There’s snow on the ground and the lights from his peripheral vision are so dazzling he doesn’t notice when some blink and disappear.
Just as he was about to snap back at his boyfriend, Yoichi’s feet caught on something—a loose tile, a rock, or some fallen toy, whatever it is, it makes Yoichi catch himself just in time to avoid falling.
But when he looks back up, expecting to see Kaiser beside him, asking if he’s okay or laugh at him for his clumsiness, there’s no one. Kaiser has disappeared. Yoichi stops walking, uncomprehending, and looks around to see if he’ll find Kaiser behind him. He doesn’t.
A strange kind of dread roils in the pit of his stomach when he finally takes notice of his surroundings. It’s all… wrong. It’s still the same street of Berlin’s, the same stores and the same layout, and yet… the lights are different, the decorations are off, and weather feels colder.
And Kaiser? Kaiser is gone.
Suddenly, the layers he has on feels insufficient as his heart freezes over, eyes wide as he tries to make sense of the impossible scene in front of him. When he hastily checks his phone, it doesn’t turn on, even though he’d checked it probably ten minutes ago and it was still at full battery.
“What the hell?” Yoichi mutters, panicked. He jolts as someone passes by him and he realizes he can ask someone what the date is.
“Excuse me,” Yoichi says in German to an older couple standing beside a thin tree with box presents below. “I’m sorry to bother you, but can you tell me the date of today?”
The older lady with a bun and a wrinkled, but kind face looks at him with confusion but answers anyway. “Today is the 25th of December, 2011.”
It can’t be.
That shouldn’t be possible.
Yoichi doesn’t even hear himself thank the lovely couple, his mind whited out by the total confusion and panic that is strangling him. When he comes to, he finds himself in an alley, the noise from the crowd and the music from different stores all muffled and distant.
His breathing is short and panicked. Why? His mind supplies under all the warning bells of everything is wrong wrong wrong and he’s nearly crippled under the unknown of it all.
His legs are shaking, but he’s forcing himself to stay upright against the wall and not slide down in defeat through sheer force of will.
He was in the past, for some reason.
Somehow, someway, he’d taken a step and come back in time to when he himself was still a child.
I’m probably at home right now in Japan, Yoichi thinks somewhat hysterically, watching those Noel Noa videos in my soccer pajamas.
What a strange thought, knowing there was now two versions of him in two different places.
“Okay, okay,” Yoichi whispered to himself, “Calm down. I gotta—I gotta calm the hell down.”
Yoichi took in a deep breath and felt his throat struggle to suck in air with how tight and dry it felt.
If he was here, somehow, in the past, wouldn’t there be a reason for it at all?
It can’t be that he was stuck here. It just couldn’t be. If he was here, it was for a reason.
He had to find that reason.
Think!
What would he be sent to the past for? What purpose would he serve? Who would he even need to—
“Mihya,” Yoichi breathed. The realization struck cleanly.
Kaiser was here.
Not his Kaiser, no. But the Kaiser he never met. The one his lover has only tentatively begun to speak about, painting a past to the person he used to be, giving explanation to the man he was now.
And the things Kaiser told him… it told a whole different childhood to the one Isagi had.
“I have to find him,” Isagi muttered to himself. He had to find Kaiser. Now armed with a purpose, Isagi set out to do exactly that.
Fortunately, Yoichi knew the streets well, living in Germany for at least a year by now since entering a relationship with Kaiser.
And he remembers, distinctly, of a place Kaiser once mentioned he’d go to. A certain park abandoned by the rest, always quiet and tranquil in the dead of night.
If he could find him anywhere, it should be there.
When he gets there, he finds a boy all alone with a ball in hand.
The sight roots him to the spot. His heart hurts immediately just looking at him.
Kaiser is shorter than he’s ever seen, but it’s not his height that unsettles him. His thin. Criminally so. There’s scrapes and uneven splotches of color on his face, mottled bruises just barely healing, the telling of someone getting consistently hurt and injured.
But his eyes.
Dark blue pools of misery, a quiet sort of pain rimmed at the edges. It strikes him how plainly he sees it. When Kaiser walks, it’s with a curved back, as if he expects a hit to land on him at any point.
“Oh, Mihya,” Yoichi whispers, watching him from behind a tree. He wants nothing more than to go closer, to draw that face in and wipe away all his burdens, but how does he even take that first step?
As he watches, Yoichi knows deep in his soul he was meant to come here. He’s meant to offer a light to that solitary figure, so convinced of a lonely life.
Kaiser said his ball was his first friend. Showed it to him when trust had been firmly built, and let him cradle it, taped and all, while he told him all the times he kicked it away and it came back. The first proof that he was not alone.
Little Kaiser hit the ball against the graffiti-ed wall a little too hard and Yoichi watched as it hit him back, struck right at the temple. The boy glared in fury and kicked the ball away, landing several paces away among the bushes where Yoichi was hiding.
Without thinking, Yoichi drew up to it. So shiny, so new, it lay among the tall grass. The existence of this ball was the first diversion of whatever life Kaiser could’ve lived otherwise, the first friend he held, the first light he followed.
Thank you for being with him, Yoichi thought, and kicked the ball back from its place into the waiting hands of little Kaiser.
Kaiser immediately caught it and yelled out in fear, “Who’s there?!”
Yoichi huddled against the bark and waited, quiet. For Kaiser to go back to kicking the wall, to run and find a safe place, but all Kaiser did was look out into the dense trees.
Then, he kicked the ball again.
And landed it miraculously at Yoichi’s feet.
Yoichi let out a breathless huff of laughter and gave in, kicking the ball back to its little owner.
The tense expression on Kaiser’s face changed into delight, catching and returning the ball with fervor, going faster, running to the side anytime Yoichi cheekily curved the course. Kaiser was playing. For the first time, there was someone to receive him, to see him.
The past cannot be changed, but a new perspective can be found.
A gurgle of sound left his mouth and with a pang, Yoichi recognized it as an attempt to laugh, a physical manifestation of glee trapped in his throat. No matter how much Yoichi wanted to steal him away, bundle him into his heart where he is loved, life must be lived, even hard ones like Kaiser’s.
He doesn’t know how long they played together, just that Kaiser started slowing down at the some point, panting harshly yet never stopping to catch his breath. His own muscles started to protest any more activity, the cold chattering his teeth from being in the snow too long.
Kaiser’s hands, when he grabs the ball after Yoichi kicks it too high and runs back, is near purple. It must be so numb he's forgotten he has hands.
There was a tug in his chest, a string attached to his heart.
Time was running out.
At the next pass back to him, Yoichi takes off his gloves and without hesitation, scrunches them up and throws them to Kaiser.
Even if he can’t bring himself to approach this Kaiser, knowing he’ll leave him in the end, damn him to the abuse he can’t save him from, he can still show proof he was there.
Kaiser sees the blue bundle fall in the snow and runs to it, holding them up. Yoichi’s blue winter gloves.
He puts them on. The remnant of Yoichi’s warmth is infused into his frozen fingertips.
The hook pulls. It’s time to go.
“Wait!” Kaiser yells out, disregarding his earlier hesitation and tramples into the snowy forest.
You are not alone, Yoichi promises with love, turning away. Never alone.
When he disappears, the only thing Kaiser finds of him is his hand print in the snow.
Yoichi barely manages to open his eyes before he’s bulldozed over.
“Where the hell did you go?!”
Over his shoulder, he can still see the same playground, so distant, only a boy to keep inside.
Yoichi hears the distress in Kaiser’s voice and how it cracks down the middle and all Yoichi can think is I’m so glad to have met you.
“Mihya,” Yoichi mumbles. His body is crushed in Kaiser’s embrace, so tight and claiming. How can he reassure Kaiser that Yoichi will never leave him?
“I love you.”
“You disappeared,” Kaiser gasped out, touching his face, “Just like that. I blinked and you were gone. Like you were never there, like you never existed. I thought I was losing my mind!”
“I’m here,” Yoichi kissed him hard. “Always.”
“Yoichi—“
“I saw you,” Yoichi croaked, “in the past. You were so little, so hurt. I wish I could’ve taken you from that life.”
Kaiser stared at him like he was seeing him for the first time.
“Mihya?”
“It was you?” Kaiser murmured to himself, his gaze faraway, his mind drifting to another place.
“Oh,” Yoichi’s mouth opened. “Your gloves are…”
“I’ve always had these,” Kaiser looks down, closing his palms. “I got them from…” he trails off.
Me. There, his gloves were, worn like a loved gift. They didn’t look like how they did a moment ago when he’d thrown them to Kaiser, now old and used for years and years.
He blinks back while he’s holding Yoichi’s hands and hisses. “Shit. Your hands are freezing. Let’s go inside, you can tell me more then.”
Yoichi sighs after he finishes the story, a wonderful cup of hot chocolate in his hands to stave off the chill that’s taken root inside him.
Kaiser sits across from him, contemplative.
“Do you believe me?” Yoichi asks him. He wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t. It sounded so fantastical from a logical standpoint.
Kaiser tapped his fingers in the table. They were inside a café, the only place opened at this kind of time.
“I only remembered it now,” he informs, picking his words carefully. “After I saw you appear, it’s like an old, forgotten memory came back to me.”
Did I change the past? Yoichi wonders, taking a sip. Kaiser had never mentioned this part of his childhood before, so was it possible he created a new memory in Kaiser?
“Is anything else different?” He worries. What if he created some kind of butterfly effect or something?
“No,” Kaiser replies. “Nothing… nothing is out of the ordinary. Only that memory.”
“Are you okay?” Yoichi blurts out.
“Me?” Kaiser raised his brow. “I’m not the one that went to the past. Are you okay? You’ve been quiet since we hugged.”
Yoichi shook his head. “I’m just thinking… about how I see what you mean now. When you saw your ball as your friend. When I played with you, you were so happy.”
“… I remember thinking the ball was sending itself back to me.” Kaiser’s lip quirked up, tickled. “Deep down, I knew it was someone else. But I didn’t want to break the illusion, I think. It was inconceivable for it to be a person when I myself was not human.”
“Mihya—“
Kaiser kissed him shut. “I know. I don’t think that way about myself now.”
Yoichi calmed back down.
“To think it was you,” Kaiser whispered, watching him with tenderness and a new light. “My invisible friend.”
Yoichi laughed wetly. “I wanted to hold him, I wanted to tell him we’d meet again. I wanted to promise him someone loves him in the future.”
“I know now.” Kaiser wiped his tear away and kissed him.
“I love you,” Yoichi said again. One in a thousand more.
“I love you more,” Kaiser countered, his love returned.