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His vision is spotted in a way he hasn't known it to be since he was a child, when another's interest in you was measured by the number of kids tagged at your hand. The spots jolt in time with the piercing of his body. It is a wire web tightening around his lungs at each shortened intake; a measly sheet of paper snatched too quickly to avoid getting cut in that space just within his ribcage; a blade skewering his heart, made excruciating for reasons unrelated to his current chase.
For all his social fluttering, so crucially owed for granting his very reason to be, Zander the social butterfly has only one person to stop for. And so, as from the moment he awoke in his uncannily foreign apartment... he runs.
The world scarcely exists beyond carelessly diluted hues; washes of retreating warmth as mistreated by gaussian. Somehow, nothing looks quite right in this city he has known longer than himself. There's no way he got lost on the way to their park.
Did he take a wrong turn? Overshoot?
The once-warmth is growing hotter, fiercer, sharper, whirling around him in the day's last hurrah as he very nearly trips over his feet to retrace his steps. There's a distant ache pulsing through his thighs, his chest, his head.
Who did he just bump into? Did he manage to smile right when he turned back to apologise?
While he frantically scans the square filled with this blur of a crowd, Zander has about decided the piercing feeling of an emotionally-driven overexertion easily comes second to the distinctly weakening feeling of loss. Of having something taken from you.
No no no, where is he? He has to be here. It should have worked. He's always—
Zander's thoughts are, too, taken from him as he stumbles. With one bump too many, his body finally fails him and that pain in his side takes the brunt of it. The world and its colours take a moment to settle. Somewhere in his brain where oxygen deprivation has found the luxury to afford losing focus, he thinks it's funny how the world only seems to slow down at the worst of times. Even the leaves seem to be falling slower than usual, dancing along with the dizzying sunset. Focusing on them almost takes the hurt of the chase away. Almost. You see, that's something that he...
A glint of sunlight against teal. A tall figure against the setting sky. A sharp sting in Zander's chest tells him that momentary break didn't let him catch his breath at all, but still he forces his body up and towards a man currently walking in the wrong direction. A man whom he knows so deeply, to love him was inevitable.
It's Aki.
Zander's lungs would cry out if they had the capacity for it. They're not even safe within the ribbed cage of his own chest, as he wraps his arms around the man's tensed shoulders tight enough to melt into him if it weren't for something so superfluous as bodies.
There's something so distinctly Aki in the air that graces him. It is more home to Zander than the apartment with his photos but none of his personality, this city with the same streets that he can't seem to navigate with muscle memory. And so he is not at all afraid to nudge the man around to hug him properly, hands unsteady with the shock of relief coursing through them.
He babbles as he always does. About wondering where the other was and what he was doing, the first gummy smile breaking across his face all day.
Now. He was not afraid. That is, until Aki carefully slipped out of his hold with that charmingly sheepish smile on his face. Until all Zander was left with was the now sickeningly plastic crinkle of Aki's grocery bags against his own pant legs, and the acidic aftertaste of that too well-known feeling of loss.
"Sorry... who are you, again?"
His voice is as hopeful and earnest as it was that first night under the stars; soft as he always was, carrying whispered affections that would've been lost to the wind were it not for Zander's blissfully floaty state, waiting for sleep. He thought he must have dreamed it, then. They were so young, after all. He wishes he could have only dreamed it, now.
Hopeful, luckless Zander. A half-smile frozen on his face, stuck in time with the beating of his heart. Does he not know? You are a mosaic of everyone you have ever known, and everyone you have never known.
At some point, who you are becomes synonymous with who those around you are. Not knowing someone makes the you who knows them a person you distinctly aren't. Zander knows Aki is not lying. So, this Aki... all scrunched eyebrows and rosy cheeks and astoundingly bag-less eyes, wide and framed by thin rims (when has he ever worn them outside..?), is not Zander’s. And the thought that any love he knows Aki had for him has been replaced by apathy, however polite... it presses that particular knife deeper into his chest.
The leaves keep falling. Zander thinks he understands how the trees must feel to have such once-vibrant life taken from them. Stolen with the wind. Time passes, and maybe he can breathe again, but nothing else changes and Zander can now feel every part of himself; as if he were never a person before this moment. Each particle vibrating so painfully with that blaring wrongness of nothing being right.
The world is ending in its aftermath and still the leaves keep falling.
But he's faced with a distinctly heartwrenching look of confusion that reminds him he can't just fall to his knees and sob and scream and beg, and whatever else you do in an apocalypse. He has to respond. However trivial that seems at the moment.
"...huh?" Very astute, Zander.
In all fairness, how was he supposed to know there ever existed a universe where Aki and him never were together? He could’ve worked with a situation when they were still friends, without the whole madly in love part— the original plan. To turn back the hands of time and relive those beautiful years with Aki all over again; only making sure to keep him away from the dangers that got him... well, away from any dangers. It's barely a price to pay if it means growing old together. Like they were meant to.
But to think they had never even met??
That was about the only thing Zander hadn't considered in the split second after discovering him, too cold and too still and too awkwardly sprawled across his desk, before deciding to speedrun time magic. So, of course this was the one thing that went wrong. Horrifically, dreadfully, wrong. Though, Aki would have better words to describe it.
The Aki who instinctively grows defensive at his touch. Aki, with his mask of gentle politeness smoothing over the confusion so unfit for a society feeding on the lies they paint as etiquette. Never has Zander seen that look directed at him. Not like that. And never has Zander felt quite so clumsy with Aki in his space; not in a blushingly nervous, bashful way, but a way that stinks of an unfamiliarity so stale it is new again.
He takes a step back—away from him—out of the horrid vertigo of it all.
In front of Zander stands a man his heart knows better than himself. Who looks and sounds and acts entirely too similar to not be Aki Betsudokoro. Yet Zander is now feeling around an odd Aki-shaped absence in his unknown mosaic that doesn't seem to need that space filled. Or rather, his body remains unphased by Aki's presence while his soul is clawing at the confines of its strange, apathetic prison. For its other half.
Through the fog in his mind, he notices his other half (no, no more than a stranger anymore) speaking up. A question? Right. While Zander knows everything from how he takes his coffee to what keeps him up at night, this Aki doesn't even know his name.
And this Zander is far too broken to remember that no love is ever wasted. It finds you as you are free, wedges itself into the cracks you have earned as your right on this earth. It is gold binding you to the whole, pumped eternally through your veins. It is weighty, and permanent as your very bones. For you could choose to rid yourself of love, but you must accept the phantom pains of its absence. Still, how could he accept starting over again? When his hands are cradling the pieces of his mosaic he never meant to break, earning cuts from its jagged edges so distinctly glueless.
What could he possibly make out of this internal war? Feeling so alien in his own body, in this world shifted slightly to the left, holding a love he cannot recognise? Hours after his fiancé died, Zander had wrapped his arms around Aki's tense frame and ducked his head just enough to hear his heartbeat thumping against his chest. Terrified, he runs away.
The tiles crumble in his wake.