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They’ll say, one day, that it was just one of those things. Cruel but inescapable, an unavoidable quirk of statistics. They’ll say that when reality itself unravels and must be stitched back together on a cosmic scale—and impossible as it ought to be, no other explanation can ever match the magnitude of what happened—that somewhere, some things are bound to fall through the cracks. They’ll remark and marvel, celebrating the countless millions of happy endings and success stories.None of it will ever be enough.None of it will ever bring Koutarou back. It happens on a Thursday.Keiji is on the subway, fiddling with his fingers; glad that none of his nerves will be showing on his face. He’s perfected his outwardly calm look over the years and it comes in handy on occasions like this. Occasions where he can feel his insides churning, when his mind is racing with a thousand thoughts a minute.What if he’s late; what if he misses his stop; what if he trips and injures himself; what if he picked the wrong clothes; what if he says something horrifically inappropriate and Koutarou finally realises the mistake he’s been heading towards all these years; what if Koutarou has already realised the mistake he’s been making and stands him up—It’s normal for him, this undercurrent of fear. Reassuring in its own way. Almost every eventuality which could play out does play out in his mind on repeat, giving him time to work his way to a solution.Perhaps that’s why, when it comes right down to it, the universe responds with its sincerest poetic irony and provides the one possibility which had never occurred to him even once:The possibility that he would arrive, emerging rather unsteadily following an earthquake-ridden train ride, and find the world far emptier than it should have been. That reality might tear itself into pieces as he makes his way to their first real date, and that he and Koutarou might end up on different sides of the resulting divide.For hours he waits. On the street at first, hugging the wall as the full magnitude of the chaos unfolds around him. At length the chill and hunger drive him inside, where he begs the apologies of those waiting staff who remain, and asks that they keep a weather eye out for his boyfriend , who was supposed to be here—who should be here any minute, he was probably just held up by all this disruption...The staff are very kind. They offer him a table in the corner with a view of the street outside, and make no complaints as Keiji sits there alone until long after darkness falls, staring at the empty seat opposite and refusing to cry. There’s no immediate comprehension of what actually happened , of course. Substantial portions of the world’s population vanishing in a worldwide tremor is hardly an expected occurrence. It takes months of near-apocalyptic chaos before any sign of order is restored. Before the announcements are broadcast that outside agents—agents from outside reality itself —are working to restore normality. That soon, very soon, it will all feel simply like a dream.Keiji can’t help but think that it feels like a dream anyway. That he fell asleep on the train and is yet to wake up, yet to reach his stop.Or perhaps it’s just a nightmare, because he has reached it. He’s reached the station; he’s climbed the steps. He’s made his way to the restaurant where they were supposed to meet and there’s no one waiting for him .Worst of all, there’s no way of knowing how Koutarou feels about all of this, wherever he is.Keiji is sure he’s out there somewhere, stuck and unable to come home. Because as much as it’s easier at first to imagine that he was simply stood up, that Koutarou came to his senses and elected not to continue the relationship he had seemed so invested in, that excuse doesn’t really hold water for long.Imagining Koutarou somewhere else in the world and not telling Keiji about it is a possibility which just doesn’t exist. It couldn’t exist. It would go so much further against reality that surely things would unravel even more.And yet, at the same time, it’s so hard to accept the truth. The truth that somehow, reality really did come apart at the seams, that most of the world’s population was scattered across countless copies of the world, hopelessly lost—and that, somewhere in all the chaos as things were patched together again, Koutarou got left behind. Months pass. People return. The Great Unravelling (or The Shattering, The Chaos, The Incident, The Fracture—it has almost as many names as there must be planes of existence in the apparently very real multiverse) becomes a notable incident, but one of the past. People patch up their lives and carry on somehow, as people are wont to do.But Keiji can’t let go. What if Koutarou returns tomorrow? What if it’s next week? They’re meant to be fixing everything, even if no one is ever explicitly clear on who “They” are.Where should he be waiting, when Koutarou comes back?Life…continues. In the absence of any better plan, he makes the same trip each Thursday alone. The same train journey. The same walk from the station to the restaurant. The same table in the corner, which the staff keep ready for him, week on week, month on month.The seasons pass, and the staff eventually change, and Keiji carries on with his routine. Every Thursday, the same table, the same order, the same wait. If he keeps it up long enough, he tells himself that surely Koutarou will have to come back. Surely they’ll get their date at last. It’s both a cruelty and a kindness that, in the end, the world moves on without him. Bit by bit the memories fade, and even those who were displaced themselves seem mostly to forget it actually happened. For them, everything is normal again. For everyone else, the agents were right, and it’s all just a dream from long ago.Keiji stops reminding the new, younger staff about Koutarou in the end. Stops insisting that he’ll be there this time, or next week at the latest. Stops showing the tattered photograph he had printed out when he was finally forced to replace his old phone. Koutarou wouldn’t look the same now, anyway. He doesn’t look the same now himself .But still he comes, year after year. Still he sits at the table which should have been theirs and gazes across across at the empty chair, long after everyone he knows says he should have moved on. After all, there is no moving on for him. There never will be, until Koutarou comes home.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
They’ll say, one day, that it’s a great tragedy. Far rarer than one in a million, an almost impossible statistical outlier. They’ll say that when reality shattered into countless pieces and was painstakingly reassembled one by one—and with a task of that magnitude, it’s a miracle it ever happened at all—lives were upset across the multiverse, but few so greatly as this. They’ll recount it and remark, offering as much comfort as anyone ever could.
None of it will ever be enough.
None of it will ever send him home to Keiji.
It happens on a Thursday.
Koutarou is on the train, standing by the door and looking up every half second to see if it’s his stop yet. He can’t keep still. He’s nervous enough that not even the constant disapproving glares or occasional tuts from his neighbours can stop him. It’s fine though, it’ll all be fine.
After all, this is
Keiji
he’s talking about. This is the man he’s spent years dancing around, playing it cool, playing it like they could just be friends, even though it’s never
just
anything around Keiji. It’s always so much. It’s always the best.
Keiji
is always the best.
And now he gets to
call
him that! Now they’re Keiji and Koutarou, not Akaashi and Bokuto, and it’s going to be the best day ever, to start the best week, and month, and year—and is it too early to be thinking that far ahead? It doesn’t feel too early, but he can never be sure.
And then it
is
too early, because right as he’s so happy, right as he’s sure everything is going so well, there’s an earthquake so hard it throws him off his feet, and when the shaking stops and he pulls himself to his feet he’s still in the train, and the train is somehow still on the tracks and still racing through Tokyo, and everything is even still in one piece. But nothing is right, nothing at
all
.
He runs to the restaurant where he’s meant to be meeting Keiji, sure he must be late and frantically texting his apologies. Except there’s no signal and it won’t send. Well, that’s no matter. He waits outside the restaurant and looks out over the rather small crowds on tiptoe, certain that Keiji must be there soon.
Keiji’s never late. Keiji’s always organised. And when the staff inside the restaurant—and huh, he’s sure the sign was written in gold letters, not red—come to ask if he’s okay, he tells them all about Keiji as well, and goes inside to sit at a table in the corner and wait.
They’re nice people. They’re good. They don’t even mind when it gets dark and Keiji isn’t there, and it slowly sinks in to Koutarou amid the growing panic that the problem isn’t Keiji somehow failing to show up. The problem is
him
, because he might be in Tokyo, but it’s not the right one.
It’s not really obvious, at first. To be fair, this Tokyo looks a
lot
like the real one, and—well, it’s sort of also real. But Koutarou isn’t the only person who’s been ‘displaced’. He’s not the only one from another version of the world—except his version of the world has got to be the real one, because it’s his version of the world where Keiji is.
And eventually the news even comes out that someone’s gonna fix it. Someone’s gonna send them all home, and bring back the people who are supposed to be in this Other Tokyo, and it’ll all be just a bad dream to wake up from.
Koutarou’s never really been one for bad dreams—once he’s asleep that’s it until morning. This, though? This feels like a nightmare.
But the strangeness is dreamlike enough, for sure. He’s pushed from pillar to post at first. A refugee from another reality, slotted in where he can be fitted until someone from beyond it
altogether
can send him back home. And until then, until he can go back to normal, what can he do? He’s given a home, and told to get a job, and just to try to carry on like normal, but what’s normal? What can he cling to?
The one thing he has is his phone, with his pictures of Keiji and their messages and their plans—Thursday afternoon at that fateful restaurant. Well he showed up alright. He was on time and everything, wearing his smartest clothes. It was going to be perfect, and then it all went wrong. What must Keiji have thought?
What must he still
be
thinking, as the weeks go by, on and on, and Koutarou is still in the Other Tokyo? Does he hate him? Is he angry? Is he disappointed? Does he know that Koutarou was trying so hard?
No, no he’s sure Keiji understands. Keiji always understands everything. He’s
Keiji
. Koutarou clings to that thought, as he finds his feet and settles into a new routine—just temporarily, just until things are all back to normal. He tells himself that over and over, long after the facts seem determined to make him a liar.
He doesn’t get to go home. Not in the first wave, nor the second or third. People return who apparently were missing, and some of them look kinda eerily familiar but none of them are right. None of them know him, and none know Keiji. Months after the Reforging (he’s heard it called lots of things—The Upheaval, The Great Shattering, The Fragmenting, The Turmoil, it’s got so many names it’s just confusing), he’s still here, left behind, and it seems like he’s the only one.
People are nice to him. They’re
too
nice, because after a while, even though he’s from another world originally, he’s got to get on with his life the same as everyone else. And he’s got to balance that with believing that someday he’ll get to go home and be
normal
again.
That someday, he’ll go home and see Keiji, if Keiji still wants to see him too.
Koutarou tries not to think about what will happen if Keiji has forgotten him. Keiji has their whole world, after all. It’s just Koutarou who’s missing. And
all
the worlds keep going on, whether he’s in them or not.
He clings to the things which are familiar—prints out all the pictures from his phone to stick on the walls, and comes back to the restaurant every week, right on time. Every Thursday, as though maybe one week he’ll be on the train and the earth will start shaking again and he’ll go
home
.
They keep the table for him, the same one in the corner where he waited that first time, even when the owners sell the place to someone else, and all the staff change. They know him by now—everyone does, around here. He’s a local celebrity really. But
because
they all like him, he knows they’re all hoping for just the same thing he is: that a week will come where the restaurant he gets to is the one where Keiji is instead. The one where they get to have their first date after all.
It’s nice and also hard, really, the way the district never stops rallying around him. The way they go out of their way to help with everything they can. They’re all so
kind
, and they make it so obvious, and they try so hard to comfort him, because they can see he doesn’t fit. They can see he never got his normal back, the way he should have.
But it sucks, it sucks so bad being the one everyone feels sorry for. So he stops talking about Keiji, and telling everyone about how wonderful he is, and how he bets Keiji’s doing great, and he can’t wait to see him again.
He stops carrying his old phone, the one which hasn’t worked in decades but is the last thing he has from the
real
Tokyo. He’s spent far longer in Other Tokyo, anyway. It’s getting hard to remember the differences between the two. Keiji’s the only part he’s missing, and he’ll
never
forget Keiji.
Still, no matter how hard the reminders are, he can’t stop keeping his weekly date. He can’t stop trying, over and over, waiting for the earth to shake, or reality to unwind once more. And the staff are on his side, even now. They’re all rooting for him, hoping his sad story gets a happy ending, against the odds. Hoping that someday, he’ll get to see his Keiji again.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
There’s too much to do.
So much lost, so much misplaced, so much broken. It’s impossible to fix everything; impossible to put it all right in anyone’s lifetime. In all the lifetimes. It’s no wonder mistakes are made.
No wonder, but—but that’s no excuse. That doesn’t make it right. That doesn’t change the fact that people were hurt who never should have been, who just happened to get caught in the crossfire, so to speak.
And yet, for all that, they can’t rewrite the past. Not so much of it, not while reality itself is a patchwork of scars, fragile and healing and far too vulnerable to alterations.
It’s not as if they know , either, until the report comes in. Not until it’s far too late to fix things the way they should have been. Saviours of the multiverse the agents might be. Omnipotent they are not.
There are options, though. Option One—the best, in terms of the overall health of the multiverse, arguably—is to leave things alone. Chalk it up as unfortunate, but move along. Bad things happen all the time, but people are pretty tough. People heal.
Then they look, and they see, and they move straight on to Option Three, no questions asked . Keiji is tired. It’s been a long day, and stairs have become a grand nuisance now with his bad leg, but he’s always taken them on Thursdays and he’s damned if he’s stopping now, after all these years. He could walk this route in his sleep—he often does—it’s that set in stone.So he grits his teeth, and holds tighter to the hand rail, and if he has to lean a little harder on his cane for the walk along the street after that, then no one needs to know. No one is watching him. These days even the staff just see him as their slightly eccentric regular. It’s fine. He can understand it. No doubt from their perspective it does look a little odd.But it’s the kind of odd they ought to be used to, at least. Every Thursday without fail, come rain, come shine, for longer than any of them can remember. Even the newest of them know that his table is to be kept free on a Thursday, so—It’s not free. There’s someone sitting in the chair opposite his.Keiji’s stick clatters to the ground and the intruder turns around, and for half a second he wills himself to believe that it’s him, despite all the evidence to the contrary.Surely it’s got to be the multiverse’s last cruel joke that it’s not. Thursday rolls around once more, and Koutarou sighs. They’ve gone and changed the train timetable again, which always throws him off for a few weeks. What’s so wrong with keeping things the same? Why do they have to go and mess them around, just for the sake of it?But there’s no helping that—he can’t exactly get them to put the old Thursday schedule back, just for him. So he sighs again, and he goes for his morning jog a few minutes earlier, and he still has enough time to shower and freshen up before setting out for the station, just like he always has. It’s not only the fact that this week—and never mind all those other weeks—it might work. He’s not exactly a nobody, and he likes to keep up appearances. People worry about him too much, otherwise.So he’s all freshly turned out, in his smartest shirt with his hair neatly combed, and there’s still plenty of it left, thanks very much. And seeing as it’s Thursday, he doesn’t check to see if his table is free, like he might if he were stopping by just to say hello, because of course it will be free, except…except…Except someone’s sitting there, watching him walk in.And it’s not Keiji (it can never be Keiji), so why the hell hasn’t anyone asked them to move?
Option Two is going back to when the mistake happened—to when the pieces were so nearly all put right, and shuffling one more person over to where they ought to have been all along.
But Option Two is as impossible as Option One would have been cruel. Reality is still unstable enough that to do so risks it all unravelling again, or at the very least, risks years of further shoring up which no one can afford to do. There’s still so much to repair. Still so many holes to patch and loose ends to chase. A lifetime of lifetimes will be needed to fix it all, and even then it will never be perfect. There will always be scars.
Nothing this broken can ever be restored to what it was.
But it can still be repaired, cracks filled with gold and polished smooth once more.
They still have Option Three.
The agent never gives their name, and assures him that their appearance is an illusory one, designed to cause a minimum of attention and distress. They are agents outside of reality, after all. Their true face and voice might cause considerable alarm.Keiji asks what this is about. Elsewhere, unaware of the parallel, Koutarou has a similar question.The agent says nothing, but slides an envelope across the table, watching expressionlessly as it is opened. What look like two slides are pulled out. Translucent, almost identical pictures depicting a man sat alone at a table in the restaurant.But when they are laid one atop the other they show two , mirrored on either side, hands overlapped in the centre.“We have an offer,” the agent says, providing a much needed handkerchief. “It’s something of a unique one.”
Option Three is against the rules, strictly speaking. Enough people have been displaced from reality. There aren’t supposed to be any more. They aren’t supposed to be dragging anyone else into this mess outside time, much less tasking innocent bystanders with the work of picking up the pieces.
But if it comes right down to it, sometimes innocent bystanders are involved, whether anyone likes it or not. Not to mention, with such a vast, measureless mess to sift and sort and put back together, they could use all the help they can get.
There are perks of course—existing outside of time does a wonder for the body. The years simply fall right off again. And it comes with a generous amount of leave, to be taken anywhere, anywhen. The good thing about time travel is that it’s pretty flexible in that regard.
It happens on a Thursday.Keiji is on the subway, fiddling nervously with his fingers. Koutarou is on the train, standing by the door and looking up every half second to see if it’s his stop yet. In one Tokyo, a table remains empty.In another, both chairs are full.