Chapter Text
Takemichi sits with his legs crossed and his back to the ledge of this 20-story building. He checks his phone: 2010, July 3rd. Back in the original timeline, back when his life hadn’t gone to shit, he always thought about how beautiful Tokyo was at night. Here he sits, in Chuo City. Just a train ride away from Shibuya, where it all started. Where it all ended.
It’s been two years since Mikey died. A year since he turned 20 and so he has a six pack of shitty, corner store beer beside him. It’s cheap, tastes flat, and doesn’t even get the job done. But none of that matters when he can feel the cool of the can numbing his fingers. It makes him think of sitting on the steps of that old shrine with Mikey and a soda in hand. Laughing. Talking. Alive.
It’s also been three years since Kisaki died, too. So, seeing Hanma walk out the roof door is no real surprise. He walks up and sits down beside him. He sets one leg up to rest his arm on and his other stretches out in front of them. Of course, he takes a can without asking.
“Did you come up here to kill yourself?” Hanma, ever the sensitive guy, opens.
Takemichi gives a shy smile, “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Well, whenever you do- tell me. I’ll have to join you.” Hanma shifts through his suit pocket and takes out a pack of cigarettes. He always seems to be far better dressed than most. Blood money will do that for you, Takemichi supposes. He takes out an extra cigarette and wordlessly offers it up to the man beside him. As he takes the cigarette, he sees “Sin” and as Hanma moves to light it, he sees “Punishment.” He wonders if He does it on purpose. Maybe he read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Hanma is an enigma who exists simply to observe the chaos he’s a part of, an enigma Takemichi never figured out. Takemichi takes a drag and holds it; lets it burn his lungs and throat and then exhales. He thinks smoke is an odd sort of beauty. Maybe they’ll cremate him.
“Humor me, Hanma.”
“Why not?” He shrugs as he answers, more focused on his cigarette than with Takemichi.
“Why Sin and Punishment?”
“Do you believe in God?” He asks.
What a loaded question. After the time leaping, the fighting, the death? He’s been through things that most likely no other living being on the planet will ever have the misfortune of experiencing. If God does exist, he’s a sadistic fuck who Takemichi expects to see laughing at him in whatever mockery of an afterlife he’ll be met with. He takes another drag.
“I guess.” He says.
“People, by God’s design, are made to sin. We are, from birth, susceptible to all the evils of the mortal realm. We do it without thinking. We indulge in greed, lust, wrath- anything and everything simply because it was there for us to take. As Eve with the forbidden fruit, we will all fall to Sin,” He lifts to corresponding hand for Takemichi to see, “And then are given Punishment,” Once again, a hand goes up, “God made us to Sin and yet gave us Punishment anyway. I think we, ourselves, might be Sin and so we are our own Punishment.”
“Huh,” Takemichi starts, “Never took you for one of those hardcore Christians.”
“I’m an atheist.” Hanma grins and Takemichi can’t help but let out a surprised laugh.
Here, Takemichi sits with Hanma with their backs to a 20 story drop. The cold of beer cans digging into their hands and the smoke in their lungs burning in that pleasant way only they know in their grief. They’re here. Laughing. Talking. Alive.
If he could bring himself to really hate anything anymore, he may have hated this.
“I’ve decided.” Takemichi takes the last drag of his cigarette before putting it out in his still full beer can. He stands. Hanma looks up at him. Without answering he moves to follow. Takemichi steps onto the edge of the building and Hanma steps next to him.
“If you don’t believe in an afterlife,” Takemichi starts, “Why kill yourself? Kisaki won’t be there.”
“I would rather be nothing with him, than be anything without him.”
And suddenly Takemichi thinks, for a second, that he might have finally figured out the enigma of Hanma Shuji. He’s a man in love. A man in grief. Him and Takemichi may be one in the same, if just for this moment.
“After everything, this isn’t how I thought I’d go.” Hanma said.
“How did you want to go?” Takemichi asks.
“Hand in hand with a love of mine.”
Takemichi can picture it. Him and Mikey; Hanma and Kisaki.
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Humor me, Takemichi.” Hanma says. They're still on the ledge, the wind whipping at their hair and clothes.
“Why not?” Takemichi smiles and Hanma chuckles.
“Hold my hand?” And it’s not the same, but Takemichi does.
They’re starting to sway; Back and forth. Playing at death's door.
“You know,” Hanma says, “I don’t even know if this will actually kill me.”
“It’s a 20 story drop, Hanma. It’d kill anyone.” Takemichi shoots back.
Hanma hums in vague agreement, “Yeah well, death didn’t take me the first time.”
They’re starting to tip over.
“First time?”
Hanma looks at him as they start to fall, “The first timeline.”
They’re falling, but that’s not the reason Takemichi's eyes widened, “You're a time leaper, too?”
Hanma has no time to answer as they reach the end of this timeline.
The sound of their skulls cracking onto the flat ground will haunt both of them for the rest of their continued existence. Of which, is longer than either of them imagined or wanted.
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Takemichi wakes up with a pained gasp with his world tilted on its axis.
His whole body aches with the phantom pain of gravity and poor decisions and his head is pounding with something akin to a bad hangover. As he gulps down as much air as he can, he tries to ground himself in the here and now. Which happens to be, once again, in his childhood bedroom crowded with the clothes and trinkets he managed to keep in his 16 years of life. Well- his past selves 16 years. The calendar by his desk reads: 2005, July 3rd.
Hanagaki Takemichi and Hanma Shuji just fell from a skyscraper in Chuo, Tokyo.
They died.
They didn’t time leap- They Died.
The panic seeps back into his being just as he’d calmed himself.
Hanma Shuji, the Reaper of Kakukicho, is a time traveler.