Despite Everything, There Was Still Love

“You know,” Mr Date’s speech is surprisingly smooth, despite the thick stench of alcohol in his breath. He’s never been one to trip over his tongue when drunk. “I think the real tragedy of this is that she did love me.”

You fiddle with your glass on the counter. Cream soda; you don’t drink anymore (you have never started drinking in the first place would say Tama if she weren’t charging, which feels like a false statement, but god knows you are terrible at distinguishing what is real from what isn’t.) “Did you… not love her back?”

“Oh, I did, Ryuki. Fuck, I do, Ryuki.” He says this with so much feeling, it makes Ryuki’s heart ache (realistically, it makes his heart aches because listening to your crush pining after someone else, but this is not about you and you might be an enormous piece of shit but fuck, you’re trying.) “I love her and she loves me, and that was not enough.”

He takes a swing off his glass. Usually, Mr Date is a happy drunk. He’s a pillar of stability even during Ryuki’s worst psychotic episodes (dissociative, not psychotic, Tama would normally chip in. Ryuki still isn’t sure about that one. This whole world feels like a psychotic episode sometimes.)

“It’s just- she loved Falco, you know? She loved Hayato Yagyuu. She loved the man who kissed her at the shrine and made okonomiyaki with her daughter.” His voice is uncharacteristically quiet. While he may not be slurring, his volume control is chipping away with each glass. “But Falco is dead. He died years ago in that chemical plant. I am Kaname Date. We haven things in common, but- I’m not him. I have his memories, but they don’t feel like mine. Do you understand?”

Do you? You, and your memories from events that never happened? Do you, you hovering between fives timelines and two lifetimes, you straddling the line between the warp and the weft?

“I can’t even stand his face. I look in the mirror and all I see is a stranger.” He pulls on his cheek, on the latex mask of a man long deceased. “This is the face of the man who killed her best friend. She hates it from the bottom of her heart. But it’s the only one that doesn’t make me want to claw my skin off.”

You get it. You have spent a decade flinching at your own reflection. It always feels like your brother is peering at you, weighting your endless sins against what little good you’ve managed to bring into this world. (Sometimes, you think it would have been better if he’d been the one to survive.)

Mr Date shakes his head. The movement is sluggish, his eye is unfocused. “It could have never worked.” His body tilts to the side and he lays his head on your shoulder. He is warm, warm, insanely warm, and you have felt like a moving corpse for so long. “It was doomed from the start.”

Slowly, you raise a hand to cradle his head. “But there was love,” you say, threading your fingers in his hair. You’re all too familiar with unavoidable tragedies. “It has to be worth something, right?”

Even if it didn’t change a thing. Even if it could have never changed a thing. You have to believe it mattered. If only in a small way. You have to believe it mattered anyways.

Comments