Story: don't you let them tame you

Summary: A chance in time. ["No problem, short stuff," she says, and giggles so that her legs pull up towards her chest. "It's good to see you, Chiaki."]

Notes: AHHH. This is sort of majorly smutty liek whoa, FYI, because apparently I am incapable of writing about this pairing and not have them end up making out all over the place. Also blame the painting Poussière de Soleil by Jean Paul Riopelle, which inspired me all over the place.

Disclaimer: Nope.

When she wakes up and sees the seedling sitting on the pillow next to her, caught in the curve of a roll of paper, all she thinks is—bull shit, he did not just go there.

Just to be sure, this time, she bounces it off of her wrist a couple times before giving up and slamming it, hard, between the heel of her palm and the mottled cork of her kitchen counters. The lights explode around her, the familiar tick, tick, tick echoing in her ears, and everything slows to a pinpoint.

When she comes back to herself, there is a neatly lined 02 imprinted on her skin. She unrolls the paper, and reads the string of numbers, until a few of them stick out at her. 2957? Really?

Groaning and mumbling to herself about idiotic men and idiotic jobs and idiotic time jumps and friggin idiotic Saturday mornings, she lugs herself to the staircase at the bottom of the second story and uses a slingshot method to propel herself up the stairs. She hasn't done this in years, but midway up the fourth floor she gets back into the rhythm, so when she barrels through the door onto the roof and takes the leap off of the building, she feels seventeen again.

She feels slightly less like seveteen and more like fifty-seven when she rolls into a stacked pile of canvases. "Oomph," she groans, feet flung over her head, and thinks, Chiaki, I hate you.

"Hey."

She slowly unfurls herself, like a flower or a new print or a little old lady, and ends up splayed on the floor, at Chiaki's feet. He's smoking a cigarette, and the smoke plumes lazily downwards from her perspective, plunging into the thick metal floor of the ceiling.

"Hey," she says. "You are such a jerk."

"Yeah," he agrees, the cigarette on the corner of his lip bobbing like a wave. "I couldn't stay for long."

"Liar."

"Maybe."

Makoto sighs and rubs at her eyes with her wrist. When she looks, the tattoo on her wrist says 01. It would so serve him right if she just left. It is when she crawls to her feet that she realizes there isn't really anywhere she can take a leap from—Chiaki's studio (what she assumes is Chiaki's studio) is small and cramped and filled with canvases, on the walls and stacked in rows and piles on the floor, with a little clearing for a half-rolled futon.

The only light, dangling near a wall and a splotchily-filled canvas, throws most of his face into relief, and when she is finally standing, her knees popping with the effort, she has trouble making out the expression on his face. Shouldn't he be happy to see her?

"You are such a jerk," she says, and half-heartedly punches him in the chest. "I missed you." As she throws herself bodily at him, arms around his neck and head under his chin, she wonders when she became a child again, and when she stopped caring about her dignity—and, now that she mentions it, when she started caring about her dignity at all.

"Hey," he says again, but it's softer and he's dropped his cigarette and his palms are gentle against her back. "Hey."

"Hey yourself," she breathes.

He makes instant ramen over a little blue fluttering flame in a can—"Seriously, like 900 years in the future and you still have crappy ramen as your main food source?"—and digs out a pair of suspicious-looking chopsticks for her to use, and they hunker down in a bit of spare concrete space between something that might've been a landscape that Jackson Pollack threw up all over and a storm of traditional calligraphy characters.

"So," she says, sticking the half-cooked noodles into the back of her mouth where it's less likely that she will choke on them and die, "be honest—this is so illegal it's not even funny, isn't it?"

"Yep," he says.

"How illegal?" she asks.

"Very," he says. "Are you going to finish that?"

She gives him the rest of her ramen and leans back on her elbows. "You look like crap, Chiaki. No offense."

"Thanks," he says, with only a thin veneer of sarcasm. "It's been a bad couple of weeks, Makoto."

"That's okay," she says, even though something is warning her that this isn't going to go perfectly peachy, "that's cool, we can work something out—"

"Do you remember the painting?" he interrupts her.

She frowns. "Yeah, you know, vaguely I remember mention of some painting and how it was apparently your entire reason for existence and how I'm supposed to spend my entire freaking life making sure it survives to see you or you to see it or whatever."

"Yeah," he says, slurping down the last of her ramen. "That painting."

"What about it?" she asks, giving in against gravity and slumping onto the floor, hair creating a short, frizzy halo against the cold concrete. "You two living happily ever after?"

"I sort of," he pauses, and there is a crinkle and crunk of the pliable plastic of the ramen container. "I found it. Thanks, Makoto." There is a new sort of vulnerability in his voice, and it makes her soften at the edges.

"No problem, short stuff," she says, and giggles so that her legs pull up towards her chest. "It's good to see you, Chiaki."

He shows her a couple of his paintings before unearthing a bottle of something he calls sake (but which is definitely at least fourteen times more acidic and alcoholic than any sake Makoto has ever sampled, but whatever) underneath a nest of brushes, and they take swigs from the bottle as they move in circles. She convinces him to give her a "tour" of his newest piece, which is big and heavy with oil paints, taller than he is in places and exploding with colors from a center of white brilliance.

"Oh my god," breathes Makoto, whose usual tolerance for art is low at best, but there is something about it that catches in her stomach, and when she turns to look at Chiaki, he is staring at her, the lines around his mouth smoothed away but something Makoto hasn't seen in a long time.

"I kissed you once," he says.

"Oh, really?" she asks, aiming for a archly but falling somewhere amongst enthralled. "And I don't remember this because . . ."

"I leapt back in time," he says, looking forward and taking another drink. He offers her the bottle without looking at her. "It was a stupid thing to do, and you hit me in the head with a textbook. But it took you a couple seconds."

She takes the bottle, and chokes on a thick mouthful of alcohol.

"Wonderful," she mutters under her breath. "Trust me to screw it up royally."

"I don't have any books," he says, and she drops the bottle and he reaches for her face with fingertips that are stained yellow and red and gold, and under the dusty glow of the bare blub, he kisses her.

With his fingers trailing down her sides, she ends up wedged between him and the canvas, and she murmurs don't, we'll ruin it and he says we won't and her shoulderblades are sliding wetly against the linen as her heels press into his lower back, and when she throws back her head she gets splotches of blue and green in her hair, but she doesn't care about anything at the moment, let alone some paint—

Her feet are sticky with the remnants of the not-sake when she takes another look at the canvas. She can clearly see her back and her ass imprinted in the sea of white, and a smear that captures the flat of her feet and his hands (when she checks her thighs, their twins dot her skin in bright prints), the fingers clenching.

"Well," she says, raising her eyebrows and turning with a grin that is kind of debauched and she should so be ashamed, except the oil paint is drying in thick flakes along her skin and she is so happy (she missed him, the douche bag) that she doesn't want to think about what her poor parents would have to say about her having paint-soaked sex in a bunker in the future, but he is sitting with his head in his hands, slumped.

"Chiaki?"

"I am so sorry," he bites out, "but they told me anything—"

YOU HAVE SIXTY SECONDS.

The voice jolts Makoto like a shot, and she looks around for something—a speaker, a clue—but all she can see is Chiaki, fistfuls of black-dyed hair clumped together. "I stole the painting," he explains. "I'm going to get punished anyway, so I thought that I'd see you again, anything, just, they said I got one thing—"

THIRTY SECONDS.

"I love you, Makoto," he says. He stands suddenly, and traps her in his arms before she can protest or move from the numbness that is cluttered around her. "If there were a way to fix this, I would."

TEN SECONDS.

He is shaking, and she barely has time to lift her hand and run it, gently, down his arm, and she is yanked backwards before she can push him away or pull him closer.

She calls in to work and begs off, and sits in a sort of fugue in her living room for a while, on the floor so she doesn't get oil paint on the furniture. Auntie Majo calls to check on her about their lunch date, and the calm voice on the answerphone is what jolts her awareness and, eventually, movement.

Her skirt is on backwards and her shirt is one button off, but the museum's night guard lets her in without any protest.

When she burns the painting, all she can think is—let this save him.

At home she peels off her clothing and crawls into the shower. It takes four handfuls of bathwash and a much-abused bar of soap to get off the last of the oil paint, and she is bone-tired when she stumbles out into the steamy air of the bathroom, smelling like jasmine and mint.

And that's when she sees her wrist.

01.

So what does Makoto do with her one final leap?

(It's up to you.)