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It was December when Ash returned to him. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence, but it had been a while since Eiji had seen him.
It wasn’t really him, of course. A flash of a stranger’s blond hair, a familiar scent, and suddenly Ash would be standing there, just out of his reach. Always watching Eiji with the wry smile that he used to give before he teased him, but the quip never came.
He’d gotten used to ignoring these visions. Everyone said that was for the best. These kinds of things happened, sometimes, to people who had lost someone.
They were hallucinations, nothing more.
But there was something about this Ash that unnerved him. It was different from his previous delusions.
Whenever he saw Ash before, it was always in the form he’d died in. The same eighteen year old who occupied his photographs, young and vibrant, crystallized in time, while Eiji aged, waded through the time that was moving past him. This person had all of the same elements Eiji recognized in Ash, but he looked older, exactly the way Eiji might have imagined him looking now, in the times he’d allowed himself to fantasize about impossible things.
After Eiji left the gallery, Ash lingered a bit longer.
It occurred to him, only once the biting winter breeze hit his face - maybe Eiji hadn’t recognized him at all. The thought settled down into his gut, a heavy leaden ball, sinking him.
Ash could have picked Eiji out of a crowd without thought. Even with his face having thinned out, his hair grown long and unkempt, his spirit dampened with years, Ash could never have mistaken that soul for anyone else’s.
Maybe to Eiji, Ash was just another face in the crowd. Maybe he’d finally forgotten, after all these years.