Chapter Text
“Harry!” The lieutenant’s strained cry cuts across the encompassing noise of pale directly into your cerebral mantle. “Get closer, I don’t want to forget you!” There’s a ray of panic shining through the cracks in his usual composed self. He understands the situation, and it makes him afraid. Kim Kisturagi fears no mob boss nor mortal danger, but disintegrating into the great mint green void around them, becoming something that never existed—that drives an electric spike of adrenaline into his chest.
There’s an old man that’s also a young man that launches himself into your arms and locks on like a vice grip. You hold him and he feels small and sturdy and he snaps back into place—a 44 year old devastatingly beautiful human who you’d lay down in front of a tank for. Your partner and the fucking love of your life. Does he know that? Do you? Past and present are swirling and when he lifts his head from your chest to look you in the eye, you see him with two faces fuzzing back and forth like static. One, the anxious searching eyes of a man in peril (“Harry, stay with me.”), and the other plastered with a brilliant smile and few more crows feet (“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”) You know which is real (both), and you fight like hell to stay grounded as you both lock arms around waists and hands into jackets hard enough to hear fabric rip, and trudge through molasses in what you pray to anyone who may hear that this direction is the one that leads back to safety.