tenipuri_xp | RP Log: The brothers Kisarazu~

Date: 07 March 07
Rating: G
Summary: The twins meet and figure out kinda what happened...

Kisarazu Ryou was the eldest of a set of identical twins.

Born in Chiiba.

And missing for the past two years.

The background checks that Oshitari had had run over the past few days had confirmed it, though when he'd handed Ryou the file of information a simple search had dug it earlier that morning, it had felt surreal. It still did. Not that the elder mutant hadn't offered to run the check before; he had…and Ryou had refused. It was just a name, after all, and without the certainty that the name he had was even his own, it had seemed more sensible to not dwell on it. Or to not attract attention to the fact that he had and used it, should it truly not be his.

But then, he hadn't known that people might be looking for him.

Which explained why he sat up a bit straighter when the car he rode in slowed near the entrance to a park. It was twilight, the winter sky was indigo and the evening was cool as he pushed open the car door. "I'll probably be done…maybe in an hour?" The man in the front, one of Oshitari's drivers, nodded his acknowledgment as Ryou slipped out of the car. "I'll call," Ryou added -- though really, that was understood.

Just as if he didn't call, the man would come for him.

Car door slammed behind him, Ryou did a brief mental check as he entered the gates to the park. He had his cell phone, dampener on one wrist (and turned on), an image inducer tucked in the pocket of his heavy wool coat, and his wallet, complete with money, and notes on who he was and who to call if he couldn't find his way back to where he lived. The only thing he needed now, he thought, as he found a bench just off the main path to settle down, was his supposed twin.

Atsushi tried not to rush as he moved through the park. As much as he wanted to be sprinting, he really couldn't afford to draw attention to himself; especially not when he was billowing smoke from the top and bottom of his long, high collared coat. He had been able to pull the smoke closer to his skin, but the effort was putting a bit of a strain on him. Pretty soon it would start slipping from his control and the smoke would leak out until it clouded around him - like usual.

He moved the hood of his pullover so that it shadowed his face and concentrated on letting his smoke billow out that way. It moved easier, clinging to the motion instead of trying to lie dormant under his clothes. In an attempt to distract from his mutation, Atsushi lit a cigarette and would pretend to smoke it every so often. He never really inhaled, however, since he privately thought that he had enough smoke to last him a lifetime.

Atsushi was starting to get a little nervous, seeing as he had entered one side of the park path and was nearing the other. A bench was near the end, with a figure sitting on it. Atsushi's heart leapt and a dark cloud swooshed out of one sleeve. He swore quietly to himself and stopped, slowly pulling it back in. When he was sure that he had it under control, he approached the boy whose face had become burned into his mind.

"Um...hello?" Cigarette burning in one hand, he pushed back his hood with the other, so his face could be seen. "Kisarazu Ryou?"

Ryou sat slumped on the nearest park bench, his gloved fingers -- protected against the cold, and not his powers, for a change -- twining one hank of hair. His stomach was clenched tight, knotted up enough that he'd skipped having an evening meal for lack of appetite. He was starting to regret that, but it wasn't like he hadn't gone hungry before.

It just made the agitated flutter of his insides feel all the more pronounced and twisted.

And waiting? Waiting wasn't helping, though it was his own fault for being early. But he'd been too wound up to do anything; his homework had been cast aside, training forgotten (Kamio had excused him anyway -- and then asked why the hell he thought he needed to be excused), and there had been nothing on television that had held his attention. Instead, he'd kept drifting back to the paperwork Oshitari had provided him. The paperwork he should have brought with him, he thought, with a small frown, though he'd already read it several times. One more time wasn't going to make the scattering of facts about who Kisarazu Ryou had been any more tangible to him.

Tugging lightly as his own hair, Ryou's eyes snapped up at the sound of his name. "Ah, yea-" he started, then hesistated as the young man who had addressed him slide a hood from his head. Ryou felt his throat tighten a margin more.

"You...you must be Kisarazu Atsushi?"

It was surreal. It was so, so surreal. "Ah, yes," his breath caught in his throat as he decided what to say. He had so many things he wanted to get out, but his mind was having trouble choosing which ones. "Th..thank you for coming to meet me. I wasn't sure you were going to." He debated on whether or not to pull out the envelope he had brought with him and decided it was too soon, yet. Sit down on the bench? Maybe not... Meeting someone with your face probably didn't warrant close quarters right away.

'But I want to hug him or something,' Atsushi mused silently. He'd been incomplete and mostly empty for far too long - maybe this was something that was supposed to fill him up again. Right now all he was filled with was smoke and scattered heartbeat.

He reached out to lightly touch Ryou's hair. "I was starting to think you were gone, too, you know."

"Yeah...well." Ryou tipped his head away from the other teen's hand as it grazed his hair and shrugged. "I wasn't sure I was going to come either," he admitted. But he'd been curious from the moment the other had introduced himself over the internet; the file Oshitari had given him had only peaked that curiousity more. And now, looking up at a face that was -- sans glasses and shorter hair -- identical to him own?

"This is weird," Ryou finally decided, voice soft. He bit his lower lip, canting his head further to the side, then repeated, "Gone? Like...dead?"

"Well...maybe," Atsushi said, taking a step back. He linked his hands behind his back and let the smoke slip slightly from his sleeves. "We didn't know if you were dead or not. Didn't know where you went. I didn't remember a lot of things, let alone my elder brother." He half-smiled, apologetically. "Um...what...happened? Do you know?"

Ryou frowned and glanced away, the anxious knot in his gut twisting harder. "I...might," he sighed, shifting and slumping back down on the bench. His arms crossed over his chest, fingers going back to tug and twirl his hair. It was a nervous habit, and he was vaguely aware of the persona he'd garnered it from -- a young woman from the broadwalk, one of the first people he'd wittingly touched.

But it was so fully ingrained that it might as well have been his own mannerism.

"I don't know exactly what happened, but my powers," he started, then sighed and averted his gaze. "They...mess up my head when I touch other people. Something...I think something went wrong a couple of years ago, but I don't know what. Everything from before then is...gone."

Watching the other's body language, and considering Ryou's semi-explanation of his powers, Atsushi struggled with the instinct to comfort him. To curb the impulse, he sat down crosslegged and tried to ease his tension by letting some of the smoke roam free around him. "So...you don't remember anything." He felt slightly disappointed. "I mean, I woke up in a hospital a year and a half ago, but they found me on the beach six months before that... So maybe what happened to us is completely unrelated, since there wasn't any sign of you, where I was found."

"Mmm, no...vague bits and pieces, but nothing really before a couple of years ago," Ryou confessed, shifting his gaze to watch the other sit down with curls of smoke wisping around him. Then blinked. "A beach?" he repeated, stiffening. The word stirred memories that Ryou knew were his own.

"They found you on...a beach?" Ryou paused, swallowed and shook his head. "I...the first thing I remember was a beach. I...I had a hold of somone and there was something wrong with him. With me," he breathed.

"His mind was just...white. Empty. Mine was too."

"Do you know who it was?" Atsushi said, finally feeling like they were getting somewhere. "Did he have something to do with what happened to us?" He paused, confused. "Wait - if you were concious, then where did you go? Or did that guy take you somewhere?"

Ryou pursued his lips and shook his head. "...no. I...don't know who he was. I didn't check. I mean," he sighed. "This is where it gets hard to explain. I knew some stuff, like talking and moving. I knew that I was different from the way people are supposed to be. That I shouldn't have done that. So, I didn't...destroy, I guess. Everything. And yeah, he didn't do it. I did. That...it's part of my power. I take stuff out of other people's minds and absorb it into my own."

Atsushi smiled at him. "I didn't know much of anything when I woke up, except how to speak. I'm glad you knew stuff- that's good..."

The smoky-mutant sighed, frowning. "But, I...don't get it," he said, trying to put everything together. "I mean...something went wrong, you said, but that doesn't..." He put out the cigarette that he wasn't smoking anyway, on the sole of his boot. "There wasn't anyone there, Ryou. Just me. There wasn't anyone else there when I was found." He stopped, realizing what he said. "But, but I mean, it wasn't me that...I mean, how c- I mean." He stopped again, hating that he babble-stuttered when he was confused. "Ah-it wasn't...right?"

"I...I'm not sure."

It was a surprisingly honest answer, all things considered. Ryou slumped down further on the bench, one arm curled around his waist and the other hand balled up under his chin, gloved fingers rolled over his lips, and closed his eyes. The memories from back then were faint, indistinct; there was so much clutter in his head from that time, when his mind had latched onto everything to fill that blank space.

So many other memories overlaid over it, many not even his own.

And getting through them was the hard part. He sighed, shifted and pulled back the sleeve of his coat, exposing the wide band of metal and circuits around his wrist. It wasn't thick, thankfully, and didn't stand anymore than some oranate watch, but a small flick of his fingers exposed a tiny keypad. A series of punches later, and Ryou hissed through his teeth. His fingers and palms tingled sharply under the gloves, a physical protest to his powers being restained for so long (that was, he noted, not as bad as when he'd gone an entire month without them). Still, without the dampener turned on, the distinction between him and them solidified in his mind. Closing his eyes, Ryou worked his way through the heaviness of the captured memories.

Minutes passed, Ryou's eyes closed and burrows furrowed in concentration. He hated this part, always, but slowly the details of that day came back into sharpness. The brightness of the sun. The sound of waves on the beach. And, more slowly, the first blurry blinks of his eyes, unfocused and...moist? He crinkled his nose, pursued his lips tight and followed the strain to the first clearest image of that other face.

It looked...like his own.

Dark eyes flew open, that memory shoved back under and behind the rest of the mental clutter, and Ryou stiffened, gasped. He...that had been...no. It couldn't have been.

Blinking and breathing in shallow pants, Ryou glanced over at the teen seated on the ground before him. "Did...did you used to have longer hair?"

"I...I used to," Atsushi said, thinking back on the photos that were snugly in his pocket. "I've kept it moderately short since I've woke up, though." He stared up at his brother and tried to see past the pained expression. "Why?" He knew the expression that he had seen on Ryou's face - it turned inward and sought something lost between layers of confusion and black spaces of emptiness. Atsushi had seen it on his own face, many times when he would see himself in the mirror.

He shifted on the ground, uncomfortable under his brother's gaze, and hated that he somehow knew that reaching out to comfort Ryou was not an option. He would have to find another way to do so.

Things were starting to fall into place. Ryou's gaze flitted from the young man seated on the ground to the gravel of the path itself, wide and unseeing. If the other's hair had been longer then...

He'd had a hold of...his brother?

"Oh...oh god," Ryou whispered. "You...I...it was you? I...I took from you?"

Atsushi frowned slightly, a ghost of a smile lingering unfeelingly at the corner of his mouth.

"It was...me?" His voice failed him. He wanted to look away from Ryou, but at the same time, he didn't want to miss something...even the horrified recognition glimmering back at him. "You...took..."

"Oh...."

It had been an unspoken rule that he not look into the lives of those people he'd wiped completely. Not after he'd gotten what he needed, because there were some things Ryou didn't want to think about in regards to his powers.

The aftermath, especially.

He had his own experiences with it, after all; the confusion, the lingering emptiness and the vague sense of the loss of something vital to him. Even with new memories layering into place, those feelings seemed to always cycle back to surface when he least expected them. Nothing could quiet them. Least of now, eyes still wide and gaze fixated on the twin seated on the ground.

The twin who's memories he'd erased. Ryou swallowed and tore his eyes away from the other, shifting uncomfortablely. "I-I think I should...go," he decided, standing up from the bench.

"W-wait!" Atsushi stood as well, his smoke unfurling. He had given up on trying to compress his powers, and now it was filling the air around him. "I mean, will I - will you still talk to me?" He bit his lip, suddenly realizing that this was perhaps a foolish request.

It seemed perfectly reasonable to Ryou that the other wouldn't want to speak to him, not after learning this. And there was no other logical conclusion that the long-haired mutant could draw. The beach. The amnesia. The familiar face that had drifted into his memories.

They all fit together now. And only one explanation made any sense.

Still, Ryou came to an abrupt halt, half-spinning to look at the other over his shoulder as smoke clouded around him. Dark eyes were wide, surprised. "Why would you want to talk to--" he started, taking a step back. "I--my power erased your memory." Worse, Ryou didn't even have the faintest recollection of what he'd taken from the other.

Though it wasn't like he could give it back, even if he did.

"I know, but," Atsushi's mind scrambled for words, "I mean, I just foundyou. And if that's what happened, then that's what happened. I don't know why...and, you don't know why, so..." He dug in his pockets and pulled the envelope of pictures (and a few letters from their parents) to him.

"You probably don't want anything to do with me, since...what happened, but I don't want to have a brother that I can't talk to, or be with or anything because of something we can't remember and could have been just an accident." He held the envelope out to his twin, worried that he was already losing him within mere days of just finding him. "Please...just think about it."

Stunned, Ryou just stared at the other for a moment, mouth open and confused. "Y-you mean, you don't hate me for..." he started, before clamping his lips shut. Disbelief marred his features. Even Oshitari has been angry with him at first.

This was just...

It was weird.

"I...I don't know," he confessed, eyeing the enevelope carefully. "I thought...no one looked for me. My family didn't want me." Because that's how it was for mutant teenagers, right? He'd known plenty, in passing on the streets -- even Saeki and Kamio, hell. Oshitari's own mother wanted nothing to do with mutants, even though they lived with her. "This is...it's a lot and it's sudden and...I took...I just don't know."

Still, one gloved hand out and plucked the envelope from the other's fingers. "I guess I can do that, but...I can't promise anything. I could still...forget everything again."

Atsushi nodded, digging in his pockets for his cigarettes. “I know…and I could too, who knows…” He smiled at Ryou and bowed his head slightly. “I’m glad to have met with you, at any rate. Take care~” He put his hood back up and turned to leave.

“You know where to find me!” He called back with a wave, going down the path and back to the school.

‘I found him,’ Atsushi thought gleefully to himself, ‘I met him, I sawhim, he took the envelope, he’s ~~real~’~~