As Never Was

Chapter 1

Tea. 

Ripe Pu-erh, it must've been, from it's colour and scent.

He was holding a pot of ripe Pu-erh and pouring the dark liquid into a ceramic cup, lapped by a coaster he was vaguely familiar with, on a similarly, vaguely familiar marble countertop. Who was he kidding, he'd seen hundreds of marble countertops in his life, anything could look familiar to him at this point. So who was he kidding, again? How could it be familiar? 

It really did feel familiar though. 

He didn't register, too lost in his thoughts, when the cup was overfilled, pouring over the rim and soaking the coaster below. Only when the coaster was then brimming did he finally take notice and stopped pouring, the action itself felt somewhat engraved into his bones. Aghast, he set the teapot down on the counter and stared at the stained coaster long and hard, trying and failing at making a semblance of sense of what was happening. 

It had been freezing, and then it was burning before his world went dark. There was fire licking his skin, and the sharp prickling numbness in his limbs, the coldness along his back, and then there was the burning of his lungs, how the smoke had filled in through his nose, how he gasped from suffocation. It was freezing, it was burning, his mind was dizzy from blood loss, his lower body cramped from the lack of oxygen, eyes stung from smoke. He had died, he felt like he died, as if all the pain he'd ever felt in his life and more were combined in that one moment, that he was screaming in his head louder than the ringing that followed. 

"Shao Long! Keep your eyes open!" Someone had yelled, he couldn't really tell who. After all, he hadn't opened his eyes once after that. The smoke stung too much. 

He had died, he was sure of that. 

So why was he—

Shao Long dipped a finger into that irritatingly familiar cup, and into the dark liquid. Before he could realize what he was doing, it felt like his finger was being cut off from the heat, and he immediately drew pulled his finger out with a yelp, only for the cup to tip and spill its content all over the countertop. He hissed, and hissed again when the tea splashed onto the rest of his hand, effectively burning him. 

"Fuck." 

Fuck indeed. The pain was real, the tea was real, and his skin sure felt real. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't even a near-death hallucination. It wasn't even—

What the fuck, what the actual fuckity fuck! 

"Hey!" A rag appeared in his sight, covering the rapidly growing pool of tea on the counter. Then, there was a grip around his wrist, pulling him away from the crime scene, and towards the, the, oh, that was the tap. Why the hell did it look so familiar too? And the voice, he could have almost sworn that—

"I didn't take you for a clumsy person." Fuck. He knew who it was. 

Shintarou had a scowl on his face, the same scowl he wore when Shao Long last saw him on TV, during his thirty fourth birthday, the same scowl he wore during his coronation a few good years before, and definitely the one he wore everyday. Just, this may look a bit less threatening, with how slightly round cheeks and softer teenage look, and hah! Isn't that hilarious? The Japanese shoved his wrist over the tap, turning it on and Shao Long could barely notice the soothing coolness of the water over his skin. He was too preoccupied with ogling this much, much younger Shintarou wearing a uniform he hadn't seen in at least a decade, and that wasn't even the funniest thing there was to notice.