Except to Feel Remorse (Yuzuvier)

ii

-o-

Yuzuru woke to the incessant beeping of an alarm, which confused him. He hadn't set an alarm, he hadn't needed one in weeks. He must have accidentally turned an old one on the previous day. He reached towards his bedside table to turn it off and instead his hand rather painfully met the wall.

His eyes snapped open and he sprung into a sitting position. He looked around the room and took in his surroundings as the beeping became more and more urgent. Dumbly, he reached over to night table and turned off the alarm, which was coming from an alarm clock and not his iPod like he had assumed.

He knew exactly where he was and he didn't understand how he was here. It was his bedroom in his Toronto apartment which he had left behind for good when he had finally retired. Furthermore, while it was certainly his Canadian bedroom, it was barer than he remembered it being, barring after he had packed it all up to move back to Sendai.

He sat in bed stupidly until there was an urgent knock at his door. "Yuzu! I don't hear you getting up. I know you're jet lagged, but we don't want to be late for your first day!" his mother called from outside the door.

His first day...? He wasn't sure what she was talking about, but decided it was best to just go with it until he made sense of things. Was this a dream? It didn't feel like one, it was too sharp, too detailed. But he didn't know what else it could be.

"I'll be ready in a few minutes!" he replied, then squawked at the sound of his voice. It sounded... wrong. Younger. He was starting to have a bad feeling about things.

He got out of bed and stumbled his way through a familiar, if old, routine. He got dressed in clothes he half remembered and was ready to leave fifteen minutes later.

"Sorry, Yuzu, but there's no time for breakfast anymore. We need to leave now or we'll miss the bus," his mother told him when he emerged from his bedroom. He paused. Didn't they have a car?

His mother seemed to mistake his disorientation for nerves. "It will be alright. Orser-san sounded very nice when we spoke to him on the phone, and you met him briefly back in Japan. I'm sure he'll be a wonderful coach for you."

Yuzuru could do nothing but nod dumbly as he tried to process the implications of what his mother said.

Somehow he was back in Toronto in May of 2012, and it was his first day as the student of Brian Orser.

He spent the trip to the club in deep thought. His mother paused to check the directions when it came time to transfer buses, but Yuzuru was familiar with the route and led her along without even thinking about it. It had been a long time since he took public transit to the club, but he had done it often enough during those early days that it was burned into his memory.

Did he travel back in time? It certainly seemed like he did, but that was impossible, wasn't it? Maybe it was a dream. Or maybe everything else—training with Javi, competing, winning—was the dream? No, that was impossible. When he first came to Toronto he could barely speak English, but now he could understand it very well, as evidenced by the conversations he overheard on the bus. (In the years since he had taken public transit in Canada, he had forgotten how noisy it was.)

He wasn't sure sure what was going on, he needed more data. Until then he would proceed as if this was real and he was actually in the past.

-o-

By the time he arrived at the club he had steeled himself, ready to meet Brian and Tracy and Javi for the first time (again?). If he really had time travelled, it had been well over a decade since he had done this, and the details of the meeting had long since faded from his memory. But Brian and Tracy were just as he remembered them, warm and welcoming and ready to make a plan for him.