"Izuna!!"

I dropped my gym bag on the ground, calling up the stairs. Many of my friends had told me going home to their parents as adults immediately made them find back to their old ways; of their mothers taking care of them, of their fathers being protective, of the family cooking and doing the laundry. I'd never felt that way. Coming home made me feel like a guest, but not at all in a bad way because I was a very welcome guest. Now I came home, and figured me and Izuna would have a few hours together playing video games together or just talking before mother came home from badminton, and father came home from work.

"IZUNA!!"

I knew it was pointless; she was probably blasting Red Hot Chili Peppers in her earphones. I went to the kitchen to get a protein bar from the fridge, and then saw something on the kitchen table.

Oh!!

On there was the letter from the hospital offering Izuna time for facial feminisation surgery after my phone call with the hospital two days ago. Our country was great like that, offering free gender confirming surgery. And now, Izuna must've read it!

Something's wrong...

It wasn't a thought of intuition but rather a fast puzzling together of little snippets of information in my mind that I didn't quite dare to finish. For example, Izuna was terrible at opening letters, and the opened envelope next to the paper had been opened very neatly. And our mother would never open a letter addressed to anyone but herself (not even bills addressed to our father), so it hadn't been opened by any of them. Also, I knew Izuna, and I knew that if Izuna had seen this, she would've brought it with her to her room. Ice cold dread clenched at my heart, but I tried to calm myself. If he was home, I would've seen his shoes in the hallway.

"IZUNA!!"

I ran up the stairs. I knew it. Deep down, I knew it. But it still didn't prevent the scream emitted from my lips. I was unable to comprehend the scene in front of me, yet I screamed. I didn't recognise my own voice.

He hadn't taken his shoes off.

He was holding my five thousand Euro Sashimi knife I brought with me everywhere.

It was covered in blood.

He was looking down on her in her bed, unable to believe what he had done.

On his face were bruises and claw marks; Izuna had fought.

Izuna had fought but she had died. 

"Hi."

I turned round.

"Shit", I said.

He just smirked.

God, was I star-struck? I believed so. I had, of course, seen him cooking on television, awfully camera-shy but sometimes allowing himself to talk, smiling a crooked smile, awfully aware of the situation he was in.

He had that same crooked smile now and it made my knees melt.

"Shit, indeed", he said. "Fuck, you're hot in real life."

I almost died.

I met him for the first time at a party on the top of a skyscraper in New York. It was brimming over with famous culinary people. Tobirama slid a hand around my waist.

"Oy! I'm straight!"

Tobirama just burst out laughing.

"Of course you are."

Okay, he knew I wasn't.

He chatted me up. To my great shame, I ended up snuggled up next to him. We ended up making out, for HOURS until we were hot messes, our lips swollen, wet. We would've been fucking right there in the middle of the party hadn't it been for our clothes.

"Come cook for me", he murmured, voice hoarse from not having spoken for so long.

He didn't even try to get me home.

I accepted.

By then, I knew I'd do anything in the world this man asked of me. And that feeling never, ever went away until the day he died. 

It was raining.

Of course it did.

Paris had a way of listening to my mood, adapting its weather to match it. Sometimes, I was grateful for it, but sometimes, I wished it would choose a weather to balance my mood instead of enhancing it.

I stood next to Hashirama, holding an umbrella over us. He was crooking his arm through mine. In this situation, it felt awfully unfamiliar. I hated that. I hated that my love and safety felt so strange. The entire kitchen stood behind us, and Tom the lawyer, but few others. Tobirama's few friends and relatives had declined coming to the funeral where his urn would be set to rest, believing everything Merlin had said. His daughter wasn't there, either. 

We were too exhausted and felt too deprived to be upset about that.

I was so frustrated that I just didn't know. I didn't know whether he was there or not. I didn't know whether his soul was watching over us. You heard people say how certain they were if the person they'd lost was there with them, and sometimes even that they were absolutely sure they weren't. But even that would've been better than this. Because I had no idea, no idea at all whether Tobirama was there, with us, or somewhere completely else, or nowhere. I didn't feel his presence. I didn't feel his absence. I felt absolutely nothing and I hated it.

I knelt beside the urn, and before allowing myself to think about whether it was appropriate or not, I dug my hand into it, took the ashes between my fingers. I had expected a powder, like dust, but it felt more like sand.

"Madara..." It was Hashirama behind me.

This used to be a living, breathing thing, I thought about the ashes. A being that held me, that kissed me, that fucked me and loved me. Sometimes all at once. Now, there's only sand.

"Proteins", I remembered my chemistry teacher saying. "Denaturate once you heat them  Change their shape. But if you cool the protein down again, it won't go back to its original shape. Your fried breakfast egg won't liquify once cooled."

I was suddenly desperate to undo the burning, but just like proteins, I knew this process was irreversible. The grains of sand were what they were, would never become a human again. I started trembling. Hashirama immediately noticed. He had a way of noticing changes in my mood just by the shift of energy surrounding me. It was incredible to experience.

His touch finally made me break down in my desperation to piece the sand together to form Tobirama again, to find his soul and put it back in the sand so it became him, him, him. I wished I could build him back up again just like you built up a sand castle after it had been destroyed by the waves washing over the beach where you played. I didn't care how long it took; I would spend the rest of my life building that sand castle if it meant I could have ten seconds with him, ten seconds to apologise, to apologise profusely, to say I was wrong to treat him the way I did, that I had believed I had infinite time to stitch things back up and that it was stupid of me, that it was stupid of me to take him for granted in a way he'd never taken me for granted.

I would never find out how much our fight had to do with his decision to kill himself.

When nobody saw, I put the ashes I had picked up into my pocket.

Hashirama took my hand.

It wasn't enough anymore and he knew it and so did I. 

We lay in my bed, hand in hand. Hashirama was asleep next to me, breathing softly while lying on his back. Man could really sleep in any position. I smiled tenderly towards him, stroke his cheek. I could never sleep on my back like that.

I looked back up at the ceiling. I was suddenly desperate to get out of my suit; we hadn't changed since we came back to mine and it was getting uncomfortable. But I didn't want to move. I didn't want to move from this moment that was so tender. I believed that deep within, I knew that what we had was limited, and I didn't want to waste any time. Neither of us knew to which extent, or to what reason we would lose what we held so dearly. But we both felt it.

I turned to him, snuggled up against his chest. He put his arm around me in his sleep. It was a rare moment for us; I wouldn't let him do that, usually. I would only let Tobirama but he was dead, the only piece I had left of him being in the pocket of my black rain jacket that was in my hallway.

Suddenly, my phone rang. Or I don't know if it was sudden, to be honest; was there any other way for a phone to ring? Would the phone somehow warm you that it may, in fact, soon ring perhaps?

But the effect was shocking. One primitive part of me immediately shot up. It's Tobirama! I thought. It's Tobirama and I can apologise! Then I realised he was dead. It's someone phoning to say there's been a mistake. That he's actually not dead. Or that his death is reversible. It will be fine, we'll just go to the cemetery and tell them to dig up his urn.

Hashirama was stirring next to me. I picked up my phone.

"Hello?" I said, my voice trembling in hope.

How could I still feel hope? Maybe, I thought, hope was like ATP, the energy molecule in your body. Our biology teacher had once held up a tiny glass jar filled with the tiniest amount of water.

"This is the amount of ATP that is produced in the body each day. BUT..." He had shaken the bottle vigorously. "You don't have this much in your body. It's reused. ADP to ATP to ADP to ATP. This is the total amount. But the amount present at all times in your body is diminishable."

Maybe, hope was the same. You had a tiny amount but once you'd used it up, you could reproduced it. Maybe, the hole within me would never die because of this. The thought frightened me.

"Madara, it's..." The person cleared his throat. My heart froze to ice. "It's me. Your father. I would like to meet you."