Chapter Text
2022
Gakushuu is going to be a college dropout.
"I don't need to do this," Gakushuu mumbles to himself like it's going to be true the more he repeats it. In front of him are bits and pieces of his latest project, his thesis and scholarship balancing on these wires and circuitry on his desk, threatening to upend all his work for the past year.
"I'm a business student," Gakushuu says, "I had prospects. I don't need to be here." And he does, but he is. If Gakushuu could go back in time, he would smack his younger self in the face. "I should just take two degrees in business and electrical engineering," Gakushuu parrots in a stupid falsetto of his own voice, there's no one around him to hear him ridicule himself anyways. "How hard could it be? It makes sense to run a tech startup with both a business and an engineering degree, right? You can take after both your parents!"
"Bullshit," Gakushuu says. "You can't handle shit." He jabs an accusing finger at his own reflection on the table, who glares back with equal ferocity. If he was to be fair Gakushuu would say he's a little hard on himself, he's been acing his classes thus far and keeping a stellar GPA, but setting aside his engineering thesis for his business dissertation is coming to bite him in the ass. He runs his hands through his hair and stares again at the mess of parts on his table.
"I should do something else," Gakushuu says. He pauses. "I should make tea."
He draws a cup on his notes, with a little tea bag label sticking out the side of it, and snickers to himself. He draws little steam squiggles wafting from the cup. Next to it is a diagram of the Gakushuu’s thesis project. It was, theoretically, perfect and innovative and revolutionary, but putting it on his workstation showed him that he was simply recreating a completely ordinary project that had been done hundreds of times before.
Sure, he wouldn't fail, and if he twisted his words enough he might scrape past with a B, but his professors were surely smart enough to catch all the crap he would be writing. He wouldn't get an A. Gakushuu chews on his lower lip.
"A time machine to smack my younger self for choosing this ridiculous career path," Gakushuu says.
He pauses. Looks at the mess of parts on his table, at his scratchpad, at the drawing of tea. He stands up and makes himself a cup of green tea in the kitchenette - something nice and Japanese, he may be a little homesick, not that he'd admit - and then sits back down, and nibbles on the end of his pen. A terrible habit.
"Fuck it," Gakushuu says. Theoretical time travel. The most brilliant theses were always the riskiest ones, anyways.
The Feasibility and Logistics of Nonlinear Time Travel is drafted in a week and a half. It's 53 pages long, written in a mixture of lined paper, dotted paper and what seems to be some art student's sketchbooks with considerable effort taken to write around the doodles. It's stained at the edges with tea and coffee and powdered sugar, bound together with binder clips, smells faintly of cocoa butter and avocado.
"I'm dropping out of college," Gakushuu says.
"You are not dropping out of college," Karma says, with as much affection as one could treat a stray dog with through the laptop screen. He has a book open in his lap and Gakushuu can see not only highlighting but neat annotations within the margins. Someone between the two of them has their life together and never once did Gakushuu imagine that person wasn't him.
"I haven't slept in 3 days," Gakushuu says. "I'm on so much caffeine I could die. I took acid yesterday and drew half my circuit diagrams in crayon."
Karma scrutinizes him from his side of the screen. "Take a shower," he says, with the voice Gakushuu could never argue with no matter how much he tried to. "A long, hot one. Then sleep for at least 12 hours."
"Kay," Gakushuu says obediently. His first instinct, finishing his last full stop, had been to instantly call Karma and rant about his life. Timezones were inappropriate for frequent correspondence but it was 3 in the morning for Gakushuu, anyways, so sometime afternoon for Karma. He's sleep deprived but soon he's sleep deprived and clean, and finds himself snuggled up to his bolster and falling asleep to Karma's voice in his ear.
When Gakushuu wakes up, it's 1 in the afternoon the next day and food seemed like the world's best idea. After that his thesis started seeming like the world's worst, even if three days ago he'd been high out of his mind and euphoric over the plausibility of drop-kicking his overambitious 18 year old self on the face. Now it seems out of a science fiction novel that even a publisher would reject, and even the crayons he used was subpar. Bright yellows on white? Navy blue on dark construction paper? High Gakushuu loved to fuck with him.
Sober Gakushuu wished he had hindsight. He stuffs his crappy thesis into his bag and heads back over to the labs, to see that yet again no one else is here - of course not, everyone normal and taking single degrees are out enjoying summer break, not rushing their final year projects for both their majors. He squints at the mess on his desk, spilling over to his two neighbors' who, from what he could remember, were in touristy Hollywood trying to get a glimpse of Angelina Jolie's backyard and at his girlfriend's in Ohio respectively. Gakushuu sifts through the mess, sorts out the trash from the possibly-legit notes and from...whatever that was... another mess of circuitry that didn't look like Gakushuu's abandoned project nor anyone else's leftovers, which means either someone had been breaking in and leaving miscellaneous electronic parts at his desk or high-Gakushuu had brilliant ideas of his own and attempted to implement them.
Gakushuu sighs. He had a total blackout, as far as he knew - he'd popped the pills in the evening two days ago to pull an all nighter and came to in his own dorm room yesterday, a stack of papers on his desk marked COMPLETED with his own shitty handwriting in red pen. Technically while he didn't remember a thing, he got the job done. He hadn't had the courage to read it from cover to cover yet, but he'll have to get around to it.
For now he picks up high-Gakushuu's electronic creation. It's hastily duct-taped together, but it doesn't fall apart when Gakushuu unpeels it, so he wonders about the secondary aesthetics of the tape. It's a little device of some sort and a quick scan of the area drops no possible hints so as to what it might be, Gakushuu flips through his thesis but nothing comes up.
"Huh," Gakushuu says. He adjusts his bag and sits back down. "Lets see what you got, high-me," he says, and flicks the one switch the device offers.
Predictably, nothing happens. Gakushuu snorts and turns it over in his arms. "At least you look like I had fun," he murmurs, but it doesn't inspire any confidence in the quality of the rest of his work. He balances the papers on a knee the device on another, wonders if he should make himself another cup of tea, flips a page, and immediately passes out.