The 2010 Timeline

Lore & Background

In the 2010 Timeline, Toman is not yet the feared organization that dominates Tokyo's delinquent scene. It is a small, loud, fiercely loyal crew of teenagers who paint their jackets, fight to protect their turf, and follow Mikey because he makes them feel like they matter. Takemichi, who in his adult life is a soft, unemployed man haunted by regret, is here a scrawny kid who has spent years being pushed around. His first days are defined by humiliation, and it is only through the chaotic, violent, oddly tender world of Toman that he begins to stand up straight.

The emotional core of this timeline is Hina. She is warm, stubborn, and the one person who saw Takemichi as more than a punching bag. Her presence gives the gang's rough edges a reason to soften, and her absence—when the Tengu's violence finds her—shatters the timeline's fragile optimism. Mikey's grief, Draken's rage, and Takemichi's desperate, failing attempts to outrun the attack all crystallize here into the wounds that will fester for twelve years.

What makes the 2010 Timeline distinct from later eras is its tonal contrast: it is the last period before the world hardens. Mikey has not yet 'blackened.' The friendships are still loud and unguarded. The violence, while real, is the violence of kids who believe they are protecting something pure. Once this timeline collapses, what remains in 2020 is the scar tissue—Toman as a monument to what was lost, and Mikey as a king who forgot why he was crowned.

In Their Own Story

The cherry blossoms were falling in strips of pink across the asphalt, and Takemichi could still taste the copper of blood from where a kid three years older than him had shoved his face into a drainage grate. He was fourteen. He was *here*. The jacket he was wearing—black, with a white kanji stitched crookedly on the back—was too big, and the collar itched, and Mikey was standing six feet away with that stupid, sun-bright grin, saying, 'You're with us now, right?' like it was a question and not a verdict.

Hina was waiting at the corner of the convenience store, her school bag slung over one shoulder, calling his name in that voice that still made his adult heart do something ugly and small. He wanted to run to her. He wanted to tell her everything—the tracks, the 2020, the way the world looked when you'd already lost it. Instead he just stood there, in the too-big jacket, watching her laugh at something off-screen, and felt the spring air hit his face like a slap.

Mikey clapped him on the shoulder. 'Come on, new kid. Bonten's got eyes on the south lot again.' And just like that, the golden hour was already bleeding at the edges, and Takemichi knew—knew in his bones, the way you know a storm is coming when the pressure drops—that he was going to lose her. Again. And this time, he was going to try to stop it.

Reader's Guide

TRIGGER & ARRIVAL: In 2020, an adult Takemichi is pushed onto a subway platform and killed. He wakes in his 14-year-old body in March 2010, disoriented and bleeding, in the same district where Toman operates. He is immediately drawn into the gang's orbit by Mikey, who claims him as a member despite his obvious weakness.

CENTRAL CONFLICT: Toman must hold its ground against the Bonten, a rival crew that has been encroaching on their territory. Simultaneously, the Tengu—a more organized and cruel gang—target Hina, Takemichi's childhood friend, in a violent attack that the 14-year-old Takemichi is physically incapable of preventing. The timeline's core tension is whether a bullied, powerless kid can outsmart a gang's violence to save the one person who made him feel human.

OUTCOME: Hina dies. Mikey is shattered. Toman survives but is forever marked. Takemichi, having failed, is flung forward to 2020 with the knowledge of what he lost and the desperate, burning need to go back and do it differently.

DIVERGENCE FROM MAIN: This timeline IS the main baseline. It is not a branch; it is the root. Every later alteration—Toman's rise, Mikey's blackening, the 2005 arc—diverges FROM this timeline's outcome. The cost of the change in later arcs is that the 2010 spring, with its cherry blossoms and too-big jackets, becomes a memory that no one can quite reach, no matter how many times Takemichi rewinds the clock.

Did You Know?

• The 2010 Timeline is the only era in the series where Mikey is consistently portrayed as open, protective, and emotionally accessible—before the cumulative grief of losing people hardens him into the distant, almost inhu
• Takemichi's physical weakness in this timeline is a deliberate narrative mirror: in 2020 he is a helpless adult, but here his helplessness is compounded by being a child, making his attempts to protect Hina feel almost i
• The Toman jacket Takemichi wears in 2010 is visibly ill-fitting and slightly damaged, a visual shorthand for how out of place he is in the world of delinquents—a detail that contrasts sharply with the tailored, authorita
• Hina's death in this timeline is the single emotional catalyst that defines Takemichi's adult personality in 2020: his passivity, his inability to act, and his desperate need to 'fix' the past all trace directly back to