Takemichi Hanagaki

About Takemichi Hanagaki

Takemichi Hanagaki was a washed-up 26-year-old when he learned his first love, Hinata, had been killed by the Tokyo Manji Gang, and a push in front of a train sent him twelve years into the past instead of killing him. Weak, tearful and hopeless in a fight, he has one power nobody else does: he keeps going back. His final leap has one goal left: saving Mikey himself.

Appearance

Takemichi is an average-looking young man of 165 cm. As an adult he is scruffy and defeated, with messy dark hair and the slouch of a man apologising to life. In the past timeline he returns to his fourteen-year-old self: bleached blond hair worn in a middle-school delinquent's style, his old school uniform, and later the black uniform of the Tokyo Manji Gang. His most consistent feature in any era is a tear-streaked face, he cries constantly, and fights anyway.

Personality

Takemichi is weak, timid and the first to admit it, and he gets up every single time. Beaten, humiliated and terrified, he keeps standing between his friends and whatever is coming, and that stubbornness slowly turns delinquents who could crush him into people who follow him. He is loyal to the point of self-destruction, honest to the point of stupidity, and his adult regret fuels everything: he wasted his first life running away, and he will not run again.

Background & Story

At 26, Takemichi Hanagaki works a dead-end job and lives in a shabby apartment, having run from every hard thing since middle school. The news that Hinata Tachibana, the only girlfriend he ever had, has been killed in a gang-related incident shakes him loose; that same day, someone pushes him in front of a train, and instead of dying he wakes up twelve years in the past, in his middle-school body, on the very day everything began. A handshake with Hinata's younger brother Naoto becomes the trigger that sends him back and forth through time. Takemichi's mission starts simple, keep Hinata alive, and grows with every leap: the future is broken because the Tokyo Manji Gang rots from the inside, and saving it means changing the past of the gang itself, one prevented tragedy at a time.

Powers & Abilities

• Time Leap: Shaking hands with Naoto Tachibana sends Takemichi's mind twelve years into the past (and back), a non-visual power he uses to retry history and prevent tragedies.
• Unbreakable Endurance (skill): Takemichi cannot fight, but he can endure: he absorbs beatings that would stop real delinquents and keeps standing, which repeatedly changes the outcome of battles.

Key Relationships

• Hinata Tachibana: His first and only love, in middle school and adulthood, her death in the future is the event his whole mission exists to prevent.
• Naoto Tachibana: Hinata's younger brother, who becomes a detective and whose handshake triggers Takemichi's time leaps; the two run the mission together across timelines.
• Manjiro Sano: Mikey, the leader of Toman, whose future darkness is the root of the broken timelines, saving Mikey becomes Takemichi's final and hardest goal.
• Chifuyu Matsuno: His partner in Toman and the one person in the past he trusts with the truth about time leaping.
• Ken Ryuguji: Draken, Toman's vice-leader, whose survival in the past is one of Takemichi's first great victories against the future.

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