FIC FOR SCORCH66
For: scorch66
From: alienashi
Title: in parallel futures, in untold pasts
Pairings/Characters: Kame/Nakamaru
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mafia AU, quasi-dystopian, and er, some kind of angst (ymmv, but I'm afraid I might have overdone it?)
Notes: Dear scorch66, this is really awkward, because I didn't expect to get you in my first ever exchange, so I stalked a lot of the past fics written for you and tried to see if I could get some inspiration. But I failed hard, so this is what I came up with. I'm sorry if some parts seem disjointed, because about a tenth of the fic was written in pieces and the whole picture only came to me when this song accidentally came on shuffle.
Summary: The letter comes to him like a timebomb.
The letter comes to him like a timebomb, as usual. That's how things work in their society.
Tic-tic-tic. The ticking of the clock bothers him. There are about a thousand people around and in the mansion and still the giant clock in the middle of the hallway is the only thing he hears. Ten, nine, eight, seven seconds later and it'll be another day starting with a ghastly strike of the clock. It is known that the clock is majestic, evidence of The Famiglia's absolute power-all the kind of descriptions that basically say that humans must die before the clock is destroyed. Of course it bothers him; a countdown to death and who wants that?
Against his back, a heart beats. Steady and consistent, unlike his own.
He takes a palm in his and puts it close to his heart. Calm it, he asks. I can't pretend that everything is alright, I can't sleep because a lot of things bother me, all the thoughts, the clock, the fucking clock, why didn't someone make it stop? Inside his chest there is a drum, inside his brain there is a malfunctioning machine.
Dong-dong-dong. One day ends and another day starts, but when did hell begin?
First lesson was: questions are best left unanswered. Don't question the conventional, follow what you were told, your missions are your missions and that's it. Questions are not for people like you. You passed the aptitude test, you went through the initiation ritual, you're now accepted by us. We are your family, we are The Famiglia. Don't make such a confused face-but don't smile like you know everything either, we don't do smug here. Nod, agree, shout with all your hearts that Boss's life is yours to protect. There, good boy.
17 was such a delicate age to be told of things like this.
He came closest to death on a mission to destroy the stronghold of the other Mafia group, [name withheld], when someone, [name also withheld], cut the wrong wire of the bomb and there was just a meagre ten minutes or so to figure how things worked.
10 minutes left and someone took out their bomb specialist. Run, take the bomb with you, run! Someone spotted them, it was now all or nothing. The timer has started running.
9 minutes left, they found a hiding spot but the timer was moving fast.
7 minutes left, their phones lost connection with the HQ.
5, 4 minutes, still no one knew what would happen if they cut the other wire.
3, 2, someone said, God help us all, but another person said, God doesn't exist.
1, and all four of them had their hearts beat in a singular rhythm.
20 second left and the timer stopped.
Thank goodness. 19 would have been a pretty young age to die at.
Second lesson was: The Boss > you, no matter who, even if his name sounds Japanese, sounding out of place in an Italian Mafia group.
They call it lesson, but it's actually the law that supercedes actual law.
Code Name: Yuichi.
Real Name: [withheld]
Chosen precisely because it was so plain, nobody would ever suspect.
The Boss is said to be a man of extraordinary charisma, with a glare so powerful that it could melt glaciers. The Famiglia has its own hierarchy, tens of thousands of men all around the world segregated to ten ranks and only Rank #1 members, a measly ten of them, are allowed to see the Boss's face in his eyes.The rest has to learn how to fear, that's why the rest have to wait. If they don't fear the boss, his mentor once said, how are they going to make the rest of the society fear him? Fear breeds more fear, it's how the Famiglia works. Remember your first lesson, then remember your second lesson. That's why there's not a single picture of him around, not a single painting, he even once entertained that idea that The Boss might not even exist.
Wouldn't it be great if The Boss was literally just a figure, a hologram of those ten Rank #1 people because they were too cowardly to admit that The Famiglia was a global hoax, a fiction-all the history and hierarchies were just products of imagination perhaps? Plot Twist of The Century, it would be-actually more like some kind of hope that the world is less shitty than it seems to be. A man can dream.
That's why, when Yuichi first meets Kame, it's an encounter between a clumsy baseball boy and a bespectacled school librarian.
Code Name: Yuichi
Skills Possessed: Disguise, Concealment, Memory Power, Resourcefulness
Years of Training: Six
Skills Acquired: Secrecy, Code Deciphering, Strategic Diversions, Intermediate Computer Hacking
Missions Completed: 4 S-Class, 14 A-Class, 23 B-Class, 55 C-Class
Old Rank: #7
New Rank: #3
Dong-tic-tic-tic. Gone are the twelve strikes of midnight and the clock is back to ticking.
And hand in his with a layer of sweat between their palms; a chest against his back and his own spine between their two hearts. Signs of life. He's alive, he thinks. He has a pulse and he has heartbeats, blood and flesh he could touch. He could feel-gentle lips following the contour of his neck, fingers on his ribs, hair on his shoulder, two bodies pressing against each other, two minds trying to read each other, two hearts trying to reach each other.
They say it could be love.
“Stay with me, Yuichi.”
It must be lonely at the top, he once thought while observing the shadows of The Boss. It looks like The Boss is even younger than he had imagined (not surprising, when he goes back to think about it, because The Inheritance Ceremony was held ten years ago when The Boss was just 14).
From where he could see, The Boss carried his youth far too well. Too charismatic for people to look away (when they are allowed to, that is), too initimidating for them to observe for too long, so they could only marvel and admire, propagating fables as they do.
“Please sit down,” The Boss says. The room is vast and exquisitely decorated with plain but clear colours, very Japanese. He had imagined the entire headquarters mansion to be exclusively western-looking, but it seemed as though only the tea room was purposely designed in Japanese style. “Your first time here?”
“Yes,” he replies, unsure what else should be said. The shaking in his hand is no joke-that's The Boss there in front of him and he's a miserable Rank #3 member, at most probably only allowed to be looking at The Bosss chest, and he's now being invited to sit. Being invited to be an equal.
“You can look at me, you know?”
More than equal perhaps. What is The Boss thinking? Is this yet another test?
“We are friends, right?”
It startles him that The Boss still remembered the contents of a conversation he had with an insignificant university student.
“Here, we are friends, Yuichi,” and The Boss turns into Kame, that boy whose rouge baseball once hit his head, “just here.”
He sits down, at last, and raises his head to look at him.
“Thank you for the tea,” he says, and bows to take a tea cup to his lips.
It's delicious.
Whenever blood is spilled, it's usually a cause of celebration. But that day, it was execution.
The Famiglia named three treasons worthy of death: betrayal, cowardice, and mission failure. The man to be executed was guilty of betrayal.
The Famiglia also named three types of betrayal: spying for the government, being loyal to someone other than The Boss, and affiliating with other Mafia groups. The man to be executed was caught spying.
It started storming 5 minutes before the ceremony, so heavy a storm that tree branches fell down to the courtyard when the execution was supposed to take place. Too bad nothing ever stopped The Famiglia's plans. Rank #2 bodyguards for The Boss were, as expected, sturdy enough to withstand nature's rage.
The guilty man was brought down to his knees in front of The Boss. “You can't shoot in this weather,” he yelled maniacally, barely audible. The grin on his face showed signs of crazy courage, a Rank #6 daring to exchange looks with The Boss, facing death with a smile-signs of insanity. How many of those stories had he heard, all those men who were so done with the world, they threw every ounce of logic aside to pass their insanity to those who would kill them.
If it was true-that everyone has a will they could pass on, and every will is some kind of force-how many times had it happened in the past, The Boss taking in every dying man's insane wills into him?
The Boss's hand was eventually stained in red patches nothing could wash off, not the heavy rain, not the tap water, not the shower.
“Yuichi,” the first first word spoken after the gunshot. “Help me.”
The baseball hit him on the forehead and he fell before he could see where it had come from.
“I'm sorry,” came a shaky voice, “I didn't see you. Are your glasses still intact?”
His glasses were fine, thank you very much, he thought as he put them back on his nose and then the face of the person who hit him appeared clear in front of him. It was a pretty face, well-groomed and carefully taken care of, flawless skin tone and perfectly-coiffed hair. It wasn't someone he was familiar with-he would have noticed someone this pretty in his 3 years on campus-a freshman maybe? Then he looked around him; Caucasian guys with black suits at random locations around the area, distant radio rumblings-
“Are you visiting?” he asked. Some country president's son? Wouldn't be impossible, plenty of grossly-paid expatriates and ambassadors visit the prestigious Waseda University. Some rich man's son surveying for future education? Quite possible too, especially if he belonged to those kind of disgustingly rich people. Difference between him and pretty boy was obvious even then: Mr Pretty played the baseball, he got hit squarely by the misaimed ball, just like how their society works.
“No,” the boy said. “This University is mine.”
[message truncated]
But Kame is such a strange name to be calling youself, he thought to himself. Then again perhaps rich people like him has distorted renditions of what they deemed cool.
“Yuichi,” short and simple. The code name, never the real, whatever it was.
The pretty boy who called himself Kame beamed.
“Are we friends?”
Smiles are privileges, yet another one of those unspoken rules of society. You bow before you smile, you don't smile to people above you.
“Yes.”
Then the boy was called away, for lunch, no doubt, and the next time Yuichi would see him, it would be in Italy.
People who rise up to Ranks #1 to #3 get their promotion ceremony done in the historical Italy with The Boss in the audience. It's a promotion ceremony as much as one of the endless tests The Famiglia derives: your first time seeing The Boss, what do you do?
For Yuichi, because his first time meeting The Boss was a baseball on his forehead, his promotion ceremony went without a hitch, much like his entire life-scouted into the Mafia for no reason other than looking like an absolutely normal person, being able to glide in and out of hidden bases, knowing too many things, completing almost every other mission thanks to sheer luck and now, this.
Kame caught up with him after the ceremony, when they were both inside the toilet and the bodyguards were turned away.
“Hey.”
The baseball boy was a little smaller than this, he was a little timid and reserved but The Boss, with his perfectly-ironed pair of suits, was really something else.
“Congratulations.”
The red stains are infuriatingly stubborn.
“Are you here to fix me?” Not a question.
“No, but let me try.” Not an answer.
The guard always crumples the notes and disposese themt to a heat-proof bin before he allows him inside.
“Hi,” Kame greets. “I have something interesting to show you, that's why I sent you a note.”
“Inside a book?” Not just a book.
“I made sure you see it.”
“I'm usually not very interested in fashion.” The book was Corsets in Medieval Europe.
“I have people making sure you see it,” Kame says, in a tone that's too used to silencing people.
Kame seemed to be interested in a lot of random things. The other day he was just talking about the wormhole theory (“This is literally time travel, don't you think? What if I could, theoretically, return to a place in the past and change something so that the me right now wouldn't be a mafia boss?”), and before that there was a pretty long period of time when he seemed to be interested in political ideologies, and then before that, he was interested in the intricacies of the Ancient Egyptian technology. Sometimes he couldn't believe that such a powerful man could be such a child.
This time, it's about the parallel world theory.
“So it's rather different from the wormhole theory, because it's like the wormhole doesn't really take into account the complexity of consequences and it's all just numbers and physics theories, but parallel world-“
He knows what a parallel world theory is. An inifinite number of futures branching from outcomes of actions. He could only imagine that Kame would like such a theory, because there's a power in his hand, the literal meaning of “the future lies in your hands”.
“But you know, Yuichi,” he says as a closing to his long-winded ramblings, “I thought about this in a way that includes you, and then I realised that meeting you wasn't really something I had any input in.”
He stops for a while and studies Kame's faces, a queasy sensation forming in his stomach. He knows his position very well, he's just a companion (what his superior said in an attempt to warn him) to The Boss, he means nothing to him. The Boss is young, The Boss is bored, The Boss is still curious-he just happened to be a little special, that's all.
“Maybe in another world, we wouldn't have met,” Kame says quietly, his eyes looking downwards awkwardly.
Maybe in another world, we would have been equals.
“I want to meet you in every world, Yuichi. I want all the many worlds in the future to still have me and you.”
Those words, if spoken in another context, would have been confessions.
The embrace weighs him down, buries his foundation in the cement, stay here, don't go away, don't be a red stain on my hand.
“Boss,” he whispers uncertainly.
Not Boss, not that, not you. Read me, read my mind, what does it say-a new mission, so Yuichi does just that.
He was right about The Boss some time ago, that he was probably just an ideal, some kind of illusion to The Famiglia so that people don't stray, so that people fear and keep fearing. The Boss is immortal, they said. He's immune to fire, to bullets, to assassinations, so don't think about it, in case you were. Drop your previous affiliations, connections, relations-The Boss is the only one you have right now.
No, no, no to everything. The Boss-no, Kame, is only immune because he has human shields. He's not an ideal, he's an illusion, a tool to make people fear a force greater than them that essentially doesn't exist. He's not impossibly sharp with his bullets, those are results of 10 years of training. He's not beautiful because he's a superhuman, he looks pretty because of the people who fuse over his everything.
“Can't you see,” Kame says, their foreheads clashing, “I'm made strong because I'm weaker than everybody else.”
The Boss has everyone under control, none of whom he actually has.
Self-restrain is self-censoring, straight lines crossing over incorrect dangerous thoughts he's not supposed to have, erasing certain parts of things like [information withheld] he's not supposed to expose, not even to himself. Self-restrain is mind control, be careful of what you think, think before you think, then think again, then rethink what you just thought. Self-restrain is remembering all the lesseons he has learned since the day they burned a tattoo over his back: one; don't ask, accept, obey, but why don't ask, just don't, and two; the boss, The Boss, The Boss.
Self-restrain is ultimately, mastering the art of lying.
That night, Kame calls him with urgently through a bodyguard called Ueda instead of the usual post-it notes. He could only guess what happened, because ever since one of the The Famiglia's most important base in New York was destroyed by an independent group of anonymous attackers, the Mafia world has been operating in paranoia. Plenty of other Mafia groups are holding internal interrogations to weed out possible traitors.
But Kame didn't call him to discuss about his anxiety-actually Kame doesn't seem to be in the mood for any discussions.
The kiss is sudden and rough, Kame pushing his lips against his, hands so close around his neck that they are leaving scars, suffocating and igniting flames inside him. This is a real kiss, he thinks, not childish pecks on the cheeks but a real one, a consummation of at least ten different kind of feelings and he feels Kame struggling with it, not because Kame doesn't know how to kiss but because he doesn't know if it's right. The unfamiliar burden of uncertainty and doubt a person like Kame has never experienced.
The more he struggles, the closer he pulls, the harder he kisses and Yuichi feels air escaping from him, so much that returning the kiss might actually cause asphyxiation but he can't release himself from it. He's trapped and it's painful.
Kame is willful alright, his own wills and the wills of the ones whose life he took with a shot of his gun, all the anger and resentment and desires for revenge.
One soft touch of the cloth and a layer of dried blood is shed.
I'm here to fix you. “Don't think too much.”
The rainwater still drips from Kame's hair, drips slowly, from the root of his hair to the fabric wrapping around his thigh. He defies protocol-this is one of the very few times-and looks at him first, meets his eyes, those intense eyes. Those intensely disturbed eyes and just one more time that night, Yuichi allows himself another defiance in the protocol: to read his mind without being asked to.
Another touch, this time harder and the red stains vanish.
I love you “There are people here for you.”
Kame's fingertips circle around his lips and he meets him halfway.
Break the chain around my tongue, please My life is yours, do you know that?
The library in the Italian headquarters is a wealth of knowledge and secrets, so naturally, he loves it in there. Promotion means that he's spending less time outside-higher chances of living to 70, so to say-and more time inside to strategise so that people outside wouldn't die needlessly.
The Boss, evidently, loves the library too and when he's in, the bodyguards make the other members of The Famiglia wait outside until The Boss is done. But The Boss makes an exception for Yuichi, because “he's a candidate for a future right-hand man”. Thanks to The Boss, he's still allowed an unlimited access to the resources. Thanks to Lesson #1, nobody questions it.
He finds a book that day with a bright pink post-it note in between, and written in a scrawny handwriting, reads:
Come have tea with me tonight, just show this note to the guards.
In the dark corner of The Boss's room, there's a highly guarded safe that only contains one thing: a complete list of people who had died in the hands of all the Bosses of The Famiglia.
“It's so thick,” Kame says, “the weight of our sins.”
He doesn't say anything. The Mafia is a nasty business from the moment it existed, is it any wonder?
“Look at the world outside, it's so rotten.”
Kame doesn't usually talk about his feelings. It's said that The Boss becomes The Boss when he shows that he is capable of sealing his own emotions, but if Yuichi is right, The Boss he's seeing now is nearly crumbling.
His name might end up there in the paper someday. Code Name Yuichi, executed for treason, like he had always thought it might be. But in case there's a future that doesn't have his name in the list and his blood on Kame's hand, it might come with he price of Kame's sanity.
“What would you do?” A hypothetical question.
“What?”
“What would you do, if The Famiglia becomes so rotten that you couldn't stand it anymore?” A challenge, maybe, but still a hypothetical question.
Kame seals the stack of paper back into the safe, then pulls him forward.
“I'll wipe out The Famiglia when it happens.” A resolution.
In the course of human history, there were brilliant things that arose from marginalisation or oppression. He once read about a language in China that was invented and utilised by women because men deprived them of education. He also remembered of a certain rebellion, also in China, that was organised purely via communications hidden in cakes.1
This time, it's customised codes, everyone involved using their brand of codes (that were approved, of course, how would the traitors be caught otherwise?) to communicate. It's all really brilliant, he thought. Even if one code was broken, the rest would definitely survive, the only trick lies in gaining the trust of the Messengers.
That's what they are all called, the Messengers, operating in absolute confidentiality, targetting carefully and specifically.
He remembered the day he was Targetted, when the Messenger spoke to him codes of purely botanical terms. To an outsider, it had seemed that they were discussing the latest discovery about those man-eating plants, but for him, it was a full-scale plan about how to destroy the Mafia monopoly of world politics, starting with one of the most powerful ones, which happened to be partially based in Japan.
The Famiglia.
Five minutes before one, the hand in his palm still isn't letting go.
“Yuichi,” he says, “you have me, right here, right in my heart, so please, please, come have tea with me again?”
He turns to face him. Kame's strong jaw and determined eyes contradicts his words-wonder how many people have heard that.
“Tomorrow?”
“Forever?”
For the first time in forever, Yuichi feels himself smiling, for the first time since forever, since his father said that the world is a hopeless place to stay, since he discovered that for the last few decades or so, society has been dictated by laws of the underground, since he met the boy who accidentally threw a baseball to his head, since his back was burned, since he knew there's no turning back ever, since he knew that the man everyone calls The Boss has been so lonely at the top and that's when he stops being bothered by the ticking of the clock, a thousand men around and in the house but none of them mattered because for the first time in forever, he finally senses that there's a way to go back to life before everything got so complicated.
Before life was a series of lies he told himself, and before life became a sequence of things phrased in words that shouldn't be said, ever.
Maybe for just one more time, he'll have him, right there, right in his heart. One last more defiance.
Don't let go, it's lonely here.
These days Kame no longer has time for post-it notes, so all the summons are done through Ueda. Tonight it seems like the summon was done through a dying force of will, beause by the time he reaches the office, Kame's lying on the couch, sleeping soundly.
The windows are opened wife, curtains flapping loudly as the storm outside threatens to rage and the wind is sharp and cold. Still, he sleeps soundly amidst the rowdiness.
Like he should be.
He catches Kame twitching slightly in response, perhaps the chill is getting a little unbearable, so he walks over to fetch the coat on the hanger and covers Kame with it.
Before he knows it, Kame's eyes are open wide and something metallic is shoved to his neck.
It's startling to be held at gunpoint so suddenly for something so trivial. I was just covering you, he will say. There's nothing sinister in my intentions, he keeps thinking and then he realises something.
It's a reaction.
“It's just me,” he says, and Kame relaxes, then goes back into deep sleep seconds later.
Instinct, he suddenly knows. From guilt, from fear, from doubt-it was the subconcious's doing, trying to protect him from everyone, everyone.
Even from those who had once sworn to serve him.
The red stains clear up and Kame's hair begins to dry.
“Will I have to shoot you one day?” Not a threat, just a question rephrased from will you betray me?
“No.” Not a declaration of loyalty
“Really?”
“Yes.” I don't want to.
The message is short, just those few words to hold him at gunpoint.
You know what to do.
The Japanese headquarters of The Famiglia is a lavish Victorian mansion on the hill, a building so sturdy that it had withstood all the four seasons, wars, rain, storm, earthquake and yet still required no renovation. The Famiglia is as proud of their headquarters as much as they are proud of their history. It's only natural for them to cling to the past, after all living with pride is living with a purpose and the headquarters has plenty to be proud of.
Taguchi Junnosuke has been living in the mansion ever since he could remember, and he takes extreme pride in the fact that he knows the building inside out, every nook and cranny, every wear and tear invisible to the untrained eye, every crack covered by sloppy patches, and every hidden traps and every secret doors. For example, the staircase on the second floor leading to the hallway and to the library, there's a hollow area about a centimetre square wide on the twenty-third step. For example, in addition to the 120 cameras installed in the dining hall, there are also cameras that are placed strategically under the dining table. Another example, there are actually 83 traps and 30 secret doors as opposed to the 70 known traps and 15 known secret doors. The thing about being Taguchi Junnosuke is that he serves The Boss directly as a member of the team responsible for daily caretaking of The Boss and hardly leaves the house, which means that hardly anybody notices him. He's not a threat, just another disposable member-a servant, so to speak. That tattoo on his back is merely for show.
Being a servant is hardly living life, so Taguchi decided that if he was going to spend the rest of his life serving a boy, he might as well derive some kind of pleasure from doing so-and that was how he became a human archive of all the Famiglia's dirty secrets.
One of the latest-while there are many, actually, even if people don't question things (thanks for Lesson #1)-is that the closest person in The Famiglia The Boss ever got to wasn't executed for treason.
But they did catch him red-handed, a spy for the government apparently on a mission to shake The Famiglia into internal conflict, but he definitely wasn't executed. Taguchi saw everything that happened that day with vivid clarity: instead of the usual, sick ceremony they do whenever The Boss shoots someone to death, The Boss shot a dummy made of rubber and ordered the “corpse” to be “cleaned away” immediately. There was blood around, of course, to make it believable, but it was merely a packet of chicken blood stuffed inside the dummy (the wonders of mafia technology, seriously). The actual person though, since he wasn't dead, was sent to a remote island outside Okinawa instead. The Boss was probably counting on the location to be hardly detectable by normal Japanese radar, being nearer to The Philippines than Tokyo, so the lucky guy was safe because The Boss spared him-
-and that goes without saying, Taguchi knows why.
It's because, Code Name Yuichi was, in a lot of ways, an exception to The Boss's-and by an extension, the Mafia's-rules. Evidences are all collected in the crumpled (eventually, burned) post-its, deleted camera footages of time spent together, fingerprints on furnitures that normal Famiglia members wouldn't be allowed to touch, dried bodily fluid on the bedsheets, conversations that were recorded and later edited. The thing about history that perhaps nobody but him realises is that documentations don't tell anything.
Real history, according to Taguchi Junnosuke, is what isn't allowed to be remembered.
That's why Code Name Yuichi had his memory altered and the skin on his back burned to crisp.
Real history, also according to Taguchi Junnosuke, is not what makes people proud.
That's why The Boss became more reclusive than he already was after the supposed execution.
That's also why The Boss purposely left a post-it note in a book about extinct medicinal plants, even if he knew perfectly well that it could be destroyed in less than a second.
Finally, that's why Taguchi starts typing on his computer, the camera behind him adjusted to film a dummy of himself sleeping soundly, that book about the extinct plants on his table, turned to the page where The Boss had attached the post-it note that wasn't read by its supposed recipient.
All the worlds in the future will have me and you.
1both were actual (at least according to documented sources) events, check out Nüshu script and mooncake.
From: alienashi
Title: in parallel futures, in untold pasts
Pairings/Characters: Kame/Nakamaru
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mafia AU, quasi-dystopian, and er, some kind of angst (ymmv, but I'm afraid I might have overdone it?)
Notes: Dear scorch66, this is really awkward, because I didn't expect to get you in my first ever exchange, so I stalked a lot of the past fics written for you and tried to see if I could get some inspiration. But I failed hard, so this is what I came up with. I'm sorry if some parts seem disjointed, because about a tenth of the fic was written in pieces and the whole picture only came to me when this song accidentally came on shuffle.
Summary: The letter comes to him like a timebomb.
The letter comes to him like a timebomb, as usual. That's how things work in their society.
Tic-tic-tic. The ticking of the clock bothers him. There are about a thousand people around and in the mansion and still the giant clock in the middle of the hallway is the only thing he hears. Ten, nine, eight, seven seconds later and it'll be another day starting with a ghastly strike of the clock. It is known that the clock is majestic, evidence of The Famiglia's absolute power-all the kind of descriptions that basically say that humans must die before the clock is destroyed. Of course it bothers him; a countdown to death and who wants that?
Against his back, a heart beats. Steady and consistent, unlike his own.
He takes a palm in his and puts it close to his heart. Calm it, he asks. I can't pretend that everything is alright, I can't sleep because a lot of things bother me, all the thoughts, the clock, the fucking clock, why didn't someone make it stop? Inside his chest there is a drum, inside his brain there is a malfunctioning machine.
Dong-dong-dong. One day ends and another day starts, but when did hell begin?
First lesson was: questions are best left unanswered. Don't question the conventional, follow what you were told, your missions are your missions and that's it. Questions are not for people like you. You passed the aptitude test, you went through the initiation ritual, you're now accepted by us. We are your family, we are The Famiglia. Don't make such a confused face-but don't smile like you know everything either, we don't do smug here. Nod, agree, shout with all your hearts that Boss's life is yours to protect. There, good boy.
17 was such a delicate age to be told of things like this.
He came closest to death on a mission to destroy the stronghold of the other Mafia group, [name withheld], when someone, [name also withheld], cut the wrong wire of the bomb and there was just a meagre ten minutes or so to figure how things worked.
10 minutes left and someone took out their bomb specialist. Run, take the bomb with you, run! Someone spotted them, it was now all or nothing. The timer has started running.
9 minutes left, they found a hiding spot but the timer was moving fast.
7 minutes left, their phones lost connection with the HQ.
5, 4 minutes, still no one knew what would happen if they cut the other wire.
3, 2, someone said, God help us all, but another person said, God doesn't exist.
1, and all four of them had their hearts beat in a singular rhythm.
20 second left and the timer stopped.
Thank goodness. 19 would have been a pretty young age to die at.
Second lesson was: The Boss > you, no matter who, even if his name sounds Japanese, sounding out of place in an Italian Mafia group.
They call it lesson, but it's actually the law that supercedes actual law.
Code Name: Yuichi.
Real Name: [withheld]
Chosen precisely because it was so plain, nobody would ever suspect.
The Boss is said to be a man of extraordinary charisma, with a glare so powerful that it could melt glaciers. The Famiglia has its own hierarchy, tens of thousands of men all around the world segregated to ten ranks and only Rank #1 members, a measly ten of them, are allowed to see the Boss's face in his eyes.The rest has to learn how to fear, that's why the rest have to wait. If they don't fear the boss, his mentor once said, how are they going to make the rest of the society fear him? Fear breeds more fear, it's how the Famiglia works. Remember your first lesson, then remember your second lesson. That's why there's not a single picture of him around, not a single painting, he even once entertained that idea that The Boss might not even exist.
Wouldn't it be great if The Boss was literally just a figure, a hologram of those ten Rank #1 people because they were too cowardly to admit that The Famiglia was a global hoax, a fiction-all the history and hierarchies were just products of imagination perhaps? Plot Twist of The Century, it would be-actually more like some kind of hope that the world is less shitty than it seems to be. A man can dream.
That's why, when Yuichi first meets Kame, it's an encounter between a clumsy baseball boy and a bespectacled school librarian.
Code Name: Yuichi
Skills Possessed: Disguise, Concealment, Memory Power, Resourcefulness
Years of Training: Six
Skills Acquired: Secrecy, Code Deciphering, Strategic Diversions, Intermediate Computer Hacking
Missions Completed: 4 S-Class, 14 A-Class, 23 B-Class, 55 C-Class
Old Rank: #7
New Rank: #3
Dong-tic-tic-tic. Gone are the twelve strikes of midnight and the clock is back to ticking.
And hand in his with a layer of sweat between their palms; a chest against his back and his own spine between their two hearts. Signs of life. He's alive, he thinks. He has a pulse and he has heartbeats, blood and flesh he could touch. He could feel-gentle lips following the contour of his neck, fingers on his ribs, hair on his shoulder, two bodies pressing against each other, two minds trying to read each other, two hearts trying to reach each other.
They say it could be love.
“Stay with me, Yuichi.”
It must be lonely at the top, he once thought while observing the shadows of The Boss. It looks like The Boss is even younger than he had imagined (not surprising, when he goes back to think about it, because The Inheritance Ceremony was held ten years ago when The Boss was just 14).
From where he could see, The Boss carried his youth far too well. Too charismatic for people to look away (when they are allowed to, that is), too initimidating for them to observe for too long, so they could only marvel and admire, propagating fables as they do.
“Please sit down,” The Boss says. The room is vast and exquisitely decorated with plain but clear colours, very Japanese. He had imagined the entire headquarters mansion to be exclusively western-looking, but it seemed as though only the tea room was purposely designed in Japanese style. “Your first time here?”
“Yes,” he replies, unsure what else should be said. The shaking in his hand is no joke-that's The Boss there in front of him and he's a miserable Rank #3 member, at most probably only allowed to be looking at The Bosss chest, and he's now being invited to sit. Being invited to be an equal.
“You can look at me, you know?”
More than equal perhaps. What is The Boss thinking? Is this yet another test?
“We are friends, right?”
It startles him that The Boss still remembered the contents of a conversation he had with an insignificant university student.
“Here, we are friends, Yuichi,” and The Boss turns into Kame, that boy whose rouge baseball once hit his head, “just here.”
He sits down, at last, and raises his head to look at him.
“Thank you for the tea,” he says, and bows to take a tea cup to his lips.
It's delicious.
Whenever blood is spilled, it's usually a cause of celebration. But that day, it was execution.
The Famiglia named three treasons worthy of death: betrayal, cowardice, and mission failure. The man to be executed was guilty of betrayal.
The Famiglia also named three types of betrayal: spying for the government, being loyal to someone other than The Boss, and affiliating with other Mafia groups. The man to be executed was caught spying.
It started storming 5 minutes before the ceremony, so heavy a storm that tree branches fell down to the courtyard when the execution was supposed to take place. Too bad nothing ever stopped The Famiglia's plans. Rank #2 bodyguards for The Boss were, as expected, sturdy enough to withstand nature's rage.
The guilty man was brought down to his knees in front of The Boss. “You can't shoot in this weather,” he yelled maniacally, barely audible. The grin on his face showed signs of crazy courage, a Rank #6 daring to exchange looks with The Boss, facing death with a smile-signs of insanity. How many of those stories had he heard, all those men who were so done with the world, they threw every ounce of logic aside to pass their insanity to those who would kill them.
If it was true-that everyone has a will they could pass on, and every will is some kind of force-how many times had it happened in the past, The Boss taking in every dying man's insane wills into him?
The Boss's hand was eventually stained in red patches nothing could wash off, not the heavy rain, not the tap water, not the shower.
“Yuichi,” the first first word spoken after the gunshot. “Help me.”
The baseball hit him on the forehead and he fell before he could see where it had come from.
“I'm sorry,” came a shaky voice, “I didn't see you. Are your glasses still intact?”
His glasses were fine, thank you very much, he thought as he put them back on his nose and then the face of the person who hit him appeared clear in front of him. It was a pretty face, well-groomed and carefully taken care of, flawless skin tone and perfectly-coiffed hair. It wasn't someone he was familiar with-he would have noticed someone this pretty in his 3 years on campus-a freshman maybe? Then he looked around him; Caucasian guys with black suits at random locations around the area, distant radio rumblings-
“Are you visiting?” he asked. Some country president's son? Wouldn't be impossible, plenty of grossly-paid expatriates and ambassadors visit the prestigious Waseda University. Some rich man's son surveying for future education? Quite possible too, especially if he belonged to those kind of disgustingly rich people. Difference between him and pretty boy was obvious even then: Mr Pretty played the baseball, he got hit squarely by the misaimed ball, just like how their society works.
“No,” the boy said. “This University is mine.”
[message truncated]
But Kame is such a strange name to be calling youself, he thought to himself. Then again perhaps rich people like him has distorted renditions of what they deemed cool.
“Yuichi,” short and simple. The code name, never the real, whatever it was.
The pretty boy who called himself Kame beamed.
“Are we friends?”
Smiles are privileges, yet another one of those unspoken rules of society. You bow before you smile, you don't smile to people above you.
“Yes.”
Then the boy was called away, for lunch, no doubt, and the next time Yuichi would see him, it would be in Italy.
People who rise up to Ranks #1 to #3 get their promotion ceremony done in the historical Italy with The Boss in the audience. It's a promotion ceremony as much as one of the endless tests The Famiglia derives: your first time seeing The Boss, what do you do?
For Yuichi, because his first time meeting The Boss was a baseball on his forehead, his promotion ceremony went without a hitch, much like his entire life-scouted into the Mafia for no reason other than looking like an absolutely normal person, being able to glide in and out of hidden bases, knowing too many things, completing almost every other mission thanks to sheer luck and now, this.
Kame caught up with him after the ceremony, when they were both inside the toilet and the bodyguards were turned away.
“Hey.”
The baseball boy was a little smaller than this, he was a little timid and reserved but The Boss, with his perfectly-ironed pair of suits, was really something else.
“Congratulations.”
The red stains are infuriatingly stubborn.
“Are you here to fix me?” Not a question.
“No, but let me try.” Not an answer.
The guard always crumples the notes and disposese themt to a heat-proof bin before he allows him inside.
“Hi,” Kame greets. “I have something interesting to show you, that's why I sent you a note.”
“Inside a book?” Not just a book.
“I made sure you see it.”
“I'm usually not very interested in fashion.” The book was Corsets in Medieval Europe.
“I have people making sure you see it,” Kame says, in a tone that's too used to silencing people.
Kame seemed to be interested in a lot of random things. The other day he was just talking about the wormhole theory (“This is literally time travel, don't you think? What if I could, theoretically, return to a place in the past and change something so that the me right now wouldn't be a mafia boss?”), and before that there was a pretty long period of time when he seemed to be interested in political ideologies, and then before that, he was interested in the intricacies of the Ancient Egyptian technology. Sometimes he couldn't believe that such a powerful man could be such a child.
This time, it's about the parallel world theory.
“So it's rather different from the wormhole theory, because it's like the wormhole doesn't really take into account the complexity of consequences and it's all just numbers and physics theories, but parallel world-“
He knows what a parallel world theory is. An inifinite number of futures branching from outcomes of actions. He could only imagine that Kame would like such a theory, because there's a power in his hand, the literal meaning of “the future lies in your hands”.
“But you know, Yuichi,” he says as a closing to his long-winded ramblings, “I thought about this in a way that includes you, and then I realised that meeting you wasn't really something I had any input in.”
He stops for a while and studies Kame's faces, a queasy sensation forming in his stomach. He knows his position very well, he's just a companion (what his superior said in an attempt to warn him) to The Boss, he means nothing to him. The Boss is young, The Boss is bored, The Boss is still curious-he just happened to be a little special, that's all.
“Maybe in another world, we wouldn't have met,” Kame says quietly, his eyes looking downwards awkwardly.
Maybe in another world, we would have been equals.
“I want to meet you in every world, Yuichi. I want all the many worlds in the future to still have me and you.”
Those words, if spoken in another context, would have been confessions.
The embrace weighs him down, buries his foundation in the cement, stay here, don't go away, don't be a red stain on my hand.
“Boss,” he whispers uncertainly.
Not Boss, not that, not you. Read me, read my mind, what does it say-a new mission, so Yuichi does just that.
He was right about The Boss some time ago, that he was probably just an ideal, some kind of illusion to The Famiglia so that people don't stray, so that people fear and keep fearing. The Boss is immortal, they said. He's immune to fire, to bullets, to assassinations, so don't think about it, in case you were. Drop your previous affiliations, connections, relations-The Boss is the only one you have right now.
No, no, no to everything. The Boss-no, Kame, is only immune because he has human shields. He's not an ideal, he's an illusion, a tool to make people fear a force greater than them that essentially doesn't exist. He's not impossibly sharp with his bullets, those are results of 10 years of training. He's not beautiful because he's a superhuman, he looks pretty because of the people who fuse over his everything.
“Can't you see,” Kame says, their foreheads clashing, “I'm made strong because I'm weaker than everybody else.”
The Boss has everyone under control, none of whom he actually has.
Self-restrain is self-censoring, straight lines crossing over incorrect dangerous thoughts he's not supposed to have, erasing certain parts of things like [information withheld] he's not supposed to expose, not even to himself. Self-restrain is mind control, be careful of what you think, think before you think, then think again, then rethink what you just thought. Self-restrain is remembering all the lesseons he has learned since the day they burned a tattoo over his back: one; don't ask, accept, obey, but why don't ask, just don't, and two; the boss, The Boss, The Boss.
Self-restrain is ultimately, mastering the art of lying.
That night, Kame calls him with urgently through a bodyguard called Ueda instead of the usual post-it notes. He could only guess what happened, because ever since one of the The Famiglia's most important base in New York was destroyed by an independent group of anonymous attackers, the Mafia world has been operating in paranoia. Plenty of other Mafia groups are holding internal interrogations to weed out possible traitors.
But Kame didn't call him to discuss about his anxiety-actually Kame doesn't seem to be in the mood for any discussions.
The kiss is sudden and rough, Kame pushing his lips against his, hands so close around his neck that they are leaving scars, suffocating and igniting flames inside him. This is a real kiss, he thinks, not childish pecks on the cheeks but a real one, a consummation of at least ten different kind of feelings and he feels Kame struggling with it, not because Kame doesn't know how to kiss but because he doesn't know if it's right. The unfamiliar burden of uncertainty and doubt a person like Kame has never experienced.
The more he struggles, the closer he pulls, the harder he kisses and Yuichi feels air escaping from him, so much that returning the kiss might actually cause asphyxiation but he can't release himself from it. He's trapped and it's painful.
Kame is willful alright, his own wills and the wills of the ones whose life he took with a shot of his gun, all the anger and resentment and desires for revenge.
One soft touch of the cloth and a layer of dried blood is shed.
I'm here to fix you. “Don't think too much.”
The rainwater still drips from Kame's hair, drips slowly, from the root of his hair to the fabric wrapping around his thigh. He defies protocol-this is one of the very few times-and looks at him first, meets his eyes, those intense eyes. Those intensely disturbed eyes and just one more time that night, Yuichi allows himself another defiance in the protocol: to read his mind without being asked to.
Another touch, this time harder and the red stains vanish.
I love you “There are people here for you.”
Kame's fingertips circle around his lips and he meets him halfway.
Break the chain around my tongue, please My life is yours, do you know that?
The library in the Italian headquarters is a wealth of knowledge and secrets, so naturally, he loves it in there. Promotion means that he's spending less time outside-higher chances of living to 70, so to say-and more time inside to strategise so that people outside wouldn't die needlessly.
The Boss, evidently, loves the library too and when he's in, the bodyguards make the other members of The Famiglia wait outside until The Boss is done. But The Boss makes an exception for Yuichi, because “he's a candidate for a future right-hand man”. Thanks to The Boss, he's still allowed an unlimited access to the resources. Thanks to Lesson #1, nobody questions it.
He finds a book that day with a bright pink post-it note in between, and written in a scrawny handwriting, reads:
Come have tea with me tonight, just show this note to the guards.
In the dark corner of The Boss's room, there's a highly guarded safe that only contains one thing: a complete list of people who had died in the hands of all the Bosses of The Famiglia.
“It's so thick,” Kame says, “the weight of our sins.”
He doesn't say anything. The Mafia is a nasty business from the moment it existed, is it any wonder?
“Look at the world outside, it's so rotten.”
Kame doesn't usually talk about his feelings. It's said that The Boss becomes The Boss when he shows that he is capable of sealing his own emotions, but if Yuichi is right, The Boss he's seeing now is nearly crumbling.
His name might end up there in the paper someday. Code Name Yuichi, executed for treason, like he had always thought it might be. But in case there's a future that doesn't have his name in the list and his blood on Kame's hand, it might come with he price of Kame's sanity.
“What would you do?” A hypothetical question.
“What?”
“What would you do, if The Famiglia becomes so rotten that you couldn't stand it anymore?” A challenge, maybe, but still a hypothetical question.
Kame seals the stack of paper back into the safe, then pulls him forward.
“I'll wipe out The Famiglia when it happens.” A resolution.
In the course of human history, there were brilliant things that arose from marginalisation or oppression. He once read about a language in China that was invented and utilised by women because men deprived them of education. He also remembered of a certain rebellion, also in China, that was organised purely via communications hidden in cakes.1
This time, it's customised codes, everyone involved using their brand of codes (that were approved, of course, how would the traitors be caught otherwise?) to communicate. It's all really brilliant, he thought. Even if one code was broken, the rest would definitely survive, the only trick lies in gaining the trust of the Messengers.
That's what they are all called, the Messengers, operating in absolute confidentiality, targetting carefully and specifically.
He remembered the day he was Targetted, when the Messenger spoke to him codes of purely botanical terms. To an outsider, it had seemed that they were discussing the latest discovery about those man-eating plants, but for him, it was a full-scale plan about how to destroy the Mafia monopoly of world politics, starting with one of the most powerful ones, which happened to be partially based in Japan.
The Famiglia.
Five minutes before one, the hand in his palm still isn't letting go.
“Yuichi,” he says, “you have me, right here, right in my heart, so please, please, come have tea with me again?”
He turns to face him. Kame's strong jaw and determined eyes contradicts his words-wonder how many people have heard that.
“Tomorrow?”
“Forever?”
For the first time in forever, Yuichi feels himself smiling, for the first time since forever, since his father said that the world is a hopeless place to stay, since he discovered that for the last few decades or so, society has been dictated by laws of the underground, since he met the boy who accidentally threw a baseball to his head, since his back was burned, since he knew there's no turning back ever, since he knew that the man everyone calls The Boss has been so lonely at the top and that's when he stops being bothered by the ticking of the clock, a thousand men around and in the house but none of them mattered because for the first time in forever, he finally senses that there's a way to go back to life before everything got so complicated.
Before life was a series of lies he told himself, and before life became a sequence of things phrased in words that shouldn't be said, ever.
Maybe for just one more time, he'll have him, right there, right in his heart. One last more defiance.
Don't let go, it's lonely here.
These days Kame no longer has time for post-it notes, so all the summons are done through Ueda. Tonight it seems like the summon was done through a dying force of will, beause by the time he reaches the office, Kame's lying on the couch, sleeping soundly.
The windows are opened wife, curtains flapping loudly as the storm outside threatens to rage and the wind is sharp and cold. Still, he sleeps soundly amidst the rowdiness.
Like he should be.
He catches Kame twitching slightly in response, perhaps the chill is getting a little unbearable, so he walks over to fetch the coat on the hanger and covers Kame with it.
Before he knows it, Kame's eyes are open wide and something metallic is shoved to his neck.
It's startling to be held at gunpoint so suddenly for something so trivial. I was just covering you, he will say. There's nothing sinister in my intentions, he keeps thinking and then he realises something.
It's a reaction.
“It's just me,” he says, and Kame relaxes, then goes back into deep sleep seconds later.
Instinct, he suddenly knows. From guilt, from fear, from doubt-it was the subconcious's doing, trying to protect him from everyone, everyone.
Even from those who had once sworn to serve him.
The red stains clear up and Kame's hair begins to dry.
“Will I have to shoot you one day?” Not a threat, just a question rephrased from will you betray me?
“No.” Not a declaration of loyalty
“Really?”
“Yes.” I don't want to.
The message is short, just those few words to hold him at gunpoint.
You know what to do.
The Japanese headquarters of The Famiglia is a lavish Victorian mansion on the hill, a building so sturdy that it had withstood all the four seasons, wars, rain, storm, earthquake and yet still required no renovation. The Famiglia is as proud of their headquarters as much as they are proud of their history. It's only natural for them to cling to the past, after all living with pride is living with a purpose and the headquarters has plenty to be proud of.
Taguchi Junnosuke has been living in the mansion ever since he could remember, and he takes extreme pride in the fact that he knows the building inside out, every nook and cranny, every wear and tear invisible to the untrained eye, every crack covered by sloppy patches, and every hidden traps and every secret doors. For example, the staircase on the second floor leading to the hallway and to the library, there's a hollow area about a centimetre square wide on the twenty-third step. For example, in addition to the 120 cameras installed in the dining hall, there are also cameras that are placed strategically under the dining table. Another example, there are actually 83 traps and 30 secret doors as opposed to the 70 known traps and 15 known secret doors. The thing about being Taguchi Junnosuke is that he serves The Boss directly as a member of the team responsible for daily caretaking of The Boss and hardly leaves the house, which means that hardly anybody notices him. He's not a threat, just another disposable member-a servant, so to speak. That tattoo on his back is merely for show.
Being a servant is hardly living life, so Taguchi decided that if he was going to spend the rest of his life serving a boy, he might as well derive some kind of pleasure from doing so-and that was how he became a human archive of all the Famiglia's dirty secrets.
One of the latest-while there are many, actually, even if people don't question things (thanks for Lesson #1)-is that the closest person in The Famiglia The Boss ever got to wasn't executed for treason.
But they did catch him red-handed, a spy for the government apparently on a mission to shake The Famiglia into internal conflict, but he definitely wasn't executed. Taguchi saw everything that happened that day with vivid clarity: instead of the usual, sick ceremony they do whenever The Boss shoots someone to death, The Boss shot a dummy made of rubber and ordered the “corpse” to be “cleaned away” immediately. There was blood around, of course, to make it believable, but it was merely a packet of chicken blood stuffed inside the dummy (the wonders of mafia technology, seriously). The actual person though, since he wasn't dead, was sent to a remote island outside Okinawa instead. The Boss was probably counting on the location to be hardly detectable by normal Japanese radar, being nearer to The Philippines than Tokyo, so the lucky guy was safe because The Boss spared him-
-and that goes without saying, Taguchi knows why.
It's because, Code Name Yuichi was, in a lot of ways, an exception to The Boss's-and by an extension, the Mafia's-rules. Evidences are all collected in the crumpled (eventually, burned) post-its, deleted camera footages of time spent together, fingerprints on furnitures that normal Famiglia members wouldn't be allowed to touch, dried bodily fluid on the bedsheets, conversations that were recorded and later edited. The thing about history that perhaps nobody but him realises is that documentations don't tell anything.
Real history, according to Taguchi Junnosuke, is what isn't allowed to be remembered.
That's why Code Name Yuichi had his memory altered and the skin on his back burned to crisp.
Real history, also according to Taguchi Junnosuke, is not what makes people proud.
That's why The Boss became more reclusive than he already was after the supposed execution.
That's also why The Boss purposely left a post-it note in a book about extinct medicinal plants, even if he knew perfectly well that it could be destroyed in less than a second.
Finally, that's why Taguchi starts typing on his computer, the camera behind him adjusted to film a dummy of himself sleeping soundly, that book about the extinct plants on his table, turned to the page where The Boss had attached the post-it note that wasn't read by its supposed recipient.
All the worlds in the future will have me and you.
1both were actual (at least according to documented sources) events, check out Nüshu script and mooncake.