Yami no Matsuei (Muraki/Tsuzuki)
Title: A Fish Dinner in Chijou
Author: Phoebe Zeitgeist
Rating: PG-13 (this version)
Warnings: Characters who won't shut up; not-wholly-balanced Tsuzuki; pretentious literary references. Unbeta'dness, and I mean it.
Summary: A chance meeting, and some consequences. Written for wordsofastory's prompt: "Pre-Kyoto. They encounter each other accidentally, alone and off-duty. At what point do Tsuzuki's reservations give way to attraction, and what are the consequences? [Note: Also, if you could keep in mind that Muraki's a serial killer and not a fluffy teddy bear? plzkthnx.]"
Author's Notes part 1: This takes place after Nagasaki, but before the Devil's Trill arc. Further notes/disclaimers are at the end of the story.
Author's Notes part 2: I hope to make some revisions to the final third of this story over the next few days, and the rating of the second version may go up a notch. For what that may be worth.
ETA, 7/16/09: I did eventually revise this, as per the notes above, and it has taken me years and a reminder for it to occur to me to post a link to the revised version. But for the record, and for what it's worth, it's here.
Tsuzuki Asato walked in Tokyo, and his ghosts walked with him. Tonight it was Hisae, pale and sad, plucking at his sleeve. She wanted him to bring offerings for her brother’s grave, as she would do today if she still lived; but he could not take on the family duties of all his dead. She had only wept when he had tried to explain: like so many of the ghosts, she seemed to grow less accepting of her death with time. It was a relief when he turned a corner and she bowed her head and let him go, fading into the air behind him.
“And you loved her,” Maria Wong told him reproachfully.
“You don’t have to,” Tsuzuki told her. “I remember.” It was strange for Maria to remember it too: he would have thought that the dead who moved on had better things to do than to follow him. But for all he knew, they all did it, spent the undefined time before their reincarnations watching over their murderer as he went about his own unending life. It must stop with their reincarnation, he thought; it was almost always his relatively recent victims who came to him. And yet, could he be sure of even that? Perhaps there was some knowledge that survived, deeply hidden, into the new life, for if nothing was saved, how did the soul grow?
Maria might know the answer. “Will I still see you, after you move on?” he asked now.
“I wouldn’t know,” replied Maria’s silver doctor. Maria had fled, Tsuzuki saw, still afraid of Muraki even in death. For himself, Tsuzuki welcomed him. Muraki, alone among his dead, was always gentle with him, strangely understanding. Perhaps it was because Muraki had embraced death, for its own sake and not merely as a release from an intolerable life. Amid Suzaku’s flames Muraki had laughed for pure delight. It made them friends now, or as much like friends as a shinigami and retrieved ghost could be. Tsuzuki was uneasy about it sometimes: was it not a betrayal of his partner, this odd affection for the spirit of the man who had raped Hisoka and cursed him to a lingering death, then caught him and tortured him anew for no better than his own entertainment? But then, Tsuzuki had killed him for it, and the Powers would sentence him; should not death and judgment settle all scores?
It was late now, Tsuzuki saw. The moon had fallen while he walked and thought: still beautiful in its dark setting but only one among many lights in the sky now, not the solitary, unfathomable wonder he remembered from his distant childhood. “I’d get it for you,” Muraki said from his place at Tsuzuki’s side. “The moon, and a chain to wear it on. But I expect you’d really rather I bought you dinner.”
“I’d let you,” Tsuzuki said ruefully. He’d had dinner, he remembered, noodles in some shop with Hisae for company. That had been hours ago, though, and he was hungry again. “Dinner, I mean, not the moon, people would miss that if you took it.”
“Well then -”
“But I don’t see how you could do it. You’re dead, remember?”
Muraki gave him a long look from his single visible eye - it was strange that he still kept the right eye hidden behind that curtain of hair, now that death had restored it, but then, the dead often were irrationally attached to the habits they’d learned in life - and Tsuzuki thought perhaps he was offended, and would go away. But instead he shrugged. “The American Express card, don’t leave Hell without it,” he said. “Come along, Tsuzuki-san. In my professional opinion, you need that dinner. And a good stiff drink.”
He trailed along behind Muraki, unresisting. “Where are we going?” he asked. Moonset was, what? Three in the morning this time of year and in this phase, he thought, although the windows of his hospital room had never faced west. Something would be open, somewhere, but it wasn’t a promising time to be looking for a restaurant. He wondered whether Muraki knew what time it was, or whether he’d lost track, as the ghosts sometimes did.
Muraki stepped closer to him. “Somewhere that won’t be filled with my colleagues,” he said. “Or yours. I think somewhere . . . earlier.”
A few more steps and the world swirled and changed, as it did in teleport and in dream, and now he was standing on a paved walk above the bank of a river. Masonry arced over his head, a wall was behind him, and city lights glittered in the water. Muraki was still beside him, shining faintly in a darkness that was more twilight than deep night. “What is this place?” he asked.
“Paris,” Muraki said. “I’ve always liked Paris. You are standing by the river Seine, and it is not yet 8:00, and I am going to take you to dinner at Fish.”
“You can do that?” Tsuzuki asked, fascinated. He had known that ghosts could move from Meifu to Chijou, to places they’d had strong emotional connections to in life. It made sense, then, that if Muraki had loved Paris he could come here. But to bring Tsuzuki with him . . . there were reasons that the living might fear the dead, but he had never before heard of this one, that they might pluck you from one place and leave you in another.
“As you see,” said Muraki. “But then, I’ve made a special study of portals.”
“The others won’t follow, then?”
“I shouldn’t think they could,” Muraki agreed. “Not unless you invite them. Shall we go?”
It was a short walk, up a flight of stone steps, across a broad avenue where four lanes of cars and buses rushed like a second river, then through an arch onto a narrow street of old stone buildings, bright with gallery windows. The sidewalk was barely wide enough for two to walk abreast, and busy, and he had to take care to avoid crowding his guide; for no ghost liked to be reminded of his insubstantiality.
Muraki stopped at a glass door framed by a broad arch of mosaic. Stylized fish danced at its corners, framing bold unreadable letters. “It was a fishmonger’s shop a hundred years ago, they tell me,” he said, following Tsuzuki’s look, and waved Tsuzuki through the door.
The restaurant was small, with a bar and bare stone walls, casual and crowded. It smelled good, and it felt good: a space that wanted you to be happy while you were there, and would do what it could to ensure it. There was a burst of conversation around him, and laughter; and then there was a table, set Western-style with heavy forks and knives and spoons, and glasses on long stems. “How -?” he asked.
“They like me,” Muraki said. “Also, you’re very decorative. Also, it’s possible that I might have stolen somebody else’s reservation.”
As evil went, it was a step up from torture and murder. Tsuzuki thought about feeling guilty, but there was bread and butter on the table now.
Muraki answered the unspoken thought. “No harm done. They’re late, and when they get here they’ll remember that they decided they wouldn’t need a reservation so early in the evening. This is Paris, they won’t go hungry.”
The menu, when they put it into his hands, was incomprehensible in the way of pages seen in dreams, the foreign letters joining to form unrecognizable words. Muraki seemed to see his confusion. “You should let me choose for you,” he told Tsuzuki. “Or, I suppose I could translate, if you’d rather.”
It felt like a test, although not a difficult or unwelcome one. “You do it,” Tsuzuki said. It was oddly luxurious, to set aside even this responsibility, to have no decision to make at all. “I think you’re supposed to.”
“Very good,” Muraki said softly. Tsuzuki drifted, giving most of his attention to the bread and butter, distantly aware of Muraki consulting with tall staff people in a singing dream language. There were two different breads, one plain and one filled with nuts, so that it was like eating field and forest. The butter was strange but rich and good; it tasted different by itself and on each of the two kinds of bread, as though it were three things and not just one. No one was trying to take it away from him, so he ate it slowly, and before it was gone other things had begun to arrive on the table: more glasses, sparkling water and plain, a bottle of a wine that looked pale as moonlight when it was poured out into Muraki’s glass and then into his; and then more food, oysters on their shells and mussels in a broth scented with coriander and cumin.
“I’ve ordered you fish,” Muraki told him. He was not eating anything himself, of course, but unlike Hisae, he seemed untroubled by it. “In honor of Aphrodite, who is the goddess of love. - You should pay attention to the wine, Tsuzuki-san. It’s not the whole point of the meal, but it’s at least as important as dessert.”
Tsuzuki looked at him in half-pretended shock. “Nothing is as important as dessert,” he said firmly. But he raised the glass carefully and let the scent and flavor fill his senses; and Muraki was right, it was worth his attention, fresh and sharp with a distant hint of sweetness in it, and a flavor that was like stones in a clear-running stream on a spring morning. It was like the butter, good with the oysters and with the mussels, but different, as though it changed by some unknown art to match each in turn. He drank it slowly, wondering at it; but by the time the oysters and mussels were gone the bottle was empty. “Is there more?” he asked.
“Of course,” Muraki said. “It will be along in a moment. But first - “
First proved to be a little scoop of something sweet and sharp and cold; it made him think of citrus and pine. Then there was another plate: some rich fish on a bed of crisp root vegetables, and a new bottle. This wine was a deeper yellow, the color of the first sunlight of a morning in summer, and it felt richer in his mouth, and it tasted of peaches and apples and wood, and of hay drying on a long summer afternoon.
He was aware of Muraki watching him eat, refilling his glass. He looked at once happy and grave, as though what they were doing in this place were some solemn and long-awaited ceremony, one that had no need of talk to complete it.
At length the fish was gone, and the vegetables, and the last swallow of the summer-flavored wine. The candles on the tables burned brighter now, he thought, and the laughter from the other tables all around rang richer and sweeter, as though the night sang through it. It was full dark now beyond the glass door and windows. There was still no sign of his other ghosts. “What now?” he asked.
“Dessert, of course,” Muraki told him. “You did say nothing was more important.” And now there was a tart of apples under a thin shell of hard caramelized sugar, with thick cream to go with it, and another bottle; and the wine from this bottle was the yellow-gold of the light at the end of an autumn day, just turning to sunset. It was heavy in his mouth, and sweet, and wild: like wind, and honey, and flowers, and all the fruits of the summer and harvest ended: not figs, or blackberries, or plums, but the essence of each and all of them: summation and apotheosis. He had to close his eyes against sudden tears. “What is this?” he whispered.
“Death, and transfiguration,” Muraki answered. “This wine can only be made from grapes that have been infected with a certain mold: botrytis cinerea, the ‘noble rot.’ It pierces their skins, destroys them over days and weeks, bleeds them almost dry and changes what it leaves within them, and those changes are essential to the flavors in this wine: without the ruin, you never taste the glory. I need not draw the metaphor out too much further, I hope. Death is still my great enemy, Tsuzuki-san; but it does not disfigure all that it touches.”
“No,” Tsuzuki said slowly, thinking of Hisoka, of Tatsumi and Watari and Wukaba, of Muraki himself. And there was Maria Wong. Maria’s soul had flared bright as a star when the enchantment holding her was broken, and who could say it would have burned with that same radiance if she had passed on in the usual way after her suicide? And yet - “It’s different,” he said. “Your grapes have no time left. Winter is coming: they’re going to be harvested, or rot on their vines, or be food for animals. They have no life remaining to them. While people -”
“Winter still comes for them,” Muraki replied. His voice was very quiet, so that Tsuzuki had to strain to make out the words. “They don’t always know when, that’s a difference. But the ones you are sent for have no more time than the grapes at harvest. You know that, Tsuzuki-san. You are the messenger of that winter, though you are not the winter itself.”
“You’re generous,” Tsuzuki told him. “But you’re wrong. I’m more than its messenger.” It was hard to find his voice. “I’m a piece of it, its enforcer: the deep cold that comes behind the first killing frost.”
“But without discretion, or free will. You come only in your time. Only, and always, for you have no authority to extend a destined lifespan and give the dead back their lives. Or do you?”
“I can bargain for them, sometimes,” he admitted, thinking uneasily of the Count. “But never for more than a few days. I don’t try very often any more.” He took another bite of the tart. The apples in it were different from the apples in the pies he was used to, with a deep singing flavor: glorious, but not overwhelming like the wine, leaving him his ability to think. “But even if you were right about my murders, yours are different. Your victims weren’t supposed to die when they did.” He paused again, thinking about it, and Muraki was silent, watching him. “But you’re going to say that in taking them before their time, you transformed and preserved their beauty. I can’t believe you’re comparing yourself to mold.”
Muraki was laughing too. “Perhaps if I had foreseen the way the conversation would go, I’d have thought of something more dignified. And yet, the analogy still fits. I took them before the winter did, and so gilded them; and who knows what might have come to them otherwise? It’s not always the best thing, to live to see the winter.”
He would have liked to argue the last point, but of course, Muraki was right: Tsuzuki had seen it over and over; and he had refused to wait for that winter himself, in his own first life. “Say you’re right,” he told Muraki. “Still, they wouldn’t have agreed with you, your victims. Who are you to decide what the best time for them is? Or to rob them of life they wanted? I’ve said it before, they’re not your art supplies.”
Muraki nodded. “Who am I, indeed? But, who is Enma? Or, who is it set the candles, and ordained their time to burn? Who determined that they should go out for the two-year-old child of two, or the 22-year-old mother - not by murder, by predestination - and burn on and on for the child’s brother, or the woman’s neighbor, until they are weary of their lives? What right have they, besides raw power? If they have kindness, or justice, or beauty to justify them, I have never seen it; have you, Tsuzuki-san?”
He reached for the wine. He might not deserve to taste the wonder of it, but its beauty was steadying, and so was the alcohol; and the tears it brought were at least not tears for his own guilt. “No,” he whispered, when he could speak again. “That’s why you’re wrong about me. If I am Meifu’s dog, still, if I can’t know my masters are right, doesn’t that make me complicit in the wrong?”
“If they are wrong. You don’t know that, either.” Muraki’s voice was gentle. “Some would say that you serve the gods; that should be enough. There could be reason, and balance, and justice beyond our understanding.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
“No. But that doesn’t mean you can’t.”
He could not look directly at Muraki. “You’re being kind to me. Why are you?”
He saw Muraki shrug a little, saw him pour more wine into Tsuzuki’s glass: large motions at the periphery of his vision. “It amuses me,” he said. “For the moment. Do you mind it?”
“No. It’s just . . . You’re always kind. None of the others ever are.”
“Am I? I make an interesting choice of comforter.” He smiled: a private smile, inward-looking, as one who shared the joke with the night itself. “But I can tell you now why the others are not kind, Tsuzuki-san. You count their deaths as tragedies, and you blame yourself for killing them; and your own judgment is the harsher because you know how desperately they clung to their lives. They do no more than treat you as you believe they should. But you desired my death.”
“No.” It was too much like the others, now; and it was important that Muraki understand. “It was necessary, I couldn’t let you go on killing. And I owed it to Hisoka to protect him, and you would have sent both of us to the true death. I had to stop you, and it was a fight, that made it easier. But I never wanted you to die.”
“No?” Muraki echoed. “That was foolish of you, then.”
“Maybe. But -” He closed his eyes. Nagasaki rose around him: his ruined body, that last hopeless gamble; his new partner doing the impossible, taking it all, holding steady through fear and agony; and then Muraki laughing in delight as the flames rose around him, like a child laughing for joy at his first snowfall. “You were so beautiful. Not for me, but so beautiful; and how could I want to see you dead?”
Muraki was silent for a long moment, but when he spoke again his voice was light. “Very easily, I should think. As putting temptation out of your reach.”
He felt himself smile. “Tatsumi would say that,” he agreed. The thought of Tatsumi warmed him for an instant, before full memory rose in him, bristling with knives. “But no. Putting temptation out of reach puts possibility out of reach too. And hope, and dream. It’s another death. And I have had enough of death.”
“But not enough of pain.” And then, into Tsuzuki’s shocked silence: “You court it very assiduously, Tsuzuki-san. It would be difficult not to notice.”
Words fled. In that internal silence he was once more vividly aware of the space around him: the resonance of other voices off the stone walls, the reflections of lights in windows and glasses and silver; deep colors of wine, red and white, gold and deepest green; scents of wine and apples; shadows, a little unsteady in the candlelight, as the shadows of Muraki’s fingers where they rested now on the stem of his empty glass.
The shadows. The world lurched, and he drew a long, shuddering breath.
He had been a great sorcerer in life, and spiritual gifts did not vanish with death: it was not impossible that Muraki’s spirit could manifest powerfully enough for his ghost to be visible and audible to ordinary living men and women, or even for it to be able to move small objects in the living world: to open a menu or lift a bottle. But for it to cast a shadow . . . Tsuzuki was suddenly aware of his heart, beating fast now with fear, or maybe it was excitement. He wanted to look away, to borrow time, but there was no point: what he had seen could not be unseen. Or at least, could not be unacknowledged: how long, now, had he been seeing it, and refusing to see it?
He closed his eyes for a moment, fought down the thrill of fear, opened them again. The shadows were still there. “You’re alive,” he said. “Aren’t you.”
“Well,” Muraki said. “That took an impressive amount of alcohol.” He picked up a fork and speared the last piece of Tsuzuki’s tart. His hand brushed Tsuzuki’s as it passed, and it was solid, and warm to the touch, and Tsuzuki’s whole body shivered at the contact. “You needn’t sound so put out about it,” he added; but his eyes danced. “As you said yourself, a dead man could hardly buy you dinner, and your office would have been very unhappy about the expense report.”
Alive. He was grateful again for the alcohol: it made the shock curiously distant. “You let me think you were dead. Why?” He should have been angrier at that, he thought, and more alarmed; he had spoken to Muraki as he would not have to a living enemy. But he could not manage anger, or even desire it, and his alarm was not for his indiscretions: it was too good to set aside the burden of having to feel what he ought to feel.
“Medical judgment,” Muraki told him. “I’m not sure you could have been dissuaded earlier, even if I’d tried to argue with you. Does that happen often?” He sounded like a doctor now, interested but a little distant, asking a diagnostic question. Tsuzuki ignored it.
“That’s why you don’t treat me the way the others do. You have no reason. I didn’t kill you.” It was too much to think about, too fast: the implications spun out in every direction, dizzying him. He was distantly aware of Muraki speaking to a waiter, settling the check, but he had no attention for it. “How do you find me?” he asked. “I know how the others do it.”
Muraki did not answer at once. He watched Tsuzuki, and his look was like his tone, clinical and appraising. There was something in it that held Tsuzuki quiet, waiting. “It’s a beautiful night,” he said at last. “Let’s go for a walk, shall we?” He did not speak again until they were out the door, until the busy part of the street was behind them and quiet had closed around them. Tsuzuki could smell the river, and the old stone, but he had little thought for the city now: he walked through it with a living man, and the knowledge burned in all his senses. There was fear, now, but it was a manageable fear, not unpleasant, shading into excitement. If this city were Tokyo, or his own Nagasaki, reason and honor might have forced him to end this, so he was grateful that it was not: that there was no course he could see before him but to see this adventure through to its end.
Muraki’s path took them by a formal walled garden, along an avenue and through narrow twisting streets, until at last they came down another set of stairs and stood once more by the Seine.
“Tsuzuki-san,” Muraki said at last. His voice was very gentle now, an anchor in the storm of Tsuzuki’s thought, commanding his attention. “I have not seen you or spoken to you since our meeting in Nagasaki, until tonight. And tonight, it was coincidence.”
“Coincidence? After midnight, in Yoyogi Park?” Suspicion rose now, and could not be shoved aside. “What were you doing there? Hunting for new victims?”
Muraki was laughing now, and shaking his head. “Are you jealous? You shouldn’t be. Now that I have met you, Tsuzuki-san, other victims mean nothing to me. And I promise you, you are well worth stalking. Perhaps I’ll take it up as a hobby, if you’re going to feel neglected when I don’t.”
“What, then?”
“Almost precisely the opposite.” The laughter faded from his voice as he spoke. He lit a cigarette and took a deep pull on it. “There was an accident in the harbor this afternoon, a bad one.”
“I know,” Tsuzuki said. There’d been something wrong about the accident, it had taken people who should not have died, and too many of them had refused to leave their ruined bodies. It had meant emergency reassignments: Tatsumi himself had been pulled from his work and sent into the field, for his shadows could penetrate deep water, could go where they could not, down to where the light failed. Tsuzuki had volunteered to help, but he hadn’t been needed for long, and Konoe had released him to wander the city while Tatsumi probed the cold and dark of the wreckage.
“I thought you might,” said Muraki. “I was almost certain I felt one of you in my hospital tonight, although I had neither the time nor the attention to be sure of it. Every hospital in Tokyo with the capacity to handle serious trauma cases has been flooded, and every surgical team qualified to treat the survivors worked late into the night tonight. And whatever else I am, Tsuzuki-san, I am a very fine surgeon.”
He paused, and shrugged once more. “We closed the last case just after two. Some of my team went home to sleep, some went for a late dinner, and I went for a walk. - I was surprised to see you, Tsuzuki-san. I had thought you were based in Kyushu.”
“I’m in charge of the Kyushu block. But we’re all based in Tokyo, with the Ministry,” he said absently. The thought of Muraki as a real doctor, practicing now and not in some hypothetical past, was almost as difficult to assimilate as the knowledge that Muraki was alive. His mind shied away from it, back to the immediate questions. Muraki wasn’t lying about the accident. The rest, though - “But you do find me,” he told Muraki. “We’ve spoken before. Often. Since Nagasaki. You know that.”
“I do know that,” Muraki answered. “Since you have been telling me about it from the moment we met tonight. Or rather, I know that you have been speaking to a shadow you believed to be me, and that it has answered you. But unless my spirit has found a way to visit you without my knowledge, it is not me that has been your companion. As for the others: the implications are clear enough, are they not?”
He was missing something, that was obvious, but he had no idea what. The thought came with another shudder of fear, or anticipation; he might not want to know, but it was like Muraki’s shadow: there was no turning from it. “Just tell me,” he whispered. “What about the others?”
Muraki touched his hand then, lightly, and drew him back from the water. “Tsuzuki-san,” he said again, and again there was the dreadful gentleness in his voice. “You must understand by now that the others are not real.”
“No,” he said. “They’re dead, I’ve seen the proof. I’ve seen them, spoken to them -” He broke off, horror rising in him.
“Exactly,” Muraki said. “You have conjured them yourself, for your own torment. As you have conjured me, before tonight.”
He should feel something, he thought: terror, perhaps, or vertigo, or at least the urge to flee, to bury this knowledge somewhere he would never have to look at it. But there was only shock now, and recognition. “Shinigami go mad, sometimes,” he said. “They told me that when I was first recruited. Am I, do you think?”
“No, not entirely,” Muraki replied. “Not as a mortal man would be. You have power of your own: enough so that the creatures of your mind might manifest themselves in some perceptible form, and deceive their creator - at least if he declined to look at them too closely. You have a colleague, I understand, whose drawings sometimes come to life. The madness, if any, is in your self-deception, and the reasons you’ve indulged it.”
“You seem very sure of my reasons.”
“Aren’t they obvious?” Muraki was very close to him now. Tsuzuki had retreated almost as far as he could from the water; he could feel the chill of the great stone embankment behind him. “It answers your own riddle. Why else are the others cruel to you, all of them, even the ones who had made their peace with death, and were grateful for your help? If they were real, some of them would have forgiven you. It is your own hunger for pain that speaks through their voices.”
“But not through yours? Yours, among them all?” He raised his head to look Muraki full in the face. Muraki was tall, taller even than Tatsumi: this close to him, he had to tip his head back to do it. He was vividly aware of his own throat, stretched and exposed, and of his heartbeat, fast now with fear, or with excitement.
Muraki smiled a little. “Of course through mine. Why else do you turn to me for comfort? I couldn’t hurt you with accusations; my own guilt would have prevented it. But that same guilt meant I could hurt you with affection, and understanding.” He did not step forward to close the space between them, but he raised one hand to Tsuzuki’s face so that his fingertips rested lightly along the line of Tsuzuki’s jaw. Tsuzuki struggled to be still, not to lean into that touch. Muraki seemed to sense it, waiting until Tsuzuki had steadied under his hand before he spoke again. “It’s better than the bludgeon of guilt from the others, I should think: delicate, and precise, and cutting deep. It’s no wonder you’ve made me a favorite: even as a shadow of your own imagining, I do it better than they do.”
He was trembling now, he could feel it, and Muraki was right, because the voice and the dreadful words were like being touched, overmastering his senses: he could drown in this. Muraki lifted his chin a little, and Tsuzuki opened his eyes to see his smile, and now that smile was a kindling fire in Tsuzuki’s blood. “As myself, and no shadow, I can make it better beyond your imagination.”
He could still run: shove Muraki away, tell him this wasn’t what he wanted. Go back to Tokyo, if he could trust Muraki to take him, and think about his ghosts and what they meant. Think about what he was going to do if any of them came to him. When one of them came to him. Think about Tatsumi, and shadows, and cold deep water. Wake his partner up and be called an idiot.
It took only a tiny motion, a turn of his head into Muraki’s hand, and his lips were pressed into Muraki’s palm. He rested there a moment, then raised his head to meet Muraki’s eyes once more. He tried to match Muraki’s smile, but it was useless: he was beyond poise, and beyond games. He let his eyes fall shut. “Good,” he said. “Prove it.”
**
Muraki turned him around, and he saw with a dreamlike lack of surprise that there was a door in the stone wall behind them now, where no door had been before: tall, wooden, carved with lotuses. It opened at Muraki’s touch, and he locked it behind them. Beyond it was a lobby, and then another doorway; and beyond that a room with tall windows facing east and west, and a fireplace where a fire of cedarwood burned, and a great Western-style bed hung with curtains of worked silk. A frieze of lotuses ran at the top of the wall, and they seemed to float, half-alive in the moving firelight.
It seemed . . . excessive. But perhaps this was normal, for Paris. And it hardly mattered: there was a bed, and a door, and there was Muraki, drawing Tsuzuki into his arms and closing the last distance between them at last; and at his touch everything in that room and that night that was not Muraki seemed to waver and go out like a smothered flame.
**
“Can you stop time?” he asked Muraki later. “We could stay here. Send out for food, if we have to.”
“‘Run slowly, slowly, chariot-horses of the night,’” Muraki answered, just as Tsuzuki had meant it seriously. “I wish it were possible. This place is not wholly inside time, or not the time of our world. But I have no art to hold it back entirely. Outside, time passes. It is still deep night in Paris, but the sun has risen in Tokyo. I have patients to see, and you -”
“The office will expect me at the usual time.” It was strange to consider it, that a few minutes from now he could be walking into the Ministry as on any ordinary day, a little late, a little dishevelled, and that nothing would have changed at all. It was exactly what his colleagues expected of him; they’d assume he had overslept, or spent too long in line at a pastry shop, and no one would know the difference.
No one except Hisoka.
At that moment, too late, he saw it: saw it, and knew that he was to blame, that he must have known from the beginning and pushed the knowledge deep, hiding it from himself until it could no longer hold him back from having what he wanted. Hisoka was the only one of them who mattered, the only one who’d care, the only one worth hiding it from; and the only one from whom there was no way to hide it. Tsuzuki could make excuses: he could tell himself that it was none of his partner’s business, that they weren’t close, that Hisoka was cold, distant, obviously expected nothing better from his undisciplined slacker of a partner anyway.
He could tell himself that, and it would be true, but it didn’t matter. Hisoka deserved better from him, from the whole universe: that would be true as a matter of plain justice, even if Tsuzuki felt nothing for him. That he did care might make his failure more painful to him, but it could not make it objectively worse.
Muraki must have felt the change in his body. “What?” he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he gathered Tsuzuki in for another kiss. It was wrong, utterly wrong, that this should be as exquisite as ever, that he should drown in it even as he remembered what Muraki had done to Hisoka: violation, murder, and that final twist of horror, the sealing of Hisoka’s memory, leaving him with no context, no way to understand his suffering or his death -
- And Hisoka was right, he was an idiot. “Hisoka,” he said, breaking the kiss. “You blocked Hisoka’s memories of what you did to him. Could you block mine?”
Muraki was silent for a long moment, and for an instant the hair over his right eye glittered oddly, as if it were lit from behind. “Yes, I could,” he said at last. “Interesting. I’d have expected immortality to make more of a difference, but the structures are essentially the same.”
“Do it, then. Make me forget this, when we’re home again.”
Muraki laughed, low in his throat. “Now, should I be flattered or insulted, I wonder? But I said that I could, not that I was willing to.”
“Why not?”
“I consider it medically inadviseable. For a start. Why should I do this, Tsuzuki-san? So that you can go back to Meifu and summon up your ghosts again?”
Tsuzuki shuddered. “No. Not that.”
“What, then?”
“Hisoka,” he said again. “He’s still my partner. Be flattered, if you like. Do you think that I’ll be able to not think about you, not feel anything he can perceive, if I can remember? He’ll know, and it’s not fair. Nothing in his life was ever fair. I can’t add this to it.”
“You underestimate him,” Muraki said. And then, at Tsuzuki’s look, “You forget: I’ve known him for longer than you have, and those are my words that are written on his body. It’s true, he won’t like this. But he’ll deal with it, if he finds out now. Conceal it from him and you’ve made a decision to lie to him; the longer it goes on, the worse it will be if he discovers it.”
“Maybe,” Tsuzuki said. Muraki had proved he understood Tsuzuki all too well; it would be stupid to ignore the possibility that he was right about Hisoka as well. “But you’re forgetting about time, and healing. He'll have more strength to face it, if it waits. And if it waits long enough, it may not even matter to him.”
“And if it does continue to matter, I will be able to threaten you with exposure at my whim. Do you really want to give me a weapon that will be always at your throat?”
He reached for Muraki’s fingers where they rested along the bone of his hip and wrapped them around his own neck, pressing down a little. “Yes, actually. What do you care?”
“I told you. I was a fool in Nagasaki: you are far too enjoyable for me to readily see you damaged. Memory spells carry risks, like any other medical intervention; in your case, as a purely medical matter, the risks outweigh the potential benefits. That aside, it would be annoying. And inconvenient. Seducing you once has been a pleasure, Tsuzuki-san, but I can’t think you want us to have it all to do over again, every time we meet.”
“Don’t, then. Knock me over the head or something next time, and let me remember when I come to. Why not? You’re not going to tell me that you’re too fastidious for rape.”
“Not generally speaking, no. But I might be too fastidious to rape you, in particular. Not when your consent is such a delicious thing.”
“You’ll have my consent. Once you dissolve the spells. Please.” He stopped, and when he spoke again it was softly, his voice low and serious. “I am begging this as a mercy from you. I would have thought you would want to encourage that.”
He could feel the moment of acquiescence in Muraki’s body, even before he spoke: “And mercy is capricious and irrational by nature, unearned and not to be relied upon.” There was smothered laughter in the words. “Very well, Tsuzuki-san. I am obviously every bit as stupid about you as everyone else is. I’ll do it. Are you content?”
He drew Muraki’s hand to his mouth, kissed it. “No. No. Would you want me to be?”
“No,” Muraki told him. “Of course not. Indeed, gods forbid you ever should be.”
Tsuzuki laughed. “Good. Then I can hope not to disappoint you.”
Muraki stood, and reached a hand to him; he took it and rose from the bed. His clothes would have to do, there would be no time to go home and change them. He’d notice, even if nobody else did; he’d tell himself some story, no doubt, to explain the missing time. Apparently, he was good at telling himself stories.
He paused at the lotus door and turned to Muraki. “Don’t tell me when you’re going to do it. Please? I don’t want to know it’s coming.”
“You won’t notice, Tsuzuki-san. I promise.” Tsuzuki could have taken him for a ghost once more, silver and white, immaculate, with no trace on him of the night gone by. But when he leaned down now to kiss Tsuzuki’s forehead, the touch was solid and real. He opened the door. There was light outside it now: morning, and Tokyo, and beyond it all the vast kingdom of death. They stepped through it together, and into the day.
__________________________
Author's Note part 3:
Acknowledgements and disclaimer: YnM is not mine. Nor is E. R. Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison. This story hardly rises to the level of a remix of Fish Dinner, but it does reference themes and lines from the book, so that if you see something you think is stolen from it, you’re right. That’s Eddison’s, not mine.
Fish le Boissonerie, on the rue de Seine, is a real restaurant, although I have taken ruthless liberties with their menu. As the name suggests, they have an excellent wine list, but I would be surprised if they really offer the 1975 Chateau D’Yquem that Tsuzuki had with his tarte tatin. (For one thing, only fantasy characters can afford it.) It’s very good, very casual, and not expensive, and unless things have changed in the last year or so, it is also popular enough that you’d better have a reservation if you expect to find a table there at eight. Or else be able to steal somebody else’s.
Author: Phoebe Zeitgeist
Rating: PG-13 (this version)
Warnings: Characters who won't shut up; not-wholly-balanced Tsuzuki; pretentious literary references. Unbeta'dness, and I mean it.
Summary: A chance meeting, and some consequences. Written for wordsofastory's prompt: "Pre-Kyoto. They encounter each other accidentally, alone and off-duty. At what point do Tsuzuki's reservations give way to attraction, and what are the consequences? [Note: Also, if you could keep in mind that Muraki's a serial killer and not a fluffy teddy bear? plzkthnx.]"
Author's Notes part 1: This takes place after Nagasaki, but before the Devil's Trill arc. Further notes/disclaimers are at the end of the story.
Author's Notes part 2: I hope to make some revisions to the final third of this story over the next few days, and the rating of the second version may go up a notch. For what that may be worth.
ETA, 7/16/09: I did eventually revise this, as per the notes above, and it has taken me years and a reminder for it to occur to me to post a link to the revised version. But for the record, and for what it's worth, it's here.
Tsuzuki Asato walked in Tokyo, and his ghosts walked with him. Tonight it was Hisae, pale and sad, plucking at his sleeve. She wanted him to bring offerings for her brother’s grave, as she would do today if she still lived; but he could not take on the family duties of all his dead. She had only wept when he had tried to explain: like so many of the ghosts, she seemed to grow less accepting of her death with time. It was a relief when he turned a corner and she bowed her head and let him go, fading into the air behind him.
“And you loved her,” Maria Wong told him reproachfully.
“You don’t have to,” Tsuzuki told her. “I remember.” It was strange for Maria to remember it too: he would have thought that the dead who moved on had better things to do than to follow him. But for all he knew, they all did it, spent the undefined time before their reincarnations watching over their murderer as he went about his own unending life. It must stop with their reincarnation, he thought; it was almost always his relatively recent victims who came to him. And yet, could he be sure of even that? Perhaps there was some knowledge that survived, deeply hidden, into the new life, for if nothing was saved, how did the soul grow?
Maria might know the answer. “Will I still see you, after you move on?” he asked now.
“I wouldn’t know,” replied Maria’s silver doctor. Maria had fled, Tsuzuki saw, still afraid of Muraki even in death. For himself, Tsuzuki welcomed him. Muraki, alone among his dead, was always gentle with him, strangely understanding. Perhaps it was because Muraki had embraced death, for its own sake and not merely as a release from an intolerable life. Amid Suzaku’s flames Muraki had laughed for pure delight. It made them friends now, or as much like friends as a shinigami and retrieved ghost could be. Tsuzuki was uneasy about it sometimes: was it not a betrayal of his partner, this odd affection for the spirit of the man who had raped Hisoka and cursed him to a lingering death, then caught him and tortured him anew for no better than his own entertainment? But then, Tsuzuki had killed him for it, and the Powers would sentence him; should not death and judgment settle all scores?
It was late now, Tsuzuki saw. The moon had fallen while he walked and thought: still beautiful in its dark setting but only one among many lights in the sky now, not the solitary, unfathomable wonder he remembered from his distant childhood. “I’d get it for you,” Muraki said from his place at Tsuzuki’s side. “The moon, and a chain to wear it on. But I expect you’d really rather I bought you dinner.”
“I’d let you,” Tsuzuki said ruefully. He’d had dinner, he remembered, noodles in some shop with Hisae for company. That had been hours ago, though, and he was hungry again. “Dinner, I mean, not the moon, people would miss that if you took it.”
“Well then -”
“But I don’t see how you could do it. You’re dead, remember?”
Muraki gave him a long look from his single visible eye - it was strange that he still kept the right eye hidden behind that curtain of hair, now that death had restored it, but then, the dead often were irrationally attached to the habits they’d learned in life - and Tsuzuki thought perhaps he was offended, and would go away. But instead he shrugged. “The American Express card, don’t leave Hell without it,” he said. “Come along, Tsuzuki-san. In my professional opinion, you need that dinner. And a good stiff drink.”
He trailed along behind Muraki, unresisting. “Where are we going?” he asked. Moonset was, what? Three in the morning this time of year and in this phase, he thought, although the windows of his hospital room had never faced west. Something would be open, somewhere, but it wasn’t a promising time to be looking for a restaurant. He wondered whether Muraki knew what time it was, or whether he’d lost track, as the ghosts sometimes did.
Muraki stepped closer to him. “Somewhere that won’t be filled with my colleagues,” he said. “Or yours. I think somewhere . . . earlier.”
A few more steps and the world swirled and changed, as it did in teleport and in dream, and now he was standing on a paved walk above the bank of a river. Masonry arced over his head, a wall was behind him, and city lights glittered in the water. Muraki was still beside him, shining faintly in a darkness that was more twilight than deep night. “What is this place?” he asked.
“Paris,” Muraki said. “I’ve always liked Paris. You are standing by the river Seine, and it is not yet 8:00, and I am going to take you to dinner at Fish.”
“You can do that?” Tsuzuki asked, fascinated. He had known that ghosts could move from Meifu to Chijou, to places they’d had strong emotional connections to in life. It made sense, then, that if Muraki had loved Paris he could come here. But to bring Tsuzuki with him . . . there were reasons that the living might fear the dead, but he had never before heard of this one, that they might pluck you from one place and leave you in another.
“As you see,” said Muraki. “But then, I’ve made a special study of portals.”
“The others won’t follow, then?”
“I shouldn’t think they could,” Muraki agreed. “Not unless you invite them. Shall we go?”
It was a short walk, up a flight of stone steps, across a broad avenue where four lanes of cars and buses rushed like a second river, then through an arch onto a narrow street of old stone buildings, bright with gallery windows. The sidewalk was barely wide enough for two to walk abreast, and busy, and he had to take care to avoid crowding his guide; for no ghost liked to be reminded of his insubstantiality.
Muraki stopped at a glass door framed by a broad arch of mosaic. Stylized fish danced at its corners, framing bold unreadable letters. “It was a fishmonger’s shop a hundred years ago, they tell me,” he said, following Tsuzuki’s look, and waved Tsuzuki through the door.
The restaurant was small, with a bar and bare stone walls, casual and crowded. It smelled good, and it felt good: a space that wanted you to be happy while you were there, and would do what it could to ensure it. There was a burst of conversation around him, and laughter; and then there was a table, set Western-style with heavy forks and knives and spoons, and glasses on long stems. “How -?” he asked.
“They like me,” Muraki said. “Also, you’re very decorative. Also, it’s possible that I might have stolen somebody else’s reservation.”
As evil went, it was a step up from torture and murder. Tsuzuki thought about feeling guilty, but there was bread and butter on the table now.
Muraki answered the unspoken thought. “No harm done. They’re late, and when they get here they’ll remember that they decided they wouldn’t need a reservation so early in the evening. This is Paris, they won’t go hungry.”
The menu, when they put it into his hands, was incomprehensible in the way of pages seen in dreams, the foreign letters joining to form unrecognizable words. Muraki seemed to see his confusion. “You should let me choose for you,” he told Tsuzuki. “Or, I suppose I could translate, if you’d rather.”
It felt like a test, although not a difficult or unwelcome one. “You do it,” Tsuzuki said. It was oddly luxurious, to set aside even this responsibility, to have no decision to make at all. “I think you’re supposed to.”
“Very good,” Muraki said softly. Tsuzuki drifted, giving most of his attention to the bread and butter, distantly aware of Muraki consulting with tall staff people in a singing dream language. There were two different breads, one plain and one filled with nuts, so that it was like eating field and forest. The butter was strange but rich and good; it tasted different by itself and on each of the two kinds of bread, as though it were three things and not just one. No one was trying to take it away from him, so he ate it slowly, and before it was gone other things had begun to arrive on the table: more glasses, sparkling water and plain, a bottle of a wine that looked pale as moonlight when it was poured out into Muraki’s glass and then into his; and then more food, oysters on their shells and mussels in a broth scented with coriander and cumin.
“I’ve ordered you fish,” Muraki told him. He was not eating anything himself, of course, but unlike Hisae, he seemed untroubled by it. “In honor of Aphrodite, who is the goddess of love. - You should pay attention to the wine, Tsuzuki-san. It’s not the whole point of the meal, but it’s at least as important as dessert.”
Tsuzuki looked at him in half-pretended shock. “Nothing is as important as dessert,” he said firmly. But he raised the glass carefully and let the scent and flavor fill his senses; and Muraki was right, it was worth his attention, fresh and sharp with a distant hint of sweetness in it, and a flavor that was like stones in a clear-running stream on a spring morning. It was like the butter, good with the oysters and with the mussels, but different, as though it changed by some unknown art to match each in turn. He drank it slowly, wondering at it; but by the time the oysters and mussels were gone the bottle was empty. “Is there more?” he asked.
“Of course,” Muraki said. “It will be along in a moment. But first - “
First proved to be a little scoop of something sweet and sharp and cold; it made him think of citrus and pine. Then there was another plate: some rich fish on a bed of crisp root vegetables, and a new bottle. This wine was a deeper yellow, the color of the first sunlight of a morning in summer, and it felt richer in his mouth, and it tasted of peaches and apples and wood, and of hay drying on a long summer afternoon.
He was aware of Muraki watching him eat, refilling his glass. He looked at once happy and grave, as though what they were doing in this place were some solemn and long-awaited ceremony, one that had no need of talk to complete it.
At length the fish was gone, and the vegetables, and the last swallow of the summer-flavored wine. The candles on the tables burned brighter now, he thought, and the laughter from the other tables all around rang richer and sweeter, as though the night sang through it. It was full dark now beyond the glass door and windows. There was still no sign of his other ghosts. “What now?” he asked.
“Dessert, of course,” Muraki told him. “You did say nothing was more important.” And now there was a tart of apples under a thin shell of hard caramelized sugar, with thick cream to go with it, and another bottle; and the wine from this bottle was the yellow-gold of the light at the end of an autumn day, just turning to sunset. It was heavy in his mouth, and sweet, and wild: like wind, and honey, and flowers, and all the fruits of the summer and harvest ended: not figs, or blackberries, or plums, but the essence of each and all of them: summation and apotheosis. He had to close his eyes against sudden tears. “What is this?” he whispered.
“Death, and transfiguration,” Muraki answered. “This wine can only be made from grapes that have been infected with a certain mold: botrytis cinerea, the ‘noble rot.’ It pierces their skins, destroys them over days and weeks, bleeds them almost dry and changes what it leaves within them, and those changes are essential to the flavors in this wine: without the ruin, you never taste the glory. I need not draw the metaphor out too much further, I hope. Death is still my great enemy, Tsuzuki-san; but it does not disfigure all that it touches.”
“No,” Tsuzuki said slowly, thinking of Hisoka, of Tatsumi and Watari and Wukaba, of Muraki himself. And there was Maria Wong. Maria’s soul had flared bright as a star when the enchantment holding her was broken, and who could say it would have burned with that same radiance if she had passed on in the usual way after her suicide? And yet - “It’s different,” he said. “Your grapes have no time left. Winter is coming: they’re going to be harvested, or rot on their vines, or be food for animals. They have no life remaining to them. While people -”
“Winter still comes for them,” Muraki replied. His voice was very quiet, so that Tsuzuki had to strain to make out the words. “They don’t always know when, that’s a difference. But the ones you are sent for have no more time than the grapes at harvest. You know that, Tsuzuki-san. You are the messenger of that winter, though you are not the winter itself.”
“You’re generous,” Tsuzuki told him. “But you’re wrong. I’m more than its messenger.” It was hard to find his voice. “I’m a piece of it, its enforcer: the deep cold that comes behind the first killing frost.”
“But without discretion, or free will. You come only in your time. Only, and always, for you have no authority to extend a destined lifespan and give the dead back their lives. Or do you?”
“I can bargain for them, sometimes,” he admitted, thinking uneasily of the Count. “But never for more than a few days. I don’t try very often any more.” He took another bite of the tart. The apples in it were different from the apples in the pies he was used to, with a deep singing flavor: glorious, but not overwhelming like the wine, leaving him his ability to think. “But even if you were right about my murders, yours are different. Your victims weren’t supposed to die when they did.” He paused again, thinking about it, and Muraki was silent, watching him. “But you’re going to say that in taking them before their time, you transformed and preserved their beauty. I can’t believe you’re comparing yourself to mold.”
Muraki was laughing too. “Perhaps if I had foreseen the way the conversation would go, I’d have thought of something more dignified. And yet, the analogy still fits. I took them before the winter did, and so gilded them; and who knows what might have come to them otherwise? It’s not always the best thing, to live to see the winter.”
He would have liked to argue the last point, but of course, Muraki was right: Tsuzuki had seen it over and over; and he had refused to wait for that winter himself, in his own first life. “Say you’re right,” he told Muraki. “Still, they wouldn’t have agreed with you, your victims. Who are you to decide what the best time for them is? Or to rob them of life they wanted? I’ve said it before, they’re not your art supplies.”
Muraki nodded. “Who am I, indeed? But, who is Enma? Or, who is it set the candles, and ordained their time to burn? Who determined that they should go out for the two-year-old child of two, or the 22-year-old mother - not by murder, by predestination - and burn on and on for the child’s brother, or the woman’s neighbor, until they are weary of their lives? What right have they, besides raw power? If they have kindness, or justice, or beauty to justify them, I have never seen it; have you, Tsuzuki-san?”
He reached for the wine. He might not deserve to taste the wonder of it, but its beauty was steadying, and so was the alcohol; and the tears it brought were at least not tears for his own guilt. “No,” he whispered, when he could speak again. “That’s why you’re wrong about me. If I am Meifu’s dog, still, if I can’t know my masters are right, doesn’t that make me complicit in the wrong?”
“If they are wrong. You don’t know that, either.” Muraki’s voice was gentle. “Some would say that you serve the gods; that should be enough. There could be reason, and balance, and justice beyond our understanding.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
“No. But that doesn’t mean you can’t.”
He could not look directly at Muraki. “You’re being kind to me. Why are you?”
He saw Muraki shrug a little, saw him pour more wine into Tsuzuki’s glass: large motions at the periphery of his vision. “It amuses me,” he said. “For the moment. Do you mind it?”
“No. It’s just . . . You’re always kind. None of the others ever are.”
“Am I? I make an interesting choice of comforter.” He smiled: a private smile, inward-looking, as one who shared the joke with the night itself. “But I can tell you now why the others are not kind, Tsuzuki-san. You count their deaths as tragedies, and you blame yourself for killing them; and your own judgment is the harsher because you know how desperately they clung to their lives. They do no more than treat you as you believe they should. But you desired my death.”
“No.” It was too much like the others, now; and it was important that Muraki understand. “It was necessary, I couldn’t let you go on killing. And I owed it to Hisoka to protect him, and you would have sent both of us to the true death. I had to stop you, and it was a fight, that made it easier. But I never wanted you to die.”
“No?” Muraki echoed. “That was foolish of you, then.”
“Maybe. But -” He closed his eyes. Nagasaki rose around him: his ruined body, that last hopeless gamble; his new partner doing the impossible, taking it all, holding steady through fear and agony; and then Muraki laughing in delight as the flames rose around him, like a child laughing for joy at his first snowfall. “You were so beautiful. Not for me, but so beautiful; and how could I want to see you dead?”
Muraki was silent for a long moment, but when he spoke again his voice was light. “Very easily, I should think. As putting temptation out of your reach.”
He felt himself smile. “Tatsumi would say that,” he agreed. The thought of Tatsumi warmed him for an instant, before full memory rose in him, bristling with knives. “But no. Putting temptation out of reach puts possibility out of reach too. And hope, and dream. It’s another death. And I have had enough of death.”
“But not enough of pain.” And then, into Tsuzuki’s shocked silence: “You court it very assiduously, Tsuzuki-san. It would be difficult not to notice.”
Words fled. In that internal silence he was once more vividly aware of the space around him: the resonance of other voices off the stone walls, the reflections of lights in windows and glasses and silver; deep colors of wine, red and white, gold and deepest green; scents of wine and apples; shadows, a little unsteady in the candlelight, as the shadows of Muraki’s fingers where they rested now on the stem of his empty glass.
The shadows. The world lurched, and he drew a long, shuddering breath.
He had been a great sorcerer in life, and spiritual gifts did not vanish with death: it was not impossible that Muraki’s spirit could manifest powerfully enough for his ghost to be visible and audible to ordinary living men and women, or even for it to be able to move small objects in the living world: to open a menu or lift a bottle. But for it to cast a shadow . . . Tsuzuki was suddenly aware of his heart, beating fast now with fear, or maybe it was excitement. He wanted to look away, to borrow time, but there was no point: what he had seen could not be unseen. Or at least, could not be unacknowledged: how long, now, had he been seeing it, and refusing to see it?
He closed his eyes for a moment, fought down the thrill of fear, opened them again. The shadows were still there. “You’re alive,” he said. “Aren’t you.”
“Well,” Muraki said. “That took an impressive amount of alcohol.” He picked up a fork and speared the last piece of Tsuzuki’s tart. His hand brushed Tsuzuki’s as it passed, and it was solid, and warm to the touch, and Tsuzuki’s whole body shivered at the contact. “You needn’t sound so put out about it,” he added; but his eyes danced. “As you said yourself, a dead man could hardly buy you dinner, and your office would have been very unhappy about the expense report.”
Alive. He was grateful again for the alcohol: it made the shock curiously distant. “You let me think you were dead. Why?” He should have been angrier at that, he thought, and more alarmed; he had spoken to Muraki as he would not have to a living enemy. But he could not manage anger, or even desire it, and his alarm was not for his indiscretions: it was too good to set aside the burden of having to feel what he ought to feel.
“Medical judgment,” Muraki told him. “I’m not sure you could have been dissuaded earlier, even if I’d tried to argue with you. Does that happen often?” He sounded like a doctor now, interested but a little distant, asking a diagnostic question. Tsuzuki ignored it.
“That’s why you don’t treat me the way the others do. You have no reason. I didn’t kill you.” It was too much to think about, too fast: the implications spun out in every direction, dizzying him. He was distantly aware of Muraki speaking to a waiter, settling the check, but he had no attention for it. “How do you find me?” he asked. “I know how the others do it.”
Muraki did not answer at once. He watched Tsuzuki, and his look was like his tone, clinical and appraising. There was something in it that held Tsuzuki quiet, waiting. “It’s a beautiful night,” he said at last. “Let’s go for a walk, shall we?” He did not speak again until they were out the door, until the busy part of the street was behind them and quiet had closed around them. Tsuzuki could smell the river, and the old stone, but he had little thought for the city now: he walked through it with a living man, and the knowledge burned in all his senses. There was fear, now, but it was a manageable fear, not unpleasant, shading into excitement. If this city were Tokyo, or his own Nagasaki, reason and honor might have forced him to end this, so he was grateful that it was not: that there was no course he could see before him but to see this adventure through to its end.
Muraki’s path took them by a formal walled garden, along an avenue and through narrow twisting streets, until at last they came down another set of stairs and stood once more by the Seine.
“Tsuzuki-san,” Muraki said at last. His voice was very gentle now, an anchor in the storm of Tsuzuki’s thought, commanding his attention. “I have not seen you or spoken to you since our meeting in Nagasaki, until tonight. And tonight, it was coincidence.”
“Coincidence? After midnight, in Yoyogi Park?” Suspicion rose now, and could not be shoved aside. “What were you doing there? Hunting for new victims?”
Muraki was laughing now, and shaking his head. “Are you jealous? You shouldn’t be. Now that I have met you, Tsuzuki-san, other victims mean nothing to me. And I promise you, you are well worth stalking. Perhaps I’ll take it up as a hobby, if you’re going to feel neglected when I don’t.”
“What, then?”
“Almost precisely the opposite.” The laughter faded from his voice as he spoke. He lit a cigarette and took a deep pull on it. “There was an accident in the harbor this afternoon, a bad one.”
“I know,” Tsuzuki said. There’d been something wrong about the accident, it had taken people who should not have died, and too many of them had refused to leave their ruined bodies. It had meant emergency reassignments: Tatsumi himself had been pulled from his work and sent into the field, for his shadows could penetrate deep water, could go where they could not, down to where the light failed. Tsuzuki had volunteered to help, but he hadn’t been needed for long, and Konoe had released him to wander the city while Tatsumi probed the cold and dark of the wreckage.
“I thought you might,” said Muraki. “I was almost certain I felt one of you in my hospital tonight, although I had neither the time nor the attention to be sure of it. Every hospital in Tokyo with the capacity to handle serious trauma cases has been flooded, and every surgical team qualified to treat the survivors worked late into the night tonight. And whatever else I am, Tsuzuki-san, I am a very fine surgeon.”
He paused, and shrugged once more. “We closed the last case just after two. Some of my team went home to sleep, some went for a late dinner, and I went for a walk. - I was surprised to see you, Tsuzuki-san. I had thought you were based in Kyushu.”
“I’m in charge of the Kyushu block. But we’re all based in Tokyo, with the Ministry,” he said absently. The thought of Muraki as a real doctor, practicing now and not in some hypothetical past, was almost as difficult to assimilate as the knowledge that Muraki was alive. His mind shied away from it, back to the immediate questions. Muraki wasn’t lying about the accident. The rest, though - “But you do find me,” he told Muraki. “We’ve spoken before. Often. Since Nagasaki. You know that.”
“I do know that,” Muraki answered. “Since you have been telling me about it from the moment we met tonight. Or rather, I know that you have been speaking to a shadow you believed to be me, and that it has answered you. But unless my spirit has found a way to visit you without my knowledge, it is not me that has been your companion. As for the others: the implications are clear enough, are they not?”
He was missing something, that was obvious, but he had no idea what. The thought came with another shudder of fear, or anticipation; he might not want to know, but it was like Muraki’s shadow: there was no turning from it. “Just tell me,” he whispered. “What about the others?”
Muraki touched his hand then, lightly, and drew him back from the water. “Tsuzuki-san,” he said again, and again there was the dreadful gentleness in his voice. “You must understand by now that the others are not real.”
“No,” he said. “They’re dead, I’ve seen the proof. I’ve seen them, spoken to them -” He broke off, horror rising in him.
“Exactly,” Muraki said. “You have conjured them yourself, for your own torment. As you have conjured me, before tonight.”
He should feel something, he thought: terror, perhaps, or vertigo, or at least the urge to flee, to bury this knowledge somewhere he would never have to look at it. But there was only shock now, and recognition. “Shinigami go mad, sometimes,” he said. “They told me that when I was first recruited. Am I, do you think?”
“No, not entirely,” Muraki replied. “Not as a mortal man would be. You have power of your own: enough so that the creatures of your mind might manifest themselves in some perceptible form, and deceive their creator - at least if he declined to look at them too closely. You have a colleague, I understand, whose drawings sometimes come to life. The madness, if any, is in your self-deception, and the reasons you’ve indulged it.”
“You seem very sure of my reasons.”
“Aren’t they obvious?” Muraki was very close to him now. Tsuzuki had retreated almost as far as he could from the water; he could feel the chill of the great stone embankment behind him. “It answers your own riddle. Why else are the others cruel to you, all of them, even the ones who had made their peace with death, and were grateful for your help? If they were real, some of them would have forgiven you. It is your own hunger for pain that speaks through their voices.”
“But not through yours? Yours, among them all?” He raised his head to look Muraki full in the face. Muraki was tall, taller even than Tatsumi: this close to him, he had to tip his head back to do it. He was vividly aware of his own throat, stretched and exposed, and of his heartbeat, fast now with fear, or with excitement.
Muraki smiled a little. “Of course through mine. Why else do you turn to me for comfort? I couldn’t hurt you with accusations; my own guilt would have prevented it. But that same guilt meant I could hurt you with affection, and understanding.” He did not step forward to close the space between them, but he raised one hand to Tsuzuki’s face so that his fingertips rested lightly along the line of Tsuzuki’s jaw. Tsuzuki struggled to be still, not to lean into that touch. Muraki seemed to sense it, waiting until Tsuzuki had steadied under his hand before he spoke again. “It’s better than the bludgeon of guilt from the others, I should think: delicate, and precise, and cutting deep. It’s no wonder you’ve made me a favorite: even as a shadow of your own imagining, I do it better than they do.”
He was trembling now, he could feel it, and Muraki was right, because the voice and the dreadful words were like being touched, overmastering his senses: he could drown in this. Muraki lifted his chin a little, and Tsuzuki opened his eyes to see his smile, and now that smile was a kindling fire in Tsuzuki’s blood. “As myself, and no shadow, I can make it better beyond your imagination.”
He could still run: shove Muraki away, tell him this wasn’t what he wanted. Go back to Tokyo, if he could trust Muraki to take him, and think about his ghosts and what they meant. Think about what he was going to do if any of them came to him. When one of them came to him. Think about Tatsumi, and shadows, and cold deep water. Wake his partner up and be called an idiot.
It took only a tiny motion, a turn of his head into Muraki’s hand, and his lips were pressed into Muraki’s palm. He rested there a moment, then raised his head to meet Muraki’s eyes once more. He tried to match Muraki’s smile, but it was useless: he was beyond poise, and beyond games. He let his eyes fall shut. “Good,” he said. “Prove it.”
**
Muraki turned him around, and he saw with a dreamlike lack of surprise that there was a door in the stone wall behind them now, where no door had been before: tall, wooden, carved with lotuses. It opened at Muraki’s touch, and he locked it behind them. Beyond it was a lobby, and then another doorway; and beyond that a room with tall windows facing east and west, and a fireplace where a fire of cedarwood burned, and a great Western-style bed hung with curtains of worked silk. A frieze of lotuses ran at the top of the wall, and they seemed to float, half-alive in the moving firelight.
It seemed . . . excessive. But perhaps this was normal, for Paris. And it hardly mattered: there was a bed, and a door, and there was Muraki, drawing Tsuzuki into his arms and closing the last distance between them at last; and at his touch everything in that room and that night that was not Muraki seemed to waver and go out like a smothered flame.
**
“Can you stop time?” he asked Muraki later. “We could stay here. Send out for food, if we have to.”
“‘Run slowly, slowly, chariot-horses of the night,’” Muraki answered, just as Tsuzuki had meant it seriously. “I wish it were possible. This place is not wholly inside time, or not the time of our world. But I have no art to hold it back entirely. Outside, time passes. It is still deep night in Paris, but the sun has risen in Tokyo. I have patients to see, and you -”
“The office will expect me at the usual time.” It was strange to consider it, that a few minutes from now he could be walking into the Ministry as on any ordinary day, a little late, a little dishevelled, and that nothing would have changed at all. It was exactly what his colleagues expected of him; they’d assume he had overslept, or spent too long in line at a pastry shop, and no one would know the difference.
No one except Hisoka.
At that moment, too late, he saw it: saw it, and knew that he was to blame, that he must have known from the beginning and pushed the knowledge deep, hiding it from himself until it could no longer hold him back from having what he wanted. Hisoka was the only one of them who mattered, the only one who’d care, the only one worth hiding it from; and the only one from whom there was no way to hide it. Tsuzuki could make excuses: he could tell himself that it was none of his partner’s business, that they weren’t close, that Hisoka was cold, distant, obviously expected nothing better from his undisciplined slacker of a partner anyway.
He could tell himself that, and it would be true, but it didn’t matter. Hisoka deserved better from him, from the whole universe: that would be true as a matter of plain justice, even if Tsuzuki felt nothing for him. That he did care might make his failure more painful to him, but it could not make it objectively worse.
Muraki must have felt the change in his body. “What?” he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he gathered Tsuzuki in for another kiss. It was wrong, utterly wrong, that this should be as exquisite as ever, that he should drown in it even as he remembered what Muraki had done to Hisoka: violation, murder, and that final twist of horror, the sealing of Hisoka’s memory, leaving him with no context, no way to understand his suffering or his death -
- And Hisoka was right, he was an idiot. “Hisoka,” he said, breaking the kiss. “You blocked Hisoka’s memories of what you did to him. Could you block mine?”
Muraki was silent for a long moment, and for an instant the hair over his right eye glittered oddly, as if it were lit from behind. “Yes, I could,” he said at last. “Interesting. I’d have expected immortality to make more of a difference, but the structures are essentially the same.”
“Do it, then. Make me forget this, when we’re home again.”
Muraki laughed, low in his throat. “Now, should I be flattered or insulted, I wonder? But I said that I could, not that I was willing to.”
“Why not?”
“I consider it medically inadviseable. For a start. Why should I do this, Tsuzuki-san? So that you can go back to Meifu and summon up your ghosts again?”
Tsuzuki shuddered. “No. Not that.”
“What, then?”
“Hisoka,” he said again. “He’s still my partner. Be flattered, if you like. Do you think that I’ll be able to not think about you, not feel anything he can perceive, if I can remember? He’ll know, and it’s not fair. Nothing in his life was ever fair. I can’t add this to it.”
“You underestimate him,” Muraki said. And then, at Tsuzuki’s look, “You forget: I’ve known him for longer than you have, and those are my words that are written on his body. It’s true, he won’t like this. But he’ll deal with it, if he finds out now. Conceal it from him and you’ve made a decision to lie to him; the longer it goes on, the worse it will be if he discovers it.”
“Maybe,” Tsuzuki said. Muraki had proved he understood Tsuzuki all too well; it would be stupid to ignore the possibility that he was right about Hisoka as well. “But you’re forgetting about time, and healing. He'll have more strength to face it, if it waits. And if it waits long enough, it may not even matter to him.”
“And if it does continue to matter, I will be able to threaten you with exposure at my whim. Do you really want to give me a weapon that will be always at your throat?”
He reached for Muraki’s fingers where they rested along the bone of his hip and wrapped them around his own neck, pressing down a little. “Yes, actually. What do you care?”
“I told you. I was a fool in Nagasaki: you are far too enjoyable for me to readily see you damaged. Memory spells carry risks, like any other medical intervention; in your case, as a purely medical matter, the risks outweigh the potential benefits. That aside, it would be annoying. And inconvenient. Seducing you once has been a pleasure, Tsuzuki-san, but I can’t think you want us to have it all to do over again, every time we meet.”
“Don’t, then. Knock me over the head or something next time, and let me remember when I come to. Why not? You’re not going to tell me that you’re too fastidious for rape.”
“Not generally speaking, no. But I might be too fastidious to rape you, in particular. Not when your consent is such a delicious thing.”
“You’ll have my consent. Once you dissolve the spells. Please.” He stopped, and when he spoke again it was softly, his voice low and serious. “I am begging this as a mercy from you. I would have thought you would want to encourage that.”
He could feel the moment of acquiescence in Muraki’s body, even before he spoke: “And mercy is capricious and irrational by nature, unearned and not to be relied upon.” There was smothered laughter in the words. “Very well, Tsuzuki-san. I am obviously every bit as stupid about you as everyone else is. I’ll do it. Are you content?”
He drew Muraki’s hand to his mouth, kissed it. “No. No. Would you want me to be?”
“No,” Muraki told him. “Of course not. Indeed, gods forbid you ever should be.”
Tsuzuki laughed. “Good. Then I can hope not to disappoint you.”
Muraki stood, and reached a hand to him; he took it and rose from the bed. His clothes would have to do, there would be no time to go home and change them. He’d notice, even if nobody else did; he’d tell himself some story, no doubt, to explain the missing time. Apparently, he was good at telling himself stories.
He paused at the lotus door and turned to Muraki. “Don’t tell me when you’re going to do it. Please? I don’t want to know it’s coming.”
“You won’t notice, Tsuzuki-san. I promise.” Tsuzuki could have taken him for a ghost once more, silver and white, immaculate, with no trace on him of the night gone by. But when he leaned down now to kiss Tsuzuki’s forehead, the touch was solid and real. He opened the door. There was light outside it now: morning, and Tokyo, and beyond it all the vast kingdom of death. They stepped through it together, and into the day.
__________________________
Author's Note part 3:
Acknowledgements and disclaimer: YnM is not mine. Nor is E. R. Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison. This story hardly rises to the level of a remix of Fish Dinner, but it does reference themes and lines from the book, so that if you see something you think is stolen from it, you’re right. That’s Eddison’s, not mine.
Fish le Boissonerie, on the rue de Seine, is a real restaurant, although I have taken ruthless liberties with their menu. As the name suggests, they have an excellent wine list, but I would be surprised if they really offer the 1975 Chateau D’Yquem that Tsuzuki had with his tarte tatin. (For one thing, only fantasy characters can afford it.) It’s very good, very casual, and not expensive, and unless things have changed in the last year or so, it is also popular enough that you’d better have a reservation if you expect to find a table there at eight. Or else be able to steal somebody else’s.