Whenever I am depressed, I spout fic ^^;
Title: Past Precedence
Fandom: Lawful Drug/xxxHoLic
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Angst/romance
Pairings: Underlying Rikuou/Kazahaya, but also Kei/Kazahaya, Rikuou/Tsukiko, and Saiga/Kakei (please don't be scared ^^;)
Wordcount: 3,680
Description: Three converging pasts, and the future chosen.
Disclaimer: I do not own any CLAMP works. Not even MKR, which has a brief and pathetic cameo here.
HOW TO READ THIS: The first three parts, like any triptych, can be read in any order. The final part must be read last. The accompanying song can be found here. If you like it and choose to keep it, please buy the album. You know the drill.
"When you came to me
You said love could not erase
The ever-present memory
Of another-face..."
-Alison Krauss, "I'm Gone"
TRIPTYCH
I.
Kazahaya lives in a world so small, he sometimes thinks he can reach up and touch the sky. It takes him twenty minutes to run from one end of the grounds to the other if he runs hard enough to get out of breath, and thirty if he lets Kei keep up. You run like the wind, she says, tumbling to the grass, kimono in a disarray from running. You are just like the wind, Kazahaya. And just like the wind, she tells him, you will fly away someday.
He doesn’t think so. The walls are taller than the tallest trees, and they lock out the world. He touches them sometimes, late at night when he and Kei sneak out of their room to go into the garden, and lets the worn stone tell him its secrets. They tell him that there is a world outside, a place strange and unfamiliar. He sees snatches of memory, stone quarries, mountain paths, the impression of heat and damp and earth. One stone in the eastern wall is worn with his handprints; it shows him the blurry image of a strange, dark-haired man, strange because Kazahaya’s world, there are only three other people and his own reflection, and all four of them look the same, with hair like honey and eyes like the worn polish of old gold, slim frames and neat features. The man the stone remembers is large and bulky, and there is hair on his face, and he is scowling with a crooked, unattractive mouth. His eyes are brightly, surprisingly green. Kazahaya doesn’t know who he is, but he is different, he is somewhere out there, and so he goes to see him sometimes, frozen in a moment, and wonders. Before the end of everything, this man is the only stranger he knows.
Kei doesn’t like it when he goes away, as she calls it. Come back, she says, tears in her voice, and shakes his shoulder. Come back, Kazahaya. Sometimes, when he is deep in the thrall of something, he will catch glimpses of her. Kei’s memories are comfortingly his own, seen from a different angle: his own face across the dinner table, his sleeping form, bathed by moonlight, his back racing away from her through the grounds. Most of Kei’s memories are of him, and he gauges his growth by them instead of his reflection in the mirror. The Kazahaya in the mirror is simply human. The Kazahaya Kei remembers is a laughing, bright creature of surpassing beauty and warmth. She has always loved him, he knows, almost more than either of them can bear.
I see you, and in that moment my heart is breaking. I’m not complete without you.
There is a collective memory to things, he knows. The teapot on the dinner table knows only his mother’s hands, soft and youthful and devoid of rings, but sometimes, the teacups remember the well from which the water was drawn, and sometimes the rustle of tea trees. These things are different, but everything else is just the same. His mother’s beautiful face never changes. His father’s smile never falters. Only Kei seems truly alive as she beams at him from across the table, sticks out her tongue at him when he teases her, rolls with him over the fragrant summer grass and shrieks with giggles. Everything else, everything not-Kei, is trapped in the shadowy corners of time.
Time is relative, here. The old walls of the house remember back hundreds of years, yet Kazahaya sees only the same corridors and windows when he looks through their eyes. For them, nothing ever changes. For Kazahaya, too, the days are the same. There is the garden, the house, his parents, Kei, and a sky not quite close enough to touch. He reaches for it, thinking, if he can just touch, he might know what it is to fly. He never tells Kei, who clings to him as though he might blow away like an autumn leaf on the wind. He lets her hold him while she sleeps and strokes her hair, content to lend her his warmth and keep dreams of wings to himself.
Things never change, except suddenly, they are very different. The first time Kei wears lipstick to the dinner table, it is like a physical punch to his stomach. She turns up the corners of her lips, soft and pink and alien, and looks just like his mother, suddenly and irrevocably adult. That very night, she comes to bed and leans close, her hair a perfumed curtain around his face, and he is shivering with the cold of winter and her hands on his skin. Don’t you see, she says, in a voice he thinks is slightly mad, don’t you see? We can be one again now. We won’t have to be apart again, never, ever, ever. You will never fly away, and I will never be cold again, and there will be no Kazahaya and no Kei. Can’t you see we’re not meant to be like this, can’t you see I’m only half a person, and you’ve taken all the warmth and I’ve taken all the heart, and until we’re one again, things will never be right? Can’t you see everything is so wrong?
Yes, he wants to tell her, yes, everything is so, so wrong. The memories in her skin are no longer of him, they are chaotic and unrecognizable weavings of fire, and he is terrified. He pushes her away, and she cries out as her head hits the side of the nightstand, then crumples to the floor and lies still. He remembers his own breathing most of all, so loud in the stillness of the night, and her unmoving form on the floor, white silk pooled around her.
He doesn’t remember much after that, only running and the sensation of flight. He must have floated over the wall after all, he thinks, on the winter wind, then fallen back to the ground with the snow, only to be picked up by a dark-haired stranger with eyes the color of spring grass.
You’ve taken all the warmth and I’ve taken all the heart…
Sometimes, he thinks Kei was not as mad as all that. Some nights, when he is very cold and very tired, he believes her, and has to put his hand on his chest to feel his heartbeat and reassure himself that he is real, even outside the house trapped in time. On the coldest nights, he listens to Rikuou’s breathing across the room and thinks that if he didn’t have a heart, it wouldn’t hurt so badly.
II.
Tsukiko is the perfect woman; this her brother knows the same way he knows that the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. In every step Tsukiko takes, there is a silent, proud beauty that he cannot describe. He can watch her for hours, the line of her back, the swing of her hair, the soft radiance of her smile. In Rikuou’s mind, there has never been a mother or a father; those figures vanished from his life almost before he knew to miss them. The only one there is Tsukiko, whose soft hands have smoothed over his forehead in times of illness and whose soft voice has smoothed over the jagged edges of his childhood hurts. Tsukiko is peace, Tsukiko is warmth, but most of all, Tsukiko is his.
He intends, with the determination of the very young, to marry her and take her away from the world someday. He doesn’t like that she has to go into the city to work, coming home tired with darkness rimming her eyes. He doesn’t like that she exhausts herself for his sake, and so the second he looks old enough, he starts skipping school sometimes and doing odd jobs, pretty much anything someone will pay him for. Occasionally, he breaks into houses by smashing the locks with his mind and takes trifles too small to be missed which can be resold later. He brings home groceries, small presents, a puppy because she’s always wanted one.
Tsukiko is quietly glowing and grateful, and never asks where these extra things come from.
When he is no longer so young, he finds that there is a great reservoir of power in her. It nearly crackles when he comes near, and her eyes, when she really looks at him, seem to know a great deal more than he has ever told her. He wants to ask sometimes what is in her mind, but Tsukiko would never answer such questions, he knows, and so he learns silence.
She alters his high school uniform, her hands lingering on his back as she adjusts the jacket. He feels her touch there like fire, like the sinuous, curling marks against his skin which he thinks she must have put there, years ago. It is for your own protection, little one. He doesn’t remember, not clearly; there is a haze of horrible pain and then numbness and the soothing sound of her voice. He never asks, and he never takes gym. She always wears neat, modest blouses with long sleeves, and he wonders if she is marked too, like him, black lines against her porcelain skin. She is fussing with his hem when he turns and folds her in his arms. They are of a height now, and she rests her head perfectly on his shoulder and tells him, oh, Rikuou, how silly you are. There are tears in her voice.
He follows her everywhere like a faithful dog. Lantis, the puppy, is useless in the capacity of guard dog-he is cheerful and a little stupid, and his only useful function seems to be warming Tsukiko’s lap when she sits by the window, and tripping Rikuou up while he is making dinner. In Lantis’ place, Rikuou acts as bodyguard, using his large stature to intimidate would-be attackers. I’m not a little girl, you know, Tsukiko tells him. I can take care of myself.
Yes, he wants to say, I know, but when you were a little girl, I couldn’t protect you yet.
Sometimes he smells blood on her clothes when he’s doing the laundry. He never finds stains, but he knows she must wash them out somewhere else. He knows with a sense that has nothing to do with his powers and everything to do with the blinding love he feels for her that all is not well. He is too old now to wish he could marry her and hide her away from everything cruel and dirty; his instincts are too base for that sort of purity, and now he just wants to kill whatever is threatening her. I’m fine, you know, she tells him when he broaches the subject. I’m just fine.
In his mind, his last morning with her is as clear as glass. He still wakes up sometimes tasting that last, peaceful breakfast, feeling the warmth of her smile-Tsukiko, the center of his world, the center of his heart, the center of the universe as far as he is concerned. He remembers scowling and arguing with her, but she’s fine, of course she’s fine, she’s never once admitted to not being fine. She kisses him on the mouth as he is leaving for school, and she has never done that before. It is a light, almost innocent brush of lips, but it makes his heart hammer in his chest long after she is out of view.
That day when he comes home from school to an empty apartment covered in blood, he knows his world has ended.
After that, he doesn’t remember much. He thinks he wandered the streets. He wonders, sometimes, if he might have killed someone, simply to lessen the pain. He doesn’t know where he is going but he ends exactly where he needs to be, somehow. There is a smell a little like incense in the air, or maybe narcotics. Maybe marijuana. He’s sold that, a couple times, delivering packages of it to bored college kids and collecting crumpled bills in return. The scent is sweet and relaxing when he comes to, and an unfamiliar face is smiling down at him. “We’ll find her,” the man says, as though they have known each other always, “if she is anywhere to be found.”
“Yes,” Rikuou tells him, and goes back to sleep, content with the numbing miasma over his mind.
III.
Saiga has always known that the man he loves will never be his in the way his former lovers have been his. Kakei is not like anything he has ever known, though Saiga has known all kinds of people from every walk of life. Kakei is something else altogether, and that is why Saiga keeps him, at first, until he realizes he is the one being kept.
Saiga has numerous valuable connections in Tokyo’s underworld, but Kakei seems unthreatened and altogether unimpressed. You will never do anything to hurt me, he says, his bright eyes glittering with barely-concealed laughter, unless I want you to. That is before, long before Saiga has made peace with his leash and collar, held, invisible, in Kakei’s hands.
Their adolescence is a haze of drugs, bought and homemade; scams both small and elaborate; mind-blowing, impossible sex; crimes against the state. Kakei has a special sense for police, and they are never caught. He packs them up and moves them out the day before a raid, a few hours before if there is an easy escape, fifteen minutes before once when they’re too busy having sex for him to be bothered and he loses track of the time. Saiga remembers sitting on the roof, stifling laughter as Kakei calmly buttons his pants and the police swarm uselessly into the apartment below them.
Kakei never asks to see him without his sunglasses, and in that he is unlike anyone Saiga has ever shared bed or business with. When Saiga asks why he doesn’t want to know, Kakei only smiles and replies, one side is broken, right? He taps Saiga’s right temple and that is when Saiga realizes that Kakei’s special sense extends far beyond knowing the whereabouts of the police at three in the morning. He seems content to use his powers for mischief and to support their hedonistic lifestyle. Saiga is happy to let him, until the day Kakei first meets the beautiful and vaguely frightening woman with the long, long hair and the shrewd, snakelike eyes.
It is as though she has hypnotized him. They are walking down the street when they see her, and Kakei’s eyes go very wide, and he lets go of Saiga’s arm and turns sharply to follow her. Stay, he says absently when Saiga tries to follow, and he stops in the middle of the sidewalk like a fool as his lover floats away, his mind clearly elsewhere.
Kakei doesn’t come home that night. When he returns the next day, Saiga wants to shake him, to demand an explanation, something. Instead, they have loud, undignified sex on the kitchen floor, and after, Kakei draws lazy circles on his chest with his long, elegant fingers and says, I think I’d like to settle down and start a business. A pharmacy, maybe. A drugstore. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
I think you’ve finally cracked, Saiga tells him.
Kakei laughs and says, Yes, probably. Wouldn’t you like to settle down and get married and start a family and be a respectable member of the community?
Saiga laughs long and hard at the image. You’ve been smoking something seriously messed up, he chuckles, finally.
Probably, Kakei says with a smile on his beautiful, innocent face, so perfect for scamming the gullible. Is that a yes, then?
Saiga knows it has something to do with that woman, but he agrees anyway. “It’s just the price I must pay,” Kakei says, as they sort the boxes in the back room of their new building. And then, chillingly, “Your time will come.”
FINALE
IV.
There are four of them, and that is unusual in and of itself. Watanuki bows the customers into the shop, recognizing the ashen, terrified face of the habitually cheerful clerk from the neighborhood pharmacy. He has seen the others, too, he realizes as he looks at them more closely: the tall boy in the pharmacy being mobbed by female customers, the man with sunglasses at the local supermarket, the slim, bespectacled man having tea with Yuuko-san one evening last spring. He was smiling then, but he is resigned now.
“Bring them in,” comes Yuuko-san’s voice from the parlor, and Watanuki opens the door. The four guests kneel with varying degrees of grace. Three bow their heads, the smaller man meets Yuuko-san’s eyes. “So,” she says softly. “You have brought them, Kakei.”
“Yes,” he answers. “Just as I promised.”
She nods. “Your debt is paid.” Kakei bows his head. “Yours, too, Saiga,” she says, looking at the man in sunglasses, and he jerks at the mention of his name, but seems to know better than to ask questions. “Now, the matter at hand,” Yuuko-san continues, and takes a drag of whatever she is smoking, and looks at the taller of the two boys with something Watanuki has learned passes for pity with her. “You.”
The boy raises his head and nods. “You know what I do here. Your name?”
“Himura Rikuou.”
“Himura Rikuou,” Yuuko-san says slowly, and his name is like a contract between them. “You are looking for your sister.”
He nods again, his eyes burning. “Yes.”
“What will you give to see her again?” Yuuko asks, and Watanuki feels suddenly like chiming in with, please, please think before you open your mouth here, PLEASE.
“Anything,” Rikuou says. Kakei flinches, barely a shiver of his shoulders. The silent boy, still ashen, looks at the floor. Yuuko-san sighs.
“So noted. Himura Tsukiko is no longer among the living of this world.”
Rikuou’s eyes are a little mad. “But you just said-”
“I have said she is no longer here. I have not said that you may not see her. It will be arranged, although if you wish to bring her back with you, I will take no part in it. That, you cannot afford.”
“If you tell me where she is, that is enough,” Rikuou tells her.
“You will pay a price,” Yuuko-san intones. She stands from her couch then and goes to kneel in front of the drugstore clerk. He is shivering like a leaf as she reaches out a hand to lift up his chin. “Don’t be afraid,” she tells him, and her voice is almost gentle. The tension flows out of the boy, little by little, and she turns to Rikuou. “Here is your price.”
“Wait a minute,” Rikuou says, and his expression darkens. “You can’t just-”
“You know very well he is yours to give.” The light in the smaller boy’s eyes has gone out. He is like a puppet, held up by Yuuko-san’s hand, and if it wasn’t for the rapid rise and fall of his breathing, he could easily pass for a lifeless doll. “You have said you will give anything. He is your price, Himura Rikuou.”
Kakei stands, his face blank. “We will go, Yuuko-san.”
“Yes,” she agrees. She stays kneeling on the floor with the lifeless form of the boy. “You may go. Your wish will be granted, Himura Rikuou.” Her eyes are dangerous and cold, stopping Rikuou in his tracks before he can come near or say anything else. “You will go, now. The contract will not be broken.” The man with sunglasses has to force him out of the room. Feeling mildly sickened, Watanuki retreats to the kitchen and starts making tempura for something to do with his hands.
Yuuko-san joins him there half an hour later, looking nauseatingly calm. “What did you do with him?” Watanuki demands.
“I let him go, of course,” she replies easily.
“Just like that?” Watanuki says, suspiciously; he has been fighting off horrible images of formerly human dolls stacked somewhere in the back of Yuuko-san’s storeroom.
“Yes,” she says. “Just like that. I have returned his life to him. He has never owned it before. What will he do with it, I wonder?”
“What did you take, then?” Watanuki asks, because this all sounds too cheerful to mesh with the image of their faces as they knelt before her.
“He has paid,” she says softly, and rests her hip on the counter. “Almost more than is proper.” Watanuki is silent, mulling that over. Eventually, she speaks again. “There is no coincidence. There is only fate.”
“Yes, I know,” Watanuki tells her, irritated. At this point, he’d like a little more than that. “Get off the counter, Yuuko-san; you’re in my way.”
She doesn’t comply. “There is only fate, but people are not powerless. What you do with your fate is in your hands.”
“That makes no sense,” Watanuki retorts peevishly. “Do we have a choice, or don’t we?”
“That child chose,” she says. “It will be too late to regret his choice, once he realizes what he has done.” She is distant another moment, then smiles brightly and says, “Now then, Watanuki-ku~n.”
“Yes?”
She gets off the counter, grins, and claps her hands. “Sake! We’ve worked hard today, so it’s time to drink!”
“Drink!” pipes in Mokona, popping up from somewhere and plopping into the mixing bowl, getting tempura batter everywhere.
“Drink! Drink!” Maru and Moro add helpfully, running into the kitchen and spinning around Watanuki in a swirl of lacy fabric.
“Okay, okay, okay! Out of my kitchen!” He is so busy running herd on the lot of them that he doesn’t notice the sadness in Yuuko-san’s eyes, and it never occurs to him that she may be drinking to forget.
The next day when she sends him out for hangover medicine, there is a “FOR SALE” sign in the window of the neighborhood pharmacy, and Watanuki sighs in annoyed resignation before going to look for another place.
Fandom: Lawful Drug/xxxHoLic
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Angst/romance
Pairings: Underlying Rikuou/Kazahaya, but also Kei/Kazahaya, Rikuou/Tsukiko, and Saiga/Kakei (please don't be scared ^^;)
Wordcount: 3,680
Description: Three converging pasts, and the future chosen.
Disclaimer: I do not own any CLAMP works. Not even MKR, which has a brief and pathetic cameo here.
HOW TO READ THIS: The first three parts, like any triptych, can be read in any order. The final part must be read last. The accompanying song can be found here. If you like it and choose to keep it, please buy the album. You know the drill.
"When you came to me
You said love could not erase
The ever-present memory
Of another-face..."
-Alison Krauss, "I'm Gone"
TRIPTYCH
I.
Kazahaya lives in a world so small, he sometimes thinks he can reach up and touch the sky. It takes him twenty minutes to run from one end of the grounds to the other if he runs hard enough to get out of breath, and thirty if he lets Kei keep up. You run like the wind, she says, tumbling to the grass, kimono in a disarray from running. You are just like the wind, Kazahaya. And just like the wind, she tells him, you will fly away someday.
He doesn’t think so. The walls are taller than the tallest trees, and they lock out the world. He touches them sometimes, late at night when he and Kei sneak out of their room to go into the garden, and lets the worn stone tell him its secrets. They tell him that there is a world outside, a place strange and unfamiliar. He sees snatches of memory, stone quarries, mountain paths, the impression of heat and damp and earth. One stone in the eastern wall is worn with his handprints; it shows him the blurry image of a strange, dark-haired man, strange because Kazahaya’s world, there are only three other people and his own reflection, and all four of them look the same, with hair like honey and eyes like the worn polish of old gold, slim frames and neat features. The man the stone remembers is large and bulky, and there is hair on his face, and he is scowling with a crooked, unattractive mouth. His eyes are brightly, surprisingly green. Kazahaya doesn’t know who he is, but he is different, he is somewhere out there, and so he goes to see him sometimes, frozen in a moment, and wonders. Before the end of everything, this man is the only stranger he knows.
Kei doesn’t like it when he goes away, as she calls it. Come back, she says, tears in her voice, and shakes his shoulder. Come back, Kazahaya. Sometimes, when he is deep in the thrall of something, he will catch glimpses of her. Kei’s memories are comfortingly his own, seen from a different angle: his own face across the dinner table, his sleeping form, bathed by moonlight, his back racing away from her through the grounds. Most of Kei’s memories are of him, and he gauges his growth by them instead of his reflection in the mirror. The Kazahaya in the mirror is simply human. The Kazahaya Kei remembers is a laughing, bright creature of surpassing beauty and warmth. She has always loved him, he knows, almost more than either of them can bear.
I see you, and in that moment my heart is breaking. I’m not complete without you.
There is a collective memory to things, he knows. The teapot on the dinner table knows only his mother’s hands, soft and youthful and devoid of rings, but sometimes, the teacups remember the well from which the water was drawn, and sometimes the rustle of tea trees. These things are different, but everything else is just the same. His mother’s beautiful face never changes. His father’s smile never falters. Only Kei seems truly alive as she beams at him from across the table, sticks out her tongue at him when he teases her, rolls with him over the fragrant summer grass and shrieks with giggles. Everything else, everything not-Kei, is trapped in the shadowy corners of time.
Time is relative, here. The old walls of the house remember back hundreds of years, yet Kazahaya sees only the same corridors and windows when he looks through their eyes. For them, nothing ever changes. For Kazahaya, too, the days are the same. There is the garden, the house, his parents, Kei, and a sky not quite close enough to touch. He reaches for it, thinking, if he can just touch, he might know what it is to fly. He never tells Kei, who clings to him as though he might blow away like an autumn leaf on the wind. He lets her hold him while she sleeps and strokes her hair, content to lend her his warmth and keep dreams of wings to himself.
Things never change, except suddenly, they are very different. The first time Kei wears lipstick to the dinner table, it is like a physical punch to his stomach. She turns up the corners of her lips, soft and pink and alien, and looks just like his mother, suddenly and irrevocably adult. That very night, she comes to bed and leans close, her hair a perfumed curtain around his face, and he is shivering with the cold of winter and her hands on his skin. Don’t you see, she says, in a voice he thinks is slightly mad, don’t you see? We can be one again now. We won’t have to be apart again, never, ever, ever. You will never fly away, and I will never be cold again, and there will be no Kazahaya and no Kei. Can’t you see we’re not meant to be like this, can’t you see I’m only half a person, and you’ve taken all the warmth and I’ve taken all the heart, and until we’re one again, things will never be right? Can’t you see everything is so wrong?
Yes, he wants to tell her, yes, everything is so, so wrong. The memories in her skin are no longer of him, they are chaotic and unrecognizable weavings of fire, and he is terrified. He pushes her away, and she cries out as her head hits the side of the nightstand, then crumples to the floor and lies still. He remembers his own breathing most of all, so loud in the stillness of the night, and her unmoving form on the floor, white silk pooled around her.
He doesn’t remember much after that, only running and the sensation of flight. He must have floated over the wall after all, he thinks, on the winter wind, then fallen back to the ground with the snow, only to be picked up by a dark-haired stranger with eyes the color of spring grass.
You’ve taken all the warmth and I’ve taken all the heart…
Sometimes, he thinks Kei was not as mad as all that. Some nights, when he is very cold and very tired, he believes her, and has to put his hand on his chest to feel his heartbeat and reassure himself that he is real, even outside the house trapped in time. On the coldest nights, he listens to Rikuou’s breathing across the room and thinks that if he didn’t have a heart, it wouldn’t hurt so badly.
II.
Tsukiko is the perfect woman; this her brother knows the same way he knows that the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. In every step Tsukiko takes, there is a silent, proud beauty that he cannot describe. He can watch her for hours, the line of her back, the swing of her hair, the soft radiance of her smile. In Rikuou’s mind, there has never been a mother or a father; those figures vanished from his life almost before he knew to miss them. The only one there is Tsukiko, whose soft hands have smoothed over his forehead in times of illness and whose soft voice has smoothed over the jagged edges of his childhood hurts. Tsukiko is peace, Tsukiko is warmth, but most of all, Tsukiko is his.
He intends, with the determination of the very young, to marry her and take her away from the world someday. He doesn’t like that she has to go into the city to work, coming home tired with darkness rimming her eyes. He doesn’t like that she exhausts herself for his sake, and so the second he looks old enough, he starts skipping school sometimes and doing odd jobs, pretty much anything someone will pay him for. Occasionally, he breaks into houses by smashing the locks with his mind and takes trifles too small to be missed which can be resold later. He brings home groceries, small presents, a puppy because she’s always wanted one.
Tsukiko is quietly glowing and grateful, and never asks where these extra things come from.
When he is no longer so young, he finds that there is a great reservoir of power in her. It nearly crackles when he comes near, and her eyes, when she really looks at him, seem to know a great deal more than he has ever told her. He wants to ask sometimes what is in her mind, but Tsukiko would never answer such questions, he knows, and so he learns silence.
She alters his high school uniform, her hands lingering on his back as she adjusts the jacket. He feels her touch there like fire, like the sinuous, curling marks against his skin which he thinks she must have put there, years ago. It is for your own protection, little one. He doesn’t remember, not clearly; there is a haze of horrible pain and then numbness and the soothing sound of her voice. He never asks, and he never takes gym. She always wears neat, modest blouses with long sleeves, and he wonders if she is marked too, like him, black lines against her porcelain skin. She is fussing with his hem when he turns and folds her in his arms. They are of a height now, and she rests her head perfectly on his shoulder and tells him, oh, Rikuou, how silly you are. There are tears in her voice.
He follows her everywhere like a faithful dog. Lantis, the puppy, is useless in the capacity of guard dog-he is cheerful and a little stupid, and his only useful function seems to be warming Tsukiko’s lap when she sits by the window, and tripping Rikuou up while he is making dinner. In Lantis’ place, Rikuou acts as bodyguard, using his large stature to intimidate would-be attackers. I’m not a little girl, you know, Tsukiko tells him. I can take care of myself.
Yes, he wants to say, I know, but when you were a little girl, I couldn’t protect you yet.
Sometimes he smells blood on her clothes when he’s doing the laundry. He never finds stains, but he knows she must wash them out somewhere else. He knows with a sense that has nothing to do with his powers and everything to do with the blinding love he feels for her that all is not well. He is too old now to wish he could marry her and hide her away from everything cruel and dirty; his instincts are too base for that sort of purity, and now he just wants to kill whatever is threatening her. I’m fine, you know, she tells him when he broaches the subject. I’m just fine.
In his mind, his last morning with her is as clear as glass. He still wakes up sometimes tasting that last, peaceful breakfast, feeling the warmth of her smile-Tsukiko, the center of his world, the center of his heart, the center of the universe as far as he is concerned. He remembers scowling and arguing with her, but she’s fine, of course she’s fine, she’s never once admitted to not being fine. She kisses him on the mouth as he is leaving for school, and she has never done that before. It is a light, almost innocent brush of lips, but it makes his heart hammer in his chest long after she is out of view.
That day when he comes home from school to an empty apartment covered in blood, he knows his world has ended.
After that, he doesn’t remember much. He thinks he wandered the streets. He wonders, sometimes, if he might have killed someone, simply to lessen the pain. He doesn’t know where he is going but he ends exactly where he needs to be, somehow. There is a smell a little like incense in the air, or maybe narcotics. Maybe marijuana. He’s sold that, a couple times, delivering packages of it to bored college kids and collecting crumpled bills in return. The scent is sweet and relaxing when he comes to, and an unfamiliar face is smiling down at him. “We’ll find her,” the man says, as though they have known each other always, “if she is anywhere to be found.”
“Yes,” Rikuou tells him, and goes back to sleep, content with the numbing miasma over his mind.
III.
Saiga has always known that the man he loves will never be his in the way his former lovers have been his. Kakei is not like anything he has ever known, though Saiga has known all kinds of people from every walk of life. Kakei is something else altogether, and that is why Saiga keeps him, at first, until he realizes he is the one being kept.
Saiga has numerous valuable connections in Tokyo’s underworld, but Kakei seems unthreatened and altogether unimpressed. You will never do anything to hurt me, he says, his bright eyes glittering with barely-concealed laughter, unless I want you to. That is before, long before Saiga has made peace with his leash and collar, held, invisible, in Kakei’s hands.
Their adolescence is a haze of drugs, bought and homemade; scams both small and elaborate; mind-blowing, impossible sex; crimes against the state. Kakei has a special sense for police, and they are never caught. He packs them up and moves them out the day before a raid, a few hours before if there is an easy escape, fifteen minutes before once when they’re too busy having sex for him to be bothered and he loses track of the time. Saiga remembers sitting on the roof, stifling laughter as Kakei calmly buttons his pants and the police swarm uselessly into the apartment below them.
Kakei never asks to see him without his sunglasses, and in that he is unlike anyone Saiga has ever shared bed or business with. When Saiga asks why he doesn’t want to know, Kakei only smiles and replies, one side is broken, right? He taps Saiga’s right temple and that is when Saiga realizes that Kakei’s special sense extends far beyond knowing the whereabouts of the police at three in the morning. He seems content to use his powers for mischief and to support their hedonistic lifestyle. Saiga is happy to let him, until the day Kakei first meets the beautiful and vaguely frightening woman with the long, long hair and the shrewd, snakelike eyes.
It is as though she has hypnotized him. They are walking down the street when they see her, and Kakei’s eyes go very wide, and he lets go of Saiga’s arm and turns sharply to follow her. Stay, he says absently when Saiga tries to follow, and he stops in the middle of the sidewalk like a fool as his lover floats away, his mind clearly elsewhere.
Kakei doesn’t come home that night. When he returns the next day, Saiga wants to shake him, to demand an explanation, something. Instead, they have loud, undignified sex on the kitchen floor, and after, Kakei draws lazy circles on his chest with his long, elegant fingers and says, I think I’d like to settle down and start a business. A pharmacy, maybe. A drugstore. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
I think you’ve finally cracked, Saiga tells him.
Kakei laughs and says, Yes, probably. Wouldn’t you like to settle down and get married and start a family and be a respectable member of the community?
Saiga laughs long and hard at the image. You’ve been smoking something seriously messed up, he chuckles, finally.
Probably, Kakei says with a smile on his beautiful, innocent face, so perfect for scamming the gullible. Is that a yes, then?
Saiga knows it has something to do with that woman, but he agrees anyway. “It’s just the price I must pay,” Kakei says, as they sort the boxes in the back room of their new building. And then, chillingly, “Your time will come.”
FINALE
IV.
There are four of them, and that is unusual in and of itself. Watanuki bows the customers into the shop, recognizing the ashen, terrified face of the habitually cheerful clerk from the neighborhood pharmacy. He has seen the others, too, he realizes as he looks at them more closely: the tall boy in the pharmacy being mobbed by female customers, the man with sunglasses at the local supermarket, the slim, bespectacled man having tea with Yuuko-san one evening last spring. He was smiling then, but he is resigned now.
“Bring them in,” comes Yuuko-san’s voice from the parlor, and Watanuki opens the door. The four guests kneel with varying degrees of grace. Three bow their heads, the smaller man meets Yuuko-san’s eyes. “So,” she says softly. “You have brought them, Kakei.”
“Yes,” he answers. “Just as I promised.”
She nods. “Your debt is paid.” Kakei bows his head. “Yours, too, Saiga,” she says, looking at the man in sunglasses, and he jerks at the mention of his name, but seems to know better than to ask questions. “Now, the matter at hand,” Yuuko-san continues, and takes a drag of whatever she is smoking, and looks at the taller of the two boys with something Watanuki has learned passes for pity with her. “You.”
The boy raises his head and nods. “You know what I do here. Your name?”
“Himura Rikuou.”
“Himura Rikuou,” Yuuko-san says slowly, and his name is like a contract between them. “You are looking for your sister.”
He nods again, his eyes burning. “Yes.”
“What will you give to see her again?” Yuuko asks, and Watanuki feels suddenly like chiming in with, please, please think before you open your mouth here, PLEASE.
“Anything,” Rikuou says. Kakei flinches, barely a shiver of his shoulders. The silent boy, still ashen, looks at the floor. Yuuko-san sighs.
“So noted. Himura Tsukiko is no longer among the living of this world.”
Rikuou’s eyes are a little mad. “But you just said-”
“I have said she is no longer here. I have not said that you may not see her. It will be arranged, although if you wish to bring her back with you, I will take no part in it. That, you cannot afford.”
“If you tell me where she is, that is enough,” Rikuou tells her.
“You will pay a price,” Yuuko-san intones. She stands from her couch then and goes to kneel in front of the drugstore clerk. He is shivering like a leaf as she reaches out a hand to lift up his chin. “Don’t be afraid,” she tells him, and her voice is almost gentle. The tension flows out of the boy, little by little, and she turns to Rikuou. “Here is your price.”
“Wait a minute,” Rikuou says, and his expression darkens. “You can’t just-”
“You know very well he is yours to give.” The light in the smaller boy’s eyes has gone out. He is like a puppet, held up by Yuuko-san’s hand, and if it wasn’t for the rapid rise and fall of his breathing, he could easily pass for a lifeless doll. “You have said you will give anything. He is your price, Himura Rikuou.”
Kakei stands, his face blank. “We will go, Yuuko-san.”
“Yes,” she agrees. She stays kneeling on the floor with the lifeless form of the boy. “You may go. Your wish will be granted, Himura Rikuou.” Her eyes are dangerous and cold, stopping Rikuou in his tracks before he can come near or say anything else. “You will go, now. The contract will not be broken.” The man with sunglasses has to force him out of the room. Feeling mildly sickened, Watanuki retreats to the kitchen and starts making tempura for something to do with his hands.
Yuuko-san joins him there half an hour later, looking nauseatingly calm. “What did you do with him?” Watanuki demands.
“I let him go, of course,” she replies easily.
“Just like that?” Watanuki says, suspiciously; he has been fighting off horrible images of formerly human dolls stacked somewhere in the back of Yuuko-san’s storeroom.
“Yes,” she says. “Just like that. I have returned his life to him. He has never owned it before. What will he do with it, I wonder?”
“What did you take, then?” Watanuki asks, because this all sounds too cheerful to mesh with the image of their faces as they knelt before her.
“He has paid,” she says softly, and rests her hip on the counter. “Almost more than is proper.” Watanuki is silent, mulling that over. Eventually, she speaks again. “There is no coincidence. There is only fate.”
“Yes, I know,” Watanuki tells her, irritated. At this point, he’d like a little more than that. “Get off the counter, Yuuko-san; you’re in my way.”
She doesn’t comply. “There is only fate, but people are not powerless. What you do with your fate is in your hands.”
“That makes no sense,” Watanuki retorts peevishly. “Do we have a choice, or don’t we?”
“That child chose,” she says. “It will be too late to regret his choice, once he realizes what he has done.” She is distant another moment, then smiles brightly and says, “Now then, Watanuki-ku~n.”
“Yes?”
She gets off the counter, grins, and claps her hands. “Sake! We’ve worked hard today, so it’s time to drink!”
“Drink!” pipes in Mokona, popping up from somewhere and plopping into the mixing bowl, getting tempura batter everywhere.
“Drink! Drink!” Maru and Moro add helpfully, running into the kitchen and spinning around Watanuki in a swirl of lacy fabric.
“Okay, okay, okay! Out of my kitchen!” He is so busy running herd on the lot of them that he doesn’t notice the sadness in Yuuko-san’s eyes, and it never occurs to him that she may be drinking to forget.
The next day when she sends him out for hangover medicine, there is a “FOR SALE” sign in the window of the neighborhood pharmacy, and Watanuki sighs in annoyed resignation before going to look for another place.