Chapter Text
Kiryu hangs in the center of a freezing concrete cell. His arms are bound together above his head, tightly wound from wrist to elbow with searing manila rope and chain, then strung from a sturdy metal bracket in the ceiling. He suspects one of his shoulders must be dislocated by now, if not both. He’s suspended high enough that his feet can’t make contact with the ground, yet despite this, his ankles are still coiled with dozens of zip-ties and yards of clumsily knotted paracord.
Two men stand before him. One approaches, brandishing the same dull box cutter he used hours ago, and resumes carving hatch marks into Kiryu’s back. When this fails to draw a reaction, the second man sneers out an insult and swings a heavy, leather blackjack into Kiryu’s ribs. This earns them a grotesque snap and a wet gasp, and they laugh and jeer in response.
Kiryu doesn’t bother paying attention anymore. It’s easiest when he doesn’t engage with his vessel, easiest when he just sways nauseatingly from the bracket in the ceiling and does everything he can to maintain vacancy.
He saw the pins on their lapels way back at the beginning and immediately understood that Kazama couldn’t risk the inter-family politics an extraction would surely ignite. Rescue was never an expectation; if he was ever going to escape, it would have to be under his own power. At first, he didn’t think it was impossible. He occupied his mind by observing every detail, scrutinizing every noise he heard. But the longer his captivity stretched, the more deeply he understood why no one ever made it out of the hole.
Shimano had ordered this facility carved out of the earth for one purpose: to neutralize by any means necessary. He staffed it with monsters, the sort of men who would rather break ankles and stomp knees than install padlocks or erect barricades. They were experts in their field, and eventually all Kiryu’s thoughts of escape dwindled to nothing. Simply deciphering the sharp throb that was once his body is now an all-consuming task. His fleeting awareness, when it surfaces, is wholly occupied with making sure his lungs are still pulling in oxygen, verifying his limbs are still attached, cataloging his encyclopedia of physical trauma.
Kiryu very much expects to die here.
A sudden, deafening rumble reverberates throughout the facility. The icy walls shake and the steel door judders in its frame. Fat motes of dust glide downward in lazy arcs, disturbed from their homes by the uproar. Muted screams echo in from outside, right alongside the thundering of gunfire.
The two men in front of him freeze. They exchange a startled glance, then simultaneously pull revolvers from their holsters and flee the room in a wordless rush.
Kiryu feels no relief at their absence, because he knows they always return. They always resume their grisly tasks: beating him until he’s so slick with blood that it feels like rain, or slicing into him with thrilled fervor until he pleads for them to stop, or carving away at his senses until he’s nothing more than a doubtful notion of self. It pauses, sometimes; there are occasional interruptions and intermissions, stretches of unremembered dark dappled throughout the weeks and weeks of agony, but their work is never concluded. They always come back.
So he forces himself to drift away from his pain and does his best to remain oblivious. The echo of handguns and screams grows nearer, and he willfully ignores all of it, drawing on his practiced detachment to stop himself from feeling — until the source of the disturbance intrudes into his cell with a shout.
“Back here!”
Blinding lights and insistent voices suddenly assault his senses, thrusting a foreign sense of urgency upon him. Someone swears in an agonizingly familiar voice. He hears liquid splatter on the floor and the sound makes his stomach flip and his throat knot.
“Oh, now ya get queasy? Ain’t time for that shit!” A manic bark in a pitch he recognizes but refuses to let himself consider. “Get your ass over here and help me with him!”
His absence from his body falters; he gasps and chokes and shakes all at once. He can’t parse what’s rising within him.
His bindings are suddenly amputated and his body buckles — a severed bowstring. The sensation makes him howl; the sound is strange and guttural and unfamiliar even to his own ears. Steady hands catch him, wrenching another cry from his throat as they make crunching contact with his splintered ribs. He’s eased down to the floor and his body sags, numb and useless; he thinks he might be weeping in relief, no longer strung up and forced to support himself with nothing more than fraying sinew. A familiar knife cuts away the ties around his ankles. Something soft brushes at his forehead.
It occurs to him that one of his wrists is definitely broken. He worries Kazama will be upset with him for being so reckless before his sluggish brain finally processes what’s happening.
It’s too much all at once.
Bile scorches the back of his throat; he can’t stop it from sliding up and out, and he gags on painful coughs. The arms surrounding him shift, gently rolling him so he can retch and drool on the concrete.
“Easy, Kiryu-chan. I gotcha.”
This doesn’t make sense. He’s been down here too long; they’ve demolished too much of him. He knows how Kazama works, and there’s nothing to gain by rescuing him now. Kiryu wants to tell these men to leave him and run. They deserve to know there’s nothing left of him — that he’s not worth the risk. He tries to form words, but his swollen tongue refuses to operate around his missing teeth, and he merely emits a pathetic groan.
“Don’t try talkin’. Looks like ya got a broken jaw.”
Kiryu recalls the time he mouthed off to a handler, earning a vicious crack from a heavy pipe. Even as his jaw exploded with pain, it reminded him of Tachibana, and he hadn’t been able to stop himself from choking out a manic laugh. “You think that’s funny, you piece of shit?” they’d shouted, before trading the pipe for a switchblade. The blade had soared right for his face, but then it disappeared from his sight almost immediately.
He doesn’t want to think about this.
“Kiryu-chan?”
He needs to detach again and go back to drifting. He needs to avoid acknowledging the rising anxiety and the looming enormity of the state he’s in. He needs to stop shaking.
The door slams open again. He flinches violently at the sound and tries to pull away from the arms holding him, but he’s too feeble to make any headway.
“We have to go. Now.” A third voice he knows but won’t allow himself to recognize. He wonders how many came along to witness his dismantling. “Can you walk?”
He almost wants to laugh at the question; conveniently, the man holding him does it for him.
“He ain’t goin’ anywhere on his own,” he says, and Kiryu knows that voice.
Kiryu tries to open his eyes, but his body only half cooperates. The world looks flat. It’s a disorienting feeling, akin to revulsion or vertigo, but he swallows it down and tries to gather himself, until he sees the face of the man holding him and quakes with recognition.
It’s Majima. His expression is stricken as he gazes down at Kiryu, but his mouth is set in a tense line of determination. His eyepatch appears more like a deep shadow cleaving across his face.
Kiryu stares dumbly, feeling lost and exposed. Everything inside of him — all of his failures, weaknesses, regrets — it’s all on display. He feels like he’s looking through a two-way mirror and he finally understands.
His eye.
They took his eye — exactly like the man clinging to him.
He hears someone scream, suspects it might be himself. He chokes, shudders, and knows without a doubt: he can’t hide anymore. Even if he leaves the hole, he can never escape it. The moment he acknowledges it, fireworks erupt inside his skull. The pain sizzling behind his left eye socket is suddenly maddening, as if he’d gouged it out with the live end of a downed power line. He lets out a mournful wail and can’t stop his hands from flying to his face, clumsy fingers trying to map the bloody hollow where his eye used to live.
“Kiryu-chan, it’s okay! We gotcha and we’re gettin’ ya out.”
He isn’t listening. His body shakes with irrepressible tremors. Every nerve burns hotter, renewed with terror. His breath comes faster, gasping in and out in shallow, useless hitches. He needs to disappear. He needs to shift into vapor and dissipate away from this freezing hole where monsters carved away at pieces of him day after day after day.
“Kyoudai, breathe. Please.”
He knows who it is and can’t stem another anguished keen. The pain grows even more vivid under the varnish of shame. Nishiki’s hands are on him now, along with Majima’s. They smooth across his shoulders, the back of his neck, the base of his skull. There’s a puff of humid air along the shell of his ear, and he feels Nishiki’s murmured appeals.
“Kiryu, you’re hyperventilating. Please, you need to calm down.”
He doesn’t understand why they came for him. There’s nothing left of the unconscious man who was dragged into this cell all those months ago.
“Kiryu-chan, listen to me. I understand.”
He moans pitiably and curls in on himself, as if it will protect him from having to hear this.
“Listen to me! I’ve been here too. You know that. I understand it’s fuckin’ terrifying.” Majima slides his eyepatch up, revealing the limp socket below. “Look at me, Kiryu.”
It’s not a request, it’s an order, and Kiryu obeys before he can stop himself. He’s never seen Majima without his eyepatch before, and it’s enough to startle him into focusing.
Majima lowers his voice to barely above a whisper as he continues. “Fuck, I… Kiryu-chan, I’m scared too. It’s okay. I know how bad it hurts, but you still gotta breathe. That’s all ya gotta do, just breathe. We got everything else, okay?”
It takes a moment, but eventually Kiryu tries to even out his rapid gasps; he really tries. He manages one inhale, a little deeper than the last, before his chest spasms of its own accord. The gasps increase in tempo, undeterred, and the betrayal from his own body is enough to sweep him fully into the rush of incoherent panic that’s been licking at his heels. He claws at his front and trembles violently. His head fills with static.
“Kyoudai, please.”
Nishiki’s hands pause in their smothering touches and curl around Kiryu’s, preventing any further mangling of the angry, infected mess that is his torso. Majima says something, pleading, and he looks so upset.
Kiryu feels a little guilty, but everything is beginning to feel so far away. He imagines he’s a hiss of steam rising away from the earth: scalding but transitory. Each involuntary pant makes the sensation enfolding him a little more nebulous, a little more comfortable.
Nishiki’s gentle reassurance swings into desperate begging. Majima shrieks out a curse and jostles him roughly.
Kiryu wonders why he’s suffocating, before consciousness evaporates right along with the steam.
Kiryu feels sand beneath his bare feet and hears waves lapping against a shoreline somewhere nearby. He can see sand dunes to his right, each soft hill crested by shoots of green as they stretch into infinity. Inhaling deeply, he smells sea-salt and antiseptic and rust. His mind is foggy, but it doesn’t bother him; it’s peaceful here.
He feels sensation but can’t identify any associated emotion.
He lets his guard down and wanders, following the coast for miles, always keeping the sand dunes to his right. He can’t see the ocean on his left, but his arm hairs prickle with its mist, and that’s enough for him right now. He never turns to look out at the water, finding the idea unsettling, so he keeps his gaze steadfastly forward and trudges ahead. Hours pass or perhaps days. The beach is bright, but there’s no sun in the sky by which to tell time. When he feels tired, he stops. When he feels rested, he continues. He never hungers or grows drowsy. No matter how far he explores, he never encounters signs of additional life — no footprints or refuse, no birds in the sky, and not a single sound beyond his footsteps and the gentle waves. It doesn’t bother him at first. This paradise is empty, but it’s safe. However, with every step his mind becomes a little clearer, and peace slowly morphs into unease.
Eventually, he comes upon a sandbar severing the shoreline; it stretches far out into the water. He can’t tell exactly how far it extends and doesn’t look. He intends to continue along the edge of the dunes until he considers: why is he avoiding the water? He has no idea, can’t actually identify a reason.
There’s a sound to his left. It rises high above the monotonous whoosh of the waves — delicate, soft and light, like the chime of a bell — coming from somewhere down the sandbar. He concentrates and realizes it’s not a bell; it’s a voice: young and feminine. He immediately spins toward it. Dread and horror well up within him as he finally looks at the ocean, but he shelves all his complicated emotions the instant he sees who is calling.
“Oji-san!” Haruka stands at the end of the sandbar, hopping from foot to foot in obvious panic as the tide rises around her. She’ll be trapped out there if he doesn’t act now.
He bolts toward her, body reacting before his mind can finish processing. The sand makes running difficult; his body shrieks in pain; he doesn’t mind. His muscles sing and his bones yell and he laughs when he recognizes exertion, like an old friend.
Kiryu reaches her and swings her up into his arms, warm and whole. Haruka tucks her chin over his shoulder and clings to him. The trust she places in him makes his chest swell.
“Oji-san, I was worried about you!”
He feels like himself again as he carries her back to land.
Kiryu’s return to wakefulness occurs with little fanfare.
He opens his eye to a lonely room. Rich wood paneling covers the walls, and fluorescent lights sit recessed in the ceiling. Two large windows overlook a courtyard where trees shed dry autumn leaves. He lies in a bed with rails and fluids course into his arm through a rubbery tube.
Hospital, of course.
Two questions burn inside him, and the first can be answered immediately. He soldiers through his apprehension and raises a hand to his face. Nausea rises from deep within him as his fingers meet thick gauze. His left eye socket tingles bizarrely.
Optimism dies last, he supposes.
“You’re awake,” someone says from his left.
Kiryu flinches, surprised the room isn’t as empty as he initially thought. He turns his entire head to see Kashiwagi, of all people, sitting in a chair pushed up against the wall.
“Sorry,” Kashiwagi says plainly. “I suppose I probably should’ve sat on your other side.”
Kiryu doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he simply stays quiet and stares. He thinks he must look like a deer frozen in front of oncoming headlights — or perhaps a deer after it encountered said headlights, given the state of him. Silence hangs between them until Kashiwagi lets out a weary sigh, stands up, and smoothly buttons his suit jacket. He busies himself at a small counter in the room's corner, pouring water into a paper cup. He pauses for a moment and then adds a straw.
“You’ve been out for quite a while,” Kashiwagi says as he moves to the foot of Kiryu’s bed and offers him the water. “Gave us a bit of a scare, you know?”
Kiryu accepts the cup with his left hand after discovering his right immobilized in a rigid cast. He raises the water to drink, and the straw mortifyingly scrapes his cheek on his first attempt. The next try hits his chin. Finally, he guides the straw accurately into his mouth. He scowls as he takes small sips.
“The change in depth perception might take some getting used to,” Kashiwagi adds, blunt and unnecessary.
Kiryu glares at him and hopes having half the eyes hasn’t also halved his ability to intimidate with a single look. Kashiwagi clears his throat and checks his phone. Good enough, Kiryu figures, and hands the cup back once his throat feels less like an abandoned quarry. He licks his lips and tries to speak, but just winds up coughing.
“I should let someone know you’re awake. The doctors will want to check how you’re healing.” Kashiwagi seems all too eager to take this as his cue to leave and turns toward the door.
“Wait,” Kiryu chokes out, willing the coughing fit to subside. He takes a deep, raspy breath; the skin around his ribs pulls concerningly, and he’s already growing tired, but he needs to know one thing.
Kashiwagi waits, expectant. His expression betrays nothing.
“Haruka… is she okay?”
“She’s fine, Kiryu. She’s with her mother.” The unreadable look on Kashiwagi’s face softens. He almost seems relieved by the question.
“Thank god.” Kiryu’s heart soars at the knowledge. He looks down at the blanket tucked around him and presses his lips together as firmly as he can, refusing to cry in front of one of the men he looks up to most. It takes a moment, but he collects himself enough to raise his head. His eye meets Kashiwagi’s approving stare.
“She’s been asking about you. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to hear you’re awake and alright.”
Kiryu hums in response and relaxes into his pillow. He already feels exhausted.
“And… I’m glad you’re alright, too. Get some rest, Kazuma. I’ll let the doctors know you’re back with us.”
Kiryu manages a lazy nod before dropping back to sleep.
Kiryu dozes in and out for a few more hours. Doctors, nurses, and specialists trickle in and out at random throughout the rest of the afternoon. He answers their questions; they bob their heads in practiced nods while staring at his chart and tuning him out. At some point, a resident with a round face removes the cast from his wrist. Kiryu inspects his arm once it's free and is shocked by how thin he is now.
The resident steps out of the room, and he takes the opportunity to run his freshly uncased hand over his ribs, disturbed by how easily he can count his bones, even through the gown and layers of bandages winding around his torso. He suppresses a shiver.
She returns with another doctor, who inspects his wrist and asks him to bend it this way and that. The doctor stays long enough to confirm some very specific medical jargon with the resident and leaves. She stays to strap a brace around his wrist, lets him know he’s doing great, and shows him a few hand stretches. Finally satisfied, she smiles and adds something to his drip that makes him feel soft and drowsy almost immediately.
“You’re gonna be just fine,” she chirps with a confidence he can’t help but believe. She almost reminds him of Makoto, but as the painkiller kicks in, he feels less sure.
“What’s your name?” The question erupts from him, unbidden, and he can hardly keep his eye open to hear the answer.
“A bit of a lightweight, Kiryu-san?” she laughs sweetly. “I’m your doctor, Omura Yoko. We’ll have time to chat more later. Right now, you should just try to get some sleep.”
He watches her leave and thinks he spies a flash of snakeskin in the hallway, but he’s unconscious before he can ponder it.
Kiryu dreams of being eleven. He’s in prison and surrounded by tired-looking adults wearing sad gray jumpsuits. He doesn’t think he’s supposed to be here, at least not yet, so he tells a guard. The guard smiles and takes off his hat, revealing he’s actually Nishiki. He boasts he was just disguised as a grown-up the whole time and pulls a gun from his belt. He brandishes it playfully, and Kiryu wants to ask him to explain, but he’s interrupted when the floor crumbles out from under them.
A young man now, wearing his old suit with the shiny Dojima pin on the lapel. He digs through the rubble and cries out for his brother. He digs until his hands are seeping and battered and finally is rewarded by finding someone else here in the ruins of the whorehouse. Their head rolls limply to look at him, and he’s confronted by the bloody face of Sohei Dojima, bullet still lodged in his forehead like a totem.
Kiryu recoils from the corpse, but he’s too slow. He’s always too slow to do anything. He knows it, because suddenly Tachibana is there with a switchblade that he dispassionately thrusts into Kiryu’s eye.
Kiryu wakes with a violent gasp and jerks into a sitting position, hands already scrambling to tear the gauze off his face in a frenzy. He can’t find the knife, but he knows it’s still in there, or a shard, or maybe—
“Would ya knock that shit off!”
“Tachibana?” Kiryu gasps, before he recalls it was a dream. He goes rigid once reality catches up.
He’s in the hospital still, and it’s night. Majima looms on the right side of his bed. He’s leaning over and clutching both of Kiryu’s hands, holding them firmly away from his face.
Kiryu lets his arms go slack.
“Ya with me?” Majima lets go of his hands, picks up the toppled chair behind him, and sits down.
“Mmm.” Kiryu wilts against his pillows. How embarrassing. He feels clammy from his dream, and his eye socket still burns, but he doesn’t know what to say for himself after such a pitiful display. After a moment, simply for lack of anything else to do, he tries out the hand exercises the doctor showed him earlier. Majima watches him briefly and sighs.
“Y’know, I thought we had a lot of trainin’ to do when ya got outta prison last year… Looks like this time around we’re really gonna be startin’ from scratch.”
There are multiple assumptions in that statement Kiryu wants clarification on, but he startles when he hears one thing specifically. “What do you mean ‘last year’?” he gapes.
Majima fidgets, uncharacteristically awkward. He looks up at the ceiling and crosses his arms, letting his shoulders droop heavily. The image of Majima at a loss for words is uncharted territory; it takes Kiryu a moment to realize that really is what he’s witnessing, and the hairs on the back of his neck tingle as he realizes it must be bad.
“…Nii-san, how—how long was I down there?”
“Ten months in the hole. Been here recoverin’ for three weeks.” Majima’s voice is dry, sobered of its usual playful lilt but forthright. Kiryu tenses up, unsure of how he’s supposed to feel, and stares at his hands. Majima regards him warily, obviously expecting a bigger reaction.
“Are… you alright?” Kiryu asks eventually, more out of habit than anything else. It’s easier than trying to decode his emotions on any given trauma inflicted upon him over the last ten months. The look on Majima’s face tells him it was the wrong thing to say.
“Shut the fuck up, Kiryu-chan. You just spent ten months in the hole, plus a whole ‘nother one unconscious.” Majima slips his tanto out from under his jacket during his rebuke and anxiously clicks it open and shut with one hand. “Lost your goddamn eye. You shouldn’t give a single shit what anyone else is feelin’.”
“I—so did you!” Kiryu doesn’t know why he’s saying it, but he’s suddenly furious. He wants Majima to take it as an insult and leave him alone. It’s immature, but he desperately doesn’t want to do this right now, unpack whatever it is he feels. Maddeningly, it looks like his lame retort does the exact opposite of what he wants and snuffs out the small embers of tension he hoped to ignite.
“Yeah… I know.” There’s no challenge in Majima’s tone, only resignation. He puffs out a single humorless laugh and locks his lopsided stare with Kiryu’s own.
Kiryu scowls and looks away. Majima’s hand keeps clicking away with his knife, and Kiryu wants to slap it to the ground. Ten months and three weeks lost. Nearly a year of his life gone, likely will be a full year by the time he’s discharged, on top of the decade prison already stole from him. The unfairness of it all stabs at him, but he exhales and buries the emotion deep down, shelves his despair and his anger. He does the math, mainly for the numbing distraction, and glances out the dark window.
Once he feels less, he speaks. “So it’s November already?”
“Yeah… it’s November. Why, ya got Christmas shoppin’ ya still need to do?” Majima is clearly injecting his voice with a double dose of its usual forced inanity. It’s a wholly transparent gesture, but it feels like an olive branch.
Kiryu finds himself overwhelmingly grateful for the halfhearted joke. He laughs like it’s actually funny, and now that he’s started he can’t stop. All the relief and shock and joy of being safe again, of being alive, finally register in him, so he snorts and giggles; he laughs until his eye grows damp and tears course down half his face, eventually tapering off with an exhausted wheeze. Majima is staring at him like he’s spontaneously grown his eye back, and his theatrical bewilderment almost sends Kiryu into another round of laughter. He contains himself, just barely, and raises a hand to wipe the tears from his eye with a shrug. Majima seems appeased once he knows Kiryu hasn’t finally teetered into hysteria, and his expression shifts from skepticism to a fond smirk.
“You’re a weird guy, Kiryu-chan.” It should be offensive, but coming from Majima, it almost makes him feel like he’s been deemed worthwhile.
“I get that a lot, you know?” Kiryu confesses. He yawns and notices how his jaw clicks but seems otherwise healed.
“Yeah, don’t doubt it.” Majima laughs, short but genuine.
It surprises Kiryu to find he doesn’t mind the teasing. He smiles wanly, but feels his eyelid drooping already. He detests how even the smallest interactions exhaust him now and fights the drowsiness. There are so many things he wants to ask, there’s ten months of information he needs to catch up on, and, selfishly, he’s not ready to give up this moment of camaraderie with Majima. All of that must show on his face, somehow, because Majima just waves a hand at him.
“Sleep. I ain’t going nowhere.”
True to his word, when Kiryu wakes again, Majima is still seated at his bedside. He bows his head as he jabs away at his cell phone like it’s wronged him, apparently sending someone a very lengthy, very aggressive text message. Kiryu glances at the window, grateful the shade is still open. It’s still dark out, but there are wispy trails of light blazing their way up from the horizon.
“I want to see the sunrise,” he blurts out before he’s even aware he’s thought it. Majima snaps his head up; he appears to consider the logistics of such a request, before he breaks into a wolfish grin. Kiryu has seen this expression before and it’s always preceded something getting stabbed.
“Okay, let’s get our asses out there, then!” Majima declares with the enthusiasm of Luther affixing his ninety-five theses. He leaps from his seat and retrieves a wheelchair from the corner of the room. Kiryu frowns at the idea of his mobility being at the mercy of The Mad Dog, but before he can protest, Majima cuts him off. “Nuh-uh, ain’t even gonna try and let ya bumble around with a catheter and an IV hooked up.” Kiryu hopes his embarrassment isn’t obvious in the way he concedes immediately, rather than continue the discussion.
It takes all the energy he has, plus more help from Majima than he would ever admit to accepting, but they eventually get him settled in the wheelchair with all his tubes still attached and associated bags clipped neatly to the chair. Majima even thinks to help him into a thick parka (which Kiryu hopes he hasn’t stolen from some other patient) and tucks a wool blanket over his lap. It’s all surprisingly thoughtful, albeit in a very confusing and unreal way. They travel in companionable silence down the linoleum hallway, into an elevator, and out onto the ground floor. The hospital is quiet, but more staff are slowly filtering in, carrying stacks of patient charts and cups of coffee. It’s comforting, the muted murmur of a day just beginning, so Kiryu lets his eye slip shut for a moment to bask in the sense of normalcy it restores in him.
He’s shocked out of his zoning by a blast of freezing air, and he opens his eye as they exit the building into the courtyard his room overlooks. Kiryu finally notices Majima is talking, and he’s not sure how long that’s been a thing. Majima is saying something about how the building was oriented westward intentionally and using phrases like “ambient solar heating” and “reduced carbon footprint.”
“…What?” Kiryu sputters.
“Oh, finally care to join the conversation, Kiryu-chan?” Majima laughs and kicks the brake into engagement none too gently. He walks around Kiryu’s right side to sit on an iron bench he’s parked the wheelchair beside.
“You keep doing that,” Kiryu says. (He’s not even going to bother puzzling over when Majima suddenly became an authority on environmental engineering, because the answer is probably prison.)
“Doin’ what?”
“Staying on my right side.”
Majima curls one corner of his lip up into an expression somewhere between chagrin and guilt.
Kiryu allows himself to feel a little smug for calling him out accurately. He doesn’t want anyone’s pity.
“Look… ain’t like I don’t know—” He gestures awkwardly to his eyepatch. “—takes a while to get used to stuff sneakin’ up on ya from that side.”
And all at once, Kiryu feels like a righteous asshole. Obviously it wasn’t pity — it was empathy. Majima doesn’t pity him; he wouldn’t be here if he did. His presence isn’t born out of obligation or duty, like Kashiwagi’s had been. Majima is here supporting Kiryu, likely because he actually gives a shit about him. The total absence of the man who raised him, or his chosen siblings, stabs at him like a physical pain.
“Thank you,” Kiryu says after the silence has stretched south of comfortable. His voice is hoarse but it passes without comment.
Majima laces his gloved fingers together and places his palms on Kiryu’s knees. It’s an unusual gesture, but it’s neither unwelcome nor too intimate; it’s just enough contact to remind him he’s not alone in all this. “You and me… we’re the only ones that ever made it outta there, Kiryu-chan. Gotta look out for each other.”
Kiryu shivers and nods, unsure how to respond to such a sincere and solemn edict. He looks up at the sky as the sun finally begins peeking over the distant skyline. The fresh air stings, foreign and wonderful, and he focuses on the act of simply breathing for a few minutes. He watches the sun rise higher and higher, warming him as its rays walk up his body. He tries to remember the last time he was outside before the hole, and smirks when something else occurs to him.
“Haww, what’s the dumb look for?”
“The last time I saw you, you drove a truck through the building I was in.”
Majima lets out a thrilled guffaw. “Damn right, I did! Why don’t you go try takin’ a knife—and then a bullet—for someone, just to watch him ditch ya in the bay! See how pissed you are, Kiryu-chan!” His words are harsh, but his tone is bright. He’s smiling despite his very accurate description of how he’d been treated, and if Kiryu didn’t know any better, he would swear Majima almost looks wistful. (Kiryu knows better. Majima is definitely wistful.)
“Oh… I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Majima makes a noise like a seagull choking on a kazoo.
Once the sun fully breaks from the horizon, Majima slaps his hands together and rubs them briskly. “Okay! It’s cold as shit out here, and I bet your painkillers ain’t gonna last too much longer. Hope it was worth it!”
Kiryu nods. “Yeah, it was nice. I remember everything looking less… flat, though.”
“Was that supposed to be a joke?!” Majima practically shrieks with gleeful rage.
By the time they make it back to his floor, Kiryu is ninety-nine percent asleep in the wheelchair, so he misses Majima getting chewed out by a frantic nurse. She banishes him to the hallway and rolls her missing patient back into his room, utterly unintimidated by the (blessedly metaphorical) daggers Majima is glaring at her.
She tsks and hums and clicks her tongue while she makes sure Kiryu’s still plugged into all the right tubes, then re-wraps the outermost layer of bandages around his eye. Shortly after, she’s joined by an orderly. He rouses Kiryu enough to warn him, then lifts him out of the wheelchair and moves him back into bed. He makes it look simple; one swift, efficient motion. Nothing at all like the production getting into the chair had been. Kiryu knows the entire process would probably embarrass him under normal circumstances, but he’s distracted by the rapidly rising tide of pain. He grits his teeth to stifle a groan.
Apparently, Majima’s prediction about his medication was spot on.
It hadn’t yet occurred to him how badly battered he still is. The drugs running through his system mask the worst of it each time he’s been conscious. He considers asking the nurse to please give him another dose right now, but when he glances up, he doesn’t immediately see her. The pain in his head increases exponentially by the second, and he can’t withhold a guttural moan. The nurse appears from the left edge of his vision and snatches his chart from the foot of the bed. She looks briefly startled by whatever it is she reads and hurries to unlock a nearby cabinet, barking something at the lingering orderly. Kiryu has just enough time to realize he can’t understand what she’s saying before the pain in him soars to newly unbearable levels. His hollow eye socket ignites like the spark from a striker clicked in front of a cutting torch and combusting. He spasms violently and clamps both hands to his temples, digging his fingertips into his scalp to keep his skull from splitting wide open. He thinks he might be screaming.
The room explodes into movement. The nurse crosses like a flash, wielding a syringe toward the crook of Kiryu’s arm. The orderly pries his hand away from his face and holds his arm straight, trying to allow the nurse access to the port in his forearm. Instinctual terror surges within Kiryu when he’s restrained, and coherent thought abandons him. He thrashes uselessly in the orderly’s hold, too weak to make an impact, and howls like a wounded animal. Majima must think that’s his cue, because then he bursts into the room.
The situation escalates from manageable crisis to unmitigated chaos with his arrival. Majima bounds toward the orderly, the orderly releases Kiryu, the nurse roars at Majima, and Kiryu seizes. For a moment he feels as if he’s looking at the scene from the corner of the room and wants to laugh, but then reality bubbles like a mistreated reel of 35mm, and he gasps wildly, unsure of when and where he exists.
He’s back in the hole, he knows he is.
But also… he’s everywhere else. His legs pump through the streets of Kamurocho while his chest sits hollow in his prison cell and his guts bleed on the tatami at Sunflower; his heart is a pile of dissected parts sitting on the bar top in Serena, and his hands are trembling at the Dojima Family Office: one holding a ring and the other a gun that’s still warm and slick with Nishiki’s sweat. He sees with both eyes even though he knows one lives only in the past and the other is with him here in the hospital. He feels soft, well-worn leather reach a decade back and grasp his hands, pulling them out of the past and away from his missing eye.
Kiryu remembers nothing after that.
“So, what’s the last thing ya remember?”
It’s daytime. Kiryu sits propped up in his bed with a tray of mild looking hospital lunch in front of him. Majima sits in the chair to the right, pulled close enough to rest his feet up on the end of the mattress.
“My eye hurt.”
“No, I meant—duh, Kiryu-chan. I saw your little freak out this mornin’,” Majima clarifies, without an ounce of tact. He grabs a cube of sweet potato off the tray and chews it more than necessary. “Meant before ya got nabbed.”
Kiryu rolls his eye and shudders when he feels its phantom partner rolling right along with it. “Shangri-La?” he says once the feeling has dissipated.
“Yeah, I was there. Try and keep up.”
“I’m well aware.” Kiryu contains another eye roll and settles for an unimpressed stare.
Majima grabs another sweet potato and performatively gnashes his teeth on it. Gross.
“I remember beating you.”
“Wow, congratulations. Ya won against the guy who was already bleedin’ out when he got to the fight.” Majima pairs his statement with a sarcastic thumbs-up.
Kiryu doesn’t feel up to handling Majima in a mood, so he doesn’t bother trying to argue; he huffs out through his nose and rubs his forehead. He’d naïvely hoped they could put off this conversation at least a little longer. Majima raises an eyebrow when he doesn’t rise to the jab.
“Fine, need me to go first?” Majima’s reputation for madness may precede him, but he can see this discussion is going to require a lighter touch. He can’t blame Kiryu for his reluctance to talk about it, either. After a second of thought, he grabs the bowl of miso off the tray and holds it out to Kiryu, insistent. “Ya gotta eat somethin’, c’mon. It’ll make ya feel better.”
Kiryu takes the bowl, frowning. Majima stares until he takes a sip. Appeased, he begins.
“Okay. So, I don’t remember exactly what happened after drivin’ that truck into the soapland. I know I wasn’t…” He holds his hand flat in the air next to his temple and flips it back and forth.
“Smart?” Kiryu supplies, unhelpfully.
“Goddammit! No! Meant I wasn’t thinkin’ straight. The fuck’s that supposed to mean? You think I’m stupid?”
“No—I just—” Kiryu makes a face like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He immediately takes another drink of soup, repentant.
“Anyway,” Majima plows ahead. “Wound up in the hospital for a bit, and when I got out I was expectin’ Shimano to ask for a pinky.”
Kiryu sucks in a breath through his teeth.
“Relax,” Majima wiggles his fingers in the air to show all ten little piggies are still alive and well. “Nah, actually gave me a promotion.”
“What? So your family is Tojo direct now?”
“Nah, Majima Family didn’t get promoted. I did. To clan captain.”
Kiryu looks absolutely dumbfounded.
“Oh, it gets worse!” Majima nearly cackles. “Wanna take a guess who went and made himself chairman once all the dust settled?”
“…Shimano is chairman?” It’s the only logical conclusion, but Kiryu hopes he’s wrong.
“Was chairman,” Majima emphasizes.
Kiryu buffers.
“Yep, seemed just as fishy to me then as it does to ya now. When I tried askin’ the boss what went down while I was out… well, he always made it clear my job wasn’t askin’ questions, it was takin’ orders. So! I did a little extra-curricular research. Got in touch with the only guy in the clan who still seemed halfway respectable. Wanted to hear what his take on all this was.”
Kiryu leans forward, expecting Majima to reveal he’d gone to Kazama behind Shimano’s back.
“Kashiwagi.”
“…What?”
“Yeah! Me an’ Kashiwagi got a history!” Majima steals more sweet potatoes, waggles his eyebrows weirdly, and gestures at Kiryu to keep drinking his miso.
“I… didn’t know that.”
“Hmm? Oh, he’s probably just bein’ shy,” Majima leers. “So—Kashiwagi and I get to talkin’ and what he tells me is this: Shimano stole that ten bill. Y’know, the one that had the whole clan in a tizzy chasin’ that girl of yours? Once he got his hands on it, he made a big show of puttin’ it all back in the Tojo coffers, killed some politician and his army of Omi backup, then just rolled that momentum into chairmanship. All while I was out on rubble-enforced R n’ R!”
“But… how did he wind up with the money? Who even took it in the first place?” Kiryu sips at his soup and frowns. None of this adds up.
“Kashiwagi wouldn’t say. Told me his hands were tied. Said he couldn’t challenge Shimano’s claim without puttin’ someone in danger.” Majima straightens up in his chair and lowers his feet from the mattress to the floor. “Honestly thought he was talkin’ about you.”
“What?” Kiryu says, caught off guard mid-sip, and coughs. “Why?”
“Well, no one knew what happened to ya. You were outta prison one day and then just gone the next. Poof! Not even a trace. People thought you’d bob up in the bay or we’d hear ya wound up back in the slammer for another ten. Think there was even a rumor ya went off to open an orphanage on a tropical island. Personally, I thought you’d just plain skipped town. Maybe popped off to Hiroshima or Fukuoka or somethin’, guessin’ you and the kid just wanted a fresh start, maybe got some new identities, after—” Majima coughs. “Figured that’s why Kashiwagi wouldn’t rock the boat with Shimano. Didn’t want him sniffin’ around. It made sense, and because it was you, I never looked into it. I thought I was protectin’ you.”
“You’ll… have to explain that to me.”
“Figured the less I heard about ya, the safer you were. Anything I know, I woulda had to tell Shimano if he ever asked…” Majima suddenly tenses, as if he’s just realizing something. “But he never did! Goddammit!”
Majima jumps from his chair and paces the room like a caged animal. He swings to look Kiryu in the eye, fury and remorse etched into every pore. Kiryu thinks he looks exactly like the hannya on his back.
“Kiryu-chan, ya gotta believe me. If I’d—if I even had a feeling you were down there, I never woulda left ya. But I had no reason to even suspect it! No one did! He never even breathed your name.”
“I believe you,” Kiryu says immediately, voice lacking any definable emotion. He stares straight ahead at the wall and waits for Majima to continue, but a thick silence blankets them. Majima exhales, weary. He sits back down, suddenly abandoned of all manic energy. Kiryu can tell he’s inwardly grappling with what he wants to say next.
“So…” Majima sighs. “I know where we found ya, but still dunno how ya got there.”
Oh.
Kiryu steels himself. He knew he would have to explain sooner or later. He takes another sip of miso, swallows, runs his tongue over his teeth. It’s not that he doesn’t want to tell Majima; it’s just that he doesn’t know what to say for himself. How could he even attempt to justify the immense way in which he failed everyone?
“The last time anyone would admit to seein’ ya was Shangri-La. Start there,” Majima says, as if reading his mind. Kiryu nods, and after a moment, begins.
“There was a girl who worked there, Akemi. She was Shinji’s… they were in love.” He hesitates, swallows a lump in his throat. “Shinji had been hiding Kazama there, after he was shot at Sera’s funeral, but the location was compromised. By the time we got there, Kazama was already gone. He’d left a message with Akemi, though. She told us to wait until evening, then go to Shibaura Wharf. Kazama would be there waiting… Then you showed up.”
(Kiryu glares at Majima’s poorly muffled snort. “Sorry,” Majima says with a shrug, clearly not sorry.)
“So, I took Akemi and Haruka back to West Park. The Florist had men there. They helped us handle Shinji and Reina… their remains.” Kiryu can feel the words getting harder. None of this is strictly pertinent, but he can’t stop. “Akemi wanted to take Shinji with her…”
He’s never spoken to anyone about what happened. The way he’d been forced to follow the pools of blood that spilled out of Reina’s bullet-riddled body. How often he still sees her corpse when he dreams, limbs at grotesque angles, cruelly thrown at his feet like an object.
“But I…” Kiryu sucks in a shaky breath, willing his body not to cry in front of Majima. “I didn’t know what to do for Reina. I thought I’d have time to find her family, or that when I found Yumi, maybe she’d know the right way to handle—” He cuts himself off. Pulls his lips into a tight line, pressing them together as hard as he can.
He can’t do this.
Majima lowers his head to let Kiryu collect himself, but when he doesn’t continue, Majima sighs and speaks up.
“I ever tell ya ’bout the first time I stopped by her bar?”
Kiryu shakes his head.
“Back in eighty-eight. I was lookin’ for you, but Nishikiyama wanted to fight ‘bout it. Woulda been a total pushover too, except for the mama behind the bar. She was just hammerin’ my skull with liquor bottles, any chance she got!”
“I’ve never heard your side of it… but she bragged about it, once or twice.”
“Good! She deserved to be proud! She ever tell ya I went back a month later to apologize?”
“No…?”
“She invites me in for a drink, all demure and dewy eyed. We get to talkin’ and I tell her she knocked out one of my teeth with that swing of hers! Brought her a pair of earrings from Le Marche, y’know, as an apology gift, so I get ’em out and she snatches ’em right outta my hands! Gives me a bill for the drink and the damages and tells me if I ever come back to her bar she’ll knock out the rest of my molars!”
Kiryu laughs. “Really?”
“Absolutely. She was fearless.”
“She loved telling the story about the time she ‘saved Nishiki from the Mad Dog of Shimano’ to customers. I saw her kick a few guys out over the years if they didn’t believe her.”
Majima laughs, genuinely, and the warm sound makes Kiryu feel a little stronger. When Majima leaves it at that, Kiryu can tell he’s waiting for him to pick back up. He takes a deep inhale, holds it, and blows it all out before continuing.
“After Akemi left, Haruka and I were planning to go to the wharf to meet Kazama that evening, but we still had a few hours until then. I told her to stay put. Wait at the park with Date-san. I needed to pick up some cigarettes. I just… I just needed a walk. Just a second after everything to get it together.” Kiryu looks at Majima, clearly pained. “I told her I’d be right back.”
“…And?”
“And… I made it as far as the Hotel District before I got shot.”
Majima bristles, just slightly.
“It was right here. Clean through, at least.” He touches his right flank, under his ribs. He can feel through his hospital gown the way the skin there healed poorly, infection turning it into a large puckered scar. They’d slapped gauze around it in the hole to keep him from bleeding out completely and ruining their fun, but that was the extent of the treatment.
Majima crosses his arms, clearly not agreeing with Kiryu’s attempt to find a silver lining but otherwise staying silent.
“I tried to look, but I couldn’t see a shooter anywhere… I didn’t—It all happened so fast. He must’ve been up on a roof, coordinating with them.”
“Coordinatin’ with who?”
“The… You have to understand… I—It was just instant, nii-san,” Kiryu’s voice is pleading. He hangs his head and burns with shame. He’s gone over it more times than he can count. He was careless. He was distracted. He wasn’t paying enough attention to his surroundings—
“Kiryu, what happened next?” Majima drops the suffix and the accent. His voice is calm but commanding. It leaves no room for noncompliance. Kiryu swallows loudly, tongue pushing against the roof of his mouth and jaw flexing.
“There were vans, at least four, maybe five. They pulled up before I even realized I’d been hit… Thirty or forty men piled out.” Kiryu pauses and laughs bitterly. The sound doesn’t suit him at all. “I know better than to try and fight with a bullet wound, but they blocked me in with their vans. I couldn’t run, so I had to fight. I took a few guys down, eight or nine, but there were so many of them… I was just bleeding so much… One of them got me with a needle and—that was it. I don’t even remember going down.”
“And then ya woke up in the hole?”
Kiryu just nods and keeps his head down. He sucks in a shaky breath and tries to ignore the wet heat building in his sinuses.
“Gets easier. Promise,” Majima breathes.
A few minutes pass before Kiryu finally feels steady enough to continue.
“So… if everyone thought I left town, how did you find me?”
“Ahh…” Majima perks up at the question, as if it’s the part of the story he’s been dying to get to. “That’s where it gets good!”
Kiryu thinks ‘good’ is the last word he would use to describe any of this.
“Okay, so one day, ’bout three weeks ago, Boss Shimano calls me in for a private meetin’. Tells me he’s about to confront a couple of traitors and wants me there as his enforcer. Says he needs it kept quiet, so it’s just gonna be me and him today. Sure, no problem. Until Kashiwagi walks in, and I think my goose is cooked.” Majima pulls his gloves off while he narrates. “But! Right when I’m about to start a little preemptive stabbin’, Nishikiyama walks in right after him. Of all the luck!”
Kiryu pales. He doesn’t know where any of this is heading, but he’s positive it’s going to be bad.
“And then Shimano, he looks right through them, and I’ll never forget what he said… ‘No one’s untouchable, or have ya never wondered what little hole in the ground Kiryu Kazuma has been rottin’ in?’”
Kiryu feels frozen in place. All that abuse. All the suffering he’d been unable to prevent in his absence. For what? He’d just been a bargaining chip, and not even a necessary one. He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until his soup spills over the rim of the bowl and he feels it running down his knuckles. Majima plucks the bowl of miso from his hands, puts it back on the tray, and moves the whole thing to the counter. After a moment of consideration, he leaves his gloves there as well. Kiryu takes a second to compose himself. He sucks in a deep breath and clears his throat once he feels able to continue. “And then?”
“And then…” Majima sighs, almost wistful, and walks back over to the bedside carrying something he picked up off the counter. “You shoulda seen your kyoudai, Kiryu-chan. I never knew what ya saw in him until that moment.”
Kiryu knows he’s going to be sick.
“Your koi became a real dragon right there in the office. He beat Shimano to death with nothin’ but his bare hands… and not me or Kashiwagi lifted one finger to stop him.”
Kiryu curls forward and vomits. Majima, somehow, has a kidney dish at the ready and gets it under Kiryu’s chin in time. He retches for a few seconds, but nothing else comes up. Majima slides across the room and throws the whole thing in the garbage. He hums lightly as he washes his hands before tugging his gloves back on. He spins around to make eye contact, and Kiryu wants to recoil at the mania he sees.
“Then… he turned on me.”
“What?”
“He was a vision. Didn’t even hesitate! The second he knew Shimano was dead, he came right at me. Covered in blood, furious as the day he was born. I swear, if Kashiwagi hadn’t stopped him, I woulda been okay fightin’ him to the death right there.” Majima almost seems forlorn it didn’t come to that, and Kiryu wants to sob.
The whiplash between the scene Majima describes and his utter delight at having witnessed it makes Kiryu’s skin crawl. His mind buzzes as it tries to restructure itself around so much new input: the revelation that he’d been nothing more than a piece on Shimano’s chessboard, the cruel sinking betrayal as he thinks about the ten years of his life he gave up to Nishiki only for him to turn around and murder another man in cold blood, Majima’s sudden fanatical ardor for Nishiki’s bloodlust. Kiryu can’t do this right now. He stamps the feelings as far down inside himself as he can.
“I’m glad Kashiwagi stopped him,” Kiryu finally croaks out.
“Well, Kashiwagi ain’t nothin’ if not practical. He got Nishikiyama to calm down. Explained to him that with Shimano dead, the job of pickin’ the next chairman falls to–”
“You,” Kiryu interrupts without realizing he’s spoken. “It falls to the clan captain while he’s acting chairman.”
“Bingo. Even though the clan captain usually just picks himself to be chairman, he does have a choice. So! Kashiwagi sees his chance to take control of all the players. He asks me, right then and there, still holdin’ your boy back, ‘Will you endorse Nishikiyama as chairman?’”
“Wait—what? Why Nishiki? Why not Kazama… or even himself?”
“Look, I was halfway down on my goddamn knees already after seein’ what he did to Shimano. I wasn’t in any mood to question it… so I told him I’d be happy to, but only under one condition.”
“…Which was?” Kiryu looks up at him, woeful. He doesn’t know how this gets any worse.
“Think about it. This was three weeks ago.” Majima waggles his eyebrows and holds up three fingers. “Told him I’d make him chairman if the three of us got in a car right that second and went to pull you out of the hole. ’Cause I knew the bastard better than either of ’em, and I knew that once word of Shimano’s death spread, those pieces of shit would be under standin’ orders to start executions.”
Kiryu feels faint and clammy. His head is overwhelmingly full of brand-new information, but one thing is still bothering him. There’s still a piece of the puzzle missing.
“Nii-san, where was Kazama during all this?”
“Kiryu-chan…” Majima looks at him sadly, and Kiryu already knows.
“Don’t—Oh, god…” Kiryu wants to die; he wants to lunge out and strangle Majima before he can say what he’s about to say. He does neither. Just sits there, frozen and rigid, and knows deeply that he is a coward.
“Kazama died last Christmas. He waited at the wharf, but you never showed up.”
Kiryu feels every muscle burn, as if his body’s trying to shrink itself into as small a ball as possible with no conscious input. The hairs on his arms tingle and rise as goosebumps ripple across his skin while his stomach turns itself inside out and his lungs fall into the space below.
And then somehow it gets worse.
“But the girl did… and Shimano had her tailed.”
Kiryu doesn’t feel like he’s crying, but he knows he must be. When he looks down at his hands, white-knuckled around one another, he sees scattered beads of water. He intently watches them multiply and slide down the valleys between metacarpals as if it’s the most fascinating phenomenon he’s ever witnessed. He sees but feels nothing. He wonders if these are even his hands.
Majima hesitates when he sees the vacancy in Kiryu’s eye, but knows if he stops he’ll never finish, and Kiryu deserves to know the fate of the man who raised him. “You should know… Kazama died protectin’ that little girl.”
Kiryu doesn’t react.
“Kashiwagi got her out during the chaos between families and got her to safety, but that’s all he’d ever tell me. I have no idea where she went. I’m sorry, Kiryu.”
Kiryu slumps forward, like a mechanical fortuneteller that’s just been unplugged.
“Kiryu-chan?”
Majima lays a gloved hand on the back of his neck, and suddenly Kiryu is sobbing. Big, ugly heaves; loud and mortifying. They’re like a riptide that has pulled him under, and he can’t find his way back to the surface. He buries his face in his hands to try and muffle his howling as each wave crashes into him. Majima scoots up onto the bed, guides Kiryu’s head to his shoulder, and wraps his arms around him while he cries.