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Fukuchi looks calmer in death than they’d ever known him in life. Looking down upon him, Teruko wishes that she could muster even a fraction of the peace that adorns his brow.
There is no doubt that he did not regret his choice at all. She would be crying, now, too overflowing with regrets of her own, had she not already wept all the tears she could, leaving salt dried on her cheeks and reddening her eyes.
Out of the four of them, it’s Jouno who speaks first. There is not much of a surprise to be held there, she supposes; they were always the most willing to place the blunt truth forward. Still, Tachihara winces preemptively and Tecchou steps a little closer to them all and Teruko wishes she didn’t have to be here for any of this.
“He had to die,” Jouno says, and there’s nothing in their voice.
“Be nice,” Tecchou responds immediately. He was waiting for it. They were all waiting for it, really.
Tachihara glances towards her, each and every one of his thoughts visible on his face, and she wonders absentmindedly how on earth he’d managed to be such a successful spy if he was always so expressive. “Well,” he starts awkwardly, “I know he tried to kill everyone, but he was also our commander.”
“He killed you, and me,” Jouno says, exasperation obvious. “He committed treason. It would have been our duty to take him down regardless.”
Tecchou hits them with his sheathed katana at the same time that Tachihara hisses something out about tact but there is no way to hide the fact that all three of them turn to look directly at her in response to their words. Well, in Jouno’s case, they don’t quite turn to look at her but rather shift to emanate implacability in her direction.
Teruko knows why, of course. She will never forget the feeling of her sword, angled upwards and bursting through her commander’s stomach and chest. Even now, her hands shake, and she feels wrong enough that she’s tempted to just start shifting forms in hopes that it will alleviate something.
Duty, indeed: when that stupid weretiger came, when she saw what was happening, did she not commit herself to what ought to be done?
They all made the same choice, as well. There would have been nothing more to say, had he not returned.
“I wish he’d stayed dead,” Teruko says dully, and the three others cease all movement immediately.
“It would have made things easier,” Tachihara agrees, and she tamps down the urge to laugh. Of course he would be the one to say that. He’s a spy, after all, he knows conflicting loyalties better than them all! Does he really think the rest of them didn’t notice how attached he got to his Black Lizard friends?
Does it matter?
“I want to hate him,” she says again. Fukuchi’s corpse does not look like she always thought it would. It really only looks sad, and it’s making her angrier than it should. It is just a body like any other, dried iron around the stomach and a hole half-hidden by his cape. The Special Division for Unusual Powers had already claimed back the sword.
Without it, he doesn’t look anything like how she’d always seen him.
She steps closer to him. It’s almost instinctive, the way she gets drawn back to his body, the way that her knees hit the ground harshly enough that she doesn’t feel it at all. He doesn’t look any better up close. She wants to stab his face in, and then she feels sick enough that she wants to stab herself, instead.
“You’re allowed to hate him,” Tachihara says quietly.
“You should,” Jouno says, at a much louder tone. “He’s a perversion of justice.”
So is she. So are all of them.
Tecchou says, “I put you above justice. The commander can put him above justice, too, if she wants.”
That’s not what Teruko is doing. That’s not what she wants to do, either, because her entire existence is meant for justice. It’s not an option for her.
Then she pauses. “What did you just call me?”
Tachihara is staring at Tecchou, too, a complicated look on his face, and Jouno is making that expression they always have whenever Tecchou does something particularly stupid in their eyes.
Tecchou sees none of this, and only blinks at her in confusion. “Well, if Commander Fukuchi is dead, then the job goes to you. Because you’re our vice commander.”
“But I don’t want to be, though.” She didn’t mean to say it out loud, not really, but the words get torn from her throat with no regards as to her wishes until they land like heavy stones between them. She’s quieter than she should be. She thinks, oh, god, I sound like a child. She thinks, why am I here?
“You have to be,” Jouno declares. “If we don’t develop some form of structure again, the government may decide to retire the Hunting Dogs after what he did.”
“Woah, slow down,” Tachihara says, whipping around to face them. “First of all, give her a break. Second of all, if they retire us, we’re going to fucking die.”
“Execution?” Tecchou asks curiously, like this is a normal conversation to have.
“No, the surgeries,” Tachihara snaps, waving his arms dramatically. She doesn’t know why he bothers. His surgeries are less frequent than theirs’, after all, because of his role as an undercover agent. He doesn’t need to care.
“That’s exactly why she needs to take the position,” Jouno says, unruffled. She admires them for it, sometimes, to have the kind of stability that they can die and get turned into a vampire and then come back to life with half of Yokohama in shambles and their commander dead and stay just as calm as always. As long as they have their work to do, they always seem okay.
She cannot. She’s too emotional, too dramatic, she throws her position as vice commander around too often and she knows it. There’s an ease to the way that the other Hunting Dogs move through life that she doesn’t have without being surrounded by soldiers that she outranks by miles.
Tachihara gets it, sometimes. She likes him for that. Maybe it’s not fair of her to think it, because it’s because he doesn’t know who he is, either, but she doesn’t feel quite so wrong when she’s around him.
“So what are you saying,” Tachihara says, and she realizes they’ve been talking this entire time. Then she realizes that while her mind had been elsewhere, her eyes had been trained forward, and the image of her commander’s body registers itself behind her eyes and she almost gags. She’s used to bodies. The one in front of her is more foreign than anything else she’s seen. “We just go back to work like nothing had ever happened? Just start treating Teruko-san as our new commander?”
“What I’m saying,” Jouno huffs, clearly already sick of the conversation – and so is she, god, she does not want to listen to this, “is that it’s our only option. Everyone is waiting for us to show that Fukuchi represents the Hunting Dogs. We have to prove otherwise or you won’t even need to wait for the surgeries to kill us.”
“That’s mean, Jouno,” Tecchou chimes in, disapproval leaking from his voice. “People don’t hate us.”
There’s a very pointed silence, where Tachihara’s mouth clicks shut audibly in disbelief and Jouno lets out a long-suffering groan. Teruko wants to laugh again. And then she realizes that there’s nothing stopping her from doing so, so she does, bright peals of it, all high-pitched and hysterical.
There is something wrong with her. There is something wrong with everyone here, really, and the corpse in front of them most of all. Why is it even still here? So they can say their goodbyes before the Special Division for Unusual Powers disposes of it in accordance with all of the surgery-inflicted rules?
Tachihara drops down to his knees beside her, one arm coming up to rest around her shoulders despite the tension lining each inch of his body. She cannot stop herself from laughing. She bends forward with the weight of it, curling her shoulders in and letting her head fall forward. She thinks maybe the only reason she’s still standing is the weight of Tachihara’s arm supporting her.
She’s already laughing, she supposes, so there’s not much more to lose. She doesn’t look at him but she asks anyway. “Why am I here?”
There’s a sharp inhale of breath from beside her, but it’s not Tachihara who speaks first.
“You’re our commander,” Tecchou says, stepping closer to crouch next to them. He’s so painfully earnest. They could have never sent him in as a spy, she thinks. “You’re here because you’re our commander.”
She sobs. She doesn’t know when the laughter had turned back into tears, but she cannot stop them, either. “I never wanted to be,” she chokes out, and tries not to feel like it’s another betrayal of hers. It has nothing to do with them and everything to do with her; how is she meant to lead them? She’d always been all too happy simply to follow Fukuchi’s orders. “That’s him, not me.”
“It’s you now,” Jouno says. They remain standing, as always, but their boots approach her vision; he’d shifted closer anyway.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Tachihara refutes, and she still doesn't look at him but she can hear the frown in his voice. “Vice commander – Teruko-san – I’m sorry.”
She makes that horrible noise again, something like a wheezing, teary laugh, and Tachihara’s arm stays tight around her shoulders. She says, “you should be. You all should be, all of you!”