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Chika
They have two children who play with a Siberian Husky in the backyard of a house larger and more gorgeous than the limits of her imagination had ever allowed her to envision. She doesn’t need to work anymore, and while she’ll always look back fondly on (most of) her time as a hostess, she had never intended it to last forever. Her most deeply cherished dream, cradled protectively to her chest as the men she loved married women who weren’t her or paraded lovers in front of her face in a never ending line, was to create something she could call her own, pour her heart and soul into marriage and motherhood and build a life with a husband she was devoted to.
And it’s not like she hasn’t done it. Mostly. Her existence is a thing of beauty, really—a beautiful home and beautiful jewels and beautiful clothes, even a beautiful dog. Her children, though, are truly the crown atop it all, better than she had ever fantasized about. The rest of it is nothing in comparison, and a part of her even wishes—wishes—
It’s just that her children are so perfect and so pure, and it’s only since they were born that she’s really looked at Goro with his eye and his scars and the mad, grinning tattoo winding down his back and been afraid. Not of him, because she knows he’s a good man, but of all that he brings with him. The way that their son grows to idolize him, to develop that perfectly natural inclination to want to be just like his father. And their little girl, always blushing and pouting whenever Chika points out the elegant beauty she can even now see she’ll grow to be—she says she wants to be like her father, too, but she doesn’t understand the danger she’s courting, because there’s no room for women in Goro’s world, not in the way she intends. It’s a dark place full of violent men, all of them with so many ways to hurt a girl.
Perhaps she should’ve thought of this earlier, before things had gone so far, before she had twined her life with his in ways that can’t be undone. He’s not her husband and he never will be, but she loves him deeper than she has anyone, and she thinks she has since the very beginning, when he looked in disgust at Kanehara at the way he treated her. There had never been any room for logic or reason in her previous loves and so there certainly isn’t in this one, when it makes the ones that came before it seem so paltry in comparison.
Her dreams only half came true, and they exist in the eye of a storm of nightmares, but she can’t blame him for it.
After all, she’s always liked selfish men.
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Yuki
She has never introduced Goro to her grandfather. She did to her stepmother once, and sometimes she still hears the ghosts of her father’s horrified whispers when he pulled her aside, asking where the handsome man in the tuxedo had gone, when he’d been replaced by this thug, and is that a tattoo under that jacket? Do you even know what that means? What are you thinking?
Maybe she’s not thinking. If she was, she would’ve taken up with one of her wealthy regulars, perhaps, or saved enough money to get out of hostessing entirely and gotten some mainstream, respectable job.
But Goro would say that being a hostess is a mainstream, respectable job, and she supposes it’s when he does things like that that she stops thinking. Stops caring. Somewhere between private training sessions and alley fights outside the club and the Five Stars blinking out in the Sotenbori skyline, he managed to bring her vinegar, presenting it to her with excited flourish, looking for all the world like he’d just had to march through hell to get it, and when she found herself smiling at him, her heart warm and fluttering her in chest, she realized there was no going back.
And there hasn’t been, whatever her father says. Even when her grandfather asks after her concernedly, telling her how very much he’d love to live long enough to see her marry—it hurts her to know that he won’t, but he does see the birth of his great-grandson, and she’d like to think that makes up for it.
For all that he adores her child, though, he's a traditional man at heart and it doesn’t stop him raging for answers about the father. But she only smiles with well-practiced placidity and glares at her father as he opens his mouth, silencing him.
She loves Goro, and with that comes the necessity of accepting the life he leads, the choices he’s made. But that’s not a burden she’ll ever allow her grandfather to share.
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Unknown
This is a happy ending. Which is very strange to her, because the last thing she’d ever expected was one of those. Oh, being some Yakuza’s whore, yes, but actually living, being treated like a human being? Definitely not.
She misses Club Sunshine sometimes, to be honest. It was fun work, certainly nothing she expected when she was bartered off, shivering, as a reward to a one eyed man in an alley.
“Are you ever gonna tell me your name?” that man asks now, smiling wickedly.
True, it’s been years. But all that means is that now, she has the confidence to smile back.
“No.”
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Mana
It’s funny she can miss something when she has everything. Possessions and extravagance on one side, lavish wealth existing in its own bubble outside of the one that popped; family on the other, home and children, a love that still gives her such pain in her heart that sometimes her legs go out from under her.
It seems so stupid in light of all that, so—laughably insignificant, but . . .
Well. She misses being a hostess.
She did try for a while. But the thing about Goro-kun is that he has a reputation. Warranted or not, she can’t say, because when he’s with her, he seems so different from the snippets of stories she’s heard, the whispers that coil like black shadows out from his name.
At first she didn’t quite understand, but as customers dwindled, regulars specifically not asking for her, she started to realize: He was feared. Feared in a deep, horrified way that spread out from the ranks of the Yakuza and into regular customers until no one dared to sit and drink with a woman they considered his.
It’s not quite like it was in college. There she was just ignored entirely, and now she’s a pretty bauble to be surreptitiously looked at but never, ever approached.
It’s . . . lonely. Isolating in a way she thought she had forgotten. Parts of her that she had tried hard to cultivate for so long are decaying away with disuse, and sometimes in the middle of the night she wakes up, terrified she’ll never get them back.
But it’s not so simple that she can say she dislikes her life now. It’s just that once hostessing was her life, the thing that made her into everything she is, and now there’s an absence inside her that she’s always dragging around, weighing down her heart even as the sight of Goro-kun fights to lift it up.
A tiny little bit of her hates him for it, really. Hates him for making her love him and realize that two feelings like that can exist alongside each other in one person. Hates him for forcing her to come around to the reality that a person can have so much, but never truly everything.
Sometimes, when she’s particularly wistful, she thinks about a conversation they had a long time ago, when she had just come to Club Sunshine and her chest was so tight, painful in a way she’d never known.
“Goro-kun, are you the S? Or the M?” she’d asked him playfully, trying to manipulate his thoughts down the path she wanted.
With long suffering, exasperated patience, he’d replied, “I guess I’m a . . . masochist.”
And how she’d giggled at that, because she liked the idea of a man she could make want her so badly that it hurt, give him a sweet pain he couldn’t help but enjoy.
Except, she knows now that he was wrong.
It’s always been the other way around.
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Hibiki
There’s a lot that Goro has given her. Love, for one—yes, she would very much like to think he loves her just as much as she does him, because even if he doesn’t say it, that’s just not him. He might be a strange man, but in the end is still just that—a man.
He says it clearly enough in his patience and his touches and the looks he gives her. He says it in paid medical bills and Yuta’s tuition and a house big enough that her mother can finally, finally be comfortable after all her years of work.
And Hibiki can live as traditionally as she ever could’ve hoped, can devote every minute of her time and every last scrap of her energy to cooking and homemaking and raising children with all the careful care necessary to get them into the best schools, to provide them with a stable, perfect home and a wide, limitless future.
She’s so close to being able to say she has all she ever wanted, but there’s always going to be the one thing Goro can’t give her. Sometimes she sits up at night in her painstakingly decorated kitchen and allows the hurt to come up out of the place she shoves it down into during the daylight hours, lets herself cry over her one hopeless dream. Then when the morning comes, she locks it back away and smiles and tries to pretend she’s at peace with the one thing she can’t change.
She’ll never be a bride.
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Ai
She didn’t quit working immediately, not until she had no other choice. Goro didn’t push her, as he seemed to understand where she was coming from—her big house and all the other nice things she wanted were supposed to be the testaments of her success, the proof of how much she had personally accomplished, and if they weren’t bought with her own money, then what was the point?
She did build her house, in the end. Goro’s knowledge of all the little technicalities of property and construction might’ve smoothed the process along, but it was all her money and her design, a sweet childhood vision finally come to life.
She’d never been so proud. Except then the slow realization began to dawn that success doesn’t suddenly make people respect you. Oh, all those girls from high school envied her, certainly, and began to hate her in a genuine, vicious way they’d lacked when they were classmates, but they still found a way to minimize her, write her off as a whore who never had a real job, whose money came on the back of professional drinking and good looks.
It’s only after the first few times Goro comes to visit her that she notices things begin to change. Oh, they all still look at her with petty, hateful glares, but now their lips stay pushed into tense lines as they shrink back and away, crossing the street to avoid confrontation, even occasionally offering her stiff, resentful bows.
And Ai dislikes it, honestly, because it’s so unnecessary. All she ever wanted was to be liked and accepted, and it would’ve been so easy, so much simpler, for them to have just been friends.
But she supposes that it’s just a lesson she had to learn, sooner or later. A hard, cynical one that makes her wish she lived in a nicer world.
Some people will never like her or respect her, however much she tries. And in the absence of that, the only option left to her is fear.
(Her children will never be bullied.)
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Dolly
It’s all because of her daughter, really, and it seems so bizarre and out of order—getting together for the sake of a child as opposed to staying together. But her little girl needs a stable home and a father, and she does love Majima-san so very much.
It’s not as though it’s some great sacrifice on Dolly’s part. Majima-san is younger than her, and handsome, and a good provider, and though she knows what he is and that makes her nervous and uncomfortable, she never tries to find anybody else.
Eventually that comes to bother her, and she thinks about it for a while, picking her way carefully through her own thoughts, delving deep into her lack of interest, analyzing it from all sides. And then it hits her all at once, with a startling clarity:
Maybe her daughter isn’t the only one who’s come to love Majima-san.
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Makoto
She’s the wife. And she fought for that, hard, because whatever noble intentions Goro had leaving her without a word, without even a glimpse at his face or the sound of his name, it wasn’t his decision to make. Nothing about her life is his decision to make.
It’s true that his world has taken a lot from her. Too much. Her vision she was able to reclaim, clawing it back to herself with a furor born of grief and hatred, but other things are gone forever, slipped through her fingers into a black abyss. Her brother’s face is fluid in her memory, only really retained through old photographs. (Kiryu-san still won’t tell her exactly how he died, exactly what they did to him. Sometimes it frustrates her, and sometimes she doesn’t want to know.)
It’s not exactly Goro's world, though, is it? It’s not like he brought her here. She got here all on her own, and it’s up to her whether or not to stay. She can more than admit that there’s appeal in the thought of leaving it all behind, going to school and building some kind of career, marrying her nice, bland, perfectly okay doctor and maybe one day coming to have enough vague, abstract affection for him that she could fool herself into thinking it’s love.
No. No, at least this way, she can be sure.
Goro has done things for her no other man would ever even contemplate, all without any motives or gain or two-faced black intentions to use her held deep in his chest. He’s always felt an echo of himself in her, the familiarity of what it’s like to go so deeply into darkness you can’t see when you come out of it.
He still has nightmares sometimes, just like she does. She holds him through them, whispering soothing nothings, and in the morning she pretends it never happened.
At least, that’s what she does when he’s actually home.
It’s not like she’s shocked, really. For a yakuza, it would be more unusual if he actually did always come back to her at the end of the day. She looks around at women like Dojima Yayoi, trapped in a state of constant devoted, patient forgiveness for that loathsome husband of hers, and wonders if she only endures by telling herself that she’s elevated above the rest, the wife and the mother, the favored one.
Makoto can’t have children. Oh, she tried again and again and again and again, but the most she ever got was a hot rush of blood down her legs before she ever even felt movement, when it even took at all. The best doctors that money can buy all tell her the same thing, that there’s too much damage, too much scar tissue, that nothing can be done.
It’s okay, Goro assures her when she finally gives up, it doesn’t mean anything. But of course it wouldn’t to him. He doesn’t need her to have children.
It’s not that she hates his children. She doesn’t even hate their mothers. He would keep them all far out of her sight if she wanted it, but she doesn’t have it in her to deprive them time with their father just because she isn’t their mother. She’s grown fond of his sons, and his daughters she can even say she loves, because when she still had some small hope she would conceive, she’d always secretly wished for a girl.
Whenever she gets the occasional glimpse of one of the women, she always studies her carefully. Her eyes are finally hers again, to do whatever she wants with, and so she takes in each of their features and movements and mannerisms and tucks them away, mulling them over again and again in her head.
Some of them are prettier than her. Some aren’t. She knows that’s not what really matters, in the end.
Goro doesn’t coddle her. He doesn’t treat her like she’s a child, or an idiot, or an invalid, or even so much that she’s irreparably damaged, never to be put back together. He knows what it is to endure, to come crawling out of hell twisted and charred but alive.
But at the same time, there’s always this . . . hesitation. When it comes to treating her like a woman, like a wife, he can never shake an anxious edge of concern, can never make himself not hold back. His touch never comes without worry, like she might shatter all over again if he does it in just the wrong way.
So no, she doesn’t hate any of those other women, the not-wives, the ones she can soothe herself by thinking of as the unfavorites.
She just envies them.