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It starts like this:
Majima is broke. Like, can’t even buy some of Sagawa’s shitty eight hundred yen street vendor food broke. Club Sunshine is closed down for that repainting Ai-chan is so gung ho on, and the operative word in the description of his other job is “slave”, meaning that however much money the Grand brings in, he doesn’t see any of it.
So, that leaves him with only a few options. Yeah, he could go beat the shit out of one of the roving Shakedown Shitlords, but after a few rotations throughout Sotenbori, he still hasn’t found one. Hell, even the thugs and the goons who usually are so eager to try to perpetrate muggings and rapes in broad daylight in bafflingly huge numbers have gone and crawled back into their holes.
So. He could go and fight for the entertainment of the rabid, mouth breathing spectators at the Bed of Styx, but honestly, that’s a pretty long boat ride, and then he has to walk through all those tunnels, and get signed up for a bout, and wait around until they go pull the other guy out of his kennel, and there’s always a chance it might end up being that clown, and just ugh. It’s been a long day and even he gets tired once in a while.
Really, it only leaves a dance battle with Areshi. It brings in chump change, but hell, it’s enough to go get some damn dinner at the Dragon and Tiger before he passes out on the floor for the night. It’s times like these he wishes he’d invested in like a bed or a futon or a hammock or something.
Except, of course, Areshi isn’t interested in putting on a show today. When he arrives in their little alley, the triplets are huddled over by a pile of trash, making strange, high pitched sounds. He assumes he’s finally witnessing them trying to communicate with each other, because the only one he’s ever heard talk before is Areshi himself.
At least, he assumes that’s Areshi proper. Really, he kind of thinks of them as collectively as Areshi, and individually as the red one, the yellow one, and the blue one.
In any case, the red one turns to him with a big smile that, on a face like Yuki or Chika’s, might be called sweet. In his case, though, it only looks kind of deranged.
“Maaajiiima-saaan!” he calls, motioning for him. Then the yellow one elbows him in the ribs, and he starts. “Oh yeah, don’t yell!”
With a sigh, Majima goes over to them and stoops down, and is met with a sight that he has to admit is undeniably kawaii. Even more than Makoto.
There’s a litter of five puppies, obviously brand new what with the fact that they kind of look like pudgy, awkward rats and can only make mewling noises as they nurse. Their mother, a dirty cream Shiba Inu, shoots him a kind of ashamed, desperate look that clearly begs him to please help me with these things.
“Kawaiiiii,” chirps the blue one.
“We just found her this morning,” says the red one. “We’ve been here all day making sure nothing bothers her. Ya know how many freaks there are around here.”
Yeah, he has some idea.
Really, though, he can’t help but smile goofily and reach out to pat the mother on the head, running a finger over the particularly velvety fur at the base of her ears.
And that, though he doesn’t consciously notice it, is when the triplets share a look. And it’s a fucking horrible, devious look that, had he seen it clearly, would’ve made him vacate immediately.
“You know, Majima-san,” the red one says, oh so casually, “it’s supposed to get even colder tonight . . .”
And somehow, that’s how he ends up saddled with six dogs.
.
He finally does find Mr. Shakedown as he’s making his way slowly back to his apartment, balancing a damp, dissolving cardboard box filled with six wiggling animals in his arms.
“You magnificently haired son of a bitch!” comes the yell, and Majima sighs, stopping and bracing the box against the rail of the bridge before quickly thinking better of it. Why is he not surprised this happened on this bridge? It’s like the center of the freaking universe.
“I really ain’t got time today, Oe . . . han,” he says, adding the honorific after a split second of consideration.
“I don’t care!” Oe fumes, stomping up with the veins in his shiny scalp bulging. “I don’t shake people down just when it’s convenient for them! Only when it is for me! And I can always find the time with you walking around with those long, magnificent locks blowing in the—oh kamisama, are those puppies?!”
Majima pulls the box protectively to his chest, startled as the man’s voice jumps up to a high squee on the word ‘puppies’. The animals in question whimper.
Oe barrels up, the ground trembling with each step, and Majima curls himself around the box protectively, trying to devise a strategy to take him down using just his legs that didn’t involve any elaborate flips.
But Oe doesn’t attack. He just clasps his hands together excitedly and grins, a look that’s really not a good one what with the big, bald dome and the general . . . Oe-ness.
“Kawaii!” he exclaims, his hands sliding up to cover his heart.
Majima blinks, very slowly. Thinks about his life and his choices, all the moments that have led up to being right here, in this situation.
“. . . Do you want one?” he finally asks.
Oe goes alarmingly red. “You’d give me one?! They can’t be more than a day old! What kind of monster are you to separate a poor, defenseless puppy from its mother so young?! It wouldn’t even live, you one eyed, pretty haired, soulless—thing!” He slams one of his feet down, and Majima worries the bridge is going to collapse and kill them all in the resulting tremor.
“Okay, okay, sorry for not being fucking up on my dog breeding knowledge, asshole! It ain’t exactly my area of expertise!”
“It’s common sense! How did you even get those puppies, anyway? Are you going to use them in a fighting ring?!”
“How the hell would I use Shiba Inus in a fighting ring?! I’d need somethin’ like a Tosa for that!”
“I knew nobody with such great hair could be trusted!”
.
Now reasonably reinfused with cash, and with the puppies and mother no worse for wear as Oe had considerately allowed him to set the box aside before they threw down, Majima has no fucking idea what to do.
Like, obviously he doesn’t have to feed the puppies themselves, right? Just the mom? But should he try to give her some kibble, as disgusting as those greasy little brown things are? Or is that not nutritionally balanced enough for nursing? Should he give her milk? What the hell is he doing?
Eventually he staggers into the Dragon and Tiger, a thousand times more tired than he was to start with, his only plan of action being getting himself some food and debating what to do while he chokes it down. Where is he even going to keep six dogs until they finally are, as Oe made such a goddamned point of, ready to leave the nest? And what if okaasan dog gets, like, an infection in her parts or something and needs urgent medical care? Or the puppies attack each other? Do littermates do that? How the hell is he going to handle any of this?
“Ke’ai!” Long Hua exclaims immediately upon peeking into the box, and though Majima doesn’t speak the first word of Chinese, her inflection, pitch, cadence, tone, facial expression, microexpressions, and body language all combine in a way that can only mean she just said kawaii.
“Yeah, yeah,” Majima mutters, sitting down at the corner. “They’re real ke’ai. ‘Specially when you don’t have to deal with ‘em.”
“She a stray?” she asks, her hand automatically going to that same velvety point at the base of the mother’s ears as Majima’s had.
“Not anymore, I guess.”
Long Hua bustles off to the back of the restaurant and comes back with a plate of full of something incredibly fucking disgusting. Honestly, it looks like someone vomited up milk with some white chunks of half digested food in it.
He winces as the mother dives into it immediately, but then again, she looks like she hasn’t eaten in days.
“Couldn’t you give her something better than that?”
Long Hua glares. “It cottage cheese. Very high nutrients. Good for nursing mother. You take them to vet yet? Need vitamins.”
“Vet?”
“Animal doctor!”
“Yeah, I know what a vet is. But so long as I feed her good stuff—” He cringes at the ‘cottage cheese’ again. “—I don’t think it’s necessary.”
“They need shots and worms.”
“The fuck? ‘Worms’?”
“They have worms. All puppies do. In—” She rubs her lower abdomen. “In belly. What idiot are you you not know this? Basic.”
Majima was all about that yakuza lifestyle, obviously, and that didn’t fucking allow time for pets, much less adorable cuddly puppies. Your enemies would probably end up feeding them to something bigger to spite you, like what happened to poor Mametaro the sparrow. Except that wasn’t even Sagawa’s enemies, just his bitch-ass psychopath parents.
“It hurt them if too much infested. And maybe blind your good eye if you get them. Call vet.”
She slams a phonebook down in front of him and he sighs, feeling the yen in his pocket bleeding away even as he looks at it.
“Fine,” he says, licking his thumb and flipping it open, tearing back and forth through the pages until he finally finds the listings for vets. “Eh, let’s see—Sakurazuka, no, wait, that’s in Tokyo—ah, here! This one’s only a few streets over!”
“Good. I’ll call. You eat.”
She takes the book and pushes his plate of food in front of him in exchange, and he smiles, breathing in the savory aroma, his mouth filling up expectantly with saliva. He’s got a pork skewer poised between his teeth when he happens to glance down and witness that, oh, he won’t exactly have to be cleaning up after the puppies for a while, because Okaasan seems to have that covered. By eating it.
“Sound like they can see you whenever you ready, Majima-san!” calls Long Hua from the back. “You can go when done eating!”
Majima slowly lowers his pork skewer. Pushes the plate away.
“I, uh, think I’ll just get goin’ now. I suddenly ain’t too hungry anymore . . .”
.
“KAWAII!!” comes a loud, high pitched chorus, the loudest and highest-pitched amongst it undoubtedly Youda-chan.
“Where did you get them, Majima-san?!” Mana demands.
“I would’ve guessed you hated animals,” says Yuki.
“I want to take them all home with me!” Ai announces.
“Yuta-kun would love a puppy,” Hibiki squees.
“They remind me of all the dogs we had back home!” gushes Saki.
“The mother is so beautiful!” Chika exclaims.
Youda-chan makes an incoherent choking noise, his hands on his cheeks.
Majima hasn’t even had time to inspect the new yellow interior of the club. His vision’s starting to get blurry, actually, because in the time he’s had these dogs, he hasn’t been able to sleep for even ten fucking minutes. If it’s not the constant, incessant care the puppies need to keep them alive, then it’s the mother absolutely shrieking her guts out anytime he walks away from the whelping box. His apartment is like five feet long—they’re literally always within whispering distance of each other, yet even an unbroken line of sight doesn’t stop her from busting out that Shiba Inu scream that makes it sound like she’s being hacked to death.
“Dextrose,” he moans, swaying on his feet.
“What?” Yuki asks. “Are you hungover, Majima-san? You don’t usually have big eyebags.”
“Dextrose,” he groans, slowly holding aloft a value-sized, green and white cylindrical tube with little silhouettes of puppies on it and a prescription sticker adhesed to the side. “Vet says they’re too thin. Okaasan didn’t eat enough during the pregnancy. Now they don’t have enough fat stores to keep everything runnin’. Gotta give ‘em this shit. Every two hours.” Even the torturers at the yakuza hell pit had let him sleep for longer than that when they got bored with him.
“Awwww,” they chorus, but no, nooo, there’s nothing ‘awww’ about it at all.
Majima crooks his finger at Yuki, who glances nervously around before scuttling over to him. He promptly dumps the only sesame-coated puppy, a male, into her hands and wedges the dextrose tube in between her side and the crook of her arm.
“They get it again in ninety minutes.” He thrusts a red female into Mana’s arms, a tricolor male at Saki, a cream male to Ai. Hibiki gets the cream female and Chika gets the mother, who stares up at her with big tearful eyes.
“What?!” Yuki yipes. “Their eyes aren’t even open yet! What are we supposed to—”
“Dextrose,” he says again. He thinks this must be what madness feels like. “Then give ‘em back to mom. Oh, and be careful, they’ve got like five kinds of worms and the vet says that dewormer shit won’t clear it up for weeks.”
“WHAT?!” Yuki shrieks.
Majima barely hears her. All he sees is the floor standing between him and the couch in the dressing room.
He doesn’t quite make it. Instead, he collapses pushed up against the elevated platform where the girls change clothes and has a dream scored to the sweet dulcet tune of 24 Hour Cinderella, wherein he’s Osaka’s Number One Idol, Goromi, who sings in a white bodysuit with rollerskating backup dancers by day and at night transforms into Hannya Man, defender of innocent puppies (and blind girls).
“I love you,” he mutters, nuzzling the carpet.
“How sweet, Majima-san!” says Youda.
“You love me.”
“Hmm, it’s kind of funny to put it that way, but yeah, I guess I do. You’ve done so much for me, Majima-san! But now’s not the time. Look at this uptick in profits!”
Majima blinks blearily and raises his head, and Youda looks horrified until he has the presence of mind to slide his eyepatch back into place over his socket.
“Isn’t it uncomfortable down there?” Youda asks, turning to stare pointedly at the floor.
“Hn?” It’s way more comfortable than home. Yeah, he might not have a blanket here, but the floor has carpet. “What’d you mean, uptick in profits?”
Youda waves a summary of the night’s profits in his face and Majima blinks, because first of all, since when was it morning? Also, if he slept through the night, fuck his life, because that means he missed work at the Grand. And while the hours were flexible enough to secretly run the top cabaret club in Sotenbori on the side, going entirely AWOL probably meant Sagawa was even now dreaming up how much more money he could tack onto what he had to make.
“There’s been a ten percent increase overall!”
Majima’s eyelid droops. The sweet call of the indoor-outdoor carpeted floor beckons him. “Why d’ya think that is?”
“Isn’t it obvious?!”
Nothing’s obvious when you’re woken up in the middle of REM.
“Puppies!”
“What?” he murmurs.
“Since the girls have to give them the dextrose every two hours, they had to take their puppies with them when they were with customers.”
Oh. He, uh, hadn’t intended that. All he’d wanted was a short little nap before the club opened and he had to go back on twenty four hour babysitting duty.
“And of course all the customers found them so kawaii! And so the girls got to talking about what horrible condition they and their mother were in from living on the street, and how it’s only because of your intervention that they’re okay, Majima-san! And the customers were so moved, they spent more to fund your street dog rescue!”
That makes Majima’s eye snap open. “My WHAT?!”
Youda-chan clasps his hands together and smiles dreamily. “It’s so considerate of you to care about those poor animals when nobody else does. The government won’t even do anything for them! And it’s really brought out the best in everybody else, too! We’ve got a huge waiting list of people who want a puppy when they’re ready to go! Though I think we’re going to have to disappoint them—I’m pretty sure the girls aren’t going to give them up.”
Majima blinks slowly. Somewhere in the depths of his just-woken-up and still somewhat sleep deprived mind, cogs are whirring to life and beginning to turn. They don’t formulate his most flawless plan, but damn if it doesn’t have some potential.
“Who says we have to disappoint them, Youda-chan?”
.
“Um, how many is this, Protector-san?” asks Makoto, raising her Styrofoam container of takoyaki high enough to avoid a rooting snout.
“I’m not even keepin’ count anymore!”
“And they’re all Shiba Inus?”
“Yeah. I mean, you’d think there might at least be a Japanese Chin mix or some shit around too. This one might be part Akita, though. She’s a nasty shit.”
The dog in question does some kind of full body slam down into the tub, sending a wave of filthy water over his head. He splutters.
For the past week, he’s had a network of agents including Erran-kun, Areshi, Long Hua’s weapons traffickers, and (after he sadly pointed out all the poor, dirty Shibas scrounging for food in the park) Komeki out scouring Sotenbori, catching any stray dogs they could find. He now has a wide selection of any type of Shiba Inu a discerning potential pet parent (as Hibiki insisted on calling them) could want.
They’re all coming along nicely. Huge heapings of cottage cheese, lean protein, and dog kibble have made it so that none of them are emaciated anymore, and the shampoo and conditioner the girls recommended to him have really brought out the volume in their coats. A variety of worms, mites, protozoans, mange, bacteria, fungus, fleas, ticks, and infections are being battled with heavy doses of painfully expensive medication.
Still, this promises to be a good investment. He’s never hosted an event like this before, but he’s had all the hostesses plugging it to the customers for a week now, and has been carefully implementing a citywide advertizing campaign.
So maybe he went a little over the top in some ways, like climbing to the top of the tallest building in Sotenbori and flinging flyers off of it, or fanning himself with flyers instead of Isobe’s fan when doing his thing at the disco, or going to all the strip clubs and working his pole routine around strategic acrobatics wherein flyers would explode from his clothing and rain down onto the audience. But he had no guarantee that he’d reach a wide enough range of people if he just relied on hanging posters in all of Sunshine’s partner businesses and writing jingles for the local karaoke machines about finding your perfect cuddly kawaii friend. He’d also had all the girls put out new videos wherein, instead of wearing bikinis, they just held up strategically placed signs that read things like, “ADOPT AND SAVE A LIFE”, “SPAYING AND NEUTERING IS SEXY”, and “PET OVERPOPULATION IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM.”
It seemed to be working. Reservations had far outnumbered the space available at Sunshine, so with some reluctance, Majima had moved the venue over to the Grand. There were way more fucking assholes over there, and it didn’t give his business the visibility he wanted, but so long as he had a huge sign proclaiming that Sunshine was a sponsor and brought over Sunshine’s girls for the night, he could deal.
“Tell Lee-san to change the wrappings on red-kun’s paw when he comes in tonight.”
“His name is Tetsu-kun now, Protector-san!”
Majima looks at the dog in question, a dainty, foxlike male with a sharp nose and a coat of deep, burnished red. He’d had a piece of glass embedded in his paw when they’d found him, but he was healing up nicely.
“Why ‘Tetsu’?”
Makoto shrugs. “It’s kawaii! Just like him!”
Ah. Naturally. He wonders why he even asked.
“But how do you know he’s—?”
Makoto turns her head slowly to face him, her lips quivering.
“I mean, of course he is! He’s totally the most kawaii of all them. If the dogs had a Five Star gang based on cuteness, he would be Tsukiyama. No, Kotomi. You know, why don’t you just keep him?”
.
On the Grand’s stage, behind the band, is a truly ginormous advertisement for Club Sunshine. The centerpiece is a photograph lined with Yuki, Ai, and Saki on one side, Hibiki, Chika, and Mana on the other, and between them, Majima in full tuxedo, grinning madly as he pops open a bottle of champagne, Youda cheering behind him with full fist pump action.
“I shouldn’t have worn that glittery two piece,” says Hibiki, frowning as she stares up at the 15x magnified image of herself, light reflecting blindingly off of the pink sparkly scales of her halter top-miniskirt combo set. It looms over Majima where he stands on the stage finishing the final chorus of 24 Hour Cinderella, doing one last twirl up on and around the shoulders of his backup dancers.
A few people in the front rows heave yen bills at him, and a drunk businessman slurs, “Take it off!”
“Ahem,” Majima says once the final strings of the music have died down. “Thank you all for coming!”
There are happy shrieks.
“KAWAII DESU!” someone screams. It sounds like a man.
“Yes,” says Majima solemnly. “Very kawaii. Now, during our adoption event, the girls will be coming around to your tables with the dogs, where you can interact with them, learn about them, and see if you hit it off. If you think you’ve found the perfect new addition to your family, please go to the back of the club to see Dolly-chan and Sakurako-chan, who have a small questionnaire for you to fill out.” He says it like an afterthought, but it’s actually pretty extensive. He knows what kind of sick fuckwads there are in the world, and he’s not letting some poor defenseless dog go home with one of them.
“And now, before you get started, allow me to introduce the MC of our Most Eligible Bachelors of Sotenbori Charity Auction—Dolce Kamiya-san! Remember, all proceeds go to help the dogs, and each lucky winner gets to spend a whole night in the company of the man of their choosing! Brought to you by our sponsor, Club Sunshine!”
Dolce-san mounts the stage to the sound of applause, and Majima is quick to scurry over to him. He catches him from the side and has already vigorously shaken his hand and fled before the man even realizes what’s happened.
As Dolce-san makes his introductions and trots out the first bachelor—“A man whose reputation proceeds him, he’d do this for free if we let him, it’s the incomparable Habu-kun!”—Majima paces up and down the aisles between the booths, casting an eye over the proceedings. It was definitely the right idea to open up the club to women and children for the night, and Ai and Hibiki’s menu of nonalcoholic drinks with canine-themed names seems to be going over well.
Over at the application table, Doll Girl is sitting at her mother’s feet, cradling a tricolor puppy in one arm and her Bunchan in the other. She’s told him she’s now firmly determined to become a vet and reform Japan’s animal control system, and Majima’s already started putting the money away for her college fund.
Further in, that weird white haired middle schooler with the bontan fetish has his freakishly muscular arms wrapped around a red adult, cradling it lovingly to his chest as he whispers sweet nothings to it. In the booth adjacent to him is Erran-kun, who’s glancing mournfully across the club at Erranda-chan where she sits showing Kokoa-chan and her new boyfriend a sesame female and making eyes at Kokoa’s dad. Luckily, Ai and the cream ball of fluff in her hands seem to be increasingly taking his mind off it.
Sleazy Moneybags-san is sitting with a pudgy blond man in a pinstriped lime green suit so garish Majima thinks it might blind his remaining eye, both of them throwing a continuous stream of cash confetti into the air to liven the place up. There’s an old crone in a robe who’s set up a crystal ball on a table and is apparently telling the dogs’ futures. Oe is holding an armful of puppies and pounding his feet on the floor in delight, causing a mild tremor to run through the club. Youda-chan sits with his daughter who came in from Tokyo as soon as the word ‘puppy’ was breathed, and at the next table are two identical men wearing identical sunglasses, who hold up the snarling, possibly half-Akita female Majima is convinced has it in for him and nod approvingly.
“This canine will bring great honor to the Clan, Father,” says one.
“Indeed,” says the other.
“Hey, BOIIII!” shouts an old, decrepit gaijin where he sits with a shabbily dressed, middle aged Japanese man and a young woman in a jacket who carries an air about her he can only describe as cute, yet fierce. The boy in question wags his tail and pees a little in pure happiness.
There’s a group of three yanki-looking assholes collected at a table in the back with a few paparazzi taking pictures of them. Majima is shocked to see that one of them actually has a dog that isn’t a Shiba Inu—it’s a fluffy little Japanese Spitz, and he’s introducing it to the other dogs to see if any of them will get along with ‘Chibi-chan’.
“You know what really gets our motors rumbling?” says the one with a huge, shiny pompadour. “Animal welfare! Real yankis are man enough to be kind to animals!” He smiles for the barrage of photographs.
When Majima notices a booth with two girls sitting on either side, both looking uncomfortable and staring down between them, he goes over to investigate. Somehow, he’s not surprised to find Nishitani lying down with his legs up on the seat, a small herd of puppies and dogs crawling all over his body.
“You’re banned from this club,” Majima says, crossing his arms.
“Oh, Manager-sama,” he whines, raising his arms to cuddle a few dogs to his chest. His eyes are closed. “This is the most relaxed I’ve been in forever. Even Billiken is relaxed.”
Majima’s eye slides over to the next booth, where Billiken is smiling as a puppy kisses his face. It’s terrifying.
“Can’t you please have mercy on poor me?”
Majima bares his teeth. “If you grope one more hostess . . .”
“The only things I want to grope are these delicious, delicious puppies . . .”
“Did ya set out to be this disgusting, Nishitani, or did it just happen all on its own?”
Nishitani’s head drops off to the side, his breathing deep and even. “Bitch, you know you love it.”
Majima would’ve facepalmed—no, double facepalmed—but that was when Sagawa decided to walk in the club. It’s the first time he’s ever seen the man double take, much less his jaw fall open in stunned, uncomprehending horror.
Though he could sit down and take that expression in all day long, he has a plan for this very moment. Launching himself up onto Nishitani’s table, he leaps over his booth and uses a new French technique he can’t pronounce to make a direct, undisrupted line over to him, his biggest, most shiteating grin on his face.
“Sagawa-han!”
“What the fuck did you do to my club, you idiot?!” Sagawa demands. Majima knows that on those rare occasions when he’s past the point of any and all smugness, gloating, taunting, and nicknames, he’s apoplectic.
“It’s a charitable fundraiser!”
“Why the fuck would we need one of those?! And why are there mutts all over the club?!”
“It’s an animal welfare fundraiser! It’s important that the customers see that our business cares about the community!”
“Who gives a shit if we care about the community?! We’re in a red light district! Why dogs?! And what the fuck is Club Sunshine?! I’m going to get on the phone with Shimano right—”
Majima bows humbly and extends his hands, holding out a small gift right beneath Sagawa’s face. He’s gambled a lot on this, not to mention spent countless hours in between administering baths, medication, and dextrose shoveling small, crushed up bugs down its gullet, so it better work.
Sagawa blinks, his tirade dying in a strangled sound deep in his throat. The little chick cheeps.
“It’s a . . .” he trails off dumbly.
“A sparrow! I found it when we were out rounding the dogs up off the street. We’re not a dogs-only organization, you know. That’d just be fuckin’ unfair! It had a little broken wing, and I immediately thought of you, Sagawa-han!”
Sagawa’s eyes suddenly seem a few sizes bigger, and all shimmery. “Mametaro,” he whispers, his voice quivering.
“Yeah! It can be Mametaro Junior!”
Sagawa snaps instantly into a glare, though the effect is dimmed by the filmy layer of tears. He snatches the chick from Majima’s hands and cradles it covetously to his chest. “There can be no replacement for Mametaro!” he snarls, even as he strokes the down on the chick’s head with a careful finger. “No. You’ll be . . . Jamba-chan. Yes, that’s your name! And I’m never letting any mean old cats anywhere near you, no I’m not! I’ll kill them all!”
However long he lives, Majima knows he’ll never get the sound of Sagawa baby talking out of his head. It’s seared there.
A number of black suited, sunglassed men suddenly come barging into the club, and as Majima perks up in alarm, wondering how he’s going to get all the civilians and dogs to safety if someone’s got it in their crawl to start a gang war, Sagawa wanders off, cooing. But the men just look around briefly before thrusting their backs to the wall and making hand gestures, which is weird because Majima isn’t aware of the yakuza having any gang signs.
Then in comes a man—no, a legend—not so much walking, but gliding, his footwork smoother than the smoothest criminal Majima knows. Which is maybe a bad comparison, because most of the criminals Majima knows are idiots.
“IT’S MIRACLE JOHNSON!!” comes a cry, and all sound in the club lulls.
Miracle goes ramrod straight and strikes a pose, a hand on his hat. “Samurai!” he says.
There are screams. A few people faint.
A middle aged gaijin with a vacant, soul-penetrating smile takes Majima aside and, with significance, introduces himself as Spining. He frowns when Majima just stares blankly.
“Miracle couldn’t be stopped when he found out about your event today. He just loves animals, and he’s a huge supporter of charity. He really admires the initiative you’ve taken here, and he has his heart set on performing. Would that be alright?”
As though Majima would ever pass up the opportunity of having the Popstar Prince use his club as a venue. They could permanently hike up the entry fee after this.
Soon, Ms. Isobe is whirling around the stage in a blur of blinding gold vinyl and artificial pink feathers to the beat of I’m Gonna Make Her Mine, performed live with the Grand’s in-house band interjecting here and there for a unique flair. Majima clasps his hands together and smiles, and for the first time in a long time, it doesn’t feel completely fake on his face.
At least until he hears the ominous, irritating call of a creature far more trying than any number of dogs could ever be.
A bratty, self-entitled child.
“You said we couldn’t go to the strip club, so we’re coming here!” it screeches. The two grown men accompanying it have identical thousand yard stares, as though they’ve looked into the blackest depths of what humanity has to offer and now have to live with the knowledge.
“Do your parents even know where you are, Master Daigo?” asks one of them. Judging by his atrocious fashion choices—a dark magenta suit and a busy black and yellow shirt, is he fucking serious?—he’s a yakuza.
“What does it even matter?” Daigo demands.
Fashion Disaster leans down to Daigo’s level, smiling a sweet, strained smile. “If your Daddy thinks I kidnapped you, I’ll end up in several pieces at the bottom of Tokyo Bay. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”
The kid stares at him. “They’ve been trying to do that to Kiryu-kun for a week now, and he’s okay.”
His smile not faltering, Fashion Disaster rests his hand on Daigo’s head and slowly, slowly clenches it into a fist. And just lets it there, unspeaking.
“Why are we here, Master Daigo?” asks the other man. He’s quite large, with a face sure to grace numerous forthcoming mug shots.
Daigo bats Fashion Disaster’s fist away and turns to him. “Because. Puppies.”
The man’s eyes widen as Yuki comes to greet them with two littermates under each arm, both of them staring each other down unblinkingly and making cute screaming noises as they try to assert their dominance over each other.
He takes a deep breath.
“. . . That’s rad!”
.
It ends like this:
Basically everyone Majima knows now has a dog. Specifically, a Shiba Inu. Needless to say, the adoption event was very successful, and he thinks he can safely say they all won. The dogs and puppies got homes, Sotenbori no longer has the sad sight of dirty, starving strays to upset the tourists, and both Club Sunshine and the Grand have jumped substantially in profits. Even Miracle Johnson and the Yokomichi Silvers got great PR out of it, and Ms. Isobe now has a gig as a backup dancer.
There is one dog that, at the end of the day, didn’t get adopted. She’s an old red with a graying muzzle and stiff joints, getting a bit stocky and losing some of the dignified balance inherent in the breed. She’s missing teeth and part of an ear and her eyes are riddled with cataracts. Yet, out of all of them, she was the one that really gave them a problem to catch. She’d always been a step ahead, too smart for traps and treats, until all of Majima’s boys had given up in disgust, figuring that she was going to die soon anyway and so it didn’t matter much.
Majima, though, had figured that he had one thing she was starting to lack—mobility. He’d finally managed route her into just the right position and launch himself at her, snatching her up and to his chest before landing on his back. Shoulder blades really weren’t meant for that kind of shock absorption.
Now here she is, all cleaned up and flea-free and pretty, but nobody took her. It should be sad, but actually, he’s surprised to find that he’s kind of happy about it.
He picks her up and lets himself fall back into a booth, his hands sinking into her fur. She nuzzles against his chest, sighing contentedly.
“Your name’ll be . . .” He hmms, already half asleep. “Taigami. Yeah, that’s good. Tai-chan. You . . .”
He doesn’t really know what he was going to say. He’s so close to drifting off, when—
“Daddy!” cries Doll Girl.
Majima jerks awake. Taigami groans.
There’s the rapid clatter of feet on the floor and Doll Girl swings into view, smiling brightly. “Look at what I found, Daddy!”
She holds aloft a small, mewling kitten. It’s extremely kawaii.
Majima lets his head fall back on the booth and looks to the ceiling, at whatever invisible entity might be swirling around up there.
“Why me?”