Chapter Text
In general, Kiryu thought of himself as a man that wasn't easily fazed.
He had after all, at the tender age of twenty two, survived one expulsion from the gokudo, escaped a murder charge by the skin of his teeth, and lived through about sixty attempts on his life on a daily basis, all of them perpetrated by his rival/lover/rabid pet.
There were few things however, that were more surprising than finding your lover handling a baby in your apartment at 4 a.m or thereabouts, yourself half-pumped with adrenaline (pocket circuit, very exciting) and Triple Spicy Ramen (less so).
"Majima-san," He announced, speaking to his hallucination.
And what a vision: sweaty Majima in his bedroom - not that there were any other rooms - but not because they were about to throw down, or exert themselves in strange and fascinating positions, but because there was a wailing infant in his arms. Majima's snake-skin jacket had been crushed and transformed into a swaddling cloth, and the apartment, never freshly scented, smelled of stale piss and shit.
Judging from the sheen on Majima's forehead, perhaps the smell wasn't coming from the baby.
"Where the fuck were you, Kiryu-chan? I've been calling you all day!"
"No, you haven't." Kiryu insisted. There were too many bizarre things to call out, but he felt it was important that they began at the beginning - which was that he, Kiryu, had not received any phone calls all day long from him, Majima, despite checking his phone every 20 minutes or thereabouts for those calls. Majima could be dead, or in a coma with pollen allergies. What the hell would Kiryu know?
Without asking he strode across the room and picked up Majima's phone, scrolled down the list of calls, and found that Majima had made sixteen calls to 'Kiryuna Onsen Gunma (good oden)'.
"Never mind that, look at this!" Majima thrust the babe under his nose. It smelt absolutely offensive, and Kiryu wrinkled his nose. It looked like a boy - or maybe an ugly girl? - a face like pumpkin squash that only its mother could love. It, or he, was smiling at Kiryu with the most gleeful expression he'd ever seen on a baby, laughing whenever Majima shook the bundle in his face.
"Yeah, I'm looking at it,"
Kiryu calmly took off his jacket, and folded it into a corner. His room was sparse: one futon (stained), one small table (now covered with various baby-food products, obviously from Poppo), and seven beer cans and a gas-operated cooker for BBQs. Those beer cans used to be on the table too, but Majima had swept them off without so much as an excuse-me. "Why don't you put that down, Majima-no-niisan, so it won't get hurt?"
"Ehh? Won't get hurt?"
He cracked his knuckles. "Yeah, when I break your neck for cheating on me."
"Woah, hey now wait a second--"
No seconds were waited. In one swift action he pried the baby from Majima's surprised hands, placed it on the futon, and landed a kick that sent Majima damned near flying across the room - across the wall, in fact, as Majima tore a Yakuza-sized hole through his neighbour's paper-thin wall and landed in the empty, astounded room.
"No." Striding across the room, he seized Majima's head and slammed it head-first into the neighbour's kitchen top. And why the hell not? In for a hole, in for a pound. The neighbour will be receiving a sizable damned reimbursement from Nii-san anyway and the more God-blessed if it burned a hole right through the damned man's pockets.
"No. One. Else," He enunciated, punctuating his words with counter-face action. "That's what you said." Somewhere the baby was squealing in glee. Majima's nose split like a watermelon.
"Ain't m--"
"No one else, you promised." Down went the damned head, and a bright red streak on the countertop.
"Ain't--" Red froth from Majima's nose - but that was okay. He's young. He'll heal, from that and also this, and this, and a double helping of this, plus the skull Kiryu was about to crack six ways into Sunday. A bottle scrambled against the kitchen counter, chased by leather gloved hands, and came down with a crash on Kiryu's head.
"Ain't mine what-the-fuck Kiryu-chan!"
Kiryu just growled, charged, and slammed Majima into the next wall - and the next apartment. They ended up on the ground, wrestling for dear life and breath and space to swing an arm.
"For fuck's fake, I shaid it ain't mine!" Majima landed a punch that sent Kiryu sprawling, then charged off back into Kiryu's apartment with Kiryu hot on his heels. He raided something on the ground, a bamboo basket from the looks, a picnic affair and seizing something, shook it at Kiryu's face.
Look, he said. Pointing right at the smeary hiragana.
THIS IS NOT YOURS BUT KEEP IT SAFE.
Kiryu had to blink hard to shift his focus from maiming and murdering.
Majima pushed the note against him, one hand still holding his bleeding nose. He'd just had it broken not two weeks ago, dammit, and it did not need breaking again.
"Kid ain't mine - ow fuck, what the fuck Kiryu, why, just why you gotta go for the nose again - and much as I like to fight ya over shit, this ain't one of them fool tricks."
"So you're expecting me to believe that this kid..."
"Showed up like damned Momotaro on my office doorstep addressed to me, but not really mine? Damned fucking straight - and I'll be breaking your neck if ya wisecrack me about it."
"You'd better," Kiryu growled, holding onto the increasingly incredulous and bloody note. "Start at the beginning."
—
—
—
So the beginning was this, short and simple, all Goro-like.
It's Sunday and the boys are off and it was just him and a weekend of zombie-flicks alone in Majima-central.
The plan was when he's done at 6 p.m he'd be going out for a prowl to harass Kiryu-chan for a bit, but until then it was gonna be a damned good movie marathon. He'd had on his favorite zombie flick of late (Zetsubou Z-day Kiwami Deluxe) a CD worn down by repeated viewings the way Kiryu wore down his Passionate Manly Bathhouse CDs.
"Cut the shit," Kiryu said. "I don't see why you gotta drag my movies into your narrative."
Well, okay, but just for flavor of what was really going on in Majima Central. So it was getting to the good part. Murder scene #5 where Zetsubou Z would cut down the demonic swathe with a chainsaw rigged to a flamethrower rigged to a gasoline tank, and when the victims were screaming the loudest he heard suddenly another scream, much more visceral and much less screen, coming strictly from outside the deadbeat office they rented for tax purposes.
"What the hell?" He said, and paused the video. The scream went on, squalling loud then low like a bitch what's got its tits torn off --
Why, Kiryu asked, did he know what a bitch sounded like with its tits torn off. Please, please don't tell me--
Ya, but hush, who cares? These are the D E T A I L S, not so important just to flavor it, like furikake on your rice balls, ya see? So there was screaming, yelling etc., and Majima grabbed his baseball bat first and foremost, because ya never know when you need to beat up someone, pronto express. You can bat on it (get it, bat? No? Stop frowning, Kiryu-chan. Ya gon' git saggy), well you can bat on it that most visitors to Majima-Corp were not, so to speak, friendly garden Yakuza.
He tore apart the door damned near off its hinge, and what does he see? No damn nothing air. He looked left and right like a good boy at a traffic intersection and still nothing. Then a wail from his feet freaked him out something fresh, thinking his doormat was being tortured to death - and there was Momotaro, all red and fresh, like a tomato, yelling at the top of his lungs.
"In the basket?"
Ya, basket.
So what does Majima do? Well, never fear, he was an expert at this. He did Goro-like and prodded the baby with the bat a bit, just to see if it would explode, if it was just a baby-shaped bomb someone decided to plant on his doorstep. But no, the only thing the baby exploded with were farts, and toxic farts are these yessir, and in time Majima became convinced that it was not a baby-shaped terrorist object, but a baby live-and-healthy, and brought him inside.
"Took me a while to calm him down, I can tell ya that," He said. "Kid took his own sweet time, and I had to clean damned ass before he'd even let me lift him up without shaking his fist at me. He yanked my hair clean off - two strands!"
"Okay, Nii-san - clearly a tragedy. That's when you found the note?"
"Ya, sure, when I was about done hyperventilating to death while I did more math than I never did in my life. I was thinkin' hard on all the ladies I ever tapped - wondering, what the hell? - but they were all more than two years ago, y'know? And I know they said babies ain't made in a day but surely they don't take two years? That's when I found the note, and some kinda accounting paper under the kid's ass--"
"Wait, what accounting papers?"
These here, sure. Goro held up the crumpled, shat-ridden piece of paper.
"That's.… Nii-san, that's a birth certificate."
"Well, I'll be damned, it is!? I didn't check - there were too many damned words."
Kiryu with a sigh took the document from Majima, and wiped off as best he could brown thumbprints both big and small. Whoever this child belonged to, it had the same kind of hygiene as the grown child who'd unwillingly adopted him. He scanned the document quickish-like, and tapped a column.
He cleared his throat. "I think this is about to blow your mind, Majima-nii-san."
"Ehhh?"
"Says here this child's name is GOMO MAZIMA." He let that sank in. "Uhh, did you hear me?"
Majima look stunned, earth-shattered and mind-juiced. He snatched the paper right back from Kiryu, damned near ripping it in half and — what the hell? The name was handwritten, squeezed into a tiny space between the edge of the column and a black bar. The kid's real name had been redacted by a careless marker.
"What the fuck? This some kinda sick joke?"
"Maybe. It certainly isn't official. Though that birthday..." The very top of the paper listed the child's birthday as 14, May, 1964, which was pretty long ago for someone who's still a baby in 1990. "Isn't that your birthday?"
"Aw Kiryu-chan, it's sweet you remembered--"
"Hard to forget a birthday bash that involved actual bashing, is all I'm saying."
"Details, Kiryu-chan! They'll be the death of you! You'll be eighty and wondering, where the hell did my life go? You know what you won't think of? Turnip stew with six strands of Shimeji in Autumn '86. Unlike this kid here, which I sure as hell will be thinking about when I'm fuckin' eighty. What the fuck? And who the fuck?"
"There's only one way to find out," Kiryu patted the child, who upon cessation of violence in its vicinity, had let out a sulky gurgle. Yes, the child had a glee in his eye that looked very, very familiar indeed. "Why don't you look up your birth certificate? It's got an ID, doesn't it? The ID on this one hasn't been tampered with, so if it turns out it matches, then either someone stole a copy of your birth certificate or… This child is you."
Majima looked extremely uncomfortable at the suggestion that he produced anything, almost half as uncomfortable as he looked at the suggestion that the child might be himself.
"That'd be nice and all but thing is Kiryu-chan..."
"No. Is this when you tell me you're secretly a Chinese immigrant too?"
"Nah, nothin' like that. It's worse. All my shit is back home with my old man."
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