Chapter Text
The rumours are already stale by the time Rei enters the Police Academy. Have become little more than another of the Seven Mysteries common to high schools, half ghost story, half historical retelling.
There’s a body in the basement of the Tokyo Metro.
Reports differ about the reason, and even the fact of it. Some claim it’s not a corpse but a coma patient, kept in one of the most secure locations in Tokyo for reasons of national security. Others say it’s the embalmed remains of the PSB’s best agent, kept by the Bureau in a kind of shrine to better days.
Most just don’t believe it at all.
Rei is firmly in the latter camp. Even as an Academy student he considers the rumours clearly apocryphal, the kind of thing upperclassmen invent to strike fear or awe into the hearts of their juniors. He chides Hiromitsu for believing it, and is in turn chivvied by Wataru for his lack of imagination.
Rei considers believing that the Tokyo Metro is keeping some kind of half-alive zombie in its basement to be the sign of softening on the brain, not imagination. By the time he graduates top of his class and is taken directly into the PSB as a junior agent, he’s mostly forgotten the rumours.
***
Rei is the only one in his class to be promoted directly into the PSB. Working as the Bureau’s most junior agent is a grind, but one he’s proud of. Most of his classmates are serving on the street in uniform; he’s working on the secure floors of the Metro in a well-cut suit.
It is lonely, though. His senpai in the Bureau have been working together for years, have established comradery and companionship. Rei is an outsider, and a young one. He’s judged for his youth, his blond hair, and his exceptional skills, all of which threaten his coworkers’ egos. He’s rarely invited out to after-work drinks, and never to eat alongside his senpai.
Instead of chatting or bonding, Rei takes to exploring the building in his free time. Apart from the hundreds of cubicles and offices, there are meeting rooms tucked away on all floors, and break rooms dotted here and there. He finds the gym and the auditorium, the armory and the locker room, as well as a myriad of janitorial closets and the hidden service elevators. And, in the basement alongside the heavy-duty printers and storage space, he finds a locked door.
Rei’s PSB pass gets him anywhere in the building except key-locked offices. He swipes it over the reader beside the door, and after a moment it lights up green. Smiling, he pulls the door open and steps inside, flicking the light on.
The room smells of must and cardboard. It’s a large space, starkly lit by the overhead fluorescents. There are stacks of boxes around the outside walls and some disused chairs and desks in the centre of the room, some sheeted.
Nothing that would require a lock. Rei prowls around, poking into boxes and peeping under dust sheets. He finds old files long since digitized and cracked or stained furniture. And, under one sheet, a long rectangular box, wooden sided. It’s too long to be a desk, and without a hollow beneath it. Rei frowns and pulls aside the dust sheet.
He didn’t have the rumours in mind when he came down here; hadn’t given them any thought for more than a year.
Here, in the basement of Tokyo Met, he finds a glass-covered coffin holding a body.
“Holy shit.”
The sheet falls on the floor with a soft sound as Rei stares at the figure he’s uncovered. It’s a man in his late twenties or early thirties with long black hair and sharp features, his clothes all black. His skin is pale but not with the waxen sheen of an embalmed corpse. There’s some pink in the cheeks and a soft texture to his face that is too subtle to be a corpse’s uniform pallor. But there’s no condensation on the glass, no sign of his breathing, and no life-support equipment.
Just a padded coffin, and within it – what? A corpse? A coma patient? Neither seem to fit.
Rei reaches out and taps the glass, half-expecting the slanted eyes to snap open. But there’s no movement from inside, no sign of life.
The man – alive or dead, at least Rei can call him that – is surprisingly good-looking. His face is calm but not peaceful; there’s a tension to his expression that has remained even in his current state. He’s dangerous, Rei thinks. Or was, at least.
The glass cover has hinges in it, a long, thin brass handle running along one side. It could be lifted; there’s no sign of a lock. But Rei knows he’s already seen something he shouldn’t have, something he has no frame of reference for. Something that’s been locked away for a reason. He’s not about to dig himself further into the shit.
He pulls the sheet up off the ground and carefully replaces it over the coffin. Then he backs out of the room, switches off the light, and closes the door.
***
Rei wishes he had someone to talk to about his discovery. He meets Hiromitsu regularly for drinks after work, and still sees the others from his circle at the Police Academy regularly. But the fact of the locked door requiring a PSB pass keeps him silent. It’s not his secret to share, not even if it is a live rumour.
Instead, he does some digging. His specialty has always been intel; he uses his silver tongue now to initiate conversations with his senpai that slowly circle the rumours about the Met, among them the body in the basement.
“Just Academy drivel,” dismisses one.
“When I was a student I heard that there were rats in the ceiling, and that turned out to be true. Doesn’t mean I believe there’s a corpse downstairs, though,” says another.
A third comments: “What I wonder is why people believe these things. Is it because they want them to be true? Or because they believe they couldn’t possibly be?”
The most interesting statement comes from Fujita Haruka, one of the oldest active agents at the ripe age of 45. “The PSB has plenty of secrets, Furuya-kun. No one knows them all.” She smiles sharply and slips away, leaving Rei behind to consider her words.
All in all, all his inquiries tell Rei is that either no one believes the rumours, or they’re all keeping a secret from him. He just wishes he knew which it was.
***
Work goes on, Rei assigned to gathering intelligence on a variety of cases both national and international, at which he excels. His English is fluent enough that he can work with overseas agencies, which gives him even more stature in the Bureau – and gains him some more detractors. He’s soaring like a rocket, and his success is scorching the goodwill of older agents who haven’t succeeded in making a name for themselves.
He’s still a loner, still on the outside of the circle. There’s no one to listen to him, no one for him to talk to.
Alone in a building of people trying to ignore him, he finds himself visiting the one person who can’t give him the cold shoulder. Finds himself visiting the basement – sporadically at first, then regularly.
There’s never anyone else down here, Rei learns quickly. He sneaks in through the locked door and switches the lights on, then crosses immediately to the coffin and pulls off the dust cover. The mysterious sleeper – he’s come to think of him as sleeping; it’s pleasanter than the alternatives – is there, silent as always. Pale skin, silken hair, dark lashes. Rei sits on the edge of a nearby desk and talks at him. Here he’s not bound by his oath of confidentiality, or by trying to disguise his pride or self-pity.
“Just back from collecting intel on one of the local Ikkebukuro gangs. They’ve been behind a rash of knife crime in the city, and we needed to know what caused the sudden violence. Predictably, it was a turf war.” He kicks his heels on the desk, hands resting between his knees. “The Metro’s arranging for a few arrests to cool down the hot-heads. Hiromitsu’s on the inquiry. He still wants to join PSB.”
And again, sometime later:
“I managed to dig up news of a major drug deal going down in Yokohama. The local cops and SAT raided it and collected 15 kilos of cocaine. The office is going out to celebrate, even me. They all fawn over me when the boss is around; when he’s not, it’s like I’m invisible.” Rei sighs. “This isn’t how I imagined it would be. Maybe I should have stayed in the Metro.”
And again, later still:
“I’ve been talking to the CIA’s local touchpoint. They’re worried about some international syndicate that’s been around for donkey’s ages and is starting to gear up. My boss wants to create a team to handle it; he wants me on it. That’ll be popular.” He snorts.
Through it all the sleeper remains still as though etched from stone. Rei has traced the lines of his face with his eyes a hundred times. Has run searches on missing persons cases looking for that face, has poured through files. But he has no idea when or where the sleeper vanished. It’s an impossible task.
All he knows is that his closest confidant is a nameless presence in the basement of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police building.
***
Time passes slowly. Rei continues to climb the ladder, successfully carrying out his missions and being granted greater autonomy and authority in his investigations. Hiromitsu continues pushing for the PSB, chasing Rei’s coat-tails as he always had as a child. The sleeper in the basement remains anonymous, unknown, but still Rei’s closest contact, the person he shares everything with.
He shares Hagiwara Kenji’s death with him. News of his demise while defusing a bomb rocks the entire building. Losing a colleague is a rare, shocking event, all the more so a death in the line of duty. Rei hears the news as gossip in the PSB agents’ large shared workroom – to them, Kenji is another faceless officer.
To Rei, he was a friend and fellow Academy graduate. He tries to reach out to Hiromitsu and Wataru, but they don’t answer their phones. Hurt and lost, he excuses himself stiffly from the office and leaves. Walks down the steps of the concrete stairwell until he reaches the basement and swipes himself into the locked room.
“Someone died today,” he says, staring at that deathless face. “A friend. I feel…” he hugs himself, suddenly terribly lonely. Suddenly no longer comforted by the silent presence of the man in the coffin, of this stranger he’s been spilling his life to in lieu of a friend. “Never mind,” he says, and spins around.
He leaves the room without another word.
***
Hiromitsu gets into the PSB the next spring, hired after a rash of sudden departures of current agents. With Hiromitsu and another new recruit to support him in the office, and with a few of the most intrenched of his senpai gone, Rei finds a new pleasure in work. He’s given the file on the Black Syndicate to lead, young as he is, and cultivates a network of informers not just in Japan but with Japanese ex-pats across the world to help him. Hiromitsu is, as always, his right hand.
He learns a lot about the Syndicate. That no one knows its origins, but that it has a strong base in Japan; that it has a finger in most every pie; and lastly, most shockingly, that his childhood protector Miyano Elena was working for it shortly before her death.
For a while, he forgets the sleeper in the basement. He’s busy living his life, advancing his career, forming the friendships that his first year in the PSB had made seem impossible. He’s no longer the isolated, unhappy man he had been; no longer desperate enough to make an anonymous face his listener.
But he is still curious, and the longer he stays away the stronger that curiosity grows. In between assignments he starts to look through old photos from missing persons’ cases, reads old descriptions of men in their late twenties who vanished without a trace. Eventually, he goes back year over year and finds many forgotten stories, but none that fit the man in the basement.
He considers telling Hiromitsu about the sleeper, but the time never feels right. It feels like a secret between him and his silent companion, one that he’s not yet willing to give up.
***
Personal life for Rei isn’t so much a problem as an inconvenience. Being gay in Japan commits him to an uncertain path – in some situations he knows he would find acceptance, in others denial or even violence. In the end it doesn’t really matter that much – he’s too busy for a relationship. He goes on strings of dates and occasionally picks up a one-night stand at a bar, but none of it works out. He blames it on work, on his commitment to protecting Japan above all else.
But in the back of his mind, he knows there’s something more. At night in the dark, he traces the lines of each face he sees, each man he meets, and finds them lacking. He’s looking for something; he just doesn’t know what.
***
Slowly as the years pass, Rei rises through the PSB to become one of its most senior agents. He earns himself the title of Zero, echoing Hiromitsu’s old nickname for him, and takes charge of the new agents.
When he’s been in the PSB for five years, on the eve of his 26th birthday, he’s sent fully undercover for the first time. His boss has been saving him for something big, has been grooming him for success. As a reward for his patience and years of success, he’s given the task of going under in the syndicate he’s been researching for so long.
It will mean severing his ties to the Tokyo Metro building, to Hiromitsu and the rest of the PSB, for the foreseeable future. The other agents throw him a going-away party at which most everyone gets truly hammered, Rei himself abstaining so he can give Hiromitsu a ride home afterwards.
After that, he returns to the Tokyo Metro building one last time. He doesn’t take the elevator up to the office; instead he descends the stairs.
The basement room still smells the same as it did five years ago, of dust and cardboard. The lights hum overhead, the dusty white sheets gleaming like ghosts in the harsh lighting.
Rei crosses over to the coffin and pulls the sheet back. Inside the sleeper looks just as he did five years ago – hasn’t aged a day. Rei looks down at the familiar lines of his face, at the features which give a subtle and yet very present feeling of danger. He knows them better than his own face, has been searching to find a record of them for years.
For the first time he reaches out and rests his hand on the handle to the glass case. But that feels too much, too extreme. He presses his palm against the glass instead, leaving a last trace of himself behind in this building, with this man he can’t seem to forget.
“I’ll be gone for a while,” he says. “I’ll see you when I get back.”
***
Months stretch into years. Hiromitsu follows him, as he always has, into the syndicate. Furuya Rei becomes Amuro Tooru, becomes Bourbon. He spends the first two years of his time undercover building his reputation, just as he had in the PSB, earning the name that Rum bestows on him without ever meeting the syndicate’s second in command.
His hard work pays off, and he becomes Vermouth’s right hand man, just as Scotch is now – is still – his. Together they run the Japanese end of the syndicate, organizing money laundering and gambling and prostitution rings all technically operated by the local yakuza but ultimately tying back to the syndicate.
What Rei learns as he advances in the syndicate though, is that its typical criminality is merely a front for something larger. The syndicate is funnelling huge sums of money into scientific research. Research that was once conducted by Miyano Elena.
Research that’s now being conducted by her daughter.
Rei doesn’t know what to make of it, and the rumours he hears have more than a hint of mad scientist to them. He collects them all, but doesn’t put his trust in any of them.
***
If he had thought that he didn’t have time for romance as a PSB agent, the idea is laughable as an undercover agent. He occasionally manages one-night stands to appease his physical appetites, but finds nothing appealing about the casual sex. He can’t seem to form attachments beyond friendship, can’t seem to meet anyone who fulfils what he’s looking for – and even he doesn’t understand his own criteria.
He’s simply not built for romance, he decides eventually. And maybe it’s just as well, given his job.
***
The day after his 29th birthday, he receives a text from Hiromitsu.
I'm sorry Furuya, my PSB identity has been seen through by those people. It seems like the only route of retreat left is to the other world. Goodbye Zero.
He searches the city frantically, finally managing to track Hiromitsu’s cellphone record to a rooftop in Shibuya. He runs up the stairs, feet pounding on the metal steps, throat tight with desperation and fear.
At the top of the stairs he stumbles out onto the rooftop.
There, on the far side, Morofushi Hiromitsu is slumped, head lolling forward, limbs limp. There’s a bullet hole in his chest.
Rei sinks to his knees and lets out a scream.
***
He comes back to the Tokyo Metro building for the first time in three years sometime in the early hours of the morning to deliver Hiromitsu’s shattered cellphone and wallet. He doesn’t want to see anyone, doesn’t want to be seen. He feels like a ghost, wandering the grounds he once knew.
He completes his task and heads for the ground floor to exit onto the parking lot. But as he hits the main floor he pauses, looking down the steps towards the basement. He’s pulled by the loneliness he once felt and the despair he now does to descend the stairs. Enters the locked room, and sees the coffin.
Rei pulls aside the sheet and stares down at the familiar face. After three years’ absence, he can still trace every line, every curve of it.
Somehow years of searching for this man have made him more than a companion, more than a friend. Have made him the face Rei searches for in the anonymous lovers he takes, the features he looks for in crowded bars before settling for someone else.
Alone and shattered he reaches out and pulls open the glass lid; it’s heavier than it looks and comes open with the sound of an airtight seal being broken.
Rei reaches out and runs the backs of his fingers down the sleeper’s face. His skin is smooth and warm, feels alive.
“Somebody died today,” he says, voice choked, repeating the words from all those years ago. “A friend. My best friend. And now… you’re all I have left.”
Tears in his eyes, he leans forward without really understanding what’s in his heart or mind, knowing only the need for reassurance – the need not to be alone.
He presses his lips against the sleeper’s.
In that pale, perfect face, a pair of green eyes snap open.