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I pulled a gun and as the preacher tried to stop me,
hold my heart, it's beating for you anyway.
— Caraphernelia
Pierce The Veil
The easy part is the murder.
Akira hadn't known, as he pressed the knife to her throat and forced his hand to move, that a person as small as her could hold so much blood. When she wore her nice shoes, she barely came up to his shoulders. In his arms, she was always frail. Small, willowy and thin, like the protagonists of the books she hoarded in his library like they were a treasure. When he did kill her, (like he always said he would, like she always said he would,) she falls over and blood spills out of the wound on her neck in a crimson river across the white marble floor of his living room.
"Even in death," he says, watching her dead eyes on the chandelier overhead, "you continue to inconvenience me, and I hate you for it."
The scene is clean within half an hour. Akira's guys are efficient — the murder weapon is wiped clean and placed somewhere convenient for the police to find when they get their heads out of their asses, the body is left where it is and any surface that Akira might have touched from the handle of the doorway to his house to the place he stood on as he wrenched the knife into her flesh and pulled is clean of footsteps. He knows he’ll be in custody in under twelve hours once Kyoutani-san calls the cops and reports the body. Detective Kageyama wouldn’t have it any other way.
It’s alright, though.
Akira knows he won’t serve time for it. He never does.
Seventeen hours later, Detective Kageyama arrives at Akira’s penthouse apartment in the center of the city, flashes the arrest warrant in his face, sneers cruelly and viscerally like he hates Akira and hates that they aren’t fucking the hate they feel for each other out like they used to, and leads him out of the building with no grace or mercy. The handcuffs around his wrists feel colder than ever. Akira keeps his head down and doesn’t look at the press.
“I’ll contact your lawyer,” Kyoutani-san says as he’s being led away, and strangely, he reaches for his personal cellphone instead of his business one.
Ah, Akira thinks, and the corner of his mouth lifts into a smirk.
The last time Akira had seen Tsukishima had been in the study of his family’s estate, five or six years ago in what he still thinks is the coldest winter he’s ever had to endure. They’d been stupidly young back then — Akira’s father had just died and he’d only had the estate for less than a month, and Tsukishima still had his skewed square glasses from his first year of pre-law. He doesn’t know what Tsukishima looks like now, but he imagines that it’s probably better than how he looked back then. Exhaustion bruised him underneath the eyes. His hands were always cold. The only time the crease in between his eyebrows disappeared was when he slept.
“I signed the NDA,” Tsukishima had said. His eyes were empty. “All the paperwork is with Kyoutani-san.”
Things with them hadn’t been good for a long, long time. Akira had known it from the moment his father had died and Tsukishima’s hands had trembled like blades of grass in the wind when he’d held his face in his hands to run his thumb along the bridge of Akira’s face, like he couldn’t didn’t quite know what he was doing, like he wasn’t sure if he could do this anymore. Looking at Tsukishima in those last days had made the inside of Akira’s chest go brittle. Like his lungs and his heart were empty and his ribs were trying to hold multiple handfuls of silver coins.
“And if I ask you to stay?” Akira had dared to ask. The words had tasted like ashes. The ring in his pocket, meant for her left hand, had weighed bricks.
“You don’t get to make demands of me, Kunimi-san,” Tsukishima had said. He had never looked as loveless and cold as he did then. Akira had never seen himself in Tsukishima until their eyes met and he realized that this was it. “You have a fiancee.”
A fiancee he hadn’t loved back then, a fiancee he’d been set to marry only to save his father’s family from crumbling, a fiancee who smelled like peonies and had a mark on her neck that first day that they met that wasn’t the shape of Akira’s mouth, a fiancee with a loaded gun in her purse. A fiancee who didn’t know that Akira didn’t have a favorite flower, that he liked his tea lukewarm for convenience’s sake, that he liked his watches slender and thin, that he had trouble doing his tie, that he hated his father, that he liked it a little rough, that he liked teeth on his thighs and cold hands on his neck, that he liked to wreck and be wrecked, that he liked a knife on his skin here and a trail of blood there —
— that he liked being kissed slowly, that he carried a bottle of lens solution in his bag even though his eyesight was immaculate, that he liked to be the big spoon, that he never liked flowers but always knew where hyacinths are sold —
— that he loved another the way he should teach himself to love her, but wouldn’t because he’d never move on.
“For what it’s worth,” Akira had said, and his cold hands had been folded on his lap, his fingers clenched together until his knuckles were blotchy and red, “I did care about you, Kei. You know I did.”
And Tsukishima had looked at him, looked at him like he was a mirage, looked at him like he was a stranger, his eyes empty and hollow and so unlike Kei who smiled when Akira gave him hyacinths or held him at night, so unlike the Kei who had once said that Akira was pretty but in an annoying way, and he’d said, “None of that matters anymore. You know it doesn’t.”
The easy part is the murder.
She didn’t mean anything to him. They spent most of the time at each other’s throats. The sex was dismal even when she hated his fucking guts. It felt like taking a weight off his shoulders, to lather his hands in her blood. It felt like retribution for the five years of misery they’d put each other through. He hated no one like he hated her. She hated no one like she hated him. Killing her had felt all too easy.
The hard part was looking at Tsukishima across the table with his hands shackled to the desk and his wrists raw, looking and seeing that he’d come even after all this time, and trying not to smile.
“You,” Tsukishima says, leaning back in his chair, “ are a fucking idiot.”
“Yeah, well, I’m your problem now,” Akira says. Tsukishima looks good. His hair is a little longer than it used to be and his skewed glasses are gone, replaced by a wire rimmed, circular pair that compliment the sharp planes of his face perfectly. The coat he’s wearing isn’t cheap either. An off-white color that goes wonderfully with his eyes. There’s no ring on his finger. There’s no ring on his finger, and he’s watching Akira like he’d kill him with his bare hands if he weren’t a temporary prisoner of the state.
It makes his blood burn, honestly.
Akira studies his profile in the dim light of the room.
“You can get me out, right?” He asks, and he knows the answer anyway.
“Easily,” Tsukishima says, and when he looks at Akira, he doesn’t look as empty as he used to.
That’s the thing about them, really.
He’d just killed his wife in cold blood, and now he’s about to walk free. He wouldn’t be thrown to the wolves solely because Tsukishima had once loved him like he was a piece of his own heart, had once loved him enough to never let him be thrown to the wolves unless he’s the one holding Akira by the lapels of his shirt and hauling him towards their open mouths, unless he’s the one teasing the line of Akira’s throat against their bloodstained teeth.
“Then I’ll be in your care,” Akira says, not unkindly, and Tsukishima looks away from him like he’s been burned.