Work Text:
He’s holding the door wide open for the delivery crew to push the massive crate into the bar. There was a brief moment when it first arrived that he could try moving it in by himself but looking at the huge crate now, there’s no way even with Iroha’s help that they would be able to even make it past the planters. He smiles at the awe on the young woman’s face as they open the box and the familiar shape of a grand piano peeks out.
It takes maybe half an hour to set it up and make sure it’s structurally sound. The delivery truck drives away and him and Iroha are left with a grand piano sitting in the middle of his bar. He grabs a duster and places it in Iroha’s hands and feels a smile come across his face as she pouts. It’s only to allow him to check on the professional coming to tune the instrument because there’s no way he’s going to waste thousands of yen handling an object he hasn’t played in years.
After the call he helps Iroha push it to the side, opening up the middle of his bar once more. He makes a mental note of figuring out how much it would take to build a lounging space around it. Iroha gives him a playful hi-five on a job well done and goes to flip the sign on the door.
The next few hours filling the afternoon were sparse with customers, seemed usual for the time of day. But the place he’s building is starting to shape up to his original plans for this bar. Day by day it will culminate into the space he’s built this new life for. One only briefly reminded of what it left behind through the pains in his aging scars and the tattoos faded on his back and arms.
While he’s watching the professional work their magic in the strings underneath the piano’s lid he remembers what sparked this in the first place.
“Boss! You never told me you played the piano!” He heard Iroha yell from the upstairs before they opened for the day. He came up to see Iroha had pulled out an old electric keyboard out of the closet. She had plugged it in but he knows the poor thing broke many years ago.
“I haven’t played in years.” He commented as she laid the plastic keyboard on her lap and cracked her fingers, “Do you?”
“Only in school,” Iroha responded as she pressed on shapes of familiar chords, no sound coming out but he could imagine, “There was a class and my mom never would be able to afford one, even second-hand. So I practiced a whole bunch at school until I was forced to go home.”
“That’s quite the dedication.” He said, reaching around and pressing his own fingers on the lower end of the keyboard. There was only a few songs he could probably hack out through muscle memory,
“You say that,” Iroha said through her giggling, “When this thing must be what, 30 years old? I’m pretty sure this company went out of business years ago.”
“Actually I think it’s older than that.” He offhandedly comments as Iroha gapes at him, “It’s probably one of the only things that I kept when I moved out of my parent’s home.”
“What?! This is basically a collector’s item at this point!” she says which gets a laugh out of him,
“I could have probably pawned it off one day, but it’s been stuck in my closet for a while I suppose.” He admits, thinking of the days where he was desperate enough to lose one, maybe the only object he was truly attached to. That same month the bandages on his face bother him while he’s swearing an oath to a man he would follow for almost a majority of his life.
“Say, Boss,” Iroha hummed, “How about we get a piano for the bar?”
“You got to be kidding me,” He retaliates, “Don’t you know how much they go for these days?”
“C’mon. I know you really want to play again, Boss.” She says as if she can read the calloused fingers laying on the keys next to her.
And she was right.
He sits at the bench and it takes a bit before he adjusts it to a comfortable height and he can test out the pedals beneath his feet. He cracks his fingers (the same way he used to right before punishing his boys that got out of line) and lays them gracefully on the keys. And suddenly he’s not sure what to do.
He goes through some of the basics he remembers, chords and a scale or two before he starts to go through the motions of a song hidden in his muscle memory.
“I can’t believe you actually figured it out through just listening to the song.” the short haired teenager looks at him in awe as he stops the CD in the player, some rock song he’s roughly playing by ear for the past half hour,
“Eh, at least gunfire hasn’t degraded my eardrums over the years.” He mumbles out as he switches off the keyboard and closes the flimsy stand it lay on, “Are you both satisfied?”
He can’t believe he agreed to watch Kazama’s two troublemakers for the afternoon.
“Hell yeah!” Nishikiyama remarked, “You’re really cool Kashiwagi-san.”
“After something like that?” He replied, “You could have at least said that for anything other than my piano skills…”
“No, Nishiki’s right.” Kiryu butted in, “It’s amazing you still dedicate yourself to a hobby like this. It takes a lot to maintain that kind of ability even if you’re busy all the time.”
The day passes by with a warmth he hasn't felt in a long time and the tune of the radio playing the era's greatest hits.
He looks up after finishing to see Iroha across the room behind the bar and a familiar patron sipping his own store bought whiskey with a big grin on his face,
“Could you at least order something?” He remarks, feeling his face twitch,
“What? I can’t come here to watch you play?” Adachi says with a laugh, “This is the best thing I’ve seen you do since I first came here man!”
“This is in fact, a bar, Adachi-san.” He replies ignoring the compliment,
“And I have what I came here for!” The man says, downing his drink, “A drink and a good experience. Looks like this place is really shaping up!”
“Sure is,” Iroha comments, “To think this place was only under construction two years ago…I never thought this building would ever be used again.”
“Also I never thought you were into rock,” Adachi says, “I don’t think I would have ever heard Judgement ever again past the oldies station on the radio.”
“It’s...it’s something my fri— boss’s kids were into at the time.” He mumbles out as some sort of explanation as he stands from the piano stool,
“That’s cute!” Iroha says, “Here let me see if I remember anything, at least it’s been only a few years for me since I’ve played.”
She receives a cheer from Adachi as she begins to play through a classic he probably tried to learn as a kid. He can almost remember the only recital he played at before his family fell apart. After that he barely could find himself to dig the keyboard out of his closet, yet he never would be able to part with it.
He spots the old dusty plastic when he’s cleaning out his apartment and packing everything to move to his new home. Perhaps the last time he took this out was when Kazama was incarcerated back in ‘85, looking for guidance in probably the only other constant in his life when the other disappeared. Albeit a constant that was always in the back of his mind.
Wiping it down and plugging it in he’s surprised it still works.
He slowly goes through an old song that still sticks in his mind, especially after recent events. He imagines the two boys stuck in his older apartment mouthing the words along while the song played on the radio. He knew why Kazama stuck them with him in his apartment rather than the office or the orphanage they easily escaped from. The same reason why he had set Kiryu up in the shitshow that was ‘88. But he wonders if he really could have prevented them from joining up after it all.
He stops. And wonders if he could have stopped any of them from becoming killers.
The turn of the new millennium passes by on a lonely night and the tune of a clumsy attempt of an old recital song.
And he suddenly loses two of them in the span of a single night several years later.
The days following the events of that night in 2005 he appears unfazed in front of his men as he becomes the next patriarch. He’s busy once more restructuring the Kazama family, until he finds himself at the funerals. He stands firm in front of both graves. Kiryu stands beside him and he can’t find the words to say to any of them.
He plugs in the keyboard and finds it doesn’t work anymore.
The new year passes on a lonely and silent night.
“Hey, you alright?” He hears Adachi ask from the seat near him, “You spaced out for a second there.”
He blinks and adjusts his glasses, “I’m surprised you care.” he jabs,
“ ‘Course I do.” the man mumbles while sipping his glass, “I’ve been having a good time here man.”
“Well then,” He says, a little off guard, “I suppose the piano’s just bringing back some old memories.”
The years pass by with an old plastic keyboard deep in storage.
It’s only 4 years since that quiet night when he stands confused in his office, staring at a drawn portrait of a man he watched die in front of his eyes.
Then he gets gunned down by a helicopter.
He only remembers Kiryu’s face as he struggles to even move his body. Then it gets dark. It gets dark for a very long time.
It’s 3 years later that he wakes up with a tube shoved down his throat.
He almost laughs that his last resort plan ended up happening. Well, he can’t exactly laugh right now due to how bad his body has deteriorated over the years, but he wonders how the HLA even managed to get a hold of his body and a death certificate.
It takes another year to climb back into a sense of normalcy. Being able to walk again, to hold things, to eat and drink. The new scars take a while to get used to as they litter his now unfamiliar body. He gets used to the doctors and caretakers that apparently have known him for years. Learning how much the world managed to change in what he used to think was a short amount of time.
The months pass by reading a few books about flower language and Chinese medicine, the tunes of jazz playing in the background of his hospital room.
When he’s finally released, he begins drawing up plans for his new life.
And it’s peaceful. He doesn’t need to get involved with the yakuza anymore because he’s already breathed his last breath for them. He loves his bar and it’s patrons. Adachi gets a jab at him while his hair goes grey and he reminds him about his tab once more. Iroha sticks by his side for the years he gets his business off the ground and he’s able to slow down.
Then Kiryu dies.
He’s not sure how to feel when he gets a phone call from the HLA about it. He almost wants to doubt it, just like his own supposed death. But he knows it can’t be like that.
He’s the only one left, he thinks.
Then he wonders when he started considering himself part of their family.
He shoves an old broken plastic keyboard out of the closet in his house into the storage above the bar where he wouldn’t have to look at it ever again.
“Boss! You never told me you played the piano!”
He gets used to Iroha sharing old sheet music with him and relearning piano together. He’s glad his fingers managed to maintain it’s old dexterity he’s already lost once and fought back to regain.
He finds himself smiling while his fingers dance over the keys. Iroha says it’s a good look on him, so does Adachi before he downs a bottle from behind the counter. And when it’s just them alone in the bar, he plays something he’d hear on the radio back in their heyday. The counter around the piano gets built and the ex-cop sits a little bit closer, leaning right next to an open lid.
Adachi brings in two new customers one day, and he can tell something’s different. Then the next few weeks are filled with housing a party of heroes, bento boxes, and karaoke. He can’t help but watch with a sense of pride in them.
The Tojo and the Omi disband in a single night as Kasuga’s party returns from Sotenbori with tales about the Mad Dog, the man’s brother, and the chairmen of both clans. He has to suppress the urge to smile as he hears of their battle.
There’s then a series of murders and political debates along with his bar getting vandalized with posters that he and Iroha spend the day taking down. Now he’s guessing they must have gotten into a massive fight because they’re nursing their wounds in his bar once more. They then quickly leave towards a building across town, but one stays behind.
“Do you need anything?” He asks the silver haired man,
“Seong-hui wanted me to personally deliver a message before I left.”
He raises an eyebrow as Joon-gi continues,
“Please don’t mind the patron she’s sending here, it’s her opinion that the person is well due a drink.”
The man leaves and catches up with his party waiting outside. He crosses his arms and lets out a tired sigh, he’s glad he sent Iroha home early today. He would rather leave her out of anything the Geomijul is sending him.
The door opens a while later and all he can do is stare, frozen in place as his arms go slack by his sides. The man stopped in the doorway is frozen as well, an unreadable expression on his face as a mixture of emotions must be going through his head.
“Kiryu…” Is all he manages to utter out,
“...Kashiwagi-san?” The man says in return.
What would have been a lonely night is filled with warmth and the tune of a piano playing an old familiar song.