Work Text:
“What are you working on there, Boss?”
Boss was in his suit, but his jacket was off and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. There was a haze of cigarette smoke in the air, refracting the reddish-pink lights; he was using an empty can of Strong Zero as his ashtray. Chuuya noticed the crumpled and empty pack of cigarettes, reached into his breastpocket, and tossed his own pack onto the table in front of his Boss.
Boss lit a cigarette with eager hands, took a deep breath, and exhaled with relief. “Ace has gone missing for the past 48 hours and is presumed dead,” he said, sounding like someone who had been awake for most of those 48 hours. He indicated the large pile of photographs and documents in front of him, organized in some mysterious system known only to him. Chuuya peered over his shoulder. “His unregistered yacht was found drifting along the shore, mostly burned. There were a number of bodies, presumably his subordinates; thirty-five of them are unaccounted for.” He held up one photo so Chuuya could see it, but did not hand it over. “It’s fairly gruesome,” he warned politely, as if either of them had sensitive stomachs.
Chuuya caught a glimpse of what seemed to be indiscriminate blood spatter and the ruins of a head. Whoever did this was neither subtle nor merciful. “Damn! Do we have any clues?”
“Two days prior to his last sighting, he reported that he had hired a bounty hunter and had captured the leader of the Rats, a Russian Ability user named…” He checked his notes. “Dostojewski? Ability unknown, currently unaccounted-for, but as you can see, adept at getting out of a tight situation.” Mori put down the photograph with a shrug. “Ace asked for permission to interrogate his captive personally, and I granted it.”
Chuuya frowned. “Why didn’t you have Anesan do it?”
“Ace was just so persuasive,” Mori said earnestly. “He wanted a chance to prove himself and I saw no reason not to allow it, as he had so cleverly captured such an elusive opponent.”
Chuuya threw himself into his usual chair at the table and reached an arm out for the nearest folder. “That motherfucker had poker chips for brains. You knew something like this would happen.”
Mori smiled without looking up. “Maybe.”
“Did you feed the rat some poison to take back to his den, Boss?”
“Perhaps.” Boss was now frowning at something else in the photos. “There’s something else consistent about the bodies; almost all wore jeweled collars. Surveillance of the yacht before this disaster shows that they were wearing them from the start, so I believe it was part of their uniform. Look here.”
“That’s in poor taste,” Chuuya said, looking closely at where he was pointing. “What sort of weird control freak was he?”
Boss seemed to find something intensely amusing about that comment, but instead of answering he tossed a gem in Chuuya’s direction. Chuuya caught it in one hand; he held it up to the overhead light between thumb and forefinger, turning it this way and that. It was only crudely faceted, but when he took out his penlight, it sparkled brilliantly. It was almost directly from the mines, but large and he couldn’t see any large cavities or much clouding on quick review. “From his casino?” he said, replacing the penlight in his pocket and taking out his magnifier.
“Ability-generated.”
Chuuya nearly dropped the jewel. “That shit again?” He stared at it suspiciously, held it to the light again. “Shibusawa?”
“Ace’s Ability creates gems. I don’t know precisely what the criteria might be, but these are not Abilities themselves, so not exactly like Shibusawa. I suspect they have something to do with his employees. Possibly tied to their lives or strength or even money, or so on. Fitzgerald’s physical strength is tied to money, after all. Do you have any initial thoughts?”
Chuuya picked up a handful of gems and glanced through them. “They’re all different qualities and sizes and origins. These are all different degrees of processing and faceting. I would have to send them to the lab to know if they’ve been treated in any way.” He flicked open his penknife, held one stone steady against the table, and scratched it, observing the result. “See, this one’s probably just fluorite, but I think some are at least semiprecious. There’s no consistency. Different sources, whatever they are.” He shuddered. “I hope these aren’t actual people. That’s fucked up, even for us.”
“Ace preferred to use his own casino employees and security on his private ships instead of mafia enforcers; he had a protection contract with the Mafia, so he thought of us as mere bouncers for his casinos. The victims are not mafia, so we have not taken a direct loss, but Ace was a parasite on Yokohama.” Mori’s eyes glittered maliciously in the dim light. “Whoever did this - and I strongly suspect that the Russian was the ultimate winner - has no interest in money, troops, or to infiltrate the mafia by joining it. He took none of those baits. He took the information about our Abilities. I believe, based upon that, he has plans to attack the Port Mafia with force, or via assassination.”
“Fuck around, find out,” Chuuya growled, immediately ready to go. Boss waved a hand negligently.
“Level 2 precautions for our Ability users have already been activated for now; we’ll accelerate as we collect specific information. However, make sure we always have two units unassigned to any specific leads we are following, for emergency backup.”
“Yes, Boss,” Chuuya sighed, aware that as usual he had to try to be a little patient. “Out of curiosity, which story did you leak about your Ability? The rest of the Executives need to have our stories straight.”
Mori almost giggled, and quickly turned it into a yawn behind his hand. He looked hastily to see if Chuuya had noticed; Chuuya had indeed noticed. “I don’t remember exactly. I’ve come up with so many fun-sounding Abilities for myself over the years,” he said cheerfully. “Invisibility, time manipulation...it might have been mind control. Yes, that seems right. I do enjoy seeing people take outlandish measures against that kind of Ability - I’ve seen people lining their hats with aluminium foil if I look at them funny!”
Both men gave into laughter.
“Do you want to come up with an Ability for me next time?” Mori said, wiping his eyes. “I’m running out of good ideas.”
“I would be honored,” Chuuya snickered, taking off his hat and bowing only a little sarcastically.
“At any rate, all pleasantries aside, I do have an assignment for you. I will leave the details for you to handle, but it needs to be accomplished within 48 hours.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone has shown up claiming to be Ace’s wife, demanding her share of his assets.”
“God, who’d marry that guy? Sorry - has his death been confirmed?”
“No. But if he is declared dead, then his assets legally revert to Moricorp. I was very clear about that clause when he bought his way in here; it was his entry fee. I believe he figured he could kill me before needing to worry about that.”
Boss always seemed delighted to hear that someone thought he was stupid, whereas that would have made Chuuya himself absolutely ready to kill. Boss did enjoy playing with his food more than he did, though.
“That’s what they all assume.”
“It would be convenient for them if I dropped dead, but unfortunately, my work would pile up,” Boss whined like an overtired toddler, dragging his hands down his face. He sighed, and then was quiet for a minute. “Chuuya. I need you to deal with Ace’s so-called wife,” he murmured between his fingers in his usual calm voice, the one that meant business.
Chuuya bowed. “You got it, Boss.”
“You may want to dress up a little. I tried to talk to her yesterday when she was yelling in the lobby when I came back from a walk, but she said she didn’t talk to stupid shabby old men. Am I such a stupid shabby old man, Chuuya?”
“Of course not,” Chuuya said loyally, looking at his frazzled boss in his rumpled shirtsleeves. “But that does answer who’d marry someone like Ace.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
Chuuya checked his cufflinks and his hair in the mirrored walls of the elevator as it slowly descended, watching the digital blue numbers count down. He had to go all the way over to Building One to talk to her, and these shoes hadn’t been fully worn in. Serves him right for assuming he didn’t have to walk anywhere today.
Ace’s wife was a thin, cat-eyed, very intense-looking woman who looked to be around thirty or thirty-five, although she lacked any smile lines. She was beautifully dressed, although her clothes were slightly out of date in their modesty. Wasn’t she hot wearing that in summer?
She also looked unaccustomed to being told no.
“I am ruined,” she said in a ringing imperious voice as soon as Chuuya came close enough to her to be clearly heading in her direction. “Ruined! If you do not do right by me, I will have to take it to the courts, little man.”
“Madame,” Chuuya said with immense restraint, “I don’t even know who you are. Why don’t we start with that, and then we can go on from there. My name is Nakahara Chuuya, and I am a colleague of your husband’s. And you are?”
“Apollinaria Alexandrovna Ivanovich,” she answered with a sniff. “I don’t want to talk to an underling. I want to talk to the Boss here! Don’t waste my time.”
Madame Apollinaria Ivanovich was clearly going to be a massive pain in the ass. She was extremely lucky that they were in the lobby of what was, in the eyes of the law, a corporate office building.
“Our Boss is tied up with business. If you want to get anywhere here, I’d suggest you talk to me, because I’m the only contact you’ll get.” He sat down in an opposing chair and before he even had fully settled in, there was tea placed in front of both of them, as well as small snacks. He took a sip of tea, and then added milk. Much better. He sipped his tea calmly; as he had the upper hand in bargaining, he had no need to rush himself.
“My husband is dead and I need money,” Madame Apollinaria said at last, about 40% more politely. Her dark eyes were narrow with some kind of emotion - disdain? Greed?
Chuuya considered the option of telling her to go fuck herself, but there must be a reason that Boss asked him to speak to her, and gave him 48 hours to deal with her. “Do you have proof that you’re married?” Madame Ivanovich angrily lifted her left hand to show her ring, and Chuuya shrugged. “I can put on a wedding ring too. Where were you married? A certificate will do.”
Madame Ivanovich grimaced.
“If you’re his common-law wife, I don’t give a shit, but it also means you don’t have a legal leg to stand upon.” Ace and his Russian wife, and the Russian rat Boss was baiting. Hmmmm. “He was well yesterday, and has not contacted work today. How do you know he was not called away on business?”
“ I know ,” Madame Ivanovich said with deadly intent. “Do not waste my time with lying. That fool Alexei must be dead, and I will wager my entire fortune that he committed suicide. That’s a gambler’s end.”
Chuuya felt a little unsettled by her brutal practicality. “Madame, I can’t do anything for you until we know that he is dead and that you are his legal heir. This is a job for lawyers; surely you know that. Why don’t you go home and see if your husband returns, and - “
“Bah! Who would live with a man like that?”
Chuuya had a headache now. “Aren’t you his wife?”
“I agreed to marry him, yes, but please, boy, I’m not in love with him. He bothered me incessantly to marry him, and eventually, yes, I did allow it,” she said casually, as if he’d borrowed something unimportant from her. “Whatever cute little story you are imagining, that was not our marriage, but that is also none of your business. And now I want what he has left for me.”
Weirdos like Dazai talked fondly about this kind of lopsided relationship, mostly because he was interested in the jaded wives. Chuuya didn’t know what to think, but honestly he didn’t really care. Maybe Ace hated his wife, or maybe he was really into this kind of emotional neglect play, or perhaps both? Either way, Chuuya didn’t want to be involved with any of this, so he had to try to get this resolved within 48 hours so he never had to think about Ace again.
He mentally swore at Boss. The Boss in his head merely raised his eyebrows and asked him what he planned to do about this problem.
“Madame, look. I don’t have any information for you. You can go to the police, or get your lawyer - “ which he knew was probably impossible if she was coming to them directly. Besides, a fair number of the crooked lawyers in town already had agreements with the Port Mafia. “Or come back tomorrow if he’s still not contactable. His assets, including the casino deed, are tied up with his Moricorp contract. There is so much legal red tape.”
There was an intense silence.
“I have something,” Madame Ivanovich said slowly, “which may help with that red tape.”
“And what’s that?” Chuuya said, ready to consider the bribe if it was impressive enough.
“He left a list with me,” she said, picking her words with great precision like a spider walking on glass. Chuuya shrugged; so what? She continued. “It is a list of the Ability users in the Port Mafia, with details about their Abilities.”
“Was your husband involved with the Port Mafia?” Chuuya said guilelessly, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers over his stomach.
Madame Ivanovich scoffed. Her dark eyes bored into Chuuya’s. She had the rusty-red hair of a fox. “I’m told that this list is very valuable to the right people.”
“Is it?” Chuuya said skeptically. Their main rivals in Yokohama was the Armed Detective Agency, which probably already had most of that information thanks to that fucker Dazai, and the government, which probably did also thanks to that fucker Sakaguchi. Even the Guild had their limited intel on the Port Mafia. They were also in formal detente with all three groups, to use Boss’s words. Evidence of spying by a Mafia Executive for any of their enemies would throw that tentative peace into chaos again, and Chuuya had no fucking interest in that. “How do you know how accurate it is, anyways?”
“I’ve read it.”
“Have you?” Chuuya sat upright in his chair, letting his own expression harden. “Then perhaps you should think very carefully who you call a little man the next time you demand favors, Apollinaria Alexandrovna.”
They stared at each other, properly sizing the other up.
“A list is fairly meaningless,” Chuuya said. “You have no way to prove its accuracy, or that anyone listed is a member of the Port Mafia. Madame, don’t waste my time.”
Chuuya’s phone vibrated; he slipped it from his waistcoat pocket and glanced at it. Five messages. Boss had texted him to report that Ace’s body had been located and positively identified on the ship; he’d apparently hung himself. Accurate dental records take time to hunt down when your subject was paranoid enough to do extensive dental replacements, but Boss believed in making sure that important corpses were scientifically identified, so he must have run a backup DNA test. Chuuya snorted. If Ace was faking his death, he was doing it thoroughly enough to be convincing to the Boss, which meant that he most likely was actually dead.
By suicide, as his wife had proclaimed, as if it was an inevitability.
“Go home,” he told the woman. “If your husband truly is dead, let’s talk tomorrow morning about what you think you’re owed and what you’re actually entitled to receive.”
Chuuya trudged back to Building Four, back into the elevator, back to the transition floor 35, and up the second elevator to the secure floors, and then down the hall to the Executive conference room, waving hello to the guards. He knocked, and was told to enter.
Boss did not seem to have moved since they last spoke a few hours ago, but the pile of documents before him were now organized and stacked, and he was now drinking another Strong Zero. The last can-ashtray had been removed since Chuuya was here earlier.
“So he’s dead, Boss?”
“Looks like it,” Boss said with a placid smile. “Dental records, biometrics, and DNA; the face wasn’t even disfigured. We can have a working hypothesis that Ace is indeed dead, and was probably taken out by the Russian rat, if not a third party.” He sighed mournfully. “Now I have yet another Underboss seat to fill...well, at least the only way is up in terms of quality. His material assets will be transferred to us by tomorrow afternoon.”
Chuuya was not entirely sure of the scale of Ace’s personal fortune and casino holdings, but large sums of money took a little time to launder properly, even if they used the casinos themselves as the method.
“Did you have any questions for me, Chuuya?” Boss asked.
“Ah - that was it, really. I wanted to confirm his death with you personally. Suicide, huh.”
“Yesterday, he had just captured a new Ability user and been given a nice chance to go after my head; the next day he had hung himself. Seems like quite a change of plans.” Mori pouted. “Would you kill yourself rather than killing me ? Even Dazai wouldn’t.”
“I...don’t know what you want me to say to that, Boss.”
“I’m kidding, Chuuya. If that’s all the information you need - and I commend you on personally confirming that key piece of information - I’ll leave you to it.” He looked profoundly, humanly tired, but also very well-settled in his armchair.
“Boss, maybe you should take a nap.”
“I’m fine,” Boss waved his concern aside. “I’ve stayed awake longer.”
Time for the tried-and-true. “Doesn’t Miss Elise need naps? Won’t she be tired if you don’t rest too?”
“Oh, she’s such a little angel when she sleeps!...but you’re right, she’s exceptionally mean when she’s sleep-deprived. Maybe I should take that nap.” Boss sighed and stretched in a truly back-popping fashion. Chuuya winced at some of the noises. It must be awful to be old. “I look forward to your report on this issue, Executive Nakahara.”
“You got it, sir.”
Today Madame Apollinaria was wearing a beautiful ivory-colored dress in an old-fashioned style with a thick choker of pearls. Chuuya wondered if the pearls were real or fake; either possibility seemed likely, especially if she was in such dire financial straits. She had probably cleverly sold each pearl one by one as needed, and had them replaced with beautiful but cheap plastic replicas. No shame there - the point of owning jewels was that they were portable and easily exchangeable for cash, and their beauty was entirely distinct from that.
He took off his hat, bowed briefly, and replaced his hat on his head. Madame Apollinaria looked tired but determined; some of the anger had drained out of her overnight. She must have had no luck with any of her other options, which hopefully made her more likely to negotiate.
“Good morning,” she said. “I have written a request that I hope you will deliver to your Boss.”
Chuuya sighed. This was going to be an annoying day, he could already tell. “I am not taking anything to my Boss. I’m not taking anything from you either.”
“It’s...it’s just a note.”
“Yeah, yeah, it always is. Look, why not just read it out to me?”
She glanced around uncertainly at the lobby, which had the normal amount of traffic. Nobody was close enough to hear too much, and he doubted there were any state secrets involved. “Here?”
Chuuya shrugged in an exaggerated fashion. “Or not, and then you can leave.”
Madame Apollinaria hesitated, and then switched to slightly-accented but fluent French as she read a very prettily-worded demand for money. These foreigners loved to assume everyone spoke their language, but French? Not Russian? Well, that was no problem for Chuuya, at least. At least she was polite this time.
Chuuya patiently waited for her to finish the reading of her letter, and then shook his head. “Are you sure you even want the rights to his casinos? Do you know how much debt he was in?” He himself had no idea - it probably wasn’t a losing proposition for the Mafia, or Boss wouldn’t bother taking control, even if he planned to sell them immediately to recoup any losses. Then again, Boss had a habit of taking over hot messes and making them functional again, and a functional casino was an excellent source of income.
However, this seemed to be a good question to ask, for Madame Apollinaria went pale and fidgety. Maybe Ace had some messy bankruptcies in his past. Gamblers and high rollers often did. So he shrugged elaborately and waited for her answer.
“Well - well - I would like to discuss the information I have and how that changes the situation.”
“Yeah, sure, let’s discuss that,” Chuuya said. “What do you propose?”
“If you - if the Port - if Moricorp is interested in purchasing my information…”
“Let’s see it.”
“I don’t have it here ; how could I carry all that? It is stored in his office at the casino. I have the keys. Come along now,” she said, as if he was a bellhop to carry her luggage, and only the vision of Anesan’s folded fan whapping his knuckles disapprovingly kept him from kicking a lady’s ass.
“How did you learn about Abilities, anyway?”
Madame Apollinaria had refused to let Chuuya drive them to the casino, instead opting for a taxi - as if the taxis that served the Port Mafia headquarters weren’t driven by mafia affiliates. A glance at the driver, and Chuuya knew the security recordings of this drive were being paused.
“I have a small Ability, a modest one,” she said. Chuuya instantly went on guard. “I can transcribe whatever I want onto a blank sheet of paper. All I have to do is to bring something to copy onto, and I can duplicate whatever I’m reading in seconds.” She scoffed. “I generally used it to send messages, but it is an effective quick-copy and transcription method as well.”
She could be a spy with that kind of Ability. Chuuya wondered if Boss intended for him to recruit her. “So that’s how you did it. That’s a useful Ability.”
Surprisingly, she brightened. “It is, isn’t it?” She flipped her letter over to the blank side of the sheet, and instantly it filled with writing. “When we first met, that’s how Alexei and I communicated. It was rather romantic at the time, in a way. He started gambling for me, you know, because I needed the money. I thought I could help him succeed somehow, and that way we both would succeed - but…” She sighed. “He never wanted to tell me what he was doing, or allow me to be involved.” She glared scornfully at Chuuya, who hadn’t even opened his mouth. “And before you say he was trying to protect me from his secret life of crime - absolutely not. He just didn’t want to think of a plan that I could be involved in, even though it was supposedly for my benefit. He just wanted me to sit and wait for results once I asked him to do something - so I did.”
Ace’s casino was on the waterfront, but instead of going up to the top, she swiped a card in the glass-walled elevator and they went down, slightly further down than Chuuya expected, and as the elevator doors open the blackness suddenly gave way to the view of an underwater office in a vault, hidden securely in Yokohama Bay. Chuuya looked around in awe at the arched ceiling and the fluttering silver fish, like birds outside the windows. Too bad some asshole like Ace had this nice office.
For a trap, it wasn’t terribly planned - they were in a confined area where he couldn’t go completely full-force with his Ability without risking dropping the entire building full of people above them. If Madame locked that vault door to the elevators behind her, Chuuya would definitely be inconvenienced for a little while, mostly figuring out how ruined his clothes would get by salt water. So he made sure to properly escort Madame Apollinaria before him into the vault, and kept an eye on her as she silently went to the desk and unlocked it with a small silver key.
Ugh, the decor in this room was so casino-tacky. Money can’t buy taste.
Madame Apollinaria took out a stack of slim dossiers from the unlocked drawer, and piled them on top of the desk. There was a surprising number of them, and she kept pulling more and more out of the drawer. Did they really have that many Ability users worth profiling? FInally, when she was done, she tossed the last one on top of the disorganized pile.
“Here’s my proof.”
This lady wasn’t a very good blackmailer at all. She was tough, and practical, but instead of squeezing him for all he was worth and withholding physical access to her blackmail materials, she was just trying to unload this information because she didn’t want it and knew it might be worth something , as if it were old silverware at an estate sale. He could almost respect that - liquidate as fast as possible on the black market, or as close to the black market as you knew to approach, take your portable wealth, and skip town.
Chuuya pinched the bridge of his nose. He was so used to dealing with hyper-manipulative people familiar with the underworld that he was overthinking it. He had expected more than an angry, desperate widow because Mori had told him to deal with it - maybe Boss just didn’t know how to handle demanding customers like Madame Apollinaria.
“I see you have a lot of stacks of paper but that’s all,” Chuuya said, coming closer. “I’m not buying anything I haven’t seen for myself.”
Madame Apollinaria put a hand on her pile of dossiers. Her hands were the beautifully-cared-for hands of a wealthy woman, but the gesture had the threatening finality of someone putting their hand on the hilt of their sword. “The information will have zero value if I just let you read it. Do you let people eat a meal in a restaurant and then decide afterwards whether or not they want to pay for it?”
“If it’s information about the Port Mafia, you aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know. You’re selling this to me because I don’t want Port Mafia secrets going to outsiders, right? So I have to know the value of what I’m buying before I can even consider a price.”
“You must be joking. I’ve given you my price; take it or leave it.”
“ You must be joking. Listen, lady,” Chuuya took off his hat and walked over to the desk; she backed away as he approached, keeping the desk between them. “You have zero negotiating power here. You have nothing that keeps me from crushing your skull right now and taking your little pile of papers. This is a waste of my time. I still don’t even have proof that you’re his wife.”
Madame Apollinaria was quiet for a minute, and the shadows of fish flew over both of them. She then asked, “Did you know my husband?”
“We worked together,” Chuuya replied, unwilling to even imply that he voluntarily spent time with Ace.
“Then perhaps you will recognize my other wedding band.”
She rapidly undid the top few buttons of her high-necked dress, and Chuuya could not entirely hide his surprise when he saw the beautiful but extremely tight choker around her neck. It was silver with a large crudely-faceted emerald centered in the hollow of her throat.
“He gave this to me the night we became engaged,” she said. Her fingers crawled along the edges of the collar, gently adjusting it for comfort against her long neck. “Once I put it on, he told me it could never be removed, and that he was pleased it was an emerald.” She sighed and dropped her hands. “I have not been able to take this off for thirteen years. I was hoping I could sell it, but I can’t figure out how to get it off.” She smiled, and the emotion in her expression was oddly ambiguous. “He told me that if I ordered him to remove it, he would do it, but I refused to give him the satisfaction.”
“What did his Ability do? ” Chuuya said urgently.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But do you believe me now?”
“Sure, lady,” Chuuya relented, finally reaching the desk with its disorganized pile of blackmail material. Now what? He grabbed the slim folder with his own name on it - nobody could get mad at him for snooping in his own leaked information, right?
The first page was simply identifying data, probably from his police records - marks, tattoos, piercings, height, weight, three sizes - wait, his three sizes? Chuuya squinted at the paper doubtfully, but perhaps this helped form a more complete three-dimensional image of the target.
Chuuya read ahead, more slowly. His years with the Sheep were condensed down into a few sentences. Shirase’s name wasn’t even important enough to be mentioned here, folded into the conflict between the GSS, the Takase Group, the Sheep, and the Port Mafia. It’s like his entire life had been narrowing inescapably down to the point where he was ejected from the Sheep - and then after he joined the Port Mafia, it expanded again.
The dossier was succinct, but his major achievements with the Port Mafia and his analysis as a Mafia member still took several pages. Reading it again, Chuuya felt vaguely proud of himself: if this was a summary of his life’s achievements thus far, he wasn’t doing too bad, was he? Maybe this is what Boss was looking at, in his cold objective way, when he decided to promote Chuuya to Executive status. Maybe Boss wasn’t just considering Arahabaki’s usefulness in a crisis - Chuuya knew he was the nuclear option for large threats, but it didn’t sit right with him to be considered useless the rest of the time. Boss enjoyed being underestimated; Chuuya himself really didn’t.
Arahabaki, to his relief, was not clearly described here in this dossier. His ability was gravity, and it was touch-based, but they didn’t seem to realize that anything he touched therefore could become a projectile. His ability to vary the intensity of his gravity control was noted, and the extremes of Arahabaki seem to have been assumed to be the upper limits of his natural gravity ability, not anything else. Good enough. There was no secret here that shouldn’t have been leaked. After all, didn’t he himself warn people about his gravity Ability?
He flipped to the front of the report and slowly reread the first sentences. There was no mention of the couple in Yamaguchi. There was no mention of Professor N, or Murase, or Adam, as if their existence was unimportant. Like every other report he’d read outside of Rimbaud’s diaries that he’d received from Mori, it was like he was born out of a peach ready to join the Port Mafia.
He shrugged, closing it again. Apollinaria Alexandrovna was standing where he’d left her at the door, but now she stood with her feet shoulder-width apart and had a pistol unwaveringly trained on him - good discipline, he noted. She’d taken lessons. But unfortunately for her, she couldn’t shoot him. It wasn’t her fault; not many people thought all the way through what a gravity-user could do with projectile weapons.
Chuuya threw the file onto the table with an elaborate shrug. “Madame, this is useless, to be honest. The police knows most of this, the government knows most of this, and my enemies certainly won’t be able to do anything with this. You can keep it, if you want. Only an idiot would buy it, but perhaps you’re only accustomed to idiots.”
“You have to buy it,” she said tightly. “You must! I will sell it to you to keep it out of the hands of my husband’s assassins.”
“Madame,” Chuuya said, and his tone of voice made her gun wobble before she re-aimed it quickly. “You have no bargaining power here, and you are wasting our time. You didn’t deserve Boss’s time, and you don’t even deserve mine. If you want to dispose of these I’ll do it for you, but I’m not going to pay money for reports from subpar private investigators. And you know you can’t take me hostage or force me to do anything.”
He deliberately broke eye contact and pushed through the pile of reports. Boss, the Executives, some of the more powerful Ability-users like Akutagawa. There were a few Mafia members with unobtrusive non-combat Abilities that did not seem to be listed here. He looked at the cover of Boss’s dossier, hesitated, and figured that if it was as poorly-done as his own, it was unlikely to tell him anything that he didn’t know. So there was no need to read it. There was no report on Dazai - hopefully because Dazai had left before Ace had joined the Mafia, not because it had been stolen.
At best, it was a limited analysis of the current offensive power of the Mafia. Perhaps if someone thought this through and figured out the limitations of each Ability - but Boss was strict about how his Ability users trained, particularly after the messes with Shibusawa, so most of them knew how to overcome their limitations. In the case of that poor motherfucker Akutagawa, he didn’t know how to improve unless someone was actively kicking his ass in the right direction, but even he had a thorough understanding of the uses and pitfalls of his own Ability. There was nobody on this short list that Chuuya truly worried about when it came to weak spots.
This was collected during the Shibusawa incidents, he realized with sudden fury. All a coward like Ace would have to do would be to hide and observe people fighting for their lives in the fog, taking notes. Possibly dictating to his wife.
“Here,” he said, opening his wallet. He put down a ten-thousand yen bill, and Madame Apollinaria stared at it. “I feel sorry for you, so I’ll pay this much.”
“This isn’t even enough to afford a bullet train ticket!”
“I don’t know, don’t buy a green car ticket, then!” he snapped back. He sighed and cracked his knuckles. “Listen. If it turns out Ace was trying to fence classified information to the Port Mafia’s enemies, no fucking wonder he’s dead and you’re clearly a potential collaborator, so you’re dead too.”
Madame Apollinaria jolted, and Chuuya was glad that she had some trigger discipline - but it also reinforced his impression that she hadn’t really made up her mind to shoot him. OK, fine, fuck it.
“Right now you have the Port Mafia, your husband’s creditors, and all his enemies to deal with.” She opened her mouth to protest her innocence in her husband’s affairs, and he spoke louder to overrule her. “Shut up and take the money and leave the information with me; that’ll get the Port Mafia off your ass as long as you’re never do something else stupid to gain our attention. If you’re clever, you can still probably escape your husband’s creditors and enemies with this much. And if you need more money - “ Chuuya smiled cruelly, “why, Madame, don’t you know a good casino? Maybe your luck will be better than your dearly departed husband’s.”
“Here you go, Boss,” Chuuya said, placing the stack of reports in front of his somewhat-cleaner and better-rested-appearing superior.
“What were your expenses? I didn’t hear that you submitted a report.”
“Oh, it was nothing, no more than 10,000Y. I had more than enough in my wallet. It’s not worth reporting.”
“Well that won’t do, Chuuya.” Mori took out his own wallet - the same pastel Pretty Cure wallet Chuuya remembered boggling at years ago when he opened it to buy ramen for squabbling teenagers, or cake for Elise - and he extracted a bank-crisp note. “Here you go. Well done.”
“I’ll put this in the drink budget for next time,” Chuuya conceded, putting it in his own wallet.
Mori patted the pile of files. “What’s in here?”
“Background files for a lot of our Ability users.”
“Oh, so she really had something! Handwritten too, how quaint. I was expecting a flash drive. How detailed are they?” Boss seemed entirely unconcerned.
“Not very,” Chuuya admitted. “I looked at mine. It was just my coolest Mafia accomplishments plus the fact that my Ability is gravity control. Nothing about Arahabaki, even. Didn’t Ace have access to Rimbaud’s notes? He was an Executive before I was, so I was expecting a little more about my background, or at least Arahabaki.”
Boss looked downright disdainful. “Ace was an Executive, indeed, but give me a little more credit than that, Chuuya. That information from Randou’s diary was intended for your eyes only.” He smiled. “Or Dazai’s, had you not been so quick to reach Executive status, but I had complete confidence in your ability to achieve what I had asked of you.”
His intense dislike of the idea of Dazai having been offered the chance to control information about his past warred with his pride at matching Dazai in their race to the top. He kept quiet, because there was no arguing with Boss about some things. Boss’s general approach, he’d learned, was “carrot or stick”, or, in Boss’s hands, something like:
- Incentive
- Blackmail
- ???
- Profit!
Or, perhaps he’d say something like, if Chuuya didn’t want Dazai to control him, he had to prove he wasn’t Dazai’s inferior through his own efforts. Fuck, Boss’s little lessons were annoying, but if he sat down and chewed it over later over a drink, he could usually make some kind of sense out of them.
“Isn’t it a problem for our current ceasefire with the other groups that one of our Executives was clearly ready and willing to fence top-secret information?”
“Oh, most of what he had to sell was meaningless, as you say, so we can just trace where it goes and see what the eventual buyer does with it.”
“But I bought - ah, shit, there’s no way his wife had the only copies.” Chuuya sighed. “What a waste of time.”
“You can’t know something is a waste of time before you investigate it. You neutralized it as a second leak, and confirmed the contents. I needed to get that information from a trustworthy source. Thank you. Well done.”
“It’s my job,” Chuuya said, partially mollified.
“If any of our ceasefire partners purchase the information, well, then that act itself could be used as pretext.”
“For restarting the fight?”
“For whatever action that we need pretext for, Chuuya. Not all damning information that you collect about others has to be acted on immediately, or ever; only when it’s maximally useful. You may learn things about people that you never have reason, or occasion, to use.” Mori smiled in what was probably meant to be a reassuring and friendly fashion. He had a number of expressions that could technically be called a smile, but meant vastly different things. “That’s part of friendship, is it not? Being aware of certain things about someone else, and not using it against them?”
Oh yeah, this was where the “blackmail” portion of his negotiation tactics came from. “I uh...admit that I have never thought about friendship like that, Boss.”
“No?” Mori said innocently.
He was unsure whether Boss was just fucking with him now. Chances were 50/50. “I guess that’s kinda true, in a way.”
The more he thought about this little mission with Madame Apollinaria, the more it bothered him. He wasn’t sure why yet. Her dossiers were accurate but limited in scope; there was nothing about the most sensitive parts of his life. That was fair - there were large gaps of information caused by the death of Dr. N and destruction of his lab, and it would be difficult for Ace or his agents to access information that both the Port Mafia and the Special Abilities Division had such a vested interest in keeping classified.
Verlaine was an eyewitness to some of Chuuya’s forgotten past, but Chuuya wanted to laugh at the idea of Ace venturing down to Verlaine’s training hall and asking Verlaine to give him the details. Verlaine would probably have shot him for his impertinence.
The feel of his hat in his hand reminded him, and he turned the brim in his hand until he could see the writing inside. The felt was warm in his hands, and though he tried, he could barely feel the metal embedded in the weave. “Boss?”
“Yes, Chuuya,” Mori said gently, matching Chuuya’s shift in mood.
Chuuya did not replace his hat upon his head. “Do you think about the past, Boss?”
“I do, but not over-much. I don’t have the kind of Ability that lets me redo the past, so past a certain point it’s wasted energy to ruminate too long. If you build a house, you have to lay a foundation. If you climb a staircase, you have to climb the first few stairs. It’s a fundamental part of the process. Maybe there are obvious mistakes that you can see now, and it’s frustrating and humiliating to know that you made mistakes. But if you can’t move forward, or even want to go backwards, that’s the error to avoid. The past might explain how you got here, but it doesn’t have to dictate where you go from here.”
“Wow,” Chuuya said.
“I got that one from a fortune box at a shrine,” Boss replied dismissively and untruthfully.
Chuuya frowned. “But your past choices might limit your future options. So how can you not look back when you don’t know what to do? Don’t you wonder what might have happened if you’d chosen differently?”
Boss paused. Then he answered, “This time I am going to borrow from an English Ability user I had to neutralize some years ago: ‘ No one is ever told what would have happened .’”
Chuuya knew that, but still - “But you always think things all the way through, Boss, so you probably do know what would have happened. You always have your additional measures in place, right?” Mori did not deny this, but looked almost smug, which was better than that intense stare. Sometimes, Boss was in the mood to accept flattery. “When you took me into the Port Mafia, for example. I remember you saying that. What were you going to do if I turned out to be uncontrollable or hostile?”
His boss smiled in his shark-like way. “Oh, I’d grab you with Elise-chan because I knew you wouldn’t immediately react with violence against a child, have Dazai disable you while you were distracted, put you into deep sedation and…” He uncharacteristically trailed off with a frown. He looked down at the gory photos of dead casino staff in front of him, lost in thought for a minute.
Chuuya smoked and waited, sliding down in his chair to get more comfortable. He tried not to ask Boss boring questions, and Boss sure was a talker when he was interested in the question. Sometimes it was worth asking.
Boss emerged heavily from the depths of his thoughts. “I’d probably dispose of you immediately so no other enemy group got ahold of you or recruited you.” He nodded, but was still frowning behind the steeple of his fingers. “Verlaine’s little visit was exhausting enough. Neither I nor the Port Mafia can sacrifice that much manpower to neutralize such powerful threats in direct combat every year or two.”
Chuuya nodded. Mori still seemed to be thinking.
“But...maybe I wouldn’t have killed you, just in case you might be more open to negotiation later. It works sometimes. I put Kyuusaku and Verlaine under house arrest, after all, for all the good that did.” He seemed surprised but not entirely displeased as he dropped his hands to the table and looked up from his photos again. ”You’ve caught me! It is hard for me to know with certainty what I would have done, knowing as I do now how big a waste it would have been to dispose of you.” He sighed, and shook his head ruefully. “But murder’s simply the logical answer here, so that's certainly what I would have done.”
Chuuya hesitated. “You wouldn’t have turned me back over to the scientists?”
“I have not been impressed by the finesse of government researchers,” Mori said vaguely but neutrally. “Now? Absolutely not. Then? Hm.” He tilted his head side to side. “Hmmmm. Hmmm? Hmmm. No. We didn’t have the resources at the time to do our own Ability research, and we couldn’t have turned you over to anyone who already had an Ability research team at the time, because those would be military or government groups. I tend to agree with Verlaine on their methods.”
Although that was what he had expected to hear, it was still reassuring to hear it said out loud. It was hard to even think about the labs. “I was just a kid. Didn’t that make any difference to you when you were making your plan B?”
Mori looked surprised. “You were the powerful leader of a rival group, Chuuya. You’re physically much stronger than I, and let’s not embarrass me by comparing our Abilities. How could I not take you seriously? Why do you think I tried to recruit you at all? It’s not because I wanted playmates for Dazai.”
“Yes you did, Boss.”
“Maybe a little,” Boss smiled impishly. “My apologies.”
“Yeah, whatever, I know,” Chuuya waved it off in good humor.
“To be honest, it is not my usual habit to make an offer to someone more than once. But, as I knew, you have been more than worth the effort we put into recruiting and retaining you.” Mori said. The colored overhead lights reflected red in the depths of his eyes. “Let me ask you, then, since we are wondering what might have happened : what would you have done if I’d simply given you all the Mafia’s information on your past as soon as you joined?”
“Oh, I know that, I think.” He took a second to steady his voice. “I was all alone back then; I had lost the Sheep, and the Port Mafia meant nothing to me other than having met you and shitty Dazai and Rimbaud. Rimbaud was dead, Dazai is a bastard, and you were…I think I was intimidated after actually talking to you,” he admitted. Boss probably knew all this, but it didn’t make it any less embarrassing to admit. “I wouldn’t have known what to do with that information about myself, or what to do with my life. I probably would have gone back to the slums and….I don’t know, honestly.”
He was pensive for a bit, rubbing his thumbs against the rough felt brim of his hat. He knew what the answer was; he was just being chickenshit. So he said firmly, “So...if you had given me all that information about my past and nothing else, I would have become like Verlaine, with no friends, nobody to trust, and nobody to stop me.” He laughed roughly. “Both you and Verlaine were right about what’s important to me. I do need a family.”
Mori closed the folder he was examining and smoothed it carefully. “You seem to have a lot on your mind today. Do you want to discuss it?”
Chuuya knew what he had to ask about now. “Can I ask you about a certain surveillance mission you sent me on some years ago?”
“You may,” Mori said. “Have you talked to Verlaine about anything that happened back then?”
“What the hell could I say to him?” That felt unpleasantly honest. He should have stuck to ‘No, Boss.’ Oh well, he might as well keep going. “I understand why he did what he did, but he killed the Flags and old man Murase and half of our men! He tried to kill you and Adam! Plus - even if he were just some assassin - it’s weird,” he admitted. “He wants to be my brother, but has no idea how human beings feel. I know he wants to protect me, but I don’t know him or feel anything for him personally, so it’s like having a fucked-up godfather or something, not a brother.” He frowned, cleared his throat. “I do wish I had had more time to talk to Murase once I knew the full story. Dammit. He was all right, for a cop.”
“I am sorry it turned out that way,” Mori said, sounding as humanly sincere as it was probably possible for him. “They were all tragic but necessary losses. We needed the time to prepare our counterattack. It was an existential crisis for the Port Mafia and Yokohama, and it was too important to risk losing.”
“And a direct threat to you.” Chuuya waited for Boss to point out the obvious, that everyone who had been in danger had been targeted due to their proximity and importance to Chuuya. Chuuya himself knew it. That wasn’t his fault; that was crazy fucker Verlaine’s fault. But still, it was hard not to feel a little guilt.
But Mori sighed instead. “Verlaine likes high-profile targets, does he not? He targeted me to destroy the Port Mafia. That is a target he would have likely gone after, even had you not been involved. And for the preservation of the Port Mafia, I prioritized as I felt was necessary.”
Maybe some people wouldn’t have accepted his plea of necessity. Back when he was the so-called leader of the Sheep, Chuuya would only have considered anger, hatred, and retaliation as a response. Anything less would have seemed…disloyal? to the relationships he’d had with the dead. But Chuuya wasn’t a dumb sixteen year old brat anymore, and he’d had some years to think a little harder about why things had happened the way they did.
He sighed deeply, letting his shoulders go limp to drain the tension out of himself. Anesan kept nagging him about that. “I know, Boss. Thanks for trying to answer. I know there isn’t a great answer sometimes.”
Mori cleared his throat. “You forget, I also wasn’t going to let Verlaine abduct you without a fight,” he said, back to his usual calm inscrutability. “You are Mafia, and therefore what affects you affects all of us. I hope you believe that.”
“I know, Boss.”
“Good.”
Fuck, maybe he still was that angry sixteen-year-old. Some things couldn’t help but turn him into that guy again. “That motherfucker Dazai, though. He sure is cavalier about making clever fucking plans that send my friends to the chopping block to serve the greater good. Just because he didn’t have any friends of his own to lose - “
“He came up with the idea on the fly, but I did allow it,” Mori interrupted gravely. He did not look visibly uncomfortable but Chuuya could tell that he was not entirely at ease with this conversation. But he was not bringing an end to the discussion, so Chuuya plowed ahead.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, his idea, your ultimate responsibility, whatever. Sacrifices have to be made sometimes, of course I fucking know that, but he never even apologized for his role in any of it!” He realized he was crushing the brim of his hat and hastily reshaped it before putting it back on his head.
Mori’s expression got colder. “As I have told you, I don’t apologize for doing what is necessary for the good of the Mafia. It is difficult for me to expect differently of Dazai as a result.”
Chuuya laughed outright, breaking the tension. “Boss, you did apologize to me. Like two minutes ago.”
“Oh! So I did.”
“It was probably, uh, the optimal solution for the time. I know that. I do. Just! The dead have no feelings, but the living do, so thanks for noticing mine.” He was reminded of a particular interaction between the cyborg Adam Frankenstein and his probably-human Boss and smiled involuntarily despite the overall sadness of the memory.
“How’s the good Inspector?”
“Holy shit, how do you do that?” Chuuya said, startled into rudeness. Did Boss remember everything he’d ever said? Mori smirked in response. “Last I heard, he and Eve are fine. I think he wants to visit again, but Eve’s too busy right now....”
Wait wait wait, he was getting led off topic. He had his foot in the door and was going to finish his questions while Boss was in a chatty mood, and not let Boss distract him with any of his usual tricks.
He took a deep breath, composed himself. “So why did you send me on that mission to Yamaguchi six years ago?”
“That’s where the trails of your past led.”
“Yeah, but - “ Chuuya didn’t know how he wanted to phrase this. Why didn’t Mori tell him what to do about it? Why did he just tell him to go all the fuck the way out to Yamaguchi, but without clear instructions to liquidate or interrogate the target? After all that trouble, all Chuuya was told was that this was a surveillance mission, to be handled as he saw fit.
And he saw fit to wash his hands of all of it, in the end. And Mori had never questioned his decision on the matter.
As far as he knew, that couple was still living out their life in Yamaguchi, waking up, folding up the futons, eating breakfast together, laughing, a complete unit of two, nothing missing.
He made a sincere effort to relax his face.
Mori began reordering the photographs and folders in front of himself, then visibly stopped himself and steepled his fingers, leaning back in his chair to make eye contact with Chuuya. “When you become an Executive of the Port Mafia,” he said, “I have some expectations of you. I expect you to act independently when you can, consult with me if you need to, and to keep the Port Mafia’s interests - which is to say Yokohama’s general interests - higher than any personal ones.”
“Yes, Boss.”
Mori then spoke very simply and directly. “You were at a turning point back then. A lot had just happened. You had lost much, and you had hopefully gained much in return. Self-examination is painful, and can lead a person to becoming alienated from themselves. I wanted to give you the chance to keep going. So I thought it might help you to think of the question of your identity like an open-ended assignment.”
Chuuya blinked.
“I wanted your honest assessment of these people in Yamaguchi, and I simply trusted you to deal with the situation appropriately. We don’t even know who exactly those people are to you. Our information on the program you were involved in - “ Chuuya appreciated the careful re-phrasing, “That is to say, the information Rimbaud collected in the months prior to his death is so incomplete.
“It is completely natural to have weaknesses and fears, but this kind of existential uncertainty can be a corrosive weakness. Once you have asked those kinds of questions about your place in the world, you must find a way to answer it to your own satisfaction, or it may kill you. But to answer questions to your own satisfaction , I can’t hand the answers to you. Other people can offer you ideas on how to think about it, but you have to think for yourself.”
Mori fell silent. Chuuya stared at him mutely, but Boss said nothing else other than: “So tell me again, since it’s on your mind again: what did you think?”
Chuuya sighed and tried to organize his scrambled emotions into a logical series of thoughts and actions. “Well...fuck, I don’t know. This is hard. They were living their own lives. Their lives went on without me, and it’s not like my life didn’t go on without them, but…at the same time, it’s hard to swallow that...there are people who you’re supposed to have a bond with who don’t care if you’re there with them or not. It’s not personal - I don’t know these people - but damn, it’s hard sometimes.”
Boss nodded. Chuuya didn’t know if he truly understood, but he was at least listening.
“At first I had lots of obvious questions. Like...did they give me up on purpose? Did they sell me? Was I kidnapped or stolen? Was it...me or the other guy?” He looked at Boss, who had folded his hands and was listening attentively. Now he had to know, or at least ask. “Do you know whether it was me or the other guy?”
Boss’s gaze was steady and calm, and Chuuya watched him closely. The first time he asked might be the only time he’d get a hint at his honest reaction.
“I don’t care if it was you or ‘the other guy’ who originally came from the Nakahara family of Yamaguchi. You are the one here right now, and so you are the one I am concerned with.” He frowned. “But if there’s a baseball team’s worth of you out there somewhere, I should probably collect them for the company team. Director Taneda would be so angry for the government team to get crushed out on the field by the Port Mafia.” Chuuya laughed awkwardly past the lump in his throat.
Mori continued kindly but inexorably. “Chuuya, normally I focus on provable fact instead of romantic fancy to answer a difficult question, so let’s do that here. Abilities are currently outside of the realm of science, and so is the soul. But we can use indirect evidence and logic too. If we understand anything scientific about Abilities, it’s that they require a soul to host them. If you were born with an Ability, or if an Ability could be planted in you and thrive, that’s all the empirical evidence needed to demonstrate that you have a human soul.
“We can even attempt to define the soul vis-à-vis Abilities themselves - whatever the soul is, that is what Abilities judge as ‘necessary’ for the functioning of an Ability, and it is a quality unique to ‘humans’ and can be used to identify them when present. We don’t have the capability to measure or weigh or describe the soul, or to quantify its components into monads or whatever may end up being the correct fundamental units of the soul. But that used to be how we thought of physical objects as well before we knew about atoms. So maybe one day we will have something we can see and measure; for now we have logic.”
Chuuya looked down at his own chest, and saw the tail ends of his tie. “So, if I have an Ability, I’m human, and the provenance is irrelevant.”
“That’s where my own thought process leads me. You are welcome to disagree; it has to be your own decision after all.”
“And if I didn’t have an Ability?”
Mori shrugged. “If you didn’t have an Ability, would you even be here right now? Maybe you’d still be in Yamaguchi.”
“Or in a lab.”
“Or a university student, or working in Hirotsu’s squad. No one is ever told what would have happened , hm?”
Chuuya smoked and thought about it for the duration of one cigarette, which was his usual timer for allowing himself to be upset. Boss watched him for a few seconds, and then returned to writing whatever he had been working on. When Chuuya ran out of cigarette he was not done thinking, so he mouthed his soggy cigarette butt for a minute until he realized what he was doing. Before he could put it in an envelope for later disposal, Boss slid over his empty beer can without pausing his writing. He dropped the butt inside.
He thought some more, and then slammed his hands decisively on the table, causing Mori to drop his pen. “Fuck! Okay, I think I’ve decided what I think. Do I have to tell you?”
“No,” Mori said. He looked pleased, though startled. “I just wanted you to think about it. I am satisfied if you do that much.”
“One last question, then?”
“Just one, I suppose.”
He got up, walked around the table, and held out his arm. “What’s this?”
Boss took Chuuya’s wrist and bent over, poking and prodding at the small bluish scar. “What about it?”
“I remember - I think I remember getting this as a child. Getting in a fight in school. Or, perhaps it's ‘Nakahara's’ memory? But it feels real to me, and - Dazai said that once I used Corruption, there shouldn’t be any memories left of the time before Arahabaki was implanted - ”
Boss pressed his thumb on the black mark, hard enough that Chuuya’s skin blanched under the pressure, and lifted it. He stared down at Chuuya’s wrist with a neutral expression. Then he smiled. “You probably got into a fight with someone much bigger than you are.”
“Unfortunately, that’s usually the case,” Chuuya grumbled, still offended at the unfairness of the world when it came to height. “What do you think?”
Boss looked at Chuuya’s wrist some more. “Well,” he said at last. “If you got stabbed with a pencil hard enough to leave graphite in your dermis, that’s functionally a tattoo, is it not. If it’s a tattoo made to look like you got stabbed with a pencil, it’s also still a tattoo. I don’t know for sure which kind of tattoo without, hmm,” he made a circle around the spot with his fingertip, “cutting this area out and analyzing it for graphite vs. tattoo ink.” He looked up at Chuuya and let go of his wrist. “And, as I said, it doesn’t matter. But if you request it, I can arrange that biopsy for you.”
“Nah,” Chuuya said, satisfied by this response. “But you have a guess which it is, don’t you, Boss.” He thought of Boss calmly testing Ace’s biometrics to confirm his death, peering into those motionless eyeballs to see the striations of his irises.
“I do. Do you want me to tell you?”
“Nah. It doesn’t matter. But as long as you know and are fine with it, I’m fine with it.”
Boss’s honest smile briefly reached even his tired eyes. He idly opened his own dossier to the first page, and he suddenly beamed and held it up.
“Look, Chuuya! It was mind control after all!”