Archive of Our Own

Nishiki goes to great lengths to make his person a disarming one. When Kiryu's around its this: a softening around all edges, just-there touches on his elbow, these looks like he can't really believe Kiryu's here now, and open-mouth kisses behind closed doors. A picture snapshot of Kiryu's late night prison fantasies birthed in ten years worth of touch starvation, taken and given and gift-wrapped.

But despite what many might think of him, Kiryu isn't a fool. Aside from the sweetness, Kiryu notices this: when Nishiki enters a room it ushers in an oppressive silence, men flinch, avert their eyes, and stiffen their shoulders. A severe sort of nervousness spreads in waves whenever he raises his voice. His men are deferential to the point of caricature, in a way that speaks to how Nishiki without Kiryu is authoritarian, and agrees far too much with violence.

No matter how much Nishiki obfuscates, Kiryu is keenly aware that this is no longer the man he once knew. Kiryu's own crimes don't lie in ignorance.

There is sometimes a sort of inevitably to the way things happen; a succession of events that fall into each other before anyone can catch up. People unwillingly fall into actions and mistakes as often as they fall in and out of each other. It's the circumstance, it's the current, and who's to say where choice gets lost and blurred.

The thing is Kiryu has never been one to get caught up in the tide.

In prison, Kiryu has this: seven paces either which way, a bed, and silence. A letter of expulsion and nine long years of solitude. The first twelve months of which he found himself hoping for visitors regardless of family decorum around visiting a murderer, expelled. This ends by month thirteen, where he cycles through the grief, the bargaining, the anger, until he finally lands around acceptance.

His lonely incarceration becomes easier once he stops expecting the guards to ever call out his name; the anxiety around visiting hours then dissipates. He settles into habit, the easiest of things to settle into, and understands with an outstanding lack of horror that this will be his life.

Kiryu's life is no visitors, seven paces either which way, a bed, and silence. He accepts this and is an exemplary prisoner and it allows him to barter kindness from the guards; more books and magazines, extra time outside. Very rarely do they give him trouble about lights out.

These are the things Kiryu concerns himself with throughout his days. Days that bleed into one another until they are weeks, then months, and before he knows it Kiryu is thirty years old, and hasn't seen anyone he considers friend or family in a very long time.

At night it is unavoidable to think of it. He thinks of his past life, a life before habit and before age thirty spent keeping his head down in a solitary cell. He has hundreds of different imagined scenarios that he can call upon like plucking a file. Imagined fantasies full-formed with their repeated use, that he can slip into.

He often imagines that Nishiki has found Yumi, and that everything has worked itself out despite Shinji's panicked last message to him. He imagines her receiving the help she needs and returning safely to Reina's side at Serena. Other times he imagines she's finding a life elsewhere, outside of the reach of the Tojo Clan and is better off for it.

He spends quite a bit of time imagining Nishiki. There was once a time Nishiki declared to him he had no interest in rising through the ranks of the Tojo Clan without Kiryu there. For his sake, Kiryu hopes that isn't true, he hopes that Nishiki has not fallen to the melancholies he was so often prone to. Nishiki is his kyodai, a person so important that Kiryu is willing to do this: no visitors, seven paces, and so many long hours of maddening quiet.

Kiryu imagines Nishiki in his memory teary-eyed and scared. He imagines him smiling and charming and yet still rude. He imagines comforting him and being comforted. At night, once the guards finish their rounds he slips a hand under the elastic band of his underwear, and strokes himself to memory of encounters long passed and imagined new ones. Sex they didn't get to try and words they didn't say because of a terrible list of things that now seem to Kiryu inconsequential.

He imagines their reunion a hundred which ways, he imagines it so often he can fancy Nishiki is in the room with him. So clear are his reconstructions that in difficult periods Kiryu talks aloud to them.

Weeks pass and then months, and then years, and suddenly it has been nine years that Kiryu lives like this in habit and in a cell and mostly alone.

The disruption to his prison life happens here at the nine-year mark, though it is not exactly nine-years. It is somewhere between the months and the days but what is most important is that Kiryu has already resigned himself to solitude and when visiting hours arrive, he follow his pattern and absconds. He has already gone through grief, and has long accepted that the hours of six-to-seven are better spent in his cell, than among the nervousness that builds among the other men in anticipation of waiting wives, lovers and children.

As he stands, a guard approaches him, "Kiryu-san, you have a visitor."

He sounds surprised; so is Kiryu.

His instinctual reaction is apprehension, always natural to the unfamiliar, and his first thought is that the only reason anyone would come to see him would be to bring bad news. Someone has passed and this is a courtesy visit for that which cannot be delivered in a dispassionate letter. Though Kiryu's never gotten letters either.

Kiryu finds the walk to the visiting room unusual, and has no preparation for what awaits him on the other side of the door. But when he sees him it kicks in another underlaid habit; cuts through the films of prison down to the core of him to where he is brat, orphan and kyodai.

Nishiki sits on the other side of glass, legs crossed and casual but no, it doesn't feel casual. Maybe it's the new suit, or perhaps the slicked back hair, but this Nishiki is his Nishiki with an added air of severity about him. Kiryu's mind begins working overtime to fill in the gaps.

"Long time no see, Kiryu," Nishiki says.

Nine years, some weeks and months give or take. It takes Kiryu an inordinate amount of time to breathe, to sit, to act normal through his shock. Nishiki nods his head, and the security guard leaves them alone and that's not policy - a bribe, he imagines.

"Nishiki…What are you doing here?"

"Are you not happy to see me?"

"No," Kiryu says quickly, "I am."

Just looking at him sates some sort of hunger in him, one he had ignored for coping's sake. Nishiki smiles, and it is so acutely handsome, that Kiryu thinks he would be fine to sit there in silence and simply look at him.

Nishiki's staring too, staring until his smile falters and his gaze becomes heavier and contemplative, "You look the same," he says.

Kiryu's never had any reason to feel self-conscious about his shaved head, about whatever age and weight he's put on in prison, but for the first time he finds himself considering it.

"You look the same too," Kiryu says, "The same but different. What's with the hair?"

"I've had it this way for years, you've missed a lot."

Kiryu's first instinct is that he doesn't like the change. He had always thought Nishiki with his hair down was beautiful; it framed his face nicely and gave him a delicate sort of sensibility. This new haircut is cut slick and maybe that's where all the severity is coming from, but no, that's not it.

It is that Nishiki's gaze on him is more calculating than he's ever seen it. He takes out a carton of cigarettes and lights up.

"What do you say I catch you up?" he says.

This visit goes by with Nishiki outlining certain events dispassionately to him: Yuko's death, Yumi's continued disappearance, the start of the Nishikiyama family. He goes through three cigarettes telling the tale and with his gaze fixed on the wall behind Kiryu. Kiryu knows enough to know there are details missing, holes in the story, that something about it all doesn't make sense.

Kiryu doesn't feel he can ask questions when visits are timed and limited and because he feels he's out of practice, in a sense. The moment he thinks as much the guard returns to tell them Kiryu has to go back to his cell.

Before he gets up, Kiryu manages to say this: "That didn't answer my question, why are you here? Why now?"

Nishiki contemplates this with a serious press of his lips, more serious than Kiryu remembers and now he knows it must come with being a Patriarch.

Nishiki answers, "You'll be getting out soon and things are different now. I wanted to get to you first."

First? Before who? Kiryu can't ask the question because the guard is upset now, "I said time's up", and Kiryu is escorted out the door.

Perhaps the answer should have been more worrying to him, but at the end of the day Nishiki is his kyodai, his most important person, and those kinds of concerns can't outweigh that. Their reunion at the end of the day is still a gift, and that night he feels the now unfamiliar warmth of real company.