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The hansom bumps along the cobblestone as Barok and his apprentice stare straight ahead in silence. Neither of them can speak. Asogi from what Barok hopes is shame, himself from the humiliation.
There’s something else, of course. Buried deep under all those layers of humiliation he’s spent nearly forty years accumulating, something he can’t even bring himself to name. It had nearly stopped him from coming to Scotland Yard tonight. Every word of the report had been a consecutive stab in the gut. Asogi, K., Regent Street, Misdemeanor Gross Indecency.
He’d come anyway. As deep as he’s buried it, nothing can stop Barok moving heaven and earth for Kazuma Asogi.
Eventually he finds the nerve to speak. “Mr. Asogi,” he says, voice stiff and hard-edged.
His apprentice answers just as curtly. “Sir.”
Barok draws a heavy breath in and out. “I cannot stop your thoughts,” he says. Lord knows, the thoughts cannot be stopped. For that he empathizes. “But you cannot indulge them so foolishly. You will not do so again.”
“I don’t see how that’s your decision,” Asogi replies.
“It becomes my decision, Mr. Asogi,” snaps Barok, “when my apprentice risks my reputation so frivolously, on a wretched vice.”
“Frivolously.” Asogi snorts. “Spoken like a man who’s never needed such a vice.”
Barok clenches his teeth. He is exactly the sort of man who’s needed such a vice; in fact, this vice in particular. But he’s had the strength to live without it. It enrages him that Asogi has given in. To argue this, though, would place Barok on ground little better than his opponent, and it’s ground he’s long feared to tread.
This doesn’t follow. Does his self-restraint come from strength, or from fear? Even in his train of thought Barok can’t seem to decide. He’s not fit to argue this case, and he’s furious at Asogi for forcing him to.
He looks at his wayward apprentice for the first time since they left the station.
At first glance, England has changed Asogi. He wears his hair combed back now under a fine cap, has grown a smooth mustache above that strong, determined mouth. He looks older and wiser, more refined, more genteel. But he still has the defiant posture of the young man he’d been, who’d set aside everything including morality to cross countries in search of the truth. The fire in his eyes has remained the same. Especially tonight.
“I will not live in fear,” says Asogi to Barok’s silence, head held high. “I’ll continue to indulge myself as I see fit, no matter your opinion.”
“And when you’re arrested again?”
Asogi is silent, but Barok knows what he wants to say.
“You’re flaunting your privilege,” he snaps. “There are men taken in every day with no well-respected prosecutor to pull rank for them.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Asogi hisses back. “They’re my friends.”
His lovers surely among them, Barok thinks again. It’s a significant amount of what he’s been able to think tonight. The thought feels like acid in his throat.
“I enjoy the respect that I do because I’ve cultivated it,” he says. “I haven’t spent my time flouting the law.”
Asogi pauses.
“You know we’re all good men,” he says quietly.
He has nothing left now but appeal to emotion, it seems. At any other time, Barok would be heartened to hear him refer to himself as a good man. “You know as well as I do that one can be good and not innocent,” he says tonight.
“But we are that as well!” Asogi replies, inflamed. “Innocent of harm to anyone or anything. Guilty only of self-acceptance and indifference to the law against it!”
“Guilty of gross immorality!” This argument for self-acceptance has always given Barok a bad taste in his mouth. Sin and folly are what make humans what they are. The work of refining and resisting and reining in is as close to holy work as they can get. Has Asogi not remained here to confront the darkness in his nature? What is this if not darkness? “I thought you aimed to free yourself of demons.”
“There are worse demons than love, sir!”
“Love!” Barok scoffs. “Strong words for a streetside stranger.”
Asogi remains stubborn. “I have love for all of us.”
Us. This is what has tempted Barok over the years, more than love, more than sex. Connection and community. Is it strength to reject it? Is it fear? Is it both? Whatever it is—the promise of Kazuma Asogi’s love has it wavering.
But none of that matters. The situation is immutable. “Regardless of your feelings," says Barok, "you have just avoided criminal charges by the skin of your teeth.” By the way he’s speaking, Asogi could use reminding. “Has it escaped your notice that you work to enforce the law?”
“Sir,” says Asogi evenly. “You know as well as I do that the law is fallible.”
The heavy implication hangs between them, of the abuse and betrayal at the hands of British justice that had brought them together. There’s nothing made by men that’s invulnerable to corruption. Both of them have known that deeply for some years now.
“What, then?” replies Barok. “We abandon it?”
“In this particular case, yes, we do.”
“The law does not depend upon the petty whims of young men.”
“Of course not. Only the petty whims of old ones.”
There is nothing Barok can say to dispute this. They fall back into tense silence.
As they arrive at Asogi’s boarding house, he finally speaks again. “Know this,” he says. “If you’re charged again, I won’t step in for you.”
Asogi finally turns to look intently into his eyes.
"Knowing you," he says, "I can’t imagine that’s true. I’ll just have to continue indulging myself to find out.”
The urge to slap him boils within Barok for one sickening moment.
“It will never be my intention to disgrace you.” Asogi reaches over to touch Barok’s hand for an electric, infuriating second before lifting the door of the cab. “But perhaps if you spent more time with your own desires, you might have more sympathy for those of us who don’t reject ours.”
Speechless and frozen, Barok watches him climb out of the cab and turn back to bow.
“Thank you, sir,” says Asogi, polite and distant as ever. “I am in your debt.”
The hansom departs.
Jaw clenched, Barok forces himself to breathe. For years now Asogi has set him on edge with his gaze. Turned him paranoiac with the sense that he knew. He has been comforting himself with the delusion that his apprentice just has a wise-looking face, but those last words… There is no misinterpreting them. Asogi has read him like a book. God knows how long ago he has.
He shakily runs his fingertips over the back of his hand, where Asogi’s had touched him.
Barok knows the worst of all this is what his mind will take from it. The thought of Kazuma Asogi embracing the Regent Street man. The fantasy of Kazuma Asogi embracing him. All the wants and the wonderings that will surely haunt his dreams. His lovely apprentice has been on his mind for years, of course. Ever since he'd first come to him, since their eyes had met through the mask. But never had it truly been real. Never had he even dared imagine it might be real.
He stares out over the back of the horse in the night, trying his hardest to still his traitorous heart.