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Kazuma has had a number of reasons to put off returning to Japan all these years, all of them weak and shameful. Fear of a number of things. His friends’ happiness, his own inadequacy, remembering his long-gone life before. And beneath them all, most humiliatingly: fear of the steamship ride that would take him there.
These days he doesn’t even like to drink too much lest the floor begin to sway. The closest he has ever come to a happy journey at sea is the time he spent breathing coal dust in the boiler room. And now he is an English prosecutor of some standing, traveling on a noble’s dime, which means he will be staying again in a first-class private cabin. Like the one where he nearly died. Like the one where he nearly killed a man.
Like the proud bastard he is, Kazuma doesn’t admit it until he and Van Zieks are on the open ocean.
The seasickness hits him worse than the fear at first. Perhaps it’s all one and the same. He thinks so many years on dry land avoiding this have spoiled him, have made it worse than it could have been. He thinks little else after this but of how ill he feels.
“You’re being preposterous,” Van Zieks tells him sternly, a firm hand on his back as he vomits. “We’ll disembark at Dunkirk and go by train.”
Kazuma wipes his mouth on his handkerchief. “We will not,” he rasps. “I will get along like everyone else does.”
“Asogi.”
There was a time, one or two years ago, that Kazuma could have asked Van Zieks to call him by first name. Around that time he’d come to realize that he’d found a partner instead of the teacher he’d someday intended to leave. They had been much more than a master and apprentice for some time then; they’d become friends and confidants, allies and equals.
He hadn’t been brave enough. Now the time has passed. If Barok van Zieks were a different man, Kazuma’s near-arrest could have brought them closer. But he is the man he is: dark and distant and unprepared to face himself. Now facing Kazuma must feel the same to him. They haven’t been friends or confidants in the same way since.
As he kneels here pathetically on the deck, he imagines his name on his mentor’s sharp tongue. Kazuma.
Kazuma…
The way that feels is an argument against it too.
Frankly he’s surprised that Van Zieks had still wanted to come along. The invitation was one of the first things Kazuma had said to him as himself, and he’d said it more or less rhetorically. His working theory is guilt. This isn’t a giant leap—many of the things Barok van Zieks does are due to guilt in some form or another. But Kazuma knows how much responsibility he still struggles with for condemning Genshin Asogi. He can imagine Van Zieks taking the chance to visit his homeland. Pay his respects. Apologize.
He’s often wondered whether his continued employment is part of the same guilt. How much obligation does Van Zieks feel to care for his old friend's son? It’s been several years, after all, and for most of them he has had very little to teach. Does he feel he needs to keep an eye on Kazuma even across continents?
In his years with Van Zieks their relationship has become an uncomfortable muddle of many. One part teacher, one part friend, one part friend of his father’s. One shrinking but significant part ghost of the past. It’s difficult to navigate. Occasionally, Kazuma wonders whether Van Zieks has less trouble. Does he consider him more of a student, a charge to be looked after? Or does he consider Kazuma his equal? Does he, too, confuse them day to day?
At the moment Kazuma is feeling particularly condescended to. He is thirty damn years old and resents being ordered about. But he also knows his stubbornness could lead him straight off a cliff if left unchecked. Is he being treated like a child, or is he acting like one?
He stands and takes his hat back from Van Zieks with trembling fingers. Like the proud bastard he is, he places it purposefully back on his head and lifts his chin. “See?” he says forcefully. “I’ll get along fine.”
The nausea subsides after the first day. The anxiety remains. Kazuma hasn’t slept at all by breakfast the next morning, and when he tries to go above deck for air he can’t bring himself to stay.
He wants to love the sea breeze. It reminds him of Japan. Of his childhood home, on the bluff overlooking the ocean. In London the water is flat and brown, and to be sprayed with it is an annoyance rather than a pleasure. But he can’t enjoy the view here. To look at the water on a ship is to see himself stranded, nothing but sea on every side.
Ryunosuke had dreamed about the ocean view from the wardrobe while they’d crossed together. He was adventurous enough to revel in that sort of thing. Kazuma had paid a fellow passenger for use of her camera to bring back a photograph for him at least—he’d done so many things for Ryunosuke at least those weeks, the horrid way he’d been forced to travel.
Now, it's one more memory for the open ocean to force him to relive.
The second night, the wind whips water against the wall of the ship and and nothing works to settle Kazuma’s mind. When he buries himself in his blankets the nervous energy just builds. When he throws them off and paces his cabin, he just fuels it. There are no rocky beaches to wade in by moonlight here, no city streets to walk up and down. White-faced and shaking on the open sea, there is nothing else to do.
When he gets like this he’s reminded of his mother, and her fate becomes one more thing to fear.
Eventually it overtakes him. He lies flat on his back and weeps between shallow gasps. Once they start coming he can’t stop them, and Kazuma is so used to fighting it that to let his panic have its way with him comes somehow as a relief.
Relief, at least, until there is a sharp knock on the door. He jumps but cannot bring himself to answer. Another knock follows.
“Mr. Asogi,” calls Van Zieks from outside. “Mr. Asogi. Open the door at once.”
Kazuma frantically tries to tame his breathing. Van Zieks cannot see him in this state, he cannot.
He’s knocking again. “Asogi, so help me, I will get a crewman—"
The thought of getting any more people involved is even worse, so Kazuma scrambles off the bed to unlatch the door for Barok van Zieks. The prosecutor is standing there in his dressing gown, thick old book raised like he’d been about to knock with it again.
Kazuma’s breath is still wild and uncontrolled, his face still humiliatingly tear-streaked. Van Zieks steps in and shuts the door. “I can hear you next door through the vent,” he says quietly. “Are you quite alright?”
He realizes at once this is a foolish question. Without hesitation, he seizes Kazuma around the shoulders and pulls him tightly against his chest.
They stand there for some minutes, until Kazuma’s open sobs lessen into slow, measured breaths. This isn’t something they’ve done before. Contact has been limited to the professional. Their emotional contact has been so as well, of course, so that may have been the reason why, but regardless of circumstances—Kazuma struggles to imagine Van Zieks hugging anyone in his life.
“There’s no need for you to take care of me,” he mumbles. “I’m not a child.”
“Mr. Asogi, there’s nothing more childish than insisting so.”
Kazuma laughs weakly into the prosecutor’s shoulder. “That’s exactly what I knew you’d say.”
“What was it?” asks Van Zieks. “That unsettled you so?”
There’s no use being a proud bastard now. “The sea unsettles me,” Kazuma says. “And the ship.”
“I assume you still refuse to leave it, as I’ve already proposed?”
“If I can get through now, I’ll get through easier the next time,” says Kazuma. “That’s the way it’s always been.”
Van Zieks releases him and sighs.
“If you’re dead set on torturing yourself,” he says, “then you must find a way to make it easier.”
“Don’t want to do this every night, do you?”
“You’ve a strong spirit, Mr. Asogi, if you’re still able to be as impertinent as usual.” Van Zieks inspects the bookshelf in the moonlight from the porthole. “Why don’t you read? Occupy your mind.”
An interesting insight into the Barok van Zieks method of avoidance, Kazuma thinks. “Is that what you were up to, then?” he asks. He can read the cover of the book the prosecutor had been striking his door with. Embossed in silver: Moby-Dick.
Van Zieks turns, lifting the book in his hand to look over it himself. “My brother’s American edition of The Whale,” he mumbles, looking faintly embarrassed. “A favorite of his I’d never read. I—thought an extended journey at sea would be a good excuse.”
“It would be,” says Kazuma. “There’s certainly nothing else to do.”
Just having a conversation has distracted him immensely. He should have thought of that himself. Kazuma can hear Ryunosuke in his head, urging him to stop shouldering all his burdens alone.
“Would you mind reading aloud?” he asks quickly. “I’ve tried, but it’s been turning my stomach.” It finally occurs to him to wipe the tears from his face. Such a horribly childish gesture while making such a horribly childish request. Horribly childish of him to be bothered by it. “Just until I can sleep. I’d…hate to bother you again, if I cannot.”
Van Zieks looks at him for a long, long moment, then sits down at the desk chair and lights the lamp. “I’d be happy to.”
Kazuma wakes too late for breakfast the next morning. The sun has risen past his cabin’s porthole, his head aches with the last remnants of exhaustion, and his boss is snoring at his desk.
He finds himself oddly pleased to discover that Barok van Zieks snores. Only lightly, muffled by his arms folded atop the desk, but it’s something that in his home they’d slept too far apart to know. Kazuma watches the prosecutor’s back rise and fall for a minute. He has come to learn a great deal about Van Zieks over the years, of course—but far too little of it has been simple and human in this way.
“Sir,” he says softly, placing a hand on Van Zieks’s shoulder. “Sir, wake up.”
He stirs, and then he startles. “Mr. Asogi!” he gasps. “I do apologize.”
The first thing he does is smooth his mussed hair and look in the mirror. He’s clearly unused to being seen without preparation. Kazuma watches him, intrigued. How solitary a life must he have led! In that manor it’s difficult to imagine meeting even his family before he was washed and dressed. Except for servants, he supposes. There’d been only two when Kazuma stayed with him in the townhouse, a housekeeper and a cook, but he knew in Van Zieks’s childhood that his family had been dressed and groomed and waited on by a veritable army.
“Did you sleep like that all night?” asks Kazuma. “It looks dreadfully uncomfortable.” Better than the wardrobe, he supposes.
“I didn’t want to worry you by leaving,” mutters Van Zieks.
“Well, now I worry for your back,” replies Kazuma. “I’ll do my best not to require a chaperone from now on, and if I fail, please lie down at the very least.”
Van Zieks stretches his neck with a grimace. “Duly noted.”
“I do have an interest in hearing more of your book at a later time, though,” Kazuma adds. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Perhaps,” says Van Zieks.
“Though you may need to repeat some,” admits Kazuma. “I’m not sure when sleep took hold of me.”
“I am,” Van Zieks replies. “Were you aware you snore?”
To keep busy, they keep on reading.
Moby-Dick takes nearly a week, but too soon it is finished. They move on through the bookshelf provided. Not every volume, of course. Kazuma passes over several Adventures of Herlock Sholmes—his mind has been returning to Tobias Gregson enough on this voyage already. Wilde as well—though he’s vaguely curious to see the look on Van Zieks’s face were he to ask to be read Dorian Gray.
Kazuma is drawn to famous books, the vaunted English canon he’d never quite gotten around to studying. Thankfully the ship’s stewards seem to have made their stocking decisions in this way. What patron can argue with Shakespeare, after all? There’s a selection of Dickens. A number of Jane Austen novels, which they put off but find themselves deeply invested in once they begin. They try a compilation of Romantic poems—Kazuma can’t be bothered, but Van Zieks seems to see something in it. They debate the merits of poetry for an entire afternoon.
They run out quickly. There’s very little to do on a ship, after all. Kazuma begins asking around their fellow passengers whether they’ve any personal copies they’re willing to lend, makes friends and arranges some trades. An old woman’s Vanity Fair, a mother of three’s Dracula. A young man’s War of the Worlds, a little girl’s Treasure Island. People get into the habit of asking him when he passes by what he and his intimidating companion are reading today.
Kazuma has brought a few of his own books with him, but they’re not useful for this. “I wish it meant anything to you, to hear me read in Japanese,” he says after a couple weeks. He’s sitting sideways on Van Zieks’ bed after a particularly fine dinner, halfway to nodding off. “There are stories I’d like to tell you.”
“Then tell them,” replies Van Zieks from the chair. “There’s no need to translate verbatim. You know the story, don’t you?”
“I don’t feel that’s the same.”
“You’ve a gift for storytelling in the courtroom,” says Van Zieks, matter-of fact. He flourishes his hand in a dismissive wave. “Your story is your evidence. Convince me.”
“In that case, I’ll require the same preparation time I receive for the courtroom,” says Kazuma. Van Zieks seems to think of his skill as more natural than it is.
“I await your statement tomorrow, then,” replies Van Zieks.
“Yes, sir.”
Kazuma lulls himself to sleep that night composing the beginning of Heike Monogatari in his head.
Time has helped, distraction has helped, but what has helped the most is giving the sea new memories. New feelings to evoke in him. The first-class cabins are no longer a site of pain and tragedy—well, they are, but now they’re just as much a site of adventures and arguments and uncommon connection with a closed-off, curious man.
After a time they branch out conversationally. Some stories lead them on tangents. Some tangents lead them further still. And after two weeks, as Kazuma lounges late at night in the armchair in Van Zieks’s cabin, he finally dares ask a question he’s wondered about for six years.
“What did it feel like?" he asks. “For you to discover that I was your mysterious apprentice?”
“...In truth I think I knew,” says Van Zieks after a moment. His eyes have gone darker than they’ve been in a while now. “If I didn’t I should have known.” He slowly shakes his head. “There was no one else whose identity would be kept from me so fastidiously.”
Kazuma knew Van Zieks had known Genshin Asogi had a son. That his father had spoken of him often. Shown them his photograph. Told his English friends stories of his first steps, of his childhood stutter, of arguments he’d been in with his teachers at school. Kazuma remembers the stricken look on his then-unknown master’s face the first time Susato had dared call him by name.
Had Van Zieks feared him? The vengeance of loved ones had been nothing unusual to Barok van Zieks, the Reaper of the Bailey. Kazuma had witnessed that firsthand. And who more worthy and vicious than The Professor’s beloved son, come of age in a crucible of grief, journeying across a continent to avenge his father?
He wouldn’t have been wrong to. Kazuma had wanted that man to fear him. The plans (of his own design) had been more legal than violent in nature, but he had certainly been consumed by them all the same.
“If you knew,” he asks, carefully, “what kept you from unmasking me?”
“It had been so long since someone had looked up to me,” admits Van Zieks, voice low and hoarse. “Needed something from me. It’s a seductive feeling, is it not? To be necessary.”
An odd choice of adjectives, but, yes. Kazuma knows exactly.
“At that point in my life, I would rather delude myself than face a difficult truth.” The prosecutor sighs. “At many points in my life, in fact.”
Kazuma can’t completely stifle his laugh.
Van Zieks looks away. “When did you know?” he asks after a moment.
Ah, so they’re speaking of it now. Kazuma raises his eyebrows and replies, innocently, “About?”
Unwilling to indulge him, Van Zieks fixes him with a deadly glare.
In truth Kazuma can’t remember. The sense had grown on him gradually. “Early,” he admits. “Or I suspected, early. I didn’t know until the night of my arrest.”
“I’ve spent years suspecting you’d suspected me,” says Van Zieks, sounding weary and defeated. “All that trouble for naught, apparently.”
“That’s the lot in life of people like us,” says Kazuma flatly. “Trouble and suspecting.”
How apt, wasn’t it, for men of the law?
Van Zieks’s wine obsession is, like everything else in his life, characterized by a careful, regimented rigidity. Compulsively moderated. Kazuma can count the number of times he’s seen the prosecutor truly drunk on one hand. Tonight might bring it up to two.
He becomes rather more effusive when he drinks, though the bar for improvement in that respect is low. He has much to say about the ship’s wine selection. “I look forward to your opinion on sake,” Kazuma tells him, setting aside his own wineglass to pry a book from the shelf with both hands. There’s a few he’d been familiar enough with to leave until there was nothing left to read. “Ah—Sao.”
He turns over the finely hardbound edition of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. He’d read a Japanese translation once, but never the original. “I’m not sure this will be worth it to hear you read,” he says. “Unfortunately, sir, you aren’t a master of theatrics.”
Neither is Kazuma. He’s put more effort into appearing so than Van Zieks ever has, but he’s also spent years comparing himself to the effortless charisma of Ryunosuke Naruhodo. That’s an upside of hanging around Van Zieks—he makes him seem likeable by comparison.
Van Zieks is thinking of Ryunosuke too, apparently. “Did I ever tell you of the Natsume trial?” he asks. “Against your friend Mr. Naruhodo before you arrived.”
Kazuma doesn’t think that Van Zieks has ever spoken of it, but Ryunosuke has. “Which of them?”
“The second. The actor.”
“Ryunosuke told me some, long ago,” says Kazuma. “The strychnine on the gas pipe.” Miss Olive Green’s cleverness had struck him, enough to remember her name. It is a hard gambit to forget.
“Yes, that’s the one.” Van Zieks clears his throat. “Mr. Natsume became a suspect because he’d been in the victim’s room that night. And he was in the victim’s room that night because they were having…a literary disagreement.”
“About Mr. Shakespeare, I take it?”
“Romeo and Juliet, in fact.” Van Zieks takes another sip before explaining. “It was about the strength of the protagonists. Not mental strength, as I might have assumed. Instead they disagreed which of them, Romeo or Juliet, was physically stronger.”
To a man who’d never met Susato Mikotoba this might have been a more foolish question, but it is still absurd. Kazuma sits beside him on the bed and gestures for him to continue.
“And how, one might ask, do a pair of madmen resolve this question?” says Van Zieks. “Textual evidence? Reasoned argument? Of course not. They dress themselves in costume as Romeo and Juliet, and proceed to fistfight.”
“You’re joking.”
“Sworn in solemn testimony.”
Kazuma shakes with suppressed laughter. “And you’re sure it wasn’t a euphemism?” This was a couple of artists, after all.
Van Zieks snorts. “Believe me,” he says, “I considered it, but nothing in my investigation indicated they traded anything but blows.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense, then,” says Kazuma. “Who won?”
Van Zieks opens his mouth, and then hesitates.
“…I don’t remember."
Kazuma bursts out laughing. To his surprise Van Zieks follows. It’s a quiet, shuddering laugh, but seeing the man smile alone is an experience rarely afforded.
“I like you better when you’re drunk,” says Kazuma, because he is also drunk enough to dare say so.
Van Zieks drains his glass with a flourish, and pours another before he replies. “I agree.”
“Yourself or me?”
“Both of us.”
“We ought to indulge more often, then,” says Kazuma.
Van Zieks arches his brows. “You've previously told me the exact opposite," he says. "Have you come around to advocating alcoholism as a way of life, Mr. Asogi?”
Kazuma shrugs and climbs further onto the bed, settling back against the wall. “It might be nice to like yourself more often than you do, is all.”
With another long sip, Van Zieks shakes his head. “Though drunkenness may be pleasant,” he says, “what I dislike is the shame that later comes with sobriety.”
“Shame for what?” Kazuma asks. “Humanity?”
As long as he’s known Van Zieks, Kazuma has had the sense of a man barely restraining a madness within. He’d once thought the madness was murder. He knows now that it’s nothing but simple emotion, and the madness brought on by restraining it.
“Perhaps,” says Van Zieks. He pauses, forming the question. “Am I truly…inhuman, at other times?”
“Often, I’m sorry to say.”
There is a long silence. Kazuma looks away, worried he’s taken his usual insolence too far.
“I admire how unflinchingly you tell me the truth, Mr. Asogi,” says Van Zieks quietly. “It’s a trait not many others I know share.”
With a breath of relief, Kazuma looks back. Van Zieks is staring across the room, dark-eyed and stormy.
Kazuma reaches out a hand and places it gently against his mentor’s far cheek, turning his face to look at him. “I know that you’re a man to be feared,” he says. He’s seen it with his own eyes. Barok van Zieks is lethal when need be, be it with sword, tongue, or heel of his boot. “But I know you enough to tell when to fear you, which not many others do.”
“I’m glad you’ve come to know me so,” murmurs Van Zieks. “In spite of my every effort.”
“It’s a privilege,” says Kazuma.
There is another long silence, this one thicker, heavier. This time it is not broken. Van Zieks takes Kazuma’s hand in his and brings it from his cheek to his lips, unwaveringly holding his gaze as he kisses the palm.
A second passes, then another, then Kazuma wraps that hand around the back of his neck and kisses him fully. Deeply, desperately. There is simply nothing else he can do. They twist, entwine, sink back into the little cabin bed. When they part with ragged breaths Kazuma is flat on the covers.
Barok van Zieks looks back at him with the hungry gaze of Adam in Eden, the first taste of the apple still on his tongue. The look of a new sinner about to revel in their fall.
They kiss a second time. And again, and again. He tastes of madness and wine.
Van Zieks is a studious lover. Despite their difference in age, Kazuma is far ahead of him in the material. But oh, does he learn quickly. And oh, do they practice.
There’s very little to do on a ship, after all.
The last weeks of their journey are dreamlike. It surprises him—Kazuma had almost expected the man to cut all ties with him the first morning after. For shame to come with his sobriety. Though Van Zieks hasn’t allowed him to see it, Kazuma knows it has. He can tell he still feels doubts, still feels guilt. Rationally, Kazuma wonders whether it’s worth loving a man like that.
Romantically, he’s unsure he has a choice.
Lazy and post-orgasmic on the last afternoon before they dock, Kazuma rests back against Van Zieks’s chest. “Perhaps we should book a double room for the return journey,” he says. “It’s such a shame to get dressed and go back to my cabin and sleep alone.” He nestles his head in the crook of his lover’s shoulder and closes his eyes. “I should like to sleep like this.”
“Have you ever?”
His boarding house is nosy, but not nosy enough to prevent him taking overnight visitors with a little ingenuity. “Will you be jealous if I have?”
Van Zieks sighs and leans his cheek against Kazuma’s hair. “Only jealous I never tried myself.”
“Tried sleeping with me?”
He scoffs. “You know very well what I meant, but I suppose you aren’t wrong.”
“I wonder when I’d first have allowed you to try,” muses Kazuma. “I hated you, of course, but I knew how handsome you were before I knew my own name.”
“Really?” asks Van Zieks.
“Oh, yes,” Kazuma replies. He stretches out his legs and grins.
Van Zieks seems less amused than he is. Contemplative, in fact. “What did it feel like, to learn who I truly was to you?” he asks eventually. “I considered asking when you did, but I feared the answer.”
“It was earth-shattering, obviously.” Kazuma laughs, in the bittersweet way that one only can several years on. “A betrayal of the highest order. In that time I’d come to care for you.”
“Had you?
“Of course I had.” He shakes his head. “I had no knowledge of my family, or my enemies, or my mission in London. I had nothing but suspicion.” Fear of the unknown, and he’d known nothing. “And you… There was nothing but rumor about you, all of it dark. But then the one man who seemed to know you described you so tenderly…”
“This is when you began suspecting, I imagine,” mutters Van Zieks, and Kazuma laughs again.
“You fought so tirelessly for his sake even when it made you look cruel,” he says. “You weren’t afraid to sacrifice yourself for the ones you loved. I admired that.” He pauses. “I aspired to be among the ones you loved.”
Van Zieks gazes down at him, looking nothing less than wonderstruck.
“Do you remember the attack before the Great Exhibition?” Kazuma asks.
He might have suspected the attacks blurred together for him, but Van Zieks nods.
“The way you handled your blade… It struck a chord in me, one I couldn’t explain at the time.”
Van Zieks sighs deeply. “Genshin.”
“Yes, I imagine so.”
“In those years I’d put much effort into learning European fencing,” he says. “Into altering my swordplay into something less…”
A wry smirk twists on Kazuma’s lips. “Nipponese?”
Another sigh slips from the prosecutor’s. “Yes,” he admits. “But when I was afforded no time to think I often found myself slipping back into your father’s technique. The old instincts I was taught in my youth.”
“I could see it,” says Kazuma. “You were familiar before it was familiar. It fascinated me.” He chuckles. “And, of course, you were striking.”
“Mm.” Van Zieks hums thoughtfully at his back. “Striking,” he repeats. “How so?”
“Why, sir.” Kazuma shifts around to face him, resting one elbow on Van Zieks’s shoulder. “Are you fishing for compliments?”
A hint of a smile flits across Van Zieks’s face as he looks back. “Perhaps, if you’ll allow me.”
“Well, you were the tallest man I’d ever seen.”
The folded legs around him shift awkwardly.
“With such light eyes. Such sad eyes.” Kazuma’s fingertips drift over the scar on the bridge of Van Zieks’s nose.
“Are they still?”
“A little.” His fingers trace the man’s eyelids now. Van Zieks’s eyes flutter shut under his touch. “But less so. You don’t keep your brow so furrowed now.”
“Hm.”
Kazuma teasingly kisses the corner of his mouth. “Decades of celibacy will do that to a man.”
“I believe I was fishing for compliments, Mr. Asogi.”
“I believe you admired how unflinchingly I told you the truth.” His lips brush Van Zieks’s again. “Did I strike you?”
He raises his brows. “You were masked and cloaked.”
Kazuma laughs aloud. Though he’d been roomed at the Van Zieks townhouse after their meeting, in the early days Kazuma had kept to himself devotedly enough that it was likely his mentor had never seen him without them. "And that wasn't striking?" he replies.
“…I suppose I did notice your mouth,” says Van Zieks. He pauses. “Admire may be a better word.”
The pad of Kazuma’s thumb strokes the prosecutor’s lower lip. “And do you still?”
“Beyond measure.”
Kazuma breathes in sharply. He has been surprised by how well Barok van Zieks’s deadly serious affect takes to romance.
“Kazuma-sama! Lord van Zieks!”
Susato meets them at the port. She flags them down in the crowd, beaming, with a wave of her colorful sleeve. Though she’s clearly bursting with excitement, she bows graciously and greets them in English. “Welcome home.”
“Happy to be here,” replies Kazuma, beaming in kind. “Is it only you?”
“The others will meet us at the office,“ says Susato. “Naruhodo-san has been held up in court.”
“And you aren’t with him?” Kazuma asks.
“He’s become quite good on his own, Kazuma-sama,” she says reprovingly. “And this is far more important.”
“Don’t let your client hear you say so,” replies Kazuma with a grin.
In the carriage Susato makes a laborious effort to include Van Zieks in the conversation. “You look very well, Prosecutor,” she tells him. “I hope Kazuma-sama hasn’t given you any trouble.”
Van Zieks lies brazenly. “None at all.”
Kazuma longs to take his hand.
They arrive at the office. The second Naruhodo’s Legal Consultancy has a bright sign in finely-lettered kanji. “To think we started out in an attic!” says Susato, as Kazuma and Van Zieks gaze up at it in wonder.
“It was a particularly auspicious attic.” For the first time in six years, Kazuma gives his surrogate sister a hug. “I’m so proud of the two of you,” he says, earnestly. This had once been his own dream, after all. It’s a pleasure to see someone achieve it.
Karuma rests in a place of honor, on a shelf behind the desk in Ryunosuke’s office. “Dusted every day, of course,” Susato says.
“I hope he’s making better use of your talents than that,” says Kazuma.
“Oh, no, he dusts it.”
His heart aches more sharply than ever for Ryunosuke Naruhodo. He looks out the window again just in case.
“Have you thought about whether you’d like to take Karuma back?” asks Susato tentatively.
“At length,” says Kazuma.
The thought of touching this sword again has haunted his mind for years. It’s become wrapped up in a monstrous snarl of self-worth and spiritual purity, so mythologically so that he half-expects it to judge him with a touch. Sting him if he’s still an unworthy master, glow if he’s free of his demons. But it’s just a sword. A precious memento of his family, but nothing more. He lays his hand on the hilt and it feels like nothing but familiarity. Goodness, he’s been foolish.
Perhaps realizing that means he’s free to take charge of Karuma again. He lifts the sword and delicately unsheathes it in a slow, careful swing. Susato claps in delight. Kazuma looks to Van Zieks.
The stoic set of the prosecutor’s face can’t mask the deep affection glimmering in his eyes.
They've just sat down to a cup of tea when there are sounds of a carriage from the window, announcing the delegation from the court’s arrival. Kazuma and Susato dash to the front door to meet them. Ryunosuke sees him from the window of the carriage, and leaps out before it’s fully stopped to bound across the street and throw his arms around him. “Kazuma!”
Kazuma hugs him just as tightly. “It’s been too long, partner.”
Why has he put this off so long? What has he been so afraid of?
“You look so different!”
“And you look just the same.” He’s no longer wearing his university uniform, but Ryunosuke has the same boyish face, the same spirit.
“I knew you were going to say that,” he mutters. “I’ve started wearing my hair differently, look.”
Following him are Yujin Mikotoba and a young woman Kazuma recognizes as a close friend of Susato’s. They join the gathering on the office’s front walk. Professor Mikotoba lifts Kazuma’s chin to squint at his face from a few different angles. “Good,” he says. “Very good.”
Kazuma knows he’s come to resemble his father. Mikotoba has the tact to tell him so without words.
He brushes one fingertip across Kazuma’s mustache. “Though you’re not there yet, my boy.”
“I’d never hope to match yours, Professor,” says Kazuma with a cheerful laugh. “I’ve a novel of a letter for you in my things; don’t let me forget it. I think we should all be glad no one let Herlock Sholmes write his own books.”
“Oh, no!” Susato says. “I think it would be delightful!”
Susato’s friend bows to Kazuma, her hair fluttering. “Welcome home, Asogi-san!” She quickly shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t imagine you remember me.”
“Membami Rei-san, wasn’t it?” She’s grown up, but her frantic energy is the same.
She beams. “Yes! I can’t believe you knew my name. All Susato’s friends thought you were so dashing, back in school… It used to embarrass her so much.”
“Rei!” gasps Susato, pink-cheeked.
“Don’t worry; I’m flattered,” says Kazuma, chuckling. “Were you assisting Ryunosuke in court, Membami-san?”
“Oh, no, not this time,” says Rei hurriedly, “I just like to watch whenever I’m free. Naruhodo-san makes trials ever so exciting, doesn’t he?”
Kazuma claps Ryunosuke’s back. “You haven’t seen the half of it.”
They troop back inside to where Van Zieks has stayed at the table with the tea. Kazuma knows he’s been worried about awkwardness. That he knows his reunions will be somewhat less familiar.
“Lord Van Zieks,” says Ryunosuke warmly, extending a hand to shake. “You look well.”
“Doesn’t he?” says Susato. “His brow less furrowed these days, I think.”
From behind her, Kazuma grins at him.
He and his friends eat and drink and reminisce, and Kazuma hasn’t realized until he’s seen them how much he’d missed them all this time. London can be a grim place when your closest companion is Barok van Zieks. He’d sworn up and down he wasn’t punishing himself, but he had been, hadn’t he? He hadn’t deserved to return home with the friends he loved. He deserved to stay in England and do penance.
The joke was on him, of course. He’d gotten fond of it.
Kazuma feels guilty leaving Van Zieks alone in a foreign country, though that had always been the plan. Maybe tomorrow he’ll urge him to rub elbows with the adults. He is curious what Mikotoba will make of him.
(He doesn’t care what the closest man he has to a father thinks of the closest man he has to a partner. He’s only curious.)
After dinner Kazuma fishes out the gifts he’s brought everyone from England. Mostly from Sholmes and Iris, though Gina Lestrade has included letters. (“Can’t pass up the savin’ on postage!”) Susato takes her leave to pen a reply at once. Rei delights in Iris’s work, which has grown no less adorable in her teenage years. “How darling!” she gushes over a mechanized test tube rack detailed in pink enamel.
“She and Iris took to each other, when she visited with Sholmes,” Ryunosuke explains. He glances toward Rei, a shy, foolish grin on his face as he watches her inspect the different packets of Iris’s tea. “They’ve been writing ever since.”
“You’ve certainly taken to her too,” says Kazuma.
Ryunosuke looks back to him, grin widened. “Is it that obvious?”
“Only to me,” Kazuma replies, more tenderly than intended.
“I didn’t want to say before it was official, but we’ve been talking,” Ryunosuke admits. “We’re—going to ask our parents to allow us to marry.”
“...You’re going to what?”
This comes out more rudely than intended. Kazuma blinks. He’s lived so long so distant from the prospect of his own marriage that he’d nearly forgotten he had friends who still aspired to it.
“Do you not think it’s a good idea?”
Kazuma hurriedly shakes his head. “No," he says, "of course I do.” Save his pathetic heart, every other fiber of him wants happiness for Ryunosuke Naruhodo.
Ryunosuke bows his head in gratitude.
“...Did you ever attend an English wedding, while you were there?” Kazuma asks after a moment, searching his experiences in desperation for anything helpful to say. “There’s a role for the groom’s most trusted friend and advisor. They call him the best man.”
“Best?” Ryunosuke repeats, taking his hand in both of his own. He grins. “Kazuma, you’re my only man.”
Kazuma swallows. He might have hoped that another man to care for might make this less heartbreaking. It doesn’t.
“And when you marry, I’ll be yours.”
He laughs weakly.
Kazuma thinks Susato has known where his interests lie for some time now, though they’ve never talked of it. It feels wrong that Ryunosuke does not. But it's his own fault. He'd avoided the subject of romance as long as they’ve known each other, obviously he had. It was one step too close to telling his best friend he loved him, and one step too close to hearing he didn’t feel the same. But Ryunosuke is his best friend. His best man; his only man. He deserves this honesty.
“Unfortunately, I’ve no interest in marriage,” Kazuma says.
Ryunosuke chuckles. “That’s what all men say, until they do.”
Kazuma breathes in deeply. The temptation to let it go is building but he forces himself to try again. “You misunderstand me,” he says. “I’ve no interest in women.”
Though it takes a moment for Ryunosuke to figure out that this means something different, eventually he does. His smile fades, his brows come together thoughtfully. “Do you mean to say that…you instead…”
“Yes.”
Ryunosuke looks back at him, his gentle, clever eyes intent. “Have you always known?”
“Since I’ve known you.”
“And you felt unable to tell me?”
If it were only this once Kazuma would defend himself, but he does, of course, have a history of feeling unable to tell Ryunosuke things. He supposes he should be thankful that this time it wasn’t dragged out of him in court. “Through no fault of your own, of course,” he says. “I’m sure it’s clear why.”
“Kazuma!” Ryunosuke squeezes his hands. “You’re—my best man. I’m your friend and advisor.”
“What, you have advice?”
“Well—no.” Ryunosuke looks across at him, face courtroom-set. “But you’re still my closest friend. I won’t allow you to keep any more secrets.” He shakes his head. “I’ve had rather enough of that.”
Kazuma smiles at him, full of love and bittersweetly. “We all have, I think.”
They visit the old Asogi estate on the third day. The grass has grown long since Kazuma was here last. His old house, once so fine, is in a state of disrepair. Moss covers the wooden columns. Dust covers the bare floors.
It doesn’t matter. It hasn’t been Kazuma’s home now for more of his life than it was. He and Van Zieks wander silently through the grounds, hand in hand.
Kazuma leads him up a path over the ocean under a single black pine. “I’m told my gravestone was once here,” he says. He chuckles. “I must say, I’m pleased with their choice. I hope it doesn’t change when the time comes.”
“This is very beautiful,” says Van Zieks quietly. “A fine place for a childhood.”
“The finest I could have asked for,” murmurs Kazuma.
Van Zieks hesitates. “Do you…wish to return for good someday?”
“Not for a long time, if I do,” says Kazuma. The thought is certainly tempting. He’d spent so much of his youth dreaming of the grandest city in the British Empire, but now that he’s lived there so long his dreams have become instead of home. But the thought of living in this house again unsettles him too.
“The legacy makes me nervous,” he admits. “The pressure I would feel here to my family name. To become a husband and father and head of a household.” There is a long, long Asogi history resting on Kazuma’s shoulders, and he is too selfish to carry it on. “I don’t think I realized how stifling it was until I lived without it.”
There had been something profoundly freeing about life in a country where he had nothing.
“I suppose it’s a blessing my family’s reputation is in shreds,” says Van Zieks, looking out over the water. “It’s been many years since any of those things were desired of me.” He snorts. “I’d never considered the privilege of having a name that deserves to fade into obscurity.”
“You don’t believe that mine does, I take it?”
“Of course not. Quite the contrary.”
Kazuma has spent his whole life wrestling with tradition. When to let go of it, when to protect it, when to fight to free oneself and one’s society from it. There’s an urge to defend the country of his birth whenever it’s maligned, but in truth Japan and England anger him equally. They are the same in their obsession with the wishes of the dead.
“Perhaps one day I’ll choose an heir,” he says. “But I don’t care for obligations I haven’t chosen to bear myself.” What do names mean, in the grand design of the human race? The father and mother he loved mean something to him. He's chased down the closest thing to justice he could get them, and now the best way he can honor them is to live as happily as they’d have wanted him to.
Kazuma climbs down the slope toward the edge of the water. He slips off his shoes and hitches up his trousers to balance between two sea-slick rocks. Van Zieks follows at a distance.
“Mr. Asogi, what are you doing?”
“My name is Kazuma, if you’d like to use it,” he calls back over the waves.
“Kazuma, then. What are you doing?”
“Do you not like the water?”
“I thought you didn’t.”
That was how he’d explained it, wasn’t it, all those weeks ago? A veritable age ago? Kazuma shakes his head. “I’ve always loved the sea like this,” he says. “When I’m part of it, not lost within it.” He likes everything that way, when he can have it so. It's a miraculous feeling when he doesn’t have to force it.
He breathes in the salt air and feels, incredibly, at peace.
Behind him, Van Zieks climbs down the path he’d used. It’s something impossible to do with the sort of dignity he likes to keep. Kazuma politely keeps looking out at the water while he tries to get his boots off, turns only as the prosecutor wades out to meet him.
From the rocks Kazuma is even taller than he is. He takes Van Zieks’s face in hand and leans down to kiss him slowly.
“It means a great deal to me that you’re here, sir,” he says after, still close.
Van Zieks gives him half a tiny smile. “I’ve a name too, you know.”
“Barok, then. My apologies.”
He wraps his arms around Kazuma’s thighs and lifts him off the rocks to kiss him again. Kazuma laughs aloud in surprise. “Have you been wanting to hear me say that?” he asks. Has he imagined his name on his apprentice's tongue, the way Kazuma has imagined his own on his mentor's?
“I've been wanting it immensely.”
“Immensely.” He rests his hands at his lover’s neck, his head against his lover’s head. The waves lick at his feet. The wind blows, the sun shines, and Kazuma Asogi is madly in love.
“You’ve another half a lifetime to enjoy it, Barok,” he says. “Don’t hurt yourself carrying me around before you can.”