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Kazuma wakes on June 17th with a suffocating weight on his chest.
Upon recognizing it, he tries for a fruitless moment to throw it off. He doesn’t want to believe anything special of anniversaries. Genshin Asogi is just as dead today as he has been any other day—isn’t it disrespectful not to put the same weight on the rest of them? What a helpless, human way of handling emotion: saving it for special occasions.
In spite of his ideals, Kazuma is human, and helpless besides. He takes a moment before rising to let himself get used to the weight.
Yesterday’s murder was a gunshot. Not in the chest, but through the head. Not in a prison graveyard, but a back garden on a well-off street. Though the body has long since been removed to Miss Gorey, the investigation is not yet complete. Kazuma shoulders his weight and catches an omnibus to the crime scene.
Van Zieks arrives twenty minutes late and more harried-looking than usual.
For a moment Kazuma wonders whether the prosecutor is bearing the same weight he is. But when he gets to work, it’s with his familiar dispassionate professionalism, and they continue taking the crime apart with their familiar precision. Kazuma often finds it’s easier to focus when his mentor is focusing with him. A shared clarity of purpose. The Van Zieks compartmentalization technique is worth the apprenticeship in itself.
And then, they stop for lunch. Van Zieks finds his voice only once Kazuma is on his way out the gate.
“Mr. Asogi—”
He turns back to the prosecutor, who has called for him quietly, haltingly. His face no longer dispassionate or professional. His compartments burst wide open now that they have the space for it.
“Yes, sir?”
“Do you plan to…” Van Zieks hesitates again, and Kazuma arches his brows expectantly. “…To visit the cemetery today?”
“I did plan to,” he says. “After we’ve finished.”
Van Zieks withdraws something small from his pocket and extends it to him. “Would you please return this to your father, when you do?”
Kazuma stares down at the red-stoned ring in the prosecutor’s hand. That thing. He hadn’t cared much what happened to it after the trial, once he’d finally discovered what had become of it. Van Zieks is the one it had truly meant something to. Van Zieks, and the rest of the men who’d thought it emblematic enough of Genshin Asogi to convict him with it.
He looks the prosecutor in the face. “Return it yourself, sir.”
Van Zieks looks away, back down at the ring, still in his outstretched hand.
“I had...assumed you wouldn’t wish me to,” he says. “That my presence at his gravesite would be...unwelcome.”
Kazuma sniffs. Van Zieks has been like this for months now—an excruciating, self-flagellating invertebrate of a man. Kazuma had loathed him as he once was, but this exaggerated repentance sickens him too. It seems Barok van Zieks is overzealous in all his endeavors.
(Of course, Kazuma supposes he has given him little reason to believe he shouldn’t be so zealous in this one. What does he want from the man? Just to disapprove of him?)
He plucks the ring from Van Zieks’s hand and tucks it in his own pocket. “Come along, sir,” he says, and jerks his head toward the door. “We’ll go now.”
“Now?”
“Yes, sir.”
Lowgate Cemetery is grittier and grimmer than the rest of London, and that’s saying something. Lord Barok van Zieks looks horridly out-of-place there. So, realizes Kazuma, must his fine-suited apprentice—but it doesn’t matter. There are no other mourners here to see them. They wander between the anonymous graves toward the one they seek.
Do loved ones also visit these men, Kazuma wonders? Do guilt-stricken enemies?
A confirmational exhumation of Genshin Asogi had followed the trial last year. In the months since then, the stone over him has been dusted and worn with the rain and the wind. The new headstone is no longer as clean as Kazuma had last seen it, the day it was installed. He remembers standing here then. Full of an emotion he couldn’t name. Too little too late, he had felt when he was asked—but who was he to keep his father’s body from bearing a name out of nothing but spite?
He brushes the dirt out of the elegant Japanese engraving. Though he’d allowed this, he’d declined to move the body altogether. His spite had won that battle. Everyone needed to remember what tragedy had happened here. Kazuma would not allow Britain to erase what they’d done.
Without a worry for his white trousers he kneels on the patchy grass before the stone, ankles neatly crossed beneath him. After a moment Van Zieks follows suit.
“There’s no need for you to sit like that,” says Kazuma, as he withdraws a small matchbox and bundle of incense sticks.
Van Zieks shifts to the ground, his long legs now folded beside him. “I apologize,” he says, straightening his back again in an effort to maintain dignity. “Seiza had seemed—appropriate.”
Match in hand, Kazuma looks over. “Seiza?”
“Have I misremembered?” Van Zieks glances to the gravestone, as if it’s going to be disappointed in him.
“No,” says Kazuma, still baffled. “I hadn’t realized you knew the term.”
“It’s been some time,” says Van Zieks. “Since I’d spoken it aloud, at least. Since...”
His eyes are on the gravestone again.
“My father taught you?” And he’d said nothing when his mad apprentice had insisted upon working on his knees?
“I spent time studying under him, throughout my university years,” says Van Zieks. There’s a thin waver of emotion in his voice. “Mainly swordcraft, but also…philosophy, I suppose. His way of being. Anything he could teach me. I admired him greatly.”
This doesn’t make sense to Kazuma, though it should. Asogi swordcraft is certainly as much a philosophy as an art, as much a way of being. But… Though Kazuma knew Van Zieks had felt a great deal for his father, he had always had the impression of a mentorship more distant than what he can see the memory of in his own mentor’s face. A young man’s admiration from afar more than a true closeness.
He looks away from Van Zieks to strike his match and pushes the lit incense upright in the dirt. Perhaps he had imagined a mentorship more like theirs.
“I had no idea you had been so close to him,” he murmurs.
Van Zieks hesitates. “…I suppose the strength of it became the strength of my hatred.”
“From what I hear,” replies Kazuma with a soft snort, “your hatred was rather stronger.”
The prosecutor sighs.
“I know what you think of my take on grief,” he says. “Believe me, Mr. Asogi, I wish I’d thought the same.”
His eyes are still on the stone. Is Kazuma the man Van Zieks is speaking to, he wonders?
Even if not, he is the only one who can reply. “There’s men I’ve hated too, sir,” he says. “Men who’d taken everything from me. I hated them so viciously it turned me mad, but I hated them without hating every other Englishman in kind.”
Van Zieks is silent, jaw clenched.
Kazuma shakes his head.
“I want to believe I’m better than that,” he mutters. “But I’ve seen the society you live in. If I had your place in it, I’d have found it too easy to cling onto the biases around me.” His lips flatten into a tight grimace. “In Japan I’m sure I’ve taken in my own.”
“It’s no excuse,” says Van Zieks.
“Of course not,” says Kazuma. “But it’s also a mistake millions of other men are making every single day. And few of them are making the effort to confront it.” He lifts his chin stubbornly to look up at his mentor. “With all due respect, you’re not the only villain in the world, sir.”
“Mr. Asogi—"
“I’ve attacked an innocent man as well, for instance,” he says. “And it’s only thanks to his lawyer he’s not buried here now.”
He and Van Zieks meet eyes, and they look at each other for so long neither of them knows how to look away.
“Do you remember Asman’s trial?” asks Kazuma.
“For his murder?”
“No, for his crimes. The one you shouldn’t have lost.” He drags his eyes from Van Zieks’s now to look back to his father’s stone. “When I saw what it did to you, I believed you were a good man. I admired you. And when I discovered who you truly were… The strength of it became the strength of my hatred, I suppose.”
He shakes his head again.
“I can imagine I would feel unwelcome at your grave, if I’d won.”
Van Zieks exhales, but doesn't reply. They watch the plume of incense smoke in somber silence for a minute.
Finally Kazuma remembers the red ring in his pocket. He pulls it out and turns it over in his fingers, watching the noon-light glint off the heavy facets. What had Van Zieks wanted him to do with this? Bury it? Just leaving the thing on the ground feels foolish. Kazuma doesn’t care much about it, that’s true—but a grave-robber’s pocket still feels like too undignified a fate for anything his father had owned.
He turns to Van Zieks. “Do you want it?”
“Do I want what?”
Kazuma extends the ring toward him. “As a reminder,” he says. “A keepsake.”
Van Zieks recoils.
“Mr. Asogi,” he snaps, “don’t be ridiculous.”
“I don’t believe I am,” says Kazuma. “The time you spent with my father clearly meant a great deal to you. I thought you might appreciate something to remember him by.”
“Surely not his wedding ring!”
“What?” Kazuma can’t suppress a short, surprised laugh. “Is that what you all thought it was?”
Van Zieks, once again, looks sensitive to misremembering. “It wasn’t?”
Kazuma shakes his head. “That’s not common in Japan. My parents didn’t have them.”
“He wore it on the finger of a wedding band,” says Van Zieks, almost sheepishly. “I had always thought it was…simply an unusual one. It seemed obvious enough that I never asked.”
“To my knowledge it was just a ring,” says Kazuma.
To his eight-year-old knowledge, that is, and he had never asked either. He hadn’t expected to never be able to ask. His father had been a man who rarely did anything without a meaning, but it seems this meaning will remain a mystery. Yet another one. Kazuma realizes with a muted surprise how few people remain to remember Genshin Asogi. Anything outside the sum total of their knowledge is lost forever.
Van Zieks looks down at the ring, brows knit. “…Hm.”
“Perhaps he saw other men wear their rings there and assumed it was the English fashion,” says Kazuma. “I might have done the same.”
“I might have asked after your wife,” says Van Zieks, with a hint of amusement.
Kazuma crooks his lips in a half-grin. “No, you wouldn’t have,” he says. “That would have been starting a conversation.”
Softly, Van Zieks snorts. “You’re welcome to start any conversations you like,” he says, “if you enjoy them so much.”
“But will you reply?”
“If you interest me.”
“I’m afraid I’ve little to say on the subjects of red wine and misery.”
Van Zieks turns away with another little huff, but Kazuma thinks he’s hiding a laugh.
There’s another brief silence, this one easier than before.
He extends the ring again. “So would you like it?”
The levity vanishes. Van Zieks shakes his head. “I don’t…” His voice helplessly trails off.
Deserve it, Kazuma can hear even still.
With a contemptuous scoff, he lifts Van Zieks’s hand and closes the ring inside it. “I don’t care if you deserve it,” he says. “Stop it. I’m tired of penitence.”
The prosecutor swiftly retracts his hand. He’s kept the ring in his fist. “What are you talking about?”
“Self-loathing achieves nothing,” says Kazuma. “It’s a waste of energy.”
Van Zieks opens his mouth, but his tongue seems stopped. He shakes his head again before he can even half-reply. “Do you not feel…?”
“Feel what?” replies Kazuma. “Any fucking better? Watching you punish yourself? No.” He narrows his eyes. “Do you want me to enjoy your misery, sir?”
As soon as it’s left his mouth, it seems obvious. Van Zieks does not reply.
Kazuma keeps staring up at him. “Does that mean you would enjoy mine?”
“Asogi, enough.”
The viciousness of his voice makes Kazuma blink in surprise. All at once he remembers that this is his employer. The uncommon candor with which they’d been speaking had let him momentarily forget.
This time he does not fight, not like he had before. “I apologize,” he says quietly.
Van Zieks exhales heavily and nods.
Kazuma watches the prosecutor look back down and open his hand. The ring’s claws have sliced the palm of his glove as he held it in his grip.
“Do you not need a reminder of your own?” asks Van Zieks.
“I have everything else of his,” says Kazuma.
“Not with you, surely?”
“No. But safe, at least.”
Kazuma, of course, has little with him at all. The single photograph, the one that even without his memory he’d known had to be protected at all costs. The few of his belongings that Ryunosuke had taken with him on to London, now returned to him. Everything else that Kazuma owns now is what had been given to the empty shell of him when he’d arrived. Van Zieks knows this. He’d handed down an old suitcase of his for Kazuma to pack it all into, barely two weeks ago, to move out of his home.
The somber prosecutor looks back to him. “I’m…sorry,” he says. “That you don’t have his sword today.”
At this, Kazuma pauses. The thought strikes him as sacrilege as it arises. “…I’m not sorry,” he says anyway, because something about sacrilege always feels powerful to voice. “I’m glad I don’t.”
“Really?”
All Van Zieks has heard of Karuma, Kazuma supposes, is the reverent Asogi mythos. It’s important to him still, of course it is—but he finds distance has put some things in perspective. “That thing had…a hold over me,” he says. “Or the rage it symbolized to me did, and I cannot untie them in my mind. I don’t want it back until I can.”
He shakes his head to clear it.
“It’s alright,” he says. “I know Ryunosuke is thinking of him today.” The man who’d never known him, but had brought his truth to light. The man Genshin Asogi deserved to think of him, instead of the sorry pair who sat now before his grave.
From beside him he can feel the prosecutor’s gaze, spellbound and heavy. Kazuma looks back up into Van Zieks’s face.
“I can’t help but see him in you,” says Van Zieks quietly. “Your father.”
“He is in me,” says Kazuma.
“But he isn’t all of you,” Van Zieks insists. “I shouldn’t let his memory affect what I—"
“I’m not listening to this,” says Kazuma, getting to his feet. “Waste of energy.”
“You deserve better than an employer haunted by impressions of a dead man—!”
“Do you think I don’t see him in you, sir?”
Van Zieks stops short and stares back up at him, pale eyes wide with shock.
“How couldn’t I?” says Kazuma. “The man who spent the years I didn’t by my father’s side? It’s simply the way our partnership is, sir. Instead of apologizing for it I’m trying to see past it.”
Slowly, Van Zieks presses his lips together.
“…And have you been more successful than I have?” he asks.
Kazuma looks down at the prosecutor on the graveyard grass.
“Not today.”
He offers a hand up, and after a moment Van Zieks takes it.
They part the second they’re steady and brush themselves off. Their lunch has run long. But even so, they stand there for a minute longer, looking at the headstone, at the curl of the smoke before it. Kazuma is the first to turn. Van Zieks follows him, like he’d been waiting for permission.
“We’ll need to identify neighboring windows with a view into the garden, when we return,” he says as they emerge onto the street outside the prison.
It takes Kazuma a moment to realize he’s talking about the case. “Ah,” he says. “Yes, of course.”
“At that time of night a direct witness would have been unlikely, but we’ll have patrolmen go around just in case.”
Kazuma watches him throw out a businesslike arm to hail a carriage. The about-face would have been more stunning if he didn’t see the man do this every day.
“You’ve such skill at putting your emotions aside for work, you know,” he says above the clatter of the horseshoes on the stone. “I don’t see what should be different about doing it for me.”
Van Zieks shakes his head, and without meeting Kazuma’s gaze, he mutters, “Neither do I.”