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Kiryu’s circle of acquaintances had never been especially big. He wasn’t much of a talker on a good day (a good day is defined as: several drinks deep at the Dojima family end-of-year-party’s afterparty, in a different time), and people who weren’t deterred by his silence generally were deterred by the permanent, scowling crease between his brows. He’d always had Nishiki and Yumi, who understood him best, who he could actually talk to sometimes. Kazama for his stern and solid support. He could only talk to their headstones now. He wouldn’t trouble the dead with his problems.
And the loss didn’t end there, but spread out, unceasing, to everyone whose lives had touched his in the time before he’d been locked up. Reina, Shinji. There were new faces in his life, but none that would understand who he’d been before, who he’d been after, and who he was now. And they didn’t deserve to bear his grief, even if they could’ve understood it.
Haruka, especially, her small, hot hand clamped in his, didn’t deserve to bear his grief merely by virtue of being all he had left. She chattered endlessly as they passed the shops on Nakamichi, pulling him this way and that when she saw something interesting or wanted to point out a sign featuring a kanji she had just learned to read in school. For a few hours on weekends, he could bear not to think of anything but the joy on her face as she scanned café menus and tried to decide how much she wanted to cut into his former-chairman’s pension for the month. She could’ve picked any number she liked and he would’ve found a way to make it work. She probably knew that.
Technically speaking, Haruka wasn’t the only person he had left. The other most obvious option wasn’t someone you invited, though; he could usually be expected to just show up, if he wanted to, and if he could be enough of a nuisance to everyone around by being there.
It had been a quiet couple months, all things considered, so Kiryu could say he was genuinely surprised for the half second it took to process that one of the ever-present store barkers had a knife and an eyepatch in addition to his suit, and was leaping right for them. Kiryu looked for Haruka first - she was already retreating to safety around a corner - before settling into a stance on the balls of his feet as his opponent skidded to a stop in front of him. “Majima-no-niisan.”
Majima straightened up, grinning wildly as he adjusted his uniform bowtie back to a perfect angle. “Heh, look at you, yer on the ball, Kiryu-chan! Really thought I’d catch ya unprepared after all this time.”
Now that he mentioned it… “It has been a while.”
“Had t'get patched all the way up after that mess with Shangri-La. Bout died of boredom! But I’m good as new now” - he punctuated the assertion with a solid thump of his knife hilt against his formerly injured side - “so enough talkin’! I’ve been waitin’ for this, Kiryu-chan~”
Majima lowered himself into the crouching stance he saved for when he was most excited about going all out. He lunged with a yell; Kiryu slipped easily enough into the familiar, even comforting, ritual of punching and dodging and getting creative with the use of traffic cones and nearby bicycles. Just one more way to not have to think.
Eventually, one of them was on the ground and not inclined to get back up very quickly. A minute or two later, the crowd that had gathered began to disperse, Haruka returned from her hiding place, and Majima pushed himself slowly up to sitting. He snorted hugely, and spat blood onto the asphalt. His nose, determined and quite wounded, continued to bleed, so he pinched it high up, tilted his head back and laughed nasally. “Good'see ya haven’ losd yer edge, Kiryu-chan! I was worryin’ I was gonna have d'lay ya oud in fron’ of the lil’ lady there.”
“Ojisan would never lose to you!” Haruka said from her safe vantage point behind Kiryu’s legs, punctuating the taunt by sticking out her tongue with grim determination.
“Careful how far ya stick that thin’ oud, girlie,” Majima said warningly, the effect not at all ruined by the fact he was still pinching his nose shut and muddling his consonants even more than usual. “Y'mighd lose id!”
He waved his knife towards her loosely and she went a little pale around the edges but stood her ground. Kiryu instinctively put a reassuring hand on her head and began to contemplate further bloodshed.
Majima, sensing the shift, quickly set the knife down and raised both hands in a placating gesture. “Heheh, alright, ya got me, ya already won anyways, I ain’t about to be a sore loser.” Blood had immediately started dripping down his face. He cursed under his breath - Kiryu frowned more deeply than before - and clamped his thumb and forefinger onto his nose again.
Still scowling impressively, Haruka reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a flower-studded handkerchief, which she threw in Majima’s general direction with as much simmering suspicion as an 8-year-old could muster. It flew a ways, then caught the air, fluttered open, and collapsed to the ground half a meter from the shiny steel tips of Majima’s shoes.
He stretched forward, grunting around what were probably a couple cracked ribs, and retrieved it with a scarlet-shot grin. “Much obliged, kid.”
Haruka huffed. “I have a name.”
“Yeah, most people do,” Majima snickered. He wiped the blood from his face where it was starting to cake and itch, then held an unsullied corner of fabric beneath his nose. “Haruka-chan, wasn’t it?”
“You locked me in a closet.”
“I did do that,” Majima said matter-of-factly. “What’s yer point? Ya got out just fine, didn’t ya?”
“You owe me. For…” She seemed to be turning over what she wanted to say next in her head. “Emotion-al dam-a-ges,” she sounded out carefully.
Majima was stunned silent for a second, then barked out a laugh that ended with him gagging on the blood still running down the back of his throat and hacking another splatter of red onto the street. “Shit, Kiryu-chan,” he managed past a residual cough. “What’re ya teachin’ the kid?”
“Don’t curse in front of Haruka,” Kiryu reprimanded.
“Alright, fair,” Majima conceded, at the same time that Haruka insisted indignantly that she “knows what bad words are, ojisan” and knew better than to use them.
“She does have a point, though,” Kiryu said, definitely because he wanted to support Haruka’s enterprising spirit, and not at all because he hadn’t seen Majima in weeks and sort of missed fighting for his life, getting a couple drinks, and then kicking his nii-san’s ass at darts.
Haruka lit up, in a vicious sort of way. Nevermind, it had definitely been entirely for her sake. Kiryu couldn’t even be disappointed that she was obviously going to twist both their arms. He had never minded; Majima probably deserved to experience it, for how he’d scared Haruka and Kiryu both when they definitely hadn’t needed any more crises in their lives. Kiryu loomed, a glowering shadow with one hand on Haruka’s shoulder, as she outlined her plan with the ruthless efficiency that was the purview only of hardened bosses and elementary schoolers.
That’s how they ended up having lunch at the sushi shop near Millennium Tower, draining Majima’s paycheck on a lavish seasonal nigiri platter rather than Kiryu’s. Both of them had had to clean up a bit - Majima had just ditched the vest and bowtie, rolling up the sleeves of the white dress shirt underneath to a still-unseasonal-for-late-January elbow height (to conceal the worst bloodstains), and undoing the top three buttons (presumably for his personal taste, since there was no practical reason imaginable). It didn’t change the fact that the bridge of his nose had gone purple, or that there were bruises and small scrapes visible on basically every patch of exposed skin, but he looked a bit less like he was trying to advertise either of those things. Kiryu had taken off his jacket as well, and stuffed it into a coin locker along with everything else that was too bloody to deal with right now. His shirt didn’t show bloodstains, and the small splatters at the hems of his pants could be mistaken for mud by anyone who didn’t look too closely, or knew better than to look too closely. He’d mostly avoided getting hit - that was the best strategy, generally, when your opponent had a very sharp knife.
Haruka was the only one of them who didn’t still look just a little bit like a wreck, not a hair out of place as she dug into their collective sushi order. She’d gotten a quarter of the way through it on her own.
“Where’re ya even puttin’ all that, Haruka-chan?” Majima asked with a touch of awe, snagging another half-seared bright pink nigiri before she could take all of it for herself.
“I don’t get to go out every day, so when I do, I want to eat as much yummy food as I can. And,” she added proudly, “I’m a growing girl!” She’d undoubtedly gotten that plenty of times at dinnertime at Sunflower.
“Ya sure are. That rate, yer gonna be as tall as Kiryu-chan!”
“Am I?” She turned to look at Kiryu, glowing. Any suspicions she’d had about Majima seemed to fall away as soon as he was complimenting her. And buying her 6,500 yen worth of sushi.
Kiryu didn’t have the heart to tell her no. Who knew? Nothing was impossible. “Maybe someday.”
“When I’m as tall as you, ojisan, you could carry me and I’d be able to touch the bottom of those big signs on the stores on Tenkaichi Street!”
“Is that…something you’ve been wanting to do?” Kiryu was already thinking of ways he could make that possible now. There didn’t seem to be much point to it, but what was the harm? Maybe he could sort of toss her up and catch her…
As if it was a perfectly sufficient answer, she said, “I bet it’s something nobody else does. How would they reach?” She stuffed her mouth with a nigiri that was 90% crab leg, and was stuck chewing on that for a while. “Except the sign cleaners. Are there sign cleaners?”
“I don’t know,” Kiryu said.
“Course there are,” Majima said, at roughly the same time.
“How do you know?” Haruka pressed. “Have you seen them?”
“Girlie, I’ve done it myself once or twice,” Majima said with a self-satisfied smirk. “Done just about everythin’ once or twice.”
“That’s weird,” Haruka said, but her eyes sparkled with curiosity. “What other things have you done?”
Kiryu knew several of the “jobs” Majima had worked, knew that what he knew was only a fraction of Majima’s total enterprises, and also knew exactly how many of them were not suitable for a child’s ears - no matter how precocious the child was - let alone comprehensible to someone without a more-than-surface-level knowledge of scams, money laundering, and organized intimidation. He frowned across the table in a way he hoped was distinct enough from his usual frown to say keep it clean.
“I filled in at a place like this for a week or so once,” Majima began. “I’m pretty handy with a knife, y'know.”
“Aren’t they different kinds of knives?”
“Eh,” Majima shrugged, and moved on. “I’ve managed clubs, bussed tables, collected garbage, worked at a bookshop-”
Kiryu could guess generally what kind of bookshop, and took a moment to appreciate the abstraction.
“-did a stint sellin’ cars, fixed flip phones, garment alterations-”
“What’s that?” Haruka interrupted.
“Tailorin’.” When that didn’t resolve any of the confusion on Haruka’s face, he explained further. “Y'know, like, sometimes ya buy clothes and they don’t quite fit ya right. Dresses and suits and things. Or ya get hand-me-downs and they’re a little too big. You can get a sewin’ machine and make a few stitches here and there to make ‘em fit better.”
“Oh,” Haruka said, and then with an unusual amount of interest, “So you can sew?”
Majima snorted, then winced around his swollen nose. “I can’t make somethin’ from scratch, if that’s what yer askin’.”
“Oh.”
“…Could probably figure it out though.”
“Oh!” She seemed like she was filing that away for later. Kiryu anticipated an eventual Halloween costume request on top of the current extortion. She stuffed another oversized nigiri in her mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and swallowed. “So how does the sign cleaning work?”
“Well, ya get into this sorta harness thing…”
The two of them chattered over the platter for some time, carving steadily through its contents while Haruka continued to ask whatever she could think of and Majima, thoroughly enjoying the chance to show off, continued to provide more knowledgeable answers than anyone could’ve expected from him. Kiryu felt a swell of gratitude - the best he could usually do was say he didn’t know and encourage Haruka to ask others, or check a library. She’d never looked exactly disappointed with that sort of answer, but given someone a lot more worldly to bounce questions off of, it was obvious how deeply she wondered about everything she saw. Maybe that was just a kid thing. Kiryu liked to think it was a Haruka thing.
They really were going through the sushi pretty fast. Kiryu pressed the button on their table to summon a waiter back, and ordered another (smaller) plate for himself only.
(When they got the bill, Majima refused to pay for that portion - “Uh-uh, the deal’s that I’m treating Haruka-chan, not the whole table!”)
“So, Majima-san,” Haruka began innocently, as they were meandering back towards Nakamichi and its host of shops and entertainment. She’d been quiet for a while; usually that signaled that she was planning an attack. “Why did you kidnap me?”
Kiryu quickly looked around them and glowered at anyone too close, which successfully convinced them to move a few more feet away and give the little group a wide, eavesdropping-proof berth. “I’m curious about that too, nii-san,” he added lowly.
Majima laughed. “I didn’t do the kidnappin’. That was someone else.”
“You did lock me in a closet, though.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Majima waved it off dismissively. “Boss’s orders to kidnap you, and bring ya to him. Boss says jump, ya gotta ask how high. I heard Kiryu-chan was lookin’ for ya though, so I stepped in.”
“Why?”
Majima’s voice pitched down an octave - “Get him to fight me.” - then rebounded. “And it worked! That was a great tousle we had, wasn’t it, Kiryu-chan? Up till my boys ruined the mood, anyways.”
Kiryu set his jaw and scowled. Majima sighed, relenting. “Yeah, alright, so it wasn’t my best idea. Boss wasn’t too happy about it either. For different reasons.”
“You shouldn’t work for someone who asks you to kidnap people,” Haruka said like it should be the most obvious thing in the world, and was also a completely normal thing to say.
Majima laughed darkly. “Yer in luck, he’s– I don’t work for him anymore.”
That was an understatement. Begrudgingly, Kiryu allowed himself another moment of gratitude for Majima’s discretion. Even if his judgement sucked sometimes. Haruka had seen plenty of people, including Shimano, die in that fight, but she hardly needed to be reminded of it, or made to connect any more dots than necessary.
“Did he…did he kick you out?” Haruka asked, quietly horrified and a little fascinated. She leaned out as they walked to try to get a better look at Majima’s hands swinging by his sides.
Majima snickered and wiggled all 10 whole fingers at her when he caught her looking. “Naw. Things just got a little shaken up.”
Haruka nodded, and thankfully didn’t press any further about that. She looked to the street corner, and bounced excitedly. “Ojisan, karaoke! Let’s do karaoke!”
“Ooohohoh, karaoke! I haven’t been in forever, with the hospital 'n all. Let’s do it, Kiryu-chan!”
“Can you go check if they’ve got rooms open? Please?”
Kiryu might’ve been able to argue with one of them - namely, Majima - but he couldn’t argue with both of their pleading faces. He suspected he was being ganged up on, gotten rid of, even, but no wasn’t an answer. “Alright. Wait here and I’ll be back in a second.”
(“Majima-san, do you like Kiryu-ojisan or do you hate him?” Haruka asked gravely as soon as Kiryu was out of earshot.
Majima cackled. “What kinda question is that?” When she just continued to look up at him in a stern mirror of her father figure’s most no-nonsense expression, Majima crouched down to get eye-to-eyes with her. “Look, it’s like this. Kiryu-chan ends up in dicey business. Someone’s gotta help him stay sharp, right? Someone who ain’t gonna stab him in the back.”
“So you’re, like…” She thought about it for a second. “Trying to protect him?”
“Pfft, he doesn’t need someone like me protectin’ him. Let’s call it 'support’.”
“Well…” She seemed unsure of how to phrase what she wanted to say, twisting the hem of her skirt between her fingers. “You still owe me. So I want you to promise you won’t…do stuff that makes Kiryu-ojisan sad again.”
Majima quirked an eyebrow. “Yer the one everyone was gunnin’ for back then. Shouldn’t ya be worryin’ about yerself?”
She shook her head vehemently. “Ojisan will take care of me. He doesn’t…have anyone anymore who’s doing that for him.”
“He tell ya that?”
“I can tell on my own, I’m not dumb,” she said forcefully. “If you want to 'support’ him or whatever then just promise already!”
Majima sat back on his snakeskin heels, the set of his face serious. “I don’t make promises lightly, girlie.”
“And you should also promise to tell him you’re sorry. For kidnapping me.”
“You listenin’ to me?”
She held out her pinkie defiantly. After a second, Majima hooked his pinkie through hers. No gloves; he hadn’t worn them with his disguise.
She bounced their joined fingers lightly between them, in rhythm. “Yubikiri genman, uso tsuitara hari senbon…”
“Hope to die, and all that,” Majima muttered over the end of the pledge. He straightened up when she let him go. “We’ll split some Calpis or somethin’ at karaoke, make it a real gokudou-style promise.”
She bounced on the balls of her feet and did a little spin. “You’re paying for that too! Don’t forget, you promised!!” She tried to wriggle away when Majima reached out with a diabolical cackle to muss her hair, but she was laughing too, and gave him a solid, completely harmless kick in the shin for his efforts.)
(Kiryu, watching them from the entrance of the Karaoke-kan, could only be surprised they’d smoothed things over so quickly, and only a little less surprised that the Mad Dog of Shimano, of all people, seemed to do pretty well with kids. It seemed like he was always finding new sides of Majima Goro. If Kiryu could still be caught off guard after 20 years, it must be exhausting for Majima’s subordinates.)
“They have a room for us,” Kiryu said when it seemed like a good time to interrupt. “I’ve already paid.”
“Kiryu-chan, yer an angel! Haruka-chan, let’s go an’ sing our hearts out!”
Haruka stayed where she was, staring calculatingly at the high up, very shiny metal band above the building’s doors that bore the shop’s name in neon katakana.
“Is something wrong, Haruka?” Kiryu asked, and she hummed, measuring up slowly with her eyes.
“Would you say that sign’s about 5 meters up?”
“I’m not sure,” Kiryu said.
“Spot on,” Majima confirmed.
“And the three of us would be about 5 meters tall if we stood on each other’s shoulders?”
“Haruka,” Kiryu began, trying to sound like a warning, but he knew he was already in for what she was getting at. It had been in the back of his mind since lunch. Of course it was going to happen. It’s not like it was illegal to touch the outside of a building. And they had already paid for the room.
Haruka was determined. Majima was ecstatic. Kiryu couldn’t help but smile as he accepted being the bottom of the tower. The young woman staffing the front desk watched in helpless befuddlement. She didn’t stop them once they’d finally finished their venture and bustled past her to their reserved room.
A week later, the sign cleaner was just as confused to see a tiny handprint marring the polished steel between RA and O, and decided he was better off not wondering.