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Quieted and disquieted evenings. The moon hidden beneath oily clouds, obscuring its light from the streets of Yokohama, empty as they were. Straggling souls were left to wander, finding their way home, or otherwise. Not all who stepped across the midnight’s road had a way to a home.
Ranpo blew air from his mouth, the cool atmosphere fogging at its wind. He trekked down different alleyways, not a location in mind. If he wanted to reach a certain destination, he’d have been much better off calling for a car. He’d lose himself to the stars, he had decided—or rather, something within him decided. Regardless, it was a better alternative to returning to that big and hollow penthouse.
He had spent money on it, and it was his, but he didn’t find himself naming it a home. Sure, most would find such an opulent space breathtaking and envy its grandeur. But Ranpo’s reasons for placing money on it weren’t for the sake of having a large and expensive place to call his.
He wasn’t one for stupidities like that. How dumb is it to place value on some space in that way? Any four walls would have sufficed.
No. Ranpo had gotten that place just to displease his mentor.
“Sweet Ranpo-kun, this is an exorbitant amount of money. Whatever do you need this house for?” Mori had questioned, eyeing the agreement for the penthouse, eyes widely blinking.
Ranpo lounged on the couch facing the wall-high windows, looking out across his city—Mori had said it was his, and he didn’t disagree for once. Any scurrying rat or crawling insect across his streets, and he’d know about it.
He always knew.
“Why not? I did the work, I earned the money,” Ranpo shrewdly retorted. Bloody, staining, soul-polluting money, but he earned it, and he earned it well. The black marks dyeing his soul be damned, he could make himself forget the next night if he so wished.
He did it often enough—it had become second nature by this point.
Mori laid the papers on his desk, stapling his fingers together, tilting his head at his mentee who refused to even look in his direction. “Is the home I gifted you not enough?”
Ranpo willed his hands to keep still, for his limbs to stand without the quivers threatening to rake through him. His fingers instead pressed into his arms, his gloves straining against the strength. “I don’t want anything from you, Rintarou,” he voiced.
Mori smiled—one fond and the picture of warmth, and Ranpo’s stomach flipped at its presence reaching him from across the room. “You truly do as you wish, Ranpo-kun. Always a rambunctious child.”
A child. A child who knew how to kill a man in ways unfathomable; a child with scars no child should own; a child with a mind cut to perfect lethality.
He hated it, despised it all. He learned flawlessly, adding every new lesson to his belt. Brand new toys and tools to make him the excellent executive and successor Mori wanted. He never failed, and Mori expected nothing less from him. His mentor had molded him, after all.
But Ranpo wasn’t his. He would never be his. He was to himself truer than the mask he played. Ranpo ignored the possessiveness to which Mori treated him, but its claws were long and sharp. Those four walls Mori stuck him in began to impose on his sanity. Every piece of furniture, and molecule of air, and morsel of food were a gift from the man who tortured and abused him for the purpose of lessons to be taught.
Ranpo could no longer breathe the air Mori sank into his lungs, so he grandiosely bought a new place, miles from that apartment where the shadows came to life in the shape of painful lessons turned into phantoms.
Ranpo tilted his head back, a callous, cut-up smile splitting across his cheeks. The nightmares never left him, but the shadows dissipated slowly. He suspected they’d always lay on the outskirts of his mind, but he could ignore them. His demons were no longer as bloodthirsty and foul as he could be.
Ruminating with the wind ruffling his hair, caressing his cheeks like a sanctimonious and lively lover, Ranpo paused in all movements as he came upon a flickering sign secured within a small alleyway.
Bar Lupin.
He remembered this name, with the voice of an uncharacteristically eager teen spouting about an interesting fellow they had come upon. Ranpo was curious. He was used to tangents about small slugs, not a serene man with a penchant for whiskey.
Finding himself before a treasured answer, Ranpo continued forward, the sign becoming clearer and clearer as he neared. Stepping through the door, he followed down a narrow and dim staircase that bursted into a bar. Amber light carefully draped the room, as if afraid of being too bright in its own existence—light was precious here, after all. Glasses lined the wall behind the bar, glimmering its welcome to the new man in the space.
Ranpo wasn’t fond of the bitterness in alcohol, but he wasn’t one to pass up on a sweeter hue of its kind. Settling himself on one of the stools, Ranpo glanced over at the barkeep.
“Sir, a glass of Brandy Alexander,” Ranpo bombarded the low kept music nimbly twirling through the atmosphere. The taste of his choice didn’t outright repulse him, hints of cacao with a creamy finish catering to his palate.
The bartender nodded in comprehension, moving from cleaning already sparkling glasses to his craft.
Ranpo leaned heavily against his palm, his fingers tracing the grooves on the bar’s wood, an eye opened to watch its path. He found new grooves with each passing minute, until a glass was placed in front of him. Ranpo thanked the man, gaining a pleasant nod in return.
Raising the glass, he lightly took two sips, coating his tongue in a sweet casing even the alcohol couldn’t overtake—it helped that the liquor would soften his edges enough to be approachable.
He took one more sip, a smile filtering through as the mystery took its cue.
Steps fell quietly, gaining volume as they closed in on the room. A man with a murmur of stubble, rust rouge hair, and steady inky blue hues that kept their onlookers afloat and calm had wandered in.
Yes, this was the man Ranpo hadn’t known but expected tonight. He always followed his gut for good reason.
He turned towards him, his smile airy and light. “Hi,” he greeted.
The man blinked, his footsteps ceasing. “Oh, hello.”
“Weren’t expecting anyone, huh? I can see why. This joint is fairly hidden,” Ranpo shrugged.
The other nodded, pacing over to the seat one apart from Ranpo to his left. Ranpo returned to his beverage, drinking down another gulp. As the man took his seat, the bartender placed a whiskey glass down for him, a sphere of ice idly floating in the auburn liquor.
He lifted it, sipping at the liquid.
Ranpo circled his own glass with a gloved finger. “Oda Sakunosuke, is it?”
The man placed his glass down, keeping a hand on its condensation cooled surface. “Executive Edogawa Ranpo, correct?”
Ranpo grinned. “You’ve heard of me?”
Oda glanced over at him from the corner of his eye. “I assume the same way you’ve heard of me. A lowly, nameless grunt. With your status, there is no other way you could’ve known my name.”
Humming, Ranpo’s eye kept Oda’s in an unyielding hold. “You’ve certainly heard of me from one source, because you obviously don’t know much about me if you’re saying that.”
Gaze flitting away, Oda continued enjoying his drink, downing another quarter. “I apologize,” he idly gave.
Ranpo suddenly frowned, his following response killed by an unforeseen response. Confused by the sudden silence, Oda faced him, a question laid within his eyes. Then, Ranpo erupted in laughter, his hands slapping onto his thighs.
Oda lifted a brow, unsure how to respond to the emotion coming from the executive. Had he said something wrong? Or right? He couldn’t begin to guess what this meant from the man. As previously stated, he only knew so much of him.
“You’re apologizing?” Ranpo snickered, his eyes hidden away, his smile amused beyond comprehension.
“Yes? Should I…not be?” Oda questioned, his brow slightly creasing. He was only growing more bewildered.
Ranpo shook his head. “You’re interesting,” he smiled.
The other hummed. “I don’t believe I am.”
Ranpo believed entirely the contrary—it was more interesting the man didn’t see it himself, and yet it was all too befitting of him.
“See,” Ranpo started, “most apologize to me out of fear for their lives. I don’t take kindly to being offended,” he laughed. It used to happen often. A cherub faced teenager rising through the ranks with ease, gliding past subordinates who’d been working there since before Mori. But he never cared—if they were too stupid to understand the mafia’s hierarchy to mold its ladder to their satisfaction, then they wouldn’t make it past their current position with their lives intact.
Nodding, Oda quietly listened, and Ranpo could tell he was taking in every last word—judgement unrooted and left to lay where it couldn’t reach either man.
“But you?” Ranpo continued.
“Me?” Oda asked.
Ranpo chuckled. “You meant it sincerely.”
“Ah,” Oda uttered simply. Why would he say something without meaning it in its sincerity? That didn’t make sense to him.
“See? Interesting.”
In this life they tread through, dredging up blood and bodies with each step, there was never room for honest words without double meanings kept beneath them to later take their strike. Ranpo found he appreciated Oda’s presence, for the air surrounding him without a mask breathing it out.
“To you, I suppose,” Oda expressed, an unkind tone absent from his cadence.
Sighing, Ranpo reflected, “Not only to me.”
That is true, Oda thought to himself. Though he never understood, it wasn’t only Ranpo who viewed him in such a light.
“I find it strange you didn’t seem too keen on smoking in front of my little brother, yet you gave him an inclination for whiskey,” Ranpo lightly chirped.
Oda merely blinked, unsure of what he was faced with. Dazai mentioned his brother (a childlike wonder in their usually hollow glass of sunken mahogany coruscating through), then separately mentioned a fellow executive of theirs. Oda had his presumptions, but he never voiced them aloud—there came a danger with giving names and relations. Yet here was said executive, giving him his answer without pause.
Why?
“They were curious, and amongst everything else they handle, I imagine whiskey isn’t the worst,” Oda responded.
Ranpo chuckled. “You’re not wrong.”
After a moment, Oda peeked over at him from the corner of his eye. “May I ask—”
“Go on,” Ranpo prompted, raising his glass in invitation. He already knew the question, up to its origins.
“Why tell me something so personal?”
“About Dazai?” Ranpo unbotheredly drank down another sip. Asking questions while knowing the answer was rude, he supposed, but he didn’t care—he’s tricked quite a few into their dying breaths that way, but that wasn’t the case here. He found no need for any sort of manipulation in this setting.
“Isn’t information like that—”
“Dangerous? Deathly, in fact. I’d kill anyone who knew. Dead men tell no tales, so it goes,” Ranpo snorted.
Oda carefully nodded. “I see.”
“As for you,” Ranpo teasingly stretched out the “you”. “Dazai sees something in you,” he plainly divulged. A trust held that blossomed into Dazai allowing his mask to fall—allowing him to become the child Ranpo always brought out in him.
He cherished that side of the kid. When he forgot about the sanguine marks and bullets and instead sought comfort and understanding. Ranpo tenderly cultivated that side to them, wanting it to flower as much as it allowed so the light in their soul wouldn’t extinguish against the suffocating air within the mafia.
(Towards the end of their grandfather’s life, Ranpo had found them with their soul darkened, at the risk of its wick giving out).
And here came along another, gently fanning the small flame.
Ranpo gingerly turned toward the man. “If they trust you, I can give this much,” he concluded.
Oda raised his brows, nodding in understanding. Ranpo was appeased by the response, finishing off his beverage. Placing it back down, Ranpo hopped to his feet, leisurely heading for the stairs. “Oda-kun,” he called, continuing his trek up.
“Ranpo-san?” Oda replied, his focus on the glass under his chin.
A knife ripped through the air, Oda minutely moving his body backwards, the blade caught between his fingers. Oda faced him, twirling the knife in his hand, the handle ending up tipped towards its owner as he handed it up to him. “I do believe you’ll need this.”
Ranpo snickered, hopping over to him, halting right in front of him. “I believe so,” he grinned, wrapping his fingers around the hilt, swiftly sheathing it. “It was nice meeting you, Oda-kun.”
Oda nodded once. “And you, Ranpo-san.”
Smiling until his eyes crinkled (a smile sincere in its making), Ranpo pivoted on his foot, striding back up the stairs—leaving the man with eyes that gazed into the future to settle his drink alone.
They’d see one another again. It was only a matter of when. After all, they shared a connection Ranpo put above everything and anything else.