Chapter Text
“Think of it like a babysitting job,” said Kyu-chan.
Kazuki groaned. “How am I supposed to look after someone else when my own life is in shambles? I can hardly find work, I’m broke, I’m this close to getting evicted….”
“This might just solve all your problems at once. The Boss’s son is the best killer in the organization. He gets offered more assignments than he can possibly accept, and he’s never failed to take down a target. But the man is insane. He charges into every job, guns literally blazing, counting on his skills and his sky-high pain tolerance to get him through it. It’s worked so far, but I’m worried his luck will run out and the organization will have to rely on guys like you who can’t shoot anything more than five feet away.”
“Hey!”
“The point is, I think he needs a partner. Someone who can plan out missions to capitalize on his skills and keep him from taking unnecessary risks. It could be great for both of you. You get more work, he gets to focus on what he’s best at and hopefully not get himself killed. He has a huge loft not far from the bar, too. If you guys get along, I bet he’d let you crash there for a while.”
Kazuki had his doubts, but his options were limited. And so, that evening, he headed to Yadorigi to meet Suwa Rei. He pushed open the door to the sound of the bell and Kyu-chan’s mellow “Welcome,” and froze.
The crown prince of the Japanese criminal underworld sat alone at the bar, hunched over and glaring dully into his drink. He was gaunt, disheveled, and pale, the whiteness of his skin all the more striking against his dirty-looking black outfit and ragged black hair and stubble. He didn’t say anything or even glance up as Kazuki walked in. Kazuki’s eyes darted to Kyu-chan, silently questioning. Kazuki had heard plenty of stories about the heir to the Suwa organization, and he struggled to believe that the slumped, silent man in front of him was capable of half of what the rumors suggested. But Kyu-chan cocked an eyebrow and nodded slightly.
“Rei,” he said, “The guy I mentioned is here. Kurusu Kazuki, meet Suwa Rei.”
Kazuki slid onto a neighboring stool and was hit by the smell of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed laundry. The other man turned and looked at him blankly. Kazuki’s voice barely trembled as he said cheerfully, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Suwa-san, I—”
“Rei is fine.”
Kazuki sputtered into silence. The guy was glowering at him like Kazuki was a fly drowning in his drink, but offering to proceed on a first-name basis, as if they were peers or even friends.
“Is that really okay?
“Mm. It doesn’t matter what you call me. If we’re going to work together, this is easiest.”
“Well, alright, then you can call me Kazuki.”
“Of course.” Rei said it as if this was too obvious to warrant mentioning.
“I look forward to working with you,” Kazuki stammered out with a forced grin.
“Hm,” was all the other man replied.
*
Kazuki headed to their first joint assignment unsure what to expect. Could the greasy-haired guy he’d met at Kyu’s bar really be the best assassin in Japan? Maybe the stories were exaggerated. Or maybe he’d been good once but had hit hard times and lost his touch. Kazuki knew how that could go…. But when he arrived at the meeting point, he was shocked by what he saw.
Rei stood in a shadowed alley dressed in an immaculately tailored black suit. His white shirt was crisp, his deep red tie was neatly clipped, and his long hair was pulled back tightly from his angular, clean-shaven face. His eyes were still sunken, but now they flicked over to Kazuki with cold focus. Even his posture was different, erect and kinetic, loose, but poised to strike.
“Whoa,” said Kazuki with a nervous half-chuckle. “You look ready to go.”
“I am,” growled Rei. “Don’t get in my way.”
Kazuki had no chance to. Without another word, the dark-haired man sprinted into the building where the target was located, and a moment later the sound of gun fire erupted inside. By the time Kazuki caught up, he pushed through a door to see Rei, eyes narrowed, mouth set in a thin firm line, put a bullet through the center of their target’s forehead. Four armed guards were slumped near the door with blood beginning to pool around them. Rei’s face and the front of his outfit were speckled with blood, but he wasn’t even breathing hard. All that was left for Kazuki to do was to search the room for materials that might help them identify the target’s co-conspirators.
When they met up at Yadorigi the next morning to hand over the materials, collect their payment, and ask about other jobs, Rei looked just as disheveled as when they got their first assignment. Kazuki would have suspected Rei hadn’t washed in days, except for the fact that he was no longer spattered with blood.
*
Assignments went pretty well. Rei didn’t always stick to the plan, and when Kazuki nagged him about it, Rei retorted that Kazuki should spend less time planning and more time learning to shoot straight. But they kept getting jobs done, and Kyu-chan was offering more difficult and lucrative work. One evening, he handed over information on a job that would require them to get past a sophisticated security system to reach their target.
“I can figure something out,” said Kazuki brightly, “But we’ll need to plan carefully, and dude, you’ll need to follow the plan.”
To his surprise, Rei grunted his assent, then added, “My place is nearby. We can discuss there.” He abruptly stood and left the bar, pausing very briefly at the door to see if Kazuki was following. Kazuki cast a helpless glance back at Kyu-chan but hurried after him, curious to see the huge loft he’d heard mentioned.
To Kazuki, the apartment felt like an absurd extension of the grubby Rei he first saw hunched by Kyu-chan’s bar. The living room was as big as Kazuki’s whole apartment, but the only visible furniture was a TV stand topped by an enormous TV and a coffee table half-buried under piles of discarded takeout containers. The room was dim, and the smell of smoke was pervasive, with strong undercurrents of must and old grease. But once the first wave of shock subsided, Kazuki couldn’t help but notice what lay under the squalor: professional-grade kitchen appliances moldering with disuse, huge windows with a river view mostly hidden behind closed blinds, spiral stairs leading off to yet more space out of sight. It could have been a nice place if it wasn’t so miserably neglected.
Rei seemed oblivious to Kazuki’s look of horror. He slipped off his shoes and unselfconsciously padded into the living room, sat down on the floor next to the cluttered table, and pulled out and lit a cigarette. “Sit wherever you want,” he droned.
“Dude, there’s nowhere to sit!” Kazuki exclaimed. “You have no chairs, and most of the floor is covered with trash. I can’t work in this environment! At least let me throw out some of this junk. Where do you keep your garbage bags?”
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? Do you not have trash bags?”
“Nn.” Rei shook his head slightly.
“Do you have any cleaning supplies?”
“Nn.”
“A trashcan at least?”
“Mmn….” Rei paused for a thoughtful moment, then shrugged.
Kazuki let out a wordless yelp of exasperation. “I’m going to the store. I’ll be back.”
Rei looked at him blankly. “But the job.”
“The job can wait!” Kazuki almost shrieked as he turned towards the door.
He was back in half an hour, carrying a plastic trashcan, two bags of cleaning products and, for good measure, an apron from the dollar store with a cartoon shark on the front. Kazuki could not have explained why he felt like his blood was boiling as he tied on the apron and set to work cleaning the apartment of a man he hardly knew. Rei didn’t ask. He just sat amid the bustle, smoking and shooting imaginary people onscreen.
*
Rei hardly noticed Kazuki until the blond man practically manhandled him into the bath. They’d done a few assignments together, of course. Rei’s main takeaway from those was that Kazuki was a slow runner and a sloppy shot. He could also be a nuisance, berating Rei when he failed to follow his elaborate plans.
“Why does it matter?” Rei had asked at one point. “The target is dead.”
“Well, yeah, but you shouldn’t just rush in like that. You could get killed.”
Rei had blinked back at him. “And why does that matter?”
Kazuki had no coherent answer to that, muttering, “Dude, just stick to the plan next time.”
“Ng.”
The upcoming mission was complex, though, and Rei was pretty sure he couldn’t just blast his way past security, so he’d decided to see what his noisy new colleague could suggest. But when it was time to strategize, the blond man had taken one look at his apartment and completely abandoned the job at hand in favor of cleaning. Rei had watched impassively as he picked up bag after bag of garbage, swept up the crumbs on the floor, and wiped down the sticky coffee table. Finally, Rei noticed the other man had come to a stop nearby, hand on hips. He paused his game and looked up.
“Done cleaning?” he asked.
Red eyes looked down at him with more determination than Rei had ever seen when they were out on assignment.
“No,” came the response. “There’s one more thing.”
Moments later, Rei blinked with perplexity as the blond man in a ridiculous cartoon shark apron hauled him to the bathroom and ordered him into a steaming bath. Rei had never experienced anything like this. Was this a thing that happened to other people sometimes? He had stripped down and climbed in before he remembered that he could dismantle the guy with his bare hands if he wanted to. But once his skin stopped tingling from the heat, it wasn’t bad. Probably nicer than his usual method of rinsing any visible blood stains from his hands and face over the sink.
Kazuki was not especially gentle as he dunked Rei’s head under the warm water. But when he poured out some shampoo and started working it into his hair, he went slowly.
“That doesn’t hurt, does it?”
“Nn.”
“Good. I can cut it too, if you want.”
Rei was disoriented. Normally he’d kill before he’d let someone hold a blade close to his head or neck. But he was tired because he hadn’t slept well—never really slept well—and the warm bath was making him drowsy. The feeling of careful fingers rubbing shampoo through his hair was soothing. He tried and failed to remember the last time someone had touched him without the intent to injure or kill. Kazuki pushed his head underwater again, more gently this time.
“Lean your head back,” the blond man advised as he resurfaced. Too late. Sudsy water dripped down Rei’s face, stinging his eyes. He squeezed them shut for a moment, then blinked until it passed.
“Okay,” he said. “You can cut my hair.”
*
As Rei steeped in the bath with the general demeanor of a wet cat, Kazuki was surprised to see that his body was crisscrossed with scars. Of course, their job was dangerous, and Kazuki had a couple of past wounds of his own. But after seeing how Rei moved when they were working, with such ease and precision, he’d assumed that the Suwa heir was untouchable, maybe invincible. Apparently not.
Kazuki sat on the edge of the tub behind Rei and scowled at the back of his head as he put conditioner in his hair, combing out knots with his fingers. He might have laughed at himself if he’d thought about how he looked, but his mind was wandering as he considered how to cut the long, dark hair.
*
“You don’t have a bank account?” Kazuki asked, incredulous. He’d been staying with Rei long enough that he’d stopped pretending he had anywhere else he might go, but the man still managed to surprise him with his eccentricities.
“Nn.”
“Where do you keep your money?”
“In my room. In a box.”
“A box?? What if somebody breaks into the apartment?”
“If somebody broke in here, they’d be trying to kill me, not rob me,” Rei said matter-of-factly. “Regardless, I’d kill them.”
That was probably true, but Kazuki didn’t dignify it with a response. “Whatever. We split everything anyway. I’m going to make us a join account. That way we’ll both have access to everything. You know, in case one of us….” He trailed off.
“Dies,” Rei finished flatly. “Okay.”
*
What had Kazuki been thinking? He’d never even spent time with a four-year-old before. Nothing in the apartment was child-proofed. The kid had looked so sweet sleeping on the couch last night, but now she was awake and careening around to a soundtrack of crashes and giggles of “Sorry!” Kazuki just wanted to make some breakfast, and the kid—Miri—must be hungry too, but he’d never get it done if she didn’t let him focus.
Following a particularly loud collision, Rei shuffled blearily out of the bathroom. Kazuki pounced. Scooping up the little girl, he thrust her towards Rei. Rei looked nonplussed but took her into his arms.
“Go on, Miri! Play with Rei Papa,” Kazuki pleaded.
“Rei Papa?” she asked, looking up at the dark-haired man with wide eyes.
“I am not your papa,” Rei said seriously.
Of course. Just because Kazuki had rashly decided to take the girl in, he had no reason to think his roommate would want to be involved. They did so much together, maybe there was a way it could’ve made sense…. But murder was different from parenting. They were partners, but not that kind of partners. Of course. It had just popped out as he was trying to distract the kid.
Rei carried Miri into the living room and released her. Another crash reached Kazuki’s ears, followed by a low groan from Rei and another fit of wild giggles. What in the world had he been thinking?