Chapter Text
Plenty had been said about the Yokohama Palace Hotel in the seven years it had been open. It had been called garish, breathtaking, tasteless, and heaven on earth; the mind behind it had been alternatingly praised as a genius and decried as an idiot squandering his family’s fortune on fantasies. It was, in many ways, exactly as polarizing as its creator himself.
Gojo Satoru, strolling from frigid formality to the humid heat of the jungle in August as he opened the door to the greenhouse, thought that he wouldn’t have it any other way.
The hotel’s design had been born at the countless tedious dinner parties his mother had hosted or forced him to attend in his youth. While she had entertained the wives of the foreign businessmen his father met with to talk shop, he would think of places he would rather be. It wasn’t as much fun as interrupting the conversation at inappropriate times, of course, but it was easier to get away with. And it happened often enough that the place he imagined began to look the same every time.
Satoru’s imagined escape would lack nothing. At every hour of the day it would be full of noise and the hum of human life, and any food he craved could be procured just by speaking its name. There would be light and color that never shut off, not like the cold western-style rooms in his own home, kept dark with heavy drapes. It would have its own movie theater, and somewhere to swim. Its thoroughly metropolitan existence was nevertheless backed up on a beach where the sea was always warm, and a lush forest, and a little nook where one could drink hot chocolate and look up admiringly at the snowcapped mountains, warm and safe behind glass. When Satoru was young, he had never placed it anywhere on earth, but that hadn’t mattered. It had been there to amuse him and perhaps to comfort him – nothing more.
When, orphaned at twenty, he had come into his family’s fortune, the only thing he could think to do with the money was build it.
He had read law at university. His father believed it would benefit the firm, and he’d been too tired of arguing with his parents to resist, so he had coasted; no one had found Satoru a particularly promising student, no matter how well he grasped the intricacies of the legal system. Most had told him in some way or another that he was entirely too flippant for the profession, a sentiment with which he thoroughly agreed. Upon his parents’ passing in a traffic accident, he sold the firm, cast off any expectation of a career in law, and found himself thoroughly bored.
It was in that boredom that he remembered his old escape, and realized how much it resembled a luxury hotel – and that had been it.
The architects he hired insisted, though politely, that he was out of his mind. They would scamper away one by one, shaking their heads, apologetically informing him that what he wanted couldn’t be done. No one had ever heard of anything as preposterous as a waterfall in a hotel lobby. People didn’t simply build glass-walled greenhouses as tall as office buildings. No one was rude or bold enough to say it outright to such a rich man, but they all thought it: Gojo Satoru was an idiot. Wealth had made him naïve; he simply had no idea what was and wasn’t reasonable.
Entirely unruffled, Satoru had kept on shuffling through architects until a university student, so newly arrived in Yokohama that he still couldn’t hide his thick Hokuriku accent, looked over his plans, raised his eyebrows, and told him, “it’ll be the talk of the town.”
Geto Suguru did not possess an ounce of whimsy of his own, but as an executor of plans, he more than proved himself. Leave it to him to haggle down the price of marble like a hypnotist, to find someone with the connections to stock the hotel’s greenhouse atrium with exotic plants and birds, and to do it all without a single ounce of enthusiasm.
“If I’m being honest,” he told Satoru one night, poring over plans for the electric waterfall that was proving to be his most formidable challenge, “it’s a tasteless hodgepodge.”
Satoru had looked at him with the blankest expression Geto had ever seen on his face, and he had elaborated: “totally incoherent. Conceptually, a disaster.”
“And?” he prompted.
“Ugly, quite frankly.”
Satoru was too amused to be offended. “But it’ll be the talk of the town, mm?”
Suguru had never believed in the project, but he had believed that it could be done, and, almost as if challenging Satoru to deny him, he delivered.
Satoru hosted the Yokohama Palace Hotel’s grand opening on his twenty-first birthday. For several months, the place had been a curiosity, one that attracted more gawkers than guests, but as its novelty wore off with the locals and caught on with the foreigners, it found its stride.
There was no beach with ever-warm water, but there was an indoor swimming pool. The mountains outside the window nooks in Gojo’s rendering of a patisserie were far in the distance, but they were still well-positioned to be admired over a glass of hot chocolate and a pastry. Three movies a day showed in the basement, the electric waterfall had been so improved that it only broke down every seven or eight hours these days, and a lucky guest might be used as a perch by one of the tropical birds in a greenhouse that was now, under the care of its newest custodian, more of an aviary than anything. The Yokohama Palace Hotel was a place to see and be seen, and that was all that Satoru had ever wanted it to be.
It was perhaps as excessive a balm for loneliness as any man had ever tried to apply, but as a business, it was a success.
“Are these new?”
Megumi, carefully filling a stone basin with water from a pitcher, turned and looked at Satoru as if he wished that he could’ve ignored him without risking the loss of his job. “I thought someone would’ve told you that we’re stopping bird acquisitions.”
He did, of course, know that. It had briefly crossed his mind when he entered the greenhouse what a shame it was that he wouldn’t find anything new inside. Still, Megumi was easy to tease, and therefore irresistible. “Not even anything for the big to-do tonight?”
“I don’t see what birds have to do with your ward coming home from school,” he said flatly.
Megumi’s parents had warned Satoru when he agreed to hire their son as a greenhouse caretaker that he would be far better at caring for the birds than he would be at socializing. This was by no means a stretch.
“Never mind,” he said cheerfully, waving it off with a flap of his hand. “How goes the bird-feeding?”
Megumi grunted in response, as was rather typical of him. Satoru, who knew when to quit better than he seemed to, walked off.
In the six years of its life, the greenhouse had flourished. Saplings had become trees, and if it wasn’t exactly a rainforest canopy yet, he thought it was impressive enough.
Yuuta had, too, when he’d first brought him here.
He’d been thirteen back then, the child of poor relations who’d caught cholera, and so skittish that Satoru had barely gotten a word out of him at first. He’d been jumpy and nervous and ready to break down in tears when he so much as bumped into a maid on the way to the elevator with her pushcart of fresh towels, and Satoru hadn’t known what to do with him. He had little choice but to take care of him, and no desire to abandon a child with no one else to turn to, but he barely even knew how to talk to people his own age, let alone children. Taking him to the newly-opened greenhouse had been a fit of desperation.
It had worked, though. One step inside and Yuuta’s eyes had lit up.
It had been something like magic to watch the real-life imitation of the place Satoru had built to comfort and entertain himself do the same for his young ward. The greenhouse had coaxed something out of Yuuta that losing his family had shut tight, and it was only then that the hotel’s marvels – the miraculous indoor waterfall and the swimming pool and the endless things to eat and look at – began to open to him. He shared the suite Gojo kept for himself on the top floor by his office, attended school, quickly endeared himself to the staff – unequivocally, he was a hit.
If not for that greenhouse, with its lush greenery and its still, steamy air cut through by the calls of exotic birds, Satoru didn’t think Yuuta would have ever come around much to his new life. Certainly not enough to have graduated at the top of his high school class and shipped out for Cambridge. Megumi, though, didn’t seem to be nearly so envigorated by his workplace.
“Well,” Gojo said cheerfully, sensing that his presence was becoming more unwelcome by the minute, “I’ll see you at the party, then, eh?”
Megumi looked up at him with a blank expression that tended more towards disgust than real neutrality. “Sure.”
That was Megumi for you – surly at even the best of times. Most of Gojo’s younger employees all but tripped over their own feet trying to ingratiate themselves when he walked by, but Megumi wasn’t the type. Perhaps it was the job security that came with a father who was head of hotel security and a mother who outranked even that in the Palace Hotel hierarchy, or maybe it was just his personality. Either way, Gojo found it amusing at worst and refreshing at best.
Still, Megumi was one with whom one had to quit while one was still ahead.
In truth, he didn’t really know why he’d wandered into the greenhouse. Nostalgia was his best guess, but he had no real goal in going there, so he quickly moved on – even though he wasn’t officially needed, there was no shortage of things he wanted to look in on and supervise. He probably ought to go make sure that the bossy teenage maid he’d put in charge of ballroom setup was actually doing her job, and the caterers – he couldn’t countenance making his own kitchen staff prepare the meal for a party they themselves were being asked to attend – ought to be arriving soon.
But he didn’t feel like doing any of those things, so, in true Gojo Satoru fashion, he simply didn’t.
He took the lift to the offices on the top floor instead, offering a smile to a tall young woman holding a stack of documents. The woman didn’t seem particularly impressed, and he thought that maybe he ought to introduce her to Megumi. They’d get on well.
Not that he had bothered to learn her name, but it was a good thought.
“Sachi-chan,” he called out, rapping three times with his knuckles on the fourth door to the right of the elevator. “A second of your time?”
The sound of a door slamming shut was promptly followed by a shrill “coming!,” a series of suspicious thuds, and a tiny crack in the door through with Fushiguro Sachi poked her head. Gojo decided immediately that he didn’t want to know.
“Evenin’, boss,” she said brightly, straightening as if it would hide the obvious flush in her cheeks. He’d bet any amount of money that she had just shoved her husband out through the other door. “What can I do for you?”
Satoru let himself into her office with an ease that would ordinarily have been inappropriate. Fond of her as he was, “Sachi-chan” was both an employee and ten years his senior. She never seemed to mind, though. The Fushiguros, save Megumi, were not especially fussy people, and Sachi in particularly had warmed to Satoru quickly. Maternal instinct, probably. If only he could say the same of her husband, who looked at him like roadkill more often than not. One couldn’t alwayswin.
“Nothin’, really,” he said, sinking into her red velvet armchair. She had asked if one might be brought to her office when a wing of guest rooms was being refurbished last year, and Satoru suspected he had sat in it more often than she had. “Just wondered what you’d be doing hangin’ around here on a day like this.”
Sachi rolled her eyes fondly, settling into the chair across from his. “Working, Shachou. The books don’t wait.”
Or, he suspected, because she couldn’t stand to lose the money. Sachi was the furthest thing from stingy, but after years of unpaid work of managing her petulant son and even more petulant husband, being paid – first as an accountant, her pre-motherhood trade, and eventually a series of positions further up the ranks until everyone involved with the hotel’s finances answered to her – had gone to her head. It came with her razor-sharp head for numbers, he supposed. She wasn’t one to ask for time off.
“They do if you just don’t look at ‘em,” he countered.
“You’re funny, Satoru,” she said. “Real funny.”
“Yeah, yeah. You coming tonight?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” she said, smiling like she did when she was anticipating the pleasure of watching her boss squirm. “Been a while since I got to wear somethin’ that made Toji-kun sweat.”
She watched Gojo’s upbeat expression deflate into don’t-know-what-I-expected disgust and laughed.
“No, but I’m excited to see Yuuta, too,” she said. “Three years, that what it’s been?”
“Mm-hm.” Satoru would know better than anyone. “Three years.”
“I bet he’s gotten so tall,” she said fondly. “He always was such a swell kid.”
“Not like yours.”
Sachi was too professional to make a face at him, but he could tell she wanted to. Working for a man ten years her junior and more in spirit had a way of making her drop her guard in things like that. “I’ve told you a thousand times,” she chided him, “he’s just goin’ through a gloomy phase.”
“I really wouldn’t call whatever he’s got going on a phase.”
“You’ll see, Shachou, you will.” She fished a compact and a tube of lipstick from her purse – it always baffled Gojo, the way women could do that without so much as a break in the conversation – and swiped it across a patch of her lower lip that already looked flawless. “Now,” she said, snapping it back shut, “you nervous?”
“Nervous?” he asked. “Why would I be nervous?”
“I mean, big day and all,” she said, shutting her purse. “And what if your kid comes back in his gloomy phase?”
He gave her a sore look. “Yuuta would never.”
“You never know,” she said forlornly. “I thought for sure my Megumi was always gonna be as cute as he started out, and look where that got us.”
“You have all the loyalty of a cat,” Satoru told her.
“Oh, shush, you know I love ‘im to bits,” she said. “It’s just that every day he acts more and more like his old man.”
“Scary?”
“Petulant.”
That was an apt description. If he didn’t know what colossal motherly rage lurked beneath Sachi’s pleasant surface, he would have said so.
“It’ll pass,” he said.
“Hypocrite.”
Satoru shrugged good-naturedly. “Teenagers.”
“Teenagers,” she agreed.
Satoru knew, though he rarely owned up to it, that his casual relationships with his subordinates were unusual. He’d hung around his father’s businesses long enough to know how things usually went; visits, casual chatter, caring – those things were out of the question. Sachi in particular would’ve made a scandal; most would assume that a hotel owner’s spontaneous visits with a married woman on his payroll could have no innocent purpose. But he couldn’t help that he liked the people who worked for him, couldn’t help choosing employees whose company he enjoyed. He had, after all, opened the Yokohama Palace Hotel because once he had dreamed about making a corner of the world where neither he nor anyone else would be lonely.
Thus, Sachi, with her offbeat combination of motherly warmth and mischievous spunk, was a fast and unavoidable friend. But not everyone-
“Gojo-sama,” Nanami said tiredly, stepping into the hallway just as Gojo did, “haven’t we talked about this?”
-saw things that way.
“Nanamin,” he greeted him, inclining his head in greeting. “Top of the mornin.’”
“It’s three in the afternoon,” he said. “Would you care to explain why you were in Sachi’s office again?”
“Gossip,” he said, grinning. “Don’t be ridiculous, Nanamin, you know Toji would strangle me if I wasn’t keeping things on the up-and-up.”
Gojo’s second-in-command could not have taken a more different approach to employee relations. Whether something was on the ‘up-and-up,’ Gojo knew well, had little to do with whether or not Nanami, a man who seemed perpetually at odds with everything enjoyable, would accept its existence. Case in point.
Oh well. Much like Suguru, he had the playfulness of a bookshelf, but his work was always impeccable and his word trustworthy, and Gojo was not blind to the benefits of having a principled Manager of Operations. After all, if he were really all fun-loving frivolity, he’d have gone bankrupt by now.
Nanami, who did not, apparently, want to dignify that with a response, looked at him as if he is an utterly lost cause before turning to leave, a leather briefcase in his arms.
Well, Satoru thought, you win some and you lose some.
A normal day like this would be full to the brim with accounts to look over, investors to meet with, telephone calls to take, renovations to plan, and important guests to placate. Today was different, though, and he didn’t want to waste it. Thus, Nanami and his rules had to be ignored.
Truth be told, he didn’t even need to be at the hotel today. None of the party preparations were beyond what he knew the staff could handle, and he easily could have gone anywhere else. But, after all, he had created his own fantasy when he built this place, and leaving was not among his favorite leisure activities.
No one knew who he was when he descended the grand staircase back into the lobby among a crowd of finely-dressed guests, and he relished that. Anonymity was freeing sometimes, and he knew that as soon as he reached the ballroom, that anonymity would vanish.
It didn’t, though, not immediately. He pushed open the heavy, ceiling-high wooden door to a flurry of activity in which a single interloper barely registered. Caterers hurried around with pushcarts full of food and hands full of place settings; the band was practicing with little regard for the fact that there was an audience. To his eyes, the room looked nearly ready, but no one acted as if it was. He scanned the ballroom for the swingy brown bob cut that identified the maid he’d left in charge of the preparations, perhaps against her better judgement, but didn’t see her.
Maybe she’d stepped out, but when it came to Kugisaki, Satoru knew when to suspect that she might have been taking the lack of supervision a little lightly.
It didn’t take long to find her, though, once he found Maki, who was carrying a stack of plates that reached all the way to her chin in each hand and headed towards a set table at which sat a teenage girl and-
Oh. Of course.
He should’ve known that Kugisaki Nobara would invariably be the first person to find the celebrity in the room.
She’d outright said when she was hired as a maid at sixteen that she wanted to work at the Yokohama Palace Hotel for the chance of spotting its famous clientele, and she had kept her word. Now, she was leaning across the table and hanging on every word from the mouth of a tall woman in a sleek western evening gown, probably relishing the chance to talk to the night’s entertainment before the rest of the guests did.
“Don’t go into the pictures, darling,” Gojo could hear her saying when she approached. “I’m tellin ya. I know it looks glitzy, but just don’t go into the pictures. Worst mistake of my life.”
He raised his eyebrows. Far be it from him to have realized that the nation’s sweetheart would be so jaded.
“It’s like that?” Kugisaki said, thrilled to have been taken into what she clearly thought was confidence.
“Oh, babydoll,” she sighed, leaning on her floppy open hand, “it’s like that.”
“But your pictures-“
“I know, I know, but really, I’m tellin’ ya, the theater’s your ticket,” she said. “Nothin’ beats singin’ onstage, really. Not even your face on the big screen.”
Iori Utahime, actress, singer, and the romantic awakening of a good quarter of Japanese youth of a certain generation – and, apparently, spectacular burnout.
Gojo shook his head, amused. Leave it to Kugisaki to have the famous guest complaining within ten minutes.
Truth be told, Yuuta probably wouldn’t even know who Iori Utahime was. He neither cared about celebrity gossip nor frequently went to the movies, let alone the theater; maybe he would like the background of her singing with the band, but Satoru doubted he would really care. But, then, he had not signed off on a grand welcome party for his own sake. He’d understood without needing to be told that this was a celebration of a place and the people who made it keep on moving as much as it was a celebration of his homecoming.
Yuuta was good like that – he never wanted a fuss made over him, but he’d allow the fuss if it benefited others. If a party on Yuuta’s nominal behalf was what would allow Satoru to give the staff he cared for a memorable night, he would put up with things not being quite to his taste.
And besides, Satoru knew that he would find some way to disappear with Maki and Toge as soon as dinner was over, and he was just fine with that. Let everyone believe the excuse and revel in it – that suited them all just fine.
Satoru checked his watch – five-forty-one, nineteen minutes until Yuuta’s car from the docks was supposed to arrive – and made his way out front. Best to be ready in case anything changed.
After all, this was meant to be a place where no one would be lonely, and Yuuta had been its finishing piece. Like hell would Satoru be late to meet him when he came home.
**
“You fixed the waterfall!”
Gojo smiled, reaching over to ruffle Yuuta’s hair. “Got a new pump put in last year,” he said. “It breaks down a lot less nowadays.”
“I remember it never used to stay running for too long.” Yuuta, clutching the strap of his briefcase so tightly that his knuckles looked white, paused in the middle of the lobby to admire the change. “I guess it’s-“
“Oi, Okkotsu!”
Yuuta stopped short, and his mouth was still open when a black-and-white blur came running at him with what looked to Gojo like the intent to kill. It was only when a white cap and the two hairpins that had held it in place came loose that he realized what he was looking at, and Zenin Maki crashed into Yuuta with a shoulder-butt that could’ve taken out a bear.
Working as a maid may have forced her to keep her violent impulses to herself, but Satoru was convinced that nothing would ever really tame Maki. That could be a good thing, if looked at one way, or a danger to society. Which of those it was Satoru hadn’t yet decided.
Nevertheless, it always amused Satoru that a boy as sensitive as Yuuta, when it came to Maki, never missed a beat.
“Maki-chan!” he replied, laughing a little and rubbing at his shoulder. Injured, probably. He’d have to have a chat with Maki about not damaging his ward after things settled down. “What was that for?”
She stepped back, folding her arms across the front of her starched white apron. “You up and leaving,” she said crossly. “What’d you do that for?”
That was as close to ‘welcome home’ as Maki was ever going to come. Smiling, he stepped aside, pretending that he needed to talk to the woman at the concierge desk to give him a little space.
“You know how the kids are,” he said to no one in particular, leaning against the reception desk’s high counter in his best approximation of effortlessly suave. “What can you do, hm?”
The receptionist, a young man about Yuuta’s age or a little older with a blank face and eyes that almost looked closed, said something generic but blandly polite in reply, though he looked as if he were trying not to wish that Satoru would go away. Perhaps he didn’t know who he was, but even so, he didn’t seem very well-suited to guest services.
“What’s your name?” he asked, trying to be conversational while eyeing Yuuta’s animated conversation with Maki in his peripherals.
“Kamo.”
“Kamo…what?”
The man narrowed his already-narrow eyes. It was an unconventional question, yes, but Satoru didn’t think he had to look so cross about it. “Noritoshi.”
“Noritoshi,” he repeated. “Nori-kun.”
Kamo, evidently not the type who enjoyed being given nicknames by unfamiliar social superiors, blinked at him.
“Too much? Sorry.” He smiled apologetically. “Nanamin – he’s my head operations guy – he’s always saying I need to be less familiar. Boring, though, isn’t it?”
Kamo looked like he privately agreed with Nanami but would not, no doubt recognizing the name and its status in the hotel hierarchy, say so. At any rate, he seemed glad to be freed when a bellhop with his arms full of bags called Satoru’s name from a ways off, asking something about Yuuta.
Itadori Yuuji, bellhop extraordinare and general raiser of workplace morale, hadn’t even been hired yet when Yuuta was last in residence, but he seemed far more excited for his return than most of the staff who had been. Or maybe it was just the party he was looking forward to. Whichever it was, Satoru appreciated the enthusisasm, even if it did seem like he might drop a bag in his excitement.
Then again, that was always Yuuji’s greatest foible. He never seemed to run out of energy, and he left one with the impression that he really was glad to have met one; guests liked that as much as they liked how many of their bags he could carry at once. But what might have been unparalleled efficiency in his work thanks to his athletic gifts was rather imperiled by his eagerness. He took a boyish pride in showing off how many bags he could lift, but he tended to forget that the number of bags whose weight he could support was not necessarily the same as the number of things he could keep a steady grip on at once.
Still, Satoru thought, you had to love the kid.
“Tell Yuuta I said hello!” he said, soundly ignoring the fact that Yuuta had no idea who he was. His leave-taking caught Maki’s attention, and she gave him a hard look which Satoru didn’t think was very called-for. One simply wasn’t short with Itadori Yuuji; it would be too much like kicking a puppy.
Then again, it was Maki. At a time like this, she wasn’t the type who would like the thought of sharing her closest friend to someone who hadn’t run three miles to the docks to see him off when he left for England.
“Teenagers,” Satoru muttered to himself, then, checking the time, returned to hs apartment on the top floor to change. He thought of asking Yuuta to join him, but Maki, employee or not, would probably not have stood for that. Best to let her be as territorial as she wanted to be for the little while that his presence was still novel, even if it meant that Yuuta had little time to get ready with the party set to open in an hour.
True to expectation, he threw open the door to their suite in a panic at six forty-three.
“I lost track of time,” he said, his face almost white, and immediately broke for his wardrobe, where a maid had hung the suit he’d traveled with in a garment bag. “We went to the kitches and-“
“Oh, to see Toge-kun?” Satoru asked, more to force Yuuta to stop talking and breathe than anything.
“Uh-huh,” he said, retrieving the suit and hastily tugging off his travel clothes with no regard for the lack of privacy. “But I didn’t check the time and all the sudden Maki-chan was saying I’d be late.”
“What’ve you got to do, get dressed and put on some cologne? You’ll be fine.”
Yuuta, buttoning his shirt with a fury and then tugging on a vest with so much force that Gojo thought he might rip a seam, didn’t seem to share this opinion. He noticed with something between amusement and fondness that his grey suit jacket hit a little higher on his hip than it was supposed to, but didn’t point it out – Yuuta would probably have panicked, and there was no need for that.
“Fashionably late, not fashionably early,” Satoru said in an attempt at reassurance, tossing Yuuta the grey derby hat that he’d set aside in his rush. He set it over his pomaded hair with what seemed like a sigh of relief.
Yuuta took a moment to examine himself in the mirror, and Gojo took that moment to note that he’d grown up more at Cambridge than he’d first thought. He was taller, yes, and he would need another suit soon so that his socks wouldn’t show below the hems of his pants, but he had an angular look to his face that was also new. And he might’ve been as earnest as ever, but somewhere along the way he’d picked up a sense of style – his suit would’ve been perfectly-tailored when he bought it, and the salmon vest beneath was a bold but fitting choice Satoru wouldn’t have expected of someone as shy as Yuuta. He wondered what minor English aristocrat he had to thank for that newfound panache.
Whatever the cause, he didn’t look like a teenager anymore, and Satoru wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.
“Yuuta-kun,” he said, suddenly convinced that he needed to say something.
“Yes?”
“I’m…I’m real proud of you.”
His cheeks flushed like they always did when somebody praised him. “I didn’t even really do anything.”
Satoru chose not to respond to this. That was one of Yuuta’s more annoying habits, downplaying everything. He would probably spend all night doing that.
But, at the door to the ballroom, there was nothing to downplay, because no one stopped talking or eating h’ors d’eouvres when they entered, and Satoru smiled.
He had wanted that for so long, to be able to walk into a room and go unnoticed not because he was invisible but because he was known. His father had been the kind of man people stood for when he entered a room, and he had probably meant to pass that air of authority down to his son, but Satoru had never wanted it. It was lonely, he had long ago realized, being on a pedestal; he wanted employees who would sound off if they didn’t like his choices, who only noted his entrance as a friend. Maybe that was a bad business practice, but the way he thought of it, business was the art of making self-service mutually beneficial, and nothing would serve him better than to be known, liked, and trusted. He suspected Yuuta would agree.
Thus, when only a few people stopped Yuuta on his way to find Maki and Toge, Satoru smiled, and made a beeline for Sachi, who was chatting with Nobara.
“And then she told me not to go into the pictures,” Nobara was saying, as if this were the most preposterous thing she could imagine. “I bet she was fried when she said that. She had to be fried. Who’d ever say somethin’ like that sober?”
Ah. Celebrity gossip. Satoru nudged his way in with a glass of champagne. “Evening,” he said. “I take it you like the music.”
“Gojo-san,” Nobara said with conviction, “if you have enough money to be payin’ someone like her to sing at your party, I think we all oughta have a raise.”
He laughed, equal parts scandalized and delighted that she’d said something he could be scandalized by. “It’s not every day your kid comes home from Cambridge, though.”
Sachi, on the other hand, eyed Nobara with what he could only describe as fond disappointment. “You must be where my son gets his fresh streak from.”
“I’m only fresh when it’s Gojo,” Nobara said matter-of-factly. “Otherwise I’m an angel. Ask anyone.”
Sachi, who knew too much to believe that, shook her head. “Whatever you say.”
At that prompting, Satoru left Nobara to plea for her innocence while he took a brisk survey of the room: a group of cooks clustered around one table, plates piled high; Yuuji stood beside Megumi in line at a buffet table of desserts, talking a mile a minute while Megumi nodded and grunted occasionally to demonstrate that he was listening; Iori Utahime onstage, crooning into the microphone in French. All his staff, or at least the ones who had wanted to attend, under the ballroom’s vaulted ceiling, and all the people he cared for dressed up and enjoying themselves – it warmed him, seeing that.
“I see your eye for design is as dreadful as ever.”
And that, the cap-off of a splendid party, late as usual.
“Suguru,” Satoru said, turning with a smile he could only try to compose. He was sure from the mildly distasteful look on his friend’s face that he probably still looked idiotically happy. “Didn’t think you’d turn up.”
This was a lie, because for all that Suguru tried to pretend he was above those kinds of attachments, he had a propensity of turning up at the hotel bar hoping that Satoru would appear so he could complain about work. That Satoru didn’t come down to the lobby often enough to know this was a habit of his didn’t really deter him much.
“Of course I did,” he said. “I had to see how terribly you’d decorate the place.” A pause: “and it is terrible.”
“Dry up,” Satoru said genially. “You’re only saying that because you don’t like admitting you’re happy to see me.”
“And it’s been a while since I’ve seen Yuuta.”
“Oh, of course, Yuuta.” He shakes his head. “How’s the business?”
“Booming,” he said drily. “I nearly walked out on a customer the other day.”
“Unreasonable demands?”
“No, he just annoyed me.” Geto glanced at the stage and raised his eyebrows. “Is that Iori Utahime?”
“Didn’t know you went to the pictures so much.”
“I don’t. Everyone knows Iori Utahime.”
He hadn’t, not until he’d asked some of the younger maids and cooks who he ought to get for the night’s entertainment, but Geto was always telling him that he lived under a rock, so maybe that wasn’t surprising. “Am I to take that to mean you want an introduction?”
“What? No. I was just curious.”
“You know,” he said conspiratorially, “she’s just cynical enough to go for a type like you.”
“Pass,” Geto said, and there was that look of distaste again. “People in show business make too many messes.”
That was roughly what Satoru had been expecting him to say, and he would’ve said as much had Yuuta not come by to tell him that the caterers were saying they were ready for the main course. Geto looked displeased with that, too.
“Well,” he said, “say your bit,” and he did.
Satoru knew that heads probably turned when he walked down the center aisle and towards the stage, but somehow it still seemed to surprise Utahime when he mounted the steps and gestured for her to hand over her microphone. Never mind that she was between songs, apparently. She gave it to him, though, and he cleared his throat and took a moment to compose himself before he began.
He could see Nanami sitting with Shoko from the infirmary at a table near the front, and Nobara had convinced Maki to bring Yuuta and Toge to the table she shared with Yuuji and Megumi. Sachi sat at the next table over between Tsukumo, a valet, and a sulky Toji. A few seconds more and Geto joined the left front table on Shoko’s other side.
All of them, at least ostensibly, there for Yuuta. He couldn’t help but think that it was what he deserved.
“Before you all get too fried to remember why you’re getting fried on my dime,” he started, trying to force a chuckle, “I thought we might take a minute to, ah, think about that. Sort of thing.” Clever, maybe, charming sometimes, but charismatic, Gojo was not. “Because – I was telling Nobara earlier – it’s not every day your kid comes home from Cambridge.”
Sachi’s polite applause prompted the same, and he gave it a moment to subside.
“But, really, this one’s for all of you.” Scattered cheers at that. “I always say Yuuta’s what puts the life in this place, but it’d be a pretty sorry mess without all of you. So…have yourselves a time.”
He cleared his throat, feeling as if there were something more that he should say, but nothing came to his mind. He cleared his throat again, found it still empty of the right words, and nodded his head to indicate the completion of that speech.
Well. They all got the point.
Satoru liked to pretend that he was better than Suguru at expressing himself, but when the mask of playfulness fell away, there was little to sustain the illusion that he was. Telling his entire staff – or at least the ones who hadn’t been quietly given a bonus because they didn’t want to leave the guests unattended – that he could never have built his grand refuge without their good work would never be easy for him. Sometimes, in moments of introspection he tried to limit as much as he could, Gojo thought he might have no substance at all beneath his constant jokes. Times like these, though, it was best to ignore the twinge of dissatisfaction in his chest, give the microphone back to Utahime, and get something to eat.
No one would remember, anyway – there was too much else to talk about for that. The food, workplace gossip, the celebrity entertainment, whatever else would surely be more interesting than Gojo’s nonspeech. Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, but either way, only Yuuta said anything, and Yuuta was entirely too kind not to make note of anything kind that was said about him.
He contented himself with that thought, and with the free entertainment of watching the young people get up to dance. Nobara didn’t even have to ask Yuuji, who was among the first to stand when Utahime cued the band for a faster song, and Yuuta was too bashful to try, but Inumaki stood and quickly found a small, chirpy girl he knew from the kitchens to partner with. Geto was ordinarily not fond enough of western entertainment for dance-hall antics, but he took Shoko, and was as infuriatingly skilled in that area as in most others. Megumi sat curled in on himself at his table as if he knew that Nobara would come for him the moment she got bored. His father looked no happier to have been coerced into dancing with Sachi.
Maybe, in some other version of events, there would have been a reason for Satoru to join them, but he’d never been fond of dancing. Nothing that required finding the right partner had ever really appealed to him.
Maybe, in that other version of events, he would have been distracted by something his partner said, and he wouldn’t have heard the double doors opening behind him. Someone else would’ve noticed a maid and a bellhop, both still in uniform, standing in the open doorway with haunted looks on their faces.
But Gojo wasn’t one for dancing, and it was he who got up and went to them and asked what had happened, and he who heard it first.
Choso had been asked to retrieve a forgotten bag from the trunk of a parked car. He had found a woman.
Miwa had opened the bathroom door of a room she was assigned to clean and found a girl lying in tepid bathwater water dyed red.
He remembered that Choso didn’t like parties, and that Miwa had chosen to work because she couldn’t afford to miss a bonus she could send back home to her parents. He remembered the happy occasion of Yuuta’s arrival and shuddered.
“Don’t call the police yet,” he said quietly to a doorman who had overheard. “And lock this room.”
He had to move too quickly for explanations, and he offered none as he took first Shoko, then Toji, then Nanami, and, for safekeeping, Yuuta. They gathered at the door in varying states of disgruntlement, though Yuuta’s only reached worry, and he almost couldn’t say it, but he had no choice.
“Two guests were just found dead,” he said, straight-faced so he could force himself to believe he wasn’t shaken. “One in the trunk of a car, the other in her bathtub.”
The silence that followed made Satoru wonder if they thought he was joking. It took a moment to realize that it actually felt much more like disbelief.
“A homicide?” Nanami finally asked.
“That’s…I don’t have the details.”
“Then we would have no choice but to evacuate,” he said. “Vacate all the rooms, get the police-“
“You handle that,” Satoru said, snapping back to business so as not to let the enormity of the thing that had happened weigh him down. “Give the order, coordinate, find people rooms somewhere else, I don’t know. Whatever that entails, you do it. You” – he gestured to Shoko – “autopsies. Don’t look at me like that, I know you know how to do that. And Toji?”
He nodded, the most acknowledgment he would give.
“Until we sort this out,” he said, “you make sure no one leaves this room.”
After all, half the people with the keys to those locked places were here.
“Assume everyone is a suspect,” he finished. “And get this under control as fast as you can.”