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As Barok van Zieks’s nameless co-counsel, Kazuma had felt somewhat superfluous. The dog was better trained than he was, more experienced, and far more intimidating. It had hardly felt worth sending him into the courtroom at all. He couldn’t contribute, under his order of silence. The dog had been fetching things for Van Zieks his entire career. The only thing Balmung couldn’t do as well as Kazuma could was sabrage—he had wondered, even at the time, whether Van Zieks had taught him just to make him feel useful.
In hindsight, perhaps Stronghart had just hoped Van Zieks would stop bringing the dog to court.
He’d been allowed his dog in prison, as Genshin Asogi had been allowed his sword. When he’d visited, Balmung hadn’t recognized Kazuma as the enemy. He was a well-behaved dog, of course—he’d never have leapt up on him like that hellhound of Lestrade’s. But it was clear enough that he found Kazuma’s presence a comfort. Still thought that they served the same master.
Van Zieks looked at Balmung, and then up at Kazuma, for a very long time.
“It’s you, then?”
Kazuma held himself stiffly still. “Yes.”
Van Zieks laughed. Quietly, ruefully—but Kazuma had never heard him laugh before. “I suppose I knew that it would be.”
Of course he’d seen the same poetry in it that Kazuma had.
“You believe you’re up to the task?” asked Van Zieks. “As your teacher, it’s my opinion that you’ve a great deal more to learn.”
“You’ve never taught me,” Kazuma spat. “You taught only what was left in my absence.”
He was trying very hard, then, to believe that. Van Zieks didn’t seem to believe he did. Of course he didn’t. He’d lived those months alongside him, after all. He knew neither of them could truly believe they meant nothing.
“…Then, best of luck, I suppose,” he said. “I imagine my innocence will complicate matters for you, but…perhaps uncovering the truth with your own hands will give you the peace of mind that simply being informed of it did not.”
Kazuma grit his teeth. “Prosecuting the man responsible will give me peace of mind.”
Van Zieks stared back at him from the other side of the bars. “I’ve stood where you stand,” he said, slowly. “It will not.”
At the time, there had been a thousand differences between them in Kazuma’s mind that made the comparison nonsensical. Barok van Zieks had never stood where he stood. He had turned on a friend, not a court-appointed master. He had deluded himself willfully. He hadn’t been right. Kazuma was trying very hard then, of course, to convince himself that he was right. He had to be. He had to be right enough, anyways, to crack open the root of it—to investigate his father’s case, and restore his honor.
His own honor mattered less.
He understands now that this was exactly what Van Zieks had felt, at his age. All-consuming grief and desperation for an answer. Justice over doubt. Vengeance over honor.
Both of them driven by half a story. Half-right, half-mad, half-good.
Lord knows how they’d planned to get the dog from him.
They couldn’t shoot the animal right there—not until there’d been an investigation. But neither could any of the bailiffs approach. This was a hunting dog. This was a dog that had torn out throats on command, who had spent the decade after protecting his master from constant threat. Even elderly, Balmung was formidable. To say nothing of Van Zieks.
He gripped Balmung’s collar to hold him still, both of their hackles raised. “Step away.”
“Sir, I’m sure you can understand—”
Van Zieks drew his sword.
“Order—order, I say!” The head of Stronghart’s cane rang off the bench. He turned down to the defendant’s dock, dark-eyed. “You are not in this courtroom as a prosecutor, Lord van Zieks. Your grandstanding will not be tolerated.”
Kazuma had seen Van Zieks defer to the Lord Chief Justice throughout his apprenticeship. Take tasks he assigned without complaint, listen obediently with his head down. Feed and clothe and teach a man with no memory, for god’s sake. But in light of the new evidence, of the accusation in his brother’s scarlet hand—Van Zieks looked back up at Stronghart with open loathing.
This was all he could do to him, however, and Stronghart knew it. “I expect this trial to conclude shortly,” he said, “and at that time, you will surrender your dog.”
There was nothing to be done. This was a hunting dog. This was a dog that had torn out throats on command. Van Zieks knew now that Balmung was a murder weapon, and one that even in the event of his acquittal, he would not be permitted to keep. From where he stood Kazuma could see the last of the light leave his eyes.
By the end of the trial, Lord Stronghart was hardly in the position to demand the surrender of anything. But he wasn’t the only one who would. The remaining judiciary wouldn’t stand for it. The public, who would undoubtedly hear of this closed trial’s events, would be out for blood. It was Scotland Yard who it fell to. The police ushered Van Zieks out of the courthouse antechamber, and he followed them with the subdued resignation of a gallows-walk.
Now in the dim evening, Kazuma waits on his doorstep until his return home.
Balmung is still with him when he arrives. Kazuma hurriedly gets to his feet under Van Zieks’s baffled stare, and reaches out to give the dog a quick stroke on the head.
“Mr. Asogi.”
“Yes?”
“May I ask what you’re doing here?”
Kazuma picks up his small suitcase—nothing but the few changes of clothes he’d taken when he left his master’s home. “I’d hoped to return to stay with you,” he says. “While I finish my apprenticeship.”
Van Zieks looks away.
“You are returning to court,” says Kazuma. He’s not surprised Van Zieks would reverse course while out from his oversight—he’d almost expected it. “I won’t allow you to—
“I will be out of the country for some time.”
“I won’t let you hide—"
“It is not my own shame that motivates me, Mr. Asogi!” snaps Van Zieks. His hand spreads out over his dog’s shoulder, and he speaks more softly. “I…I will be taking a leave of absence until Balmung’s natural death.”
Kazuma has put the man through hell these last few days, and through none of it had he looked closer to breaking.
“Is that a condition?” he asks, looking away from Van Zieks’s exhausted face and down at Balmung’s noble, white-flecked one. “I’d thought for sure that they’d…” That he had only gone along to be at his dog’s side for the euthanasia.
“If I remain in England, they will be required to,” says Van Zieks. “That was made clear.”
“They’d let you leave to escape it?”
He swallows. “Balmung has not harmed another, human nor animal, since…since he has been in my care. I will not instruct him to. Though Scotland Yard knows this perfectly well, the London public does not, and it’s absolutely unreasonable to expect them to live alongside the…” His voice falters. “…The Professor’s hound.”
Kazuma had seen the public’s fear of the Reaper. He can’t imagine seeing it compounded.
“He is an old dog. Older than average.” Van Zieks strokes Balmung’s fur slowly, almost unconsciously. “It’s likely he will live only a few months more at most. I’ve been granted the opportunity to allow him to live those months in peace before I return to work.”
“…I see.”
“I… I understand that you hoped to continue your apprenticeship,” he says. “And I apologize. I’d be happy to help place you with a different prosecutor—"
Kazuma laughs. It’s absurd—there’s not a single other man in the justice system that he even halfway respects.
Van Zieks presses his lips together. “…In that case, I would suggest returning home.”
“Can’t I come with you?”
He’s two steps below the door. As he stares back at Kazuma, curious and furious at once, their eyes are level.
“…Mr. Asogi, I won’t be in court.”
“You don’t need to be, to teach.”
“Mr. Asogi...”
“What else are you going to do with your time?”
Kazuma had stayed in his home. He’d seen his despondent off-hours. Van Zieks knows he had—they’re both picturing how much worse he’d be in total isolation, waiting patiently for his oldest, most beloved friend to die.
He makes a slightly better attempt. “You won’t speak the language.”
“I won’t need to, if I live with you.” Kazuma shakes his head. “I don’t care. I’ve waited years, sir. I can wait a few more months.”
“Be reasonable.”
“I feel I’m being quite reasonable,” Kazuma replies. “I thought you said I had a great deal more to learn. You would deny me my chance to learn it?”
Van Zieks gazes back into his eyes for a long second.
He lowers his head, lifting his fingers to the scar between his eyes in helpless annoyance. “If you are determined to waste your time, I suppose you’re welcome to,” he mutters. “May I enter my home now, Mr. Asogi? I’ve had a very trying day, and a great deal of it at your hand.”
“…Oh. Yes.” Kazuma steps aside from the door, bowing his chin. “Of course.”
Balmung trots in after him, but his paws patter around on the marble as Van Zieks pauses in the entryway to call back.
“Are you coming, Mr. Asogi?”
Kazuma hesitates.
“I can’t apologize,” he says.
“Of course not,” says Van Zieks. “No more than I can.” Matter of fact—as matter of fact as Kazuma had said it in the antechamber. Had it felt as cold to Van Zieks then?
“Of course.”
Van Zieks straightens his back, squaring his shoulders. “But I repeat—are you coming?”
They leave quickly, ahead of the press. Ryunosuke and Susato and their friends see them off at the pier. Van Zieks clearly hadn’t expected such a large contingent—he shakes hands politely, bows to his lawyers, hangs back as Kazuma says his goodbyes.
The little girl reaches out a tentative hand to Balmung, who stoically tolerates it—the children who reach out for him on the street are often far less cautious. She glances up to Van Zieks. “May I pet him, Mr. Prosecutor?”
“…Yes,” he says, voice tight and strained. “Yes, you may.”
Balmung is nearly as tall as she is. She gently strokes the top of his head, and then she giggles and scratches between his ears. “You’re a very good boy, aren’t you?” she coos.
Kazuma is close enough to Van Zieks to hear his intake of breath as she wraps her arms around the dog’s neck. The Professor’s daughter—his niece.
It will have to wait. They board the ship.
They cross the channel, and take another ship down the coast of France further south. Kazuma hadn’t been able to catch the name of the area—Van Zieks pronounces French words as Francophonically as possible, even when speaking in English. A carriage brings them deeper into the countryside. They don’t make conversation. Kazuma watches the landscape pass as the sun sinks.
Balmung gingerly leaps from the carriage when it stops, sniffing around as they remove their luggage. He knows this place, but hasn’t been for some time. The house is old, pale stone. Modest—or at least, what the term might mean to a man like Barok van Zieks. “This is where I stay when I visit the vineyard,” he says.
“The vineyard belongs to you?” asks Kazuma.
“It’s been in the family since the Médoc was drained.” Van Zieks shakes his head. “I spend time here on occasion. More before my return to court. But generally I leave the operation of the winery to those far more skilled in the art than I. They’re the ones who use the property.”
Kazuma looks up at the barren rows before the distant château. There’s not much to see. Knowing the man, he’d expected something glorious, but the grapevines are little more than dry spindles.
Van Zieks can read his underwhelm.
“The vines recover in the winter,” he says. “After the harvest. The leaves fall and the plants are pruned. The winter rain cleanses the soil. The buds mature and the roots expand, stockpiling energy as they expend little. A hibernation, of a fashion.”
“…I see,” murmurs Kazuma.
He and Van Zieks are silent for a very long time, staring up at the vineyard in the dusk.
Kazuma glances toward him from the corner of his eye.
The isolation is strange.
Kazuma had grown up in the country, but he had done so with a family. It has been years since then even so. Enough that he barely remembers the feeling of life outside a city, or close enough to one.
They’re not far from the city of Bordeaux itself. Occasionally they’ll go into town, purchase groceries or have a meal. One Saturday when he tires of textbooks Van Zieks takes him around to all the important sites and monuments. His English voice is a beacon in the fog. Even in the city, Kazuma has no one here but his master.
At the house it’s quieter. The winery staff is, like the vines, bare-bones for the winter. Occasionally they will see a lone worker up in the vineyard, or pass by someone with whom Van Zieks will exchange a few polite words of French, but for the most part, the three of them are alone.
Kazuma had imagined speaking the language would help, but Van Zieks seems just as isolated as he is. Even in London he had had a semblance of a life. Perhaps all it had been was his work. Now that he has none, he goes nowhere and sees no one. Christmas comes and goes unadorned, and the New Year after.
They’re reading before the fire on the evening of the latter day, Balmung on the sofa with his head in his master’s lap, when Kazuma asks, “Do you feel lonely here?”
“Never as a child,” says Van Zieks, after a few thoughtful seconds.
Kazuma can picture the bank in summer, lush with green. Barok van Zieks as a young boy. Frolicking through the rows, toward his family still with him, before there was earth over their bodies or blood on their hands.
He snorts softly. “But as an adult, I often came here when I sought the feeling.”
“The feeling of loneliness?”
He strokes Balmung’s velvety ears. “Yes.”
There aren’t many who would understand, but Kazuma knows exactly what he means.
“Is that why you didn’t want me to come?” he asks.
Van Zieks looks up at him, furrows his brow apologetically. “I… Forgive me, Mr. Asogi, if I gave you that impression.”
“You’ll forgive me for getting that impression, when you made every attempt to dissuade me.”
He sighs.
“I had no objection to your company,” he mutters, looking away. “But I didn’t want you to feel trapped here. Alone with me, of all men, in a land whose language you cannot speak.”
He hadn’t wanted to be Kazuma’s beacon in the fog. He’d wanted him to have more than Barok van Zieks—he didn’t feel he was a worthy sole companion.
“I don’t mind,” says Kazuma, rather than try to claim this fear isn’t true. “I’m learning a great deal. Surely more than I would be in London.”
“Are you really?”
He nods. He is. Here, they’re removed from the storm they’d left in their wake. In London they’d have been in the midst of it—distracting at best, more likely infuriating. The pressure of it of it is distant now. He can focus. But it’s more than that.
Kazuma hadn’t ever expected to return to the intimacy of his former apprenticeship. Working further with Barok van Zieks would be fraught; he had accepted that before asking. The ease and understanding that they’d had before he had a name… It would be gone. Even when he’d agreed to follow him here he’d believed that. Even outside of the greater storm, he had imagined they couldn’t run from the tiny storm they carry with them.
And yet…living with him here is almost easy. They don’t discuss the storm. They discuss landmark cases and courtroom tactics, history and precedent and poise. The weather and the theater and the laundry. What to have for lunch and where to walk the dog and what to talk about while they did.
He'd never had this. Even as the masked apprentice, he hadn’t come to know Barok van Zieks like this. He’d never known he wanted to—and now he feels privileged to have been given the opportunity.
“Really,” says Kazuma. “I’m glad I came with you, sir.”
Van Zieks stares at him for a long time, as if his apprentice has done magic and he’s trying to figure out the trick of it. “I’m glad to hear it,” he says softly.
“Of course.”
After another stiff second, he gently shifts Balmung from his thighs and rises. “I’m—going to make a cup of tea,” he says. “Would you like some, Mr. Asogi?”
Kazuma nods again, brow knitting in concern. Had he been too open? Too affectionate?
He supposes that their little storm still remains, if only in the fear that Van Zieks still feels it. The fear that he should still be feeling it himself.
The dog climbs off the empty couch and pads over to his chair, where he rests his heavy head on Kazuma’s knee. Perhaps he’d noticed his unsettlement. More likely he’s grown too used to being doted upon at all times. His cloudy eyes turn up to him, searching.
“You’re getting spoilt,” Kazuma mutters.
He supposes that’s the point. He runs a long, slow hand up the dog’s nose over his head. Balmung, contented, closes his eyes.
Kazuma has never owned a dog. It had never occurred to him to be jealous of those who did. But he thinks he understands now. It’s nice, that Balmung doesn’t understand what he’d done. It’s nice to have a friend who doesn’t.
Van Zieks doesn’t keep staff at the winery house. His handful of servants at home couldn’t be asked to leave for so long—they’ve been given an extended paid vacation. He and Kazuma make their own beds and tend their own fires. On occasion they dine in the city, but mainly, they cook for themselves.
It surprises Kazuma, far too much to hide, that Barok van Zieks knows how the washing is done. On a Monday afternoon in mid-February, as he heats the iron, he finally asks about it.
“I’ll admit I rarely do it myself,” mutters Van Zieks, cheeks a faint pink at the question. “But I was shown as a child. I spent a good deal of my time among the staff.”
“Not with your family?”
He looks up at Kazuma, eyes narrowed. “You imply I distanced myself by choice?”
Kazuma shrugs. “Many do.”
Van Zieks holds out a hand. Kazuma hands him the hot iron.
“Many families among the peerage are distant, at best.” Van Zieks turns back to the ironing board and shakes his head. “Aside from it my mother was ill more often than not, and my father…” He pauses. “My brother was far older than I. By the time I was born our father had no interest in another son, beyond the practicality of having a spare one.”
“I see.”
The prosecutor dresses more casually here, outside of the world. Just in his shirtsleeves most days. Kazuma watches the fine shirting crease over his upper arms as he glides the iron over his trousers.
The lust had never truly left, after he’d regained his memory. But it’s been more present lately.
Van Zieks sets the iron aside to reposition the trouser leg. “When there was no one but Klint left to raise me,” he says, “I believe he felt we ought to be closer.” His eyes flick upward, to where Balmung sleeps on a fireside cushion in the sitting room. He’s spending the bulk of his time asleep these days. “We clearly became close eventually, but at the time, I recall it felt strange.”
“How old were you?” Kazuma asks.
Van Zieks looks back at him, blankly.
“I was seventeen,” says Kazuma. When his mother died. When there was no one left but Yujin Mikotoba to raise him, and for so long it had been strange.
“Twelve,” says Van Zieks, after a long pause.
“I’m sorry.”
Awkwardly, he nods. “…Likewise.”
Kazuma watches him turn to the side, pick up the iron once again. He swallows. He’d been too eager for that connection of their pain, that confederacy of loneliness. To make it real and spoken. But it had been foolish to keep asking more and more. An old defense instinct—to press.
“…Please tell me if I ask too much of you, sir,” he says. “I don’t want to pry.”
Van Zieks shakes his head. “Think nothing of it, Mr. Asogi.”
“I suppose I forgot myself,” says Kazuma. “You’ve seemed to be more…open than you have been in the past, while we’ve been here. I’ve become less accustomed to propriety.”
An unpardonable lapse, to the mind of Barok van Zieks. “Forgive me—”
“No.” Kazuma steps away from the stove, close enough to watch him in profile. “I like it,” he says. “You fascinate me.”
Van Zieks snorts, amused and oblivious. “Is that why you chose to remain in my tutelage?”
“Partly.”
The sentiment is clear now. Kazuma can see it in the tension of Van Zieks’s back, in the stiffness of his movement as he sets the iron down. If he’d been any more nervous he’d have left it flat on his trousers.
Kazuma straightens his back. He’s finally set foot on the path now, the one that both of them had been lingering fearfully on the edge of. He can pretend no longer that they hadn’t. “Are you truly surprised?” he asks, forcing nonchalance. “I thought you knew from the beginning, that you fascinated me.”
“The beginning? As my masked apprentice?” Van Zieks snorts once more, more weakly, as he turns to look back at him. “You behaved so inscrutably that it was difficult to tell.”
“I wasn’t inscrutable,” says Kazuma, shaking his head. “Not for long; not to you.”
They both know it’s true. They’d developed a quiet rapport in those months, an instinctive understanding even with the mask between them. They’d known even then. They were two of a kind.
Van Zieks stares down at him, blue eyes dazed, but deep.
“Perhaps,” he says. “Even so, I fear that in comparison I was—” He falters, glancing away. “An—open book.”
“You were,” says Kazuma.
He lifts his hands to Van Zieks’s ashen cheeks. They’re cold, drained in terror. Kazuma strokes his thumbs along them.
“Mr. Asogi…”
“It is why I stayed, in part,” he says. “I couldn’t bring myself to return home, that’s true. I intended to learn from you, that’s true as well. But more than that…I needed to know what would become of us, given time. Considering what we were before.” He breathes out a soft laugh. “Call it curiosity.”
“…What was it you hoped would become of us, then?” murmurs Van Zieks, half a whisper after a long silence.
As he lowers his head to him Kazuma wraps one arm around his neck, flattening the palm over the muscle of his broad shoulder.
“You know what,” he murmurs.
They kiss. Just lightly at first, a lingering of lips—neither of them are used to being this close to anyone. Close enough to feel their eyelashes, their hot breath—Kazuma imagines the closest Van Zieks has come is with the dog.
He leans back and draws him lower, around him and into him. Van Zieks’s iron-warmed hands keep him steady as he presses their lips together properly. Parts them, turns his head hungrily to taste his tongue.
The iron cools, forgotten.
The lessons in law have a clear student and teacher, but the lessons in pleasure they learn together. Experimentation at its purest. Some attempts are clumsy, some promising with further practice. Some end gloriously, in such raw, rough gasps and groans that Balmung growls at the bedroom door.
“La petite mort,” murmurs Van Zieks, a hollow, exhausted laugh in his voice. “I suppose he’s been trained to guard against any death of mine.”
He gracefully disentangles himself from his lover and his bedsheets to stand and wrap himself in his dressing gown. Kazuma settles beneath the covers as Van Zieks lets the dog in, bends down to pet him indulgently and whisper praise at the doorway.
Balmung trots up the stairs that Van Zieks had set up to his bed. He sleeps there at night—Kazuma, at any time, is a suspicious interloper. The mattress shifts as the giant dog pads around him, intently curious.
“Look at him, he’s fine,” says Kazuma, hands up in surrender. Balmung gives them an investigative sniff. “I’ve done nothing to him.”
Van Zieks rejoins them on the bed. “I disagree,” he says, reaching out to give Balmung more calming strokes.
“That I’ve done nothing?”
“Of course. You’ve done a great deal to me, and all of it sorely needed.”
Kazuma snorts. Before, he’d have taken issue with the phrasing. He’d fantasized about it, but he’d never understood how desperately he’d needed to be touched. What was missing.
“More than that,” mutters Van Zieks. “You must know, don’t you? How profoundly you’ve changed me?"
Satisfied with their safety, Balmung folds his legs to sink down to the mattress. He rolls over between them and nuzzles against Van Zieks’s knee. “I know,” murmurs Kazuma as he reaches out to scratch between the dog’s massive, bony shoulders. “I’ve felt it too.”
They sit there, dog between them. Van Zieks’s hand meets his atop Balmung’s flank. Their fingers brush over the soft rise and fall of the dog’s slow breath.
Kazuma says nothing for a long time, turning the thought over inside him until it bursts. “…Can we remain this way in London, sir?”
“…Lovers, do you mean?”
“Open,” he quietly replies. “I…I wonder sometimes whether it’s the isolation, more than anything, that’s changed us. That we wouldn’t have had the nerve to know each other if we’d remained in the city.” He looks up into Van Zieks’s face. “Even before we were lovers…sometimes I would dread returning.”
Van Zieks is silent, eyes closed.
Kazuma’s stomach twists. He’d never planned to say this aloud. He’d worried Van Zieks would be offended at the thought. But he hadn’t thought to worry that Van Zieks had had the same one—that he’d tell him he was sensible rather than stupid.
“You’re correct that it’s different here, alone,” says Van Zieks after a long while. He sighs. “You were correct too, of course, that we’d been…on the edge of something even then. But had we remained in London as we were, with that weight… I’m not sure I’d have had the nerve to face it.”
“Nor I,” murmurs Kazuma, stroking Balmung’s fur flat with his thumb.
“I suppose we won’t know whether returning will change things until we do,” says Van Zieks. “And I don’t know your feelings on the matter. But for my part…” He looks up at Kazuma, meets his eye with courtroom conviction. “Now that I’ve faced it, what we have… I’m not sure I have the nerve to turn away.”
Kazuma breathes out, and then he takes Van Zieks’s hand and brings it to his lips. “Nor I.”
Balmung whines weakly at the sudden absence of hands on his belly. Laughing softly against Van Zieks’s fingers, Kazuma drops his hand so they can resume their more important task.
He looks up across the bed. Van Zieks is smiling. Small, but calm and genuine, serene and unpressured. Looking at him here, at peace…Kazuma desperately hopes that he’s right. That he cannot turn away, no matter what. He wants to see this smile again and again and again.
“Whatever comes…it means a great deal to me, Mr. Asogi,” says Van Zieks. “To know that you like me this way.”
Privately, still unready to say it, Kazuma wonders if love is the right word.
They bury Balmung in early spring, in the field below the grapevines. They’re just beginning to return to life. Kazuma had almost hoped to see them in the summer and autumn—to walk through the vineyard in its prime, eat grapes off the vine and watch Balmung gambol about between the stakes. The loss of that fond dream is the smallest of the day’s tragedies.
There are no funeral proceedings; Van Zieks has nothing to say. Kazuma just stands beside him, their clothes still dusted with soil, as they stare down at the hole in the ground.
Van Zieks cries that evening. Deep, undignified tears. Kazuma had known, even going in, that at the end of it all he would be the last remaining comfort for a broken man. He’s grateful that now it isn’t strange to hold him. He cradles his mentor’s head to his chest in the bed that Balmung will never share again, until the shaking of his shoulders slows.
“Thank you, Mr. Asogi,” he whispers.
Kazuma speaks into his undone curls. “Of course.”
Van Zieks takes a rattling breath in and slowly out. “I’d spent so many years fearing his death,” he says, voice hoarse from sobs. “Wondering what would be left to me once he was gone.” He laughs weakly. “I never expected there would be you."
“…I find we never expect the most important things,” Kazuma says.
“I suppose we don’t.”
He rests his cheek against the top of Van Zieks’s head. “Though…even without me you wouldn’t have had nothing,” he says. “Nothing of the past, perhaps, but every bit of your future.”
“Hm.”
He’s reluctant in his grief, Kazuma imagines, to see a silver lining. But he cannot listen to such unwarranted fears. “Your life is left to you, sir. There’s nothing tying you back. You’re free.”
Van Zieks sighs. “I’m grateful I have you, then, Mr. Asogi,” he says. “To remind me of such things.”
Kazuma tightens his arms around him.
“…Is that why you left your sword with Mr. Naruhodo?” asks Van Zieks after a moment. “To free yourself of it?”
Kazuma blinks. Van Zieks hasn’t mentioned Karuma once since they’d left the quay. But he’s right, isn’t he? There’d been self-doubt and there’d been self-determination, but there’d been a thirst for freedom as well. To cut that one last thread that tied him to the past, and learn to live unmoored.
“Partly,” he says.
“As always, you’re stronger than I,” murmurs Van Zieks. “I suppose I’ll join you, then. In your freedom.”
“Good,” Kazuma replies. He can see hope on the other side of it all, in the thought of the lives they haven’t lived for years and years now. Now their last threads have both been cut.
Not forgotten, but gone.
They sleep late and go outside in the morning. They wander up and down the rows of vines. Van Zieks reaches out, cradles a tender bud just bursting with the tips of his fingers.
He asks, “Do you still dread returning to London?”
Kazuma doesn’t know how to answer. He does still dread it, a little. But he also knows what Van Zieks is asking.
In his silence, Van Zieks shakes his head with a quiet snort. “It stunned me, to hear you say that,” he says. “Considering your words after the end of my trial.”
“I stand by them,” says Kazuma. “Dread or not, I understand my obligations.”
“You don’t consider your newfound freedom to have changed them?”
Kazuma clenches his jaw. They’re free of the past, but not of the present that the past has wrought upon them. Free to move forward unhindered. Not to forsake their path completely.
Van Zieks’s fingers drift along the edge of a leaf. “I must admit I still imagine it,” he murmurs. “That fantasy you forced me to abandon. Never returning. Beginning again.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“We could make a life here, you and I.”
Kazuma shakes his head.
“You couldn’t do that,” he says firmly. “No more than I could.” He’d known, even when he’d dreaded it, that he would return to London no matter what. He knows now that their natures will not allow inaction. Even when it feels so sweet.
Van Zieks looks out over the sprawling rows, and he sighs deeply.
“…I know.”
His hands are as gentle as they’d been on the grapevines as he reaches back for Kazuma’s, lacing their fingers together.
“Though I’m glad to have been given the opportunity to leave for just a while,” he says. “To taste it.”
“…I suppose I am as well,” Kazuma admits.
“We’ll return here on occasion,” says Van Zieks. “When we need to, as we needed to then.”
“I’m not sure we’ll ever need a vacation so urgently again.”
“I see you’ve still a great deal to learn, Mr. Asogi.”
Kazuma laughs aloud. Beside him, Van Zieks chuckles softly.
They look out over the field, over the water.
Forward.