Chapter Text
Takasugi doesn’t remember the last time he went to a museum – probably not anytime lately. But there he is, engulfed by the squeaky clean atmosphere, the unorthodox feelings of seeing the ancient objects too neatly placed and brightly lit, and the reek of time from a period older than anything he can remember that contradicts yet perfectly matches the background of a modern room, feeling surprisingly at home.
There is, indeed, an unexplainable welcoming sense that hit him right as he set foot in this exhibition room. Familiarity emerges as his eye lands somewhere among the artifacts, bringing a benevolent warmth that clasps him gently, its nonexistent fingers running through his memory, trying to trigger any reminder about him ever being in such a place.
He can tell, however, that it isn’t the museum in general that tickled his feelings. A venue alone is like an empty shell, offers nothing, conveys nothing, and means nothing. The source of the tickle had to be lying among the hundreds-year-old content on display, which hasn’t yet caught his eye but already his instinct, and will soon be the target of his sole attention.
Which, unfortunately, should be on something else . He’s a terrorist whose mind isn’t tailored for noticing ancient artifacts that have nothing to do with his task, sake, or existence. He isn’t here to admire old-time works, more or less damaged totally or partially, silent and boring, telling vague stories, none of which he understands. He’s on a mission, and now it annoys him to see himself distracted.
“Have you noticed anything special?” A voice lands beside him, and Takasugi looks up at where it comes from, frowning. Bansai speaks in a low tone, almost whispery, for the sake of not giving away their undercover, but the strange quietness of the room, paired with the fact that there weren't many people here from the start, makes his voice unnecessarily twice louder.
Takasugi's eyebrows go deeper, but Bansai doesn’t look like he gives a damn about it. It isn’t easy to tell if Bansai cares about anything unless the man says it himself, and even then his words can still be unreliable. His favorite subordinate/co-leader’s like a book written with the rarest Kanji randomly scattered among the most updated and nonsense modern slang invented by cringeworthy teenagers.
That’s to say, Takasugi’s never able to read Bansai thoroughly, and this time it isn’t any different. The emotion written on the man’s face remains a mystery, and it isn’t because of the sunglasses he insists on wearing most of the time – he was an unsolvable puzzle long before them – but more likely due to the regular calm demeanor by which he usually responds to Takasugi’s expressions.
It takes Takasugi a few seconds to ponder upon the options that he has as a reaction to Bansai's attitude. It isn’t an easy task. The emotion on Bansai's face is unreadable, and it piques Takasugi's patience to see that he supposedly does it by choice.
“Should we be talking like this?” he ends up with a sneer, eventually, making sure that his words come out in the form of an irritating mumble, quiet enough not to draw attention, but loud enough to let Bansai hear, and, hopefully, ponder on the irony.
“It’s not like anyone would notice, I daresay,” Bansai shrugs, his eyes stay fixed on the quiet small group of people darting around in the exhibition room, many of those have eyes and probably ears on the artifacts. The silence of the room enhances the echoes of their footsteps, and the white walls seem to make it ring louder, twirling in between his thoughts.
Takasugi hates it when Bansai has a point, especially one that supports what he’s trying to argue against, like talking to each other in the middle of a spying mission being allowed because it doesn’t look like they may draw any attention.
He considers letting it slide, but then again, what’s the point of having Bansai by his side if he can't throw some retorts here and there, waiting for the man’s reactions and then scolding him for absolutely no reason. It's become a routine that Takasugi never wants to give up, and there are days the provocation jabs at him harder, stirring up his pettiness.
“Better be careful,” he grits his teeth at Bansai. It’s a stark contradiction to his words and just proves Bansai’s point even more, but Takasugi couldn't care less, “we may never know what form he takes, or if he’s in the hearing range. Need I remind you he’s a shapeshifter?”
“No doubt, I daresay,” Bansai nods, “but then what’s even the point of looking for him then, if he’s gonna take any form anyway?”
“He can change his look, not his reflection.”
“What kind of pathetic shapeshifter is this, I daresay? Also, it doesn't sound scientifically co–”
“Were you for real not paying attention when I described the plan?” Takasugi harshly cuts him off.
“Can’t. It's your fault, I daresay,” Bansai turns to him, “I was too busy focusing on you.”
Takasugi stares at him in disbelief, to which Bansai replies with a quirky smirk, fleeting and fading, in almost a second, only enough for Takasugi to see and feel his stomach squirm.
“Focus on the glass instead,” Takasugi growls, turning his head away, “it’s not the time to flirt.”
“So you take it as a flirt?”
“I said focus on the glass.”
“Right,” he can hear Bansai’s voice closer to him, knowing that the man’s reaching down for his favorite move, an inappropriate whisper in the ears, “I daresay that the glass can reflect everything clearly, like mirrors.”
“Is that supposed to be a mock on my plan?” Takasugi glances at him and snarls, quietly, but doesn't forget to show his anger.
“You said it, not me,” there's the hint of a faint glint on Bansai’s calm face, “although I dare-not mean to criticize you. I’m just saying that it’s hard to detect him.”
“Then try harder and drop the damn distraction.”
“I sure am. I think I found something. Shinsuke, on your left,” Bansai drifts from their conversation, startles Takasugi as he grabs his shoulder and whispers, “don’t turn your head, just look. Isn’t it him?“
Takasugi throws Bansai a sharp glare. He doesn’t know if it’s in Bansai’s intention to forget that he physically can't just look without turning at something to his left. It’s probably not, considering Bansai’s wicked and flippant personality, which's the origin of his mysterious behaviors, provocative dialogues, and special liking for inappropriate jokes that most of the time target Takasugi.
Taksugi says nothing, nonetheless. He has to prioritize the mission over the childish banter about the eye he had lost, and about the fact that Bansai’s bold enough to poke on that , out of every other provocative card the man has to play at him. It’ll be a matter of later, when they’re back at the Kiheitai, done with the task and relaxing, preferably in fewer clothes and in bed. For now, he needs to see who’s on his left.
Takasugi takes a step up and turns his head a bit, darting his eye to see a man dressed in black standing a little apart from the small crowd. He saw that man before, wandering around the glass cabinets and examining the artifacts carefully with interest written on his face. He behaves like someone genuinely into the exhibition content, not a suspect, so Takasugi let it slide.
Normally he’d give his deduction no second thought, and be mad if anyone dares to speak otherwise. But now Bansai has eyes on that man, and Takasugi knows better than not to trust Bansai's suspicion. It’s, after all, specifically why he brings Bansai along on this mission. Bansai never judges people based on their outlook, but on the bizarre thing he calls the songs of their souls. Whatever Bansai detects about that man is hidden well enough not to be seen, but sloppily enough to be heard.
As his ego pouts and tries to throw an internal tantrum, Takasugi's instinct tells him that he should listen to Bansai. He’ll be damned and drag the whole mission with him if he doesn't check it properly. Takasugi turns around and approaches the man in black closer, slowly, quietly, with his only eye pretending to slide through the random artifacts on his way, not to alert his target's attention.
Fortune’s on his side, it seems. The man in black leaves his spot and walks past a huge shield made of black copper placed behind a glass cabinet. In that split second, Takasugi can see his reflection in the glass pane, which is not a man in black, but an Amanto with the head of something resembling a boar.
He senses a tug on his sleeve and looks to the side to see Bansai, luckily not at his blind spot, nodding to him in agreement. Bansai must have seen it as well. He receives a squeeze from Bansai's hand, knowing that he’s ready and waiting for Takasugi's command to attack.
As Takasugi opens his mouth to deliver the command, his words, all of a sudden, are caught up, dangling between his throat and refusing to leave, resulting in nothing but a light gasp. It isn’t loud, yet it’s unmistakably the sound of surprise. Takasugi doesn’t know what caused that, but realization barges at him as his gaze stops at the spot where the Amanto in black was standing a few seconds ago.
There’s a painting displayed behind the glass, shabby-seamed, fade-colored, covered with a sepia layer of time. Still, Takasugi can see it clearly. He doesn’t have enough time for an in-depth observation or even a decent look, he just glances over there and suddenly his head’s filled with details, and with each of them, the annoying surge of familiarity that’s been clinging onto his head since he first walked into the room.
The painting depicts a couple, a man and a woman. The woman has a butterfly-resembling mask covering the left side of her face, her hair’s kept in an elegant up-do by a solitude hairpin shaped like blue hydrangeas. She’s playing a zither near a river of hydrangeas in many colors, a majestic feast for the eyes. The man stands by her side, his hand placed gently on her shoulder, and his eyes fixed on her, with unconcealable yearning.
It’s his eyes that cause a flash of unwelcome, foreign realization through Takasugi's head. He knows that he's never met the couple before – the state of the painting suggested that they are centuries apart – but there’s something about them that makes his heart clench, not with the usual remorse and pain about his forsaken past, but with, surprisingly, joy and peace. It’s almost as if he’s found the part of his soul that he never thinks he has, and for once, can truly be whole.
“Shinsuke,” he hears Bansai's voice, urgent and confused, over his scattered thoughts, the words are clear but they sound far away, and at that very moment, mean no more than nonsense babblings, “Shinsuke,” Bansai’s voice calls for him again, “he's making his way to the door. What's your call?”
Takasugi wants to say something, but his head’s spinning with emotions he never knew before. His mind starts filling itself with scenes that are supposed to be memories, except they seem to have happened centuries ago and Takasugi doesn’t remember any of them. The contexts were unclear, the costumes and the conversations were foreign, but the bizarre sense of familiarity from them hits painfully hard.
“I–” he tries to clear his throat, seeing his target aiming for the exit. They’ll waste months of inspection if he lets the Amanto go, but Takasugi feels like he’s under a twisted enchantment, where his head bids its ability to talk adieu and goes for a crazy spiral of unclear flashbacks , and his body's frozen, unsure of what to say, where to move, and how to explain this peculiar situation.
Then he vaguely hears the sound of glass cracking. In a minute, the modern setting of the museum around him falters. Even the white walls change their colors, draping on a layer of sepia, strictly resembling the paper of the painting. Just as Takasugi’s wondering if the crack he heard earlier was the shattering of his last sense about reality, he sees the cabinet in which the painting’s stored broken. He turns around to have a better look, trying to ponder on what’s happening, and that’s when he sees them .
It’s ridiculous, and in a second Takasugi really thinks that he’s snapped and gone mad. Probably due to the pain that’s been haunting him ever since the start of the war, probably due to his trainwreck personality, the gift of whatever entity above to him at birth, very likely due to the prolonged inspection without any proper break, there’re a lot of reasons behind this foolery.
There is, in fact, only one thing for sure. He’s out of his mind.
Nobody in their right, functional mind should indulge in what he’s one step too deep into now. They should prioritize not letting the target run away, giving commands to their partner, or better, jumping over there to catch the target themselves. Instead, he’s there, getting unhinged all of a sudden and staring at characters from an old painting, who, out of the illusory collapse of reality, just become alive.
And to make it worse, he hears them, too, louder than anything in the museum, louder than the reverberation of everyone’s footsteps, louder than even Bansai's voice. The song from the zither swallows everything around Takasugi, and with it comes the gentle rustle from the flowers in the river, the rippling of the water, and the breezes that tangle with the couple's hair. Soon after he was engulfed thoroughly with the painting's context, he starts hearing their conversation.
“My love,” the man in the painting, now more real than anything in Takasugi’s fleeting reality, hums. He leans in and places a kiss on his beloved's cheek. The action suddenly makes Takasugi feel his cheek burn, his whole body quiver with sentiments, and he wants to cruse as the heat of blush suddenly takes over, creeping quickly throughout his expression.
But the peaceful scene and the weird sentiment are interrupted by a cacophony of noises, fortunately from the reality that has yet to dissipate. There’s more glass shattered, more thuds and bangs, more clashing, more screaming, and a lot of curses. On top of that, Takasugi detects a faint presence of music revoking the zither. It’s the song he’s been familiar with, the death sentence played by none other than the extraordinary shamisen.
Takasugi blinks. The shamisen’s melody seems to pave the way for reality to sneak in and build itself back up, bringing along a voice he’s never thought he’d be eager to hear again. It’s a curse made of three bad words and a stupid I daresay, in a most threatening and annoying tone belonging to no one other than the notorious Manslayer.
It's Bansai that yanked him out of the unexplainable daydream. The painting-resembled scene disappears, the walls return to their usual shade of eggshell, and the cabinets remain shattered because obviously there’s a fight taking place, but at least there’s no longer any sepa-layered, peaceful love-birds scene taking place in the middle of the fight, and his world’s come back to its usual chaotic state.
“Damn it, Shinsuke,” he hears Bansai curse again, this time he even drops his usual conversational patterns, “help me the fuck out.”
Takasugi looks in the direction of Bansai's voice and tries to detect him from the crowd. He finds Bansai struggling with the shamisen strings at one end, and at the other, there’s their target, who’s returned to its Amanto form, trying to wiggle out of Bansai's trap.
“Hang on,” Takasugi shouts in reply and jumps in front of the Amanto. It’s much stronger than they thought, and he knows that Bansai's strings can’t hold it any longer. He unsheaths his sword and aims at the Amanto's legs.
A shriek fills the air as Takasugi's sword cuts through the flesh and reaches the bone. It takes more than one go to finish – his sword’s duller than he thought, the bone’s harder, and the legs are placed too far apart to be completed in a strike in one go – but he eventually manages to do it. The Amanto collapses beneath him, blood gushing from its wound, causing more witnesses to cry, faint, or vanish with terror.
Takasugi stands aside and shakes his head, glancing at Bansai. He hopes that Bansai wasn’t looking at him, or worse, seeing that he got blushed all over probably nothing. He isn’t sure of what happened then, but something about it tells him that he was the only one who saw all the hallucinations. The sepia layer, the song, the characters in the painting, and their words and gestures, were present for only his eye.
He sighs, feeling anger rising in his heart as he looks at the ragged cut on the Amanto's leg. He can make up as many excuses as he wants, but Takasugi knows that it’s due to a lack of focus. He wasn't paying attention then and his aim was bad, leading him to chop at the harder part of the bones, hence the many undesirable attempts to completely amputate the Amanto.
Bansai shows up beside him, quiet as ever. He’s withdrawn his strings and is now stooping down next to the wounded Amanto.
“I daresay he's better for us alive than dead, Shinsuke,” he comments. He’s regained his annoying conversation pattern, his voice’s found its usual calmness and his face remains stern, unreadable like ever. Still, Takasugi can imagine his irises rolling under the shades, full of unuttered questions. “We need him to trade with his people, and no one wants to trade a dead man, I daresay.” Bansai continues.
“He's alive,” Takasugi grunts.
“Not for long, if we don't treat his wound, I daresay.”
“Then find someone to do it instead of standing there and mocking,” Takasugi says nonchalantly, trying to fish for his kiseru in the sleeves, “it’s your duty.”
“Already did,” he hears Bansai heave out a sigh, “I called the Kiheitai when you sliced him. They'll be there in a minute.”
“Good. Better before the cops, too.”
“Yes, I daresay.“
As silence falls over, Takasugi can tell that Bansai’s looking at the Amanto longer than necessary, apparently to avoid his gaze. While he usually likes having Bansai's eyes on him, it's one of the rare occasions he’s happy that Bansai’s looking away. He doesn’t know what to say if Bansai started asking about what happened, and he knows too damn well that he can never lie to Bansai.
“You dozed off earlier, I had to call the attack myself,” Bansai suddenly speaks, breaking the ice that starts to creep on both of them, “hence the mess. Acted on the spot, no time to think, I daresay“
“You did what you had to. It was a nice job holding him.”
“So, should I ask abou–”
“No,” Takasugi says with a glare, cutting through his words, and bringing the ice back. He can’t tell if it works, but Bansai seems to back down at his firm answer.
“Sure,” is his reply, soft light breath, going with a slight shrug, after a few seconds of probably pondering. Bansai leans back against the wall, and the way he fixes the sunglasses, keeping them higher, more secure, and blocking his emotions totally from view lets Takasugi know that his head’s full of thoughts, many of which he would rather not let anyone know, including Takasugi.
The Kiheitai soldiers show up soon after that to carry the Amanto back to their ship and put an end to the prolonged mission, also freeing them from the ice Takasugi insists on keeping. As they’re fleeing from the premise, Takasugi stops and lingers at the painting. He doesn’t know why, and he still hates the experience earlier, but he feels the urge to take it.
There seems to be a connection between him and this painting, although he hasn’t figured out why and how something created centuries ago may have anything to do with him. But it called for him then, splashing him with surges of familiarity and emotions he never thought he still had. He can’t simply discard such a thing.
There are too many things that happen around the painting for it to be coincidental. Whatever the reason behind the whole thing, whatever kind of wicked spell it possesses that affects no one else but Takasugi, is worth getting figured out. He knows his mind won’t rest if the matter isn’t addressed properly.
So he does what a terrorist in his position is expected to do, getting rid of the leftover of the cabin protecting the painting – it could hardly be called smashing, as Bansai already broke a huge portion of it during his fight earlier – and taking the painting with him.
Takasugi can see Bansai stop as soon as he lingers. They always walk side-by-side, and perhaps it’s become a habit he doesn’t want to give up. Takasugi feels his heart jump, very little. Bansai might be wicked and super inappropriate, annoying and nosy sometimes, and difficult to read. Still, there’s something about him that Takasugi knows he can always count on, in the way he never does to any other.
Bansai’ll never leave his side, no matter what the situation. Bansai’ll detect his absence right as it happens, and he’ll always be there, waiting for Takasugi to catch up. Bansai’s a free man, but Takasugi knows, from the first second they met in that chaotic crowd, and probably until when Takasugi breathed his last, Bansai's place would stay unchanged, loyal, always next to him.