Chapter Text
“In the end, you may have brought to light the way to restore my soul…”
Words creaked out of the deepening grain of wood, mingling with the stifled gasps a mere meter away. The boy hunched forward on the ground, even now habitually fighting the emotions that had promised his demise many lifetimes ago. The old cane felt, rather than saw, tears dripping from blue eyes squeezed shut. Each one washed away another handful of dust. Centuries of decay caught up all at once.
“Parting from you is somewhat regrettable now, Satoshi.”
The sounds were growing harder to form, requiring more focus, more effort than it had with blood filling what had been left of his lungs. It was only the indomitable emotion behind them—that fact mustered up a few dregs of amusement—which gave him the strength to speak at all.
Regardless of regrets, he'd long overstayed his welcome. Much longer than he himself had imagined. But his task was complete. The rest lay in the hands of Satoshi and the thief.
“I... hoped... such a day would come, you know.”
Satoshi finally peered up through a thin fringe of light blue. Lines of smooth, clear skin had been drawn down both cheeks where dust and tears met.
It was enough.
And then Elm Root was no more.
***
There’s pain where his heart should be.
Normally that would have been reassuring. It was a relatively new sweetness linked to two pairs of dark blue that glared with varying degrees of mistrust. As he liked to do in the quiet moments between policework and supporting his Hikari, he prodded the ache with his mind, dwelling on how each throb currently rang out in sync with the growing sensation in his cold arms. Then his colder legs.
His lips parted—they were dry enough to crack, and that was another unsurprising detail—to sigh deeply. Only to abort it with a shallow gasp.
The delightful sting of his newborn heart shouldn’t sting quite that much, in his educated opinion. Not even when he’d pulled the white sheet back over Rio’s ashen face. Nor when he’d found the boy collapsed in their temporary home for the first of many times—
Blinding white light came next.
He blinked it back, or rather tried to. Maybe he wasn’t blinking at all. His eyes would water from yet another assault on his senses but they were as dry as his tongue. He tried to call out, but only a hiss of air could escape.
Satoshi.
His lips formed the syllables. Again and again.
Satoshi.
But no one answered.
Where was his son?
Finally his lungs burned in demand for air and the pain ignited anew as he shuddered in another shallow breath.
His heart was killing him.
… He might have to save laughter for another time.
If the slight push of air could be called a laugh. Either way, his body resented the cosmic joke. In the following minutes before the static of agony dissipated, he noted that the greatest source of discomfort wasn’t exactly the left side of his chest, but more centered, and a little lower.
Why, of all the injuries Krad inflicted on him in that final confrontation, had this one not healed?
… Why had any of them healed when his curse reached completion under Satoshi’s tearful grief?
There now, that was the comforting ache he remembered. He closed his useless eyes and replayed the events of his latest death. Airing it all out to Krad had been worth the literal stabbing discomfort of his retaliation. How many decades had he waited to rip out that parasite and shove it back into its coffin?
He skipped over the cascade of confessions he’d tried and failed to take to his grave.
At the end, Satoshi looked like he wanted to stop the magic from fleeing his crumbling body. Sure, he and Rio hadn’t fully tested the limits of their son’s blood, but it never had anything but a negative effect on Elm Root before. Perhaps he succeeded where they failed.
Someone would have carried his body… or cane… up the stairs and to a hospital. Perhaps that someone was Satoshi too, alive and uncursed.
Acrid odors of antiseptic combined with the steady beep beep of a heart monitor to his left were all too familiar when tending to a frail bloodline like the Hikari, though being more artwork than human, he’d never needed a bed himself.
His fingers twitched and jerked and fumbled.
By the time he’d reached the expected button on the side of his bed, he was panting from exertion. Shallow breaths did nothing for the wound that seemed to have pierced his lung and who knows what else. Damn that miserable half of the Black Wings.
An eternity later, several pairs of cloth shoes scuffed into his room. The burst of noise—orders for diagnostics, reading charts, adjusting fluids—dizzied him enough to forget why he’d pressed the button in the first place.
“Commissioner Hiwatari? Commissioner, can you hear me?” A gloved hand grasped his chin, gentle enough not to hurt but firm enough that he couldn’t turn away from the too-close voice.
His tongue still wouldn’t cooperate, but the owner of the hand had moved on anyway.
“It’s okay to feel disoriented, sir. You’re in Azumano General Hospital. I am…” The static returned, try as he might to shake it off. This sounded like important information, but something cold was running up his arm and for a shameful moment he lost himself in panic. He was even less eager for his vision to turn black than its current opaque white.
“Signs of waking… days ago… transferred to rehab…”
The hand grabbed his chin once more. He had just picked up the words “surgery”, “induced coma”, and “intubation” and then something was pulled, pulled, pulled out from his chest, his throat, his nose, and he was gagging on nothing.
When he regained his breath, with the guidance of another hand pressing featherlight on his chest, up and down, he spoke.
“Why can’t I see?” was what he’d tried to ask, but even to his own ears it sounded more like “Wucansss” and that was helping no one. The arm that wasn’t tied to the ice-cold IV gestured in the general direction of his face. Or rather, it tried. It might have weakly flopped on the bed.
Honestly, coming back to life the first time hadn’t been nearly so tedious. Did he really have to endure this? Would anyone be willing to buy the entire Hikari collection in exchange for a glass of water?
“Sssa…tosshhh,” he enunciated as clearly as possible through the second whiplash of memories associated with that infamous family name.
The murmuring at all sides had reached a crescendo, still ignoring him, still obnoxiously noisy, but one statement pierced the fog in his mind like lightning.
“No registered next of kin, but there is a relative on file.”
“Oh, I know that one. Been a patient himself on the upper floors too many times, poor thing.”
“Have the front desk give Hiwatari Satoshi a call then. Let him know his father is awake.”
***
The next several days passed in a haze—literally—of treatments, bandages, reflex tests, questions, and stretches of unconsciousness. His eyes regained a little more of themselves each time he awoke, which made the too-frequent occurrence of the last item on the list slightly less annoying.
With effort, he could find the blurry shape of a rehab nurse with dark hair at the side of his bed. There were a lot of those here. This one was Senri-chan; she had introduced herself once and he’d never bothered to break the habit of memorizing as many faces (or voices, in this case) and names as he could. It had served him well in his years as an art broker and later as a rank-climbing policeman.
He answered the same questions from this morning, or had it been yesterday, as charmingly as he could while his chest screamed in protest of old bandages being peeled off. It was still very charming, actually, having also mastered the skill of aping human emotions regardless of circumstances.
(What’s your name? How old are you? Where were you born?)
Simple enough. Yet he could sense his confident smile in the general direction of the blob that was her face wasn’t working as well as it should. Perhaps his facial muscles hadn’t regained their strength entirely.
“Hiwatari Kei. Twenty eight. And I was born here, in Azumano.” Yes, he was sure. He’d written it on the birth certificate himself.
Questions softened and repeated after that, as they always did. It couldn’t be normal to interrogate a lucid patient this often, and he was at a disadvantage without the ability to study the expressions of her face or steal a glance at the chart she scribbled on. So he smiled, asked how her day had been, made her laugh, and sent her on her way until he needed to cash in on this good will.
Senri hovered in the doorway this time.
“Would you…” The tap tap tap of her pen against the back of the clipboard rang out in the silent room. Nearly silent, save for the omnipresent heart monitor. “Like me to turn on the television?”
“I could use a change of scenery, thank you,” he said and was rewarded with another light laugh.
The doctor had promised his blindness was a temporary side effect of the coma and would pass on its own. Kei was holding her to that promise, or there’d be hell to pay.
“Any preferences?” Senri clicked through the channels and he pretended to consider the blinking blue, green, red blobs on the other side of the room.
“The news, if you don’t mind.”
Doctor Yamazaki did in fact mind, as the grey woman had bluntly refused to turn on the television for him when he’d first asked and forbade any nurses within earshot. There was some protocol about not overloading coma patients with information. There should be one about not boring them to death either. Cracking her shell remained a work in progress.
Lucky for him Senri hadn’t been around to hear that rule, or she liked him enough to break it. He wouldn’t waste the opportunity.
She slipped out the door as softly as if he were asleep.
They left him alone more often now as his condition had been confirmed stable. Apparently they also let visitors stare at him while he slept. Who exactly was doing that, and why they left flowers at his bedside, he couldn’t say. But when he’d asked if Satoshi had been one of the visitors, the nurse at the time (Shinichi-kun) had stuttered such an apologetic negative that Kei ended up having to comfort him.
Love was an exquisite ache, truly.
He’d always accepted that the feelings between him and Satoshi would not be enough to repair the rift born of two curses and years of deception. It hadn’t been a problem when he knew he wouldn’t survive that love to begin with. Now they were both alive. He sank deeper into the soft pillows propped behind his torso as the pleasant revelation washed over him anew—more the fact that Satoshi was alive than himself. Someone had managed to contact the boy, though they refused to let Kei use a phone and hear that adorable sullen voice himself. How sadistic. It was a simple matter of lifting him out of bed to wheel down the hall to a landline without reopening the hole in his abdomen.
Regardless, he obviously couldn’t rely on anyone else to do what needed to be done.
Starting with a slow rotation of his right ankle, then his left, he resumed the painful therapy exercises prescribed to rebuild muscle, while also keeping an ear open to the unfamiliar voice on the television.
“—Reconstruction is steadily underway on the areas affected by the Christmas earthquake—”
That indeed had been news to him the first time someone mentioned it. One would think the Commissioner of the Azumano Police Department would have noticed a destructive natural disaster mere months ago.
“—one more week to clear the last of the rubble from downtown Azumano. Identifying weakened structures could continue for months to come, specialists say.”
There was something that had nagged him ever since he’d been able to stay awake long enough for a complete conversation with the hospital staff.
He understood most of the words being said, give or take a couple seconds to parse the meanings of the more technical ones. He’d chalked it up to office slang infecting communication with clients—something he himself had had to crack down on in his own headquarters—or even accommodation to Azumano’s robust tourism industry, but the news reporter gave him pause once more. Everyone spoke a discomfiting mix of Japanese, English, and latinesque words. The words that had been switched out appeared random too, consistent in their usage but with no clear reason why perfectly good Japanese was replaced.
When one had more time than most mortals, it didn’t hurt to pick up a few languages to lure in foreign collectors of Hikari art. This was the most he’d ever had to rely on them. He half expected to read roman letters scrolling on the bright screen across the room, if only he could read anything.
A deep sigh escaped his chest, and he rode out the inevitable twinge that ran through his whole body afterward. His fingers responded to his cues for exercise next, too sluggishly for a man with as many responsibilities as him, too clumsily for a former artist’s apprentice. The price one pays for a third chance at life was rather steep.
Though he’d never strayed far from his Hikari and thus visited only adjacent cities, Azumano was the sparkling gem of integrated westernization in Tokyo, in no small part thanks to Hikari’s artistic influences. The Cultural Reformation might have purged the city of many outsiders along with the majority of its priceless artworks, but it left behind a beautiful architectural skeleton to be refilled with the surrounding modern Japanese culture.
In short: a linguistic trend like this couldn’t have reached this level of popularity in the weeks he’d been asleep.
On and on the television talked about this grand earthquake. Doctor Yamazaki said he’d also been injured during it. One of the few victims, with no casualties, thanks to his inspector’s timely evacuation.
(The unspoken implication that he tripped and impaled himself during a routine part of life in Japan was… not ideal. But their assumptions spared him from having to invent another explanation for Krad’s spite.)
Among the three dozen and a half questions he’d prepared for Satoshi, nearing the top was whether the Black Wings had actually caused the tremors or simply reprised its horrifically inconvenient timing.
He leaned heavily towards the latter, given his experiences in the Hikari household.
Kei fell back against his pillows after another failed attempt to push himself into a sitting position. The sorry excuse for exercise once again left his atrophied muscles burning and shaking. The room appeared dimmer already, save for the bright square screen. Someone would come in soon to close the curtains on the large window that he couldn’t see through. He had to prepare “answers” for whatever Satoshi might ask, whenever that meeting would take place. They would be more curated than the rushed confessions of a man stabbed six ways to Sunday.
In the background, the voices droned on in their melodic jumble of languages.
***
Long fingers tapped a rhythm on the mattress. It stilted and stalled as the short doctor read down the chart. The wrinkles in her neutral frown looked to be carved out of stone.
“Your brain scan shows no remaining swelling or signs of damage despite the initial concussion. It’s hard to say the cause of your confusion—not to be mistaken for the colloquial use of the term, mind you. It can take months for car accident patients to regain the memories lost due to trauma, if they ever do.” He appreciated her blunt professionalism much more than he appreciated her placing the television remote on the other side of the room like he was an errant toddler. “I’ll recommend you to an occupational therapist alongside your physical therapy.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
His voice had already lost most of its hoarseness and he spoke just a hair slower than he preferred.
Kei resumed the very casual tapping, contracting and stretching the muscles that ran along delicate bones. They could hold a fork without dropping it now.
That meant he could finally feed himself without a tube. Even Doctor Yamazaki had to admit some surprise at his swift recovery, though those brown eyes narrowed in warning when he once more promised to take things slowly. He smiled brighter in response.
As impressive an accomplishment that was for a coma patient, it had been another week wasted fighting against his own, extremely human body. The smile fell back into blank neutrality as she left him in the room with only his thoughts. Squinting his eyes towards the window, he could make out the smudges of green roofs of nearby buildings and the dark brick clock tower rising above them. The hand that needed a break from tapping brushed his overgrown fringe out of his face. His fingertips came away greasy. What he’d give for a shower and mirror.
Those dark blond strands in the corner of his vision gave him a start every time, though he hid the reflex well from staff members who already questioned his sanity.
(If they knew he’d spent four centuries with decidedly black hair, they’d be more understanding.)
There wasn’t anything wrong with his brain, but he’d agreed to the scans anyway out of morbid curiosity.
No, it was this place that was wrong. This “Azumano” and its “Hiwatari Kei”.
Still, memory loss was a useful excuse for the gaps in his knowledge.
“Commissioner, I brought you some books!” A cheery young woman pushed the sliding door wider with her hip as she balanced a tall stack of varying colors. “The hospital library didn’t have much of what you wanted, sorry. But this is a really great historical fantasy book; I read it myself a couple years ago during breaks.”
“I’m sure it will be a good diversion, Senri-chan.” He accepted the offered paperback with a cursory glance at the swirling blues and greens on the cover. Some kind of god of the seas fighting a dragon. On the little table to the side, she placed the rest among the cards and flowers. Her hands hovered until the wobbling books steadied themselves.
She tucked a lock of black hair that had fallen loose from her bun. “No no, it’s nothing! I can’t imagine how boring it must be here.” Her green eyes lingered guiltily on the television remote, and he mimicked the gaze to wring a little more pity out of the girl.
He couldn’t ask her to circumvent Doctor Yamazaki’s overbearing laws again. Not so soon at least.
“There wouldn’t happen to be a newsstand around here, would there?” he asked with a tilt of his head when the moment had passed.
But his sympathy only went so far, when she’d been the one to inform the doctor of his incorrect answers to the daily interrogations. How was he supposed to know this place’s Hiwatari had been born out of town, on another date no less? Did the man have no shame when he’d gone and stumbled during an earthquake, only to leave Kei with the gaping chest wound of a fallout?
Gaining the affection of a nurse had quite a few perks, including extra attention to his needs. Unfortunately that had meant extra attention to his weaknesses too.
Senri bit her lip, nodded, and—in a move that would earn her fifteen-percent forgiveness for her past transgression—pointed very unsubtly at a slight gap in the stack of books.
It wasn’t as thick as one would expect, but.
“You don’t seem the type to read sports articles or comics so that made it easier to hide…” she whispered, face flushing with a new type of guilt and the thrill of the crime.
He slid a corner of the folded grey paper out to get a peek at the printed date. With a squint the tiny print came into focus. February 3rd, 2004. Yep, that was the current date “here”.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he murmured in return, and he might have meant a fraction of the feeling behind it this time.
He just caught the blurry hint of wolf in her puppy-dog grin as she trotted out the door to help other bedridden patients. Kei sighed in mourning. If only Satoshi had been so open to corruption; it would have made their completion of the Black Wings far less painful. For themselves, maybe not the Niwa clan.
With a snap of the paper, he dove into articles on the latest happenings of some seaside town named “Azumano” on a southernmost island of Japan that simply did not exist.
It was a surface-level distraction, as his mind still turned towards Satoshi between every beep of the heart monitor. Since he’d discovered the massive, illogical changes since his awakening, he’d searched in vain for a way to confirm that it was indeed his son here rather than a doppelganger. But what could he do while the boy refused to visit? Thus, he’d continue to glean as much information about this world as he could. Senri had been unable to find any historical non-fiction, but if witnessing the aftershocks of the Cultural Reformation had taught him anything, it was that fiction could hide useful truths as well. Speaking of which…
He flipped to the indicated Page 2 Article B and only dropped the paper once, another microscopic but big accomplishment.
Suzaki Yuki. There was the name he wanted to see. He’d heard about her on the news: the journalist responsible for investigating the Cultural Reformation and apparently catching a ferocious battle between Dark and “White Dark” on camera. The channel he’d been saddled with only teased the footage and advertised a future guest appearance, of course, but she promised to be a useful source for the subjects he most cared about. Today she’d written about a destructive earthquake forty years ago coinciding with the end of Dark’s crime wave. And wasn’t that a curious coincidence; he added between the lines what any journalist worth her salt dared not without concrete proof.
Unfortunately, he only made it halfway down the article before he had to pinch the bridge of his nose. His eyes squeezed shut until they ached from the pressure rather than the strain of prolonged reading for the first time in a month.
With a grim acceptance, he conceded that the Japanese newspaper at least did not have more roman letters than usual.
Because the mess of foreign words was written in katakana.
He couldn’t be rid of this place soon enough.