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There were a couple of times some guys tried to get smart with him on the job. But maybe that gave them credit they didn't have to begin with.
"You sure you wanna put a hand on me?" He said without lowering his cigarette, barely burned past its tip. It was a cliche in fifty different ways: him with his polished shoes and slicked back hair, decked out in smoke, ready to be sacked in a deal gone sour, surrounded by men who knew better but were still shaking their chosen metals at him. Bat, bar, handgun. Nothing was less impressive than the creatives gruntmen shaped up to in efforts to hit jackpot. Their educated guesses was just about as bad as the intel he got coming in here.
The best deal they had to strike for a temp contract with the underworld's most pursued, storied killer was a house of sex workers and a few diluted canisters of mixed entertainment drugs and imitation gunpowder. He laughed when he first got the terms, which for the better part of the evening landed him square on his ass about to greet the ground with his knees, on his third wasted cigarette since the start of the meeting. It wasn't like he paid for protection from the crazy guy he represented and acted proxy for. Knowing the sorcerer killer helped streamline some tricky situations before, but that was when he was dealing with people who grasped the distinction between an ordinary underworld killer and a killer of specifically jujutsu sorcerers.
"That guy isn't going to like it when I come back missing a finger," Gong Si-Woo said, professionally, as one of the bodyguards reloaded a gun. "And I know how badly you wanted a deal."
"Yeah, I want a deal," said the guy who looked broody enough to be the boss, or the middleman to the boss. "But I wanna send a message even more." Cocksure baby fists. They didn't even know how to grow new teeth. Gong Si-Woo masked a sigh with an exhale of smoke. Toji was going to make fun of him about this.
"Well," he said, like he was thinking about it. Everybody surrounding him looked slowly more annoyed at this, like the placidness and not shitting his pants ruined the mood. "How about this. I get out my smartphone and dial his number, and you can do whatever you'd like to me while he listens." He smiled. Maybe it still looked professional to them. He'd stopped giving a shit about any serious negotiating half an hour ago. Now it was about how lazy he could be about ending it. "All I ask is to give me two minutes on the phone with him."
"I like you," the guy said, grinning. He pointed at him with his gun. "O-kay, open up. Let's see how pussy you get."
Toji picked up on the sixth ring. "I told you not to call until you had seven two million in pocket," his voice half roughed up by sleep, and Gong Si-Woo could tell from the way it sounded vaguely dragged over coals that he had been day drinking. "I do," came his own reply, tucking the cigarette between his teeth and eyeing how his personal space had shrunk by the inchmeal gleam of bats touching down on concrete. "Not from this appointment. You have a request for hire from another cult." It came in earlier when he had just about judged the front this group was putting up. He barely needed to watch the boss man to know he was sitting knees crossed, faked-out confidence that would need an indeterminate number of years to look like anything polished. If he lived.
He listened to Toji yawn over the line. "You want to hire me to protect you or something? Si-Woo."
"You don't cover for guys," said Gong Si-Woo, shaking off an edge of ash with a rotation of his tongue. He blinked at the gun barrel he felt at his back. "And I don't have that kind of money."
"That would be an incredible lie if I didn't know your cut." Toji sounded like he was picking at his teeth with something he shouldn't be picking his teeth with. For his lifestyle Gong Si-Woo barely grasped how his size barely changed over the years. Heavenly pact metabolism, appropriate for splitting mountains and used mostly to try out different pure alcohols over the span of a night. "You done entertaining your guests yet?"
"It's in progress," Gong Si-Woo fought to keep his tone level. One could mistake it for bravado if they tried. "You're going on speaker now."
"Eh," Toji said, drawling, which was as close to whining as he got. His voice culled the air. "That's an extra million, Si-Woo."
The boss man flicked his eyes first to the phone at the voice of the man he was waiting on, then to him. An iconic sneer pulled over his face. "Knew you weren't Japanese."
"He's on the phone, sir." Gong Si-Woo rotated the phone outward so the speaker faced the rest of the room. Toji's boredom looked like a fast job, pulled up like carpet by the roots, and also a dedicated period of throwing money at horse races and more recently, boat races. His way of participating in society, he said.
When Gong Si-Woo was bored, he gained a professional edge that pissed most men off. "Want me to leave the room?"
The back of a rifle hit the back of his knees and he met the floor easily, the bone of impact vibrating up to his throat. Most days he knew he was close to thirty, but right now he really knew he was close to thirty. "Korean fuck," someone said from behind him. Gong Si-Woo kept his cigarette in with a few teeth. When nobody more seemed intent on laying a hand on him, he loosened his mouth's grip and sucked in another mouthful of smoke.
"Fushigoro Toji is on the phone," he said again, less like a victim and more like a businessman who occasionally found himself on his knees. He exhaled thinly. Violence should always beget fear, so when it begets boredom? "What's your message?"
"That sounded like a silly whack to the knees," Toji's voice came thin as a razor and clear as a wake from the phone's speaker. "Here's a tip, newbie. If you want to bring a man down you shank the thighs. I can see why you went after the kneecaps, though. Easy with gravity."
The man laughed. "Fushigoro Toji-san! Your man has been driving a hard bargain, you know, about your rates and our savings," and here there was a hand motion, and then there was a sharp object digging half-heartedly into the throat of Gong Si-Woo's back. The leader grinned like lazy was something affordable for him. "Thought it might be pivotal to let you know what happens when guys do that in deals with me. Donkeys especially.”
“Hey,” said Toji, only seconds out of a yawn. “That face scores me good deals."
"It'll make you lose one too if you don't do something about it," the boss man replied, and Gong Si-Woo felt the sharper end of a blade jut against his cheekbone, an inch below where his eye was. This wasn't even a video call. "Fucking wannabes. Want me to take out the trash for you, Toji-san? Our deal can come after."
"I don't deal with morons," said Toji. "And I hate repeating myself. So I guess I'll tell you a story." He yawned for real this time, loud enough to scatter static through the phone speaker. “Once upon a fucking time, there was a guy who tried to get smart with me because he figured I had a Japanese dick like his. Said a whole load of shit about having a body fit to be passed down or something. Even offered his daughter to be a mistress or something, I wasn't really listening. When I said I didn't go for kids, he tried to pay me to get into bed with her. I forgot whatever else shit he said because he died after I killed him. This was after I got a few nifty billions for the torture work. Think I got another fifty mil off his debits. Which, you know."
There was a pause, and the silence on the floor was starting to accrue discomfort, like debt. Gong Si-Woo guessed he was making a cuckoo gesture of some kind. The burner was close enough to Toji's mouth to discern his breathing. It sounded like he was talking through a closed smile. “I looted off his dead body. But why tell you how it went down over the phone when my storytelling's more special in person. So do you consider yourself a visual learner, boss,” and here Toji’s teeth made a sound the way mouths did when they got too wide too fast on someone’s face, “‘cuz I can make sure you are one once I’m through with you.”
After a minute, there was a rapid hand motion and Gong Si-Woo felt the blade and gun and men lower and peel off the skin of his cheek and the back of his jacket. He took another drag. Would’ve been out of here by his second smoke if Toji picked up the first time he called.
"Guess you're not much of a visual learner then," crowed Toji from the burner with the smile gone from his voice. "Too bad. It's gonna be a 80-20 deal for me to consider killing a guy on your tab," and this dropped the annoyed veneer covering for the wholesale fear, the boss man's face going for a snarl over a sneer, his attention honed entirely on the voice in the phone now.
"That's a pitch fucking black deal, Zen'in," he said, angry enough to advance towards Gong Si-Woo but not stupid enough to actually touch him where they had him on the floor. "I'm not that desperate to secure a working relationship with you. There are people with the same services who are after my money." Gong Si-Woo figured that his coffers probably ended the same place his father’s patience did. He stood, Toji in hand, deciding on another stick.
"I don't come cheap for a few reasons, sweetcheeks," arrogance emerged fully formed from Toji's belly like his curse slug come out to regurgitate. It worked on everybody even when it slid off some faster. People did not have the luxury of being unaffected when Fushigoro showed up. It was partially why securing a deposit was easy when Gong Si-Woo had clients spend ten minutes in the bleachers of some dogshit horse racing arena. Getting shit on their shoes didn’t matter, and neither did Toji in crocs and a sweatshirt that hadn’t seen detergent for a year.
“You want your rival in the ground by next Tuesday before that merger of yours goes through,” said Gong Si-Woo after getting another cigarette started. He took a minute to suck up the smoke. Eventually the boss man got him in his line of sight, obvious with how interested he still was and how he was still being made to negotiate with the guy on the ground with his Korean ass suit and Korean ass terms. Gong Si-Woo flicked ash onto the concrete between them. He smiled, professional. “Put down the deposit we asked for and your company’s competition throws a funeral party this Sunday.”
The smartphone crackled. “Yeah,” Toji said, sounding more pleased than ever, malice there curling up unhidden like curse worms from the dark of his belly. “I don’t make the final call on contracts.”
“Hey, Gong Si-Woo," the sound of his name dropped from the short blade Toji was sharpening, hands spread out under the metal where they were framed by its edge, loose with expertise. His hair, damp from the shower he just came out of after finishing a job that took a day of recon and another of execution. They were trading cold cans of convenience store beer, nursing the sleeplessness with hits of nicotine, silent as death in the same room. It wasn't unique between them for a few years now, closest to a ritual as it got under the guise of wrapping up. Like rinsing off blood and leaving a valentine's on a two-hour old listing. 30% add. tip for collateral.
Gong Si-Woo was slowly clearing the week's hit list when his name feathered out from Toji's old blade, and then: “Wanna sleep with me?”
Gong Si-Woo barely eyed him past the haze of smoke he was drawing out of his fourth cigarette. “I’m old,” he said, using one hand to pinch the stick out of his mouth and the other to confirm termination.
“You’re pushing thirty,” said Toji.
When Gong Si-Woo looked at him the sword was gone from his hands. The thing about Fushigoro was how unmistakable it was when he came up from behind, absolutely detrimental. Always singing about nobody noticing him unless he willed it.
“Yeah, and you don’t pay for guys,” Gong Si-Woo weighed lighting a fresh smoke. He was hungry, and he was likely experiencing the residual fatigue of what it meant to have history with one of the most significant non-sorcerers in the Oceania sphere. “The job got you wired up?”
Toji shrugged, pushing his elbows up on the sofa cushions. He changed out of his usual tights, or what he preferred to be called his killer fit, sporting a shirt that drifted over his frame with an ease that suggested a deeply untrue slackness, a near superimposed softness. Gong Si-Woo dreamed; here, he didn't look away. “Didn't even need me to do it. All you had to do was demonstrate what fingering a bullet hole is like."
What was obvious about Fushigoro was that when you took off his clothes, you would find scars and slim hips and a power that marched to the drumbeat of god’s worst dichotomy to date. He came from the last job spotless, tasked with the slaughter of a small suite of sorcerer opposition, barely dark with sweat. His slug slung across the peak of his shoulders, swinging that revered sorcerer killer metal by the grip, and he smiled lazily at Gong Si-Woo when he asked how it went.
“How else,” Toji said.
Gong Si-Woo didn’t think of it as competency anymore. Toji was a sharp, ugly, brutal thinker; he was beautiful even when he pulled up to the scene, half-baked, firing off a pickpocketed revolver to save him the trouble of summoning any favored weapon of his own. He wasted no time to draw out his targets and open up the seconds required to cleave them apart.
It was a rare pleasure to know that when Gong Si-Woo saw him next there would be no need to ask, to wonder. It would be small talk that he opted into.
“I haven't fucked in years,” he said when he felt the one wave a hand through the smoke, eyes on him. "If you’re trying to have sex with me out of boredom, I can recommend a couple of places my customers use."
Toji slotted some teeth through the slick curve of his scarred mouth, tiger's grin. "That's the most fucked thing I've heard." If he grew old, Gong Si-Woo figured, his eyes would be folded under the creases of his grinning and smiling, malicious. It would be a mistake to trust him, then. "When was the last time you got laid? Junior high?"
"Years," Gong Si-Woo said again, partly to remain elusive and partly because he didn't care enough to recall. He hadn't slept for real in two days. Neither had Toji. The issue with long-term partnerships began when they stopped watching their mouths to start watching each other’s. "Your wife. She passed, what, some time ago.”
Toji didn't retire his smile but it got leaner, the way it did when he cared and would bare more than enough teeth for it. "Yes," he said, like Gong Si-Woo was an idiot. "She did."
"Keep mourning," Gong Si-Woo gave after a minute, like Toji didn't imply he could use the company now that she was dead. "You know, have a grace period. Some people spend a few more years on it. Maybe a decade, if you'd like to prove something."
"Cute," said Toji, properly amused now. The scar at the edge of his mouth thinned. "You getting annoyed on her behalf?"
“Don’t get off on a normal level of compassion,” replied Gong Si-Woo. He deleted another name off the list. A girl, or cousin, or uncle, he didn't try to remember. He was a bootlicker and he would be somebody's bootstain sooner than later, too.
"Ah-ah, the c-word," said Toji. He sagged fully into the cushions and looked at Gong Si-Woo low-lidded, eyeline like chain metal going taut. After a minute he said, as neat as a cut from a itemized will, "C'mere."
Gong Si-Woo looked at him from over his laptop. Toji smiled, leaning his right ankle over his left knee. He was beautiful, even while he was half-baked, even while he faked charm and oozed detriment. Gong Si-Woo would not die at his hands, but he knew he would from what they have done. If Toji was responsible for cutting a client’s target out of life, he was responsible for delivering them into reach.
"When was the last time you saw Megumi," he said instead of getting up and following Toji's lead, after another minute.
"You say that name like it should mean something to me," said Toji. His eyes rolled up to the ceiling. "Who cares, Si-Woo. I want you in my lap."
There were very few things in the world that Toji thought seriously about. Among them Gong Si-Woo could count his money, his wife, her last name which was now his, and that Zen'in grudge. He barely remembered his son.
Gong Si-Woo was disturbed by this before he realized between getting born into the Zen'in clan and getting out of the Zen'in clan, fully dissolving its namesake from his body that nobody acknowledged except for the woman he would eventually decide to marry, Fushigoro Toji had no more room for more devotion.
He was dedicated to his wife and their Fushigoro name and his hate of sorcerer clans and his home claim the way the sky was dedicated to thwarting the ocean through an impermeable horizon. There was no place for Megumi in his life. He purposed it that way, ejected what had not blessed his complete disavowal and goals of eradication, to move singularly in the direction of revolting against sorcerer society.
He would have his way, so it did not matter who followed after him. The kid who came after could do whatever it was that kids born to non-sorcerers did: learn to live without the shadow of their parents and grow up in a vacuum knowing he did not belong to institutions of old.
It was not indifferent, Gong Si-Woo had determined then. Nor was it cold. It was very honest with what it could do, so self aware it could fit into his hand like a small bird, and in that way he found it lovely and also insane. Gong Si-Woo looked at Toji over his screen for a minute longer and then returned to his laptop.
“There’s a district nearby,” he said while pulling up an email chain with another potential employer. Usually it took no more than three back and forths to get a hit order secured. With this guy, there were more than eight emails in the thread and he hadn’t even locked down the deposit. It meant he was skittish, and it meant Gong Si-Woo would need alcohol stronger than beer, and it meant he did not have time to free for Toji. “You’ve been before. Remember the time you tried baijiu and tried to duel three women?”
“Yeah,” his voice clearer than it was before, and Gong Si-Woo registered the taste of air growing awake, the way rice wine did when it started properly fermenting on the fourth day buried under cool, dry care.
Because Toji was close, and Gong Si-Woo was starting to look closed in. He picked his head up to Toji showing his neck, leaning his damp head against a shoulder, dark hair spidered over his ears: eyes on him, left palm flattened once over the sofa’s armrest. He was close, and Gong Si-Woo was closed in on. Gong Si-Woo blinked the way he normally did.
“Yeah,” Toji murmured. “I remember.”
Gong Si-Woo got a full sentence into his anti-skittishness assurance script when he felt Toji’s shadow slant like a mane over him, pushing the imprint of his hands over the keyboard into a mesh of illegibility.
“You know I don’t like repeating myself,” the one said, so impersonal Gong Si-Woo could mistake his approach as a kind of death threat if it weren’t for the obvious way Toji adjusted the plane of his face and took a breath by Gong Si-Woo’s jaw. It did not take a revelation to recall how Toji was beautiful even when he was chasing what he could not take.
“Did you use my shampoo,” said Toji, still motionless by his face like this was their usual ritual. There was a tiger’s grin, again. Nothing like endless thwarting wherever Fushigoro Toji was concerned. “You smell like I could get you to stay overnight,” and Gong Si-Woo itched for a cigarette so strong he forgot the one he had in his mouth, nearly dry where it was clamped between his tongue and teeth.
“You won’t,” he said. He gave up on trying to smoke it and moved his arm past Toji’s midriff to stub it into his ashtray. “I’m not looking to fuck with my partners.”
“Weren’t you impressed, though,” and Toji took his cigarette pack out of reach like an asshole. “The way I came back this time.”
“I got you your bonus for that.” Gong Si-Woo motioned for the pack without looking over. “So spend it.”
“You aren’t going to be easy money?” Toji said, again like an asshole.
“Get someone who is,” gave Gong Si-Woo, trying to ice his annoyance. There were many men and women who barely required more than a cursory glance to want Toji inside them. It wasn’t unique. It wasn’t going to be hard, either. All the one had to do was walk the streets and grin his tiger’s grin. Eventually Gong Si-Woo looked at how the man was messing around with his cigarettes and found Toji balancing the box’s cardboard edge over his middle knuckle.
“I don't know why she married me either," Toji said.
He flicked the carton into the air and swiped it from the air with a quick, unwasted motion. Then shook out a cigarette and mouthed at its other end, unhurried, still hung over Gong Si-Woo's head like a petty god with some rope. His eyes held Gong Si-Woo's, chin down: bowed bird of prey. "Give me a light."
Gong Si-Woo wordlessly angled the lighter in his fist towards Toji's face, working up a weak flame strong enough to spark the butt of his cigarette. The putrid smell of smoke wafted up between them. It was nearly indistinguishable to air to him, now, offering neither repulsion nor spikes of clarity.
It was rare to see Toji with a cigarette over his lip. It was why Gong Si-Woo stared now as he breathed the smoke deep like a chronic chainsmoker, eyes going up, mouth left ajar. His bottom lip wobbled as if to cough, scar straining at his mouth's edge. He exhaled.
"I know why she died," Toji said eventually. "I never knew why she said yes when I asked. I was being semi-serious. That was one part of her that I respected."
"You never told me about the two of you." Gong Si-Woo never asked. Only knew what happened by the lifting of his whole demeanor and then the death that followed it in a year's time. "Your wife must've been interesting to commit to someone like you. Marriage isn't the same as cutting down sorcerers."
Toji looked down at him. "What, you familiar?"
Gong Si-Woo took a stick when he offered. "I had parents." He sighed around the cigarette, keeping it unlit in his mouth. "But I wasn't born into the top three sorcerer clans in Japan."
Toji snuffed out a laugh with his tongue. He considered Gong Si-Woo for a minute, cigarette in hand, and then reached his other arm, catching the back of his neck in his grip.
"She killed herself after mothering me the first couple of years," this when he reeled in Gong Si-Woo’s head close enough to push smoke into his mouth. Gong Si-Woo could see the moisture sticking hair to the skin by Toji's neck. The one slanted his face and butted cigarettes with Gong Si-Woo. Didn't back away after, pressuring the top skin of his mouth. When it lit Gong Si-Woo finally inhaled, taking in Toji's conditioner and lightly shaved jaw and the smoke leaking from between his gums like a bad car engine.
"He would've killed me too if I wasn't their second boy heir around that time." There was another heir now, some punk who barely had a quarter of Toji's prowess in battle. Gong Si-Woo figured the guy would not make it past his twenties. Toji didn't back away, occupying Gong Si-Woo's space without effort or resistance, only adjusted the cigarette with tongue and exhaled smoke using the opening at the other side of his mouth.
"My parents got divorced," said Gong Si-Woo.
"Turned out fine, didn't we. Me with my swords, you with your pretty face." Toji huffed out another mist of smoke. Gong Si-Woo glanced at the way he was: head ducked, hair at his nape dark with vanishing wetness, face no longer tucked in the air near his ear. He was curious. It was an unremarkable kind of intent. "Toji."
The one barely showed his neck, bowing his chin. Smoke rose up around them as if to cover for something forming in the fog. Toji's eyes were on him.
Gong Si-Woo leaned up without raising a hand. He pressed his mouth dryly to the scarred tissue razored by Toji's lips, nose grazing shaved stubble.
Toji was motionless above him. Smoke from Gong Si-Woo's exhale disappeared into the window between his teeth. Beneath him he must look like a snake of skin, throat stretched to gain an inch, mouth numb against scar and long shorned nerve. Hands by his sides, cigarette driven between two fingers.
He said nothing when he drew back, tucking the stick back between his teeth, immune.
"You did well," Gong Si-Woo gave, Toji watching him without blinking. For somebody who earned his victories and his scars, the best Gong Si-Woo could do was not to touch him. Toji was the most beautiful, Gong Si-Woo decided, when he was free. "Tip from me."