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There’s a wooden box in one of Barok van Zieks’ desk drawers. It is small but heavy, the dark wood not ostentatious but obviously well crafted and cared for all the same.
It's not something Kazuma remembers ever seeing somewhere else. But, well—he only knows about it because he was looking through his desk (Ryuunosuke would call it snooping, but Ryuunosuke is not here to have an opinion on the matter, so it isn’t snooping).
He can't remember what he was even looking for—if he was looking for anything at all. Barok van Zieks is not a man that shares anything about himself, no matter how much Kazuma wants to rip it out of him. He knows Van Zieks as the façade of ghosts he still put up when he first knew him, and now their very image. He suspects Ryuunosuke has gotten to see more of who Van Zieks is than he's ever had a chance to, and he's told himself he's not jealous enough times he almost believes it.
Still.
Kazuma gets to know. And if Van Zieks won’t show or tell a thing, then so be it. Kazuma does not place himself above petty acts such as going through drawers or messing with Van Zieks’ ridiculous models a little.
Gina would also call it snooping. Fortunately, he still doesn’t care.
The wooden box is locked tightly, and the simplicity of the keyhole keeping its contents hidden feels like an insult. A dare. A glove thrown in his face. All of these and, if he’s honest, none. It’s a small wooden box, locked. Kazuma needs it open more than he’d have the words to say.
There are few things of interest in that desk, truth be told. Kazuma doesn’t expect the disappointment, but it pricks him all the same, like a needle forgotten into clothing folds. Nothing but papers and papers and papers, impossibly endless stacks of them neatly placed on top of the desk—left in disarray into the drawers, and here lies the start of a thread he wants to pull at and unravel until he sees the truth, laid bare.
He’s had too many occasions to see Van Zieks handle the court records and minutes and whatever else in this room, always with a care that so deeply contrasts with his behavior in the courtroom Kazuma would more easily doubt his eyes rather than admit to. There has always been duty in his movements, and yet the drawers speak of shackled freedom, and maybe now of the rotten stench of where that duty took its roots in the first place.
It isn’t something he wants to think about, the taste of blood and bile already rising in his throat.
Kazuma has been in this room more times than he can count, with memories and without, for longer than he’d really care to think about. He knows how to put everything back so that nobody would know he’s been here.
That is, if he leaves before someone else comes in.
“Are you,” he looks up to find Barok van Zieks himself in the doorway, his hand still on the handle, looking both unimpressed and unsurprised, “looking through my belongings?”
Kazuma straightens up and calmly shuts the drawer closed. “Yes.”
He looks at Van Zieks looking at him for a moment in silence. It has been weeks since he’s known what he feels towards the man anymore. Neither of them is still the person they were when their paths first crossed—Kazuma feels like he’s been so many people since then, it’s dizzying.
He remembers the rage and the hatred, focused and all encompassing, burning so bright against so many people until it honed in on Stronghart as its most righteous target. He remembers the hatred, blazing, fury in his veins until he was consumed whole and it finally burned out.
He doesn’t have any of it left now, only grief and a fatigue set so deep in his bones he doubts it’ll ever leave.
He’s tired of all this. Tired of his quest for revenge, for justice, tired of finding himself seeking the truth, still, like it’s the only thing he’s left capable of doing.
“Why?” Van Zieks asks.
He’s let go of the handle without Kazuma noticing, stepped into the room and closed the door, and now leans against the wall. Kazuma’s eyes dart to the arms he has crossed over his chest. He wonders who it’s supposed to protect from who, here.
“What do you mean, why? Shouldn’t you be angry regardless?”
Van Zieks’ eyes are considering, and Kazuma thinks this is where Ryuunosuke would tilt his head to look at him, like a problem he’s trying to figure out by observing it from another angle. He wonders if he’s as much of a puzzle to put together for Van Zieks as the reverse is true. He doubts it.
At the core of the worst part of both their lives, lies the love of a father and a brother. Kazuma needs to know what about Van Zieks let his brother commit atrocities to save him alone, dooming the Asougi name in the process.
“I do not know you as someone who does things for no reason,” Van Zieks says, and Kazuma wonders if he knows him at all.
Kazuma wonders if he knows himself at all anymore, when so much of his life has been spent in the pursuit of justice and answers—when that led him here, even with his memories missing. Now that truth has been found, and here he remains.
He doesn’t want to think about it, and he doesn’t want to give Van Zieks the answer to the question he didn’t ask, so he opens the lowest left drawer again and pulls out the small wooden box again, placing it firmly on the desk in between them.
“What’s in the box?”
Van Zieks doesn’t flinch, because he never flinches—for all his theatrics in the courtroom, Kazuma’s only ever seen him almost reasonable in his office, a more subdued version of himself, and Kazuma never quite knew what to think about it—but the ever-so-slight tremor of his eye gives him away just as easily as a sudden step back would have. If he didn’t know better, Kazuma would almost think he had forgotten all about it.
“Nothing that concerns you.” He speaks harsher now, and almost sounds like the man Kazuma thought he knew.
“It concerns you,” he replies immediately, “so it concerns me.”
He won’t explain that phrase. If Van Zieks is trying to figure out just as much as him, he’ll know what he means. And if not, well, he still might. Barok van Zieks is a man of few revelations but of surprising insight, even now.
If this were a few weeks ago, Kazuma can picture himself smashing the box on the floor, any means acceptable as long as it gets him what he wants.
For all he doesn’t blame Van Zieks like he used to, he also doesn’t trust him—like he used to, because maybe came a time where he did trust him to a degree, after long and silent hours spent working together in this room—but he wants to peel back the curtain and see him, out of the shadows of reputation and regrets and grief and rage and expectations.
Not like his father would have seen him, because Kazuma knows as well as most, that Barok van Zieks is gone forever.
And it’s unfair, really, he knows it. But he wants to know if, a decade down the line, after everything is done and the dust has settled, it was worth it. Whether Barok van Zieks deserved protection at the expense of so much, even his brother’s own life and soul.
The seconds of silence stretch until Kazuma isn’t sure how long it has really been since either of them spoke but, this too, is nothing new in this room.
“I don’t know what you’re expecting to find,” Van Zieks says eventually, “but that won’t be it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Kazuma hopes it isn’t desperation he feels bubbling up at the back of his throat.
It’s about the box, but it’s not.
Van Zieks stares him down a moment longer, as if trying to read Kazuma’s intentions from his tense posture, hand still over the box on the desk, and sighs. He takes a few steps forward, extends out his hand, and it takes Kazuma a second to put the box in his palm.
He doesn’t feel the brush of glove against glove, but it’s there.
Van Zieks walks over to one of the bookshelves and reaches for the top of it (higher than Kazuma could have, and he tells himself he doesn’t care) where he retrieves a thin key. It clicks in the lock, and Kazuma grabs it again before Van Zieks can be the one to open it.
He’s admitted to being petty before.
There’s a single object in the box, carefully placed over a small cushion that looks to have been made to hold something far more precious than a single glass marble.
Kazuma knows marbles from home, obviously, but he’s seen them in the London streets a few times as well. The difference is, where those have always been scratched and marked with obvious use from the shocks that come with playing them, this one is flawless, round and whole, clearly still brand new.
Van Zieks hasn’t made a move to retrieve either the marble or its receptacle, but speaks up when Kazuma’s eyes are still fixed on both. “My brother gave it to me as a child,” he says, and that gets Kazuma’s attention snapping back to him. “I’d forgotten all about it until you brought it out again. Satisfied? I said it would be of no interest to you.”
“What were you even supposed to do with a single marble?” is what Kazuma ends up saying, out of the half-dozen replies he had. “You clearly never even used it.”
On anyone else, Kazuma might have described Van Zieks’ expression as fond remembrance. On him, he just thinks one of them might finally be going insane.
“I think Klint’s aim was to get me to exchange it with ones from other children my age, so that we’d play together—though, obviously, that didn’t happen. I did not tend to particularly engage with other children, so I kept it as a souvenir.”
Kazuma bites the fingers of his glove to help take it off and takes the marble between two fingers, the glass cold against his skin, and places it in Van Zieks’ palm.
He feels the brush of his fingers against the glove, this time.
He won’t get any of the answers he’s looking for, he knows. It’s a matter of forming his own, now, not of finding the sole existing truth anymore, and learning to live with it.
“It’s yours,” he says when Van Zieks hand closes over it, “not your brother’s.”
Like both of their lives are theirs to live, and not a tribute to the people who died in their name.