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Between them Toji has always thought it would be Si-Woo with a ringed finger and a daughter he wants to see tall, shoulders broad. Blessed under his care and with his wit. Maybe his mother would riot if she had lived. Toji doesn't think of her when his wife's water breaks and he runs to the closest doctor with her gritting her teeth against his chest, belly roiling, small, small feet in her bucking.
He calls Si-Woo two weeks after she’s been discharged from the provincial hospital, their newborn’s birth certificate in hand. The last they spoke, Si-Woo had dismissed the need of him with a wave of his hand, cigarette classic between his forefinger and thumb, eyes dropping to the ring his wife got him using her savings even though he’d insisted otherwise, then back up to his face. Seemed to see something that Toji hadn’t posted up there. “You’ll have to make do with being jobless,” Si-Woo says as he turns his back. “I have none for you,” which was news to the most pursued underworld killer handled by the next most infamous man in their slice of Japan. They haven't talked since, only a text that asked if Toji was alive after the baby came, congratulations attached.
Kong Si-Woo had stopped asking him to show for meet and greets when he knew of his engagement; he stopped sending any requests for hire when he knew there would be a baby. Like sending a card without saying any of the words. The wedding had been without ceremony: Si-Woo had appeared in a lean suit with a glimmer of a smile on his face, cheeks chapped and piercings honest on his old lover of a face, warming Toji's palm in a handshake. "You look proud," is all he said, before ducking his mouth to press a kiss to his wife's cheek.
The phone's a burner, switched every two months, in their tested tradition to keep contact since Si-Woo's patience shorted after too many disappearing stints. It's been close to a year. Si-Woo is nothing if not a professional, suited to burn for the work he has done, and smoke pot while he gets more listed. Nothing less than paid-for collateral. Best tip big for that extra kill. The March burner has been cleared.
It's him. He's a professional: of course he picks up.
"What do you do with a kid the size of your thumb," Toji says into the phone thinly and barely roping his voice in. He sounds like a man who had been just made a father fresh from stumbling into the word live rather than its cousin survive, survive. He sounds like a boy who grew tall and unloved in the basement of his house. He doesn't know a thing about a life like this. He has dreamed Si-Woo a wife in a tall drink of a woman, crisp invite trashed in the bin by the bed of Toji's latest conquest, earning a newborn in the same year with that well dressed wife of his, beloved: but it has just been him, finding her. Listening to her yes, disappearing inside her, and swaddling a baby's bald head in his hand under his tender nape, air weeping into his just exerted, recently exposed body.
It has just been him. "Si-Woo," Toji hears himself cut his words off in his throat. Wished he had a gun on him. He would strangle himself if he could. He could kill himself. He would. "What do I do?"
There's a long sound that evens out at the other end of the line, a deep exhale that smokes its way through the static. "You raise him," says that voice that has been in the corner of his life for as long as he can remember.
Followed the rest of his life after he left that estate weeping blood, regretting not razing it with every waking moment after. He closes his eyes, cells of his skin humming. "You go to him when he cries and keep him fed, keep him warm. Trade shifts with your wife and lose your nights at the same time. Spend your blood money to buy diapers, pads, formula—buy whatever they might need, and then buy whatever they might want. Hold his head up right. Get rid of your knives. You massage your wife's feet, ditch the guns, and lose every race bet. You live off your bounty money for the rest of your life, Toji, and figure out how to nurse a child when she has a fever that refuses to break." He sucks in an inhale. Third, fourth, fifth lit cigarette.
Straight gin would be nice--yuzu and egg foam, to soothe this tightening quick gratitude going smooth over him. "You take care of them the way your people refused to care for you and you find somebody that can when you can’t. Learn the way your kid sounds when he’s mad, then deal with the rest. Same thing with your wife. You get me?" So clean it is like the teeth on a knife in his mouth. He does. He gets it like a buck clawed off a dime.
"I do," Toji says, one vow away from getting down to his knees. Christian church call fathers out of their holiest men, and he’s not heading to the same place his wife is. "I do," near murmur, as if he's about to be wed again. He could kill himself. "Si-Woo," Toji gives.
"I'm in Malaysia," Si-Woo says, like he knows everything about him. The sound of another strangled Asian nation behind him. Sweatshop linen seethe with movement, tourist engines rumbling. A rougher sound in the foreground, like a muted sigh. There must be hard light glancing off his thighs right now. "Go back inside, Toji."
If it’s broad daylight where he is, those decorated metals of his are striking a hidden African painting technique alongside the rest of him. Si-Woo has looked like he’s wanted for nothing for all the time Toji has known him, which has been as untrue as the next biblical apple tree. It has made Si-Woo dislikeable, and it had made Toji insatiable.
Because he has fucked him starved of meat and water, Toji’s kind of violence tucked into the gums to bleed out later when he flossed, body singing with that recent force, fingers thawing up to the knuckles inside Si-Woo. Toji has fucked him on a full belly, fed first on convenience store beer and dry fingerlicking food, then after shared hotpot on so cold a day the lukewarm heat whitened the windows and swirled under the hanging lamps and vanished into Si-Woo's mouth as he downed his sake and broiled glass noodles. In the car, faces lush with food and drink, Si-Woo taking his chin to his with one look at him. Disappeared Toji's cock inside him, thick coat barely bucked off his shoulders, their moving bodies making fog and their own humid heat. He's had him silver spoon in cheek, fevered from a cashed check, fast and easy like working a gun by the edge of the bed where Toji had cleaved a man's head off moments prior. He's slid inside Si-Woo drugged with alcohol and in the blazing afternoon of day, cold and hard, forcing his fermented name out from the oil in Si-Woo's throat. Rang up his mouth still leaking sluggish blood over his front teeth, Si-Woo shuddering with the finish of the fight he'd started minutes after walking into that hole in the wall, a sprawl of what could be dead bodies, completely cold if they were real honest enemies.
"Weren’t you a real man this evening," when Toji had a hand between his legs and his back against the stall wall, hung on his face a kind of smile that told of rope off rafters. "Watching my back like that,” breath wet and welded, “Could fucking marry you without a ring," shoved his pelvis down like something to end his life with. Laughed, too. It was blunt and the backend of a throat punch that laid another man out earlier for addressing his fine Japanese cock to Si-Woo's insides like a dormant rapist might. Si-Woo held Toji's head with both hands as he went down with the rest of him, underwear choking up at the throat of his entrance.
"C'mon," he mouthed there into Toji’s throat, so mean, so red, so unforgiving, "Just try knocking me up in under ten, Toji." And Toji remembers cutting his mouth on his showing collarbone, knocking bone on bone with his teeth with the way he drew back his hips like a pair of fists and bled Si-Woo's voice from him in that bathroom bar stall for what felt like minutes. After, they took the train back to Si-Woo's apartment and fucked on the floor. And after, with Toji's spend cooling over his belly, Si-Woo snagged a hold on his chin, said, "You got raked," and got up.
He kneeled then before his mostly nude body, Toji's cock softening over his thigh and wiped the dried blood thinning across his cheek with a pad of alcohol and dressed the cuts in a patch of gauze, draped him in a dress shirt set for the washer, cleaner than both their discarded clothes combined. Toji will only be honest about this when he's dead: he thought of his mother, and then he thought of having a wife, in that order.
"Si-Woo," he says again, imagining the sun in Malaysia, the moon he would see in twelve more hours. A Japanese man made father on Ainu land. A Korean man learning the backstreets in another colonized land. Foreigners the way they never intended to claim a home here. "I named him Megumi."
A pause, then a short sound. "Blessed child," says Si-Woo, after a mouthful. "It fits." More smoke, ash off the cuff. "Did you name him for you or for your wife?"
"Fushigoro's nice off the tongue," is what Toji answers him with. His breath mists over his face. He's out here in a shirt and sweats. She’s going to berate him if she finds out about him dressing so down the freezing temperatures numb themselves to his senses. "Give me a job when you get back."
The snap of a lighter opened and closed with a veteran's thumb. Si-Woo fakes being capable of being persuaded with a dragged out considering sound. Silver fang with: "Isn't popping a guy quite boring compared to the woman of your house? The mother of your child? A dream, you know, you said before. Set it all up. Now you just have to live it."
"Will you or won't you," Toji says, the question of his life charged forever to his care a sentence he never cares enough to answer: ask it of me again. Make me earn my keep. Sign over my check yourself. Have me ditch my last name the way she did and then tip me big the way you had after Okinawa.
Si-Woo wires over a deadbeat hum. "You've made enough wealth to last your kid and his grandkids and their grandkids. Nice that you aren't homeless the way you look, yeah?” Sings a laugh down the line, sounding like heaven and earth blended together in a fusion drink spiced with something full and dense like a stolen liquid nickel core. “You're unemployed, Toji. How’s it feel?"
"You would lose your best honeypot?" When Toji grins around his teeth by the mouthpiece he knows it arrows the short ocean over. "Your bloodsucker days are over. Would’ve left claw marks before than let me go without a fight."
Si-Woo laughs a second time. It's a fine wine of a sound. They had aged together. Eight years. More. Longer. Fruits that failed to spoil. "You threw my deals constantly," he says, lowered now, touching down in Toji somewhere near the small bird of muscle between the blades of his back. "Lost count of the times you sang about hiring you if I wanted to make it back alive that day. Asshole."
"You never did," says Toji, bareback and amused. Kong Si-Woo, yellow-faced and partially stubbled, eyes as cutting as a salted glass rim, clearly tortured for at least five minutes: watching him from between his brows, resistant and unrepentant, stubborn and so, so nice to look at.
"I took hard cash for four years." Toji can hear Si-Woo do something with his eyes. "Served well to keep you coming."
"I would bring you home now," says Toji. Clean the way he never can be but in his wife’s dreams. Knife teeth, loved on with the blunt of his tongue. "Without a ring."
“Last few years have made me too reputable,” Si-Woo says eventually, when his voice warmed over with an unspeakable kind of quiet. “It won’t happen again.” Posters and surveillance of him in police precincts in twelve different countries. SHIU KONG, an estimated $7 million total across Eastern Europe. コンシウ, an estimated 2 billion yen in Japan. 공 시우, an estimated 1 million won in the homeland. Fattens any man's dick with the way he's wanted. Si-Woo can call his enemy and have him pick him up while marshaled in the states. Helicopter or first class? Gone are the days Toji gets to discover him on his knees in a dirt courtyard, wrists behind his back, hair chewed from its usual slick, gripping a man's jugular in a trap of teeth.
Toji had seen it once: the man brought his face forward, leering, and Si-Woo licked his top lip.
After, Toji had jumped the fence and stepped over the body and swiped a thumb over Si-Woo’s cheek and kissed dead man's blood like it were shed lipstick. "You're gonna get a disease," he told him. Si-Woo looked at him, face a wet sheet hung out to dry, and just closed his mouth over his red teeth.
"You’ll get your tip,” was all he said then, before earning himself a knife’s grip in a fist with a swift kick to its handle on the ground where it had been thrown off, swiping through the restraints with a backwards grip. So professional it could make a whore ache. So efficient it could make him run on Toji’s side of men for a day.
He hadn’t even asked Toji to unbind him. The way he hadn’t flinched when he stripped those zipties from his wrists--Toji remembers it. "Made a household name out of piggybacking off my wins, hm?"
"You've always got something to prove. Get rid of that habit before you give god another reason to put you down." Vehicles shuttling foreigners through tourist traps. Si-Woo says something to someone else, some blend of the native dialect leathered in foreigner speak. Toji catches some of it when it’s said in English: he will see you now. Si-Woo comes back to their call, probably looking like he’s about to have a staff meeting except the meeting is with one of the few important men in the local Malaysian economy. "Toji. Go back to your wife.”
"Keep the burner," Toji says. “Don’t make my restock list longer.”
“You tracked your bets crystal,” says Si-Woo, but he would now that Toji has asked it of him. “You walking back to your woman like that? Warm yourself up before getting back into bed, freak,” once Toji had laughed hotly down Si-Woo’s naked back when he stayed a morning after, fresh out of his run, making the man under shudder with the ice and force of him, Si-Woo trying to throw him off, Toji all over him like an asshole—all that nude heat, all that precious rushing blood. Si-Woo cursed his bloodline in lashing Korean when Toji bucked his fingers inside him until he sweated off the Tokyo breeze and the speed of the city’s heavy traffic streets, the curiosity of having Si-Woo laid out in the blandness of day cannibalized slowly into conviction with the grip Si-Woo had had on him, hands clawed into his hair, emptying out from under him.
“Yeah, yeah,” and if Toji wants to see him now all that will appear is him in a turquoise suit, on his knees. “Si-Woo.”
“Toji,” gives the one, again like he knows most and all things about him. He is probably the only man who can hedge that bet and earn interest on it. Si-Woo is the worst at losing, better than Toji at remembering, always had been, even if his face was silk and sweet about it: mean like a dog, rinsing his teeth on the slurs he doles out to start fights that he would occasionally let Toji finish when his drink comes earlier than expected, sweating nicely. Toji doesn’t say anything. He almost wants him to say bye like they’re drinking buddies. Start that new chapter, comrade.
But it’s him. "I was there before," said so simply it gets clean on Toji’s molars, and Si-Woo doesn't say a thing about how he will be there after: her, her child that she’s chosen to have with him, and this magic trick of an unlived life. It is a strange, brutalized thing—for someone to wish for him to have something lasting. “Go. I’ll call when you see the sun on the other side.”