Work Text:
When you asked, he told you, the old man was waiting for me. He said I had nice nails. When I told him I got fired from my job, he asked me if I wanted to come home with him. So I said okay. Got in his car. Here I am.
He told you all this while fully naked, both of you standing in the doorway of one of the bedrooms of your boss' house. Go check in on the kid, see if he's finding everything all right, oyaji had said from the couch where he was toying with one of his cats, a black one that, based on the gouges it had made in your shoes when you walked in, needed its claws clipped. You hadn't been told which room, so you tried all the bedrooms until you caught an eyeful of his bare ass. You stood there, one hand on the doorknob, nonplussed, until he came to stand next to you, waiting for you to say something else.
"And knowing who he is and what he does, you just got into his car?" you asked wryly. "What if he meant to kidnap you? Get you addicted to drugs and sell you off to someone else?"
He shrugged. He was holding a pair of boxers in his hand and made no move to put them on. You suddenly needed a smoke, and badly. Part of you wondered if he would follow you like this, completely naked, all the way to the backyard if you told him there was a cigarette in it for him. It was not a rational thought.
"You shouldn't let anyone sneak up on you naked like this," you said instead. "Next time lock the door."
"Even if it's you? Even if it's the old man?"
That was none of your business. "Mm," you said, and closed the door.
-
Your boss had a bad habit of picking up strays. You had spent most of your adult life adjusting to their comings and goings. A year ago he had given you a kitten to take home, a beautiful calico thing that one of his older adopted cats had given birth to under the porch. Raise it big and strong, he told you, with the gravity of an order, and you hadn't had the heart or the right to tell him that your line of business was not conducive to raising pets. Predictably, while you were away on business, it had died or escaped, you didn't remember which, and you had searched across town for a similar cat at no small expense for your cousin to raise, so you could pretend you had sent it to live a better life in the countryside.
That was the nice thing about stray humans, at least. No matter how helpless they looked at first, they would usually find a way to feed themselves.
Kyouji spent his training period at oyaji's house. You had too, when you first started. You were appropriately nostalgic for those times, when you were so close to the boss and couldn't appreciate it, but you didn't miss them now: the endless pointless errands, the staying up all hours in case you were needed, the way you were supposed to feel at home but didn't. You'd come from a decent enough family, and still occasionally remembered the taste of your mom's cooking. You had no difficulty accepting your boss as your father, your master, and your god, but the rest of it still felt like playing house.
When you visited every two weeks or so, oyaji would trot him out to put away shoes, pour the tea, light your smokes, as if every act Kyouji performed at his command was a new trick warranting acknowledgement and praise. The cats loved to attack his feet with a ferociousness they had previously reserved only for you. It was his only complaint about his new life, he told you, the fact that the cats hated him and wouldn't even come near him for a tube of Churu. He had let his hair grow wild, which he nonchalantly pushed off his forehead with a headband he said was a gift from the boss's wife. There was a pathetic quality to him that moved the other older brothers, who routinely sent you to the boss' house with paper bags of second-hand clothing for him, t-shirts and old tracksuits and ill-fitting suit jackets he never wore. You said a silent prayer to your strong sense of self-control, which prevented you from congratulating him on finding another way to be a kept man.
You were there when Kobayashi met him for the first time. "Who's this dandelion head?" he said, roughly carding his hand through Kyouji's hair like he was greeting a neighbor's pet. "Don't you think he needs a haircut?"
"He's a handsome guy," you said, smiling faintly. "Or he was when I met him, anyway. Maybe he only cleans up for women."
That was when oyaji came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on his pants. What's this? he said, like he was talking to Kyouji, but his eyes were trained on you, and you felt your blood run cold in a way it hadn't since you were a newly made man. Am I doing a bad job keeping you happy, Narita-chan?
"They're weird, aren't they?" Masanori mused one afternoon. You'd come to make a report and the boss had told you over the intercom to come in, but when you did, there was no one to greet you except for Masanori, who was doing his summer homework on the living room floor.
You made a little noncommittal noise. It wasn't for you to criticize the boss out loud.
"The weirdest thing is when they do this. They go into the office together and shut the door," Masanori said, chewing absently on a pencil. "They'll stay in there for hours. And then they'll come out separately. I never know what they're doing."
"Shogi," you said automatically. It was probably true, some of the time. There was always a board set up in the office and you could reliably find your boss there, shooting shit with the other lieutenants while mindlessly moving the pieces. "They're both bad at it, so the games take a long time to finish."
"Should I take up shogi too? I could get Kyouji to teach me."
You considered this carefully. Kyouji was the first newbie to be close enough to Masanori's age, and you sometimes found them together talking like normal kids, Masanori rattling off incomprehensible manga plot developments while Kyouji nodded and smiled. Left to his own devices, you never spotted Kyouji reading much of anything at all, except maybe the old magazine issues on stock trading scattered around the office while he was waiting to drive the boss to his next meeting. No, he didn't understand them, Kyouji had said when the others ribbed him about it, he was no good at math, no matter how much he had studied back in high school. Which was a shame because he had a memory like a party trick and could memorize the face, name, and likely real age of every hostess if shown a flyer for only a minute.
But those were not moments for which Masanori was around. Masanori only saw Kyouji here, in his own house, in worn down slippers taking out the trash. It occurred to you that, to Masanori, Kyouji might be an actual friend.
The cat Masanori had deposited on your lap started to struggle. You were holding it too tight. You let it jump off, and it ran to hide under the couch. "I thought Masanori-kun didn't want to follow in the business."
"I don't," Masanori said, flushing. "But when I see my dad talk to Kyouji, I think, what if that's the son he always wanted?"
"Ha!" you snorted, dusting cat hair off your pants as you got up. There were limits to what you could bear.
-
Kyouji was initiated in the spring, nearly a year later. You almost couldn't recognize him at the ceremony: carefully shaved, hair slicked back, luminous in a jet black kimono with the family crest. He had broad shoulders, a real batter's build, but the squinted eyes of an outfielder who could watch a ball fly into direct sunlight and still tell you exactly where it would land. He looked like the shinigami of rakugo stories coming to take his share of your life; he looked, disconcertingly, like the old photographs of your boss hanging on the office wall. For your own ceremony, your older brothers had instructed you to keep your eyes down, like a dog that knew its place was to submit. But you watched oyaji and him match gaze for gaze, staring at each other as they drank from their cups three times, and something churned in your stomach, looking fruitlessly for a way out.
-
After Masanori disappeared, you feared the worst. Not anything to do with Masanori — he had run off like someone trying to get out of a black loan and did about as bad of a job as they normally did. Telling Kyouji, who would never dream of keeping a secret from the boss and especially not when it came to something of this magnitude, was the most obvious error, but even still, Masanori would have spent the rest of his life away from the group with more eyes on him than a fresh girl at a peepshow. This just shortcutted the whole process.
No, what you fretted over was the possibility that the boss would promote Kyouji to wakagashira. But that had been one of your rare moments of bad judgment, you told Kobayashi later, when it was just the two of you after the promotion ceremony. Your boss was smarter than that, had lasted this long because making stupid mistakes was not in his nature. Even if others in the group sometimes joked about it, even if Narita was sometimes called the favorite son, even if he won the flashiest fights and brought in the most money, it had always been out of the question, and you should have known that.
"What do you mean?" Kobayashi asked.
The group had reserved a traditional Japanese restaurant for the evening, and the two of you were sitting on the porch along the interior garden, listening to the sounds of a shishi-odoshi and making idle chit chat about which older brothers were still around, which had been taken out or moved on. Earlier, Kyouji had been here too, loudly insisting that he was bored, so bored surrounded by all these old men, and would you take him to the batting cages, you promised you'd help with his swing—but everything was quiet now. He'd been called away by oyaji and the new wakagashira a while ago and had never returned.
You took a long sip of tea and mulled over what you could say, if you dared to say it out loud. Finally, you closed your eyes. You thought, my life has always been in my brother's hands. And you said, as calmly as you could manage, "You don't bring your whore into the house as the main wife."
Kobayashi choked on his beer, coughing so hard that one of his young guys rushed out to see if he was okay. In his panic to save Kobayashi from a coughing fit, he slipped against the floors, which had been newly polished for tonight, and maybe it was his frightened face hitting the ground, or the endless toasts from earlier, or how close you had come to saying something so treacherous even your pinkie wouldn't have made up for it, that made you and Kobayashi both laugh. Either way, you couldn't stop laughing, two middle-aged men holding each other as their bodies shook to the point of tears.
After that, the two of you never spoke about it again.
-
You watched him get older. You watched him get harder. Thankfully, no taller or bigger. He became an older brother. He became wakagashira-hosa. (In the end, that had been what had taken up all that time the night of the succession ceremony.) His younger brothers brought in their own younger brothers. At some point, though you were his elder, the younger guys would talk about you and him and Kobayashi in the same way. This did not affect how he talked about and to the two of you, which was always perfectly, perfectly correct.
He went to the boss' house often, maybe too often. Sometimes, you knew, he stayed the night.
You wondered if he still kept the door unlocked.
-
The problem was that Narita Kyouji was not a whole person. Something had gone wrong in the making of him, long before you had met him, and though oyaji had tried to fill him up and was tolerably successful, there was only so much you could do with a man who was less than half a person. He was a shadow in the shape of a man, an outline a child had drawn on the sidewalk of someone who had stood there once upon a time, when the sun hit just right.
Yet that was also his charm. There was nothing nature abhorred more than a void. All of you threw things into Kyouji like he was a wishing well. If you gave him something worthwhile, he added it to the armor he had built around himself, the one that approximated a person. So, little by little, he was made of Kobayashi's brash humor, the boss's fondness for the pathetically cute, outdated manga references from when Masanori was still at home, cigarette brands from past girlfriends, your way of holding a golf club like a baseball bat to magnify the impact on a skull. Lesser men with nothing to give threw themselves into him, and panicked when they got nothing back. He was an attractive but reluctant patron saint to junkies and thrill chasers, any subordinate who wanted to flare out brightly and disastrously. You saw him eat them up, bones and all, and carry on as if they never existed.
Tamai had been one of them. His expulsion hadn't even been Kyouji's fault. Tamai's newer subordinates didn't care and even preferred the new reporting structure that put them under Kyouji, who still consistently turned a monthly profit. But the older underlings had come in when the virtues of the group were still more old-school. All they saw was a man who had known his brother for almost twenty years and cut him off with barely a second glance, so low on the list of priorities that the boss didn't even want the severed pinky afterwards.
Minami had been the one to call you over after the ambush. Anytime the younger members started scrapping, you and Kobayashi were the designated mediators, the sometimes cleanup crew. By the time you arrived, the fight was long over. You could tell from the swollen faces and broken arms that it had been ugly. You could tell from Kyouji's demeanor, as he wiped his hands with a crumpled tissue, that to him it had barely registered as something worth telling the boss later.
"Look at me," Kyouji pretended to whine. He had never been particularly good at it. "All banged up, like an old car. What if I'm ugly now?"
"Stop fucking around," you said. "You didn't even get hit in the face."
"Keep on like this and I'll hit you in the face," Kobayashi grunted in agreement. He strolled over, examined one of the losers, and spat on his face. "You know, you really should stop letting yourself get drawn into these things," Kobayashi said, his tone conversational, even a little cajoling. "How old are you? Let your younger brothers bang these small fries around, not you. What did we promote you for if you're going to act like a rookie?"
"You should think about how it reflects back on oyaji," you added. You lit two cigarettes, passed one to Kyouji, who gestured for you to put it in his mouth for him. "And the kashira too."
"Ah," Kyouji said with an exaggerated sigh, leaning his head back so he could blow smoke at the sky. "It's been such a long time since I've heard that. Both of you used to say it all the time, back when I was just starting. You should do this, you should do that." He squinted at you with that long suffering outfielder's gaze, the cherry of the cigarette lighting up his face. "Don't you care about your cute little Narita-chan anymore?"
-
You cared. You cared so much you marched over to one of Tamai's men, gave him a mean kick to the crotch, then walked away to keep yourself from doing the same to Kyouji. You cared even more because you knew Kyouji didn't, that he was doing what he did best—filling a silence with inconsequential words so that he might slip away without revealing anything of himself. Kobayashi texted you after, a little mockingly, don't take it out on the babies. You were so full of unspeakable rage: against Kyouji, against your boss, against the world. It was the same rage that filled you, months later, when he showed up late to the karaoke competition, his jacket torn in one place, his knuckles busted open, an obvious gash on his forehead from smacking into what you later learned was the edge of the steering wheel.
What you had learned from years of being in the business was to recognize when an emotion was useless, to bear it silently without action. You could own a feeling, wholly, without it making a difference. No one had asked you to be responsible for him, and you weren't. Couldn't be. He wasn't yours to bear.
Instead, you watched as your boss, father and master and God to both of you, take him in, all of him, the blood stink rolling off of him like the aura of some vengeful angel that had nowhere to fold its wings, his eyes so black it made you dizzy. It was moments like this that reminded you of how much you loved your boss. Where other kumicho prided themselves on action or reaction, on the ability to strike, his strength was to be unmoved, unmoveable. There was nothing your boss couldn't withstand. He stood up and pointed Kyouji to a bar stool, then yanked Kyouji's head back to look at the wound. No one dared to say a word. It was so quiet you could hear your own breathing, steady like a metronome, as all of you watched the boss dip a bar napkin into someone's whiskey and tap it against Kyouji's forehead. Grinned at Kyouji, told him, all right. The car was registered to you? All right. Told him to go to the bathroom and wash up. We'll talk about this later. Said all that with his hand still in Kyouji's hair, gripping hard enough to turn the scalp white along the hairline, keeping the back of Kyouji's head against the bar counter. You watched Kyouji swallow, once, twice, the line of his throat and Adam's apple frighteningly exposed in the smoky light of Bar Katsuko, the air thick and hazy like a storm waiting to break.
You squeezed your hands into mute fists by your side. Squeezed so hard your arms shook with the tension.
When oyaji let him up from the barstool, he had already transformed. Had tucked himself back into the void that was inside him, of which he was made. Nothing but a sleek black presence in the shape of a person. A slight smile, even, on his lips as he passed you, his hands already at the side of his temples, smoothing back his hair.
You thought, like you had all those years ago, ah, now here is a good-looking man.
There was always something a little wrong with you too.
-
And when you ask, he tells you, I was waiting for him at a singing competition. That's where I found him. I told him, let's go karaoke! He got in my car. No, he didn't ask questions. Didn't call his parents. Just got in and let me drive off. We went to karaoke. And then we kept going.
He tells you all this without looking at you, his eyes fixed on the bench they had cleared off after the kid had cried himself into a state of exhaustion and passed out with his head nestled against the crook of Kyouji's arm.
When the boss first got into giving out tattoos, you were the only one who wasn't surprised. You had been waiting for this next step for years. But then again, you were the only person who had been there, so many years ago, when the boss had first taken Kyouji home. It was almost six in the morning, you were headed home from the karaoke joint, and you got a text from the boss, come to the bath house. It had been such a long night. You were ready to pass out from exhaustion, your head almost dropping to the steering wheel as you nodded off at a stoplight. But it felt like there were pieces of glass lodged in your forearm that you hadn't gotten out from the door of the karaoke room. A bath sounded nice. And, well, oyaji was asking. So you went.
He was already soaking with Kyouji next to him when you arrived. What you remember of that moment, before he turned and waved you over, was the way the boss had looked long and hard at Kyouji's back, all white and untouched. He had one hand on the nape of Kyouji's neck, pressing there, gripping hard enough that when he let go, the skin was red, and Kyouji had let him, not even flinching. You had never seen someone so ready to be taken in, to be hollowed out and utterly transformed. Ready to be made in the shape of someone else, another man.
For some reason an old metaphor had come to you at that moment: "To be dyed in your colors." A poem you learned in class when you were still a schoolboy which ended in, the Tatsuta River dyed in autumn red.
That was when you knew.
Oyaji had waited until Kyouji had gotten initiated. Earned his stripes. Gotten promoted. Become an assistant to his successor. His irezumi had long been filled out and there were no obvious blank spots left. That's when oyaji ordered you to call up the family's personal artist for lessons. When I retire, maybe that's what I'll do to keep up the hand-eye coordination, he had joked. You tallied up the years to figure out how many unwilling human canvases would be offered up. How many more times you would need to bear Kyouji's horrible reedy falsetto belting out, "Kurenai da!"
You've known Kyouji for almost twenty years. You've been under your boss's care for more. There are no two people in this world you know better than them.
He got in my car. He didn't ask questions. He let me drive off. We kept going. A kid in his middle school uniform, his back starched white. Kyouji had put his arm heavy around his neck when the song was done, and his face had bloomed red.
That was how you knew. You have known from the day they met. You have always known.