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It’s so easy to slip into the old posture around Kiryu. Something about the architecture of him, the beaming power, is magnetizing, and Majima gets himself all caught up in his orbit too easily. Too close for comfort. Sort of makes him glad the guy grew a pair and fucked off from the clan.
He can run but the sweetheart can only stay away for so long. What would the Tojo be without their hero back to save the day? Majima was stuck behind. Majima knows. It’s the same as it always was—just a bunch of backstabbing cheating lowlifes, all red in the face from trying to pretend they’re better than that.
Welcome back. Good to see him again. The big shining thing in the sea, the lighthouse, the anchor. The coliseum is the aperitivo, the housewarming party, jabbing elbows into old sore spots and searching for new scars, advancing techniques, oh, this is how you’ve changed.
Kiryu lays him on his ass and he’s not lying when he says it’s a massive relief. From the drumskin floor, Majima leers. “Missed me?”
“Maybe,” says Kiryu with his big eyes. Hand outstretched. “Did you miss me, niisan?”
“Like a schoolgirl misses shortcake.” Majima rolls away from him, rises to his feet. “Up and at ‘em, ya ox.”
They stumble four legged into the dark. Kiryu makes him feel that special way, the way it might feel to get hit by a parade of semi-trucks. Brown sugar sweetness, cutman’s choice, avitene and enswell. They pull their clothes back on in contented silence, the green sky before the great storm. Majima in the new harness, Kiryu in the old digs, what he saw from behind in the diesel gleam of the tower.
He tracks the stark chevron of Kiryu’s cleavage trailing down. Can’t imagine him wearing this fussy grey shit in sunny Okinawa. This is the Kamurocho skin, the thing he slides on for the sinkhole city, collapsing under its own weight. For Daigo.
Majima’s eye goes half lidded. “You happy out there in the boonies?”
Kiryu doesn’t turn, fussing with his buttons. “Hmm?”
“They treat ya well? You got friends?”
“Yeah. I have the children, Haruka,” the distinction between the two abruptly evident, “and…and there are people, in my corner, I think.”
“Crazy shit, Kiryu-chan,” Majima says. “Never woulda took ya for the dad type.”
“Ha.” Silver shrugs over red. Blood swabbed from his brow. So simple and serene that Majima wants to have another go, really cave his head in: “It’s good. I like it.”
Kiryu comes to him in duress, looking only for answers, and Majima takes from him what he can, and Kiryu smiles. Mixed signals, there. Makes a fella wonder if he’s wanted or needed.
The idea that Kiryu is somehow at peace out in the sticks, for real? It doesn’t do shit for him. Little Pochi went up to the ranch where he has lots of room to run and play. Sure thing. But he’s still gone. Majima is sick—he’s sick and tired, alright, and his time’s running out in tandem with the tiger, and he’s real weary of being the last man standing.