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In the end, Yokomizo made the hardest decision of Mushitarou’s life a little easier by asking a simple question.
Not the question. Not the one that had punched through Mushitarou’s sternum and pulverised it before scraping out his insides. (“Will you do it? I want it to be you.”) No, apparently there were worse questions to ask after requesting that your childhood best friend assist in your suicidal magnum opus.
“Before you do it. Mushi-kun, will you let me be there for your heat? Just once?”
Yokomizo, the bastard, the absolute fool, let his gaze follow the path of a sparrow that flitted from tree to tree just beyond the veranda where they were sitting outside the inn. He didn’t even have the balls to look Mushitarou in the face when he asked. Instead he let his hands wilt into the folds of his grey hakama, succumbed to entropy now that he’d used up the last of his audacity for the day to utter such a brazen question.
Mushitarou’s fists were so tight that his dry knuckles itched. “How dare you.”
Only Yokomizo could ask such a thing, could sit there while his body decayed and speak so directly about the thing that had grown into a tangle of complexities in Mushitarou’s heart — one long möbius strip of desire and dreams and loathing and longing shaken til it resembled interlaced strings. After he’d already asked for the worst thing imaginable, of course Yokomizo would grin like it was nothing, cheeks puffing out the gaunt face til it bore traces of the impertinent teenager that had captured Mushitarou’s stupid little omega heart. Wasting away under the springtime breeze that wafted his curls, waiting for the moment the hands that loved him would snuff out his dying light, of course Yokomizo would say the one thing that would both elate and destroy his dearest friend.
Mushitarou expected nothing less from a man who could manipulate readers with his pen.
His sock snagged on one of the splintered boards as he shot to his feet, because when terrible things happened to Mushitarou, they happened en masse. He’d have to throw them out when he got home. Somehow, this, too, was Yokomizo’s fault.
Say yes, his omega pleaded.
“How dare you,” he repeated into the thick silence between them.
On the scale of their dramatic arguments, this one was hardly enough to make Yokomizo flinch. Leaning back on his hands, he tilted his placid expression toward Mushitarou’s ire. “It doesn’t have to be complicated. You’ve been here for me when I needed you. I want to do the same. Can’t it be OK to want something?”
Mushitarou sputtered around a jumble of responses. “You ask me that now?”
“Of course now,” Yokomizo said. “We both know how this ends.”
The splintered board creaked under the pressure of Mushitarou’s foot. “Then maybe I should go ahead and kill you.”
“Mushi-kun, you’re always like this.” The author clicked his tongue. “Just because you can’t make every bad outcome disappear doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.”
Unable to bear the sight of him any longer, Mushitarou jerked his gaze past the sliding door toward the interior of Yokomizo’s room. The usual tidal wave of paper and books that swept across tables and tatami had grown more scattered and haphazard as another editorial deadline approached. It would make undetected movement difficult when the time came, and cleaning up even more difficult. Mushitarou couldn’t suppress the hurt, but the least Yokomizo could do, after asking for so much already, was make the rest of the evidence easier to remove.
“Fuck off,” Mushitarou said.
Yokomizo’s eyes were closed now, though his face hadn’t turned away. “I’m being selfish, I know.” He laughed. “Regret is a hard thing to live with. I’ve never known your scent, but I don’t want to die without knowing your taste.”
They had never spoken of these things before now. Their childhood had been soaked in blissful ignorance of things like heat and rut and mating, confident in their naive belief that they were both betas. Until Grade 11 came, and Mushitarou the late-bloomer had skipped school for a week, turned off his phone, and shut himself in his closet, one fist tight around his erection and the other balled in his mouth to stifle his call for the only friend he’d ever had. Humiliated and stinking of pheromones, he’d returned to a classroom full of stares and gossip and whispers that called him a misfire — the kind of nuisance omega whose heat would never come on time or be good for anything productive.
The kindest thing Yokomizo had done was to say nothing and pretend nothing had changed.
Why couldn’t he have shut the fuck up a little longer?
Worse, why was Mushitarou allowing himself to take the bait now presented to him so neatly wrapped? It was an invitation to hate this man, lounging casually on a blanket outside his room like the cancer wasn’t eating him up from the inside, like he wasn’t dangling the thing Mushitarou wanted most but could never have beyond this moment. It was permission to hate enough to make him kill. What could be more detestable than using Mushitarou’s heart as the linchpin of a carefully crafted thriller?
Fuck that. Fuck him.
Mushitarou felt like shit for wanting to punch a dying man. For knowing he was being baited and falling for it anyway.
“I hate you,” he said.
The words tasted like tears.
Yokomizo used to joke that Mushitarou was interested in the occult because he was a shit magnet. No matter how good he was at making evidence disappear, an ability alone would never be enough to lift the arcane curse of terrible occurrences he could never escape. Maybe it was karma for all the crimes he’d covered up. Or maybe Mushitarou had been a serial killer in his past life. Little else could explain why he’d been fated to become his best friend’s killer, a criminal tool for a series of madmen, victim of an insufferable savant detective’s blackmail, and now prisoner in the mansion of another eccentric mystery author.
Worse, he had to make small talk with this one.
“Have you considered what you’ll do after this?” Poe asked him over a game of cards after dinner, the two of them seated at the end of a long mahogany table long cleared of everything but the ¥30,000 bottle of pinot noir. “Do you have family at home?”
Mushitarou tried not to think of how he’d sold Yokomizo’s manuscript to the very man seated across from him because nothing in the world was of interest after this. He’d held his home and his family between his fingers and squeezed them out of existence. “Not anymore.”
Poe nodded and drew a card from the deck to add to his hand. “Family is a complicated thing. Sometimes I think it might be more practical to make our own rather than salvage what we’re given.”
Depressing implications aside, Mushitarou couldn’t help the way his brow lifted at a certain manner of phrasing in that statement. “Who would you be making a family with?”
“I don’t—” Poe flushed red behind his mop of hair. “I misspoke. I was referring to found family, of course. Tsukuru, mitsukeru, these verbs are too phonetically similar. The nuances of the tongue are often complex to the ear.”
A bullshit author answer, like the thousands Yokomizo had given over the years.
The thought of Poe making a family with another human was absurd. Before Mushitarou had begun residing here, the entire manor had been empty of life beyond the author and his pet raccoon. But there were hints of someone else’s presence scattered about: in the bags of marshmallows in the pantry, the multi-coloured jars of candy in the cupboards, and the packs of gummies in every desk drawer. The calico cat kigurumi folded neatly in Mushitarou’s closet certainly didn’t belong to him or to Poe.
The red string of fate connected everyone to someone, didn’t it? Even if the two it connected were separated by distance or—
Or death.
Though Mushitarou considered himself a connoisseur of the melodramatic, it didn’t take an expert to see that every book of Poe’s had been penned for an audience of one. Of course a crafter of mysteries would be drawn to someone who could unravel them. Chances were high that Poe’s someone was currently at an airport trying to orchestrate the downfall of an organisation hell-bent on reshaping reality.
“It’s Ranpo-kun,” Mushitarou said. “Right?”
Poe looked away, still flustered, and pressed his hand of cards face down on the table.
‘Spot on deduction, Mushi-kun.’ Yokomizo’s voice lingered from somewhere beyond the grave.
“Ranpo-kun is my rival,” Poe muttered, though his tone sounded unconvinced.
People used to call the sun a planet, but that didn’t change the fact that it’s the center of the galaxy, Mushitarou thought. “Rival” had no more significance on Poe’s relationship to his detective than a coat of paint had on a fence. Words could change meaning, but did they change the truth? Poe had once told him that the power of words lay in their ability to bring people into worlds beyond reality. Yokomizo had once told him that words could reinforce beliefs that did not reflect reality. But did using a different word really bring the hate any closer to reality?
Why were they bothering to entertain this conversation? If Poe was looking for a philosophical discussion on love and family, Mushitarou was the worst person to ask; his opinions on the topic were certainly not something Poe would appreciate.
Edgar Allan Poe carried the same kind of energy as those lovesick lunatics he and Yokomizo used to make fun of in university. Guys in skinny jeans who would sit at the back of the lecture hall and sketch flowers and skeletons on Pablo Neruda poems and listen to Miyavi unironically. Except Poe was a white boy with a trust fund and a successful writing career and a passion for 19th century fashion. But the essence was still the same — someone who wallowed in heartache as an art form. He craved romance in the same way he craved death: as an ideal to be beheld from afar, away from the living things that might get their stink on it.
It would take a man like Edogawa Ranpo, who transcended ordinary creatures, to snare the heart of a man like Poe.
Mushitarou had no interest in helping either of these people navigate the subtleties of a relationship. What guidance could he even provide? Unless Poe was looking for advice on how to convince himself he despised the person most precious to his heart.
“You’re from overseas. And your Guild has dissolved, hasn’t it?” Mushitarou asked. “But you’ve chosen to put down roots here for a rivalry.”
Poe drew the wine glass to his lips with a sniff. “Well, when you put it that way, it does sound rather pathetic.”
“I didn’t say that.” Mushitarou brushed a strand of hair from his eyes in annoyance. It had started growing beyond his ears and would likely become as unruly as his companion’s if he didn’t trim it soon. Easier said than done when every pair of scissors in the house looked like a 17th century murder weapon.
He pulled a card from the draw pile and let his eyes linger on the figure of the yellow and red jester, smiling and inverted as it stared back at him. It had been shuffled in upside down at the beginning of the game. The Fool Reversed, his mind supplied, even though they were playing with a 52-card deck and not a tarot deck.
Poe tilted his head with a shrug. “These roots were laid long before I arrived. I simply followed them to where I was meant to be because I grew tired of stewing in my regret.”
(“Regret is a hard thing to live with,” Yokomizo had said.)
What was it like to surrender to fate? To be so unafraid of what it might bring that you chased it, tried to bed it, sought to make a life with it? Mushitarou felt, at once, both sad for and in awe of this man. There was so much of Yokomizo in him.
“There have been stranger families, I suppose,” Mushitarou said.
After beating Poe handily in three rounds of cards, he topped off his glass of wine and retired to bed. Too fed up to look at the stacks of genkouyoushi spread neatly throughout the manor, he walked to the balcony outside his guest room — the one he’d insisted on because he couldn’t bear to sleep in another locked room with no exit — and watched the crows gathering on a nearby power line. Dark feathered bullies along the orange horizon with volition that Mushitarou would never have. Volition that Yokomizo used to exude. A murder of Yokomizos.
How lucky they were for the freedom they possessed.
Edogawa Ranpo was pregnant.
Edogawa Ranpo was an omega.
Edogawa Ranpo was going to be someone’s parent.
Those three statements had been looping in Mushitarou’s brain since their encounter at the boba shop that morning, when Ranpo had waltzed in ten minutes late to a meeting he’d requested, stinking of preheat, and looking like he’d swallowed a bowling ball. The tendrils of vanilla and bergamot and milk, a scent like London Fog, had been so piercing it made Mushitarou’s eyes water.
An omega. The bearer of a womb that could be filled.
Just like Mushitarou.
It was absurd to be hung up on such details when presented with evidence of a criminal who was trying to murder Ranpo by stealing Poe’s identity. But given their line of work, such a threat seemed less bizarre than the concept of Ranpo carrying a child.
The discovery shouldn’t have come as a shock. Mushitarou had, after all, seen the photo above the lede in the Maiasa Shinbun weeks ago, wherein a familiar detective at the head of a serial murder investigation had touched the gentle slope of his middle in delight. The sight of it made some instinctual mote of terror seize Mushitarou whole, reminded of the way Yokomizo’s stomach had bulged from the gastric cancer in the weeks before—
But no, to touch one’s belly in such a joyful way… pregnancy was the most likely conclusion.
Which meant that Ranpo was an omega, and Poe, that lying fucking liar, hadn’t misspoke when he said he’d wanted to make a family. For who else would Ranpo have allowed to put a child in him but Edgar Allan Poe? It was almost inconceivable — no pun intended — for there had been no trace of pheromone scent on Ranpo in the backseat of that car during their first meeting or in the recreation of Mushitarou’s worst nightmare that Poe had drawn them into. That alone had been enough to convince Mushitarou that Ranpo and Poe were both betas.
It was the second time such an assumption had proven false in his life.
All these things had become evident in the hours before Mushitarou came to be standing here now, in the doorway to the master bedroom of this manor he could never really escape, even after his reclusion ended and the Decay of Angel danger had passed. His instincts wouldn’t permit a fellow omega to be alone on the cusp of a heat, couldn’t resist the invisible pull that brought him to the nest of blankets and pillows that Ranpo and the man-tiger omega, Nakajima Atsushi, had piled on the four-poster bed. Mushitarou had always endured his heats alone, but that was by choice. No one had interested him other than—
And besides, what kind of person would he be to forsake another denied that choice, especially in a state as vulnerable as pregnancy heat? Abandoning friends was not in his nature, despite all the times he wished it were.
Mushitarou let his eyes linger over the way that Ranpo’s body was being shaped by fearlessness in the face of the unknown. The pregnancy made his sleek mess of black hair thicker, longer, nearly to his shoulders. He lay on his side next to Atsushi in the nest, rosy cheeks puffed up in a grin, big belly stretching an old t-shirt. His skin seemed brighter, smoother, filled out and healthy and infusing everything with the scent of sweet milky tea. He must’ve shifted while Mushitarou had gone to change into his sleep clothes, because now there was a spot next to Ranpo just large enough to accommodate another person if they lay close.
It was hard not to look at him and see the embodiment of things Mushitarou could never have. Things he never knew could be his until this moment, when they were already beyond his reach. Did they still fit inside the vortex of grief when the only thing lost was their potential?
Book clutched in one hand, Mushitarou grit his teeth and slunk toward the bedside. The nest was a haphazard pile of quilted lace and throws with hand-embroidered cobwebs interspersed with a few Pokémon-themed fleece blankets. Mushitarou preferred his neatly ironed Egyptian cotton sheets with blue satin pillowcases, but this nest was softer than it looked, plush against his heated face as he stretched out face-down til his shoulder touched Ranpo’s back.
That small point of contact was featherlight and electric, pleasurable in its intimacy, though not in a sexual way. Face still partially buried, he watched surreptitiously through parted hair as Ranpo rolled onto his back and stroked his belly. It wasn’t like Mushitarou could ignore it — so round and close and warm, selfishly drawing attention, just like the one who carried it.
His interest stemmed from pure intellectual curiosity, of course; not personal relevance. Beyond one-night stands over the years, no one had ever made him want to consider the things a relationship might entail. Other than— But Mushitarou had buried that opportunity just weeks before he’d buried the man who gave it to him. All his life, he’d been diligent about his birth control and had made an effort to spend his heats alone because he knew he wasn’t cut out for parenthood.
He certainly didn’t think Ranpo was any more suited for it. He didn’t think most people were suited for it.
When he said as much aloud to his companions, Ranpo simply rolled his eyes and told him, “Most people can learn.”
As though it were that easy.
(“It doesn’t have to be complicated,” Yokomizo had said. “Can’t it be OK to want something?”)
Maybe for Ranpo it was that easy. His confidence in his own reasoning gave him such power to confront the unknown. Much like Yokomizo, who had used a terminal diagnosis to craft a mystery that bent reality, Ranpo barreled forward, using every uncertainty as an opportunity to chart a new course toward his goals. Edogawa Ranpo had never let a locked door constrain him.
Not like Mushitarou, who lived every day of his life in the locked room of his own hesitation.
Perhaps there was a reason fate had drawn him to these people who carried a piece of Yokomizo in them.
Perhaps wanting something was that easy.