Work Text:
The first time Hiromi regains consciousness he barely cracks his eyes open before slamming them shut again. It’s a feeble attempt to block out the harsh glow that irritates his light-deprived eyes—it works but the space behind his eyelids remains filled with a yellow-orange after burn. It’s a color that matches the feeling in his arms, and much of the rest of his body. A humming, thrumming, warmth, that curls through and around him.
At first, it’s not uncomfortable. It actually feels soothing and therapeutic, but after a few moments of consciousness and focused attention the warmth compounds into a painful burning heat that radiates up from his arms. Instinctively, he clenches his fists against the pain, his fingers slow to act but once they do it only worsens his predicament, feeds the fire.
He mumbles a string of curses—pathetic words entwined with a plea for help, for anything to make the burning go away. He’s starting to remember where he’d been, what had happened to him, as if the heat has awoken his memories.
He shouldn’t be here. He remembers the look on Itadori’s face when he’d finally met his gaze, eye to eye, seeing clearly for the first time in a long time. The kind of clarity that’s only bestowed on a person at the end of their struggle.
He should be dead. Why isn’t he dead?
The heat flairs again and Hiromi whimpers, tries to reverse the energy inside him, to flush it through his system like an intravenous drug as he had in Shinjuku while the King of Curses taunted him; there in the shadow of so many sorcerers that came and went before him, those more learned, more deserving of a second chance than him.
A drop of water, startlingly cool, hits Hiromi’s forehead. Then another. He’s surprised they don’t hiss and evaporate on contact for how hot he feels, but he’s grateful for the relief, grateful even more when a cool cloth presses against his forehead. He doesn’t dare open his eyes again, refuses to look upon the visage of his savior, but it jerks him back from his downward spiral.
A groan escapes his lips, one verging on ecstasy.
“Hey, now,” a voice says, stern but quiet—admonishing, but also teasing. “You’re not supposed to be awake yet.”
I couldn’t agree more, Hiromi thinks. To his savior that quenches the fire he can only nod his head once. The movement makes him queasy.
“Lets get you back under.”
Hiromi nods again, or thinks he does. There’s a tingling in one hand, then a different kind of warmth spreads through his body. It comforts him, like being wrapped in a blanket. It chases away the demons but not the guilt. Never the guilt.
IV, he thinks. Pain killers, he thinks.
Then, mercifully, he stops feeling.
*****
The second time Hiromi comes to, the room is considerably darker; colder too. This time he notices the immediate presence of the pain, but its scope has narrowed to only his arms, and a dull roar instead of that raging bonfire.
For a time, he stares at the textured ceiling above him and allows his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He’s in the morgue at the school (a phrase he never thought would become a part of his lexicon). He recognizes it from his single pilgrimage to seek treatment from Ieiri after an injury during their Shinjuku prep. It had been somewhat embarrassing to have caught the wrong end of Kusakabe’s sword during training, but he’d been lucky he hadn’t severed the arm completely. Now, irony is sneaking up on him and Hiromi refuses to acknowledge its presence. Instead, he pushes energy towards his aching arms, through a barrier disrupting the flow, until there’s a sudden explosion of…relief; like a joint popped or a knot of muscle smoothed out.
Losing his arms to Sukuna’s Cleave, all while the curse taunted him, burns fresh in Hiromi’s mind. In the end, miraculously, it had been the key to plumbing the depths of his talent and unlocking the buried reverse-cursed technique inside him; but it was a steep cost, one he isn’t convinced he’s finished paying for yet.
He can tell now, they’ve both been restored—the one he’d healed on the spot, and the other…healed in his sleep, or by Ieiri herself? He’s not sure which—
A sniffle from across the room startles him out of his thoughts, despite the softness of the sound. He had mistakenly thought he was alone. He flops his head to the left to look around, but finds only another examination table, this one occupied, in the worst way. Quickly, Hiromi turns his head the other way, tries to push aside thoughts of the body under the crisp white sheet stained with patches of blood.
There’s not a lot of mental arithmetic required to figure out who his roommate is. He saw Gojo die as clearly as anyone else who had witnessed the confrontation with Sukuna; but it occurs to him then, that he doesn’t even know if they won or not... If victory was even the right word to use.
There’s another ghostly sniffle, followed by a quiet sigh.
Hiromi swallows hard, then tries to speak.
“Ieiri-san?” Her name comes out like a frog’s croak, dry and scratchy. “Is that you?”
There’s a startled flurry of motion, a repressed bark of surprise, but Hiromi doesn’t have it in him to laugh.
“Shit. I forgot you weren’t dead.”
In a way, it’s comforting that Ieiri’s legendary (lack of) bedside manner remains firmly intact. He’ll forgive her in these trying times that she may have forgotten about him, temporarily or otherwise. He was but a blip on her radar, compared to everything else.
“Are you…okay?” It feels weird to ask such a question when he’s the one that’s been brushing up against death like a touch-starved cat. It feels weird to ask Ieiri because, well…does anyone ever? He never has. Surely someone should have, though.
It takes a moment for her to answer. It reminds him of a difficult witness in the hot seat, one who’s still weighing the pros and cons of honesty versus saving their own hide. Her eventual response is a full-bodied no, followed by the grind of metal on metal and the brief illumination of a flame that lights the room as well as her cigarette.
Now, at least, he knows where she is. He tries to sit up, but finds it difficult to push himself up more than halfway. To add insult to injury, it’s also nauseating.
“How do you feel?” she asks after two slow, exaggerated drags on her cigarette.
Hiromi’s arms throb under the weight they’re managing to hold up and he decides to quit while he’s ahead.
“Terrible. Really,” he says as he lowers himself back onto the examination table.
“Welcome to the club.”
Again, the stoic boredom woven into Ieiri’s reply eases the feeling of a world turned over on itself. He has a million questions he wants to ask but does not want to burden her with any of them at the moment. Instead, he closes his eyes and inhales the smell of tobacco until he drifts back into unconsciousness.
*****
Hiromi gazes down at the balls he’s holding, one in the palm of each hand. They’re fairly lightweight and soft, easy enough to squeeze. Accompanying the balls are several printouts of various therapeutic exercises he’s meant to incorporate into his daily routine now that his stay under Ieiri’s care is coming to a (regrettable) end. He has half a mind to injure himself again, so that he might continue to experience the clockwork reliability of her cigarette habit, but the tragedy of that plan is obvious. From here on out he’ll be expected to heal his own wounds.
“Have you never seen therapy equipment before?”
Ieiri’s question eases the tension in the room, the clear indication that Hiromi’s moving on to the next chapter of his life, one that doesn’t seem to have even an outline written yet.
“They’re blue,” Hiromi mumbles, the tiniest bit of a wry smile tugging and the corner of his mouth. He looks up and meets Ieiri’s tired expression. “The balls, that is.”
Unsurprisingly, Ieiri stares back at him like he’s just sprouted horns from the top of his head. The way she wears a look of pure, unadulterated disdain for his foolishness is, unfortunately, very attractive. The heat prickling his cheeks and the back of his neck is enough to flare his embarrassment at this revelation.
“You gave me blue balls,” Hiromi continues, because he cannot possibly allow the joke to die in the air, for some reason. It’s as if he were operating on autopilot and could only watch the oncoming disaster like a helpless passenger.
For an excruciatingly long and painful moment, Ieiri remains silent, a look of cold calculation evident in her gaze. When she finally speaks, she sounds utterly exhausted.
“You know, even in this fuck-ass jujutsu boy’s club, that would still be considered sexual harassment.”
The flush on Hiromi’s skin becomes molten with his compounding embarrassment. He feels childish, now, in the shadow of her scrutiny. “I apologize. That was a stupid joke.”
To his surprise, a brief flash of humor twinkles in Ieiri’s eyes, not unlike the way the flames do when she lights a cigarette. “Relax, I was kidding. No one around here knows what sexual harassment means.”
Hiromi opens his mouth to further lampoon himself on the sharp spear of his righteousness, but Ieiri waves her hand in the air to silence him. She turns her scrutinizing gaze to the bag sitting on the gurney next to him and gestures inside with a finger.
“You’ll note that I have, in fact, given you several colors of balls and tension bands. I’ve emailed you a PDF but there’s also a print out of the therapy regime I’ve recommended. Since you’re an adult with a law degree that I assume didn’t get shot out of a gachapon machine, everything should be straightforward. Follow or it or don’t, I’m not your parent, but be prepared to suffer the consequences if you ignore my advice—”
The sentiment of Ieiri’s veiled threat makes Hiromi wonder how many sorcerers who had came before him had chosen not to heed her advice and caused her more headaches. He might have a penchant for terrible, inappropriate jokes, but he’s determined not to disappoint her in this one area, at least. He could, indeed, follow instructions.
“—you may also note that I’ve recommended additional repetitions for your right arm for a period of two to four weeks—”
Hiromi cringes inward slightly. “Is that because you healed my left arm better than I healed the right?”
The tilt of Ieiri’s head should have prepared him at least somewhat for the reply to come, but it catches him off guard in the most enjoyable way.
“Yes, you under performed in that regard, but don’t be discouraged, it was your first time—”
Hiromi barks out an indignant laugh. “Oh, now who’s sexually harassing who?”
Ieiri shrugs her shoulders. “I told you, no one knows what that means around here.”
Squeezing the ball in his right hand, as if already committed to the extra reps, Hiromi gestures for Ieiri to continue.
“Anyway, RCT is largely a work of self discovery and you will learn over time how to make it work for you. Some day you may even figure out how to apply it to others, but I wouldn’t focus on that—it’s rare, even among the strongest of sorcerers. If you follow the PT schedule I’ve set up, you should recover fully from these injuries. Growing back an arm, not to mention two of them, is no easy feat. This isn’t like healing a cut or a bruise—”
“I understand.”
“—eventually your own RCT from within will work better for you than any RCT from an outside source, including my own. You're just a beginner right now so everything is going to be kind of shit.”
Hiromi huffs out another laugh, feels the way it flutters his bangs against his forehead, then brushes them to the side. Almost immediately they fall right back into place.
Ieiri smiles a little, as if she’s noticed it, too.
“Thank you, for—well, for everything, I guess.”
She doesn’t respond, but he can feel the implied you’re welcome in her gaze.
“What are your plans now?” Ieiri asks instead. Blunt as ever though the curiosity is evident in her expression. Maybe she feels it, too, because she quickly maneuvers a cigarette into her mouth, like seeking cover. “It’s just that we need all the help we can get around here. The more the merrier or whatever the hell I’m supposed to say to make you stick around.”
Hiromi smiles, and squirms a little where he sits. He wonders just how merry it could get around the place, especially with all the fallout they’ll be dealing with. A small part of him wants to help, to stay close to the people he’s come to regard highly in this strange world he stumbled into. The truth is, if it weren’t for the extenuating circumstances of his life, she’d have to say very little to convince him—though he’d happily listen to her attempt it anyway.
“I understand that everything about me and my curse technique makes me a desirable ally, but there are matters relating to my… former life that I must attend to—and atone for.”
Ieiri doesn’t look disappointed, not exactly, but her standard expression of passive indifference sits slightly askew. “Well, I wish you luck but don’t be surprised if the last remnants of the upper echelons of this society make that difficult for you. For my part, I’ll leave you be, if that’s what you prefer.”
He does not, in fact, prefer that at all, but what else is he to do? There is no space for her in a future where he is a convicted criminal.
“I have considered that there might be attempts at meddling, but I must do what I can, or I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”
For a moment, Ieiri’s lips fidget indecisively around her cigarette. “If you change your mind, I might be persuaded to help you with your RCT. A carton of Hi-lites or a bottle of Akashi White Oak—per session—would go the distance.”
Hiromi snorts at the offer. “Steep prices.”
Ieiri shrugs. “Well, I’m the only game in town, so I can charge what I want.”
With a gentle push, Hiromi slides off the examination table, then tosses the therapy balls into the bag before taking it up by the handles. “I appreciate the offer, Ieiri-san… and everything else.”
“All in a days work,” she replies nonchalantly, indifference once again her default state. For a moment longer she stares at him, and Hiromi is prisoner to it, though he notes the way she crosses her arms tight against her midsection, a shield against the familiarity that’s growing between them. More than once during the ongoing planning meetings he’s attended he’s caught her staring. Now, here, it’s hard to hide.
“I’ll be staying at the dorms a few days longer, if you need me,” he reminds her, before he forces himself to head back towards the hall.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she replies, bored and detached as usual.
*****
A tingling at the tip of his nose wakes Hiromi from sleep. There’s something soft pressing against it, and now that he’s awake, he can feel itching in some places and cold in others. He’s covered by something but can’t seem to open his eyes to see what it is.
“What the hell?” he mumbles to himself.
Somewhere in the background of wherever he is, there are people talking, their conversation unintelligible though Hiromi’s ears burn as if they’re speaking filthy things about him. The tingling at the tip of his nose grows stronger, begins to spread down towards his cheekbones, heated and intense. Finally he’s able to force his eyes open, but all he can see is a veil of white. A sheet.
Hiromi’s heart hammers in his chest like a gavel calling his panicking body to order—but there will be no order here, not until he understands what’s going on.
Approaching footsteps add to the chorus of sounds, the clack of heels on tile floors. Hiromi stiffens in anticipation of help, of assistance, of an explanation; he blinks rapidly at the sheet draped over his face. It’s so close his eyelids brush against it. It tickles him but he can’t move his hands to tear the vexing thing away.
“Alright everyone, first up we have a Japanese male, age thirty-six—”
Hiromi’s heart soars at the sound of Ieiri’s voice but his elation is cut short a moment later. A light clicks on, blue-white and blinding through the thin white sheet that covers him; then it’s pulled back, exposing him further to the light and the world. It’s only then, as cool air hits his chest, he realizes that he’s undressed.
Ieiri’s there, looking down at him, cigarette dangling from between her lips, ash hanging on for dear life to the end of it. Her expression is stern, serious, like she’s concentrating fully but there’s something else there, too. Something like anticipation, or even…glee.
Hiromi can’t see the everyone Ieiri’s referring to. He can only lie there and listen to the way she lists off the particulars of his life in truncated, bullet point details.
“—reformed smoker, unmarried, childless, lawyer, genius sorcerer gifted an incredible technique—”
His face tingles with a mixture of shame, embarrassment and an itch he cannot move to quell.
“Too bad it was all wasted on a fraud—a murderer.”
The assembled “everyone” murmurs in agreement. Hiromi wishes he could make the litany against him stop, but there’s nothing he can do but lie there and take it, as the flush moves down his skin, as Ieiri pulls the sheet—the veil—further down his body, exposing his fraudulence with both action and word. He’s naked now, in totality. He can feel the stares of the many though he can only see two eyes staring at him now, accusing and scrutinizing.
When Ieiri reveals a sharp scalpel it gleams cinematically in the examination light. He thinks, behind her surgical mask, that she’s smiling. It’s clear in the way her eyelids crinkle at the corners, a smile that reaches her eyes.
“We’ll begin with an incision to the—”
Hiromi tries to shout, but fails. He’s not even sure if he manages to open his mouth. He still can’t move, not even a minute amount to indicate he’s alive, though surely Ieiri can see that his eyes are open, that his body is flushed with fear and excitement, and a terrible, secret third thing.
He wishes he could tell her that she need not cut him open, that he’ll spill his metaphorical guts on the condition that she spare his real ones; but no amount of mental squirming does the trick until the scalpel presses into his skin and drags deeply down his chest.
It is, finally, enough.
“Shoko!” he yells, too hyper-focused to be ashamed of the presumed familiarity of her given name. “Stop! I’m alive!”
For a moment Ieiri looks like she’s about to stop, but then she turns to face him and smiles. “Too late to ask for forgiveness.”
She’s holding a bone saw now, its whirling and screaming and—
Hiromi awakens with a start, his eyes snapping open, gasping for air. His heart pounds rapidly in his chest, like a prey animal caught in the jaws of the beast about to devour him.
He recognizes his cell at the detention center, immediately. It’s strange how he’s starting to know places by the texture of the ceiling. It’s as if his life has been a constant waking up from one nightmare or another. Already this dream is fading. All he remembers now is a desperate urge to scream, which he’d thankfully not pulled into the real world. The slightest thing could bring reprimands down on his head and he’s trying to be a model prisoner-in-waiting.
“Higuruma Hiromi?”
Hiromi snaps his gaze towards the cell door where a guard stands, waiting. He sits up, wondering how long he’s been standing there, watching him; if his arrival is coincidence or the real reason he’d been roused from his dream.
“Yes?” he says, as if he could be anyone else.
“Your lawyer is here to see you.”
That startles Hiromi, because he is his own lawyer. It’s an ill-advised tactic, to be sure, but he isn’t exactly trying to get himself out of anything. He’s merely trying to get this whole thing over with now that he’s confessed to the local authorities. Adding another lawyer to the mix would only slow things down. Whatever’s going on now, it’s best to meet it head on and deal with it, or there will only be more delays.
Blinking away the tiredness that continues to blur his eyes, Hiromi stands and turns to face the back wall of the cell, his hands positioned behind him. It’s weird how quickly it’s become muscle memory to prepare to be handcuffed.
“You won’t be restrained, if you behave.”
Hiromi turns around, surprised. That’s also unusual, to say the least, but he nods and steps towards the cell door. For a second he thinks he smells lingering cigarette smoke, probably from the guard, but for one brief moment he thinks it’s from his dream.
In the interrogation room he’s brought to, Hiromi is met with further surprise and confusion. The man who sits at the table, dark-haired and bright-eyed, is unfamiliar to him, certainly not anyone he ever retained as a lawyer, nor one he had even a passing acquaintance with. On the table there’s one manila folder and a large evidence bag.
Behind him, the guard sighs, then nudges Hiromi forward when he deems he’s taken too long to assess the situation.
Reluctantly he steps further into the terribly lit room and takes a seat across from “his lawyer”. Neither of them speak until the door to the room is closed, and not before Hiromi flicks a glance at the two-way mirror that covers much of the wall behind the lawyer. He can almost picture Shimizu standing there, watching him, though the room on the other side of the glass should be vacant for this conversation.
“Who are you?” Hiromi asks after enough time has passed for him to feel comfortable. “You’re not my lawyer. We both know that.”
“On the contrary, Higuruma-san. I have been hired on your behalf, by a party interested in your well being.”
“Who?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Hiromi snorts. “Don’t you think I have a right to know?”
“It's not really important who, only that you know why. And I think you know why.”
He sure he does know why, and he hates that, too.
“Well, what news have you come to deliver then, lawyer-san?”
“You’re going to be released today, with conditions. All charges will be dropped.”
“No,” Hiromi says, surprised at how quiet the word comes out. He clears his throat, tries to sound more assertive. “I refuse.”
“You’ll be tossed out on the street, if you choose the path of resistance. There is no room for you here. However, if you co-operate, you’ll be allowed walk out of here gracefully, dressed in the suit you came in, as if you were any other citizen.”
“And what are these ‘conditions’?” Hiromi asks. It’s clear that choice isn’t really on the table here, but he needs to know what he’s getting into.
“First, you will be stripped of your law degree and any right to practice law in any prefecture of Japan—”
Something in Hiromi’s chest throbs painfully. While completely rational, it still hurts to hear. The thing he’s fought the hardest for over the years being taken from him. Of course, if he were to remain in prison, he’d never practice law again, either; but this feels different somehow.
“—all of your assets will be seized, including but not limited to property, and all items found within said property, businesses, automobiles, savings accounts, secondary bank accounts, stock portfolios, and all other items regardless of perceived value. Consider it reparations to the families of your victims.”
Though the mention of ‘your victims’ is another stinging blow, but it sits better with him than anything else so far, even though his wealth is modest at best. It was something but not enough. No amount of yen could replace a human life.
“Beyond this, you are free to live your life however you see fit.”
Hiromi swallows. With no legal residence, place of employment, or funds beyond what’s in his wallet and checking account, that doesn’t leave him many options.
“Alright,” he says, reluctantly.
“I’m glad you see it our way,” the lawyer says before he pushes the evidence bag closer to him. “These are all of your personal effects that you arrived with. After you change, you will be required to sign some paperwork, then you’ll be free to go.”
Hiromi takes the bag, heavy with the weight of his suit, and says nothing else.
The sun shines down on Hiromi like a spotlight as he exits the detention center, and despite the displeasure of the current situation, he can’t help but turn his head up to bathe in its warmth for a moment. He has nothing now, except the clothes on his back, a small amount of money, his wallet and his watch, which he’s surprised wasn’t also seized. Perhaps it was a miscalculation on their part, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s not an expensive watch anyway; he’d bought if for function over fashion.
Behind him, someone else exists the building and he moves to step aside, then he hears a familiar voice.
“Where will you go?” Shimizu asks. So she had been present; or at least in the building somewhere.
It’s a question he’s wondering himself, though she doesn’t sound curious or concerned. It’s more like she wants to avoid any place he might end up.
This, Hiromi thinks, is also fair.
“There’s only one place I can go,” he says, and it’s as true as it is unsettling. It isn’t really a matter of options, when it’s the only choice he has, aside from destitution. “Well, two places. I think I need to pay a visit to a liquor store first.”
“What?” Shimizu asks. She sounds both confused and angry. He can’t blame her for either. They’re part of two different worlds now.
“Nothing, never mind,” Hiromi says. “If it’s any consolation, I really am sorry.”
She doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t have to. He can see in her eyes that she doesn’t really believe him. Not yet. Maybe she never will.
“I’m going to keep pursuing this case. Someone has to.”
Hiromi nods appreciatively. “You should,” he says, and he means it. He would welcome her busting through the barrier that has so clearly been dropped between them.
They stare at each other for a moment longer and Hiromi soaks in the disappointment apparent in Shimizu’s gaze. He won’t forget it, it’s the least he can do.
“Alright then,” she finally says, breaking the uncomfortable silence in their little bubble. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” he says quietly as she walks away.
*****
Hiromi takes the steps down to the basement levels of the school slowly, careful not to clang the bottles in one of the two bags he’s carrying. It’s strange how this, of all things, feels like the most treacherous part of his return. Like he’s walking directly back into the belly of a beast he doesn’t really understand.
In the basement, the door to the morgue is open a crack, a sign that Ieiri will entertain visitors, at least a little bit. He toes it open gently with one loafer and walks inside with all the confidence of someone who’s been personally invited.
She’s sitting at her desk when he enters, a full ashtray on top, and her feet kicked up next to it. There’s a steady trickle of smoke drifting up to the ceiling from the cigarette which is dangling from her mouth. Her eyes are closed. He’s almost certain she’s not sleeping and equally certain she knows he’s entered the room. The paper bags he’s carrying aren’t exactly wrinkling quietly, and he doesn’t avoid the thumping and clanging of bottles on the examination table nearest her desk as he sets down the bag.
After, he waits patiently for her to acknowledge him; and, as expected, she keeps him waiting until he’s about to clear his throat in polite protest of being ignored.
“I’ll admit, I was a little hurt to find you’d left without saying goodbye—”
For all her talk, Hiromi doesn’t thinks she sounds hurt, just indifferent as always.
“—even Suguru gave me that courtesy.”
The name bites at the back of Hiromi’s mind, like he’s heard it once before and had simply overridden the space it’d occupied in his brain with something that, at the time, he thought was more important.
“Who?” he asks, unsure if it’s curiosity or jealousy or some horrible combination of both that fuels his inquiry; but Ieiri simply waves it off, along with the smoke that’s orbiting around her.
“Never mind,” she says. “You’ll either find out one day, or you won’t; but I don’t feel like explaining.”
It’s a fair decision. There are names that float through the school halls like ghosts on their haunting paths, names he’ll never have faces to connect to; names that have stories he’ll never understand the true depths of: Yaga, Yuki, Nanami and others. Gojo will become one of them, in time.
“I apologize. I should have said something. You’re right.”
Ieiri sits up, her feet hitting the tile floor with a clattering of her heels, her eyes finally opening to regard him in the harsh morgue lights. For once she doesn’t look like she’s hovering at the borderlands of sleep.
“Did you at least get your house in order?”
Hiromi sighs. “In a manner of speaking; but not to the degree I had hoped for. As you suspected, there was intervention on my behalf.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Me too, Hiromi thinks, but decides not to say it out loud. They could run circles around the topics of higher purpose and destiny, but it’s hard to think about those things when his eyes are open to his own injustices. In time, maybe his guilt will fade, but in a way he hopes it doesn’t. It could be a useful force to drive him towards his own brand of atonement.
“Are you back, then?” Ieiri asks when the silence grows long between them. She hasn’t moved from behind her desk, but somehow she feels closer. She’s certainly scrutinizing him carefully with her gaze.
“I am. For better or worse.”
Maybe he’s mistaken, or it’s a trick of the light, or it’s just something he wants to see, but Ieiri actually looks pleased to hear this. Maybe even relieved.
“Yuji will be happy to hear it, I think.”
“Yes. I haven’t seen him yet, but I will go find him soon. In the meantime, I wanted to ask if that offer to assist with honing my RCT skills is still on the table?”
“It is. Do you remember my price?”
“I do,” Hiromi says as he starts lifting items out of the two paper bags and setting them on the examination table: two cartons of Hi-lites cigarettes and two bottles of Akashi White Oak whiskey. Variety for varieties sake. “I’d like to book four sessions in advance.”
He can tell that Ieiri’s trying not to smile, or even more, trying not to laugh. His ears start to burn at the sheer curiosity of what its like to catch her in full bodied laughter, or to be the cause of it.
She gets up out of the chair and he watches her every movement, the way she maneuvers in the space that’s her domain as much as Deadly Sentencing is his. She approaches him, and his offerings, stopping at the other side of the examination table.
“I’ve had worse apprentices,” she says as she picks up one of the bottles. “I could use a new drinking buddy, too, if you’re interested.”
Hiromi almost asks what happened to the last one, but doesn’t. Maybe one day she’ll tell them that, too—or maybe she won’t.
“What if I’m looking for more than a drinking buddy?”
“I don’t date patients,” she says, abruptly. Maybe too abruptly, as if the thought had already crossed her mind; as if she might have accidentally shown her hand.
Hiromi ignores that and goes the easier route instead. “I’m not your patient anymore.”
“You could be at any moment.”
“Not if you teach me well enough.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“I guess we will,” Hiromi agrees. He’s happy to take things at a slow, meandering pace, if she’ll let him. For now he’ll leave her to whatever quiet contemplation she’d been enjoying upon his arrival.
He takes the paper bags, but leaves the cigarettes and booze, the down payment on his future as a sorcerer.
At the door, he pauses and looks back.
“It was a vending machine in Morioka Station, by the way.”
“What?” Ieiri asks, confusion clear in her expression.
“That’s where I got my law degree.”
“Get the hell out of here, you idiot,” she barks through her laughter, brandishing one of the cartons of cigarettes like a weapon.
Hiromi raises his hands in front of himself, in mock defense.
“Already gone,” he says as he flees into the hall.