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Mao doesn’t believe it for a second, when he starts getting a slew of frantic messages that Spike Spiegel is dead.
It just doesn’t seem like a reasonable assumption to make, given the sheer amount of physical damage Spike’s been known to live through. He’s done this before, too—disappearing long enough to make people think he was a goner, and then resurfacing with no explanation. The first time was jarring, the second a little less so, by the third or fourth Mao stopped believing the rumors altogether, and just waited for him to turn back up.
This time around, the messages had rolled in at nearly midnight. Mao replied with frank disbelief, told the men looking for Spike’s body to that he doubted they’d find anything, and went to bed. He isn’t as young as he used to be—he doesn’t have the energy to go on a wild goose chase in the middle of the night.
He’s at his office early the next morning, sitting down to work at just past seven. The sun is just starting to rise, and no one’s found Spike yet. Julia and Vicious haven’t been seen since Spike’s mission went awry either, which probably means they’re looking for him, out of a sense of obligation as much as genuine worry. Mao doesn’t understand the three of them in the slightest, but they do good work.
Mao is valiantly ignoring his communicator by editing an article for publication in one of the Dragon-controlled newspapers of Tharsis, about a recent uptick in gang violence, when the door to his office slams open with such force that the knob bounces off the wall.
Mao’s pen slips, gashing ink across the document. He bolts to his feet and draws his gun on sheer instinct, ready to fire at least a warning shot at whoever decided that their news was more important than manners and decorum, even if it is Spike—
—and finds himself staring at Vicious, wild-eyed, clutching the doorframe like it’s the only thing holding him up.
“They’re gone,” Vicious says, in a voice Mao hasn’t heard from him in years. Paper-thin, crumpled at the edges. As likely to fall to tatters as it is to burst into flames.
“So I’ve heard,” Mao says. “Did someone find a body?”
Already, dread is pooling in his gut. They’re gone. Mao doesn’t have to clarify who they are, but if Spike was dead, Vicious would have said that. If Spike and Julia were just missing, Vicious wouldn’t react like this.
If they’re actually gone, dead is the best case scenario, of the three options. Dead, or taken hostage, or—
(Mao knows, before Vicious says it.)
“They ran,” Vicious replies. The worst case scenario, of course.
Mao drops back into his chair. His gun clatters onto his desk, slides across the ruined paper.
“Close the door,” Mao’s voice says, from somewhere far from his body. It’s cold, but trembling.
Vicious closes the door. He leans his back against it and slides down it, limbs sprawling out on the floor like a dead thing. His face is frozen over in a rictus, teeth bared, pupils shrunken to pinpricks, like he’s using. If he is, he’s hiding the tremors well.
It’s a rare lapse in composure for the both of them, and it stretches on longer than either of them should allow, before Vicious hauls himself to his feet, and Mao inhales and forces his breathing to steady.
“This was a long time coming,” Mao says. He flicks his gun’s safety on and holsters it, watching Vicious’ eyes track his hands. “Spike’s been slipping for months now.”
Slipping—that’s the nice way to put it. Spike’s been fucking up. He’s been sloppy, distracted. He still kills as well as he ever has, because it’s the only thing he’s ever really taken to, other than pool, but it’s gotten harder and harder to keep him on task, harder to keep his hand on Vicious’ leash.
Mao sighs, and mentally edits that entire sentence into past tense. Every moment of realization deepens the wound of Spike’s absence further. It feels a little like being impaled, the moment before the pain really sets in, where it just feels like getting the wind knocked out of you, the sense of wrongness and intrusion prickling through you.
Vicious is gripping the hilt of his katana, so tightly that his already-pale knuckles are going white. It’s bad form—his hand will ache as soon as he lets go, make it harder to hold on to whatever he next lays his hand on.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but Mao doesn’t have the energy to root it out. Instead, he gets up and goes to the sideboard, pouring them each a generous measure of whiskey.
Vicious downs his as soon as it’s in his hand, and immediately gets up to refill his glass.
Mao almost lets him get away with it, remembering at the last second to hiss through his teeth like he’s calling a dog to heel. Vicious stops, hands hovering, then snapping back to his sides.
“Sit down and ask nicely,” Mao scolds. “Spike leaves you and you immediately lose your manners. First slamming through my door, now this. Honestly. ”
Vicious sits. Tension ripples through his body, violence barely restrained.
Mao finishes his drink in silence, then refills both glasses, leaving the bottle on the table.
Vicious drinks this one slower, his hands moving like he’s aware he might break the glass if he grips it too tightly.
“I gave Julia an ultimatum,” Vicious says.
Mao feels a chill, deep in his bones. “When was this?”
Vicious glares over the rim of his glass. “Last night. I walked in on her packing. I didn’t know this was happening before it did, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
He should have known, Mao thinks. Vicious spends nearly all his waking moments with Spike and Julia, he should have seen this coming. Mao had seen something coming, but he’d expected a coup, not a disappearing act.
“What was the ultimatum?” he asks.
“Kill Spike for his treason, or I kill her.”
Leave it to Vicious to make up someone’s mind for them. Julia always had an air of uncaringness to her, a sense of perpetual deliberation. She would take the path of least resistance, like water flowing. If Vicious hadn’t threatened her, she might have stayed.
“You can see how that didn’t help your situation,” Mao comments.
Vicious only growls, low, like a wounded animal, which is as accurate a description as there’s ever been for him. His grip tightens around his drink—if it were made of anything lesser than the sturdy crystal of Mao’s glassware, it would crack. It might yet.
“He faked his death, then?” Mao asks. “And she vanished into the night?”
Vicious nods. His eyes are very far away.
“What would you like to tell the Van?” Mao says, at length. Casually, like there’s a good option here. The truth would be an admission of failure. Lying would risk a death sentence.
Given that he’ll almost certainly fail to find either of them. People with the skills Julia and Spike have… by now, they’ll have already disappeared. If Vicious couldn’t find them, with the head start he had, with how well he knows them, the Dragons won’t be able to either.
“Nothing,” Vicious says. “Nothing more than is immediately obvious. They can come to their own conclusions.”
Mao pinches the bridge of his nose, warding off a suddenly-encroaching headache. The Van will come to conclusions, indeed. None of them favorable to Mao in the least. It won’t be the first time he’s laid his neck on the block for these boys, and he doubts it will be the last. “And the others?” Lin and Shin and the like—Spike’s other blood-brothers, not quite as close to him as Vicious, but close enough to want a better answer than they’re equipped to give.
Vicious hums. “Depends. Are we looking for him?”
Mao startles himself with the vehemence of his own response. “Of course.” At Vicious’ raised eyebrows, he scoffs. “His days are numbered anyway. I’d like to see his face again, even if it’s as a corpse.”
“Then we’ll tell them only what they need to know,” Vicious says. “That he is to be brought home. Alive or dead.”
Any response Mao could possibly offer dies in his throat. He settles for lighting them each a cigarette. Vicious takes his but doesn’t smoke it. It hangs from his fingers, dropping ash onto Mao’s desk.
Mao can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen Vicious cry in the twenty years since he brought him under his wing, most of those a reaction to pain more so than any strong emotion, but he would swear that he sees the glint of tears in Vicious’ colorless eyes.
There’s nothing Mao can do to comfort him, not that Vicious would let him.
“They’re both gone,” Vicious says, at last, so quiet that Mao almost doesn’t hear him. The tears fall, one and then another, before Vicious scrubs a hand roughly over his face and emerges from behind his fingers with a face as hardened as the cut glass still clutched in his hand.
There’s nothing Mao can say to that. The grief hangs like a stone around his neck, no lighter for being shared.
He wonders if Spike, somewhere far from here, feels it too.