a rose, by any other name

by laylayli

Summary:

In a city overrun with crime, Isagi Yoichi keeps running headfirst into trouble - and the masked stranger who takes a keen interest in him.

Chapter 7, Part 1 | Chapter 7, Part 2 (updated 15 Feb 2025)

Chapter 1

Now

“Rin-chan’s not going to say it outright, but he needs a place to crash for one night before he takes the train to the next city over, for his try-outs,” Bachira has both his elbows propped over the counter Isagi has just wiped down and Isagi would chew out anyone else, but he’s also brought him an assortment of leftover pastries from his barista gig, so Isagi holds his tongue. “Think you can let him borrow your couch for a night?”

 

Isagi tries to imagine Rin in all his tallness trying to fit himself into his tiny little barely two-seater couch and snorts. “He can have a futon, it should be fine.” His senpai-instinct kicks in. “Or the bed.”

 

Bachira’s eyes glitter as he bounces back on to the balls of his feet. “You’re such a softie for him. It’s almost like he doesn’t threaten to kill you every time he sees you.”

 

Isagi wipes down another glass and places it in its neat row with the rest on the tray he’ll take round back eventually. “It’s how he says I can tolerate you enough to hear you breathing near me . Or at least, I like to think it is, or else you’re inviting over a walking stabbing incident into my apartment.”

 

“As though you don’t enjoy the danger,” Bachira is already fixing him with that unamused look of his whenever they get to this topic - which they do, a lot, because Bachira can be surprisingly naggy when he cares about you enough to worry near-constantly about your well-being.

 

“You make it sound like I’m an out-of-control thrill-seeker,” Isagi complains, carefully hefting up the tray of glasses and retreating to the kitchen with them. Bachira just follows. Technically, this place is completely off-limits to non-staff - but Bachira has a way of wiggling into anyone’s good graces, including Isagi’s prickly manager’s. Isagi suspects it's because the first time Bachira had rocked up to his workplace, he’d brought an entire party-sized box of pastries and a cup carrier of those outrageously priced coffee drinks that are more whipped cream and caramel drizzle than coffee for the staff. He greets the servers and cooks working the kitchen today by their first names, asking about how the kids are doing, or how college is treating them, before picking their conversation back up.

 

“You’re worse, ” is Bachira’s eventual retort, now that he’s done being an incurable social butterfly. Social bumblebee? “No one in their right mind would decide to live in the most crime-prone neighbourhood in a stigmatized property, no less.”

 

“It’s cheap! I get the whole apartment to myself!” Isagi defends for possibly the hundredth time. “And you’re acting like the place is haunted or someone got murdered there or something. It was a natural death.”

 

“Doesn’t that weird you out?! To live somewhere someone died?!”

 

“Bachira, we live in the country’s most crime-ridden city. Someone is dying somewhere every single day, at least the grandpa who lived there before me had the chance to live a long life and pass away in his sleep.”

 

“It’s still a bad neighbourbood,” Bachira is pouting, and Isagi can hear it in his voice even as he takes inventory of the late night supply drop they received not too long ago, to crack into for the next day. “During the day, okay, fine, but you’re working late night shifts here and going back by yourself, it’s… just not safe.”

 

“You have so many issues with where I stay and you’re sending Rin to me anyway,” Isagi grumbles. He knows he’s side-stepping the issue, but what else can he do? His part-time job at the library pays a pittance, and while he makes more at the family diner, the compromise is the late hours. If the internship were a paid one, it would make life a whole lot easier, but until Isagi gets a leg into the full-time workforce, he doesn’t see how he’ll make ends meet without clenching his teeth and dealing with his lot. 

 

Bachira is pouting even harder when Isagi finally turns to look at him. “You’re the only one with the space. My flatmates have that stupid rule about not having guests stay the night, and you know how Rin-chan is, he’s not that close with Reo or else I’d have just had him shack up at that guy’s stupid penthouse or something. The fact that he’s even entertaining the idea of sleeping over at yours for a night is something , for him.”

 

Isagi has to agree. If there’s anyone pricklier than Isagi’s manager, it’s Itoshi Rin. Bachira and Isagi like to joke among themselves that he’s simply forgotten to outgrow his angsty teen era with his hyper-focus on becoming an athlete. But over the years, he’s mellowed out some - to put it very, very generously. He’s still lone-wolfing ninety-percent of the time, even more so now that he’s moved one town over, but he does occasionally let Bachira and Isagi step into the older brother role his own older brother had left vacant for a couple of years during his time studying abroad in Spain. The adjustment had been harder on Rin than anyone’d expected - harder still when Sae came back with issues of his own and unable to just pick up that relationship where they’d left it off.

 

They’re sorting things out now, so that’s good. And Isagi’s genuinely so proud of all of Rin’s growth. In his heart of hearts, he’s even a little pleased to have Rin rely on him a bit. Even then, he asks, “Did he actually agree or are you prospecting for him?”

 

He gets his answer in the coy little look Bachira gives him before he twirls away. Of course. Rin would bite off his own tongue before he ever approached anyone asking for a favour. “I’m just gonna text him and tell him about the very generous offer you have made to let him stay over at yours for the night,” Bachira hums as he makes to exit the kitchen. “And that you’re insisting, you won’t hear no for an answer. ” 

 

Isagi watches Bachira go with a shake of his head, doing his full round of goodbyes with the kitchen staff on his way out, and calls out, “Text me when you get home!”

 

“Aye, aye! ~”

 

“Isagi, if you’re done slacking off can you take the trash out, please?” 

 

At this point, Isagi doesn’t even bristle - he’d gotten used to the manager’s selective oversight during Bachira’s visits, forget the fact that he’d been working the entire time he had been here chattering away at him. He - and his colleagues, if he’s being fair - are all used to Bachira gliding in and out of his workplaces without consequence. He’s just got that sort of aura, Isagi can’t fault him for that. And at the end of the day, he collects his paycheck in full, and the occasional bonuses for holidays and leftovers to carry home, so Isagi lets it slide and grabs the trash bags, heading to the back entrance.

 

The night air is cool, a welcome relief against his skin. He’s acclimated enough to the inherent warmth of the diner, with the muggy heat that comes as a consequence of continuously burning stoves and hosting crowds of people at a time, that whenever he steps outside, the temperature difference always surprises him a little. The steady background noise of pots and pains and chinks of chopsticks and spoons against cutlery layered over the buzz and drone of conversation fades almost as soon as the back entrance’s door clicks silently shut, and in the stillness outside, Isagi has a moment to breathe.

 

Or he thinks he does, because the second he flips open the lid of the giant dumpster hulking against the grey brick wall, he spots A Problem.

 

The Problem is a bag. Largish, a plain dull red with a brand name and the tag still attached to a zipper. It’s an innocuous thing, completely unsuspecting in every other scenario than it would be just sitting atop a heap of black plastic bags, gleaming slightly in the sparse lighting of the back alley.

 

There’s a lot of things Isagi can do about this. And one of them, probably the smartest one, is nothing at all. He can just heave the garbage bags he’s brought out back into the dumpster and go back to the kitchen, wash his hands, clean up some of the tables as the diner’s late night patrons filter out. And then he can go home, like his sore body and tired brain have been aching to since the last of his classes for the day, and pretend he didn’t see a perfectly good, high quality gym bag just sitting on top of a pile of trash. If it’s still here by morning, this becomes the garbage collectors’ problem. 

 

Isagi doesn’t think it will still be there by morning.

 

Even an hour later, after his shift is through, Isagi thinks that he still has time to just. Leave. He can just go home and wash the problem away in the comforting warmth of the bath, a relief his entire body craves all the more as he huddles down on the rooftop of the diner’s building, situated just so to be able to have a clear view of the alleyway and that godforsaken dumpster.

 

And because of course, thinking things can’t get worse is an invitation in Isagi’s life for worse things, The Worst Thing of all arrives not long after he does.

 

Isagi doesn’t even turn around - he has had the grim displeasure of becoming quite well acquainted with that very specific combination of metal chinking and the muted tug of cable being pulled taut before zipping back into its holder. The tap of leather boot making contact against hard ground, the barely there swish of fabric in motion. “Not you again.”

 

“Sharp as always, darling,” comments the newcomer, “It’s like you’re some kind of dog or something.”

 

Isagi throws a glare over his shoulder at the newest arrival. He cuts an impressive silhouette against the muggy night sky, stars shrouded by the miasma of smoke and dust and lord knows what other unsavoury byproduct of human enterprise. Isagi can’t quite remember the last time he’s seen stars.

 

“Are you here for what I think you’re here for or did you just spot me while ziplining around, you fucking stalker?”

 

“Always so rude,” with an elegant swish, the figure swoops in until it’s blocking Isagi’s view, swallowing up the night sky to fill his vision with nothing but a depthless, impenetrable black. A black so deep it seems to eat the light, the newcomer is completely cloaked from sight - from his visored head down to the form-fitting suit that seems to cling to a… very well-proportioned body, that leaves little to the imagination. Isagi would appreciate it more, if it didn’t belong to the current bane of his existence, breaching into his air and hooking his chin in a leather-gloved hold. “It’s hardly my fault that you seem to be everywhere trouble is.”

 

His voice crackles out, fed through whatever voice modulator he has outfitted in his helmet and churned out in its robotic rasp.

 

“Tsk,” Isagi pushes the hand off, eyes scanning the alleyway again. “So this is trouble.”

 

“You clearly suspected as much, otherwise you wouldn’t be on a dank rooftop at 3 am staring at a dumpster. But then again, you seem to gravitate towards trash…”

 

“That’s probably why I keep running into you, then.”

 

“So drôle you are, sweetheart. You’d be so perfect for the role of the Fool for me.” 

 

“Please keep your cringe tarot themed posturing to yourself.”

 

Isagi fully means this to be as insulting as possible, but the figure claps his hands together once in a gesture that seems entirely too cheerful for the aesthetic he otherwise gives off. “Oh!” he leans toward Isagi, and this close he can hear the thin filter of his breathing through the speakers too.” “You’ve been looking into me.” 

 

It should be impossible, what with the fact that the only part of this man Isagi can see properly are his contact-lensed eyes, black and silver and as eerie as the mechanical grind of his voice, but he almost sounds pleased about this.  

 

Isagi does not dignify that with an answer. He feels like he shouldn’t be humouring anyone running around with a cloak and a grapple gun all over town and calling themselves The Emperor with an answer at all.

 

It’s not long after Isagi’s first encounter with this absolute nuisance of a person that he’d started looking into him. Which, all things considered, is probably the reasonable thing to have done. This city has produced many oddities - necessity and desperation force people to get creative with their enterprising, and that can run the gamut of elaborate money-making schemes to stomach-churning crime. But even against the backdrop of the kinds of surprises that skitter and crawl out of the cracks of the North Wards’s back alleys, The Emperor stands out.

 

Then

 

Chigiri had been as fascinated as he’d been disturbed by it. 

 

“So, I’ve been looking through the online forums, especially the true crime places and, would you fucking believe it, the creepypasta sites,” Chigiri has his iPad propped up on the library’s front desk, taking advantage of the relatively slow work day and the senior librarian on her rounds on a different floor to catch him up. “And it turns out, this guy has been getting kind of internet famous, lately.”

 

Isagi swipes through the tabs Chigiri has kept open for him to look through. It’s Twitter accounts and forum threads and obscure blog posts about a masked stranger who has been spotted flitting through the streets of the city - the information is vague and inconclusive at best, can hardly be called information in most cases. As with most things that dwell on internet forums and urban legend websites, every morsel of truth has pages and pages of embellishment and conjecture to dig through. 

 

But there is truth in here, that much Isagi knows. He’s confirmed it with his own eyes. 

 

“This,” Isagi points to a thread someone had started, in a forum that seems local to their city, ‘I swear I am not going insane, but I saw a man glide up the side of a building and leap on to the roof - does anyone know what’s going on in North Ward?’ “The guy has a grapple gun. This has to be about him.”

 

Chigiri has an impressive frown on his face - impressive, because Chigiri has a resting unimpressed face ninety per cent of the time that he’s a little insecure about. His frown right now would give even the older Wanima brother from their shared Global Business and Economics elective a run for his money.

 

“Isagi, I don’t feel good about this.”

 

“No, I know,” Isagi hastens to reassure. He’d hesitated to even bring it up to his friends, because he knows their first and strongest response would be extremely powerful disapproval, if not the insistence to escort him everywhere because none of them seem to trust him on his own. “It’s not like I’m going to go chasing after him. I really am not, I promise,” he doubles down as Chigiri raises the most sceptical eyebrow he’s ever seen. “It’s just - I mean won’t you be curious if you run into something like this?”

 

Chigiri plays with the end of one of the curls that’s worked its way loose from the bun his hair is in today. He’s thoughtful as he scrolls through the post Isagi had pointed out, the replies to which are either people colourfully dunking on the claim with the unrestrained unkindness internet anonymity seems to afford people and the conspiracy theorists adding on other sightings and incidents. 

 

Opinions seem to be split between this cloaked, hooded, masked figure being some kind of vigilante, or an entirely new breed of criminal. 

 

What they don’t know is that he is possibly neither of those things. Not entirely. 

 

“You’re saying he just gave this to you?”

 

Chigiri taps at the piece of black card on the counter between them. It’s matte, a deep, dark inky black on a thick piece of card. Embossed on it in silver is a single symbol, a cross with a loop at the top. Chigiri is more tech-savvy than Isagi is, and he’d had the idea to take a picture and reverse image search it. 

They’d learned what it was right away - an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life.

 

They’d also learned something they had not been banking on, not from a piece of card as simple as this. 

 

A near identical picture of the card had cropped up in the search. And with it, a corresponding website link.  

 

“I don’t want to open that,” Chigiri had said flatly. They’d been on campus then, staying back in an empty lecture hall after class. “I especially don’t want to open that on any of my devices or like, anywhere that makes obvious where the search is coming from.”

 

That’d been a very, very good point. Anyone who invests in grapple guns and cryptic embossed calling cards probably has the means to trace where clicks into their website are coming from, Isagi thinks, and there’s no reason for them to give that away. Even if they use one of the campus computers, or one at the library - it would just narrow down the physical radius of where to look for people who might be holding one of these stupid cards. 

 

Isagi can only assume it was meant to bait an action like that, when the masked figure had curled a hand around his wrist, using the other to spread his palm open before placing the card in it. “In case you need my…services.” And then he’d twinkled down at him, and said in the mechanical approximation of a sneer, “Though I doubt you’d be able to afford it.”

 

“He did.” Isagi rubs at his temples. He should have just thrown it away, honestly. He wants to think that the odds of running into him again are slim and he can probably live the rest of his life without it happening again - but he also seems to be turning corners and walking right into him these days. 

 

“Tell me what happened again.”

 

So Isagi does. He’d been on his way home from the izakaya after another late shift when he’d run into the masked man the first time - he omits the fact that this had only happened because he’d heard the sound of a scuffle and gone running towards it instead of away even with Bachira’s voice in his head screaming at him to stop being stupid. 

 

He also omits that fact that when he’d skidded to a halt at the mouth of the alley the sounds were coming from, he’d stumbled upon quite the scene - cash, hundreds of thousands of yen, carpeting the damp alley floor, and what was unmistakably a gun lying by the foot of a person currently getting choke-slammed into the wall. 

 

The person doing the choke-slamming had turned towards him - Isagi had known the second he’d seen the faint gleam of the smooth metallic cover hiding the guy’s face that he had seen something he absolutely should not have. 

 

Isagi had legged it. He may be incorrigible when it came to interfering if he stumbled on a pickpocketing or a stabbing, to the point that Bachira has dragged the both of them to sign up for self-defence classes “for fear of your life, since you don’t want to fear for it yourself” , but even he did not want to be involved with someone who looked like he’d jumped out of the pages of a seinen manga and had enough strength to suspend a fully grown man with one hand pinning him a foot above the ground by the neck. 

 

And he’d hoped, against hope, that that would be the end of it. It was dark, they would not have had a good look at his face, and he’d zigzagged all the way back to his apartment, darting in and out of the shortcuts he’d learned by heart in a frantic attempt to throw off pursuit, if there was pursuit. Unless that guy had an accomplice, he would probably not have been able to leave all that cash, which must have been the motive of the capture, nor the person in possession of it, to come chasing after him.

 

By the time he’d gotten home, a stitch sharp and stabbing at his side, lungs rattling as they tried to take in air and skin clammy and cold as the adrenaline trickled out of his system and left him shivering instead, he hoped, hoped , that he would not see either of them again. 

 

His hopes had only half come true.

 

Chigiri doesn’t find out about any of this. Not the choke-slamming or the money or the gun. Not the fact that some two weeks later, Isagi had happened upon a mugging, a middle-aged man he recognised living a block away from him getting shoved around, bloodied up as a gaggle of delinquents pushed him about, their jeers and taunts bouncing grotesquely off the cramped walls of the side-street.

 

A number of things had run through Isagi’s head in the fraction of a second. Not enough time to call the police. Too late at night to ask passers-by for help. Too many of them. Too many of them.  

 

That man had a little daughter at home and Isagi had seen him walking her to school before. Holding her little hand in his, carrying her cute bag in his other hand.

 

He’d pulled out his phone. Yanked his hoodie over his head for at least a little bit of cover to not be instantly recognisable. Started recording. Pushed air out of his lungs even though terror had wired itself into tension throughout his bones and shouted, “HEY!” 

 

They’d turned, they’d seen him, they’d seen the phone, and Isagi had bolted.

 

Geography had been on his side - he knows the lay of the land better than anyone, can map it out in his mind as clearly as though he had a bird’s eye view of it. If he’s got anything going for him, it’s his fine-tuned sense of direction and the kind of heightened awareness that would creep his friends out a bit when they were younger, because he could tell they were approaching before they appeared at the door or in the room or behind him. 

 

What worked against him, then, though, was speed. 

 

He’d bought himself a little time, ducking into alleys and side streets as he put distance between them and inched agonisingly closer to the nearest police box. But he could hear their voices carrying in the distance as they called out to each other, could hear, with a sinking nauseating lurch in his stomach, the motorbikes revving, the sounds tearing through the night. There were at least six or seven of them, and one of him, and he should have been going to the gym with Chigiri on leg day, and before even that, should have been listening to Chigiri telling him to save his own hide first before taking on thugs that outnumber him. Fuck. Fuck. 

 

It had been with all his senses stretched to their limits, heart pounding in his skull with the awareness that they were rapidly gaining on him, that Isagi had noticed someone entering his space a beat too late to react.

 

And then he was airborne.

 

He’d wanted to scream. His mouth had opened too, but the sound got swallowed back, as he blindly clutched at the figure that had snatched him up around the waist. Air whistled and sang past Isagi’s ears as he squeezed his eyes shut, as though his body had been fish-hooked up and left his sense of place back down on the ground. 

 

And then there’d been ground again, back beneath his feet, although his knees had been shaking too much to keep him up. Eyes wide, heart clattering around in his ribcage, Isagi had gotten his first, proper look at the face of the person who had just plucked him off a backroad and onto… a rooftop? 

 

His knees had buckled even more when he’d realised they were perched on the slant of some shingles. 

 

The only thing that had been keeping him upright was the arm secured around his waist. Isagi had still been gawking as a thick cord of cable retracted over the angle of the roof and snapped back into the cylinder of what was, unmistakably, a grapple gun. 

 

The air had still been leaving him in heaves and whistles when the guy spoke to him, in the crackly rasp of a voice changer. “So. We meet again.”

 

Isagi mentions none of this to Chigiri. He doesn’t think Chigiri fully buys that he’s telling him the full story as it were. There’s that downward slant of his mouth and the furrow of his brow and the critical look he’s levelling at him without even blinking and Isagi is internally sweating bullets but he avoids outright lying. He saw the guy once in an alleyway and thought he looked shady and ran away. Then he ran into him again while trying to avoid a mugging. And then ran into him again after. 

 

Specifically, at the 7-eleven Isagi dragged his feet into after a shift at work to buy himself a bento box to reheat, only to find that he’d walked right into a robbery. 

 

The cheerful electronic chime of the door and the recorded female voice chirping Welcome! had been almost comically morbid as Isagi made eye contact with the man in the balaclava covering his whole face, in the middle of waving a serrated knife in the face of the elderly lady behind the counter. 

 

Isagi had an exact split second to think. In that split second, he could see the slow arc of the knife’s blade moving towards the elderly lady, shorter than him, her smile-wrinkled face twisted in the kind of horror that made Isagi taste bile in the back of his throat. 

 

“If you move, she gets -”

 

“That’s your bike outside, right?” 

 

The robber had blinked at him. “What?”

 

“I said,” Isagi repeated louder. His pulse hammered against his ears, thoughts racing but everything else moving slow, slow, even the confused blinks of the man in front of him.

 

“That’s your bike outside. You’ve left the key in, so you can get away faster.”

 

There’d been exactly one beat of silence before Isagi had thrown himself back out of the automatic doors, squeezing through sideways as soon as there’d been a wide enough opening and thanking how stupidly slow they moved because they ran interference for the robber, who very quickly realised what Isagi was trying to do. 

 

Isagi’d been on the bike and kicking it into life before the thief could make it to the sidewalk, and it had taken off in a lurching jerk even as the guy screamed obscenities at him. 

 

“You fucker, I’ll KILL you!”

 

Not unless Isagi got himself killed first, because he didn’t even know how to ride a motorbike and it was bucking like a wild animal under his grasp and he was absolutely going to -

 

CRASH 

 

The machine had gone spinning out from under him, and Isagi had thought for a second the force of impact was what had sent him flying and, in the odd sort of calm that descends on a person when everything is spiralling out of control, had guessed that this should have bought the grandma enough time to call the cops, or someone in her family that she ran the convenience store with. 

 

And then his feet were back on level ground, and he’d been leaning against something solid and firm and decidedly human.

 

“You fucking clown,” a hissing voice, broken and reconstructed and sieved out of a speaker reaches him and Isagi’s blood had been pumping so hard he’d felt in all his entirety like a thumping pulse. “Are you actually trying to get yourself killed ?”

 

The motorbike was lying in a heap in front of the building it had collided into. Isagi only had enough time to register the broken headlamp and think with morbid clarity that he doesn’t think he’d have broken any bones in that crash when he’d bitten down a yell and felt the world tilt dizzyingly, awareness catching up a second later as his vision refocused to the ground below him - this guy had thrown him over his shoulder.

 

Moments later, they were closeted away in another dark side street. Isagi had sunk to his knees as soon as he’d been put down, the vertigo making everything sway as he sucked in lungfuls of air.

 

In front of him, the masked figure stood with his arms crossed. Just from body language, Isagi could tell he was not very amused. 

 

“The guy -”

 

“Ran away because of the commotion.”

 

“And the grandma -”

 

“Would have had plenty of time to call the police, or one of the neighbours that woke up thanks to that racket would have instead.” There’d been a tight silence before the masked man had asked, “What the fuck were you thinking ?”

 

Isagi had blinked up at him. Wobbled back to his feet, because he did not like how he felt even smaller in his near foetal position compared to this masked man’s intimidating height, made more intimidating from how solid and dark he appeared, almost at one with the night. 

 

“The store was about to get robbed, he -”

 

“Do you enjoy playing the hero? Is that it?”

 

His tone - stripped as it was of anything that made it sound human - had pissed Isagi off.

 

“Am I supposed to just stand there and watch people get hurt then?!”

 

“Wow. You really are trying to play the hero.”

 

Rage had begun to cloud Isagi’s vision. He had not even really thought about it as he took one shaky step closer and stared right up into the masked man’s face - held the contact-lensed eyes, the only part of him that he would reveal to the world. 

 

“And what about you? Running around fucking ziplining over the city but somehow, you’re just hiding in the shadows while there are crimes happening?”

 

The noise that’d crackled out of the mask was definitely a snort. 

 

“Sorry, but these “crimes” are below my pay grade.

 

Isagi hadn’t even been able to process that right away. “Excuse me? Your paygrade ?”

 

The guy had just cocked his head at Isagi, tilting it closer - a hand had come up to hold his chin. 

 

“Do you think I’m spending my nights in these godforsaken dumps for free? Out of the goodness of my heart?” 

 

A sick feeling had pooled in Isagi’s gut. He’d shoved the man’s hand away, backed away from him until his shoulder blades hit the wall behind him. 

 

“So what are you exactly?” Isagi’d spit out. “A paid… what. Hitman?”

 

“You’re funny. Do you think you’d be alive if I was in the business of killing?”

 

“Then if you’re not in the business of saving either, why did you help me just now?” Isagi had shot back.

 

On the rooftop of that house all those nights ago, when Isagi had been at the mercy of this guy’s hold keeping him from tumbling down the slope of the tiles and landing in a crumpled heap where the delinquents giving chase could easily find him, he’d simply told him - “There. Now we’re even.”

 

Even, because Isagi had not gotten in the way of the job. Even, because when Isagi had called the police, an anonymous call from a phone box the next day when he’d felt braver and safer under daylight, he’d only mentioned a fight in the general location of that alley, and no other details. 

 

Even, because, suspended above the lip of the roof and the certainty of pain and worse waiting if this guy had let go of him, Isagi knew what this was. A bargaining chip. Isagi’s safety just then, in exchange for his silence.

 

And Isagi had bought that - in the give-and-take ruthless barter of life that happened every day in this part of the country, these sorts of deals were being signed in far worse ways. He’d taken it and gone home once he’d been silently set down on the street after a police patrol had sounded in the distance, the sirens chasing away those obnoxiously loud motorbikes. 

 

The masked man moved towards Isagi - loomed over him, actually, arms coming up to cage him against the wall as he bent just enough to be eye level with him. 

 

“Let’s say I’m in the business of debt collecting,” he had whispered to him, lightly, and Isagi had thought with how hard his heart was pounding he shouldn’t be able to hear anything at all, “And now, you owe me.”

 

---

The senior librarian making her way back downstairs saves Isagi from having to try to outmanoeuvre Chigiri and his obvious hunch that Isagi wasn’t telling him everything. But this didn’t stop his friend from pulling him aside after politely requesting a word with him, and tightly holding both his shoulders.

 

“Look,” he tells him seriously. “I don’t know what you might be getting yourself into, but you better be careful , Isagi. Whatever this guy is, he’s bad news, and you need to stay away from him, right?”

 

“Right,” Isagi agrees readily, because what else is he supposed to say?

 

Chigiri frowns deeply at him. “I know you said not to tell Bachira but -”

 

“Chigiri, I promise I’ll leave it alone,” Isagi hurries to say immediately. “Really, I will. I don’t take the roads I used to get home anymore, and I’m looking at daytime shifts at the diner. And if anything happens I’ll call. Don’t tell Bachira, he’s been freaking out since I moved anyway.”

 

Chigiri considers him for a while longer, and finally sighs. “You better mean that, you punk.” he mutters, and smacks Isagi on the forehead for good measure before he goes. 

 

Neither of them find any more leads about the card for a couple of days, until it comes up purely by accident.

 

“The Emperor,” Isagi repeats, around a mouthful of onigiri . He ignores a “Chew your food properly!” barked from the neighbouring table from Barou, and tilts his head in question at Reo, “No, I don’t think I’ve heard about that…”

 

Reo is picking at his convenience store lunch, deftly removing a mushroom and then offering it to Nagi, who just eats it off his chopsticks without looking up from his game. Isagi does not understand how a person who can eat wagyu every day of his life if he so pleases could be so fascinated with convenience store bento boxes, but maybe when you get to eat Michelin five star meals around the clock the mundane turns fascinating. Whatever it is, Isagi likes how happy Reo looks whenever he’s eating one, so he’d picked one up earlier when he’d been grabbing his own lunch. “There’s been talk of this masked mystery man that’s been running around the city, recently.”

 

Isagi twitches. Across from him and to Reo’s other side, Chigiri makes eye contact with him.

 

“Masked mystery man?” Chigiri asks lightly.

 

“Supposedly,” Reo says. “No one’s got any pictures of this guy, but there are stories floating around on the internet of a man in a mask who climbs up the sides of buildings and goes flying from rooftop to rooftop.”

 

“Eh?” Nagi tunes into the conversation just long enough to blink around at the table - the brief one hour lunch break where they don’t have classes overlapping is usually the only time during the weekdays they’re able to hang out together. Or mostly together - Bachira’s off helping one of the dozen clubs he’s part of with something. “Like a superhero?”

 

Reo makes a “not exactly” motion with his chopsticks. “Won’t say that. I think he probably only goes after select types of crime. For specific clientele. Specifically, people pay him for certain jobs.”

 

“How do you know?” Isagi asks, at the same time as Chigiri blurts, “What kind of jobs?”

 

“Well…I think some friend of my dad’s on the non-exec board of directors must have hired him recently. I heard them talking during one of their dinners over at the house.” Reo explains. “Something about recovering extortion money, and a clean hassle-free way of doing it without involving the law.”

 

Chigiri has that frown on his face again. Seriously, Isagi has to tell him about the wrinkles, but he has a feeling Chigiri would whack him. Isagi focuses on sipping the green tea he’d grabbed at the convenience store just slowly enough to not be suspicious. 

 

“Doesn’t sound legal.”

 

Reo grins. “You’d be surprised how little of what goes on among guys like that is.”

 

“So…what about this Emperor ?” Isagi asks. 

 

“That’s the name the guy was calling him by.”

 

“Corny as fuck,” Nagi contributes, even while immersed in his game. 

 

Isagi’s phone buzzes. Across the table, Chigiri is staring him down, his own phone in his hands.

 

He unlocks his screen to the message Chigiri has just sent him. It’s a screenshot of a page where the search term Chigiri had typed in catches his eye first. 

 

“emperor ankh”

 

And the search results below - 

 

About 652,000 results (0.29 seconds)

 

“The Emperor (Tarot Card)”

 

“Ankh Symbol Meaning in Tarot”

 

“The Emperor Tarot Card Meanings”

 

“So it doesn’t sound like he’s a bad guy,” Chigiri is saying thoughtfully, when it’s just the two of them heading back to class. Bachira complains constantly that they didn’t get any overlapping classes - it makes him extra clingy whenever they all hang out. “I mean… it just sounds like he’s a fancy loophole for people who don’t want to go through the legal system for whatever reason. Like, to avoid the bad press or bury scandals or whatever.” There’s a considering pause and then Chigiri adds, dryly, “Okay, fine, not not a bad guy.”

 

That’s…putting it mildly. As they wind their way to their habitual seats in the lecture hall and Isagi pulls out his laptop, his thoughts are a blurring timelapse, recontextualising his previous encounters with the masked man, all the things he’s read about him online, true or untrue, against what he knows now. 

 

A hired hand for the rich. Someone who cleans up the messes the affluent get into in their brushes with the dirty underbelly of their empires. What was all that cash that he’d seen pooled out on the alley floor that day, that first day he’d stumbled upon the Emperor in action? Extortion money, probably. Ransom, maybe. Someone with dirt on a person with power and influence, leveraging it to…

 

To what? To label it as a crime is so simplistic. Isagi may live in the country’s most crime-riddled ward, but crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. When neighbourhoods bleed dry while skyscrapers loom in the horizon, twinkling like stars making a mockery out of the ones that don’t appear against the horizon anymore, and the rich continue to get richer while jobs disappear and so income disappears. And then doors start closing one by one, to schools, to healthcare, to basic human respect and the right to live with dignity, and the whirl of the vicious cycle is so strong that none of the straws you clutch at can hold as you try to pull yourself up and above the surface.

 

There are emperors and kings in this city, sitting on the lion’s share of its wealth with their thrones built on the desperate, clawing hands of those trampled down to build their towers so high. Isagi does not know what kind of man that was in that alleyway, what kind of life he lives, why he was in possession of a weapon he could not possibly have the legal permit to openly carry, let alone the wads and wads of cash spilling out like an open wound in a grimy, unlit back street. But who was the worse villain there - the guy trying to make money off a man who could afford to stuff a bag full of more cash than Isagi’s ever seen in one place before and hire a glorified vigilante to nip the problem in the bud…

 

Or said glorified vigilante? Who somehow had the ability to tap calls going into the police and verify that Isagi had never mentioned him when reporting the incident, who had the power, ability, and resources to do something - in ways Isagi felt so helpless, sometimes, to do? 

 

“Oh, I really hate that look on your face right now,” Chigiri’s voice reels him back to the immediate - the lecture hall is mostly full now, the professor setting up at his podium and struggling as he does every week to hook up his laptop to the projector screen. “That’s your I’m thinking intensely about the unfairness that plagues modern society face.”

 

Isagi huffs, though he colours at being seen through so completely. “I was just thinking about…you know, the hired hand thing. It just seems…I mean the rich folks are the ones who can hire the best lawyers, they’re the ones with the connections and sway to have law enforcement and politicians move to their will. Isn’t it… I mean if you’re going to be someone who operates above the law and below the law at the same fucking time shouldn’t it be for the people that actually need the help?”

 

Chirigi just considers him for a second and then sighs. “Listen to me, Isagi,” he says, leaning closer to him and putting a hand on his knee, squeezing at it. “You’re right. Your ideal is right. But getting involved with that guy is not going to change anything. This -” he waves a hand at the class they’re in - Education and Social Justice, a combined module by the university’s social sciences faculty - “- can. It’ll take longer, sure. It’ll take a lot to get there, sure. But none of that is going to happen if you end up getting yourself involved with all these shady, dangerous people.”

 

Isagi doesn’t say anything. He wonders, sometimes, in between nights spent up cramming for exams and the discrepancies he sees between the theoretical ideals of his textbooks and lectures and the reality that plays out on the streets and in courtrooms all the time… doubts, whether this can be of consequence. Because if it could, why hasn’t it, yet? 

 

After another second of scanning his face, Chigiri gives his knee an extra squeeze. “If you get yourself hurt, I’m going to kill you, you know that right?”

 

Isagi lets out a snort at that. “I love you too, man,” he mutters back, at the same time as the professor calls out, “Isagi-kun, could I trouble you to help me with the projector again, please?”

 

“Of course, Sir.”

 

---

(“There’s one thing I don’t get, though, and it’s bothering me,” Chigiri had said, begrudgingly, frowning. “Why did he give you that card?”

 

Why, indeed.) 

 

---

 

Isagi does not know, as he walks home after his shift at the library, for once enjoying getting to see the twilight on his way back, if he would be able to just look the other way if something happened in front of him right now. 

 

A mugging, a burglary. A pickpocketing, an attempted purse-snatching. 

 

It’s not like he ever plans to intervene. It’s just that a lot of the time, he’s moving before he can think about it. 

 

But even then, even with whatever incorrigible strand in his DNA makes it physically impossible for him to stay out of trouble, he genuinely does not think he’s going to run into The Emperor again, especially when he’s actually not running around like a homing device for it. 

 

So, when a caped figure lands deftly in front of him as he turns into one of his dozen shortcuts in this area, Isagi takes one look at him and immediately goes, “Oh, hell no.”

 

He’s cursing even as he’s turning around and briskly speed-walking back out into the street, “Fuck that. No. Piss off.”

 

He hears the chink of metal on metal, a cable snapping tight behind him, and looks over just in time to see a dark silhouette swoop over the edge of a rooftop and disappear. 

 

The day grows gradually darker, the last of the sun fading out as Isagi hurries into the pathways he knows will have the most people. Students coming back from cram school, office workers heading home. There are more motorbikes and bicycles in this part of town than cars - a reflection of its collective income as well as a precautionary measure because owning a car in these parts is sometimes an invitation for someone to pillage it for parts to resell or just vandalise. 

 

Even as Isagi mingles with the foot traffic, though, he’s aware of the shadow gliding from rooftop to rooftop close behind him. 

 

Seriously, he’s getting farther from home with the meandering at this point - because no way is he going to walk right to where he lives with this asshole clearly following him - and he takes one turn already expecting the masked man to be perched at the corner of a rooftop like a stupid unnaturally large bird and glares so hard he hopes it feels radioactive. 

 

He swears he thinks he sees that guy’s shoulders shake. Like he’s laughing at him. 

 

Oh fuck this. Maybe he’s come to collect whatever debt he said Isagi now owes him, right? Fine, then. He’s going to fucking give him a piece of his mind to pay him back. 

 

Against all good sense, and even with Chigiri’s death threats hanging over his head and Bachira’s continuous warnings of stop doing stupid shit, for the love of god ringing in his ears , Isagi cuts across the street, down three blocks, and he’s left behind the slowly thinning throngs out and about shopping or going for dinner or on the way back home from a day of school and work. 

 

Before long, he’s in an isolated side street, the kind he seems to be finding himself in a lot, especially with this guy - smoothly sliding down the height of an apartment building’s backhouse and clicking the grappling hook back into place as he touches down gracefully. 

 

“What the fuck do you want?” Isagi is gritting out through his teeth even as he stomps furiously towards him. 

 

“Oh? What’s got you so pissy today?”

 

“Listen, you stupid ass flying monkey man,” Isagi spits, and for all the camouflaging and cloaking he takes a grim delight in the way he can see this asshole’s eyes widen behind his mask, “Either you tell me why you’re following me around like a fucking creep or I start yelling until the police arrive.”

 

Isagi jabs his finger behind in the direction leading out of the alleyway, and delights some more as he watches the realisation dawn upon the masked man of exactly where Isagi’s brought them - across the square from the nearest police box. 

 

The guy shakes it off annoyingly quickly. “Well, well,” he murmurs, taking a step towards Isagi. “Aren’t you always full of surprises?”

 

“What. Do. You. Want? ”

 

They’re in deadlock, just staring at each other. Isagi refuses to back down or even blink. It’s stupid, he thinks, the part of his mind frantic and panicking about all the ways this could go wrong compartmentalised and separate from the rest of him that’s been raring to have a go at this guy and how he’s come to stand for the very kind of callous apathy Isagi hates and blames so much of the state of the world on. Just because this guy said he’s not in the business of killing did not mean he was telling the truth. He shouldn’t be here, but even as he retraces the steps he took to arrive at this moment, he can’t think of what he would do differently if they hit rewind and did it all over again.

 

“You know this place well,” is what the masked man says, eventually. 

 

Isagi says nothing. 

 

“In fact, your sense of direction is almost disturbingly good. You compute your routes to where you want to go on the fly, don’t you? That time too, when you were being chased by the biker gang - you had them lost and disoriented even though you were on foot.”

 

This… is not where Isagi had thought the conversation was going to go.

 

“Your senses are also very sharp,” the masked man continues, shifting closer to Isagi tipping his head to the side, something about the gesture questioning, pondering. “The entire time you were trying to get me off your tracks today, it’s like you knew exactly where I was going to be coming from, even though you can’t move as fast as I do. You even lured me here, this close to a police box, without me realising” He almost sounds…pleased, about this.

 

“Just spit out what you want,” Isagi growls. He doesn’t want to show it, but how keenly this man has been observing him sends every single one of his nerves on edge.

 

A gloved finger tilts Isagi’s chin up. What is with him and touching his jaw?

 

“It’s a shame that you’re completely mannerless, but at least you’re cute.”

 

“ Excuse me -!”

 

The man cuts off Isagi’s spluttering with a finger to his lips. Isagi feels his eyes blow wide open. 

 

“How would you like to work for me?”

Now

 

“Is it…ransom? Theft?” Isagi asks, peering out into the alleyway and then back down at his watch. It’s closing in on 3 am - he’s not going to be getting much sleep tonight before the grind starts again, he thinks, miserably. 

“Silly little idiot,” Isagi feels the figure behind him crowd closer, looming over him in height. “Why won’t you learn? You could be putting that nose of yours to use by working for me. Could actually be useful instead of running around playing detective.”

 

“I already told you that I don’t care for making rich people stay rich or whatever it is that you do.”

 

“You could find out,” The rasp of the robotic voice has a lilt to it, like it’s meant to be tantalising. The masked man is almost draped over Isagi’s back as the shorter one stands his vigil watching over that stupid dumpster he should have just left alone. “I could make it so worth your while.”

 

Isagi bites down on his tongue because there’s a real risk he’ll just scream if he speaks otherwise. This is another unexpected development he’s not had any idea how to navigate, let alone broach with someone that will end in any other way than him being put in solitary confinement by his friends for his own safety. He doesn’t even know what to call it. Ever since he’d flat-out refused that inane invitation, it’s like he can’t go a couple of days without running into this stupid, shitty, self-proclaimed Emperor. It freaked him out enough to check his clothes and bags for hidden trackers and download VPNs on all his devices to mask his location - this man has to have some kind of hidden surveillance network at his disposal, if he’s able to find him so easily and at will.

 

And he seems to have a knack for finding him when he’s about to get himself mired in another of his incidents . 

 

The loud crashing and jeering noises he’d followed to a store getting vandalised a couple days ago, and police sirens blaring out of nowhere before Isagi could think of a way to bait them away only for this smug bastard to emerge from the darkness, no speakers upon his person but clearly responsible for making the thugs flee. 

 

The time he’d heard panicked screams for help and gone running in the direction they were coming from, only to be grabbed up and into the air and deposited into the balcony of an empty apartment, moments before he could run directly into a violent stabbing incident that had left three people injured. The culprit had been found knocked out hours later, zip-tied and dumped on the pavement he’d started attacking pedestrians at.

 

And then most recently, when Isagi’d been stumbling his way home, exhausted even more now that he was alternating between his internship and part-time jobs, this dense cloud of black that seems to perpetually exist in the corner of his eye had swooped in and told him to go spend the night at the nearby manga cafe instead. Isagi had found out the next morning that there had been a bloody, dangerous gang fight along the route he’d usually take to head home. 

 

Each and every time, it ends with the same song and dance. “There’s so much you could do if you’d just stop being stubborn. Put those animal instincts of yours to use, darling. You could be so useful to me.”

 

“Which part of no do you not understand?” Isagi mutters, finally, keeping his eye trained downward at his mark. He’s not going to say what’s really been going on in his head - not going to talk about how, when he’s at his most tired, brain feeling like sludge trying to understand whether the sirens in the distance are the police or the ambulances, he’s almost tempted. Almost tempted to dip his toes into what this man could be offering. The power. The connections. The ability to do something more consequential than put a mark on his back to try and lure threats and danger away from civilians in harm’s way. 

 

But the flipside that must come with the offer - making himself another tool in the arsenal of the very people with the spending power to solve the city’s problems ten times over - keeps that temptation under its heel.

 

The Emperor - Isagi cringes internally every time he thinks of him by that name - sighs. “You’re hopeless. Such a clown. One of these days you’re going to walk right into a problem bigger than you are. What are you going to do then?”

 

I’ve survived you so far, haven’t I? Isagi wants to bite back, but that feels like it’d open the gateway to something neither of them have touched on, yet. The last person he will stand being reprimanded by about his safety is this obnoxious prick. Especially when, lately, it seems like said obnoxious prick is making it his business to appear wherever Isagi and his problems are.

 

Completely ignoring him, Isagi asks, “So you’re here to catch whoever comes to take the bag away - not just to retrieve the bag itself. Is that it?”

 

The figure sighs again. “Okay, then,” he hums eventually, and then Isagi startles as he feels two arms come up on either side of him, fingers hooking into the wire mesh fringing the roof and effectively caging Isagi there. “Let’s make a deal.”

Isagi, frozen, is wary as he asks, “...what deal?”

 

“Since you want to play Sherlock so badly, why don’t you tell me what you think is happening? If you do well, I’ll answer exactly one question for you. Any question at all, besides, of course, who I am.”

 

The offer is… Isagi hates to admit it, but it’s tempting. He has plenty of burning questions he could ask him, and one that’s been screaming for his attention every time they’ve crossed paths in recent days. His tentative goal coming up here had been finding out who came to retrieve the bag, getting a picture or video, and deciding whether or not to send it to the police. Ever since this guy had shown up, though, Isagi’s chances of doing this unimpeded had dropped to less than thirty per cent. If he’s intervening on behalf of a client, it’s not like Isagi could win against him in a physical fight. Nonetheless, he does shove his elbow into the guy's middle, annoyed at how solid he is, until he relents and shifts a little to Isagi's side instead of half-draping himself over his back.

 

“The…bag is unmarked but brand new, the tag was still attached. So it’s like someone bought it just to hold the cash inside,” Isagi begins, begrudgingly. He’d verified that it was cash, wearing kitchen gloves as a precaution against leaving fingerprints, just to make sure he had actual reason to be freezing himself outside on a rooftop in the dead of night. “But the fact that it was in the dumpster - not underneath any of the other trash bags, not hidden - I think it means that whoever threw that in there, probably did in a hurry because he was trying to hide in a moment’s notice, or was being pursued. So, likely, they’re going to come back when there’s fewer people around.”

 

“So why didn’t you call the police the second you found it?”

 

Isagi shoots him a dirty look. “As if police lines are secure.”

 

It gets him a chuckle. “Fair enough.”

 

“And besides, even on a secure line, the city’s resources are stretched thin - there’s no telling if they’d arrive on time. There was a statistic, recently, that crime prevention by the police fails nine out of ten times here because by the time they arrive, not only is the deed done but the evidence has been messed with too.” 

 

And when they would finally arrive, likely when either the culprit or someone else who’d caught wind of it had taken the bag away, it would be everyone in the surrounding buildings that would be grilled - including the person who reported the bag being there in the first place. That’s what would get in the newspapers, and Isagi doesn’t particularly want a potential criminal to know who he is and where he works.

 

“And how did you come to discover that bag?”

 

Isagi blinks. And then groans.

 

Fuck. He’d been so caught up with the situation that he’d completely forgotten that the last person he’d want to know where he works four out of seven days a week is currently standing on the building’s roof. 

 

“Uh, I was throwing away a candy wrapper and I saw it there.” It sounds stupidly unconvincing to his own ears. Isagi can’t see his face, but the Emperor’s posture communicates how unamused he is by that answer.

 

Isagi deflates. “I work around here and was throwing the trash out,” he hedges instead, trying to minimise the damage.

 

“Better,” a hand comes up to ruffle his hair that he bats away. “Not bad with the deduction work though. Now if only you would put your smarts towards -”

 

“Can you stop with the recruitment pitch already?”

 

“It would pay a lot better than whatever you’re earning here,” the hint of disdain in his tone makes Isagi wish he had the physical strength to toss him off of this building. He’d probably just grapple hook himself to safety though, like a spider that keeps coming back out no matter how many times you wash it down your sink. 

 

“Don’t care.”

 

“How noble of you. Did you know that money can solve practically every problem you could possibly have? Even the ones you’re so fond of jumping into.”

 

“Then how come you haven’t solved world hunger or poverty, if you’re rolling in so much dough?”

 

“Because those are not my priorities.” 

 

Isagi’s getting pissed off all over again. Butting heads with this guy always leaves him feeling more rage than he knows what to do with. He bites down on his lip to keep from retorting, because this would just devolve into a one-sided screaming match. 

 

“Not going to yell at me today?” The Emperor asks, indulgently. “But I do so enjoy the feral look in your eye when you fight for your moral high ground, darling.”

 

If no one shows up in the next fifteen minutes, Isagi makes up his mind, he’s just going to leave. 

 

“Nothing? Not even one of your adorably uncouth insults?”

 

Okay, ten minutes.

 

“Boo. That’s no fun.”

 

Five. The next five minutes and then - 

 

“Shh,” he’s holding up a hand, cutting off whatever gibberish the tin-head man was spouting. He’s ninety percent sure he heard something and…

 

A figure appears at the lip of the alleyway, dressed all in dark. Isagi instantly crouches, keeping just his eyes above the bricked edge of the roof where the wire mesh begins. There’s barely any light down there to tell who the figure is, but he’s darting directly towards the dumpster, furtively looks left and right, and lifting up the lid with a creak that carries in the quiet of the night, in a way that makes Isagi, four floors up, flinch. 

 

He’s wondering if this had been a hopeless fool’s errand in the first place, because it’s so fucking dark he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to see who it is and even modern day smartphones don’t have night vision that good, when a pool of light flicks to life in the hand of the man by the dumpster. It’s the guy’s own phone, the point of light swinging around to focus at the dumpster and -

 

Isagi’s mouth dries up in an instant. He knows that man. 

 

He’s known that man for the entire time he’s worked at this izakaya. The man who owns the liquor store close by. The friendly, cheerful man who always snuck free bottles of saké into Bachira’s bag whenever he tagged along with Isagi for emergency drink runs because the diner had been running low. 

 

The man whose son had recently gambled away all their property and possessions, after, according to Isagi’s manager, getting into debt with the wrong sort of people. 

 

That son, his only child, now behind bars and awaiting bail. 

 

“Hey,” Isagi whispers, his eyes wide and panicked as they try to find the shape of the person crouched next to him, melting into the darkness. “Hey, what are you… what are you going to do to that man?”

 

He can hear the panic high in his own voice - it’s obvious that the Emperor can too. 

 

“...you know him.”

 

Isagi doesn’t know if he can confirm or deny that. Doesn’t know if it would make a difference, if someone had paid enough money to have The Emperor here today, to recover that cash - wherever it had come from, whoever it belonged to. 

 

“Don’t…,” his voice is hoarse, and his tongue is heavy in his mouth as he tries to force the words out in a hurry. “Don’t hurt him. Please don’t hurt him.”

 

He’d beg. If that’s the only thing he can do. He thinks about being choked by large leather-covered hands, eyes bugging and rolling around in their sockets and spittle collecting at the corner of the mouth as the air was slowly wrung out of the body, and feels his own lungs struggle to remember how to work. This smiling grandpa who’d run that shop for almost his entire lifetime, whom everyone on the strip knows by name, and everyone on the strip felt for as his livelihood and family descended into the undertow continuously rocking these neighbourhoods.

 

The Emperor makes a move and Isagi grabs on to his hand with both of his. “Please. You can recover the money but don’t hurt him.”

 

“Hey.” The hand Isagi isn’t holding comes up to the side of his face and Isagi, in his complete panic, almost winces - but it only settles against the side of his face. A gentle and careful touch. “Relax. Breathe. Look - he’s already leaving.”

 

Isagi snaps his head back around in time to see a figure disappearing out of the alley mouth. 

 

“Don’t -”

 

“I’m not going to follow him,” The Emperor assures him, and through the fog of his alarm, Isagi realises with a jolt that the tone trickling out through the voice changer is almost cajoling. 

 

“You’re…not?”

 

“No, I’m not.”

 

“But isn’t that -” Isagi blinks, confused, willing the adrenaline down so he could think over his fevered heartbeat, “Isn’t that your job?”

 

The Emperor cocks his head at him, a move so familiar Isagi has lost count of how many times he’s seen him do it. “This wasn’t a job.”

 

Isagi’s brain goes quiet. Dumbfounded, he repeats, “...wasn’t?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Then why…”

 

“Because you were on a rooftop at two in the morning,” the Emperor tells him, and Isagi doesn’t know if he’s spent so much time around this faceless nuisance that he’s starting to imagine expressions on him because he sounds like he’s smiling, “and that’s basically a guarantee that there was trouble nearby.”

 

The implication that this guy has eyes on Isagi when he doesn’t even know, that maybe he already knew he worked here, flits through Isagi’s head like lightning, but somehow isn’t the most pressing issue at hand.

 

“But…,” Isagi whispers, “you… you’re not supposed to care. You’re not supposed to involve yourself with people unless you’re being paid for it. Then why?”

 

“Is that your question in exchange for our deal?”

 

Isagi takes a deep breath, seeks out his eyes and holds them. “Just tell me.”

 

The Emperor regards him for a long time - or at least, it feels like a long time. 

 

“I suppose it’s because you’re an exception to that rule.”

 

---

It’s almost 5 am by the time Isagi makes it home - too late to try and sleep and hope that he would be able to wake up in time to get to class. He gets some food in him - the pastries Bachira had brought him the evening before cheer him up somewhat, as he inspects how the plants on his balcony are doing. There’s one that’s started attracting little bugs under the leaves, and Isagi makes a mental note to call Nagi and ask him what to do about that. 

 

Thinking Netflix would probably not make his night of sleeplessness any better, and desperately needing to empty his mind of all thought, Isagi decides to get his laundry done. He’s showered already, and after adding the clothes he’d been wearing to his hamper, makes his way down to the building’s laundry room.

 

Because of his wonky work schedule, Isagi has done his laundry at odd hours of the day before, enjoying the quiet of being down there without having to compete for one of the only two machines or the single tumble dryer with the other tenants. So he’s surprised when he throws the door open in the middle of humming a jingle from an old TV advert to find that someone’s already there.

 

“Oh! Sorry,” Isagi apologises, embarrassed about the singing, eyeing the person’s hair - blond dip-dyed in blue - when they turn around.

 

The first thing Isagi registers are the eyes. Bright, startling blue - so blue they’re almost unnerving to look at.

 

And the second thing, the tattoos - blue peeking around the neckline of a plain white shirt that sits a little insultingly perfectly on this man’s frame, inked black coiling down his arm to end in what Isagi thinks looks like a crown.

 

“No worries.” He speaks perfect Japanese, without an accent. 

Isagi awkwardly shuffles into the room, heading towards the free washing machine and loading up his clothes. The German. The one the landlady is always gushing about, with the supermodel looks and the charisma to make an adult elephant keel over. He lives opposite Isagi, in the wing of the apartment adjacent to his balcony - Isagi’s seen him before, out there in his own balcony in nothing but a fluffy robe and glasses, on his laptop or tablet.

 

This is his first time seeing him up close, though, let alone speaking to him. Everything about him stands out in this place. His build, the hair, the tattoos, sure. But also the simple but tasteful cut of his casual clothes… and that face . It makes sense that he’s heard about this guy long before he’d seen him. Isagi doesn’t understand how a combination like this even makes sense in the dank, slightly sweet smelling laundry room of an apartment complex in a less than stellar part of town. 

 

“You live opposite me, right? You have the plants all over your balcony.”

Isagi’s had a long day that’s spilled on to another day without any break in between, so he’d like to forgive himself for the surprised squeak he lets out at being addressed. Let alone, noticed. “Uhm, the one with the hanging plants, yeah… that’s me.”

 

“I’ve seen you out there watering them,” the German comments conversationally. He’s sat himself down on one of the chairs someone had brought down here and then left for general use. As he speaks, he stretches his legs out, and they go on for days - Isagi wills his sleep-deprived brain not to hone in on those thighs. “It looks like so much work, but it’s nice to see some green when I look out the window.”

 

“Oh, um, thank you? It’s a lot of work but it’s relaxing.” Lies. Isagi almost cried when the plant Nagi had gifted him after he’d jumped into plant parenting started turning yellow. 

 

But his German neighbour, in his nice clothes and stylish red eyeliner - seriously who is this put together before the sun’s even risen? - only smiles at him. It’s a really pretty smile. 

 

“Maybe I’ll get you to share your tips with me, uh -” the blond tips his head to the side questioningly. Something very faint and nebulous bubbles at the back of Isagi’s brain and fades away.

 

“Oh,” Isagi puts his hand out, “um, I’m Isagi. Isagi Yoichi.”

 

A large, warm hand takes his. Isagi’s eyes are drawn to the black inked crown, and the twining vines that curl up his arm to disappear into his shirt-sleeve. “Isagi Yoichi,” the German repeats, as though testing the syllables out. “ The world’s purest, huh . ” There’s a glimmer to his eye as he says it.

 

Isagi’s surprise must show on his face, because he laughs a little. “I study etymology - I’m in the field of languages and translation and such.” He explains. “Though, I’d say it suits you - the landlady is always talking about how the boy who lives across from me is helping her carry the groceries up the stairs and keeping the neighbourhood kids in check. That’s you, isn’t it?”

 

Isagi, a little thrown off by the fact that the landlady is going around saying these things about him - and to her personal celebrity tenant no less - says, “I…think so?” 

 

Their hands are still clasped in each other’s, he thinks distantly. “And, um… your name…?”

 

“Michael,” the blond man smiles up at Isagi from where he sits, his eyes a stunning ocean blue. “Michael Kaiser.”

Notes:

fun fact 1 - according to the blue lock wiki - "michael kaiser's name can [...] be interpreted as 'god's chosen emperor'"

fun fact 2 - the tarot card for the emperor typically depicts the emperor on a throne with 4 ram heads, associating it with the astrological sign for aries. isagi's star sign is also aries

fun fact 3 - there are a couple of different ways to translate or interpret 'isagi yoichi'; i went with the one that best fits how i'm hoping to characterise him for this fic

 

this fic is brought to you by our sponsors
- the strange conversation about vigilantes i had with my best friend that neither of us now remember
- watching the apothecary diaries and thinking maomao-jinshi have kaisagi tendencies
- the burning desire to write more for some of the gang i didn't get to write in the last fic (specifically chigiri and rin!)
- my wish to write One Good Plot Twist. at least one.
- all the hours i've sunk into japanese internet forum rabbitholes of urban legends and true crime
- the demon that possessed me while working on this because i came back to my senses 20k words in - ch 2 up soon

Chapter 2

Notes:

i had 70% of this written when i posted the first chapter, thinking i would be able to knock the 2nd out soon - and then the remaining 30% thoroughly humbled me, called me names, plagued me with self-doubt, and hauled me backwards and forwards through fire, i will never think with such confidence ever again oof

Now

 

Isagi can smell rain in the wind - it’s strange and cool and oddly calming, even though the street down below is lively as it usually is at this time of night. The smog in the city is too bad on a good day to tell whether the sky is blanketed by smoke or clouds, but Isagi can feel the sharpness of the air, prickling against his skin, and knows that they’re probably about to get pretty heavy rain, pretty soon. 

 

I didn’t even bring my umbrella, he thinks, glumly, and considers for a real second whether he should abandon this insane plan and go back down into the diner where it’s warm and cosy. There’s no guarantee, even as he stands up here, pulling the lapels of his jacket closer around himself, that he is even going to show up.

 

The lightest smattering of rain has just started peppering the rooftop, dotting the barely visible ground at Isagi’s feet darker, when the noise he’s been keeping an ear out for makes him turn around. 

 

“Angel,” lightning flashes in the distance, concealed in clouds, and the wind kicks the figure’s cape into a fevered little dance as he comes closer. “We really gotta stop meeting like this.”

 

Isagi takes a deep breath. The downpour is picking up, its drumbeat against the ground drowned out by Isagi’s own heart thudding violently against his eardrums. It’s too late to back out now. He’s been counting on him to show up. He’s committed.

 

“I…,” he licks his lips, then stares right up, past the rain-flecked headgear and into those eyes watching him, “I want to ask you for a favour.”

 

Then

“Should you be out in the daytime like this,” Isagi mutters in an undertone, unfazed by the muted thud of boots making contact with pavement right next to him. “Aren’t you wanted by the police?”

 

The cloaked figure gliding along beside him as Isagi wound through his shortcuts - remote and empty in the drowsy hours of an early morning - huffs a crackly laugh. 

 

“You’ve been keeping up with the news about me,” he chirps mechanically, “If you’re such a fan of my work, you should consider -”

 

“No, thanks,” Isagi cuts him off unceremoniously, quick-stepping towards the main road where there will, certainly, be more people, the early birds who have to start their days opening up their shops and cleaning out fallen leaves and delivering newspapers before the sun has even fully breached the horizon. It feels surreal - more so than usual - to have something that only exists in nocturnes jauntily keeping pace beside him in daylight. “I don’t know why you sound so happy about being in the news, what about… I don’t fucking know, client confidentiality? Don’t they pay you to be discreet?”

 

Another distorted sound, a mangled guffaw. “The only lead they have is Masked man spotted exiting 12th floor of building through window. They’re not going to catch me based on that, that could have been any adventurous burglar. If anything, it’s good PR. But it’s sweet of you to worry, angel.”

The nickname blindsides him enough that he trips over his feet a bit. “What is with you and these corny ass nicknames,” he splutters, ears feeling hot - if he isn’t self-conscious enough having an actual wanted criminal who’d up until recently only been moonlighting as a comic book caricature, any visible reaction this bastard can latch on to from him makes it worse. If anything, under the light of a gradually brightening day, he feels even more exposed - sharply so, considering there’s very little of the person beside him that he can see. 

 

“But it suits you,” comes the staticky sigh. “What with your na - your nature. Bleeding heart and all.”

 

Isagi throws a glare at him for that, and speeds up even more. “Why do I have to deal with you in daylight too,” he complains, thinking that if this is going to be the norm now he’s going to add the extra fifteen minutes to his commute by avoiding all his little shortcuts, “don’t you burn in the sun or something?”

 

More laughter. Isagi blames his still sleep-damp brain on the runaway thought that rolls through his mind, wondering what it would sound like without the odd distortions. “Well, maybe I was about to clock out… and saw a cutie I just had to come take a closer look at. You look great in a tie, by the way.”

 

Isagi groans, even as he feels the warmth bloom under his skin. The business casual get-up he’s had to enlist Bachira and Chigiri to help him shop for had felt awkward enough on him in the changing rooms - in public, and worse, under this guy’s scrutiny, Isagi’s more aware than ever of the alien fit of his carefully pressed dress shirt and slacks over his body. 

 

“What? I mean it,” the asshole continues, undeterred. “You should do your hair like that more often too. It’s hot.”

 

“God please, leave me alone,” Isagi is practically running at this point. Of course, this stupid Emperor and his stupid long legs are barely breaking a sweat keeping up with him.

 

“I understand you might mistake me for a higher power, angel, but I’m just a mortal man with eyes,” Isagi shouldn’t be able to tell tone out of the synthetic words fizzling out of his hidden speaker, but he swears he thinks he can hear the jerk smiling. “I mean it. You look good. I’m envious that people get to see you like this all day.”

 

The main road is just up ahead, and Isagi is swearing to himself that from tomorrow onwards he’s going to take the long way to work on the other side of the city as he hurries right towards it, “Good bye. ”

 

“Have a lovely day at work, darling!” 

 

It’s such a horrendous approximation of a stereotypical housewife seeing her spouse off in the morning that Isagi almost wants to gag. 

 

His face still feels warm as he boards his bus, beelining near unseeing to the back and dropping himself into a window seat. There’s that thrum in his pulse again, agitating his nerves - but as the thoroughfares and apartment buildings bloom out of their muted night-time blues and greys under the sun, the brighter green of trees and street signs getting coloured in as the bus trundles towards its next stop, Isagi feels it with a different sort of keenness than he’s had under cover of darkness, where he could flee home and unplug himself by diving under the duvet and into sleep. 

 

And it’s not just the darkness, either. It’s one thing to deal with the interference when he himself is a walking concoction of nerves and adrenaline - it’s easier to write off a lot of things when he’s on a hair-trigger of tension because of the many ( many ) potentially dangerous scenarios they’ve crossed paths in.

But something has shifted since that time on the roof. 

 

And when he crosses paths with the Emperor without the pressing need to have each of his senses working overtime to scope all the active threats he’s got a knack for surrounding himself with…

 

It’s just so much harder to ignore.

 

Chigiri compliments how he’s styled his bangs later in the day, when they meet up after Isagi’s done at the internship, Nagi letting out a whistle that makes Isagi colour all the way to the roots of said hair. And all he can think about is how his friend had made him promise that he would stay away from that guy , and instead he thinks that, for some reason, somehow , he’s gotten himself more entangled with him instead.

 

And he’s so conscious of it - it occupies so much of his greymatter, pushing and intruding and demanding his attention - that when the man comes up in conversation Isagi has to tamp down the visceral physical reaction.

 

“Huh?” he asks, snapping back into the present. 

 

Bachira looks at him critically. “Spacing out? That’s not like you,” he says, his mouth turned down as he peers into Isagi’s face. Without his wits about him, Isagi almost fears that he’d see right through him, right in between his eyebrows and into the caped, masked, source of his distraction. “It’s because of all these jobs. You’re spreading yourself too thin.”

 

“Yeah, no, I’m fine,” Isagi hurries to assure. If he lets Bachira continue on this track, it’ll devolve into another argument - or a one-sided scolding from Bachira as Isagi tries to appease him. “Sorry, I just didn’t get too much sleep last night, I was watching the match.”

 

Bachira’s cheeks are puffed out, his frown unamused. “You’re not looking after yourself properly,” he grouses, as the two wind their way down the sidewalk in the late evening sun. “If you keep this up I’m gonna call your mum and snitch on you.”

 

Isagi laughs, but this is enough of an active and real threat that he makes an urgent, mental note to be more careful. Bachira is keenly observant, all the more so when the people he cares the most for are involved, and it only makes Isagi guilty how violently he almost jolts when Bachira mentions, as they head deeper into the shopping district, “I was asking - do you know about the masked guy that robbed that politician?” 

 

A dozen potentials zip through his exhausted, mildly panicked brain before he settles on the semi-truth. “Ah, yeah. The one in the news right? The guy the police are looking for.”

 

“Mmhmm,” Bachira confirms - he’s linked their hands together and is swinging their fingers cheerfully between them. “People are saying he apparently flew out of the penthouse window, like a big bat!”

 

That’s among quite a few things people are saying. Isagi won’t ever admit it to Chigiri, but he’s taken to trawling the forum pages Chigiri had been scanning through for clues about the masked man almost every day and… well, maybe it was only a matter of time before something so outlandish started to catch the public’s eye, and their attention, in a more definite way than just the urban legend threads. 

 

Isagi’d been keeping track of brief accounts of sightings of a dark figure aerial rope-sliding across the concrete jungle - someone swearing they saw a large shadow flit across the gap between two roofs while they’d been walking down a laneway below, someone else who swears they saw a full-fledged man, dressed all in black, flit past their window before they heard a sound on the ceiling. There’d been enough of these accounts that there’s a near dedicated internet community, now, focused just on curating these sightings, arguing at great pedantic length about how real these anecdotes are. People breaking down the physics of how and with what equipment a large, full-sized adult could even possibly manoeuvre themselves like that in one of the most densely populated ends of the ward without being seen a dozen times more than he already had been, and other obsessively resourceful people listing where they could be getting said equipment from, how much it would cost to have made bespoke.

 

It’s ironic, maybe, and at the same time, telling, maybe, that the account that gets the most visibility is not in North Ward’s congested downtown - but in one of those exclusive luxury apartment buildings aways off from the city centre, at the penthouse flat of a politician whose name is near synonymous with two things - wealth, and corruption. 

 

Isagi’s sure people have been praying for his downfall for years - and they must be aware of it, too, because the security detail that follows him around is probably draining a good fraction of the city’s taxes. Which makes it all the more wild - and definitely newsworthy, because the papers have been having a field day - that someone, one person, was able to get in, undetected, and leave, uncaptured, from his private home. 

 

The police are on the lookout, the news says, taking subtle jabs at the force’s general lack of competence, lightly referencing the case that blew open last year getting several senior police officers fired after they were found lining their pockets with hefty bribes from multiple high profile people dodging criminal charges. One of the names that had - allegedly , the papers make a fine point to underline - been involved in this shady alliance with the city’s law enforcement was that politician. 

 

They’re still talking about it by the time they meet up with Chigiri, and then Reo and Nagi at the fusion Japanese-Italian place Chigiri’s sister had recommended. Nagi groans the second Bachira catches them up on what they’re talking about, while Isagi decidedly avoids eye contact with Chigiri. 

 

“Not you too,” he grumbles, bonelessly sinking into his seat. “Reo won’t stop talking about that guy.”

 

“Everyone’s talking about him,” Reo defends, but there’s an animated glint to his eye as they settle down. “Did you see that video? It’s a shame no one got anything clearer, but I swear he ziplined out of the balcony and to the rooftop.”

 

Isagi, who doesn’t need to have seen the video now saved on his phone, knows that that’s probably exactly what he did. He takes a sip of his water. 

 

“Ugh, not the conspiracy theories again…” Nagi glances once at the menu and then shoves it into Isagi’s lap, sat next to him, “Isagi…order for me…”

 

“Oh, I love conspiracy theories!” Bachira claps his hands in delight. “I overheard some of the teenagers at the coffeeshop talk about him - like something about a vigilante flying around fighting crime downtown?”

 

“It’s not quite as cool as that,” Reo says, and catches Bachira up to what he’d told the rest of them about the Emperor earlier - with a few added details.

 

“- now that it’s clear that his potential client base are also potential targets, people are freaking out,” Reo delicately shakes a napkin open to tuck into his neckline, pointedly ignoring Bachira, who’s asked for chopsticks for his spaghetti carbonara and is currently drowning it in sriracha, “My dad’s had security tripled at the company and the house.” 

 

Isagi blinks. His plate, piled generously with a creamy mentaiko pasta he’d known he was getting from the number of pictures of this beauty he’d seen on socials when Chigiri had pinged them the location yesterday, sits untouched. “Did…I mean why would someone send that guy after your dad? Rival companies?” 

 

Reo nods. He seems pretty unbothered by it, and it makes Isagi wonder exactly how cut-throat corporate competition can get that being driven here with his personal security detail while his father sits at home freaking out does not faze him. “Yeah. Things like patents, intel on profits and any projects in pipeline. I mean, I think he’s overreacting. If dirt like that ever got out - industrial espionage, I mean. You’d want to keep that as low-profile as possible, I doubt they’d hire a Batman knock-off.”

 

Oh, he would hate that. 

 

“I think what’s scaring people is the fact that it happened, which means now it’s a possibility they have to worry about.”

 

“And…it could give other people ideas.” It’s good PR. Was he trying to scale up his client base? A job like that… the paycheck must have been hefty, what with the target, and those stakes.

 

“That part,” Reo points his fork at Isagi. “If anyone should be worried, it’s the people with actual dirt they’re hiding. If the Emperor is branching out to targeting high-profile people…”

 

“Like that piece of shit running for office again.”

 

“Yup. The streets are saying, his ex-wife will be running for his spot next season against him,” there’s a ripple of surprise along the table at that tidbit, and Reo’s eyes glimmer, pleased. Isagi often forgets, from how poised Reo normally is, that he’s also an incurable gossip. “If anyone’s got the dirt on him, it’s gotta be her, right?”

 

“...Reo, what do you even know about the streets ?” Chigiri deadpans. 

 

“Okay, fine, the stuffy boardroom tea parties are saying,” Reo is saying, rolling his eyes - but he’s into it, Isagi can tell, and Nagi has that look on his face that’s even more unamused than normal, seems to say he’s been hearing about this far more than he wants to. “Whatever the case is, it’s crazy that it happened? I wonder what he went in there for, though.”

 

They find out, soon enough.

 

The city’s biggest news station breaks a story a couple of days later that’s even bigger and more brutal an exposé than the one leading to the mass firing in the police force last year. A damning paper trail of embezzlement, multiple money laundering schemes thinly disguised behind barely legitimate businesses fronted by family members. Bribery, campaign money funnelled into buying luxury island homes and building resorts offshore. 

 

It’s so outrageous it almost feels unreal, because how, how galvanised could a person feel by privilege to be so audacious in their crimes? 

 

But the newscasters take particular pains to break down how each allegation has been individually investigated and verified. 

 

And the disclaimer with every round of follow-up as the story developed - 

 

The evidence was mailed to our offices anonymously - IITV News has yet to verify the sender.

 

At this point, no one needed a signature to add two and two together. 

 

Almost overnight, North Ward’s niche urban legend becomes a faceless hero. Wanted by the police, applauded by the average citizen directly linking him to the downfall of one of the prefecture’s most notoriously corrupt and disliked political figures.

 

Isagi does not know what to think. He reads the increasingly romanticised conspiracy theories online, the tweets that hail the Emperor - a name that hasn’t yet made it into the public’s consciousness - as a force of good whose done far more in one case of breaking and entering than all the political parties ingratiating themselves for votes as election season rolls around combined. An act of politicised resistance against a broken system. A vigilante taking matters into their own hands.

 

The cognitive dissonance is too much - between the picture of him being painted by the average member of the public, and what Isagi knows. And how much - he realises the more he thinks about it - he does not know. 

 

On the one hand, that hateful fucker appealing to outdated overly-conservative sentiments for votes, but more importantly, money, has been decisively taken out, and Isagi takes grim pleasure watching his career go down in flames. If anything, he hopes it serves as a deterrent for anyone else thinking to abuse their power as an elected official.  

 

On the other…

 

On the other, he’s more confused than ever about where the Emperor fits, in the way Isagi makes sense of this world. So, he was instrumental in bringing down a horrible man who couldn’t be taken down lawfully. But… based on what they’d heard from Reo originally, and the kinds of things the Emperor likes to gloat about… maybe that’s not a choice he’s actively making. Maybe it’s incidental, that a case he took on serviced the greater good in some way. 

 

It’s all so grey. The darker, grittier, grimier shades, because the Emperor’s proven time and time again that he would stand by and let people get hurt, let preventable crimes happen under his nose, because it’s outside whatever the fuck his job description is. 

 

And then…

 

The lighter, brighter greys. Because Isagi knows that he has the capacity to choose. Because every time he’s intervened to help Isagi, he’s made that choice. 

 

So what does that make the Emperor? 

 

It’s not like Isagi has the chance to find out. For one thing, his hours at the diner mercifully pushed earlier into the day as he shifts his job at the library to the weekends to accommodate the internship, he’s getting home earlier (to Bachira’s vocal relief), seeing less and less of the city after dark, the witching hour for the sorts of things that seems to be the Emperor’s typical trade. 

 

And for another, maybe because of the increased public interest, or the actual price on his head pushing him into discretion…it’s like the Emperor has faded back into an idea, a concept, rather than the real-life shadow physically hounding Isagi every other day just weeks ago.

 

In the middle of all this, he has Rin over. 

 

“I saw your neighbour,” Rin volunteers suddenly, and first thing in the morning with a rough third of his braincells functional, it takes Isagi a second to react because Rin is hardly forthcoming in conversation on a regular day. “Out on the balcony.”

 

“Oh?” is what he ends up saying, which isn’t particularly intelligent but gets the job done in inviting Rin to go on.

 

“He’s blond,” Rin continues after some time.

 

“He’s German.”

 

“He’s got tattoos.”

 

“Yes?”

 

Rin seems to be pissed off. Isagi can’t tell if he’s pissed off because of Kaiser or pissed off because he’s Rin and he wakes up mad.

 

“He looks like bad news.” 

 

“Rin just because a guy has dyed hair and tattoos doesn’t mean they’re a bad person,” Isagi immediately feels the need to defend. He’s been living opposite Michael Kaiser for a while now and the man has been nothing less than pleasant, if…kind of flirty. That’s probably a European trait though. Sae had come back from his stint in Spain pretty shameless too. 

 

Predictably, the way any effort on Isagi’s part to be a good senpai to this kid goes, Rin just sends him a death glare. They sit in silence some more, and honestly it’s a good thing Isagi is the type who can adjust to people’s levels of talkative at will because how on earth he and Rin have managed to maintain a connection when one-half of the dynamic is about as conversational as a refrigerator, he doesn’t know.

 

“He gave me a really weird look when I was out on the balcony.”

 

“Isn’t that because of the angry yoga?” Isagi wonders aloud. Anyone would look at Rin weirdly if they caught him in the middle of his morning ritual of meditation and vengeance. The concepts seem counterproductive to Isagi, but he has learned a bit of yoga from Rin and does also run on pure rage sometimes, so for all he knows it’s an advanced yin-yang balancing act he has yet to master.

 

While he ponders over the mechanics of angry yoga, Rin continues to glare at him. “What?”

 

Rin looks like he’s not going to say anything for a bit. He shoves his eggs around on his plate and it’s just when Isagi realises that his silence is more petulant than cold or mad when he speaks again, “Be careful of him.”

 

“Rin, seriously, just because he’s a foreigner -”

 

“Tch, it’s not because he’s a foreigner. You’re just too fucking clueless for your own good.”

 

“I don’t even know what I did to deserve that,” Isagi says, bewildered. All he’s done today is wake up earlier so he could make this brat breakfast and this is the thanks he gets. “I don’t even speak to him much.”

 

“Why was he on his balcony in a fancy-ass robe looking shocked to see me on yours?”

 

“Maybe because you were on my balcony doing angry yoga?!”

 

“Is he an exhibitionist?”

 

“Rin you were literally shirtless out there yourself, I don’t know if you can accuse him of being an exhibitionist.”

 

“Whatever. You’re too fucking trusting. Just…be wary of him.”

 

Is it that Rin is being cryptic on purpose or he’s just that bad at communication? It’s way too early for Isagi to figure out. But at the very least, it seems that he’s looking out for him in his own strange way. None of his friends have been resting easy since he moved into this neighbourhood, and well, maybe the paranoia is justified given the frequency of incidents Isagi has already been at the centre of since he’s started living here, most of which they don’t even know about. 

 

The thought of a tall caped stranger flits through Isagi’s mind and he shakes it loose because if Rin knew about that he doubts he’d ever be allowed to step out of the house without supervision. 

 

Except maybe Rin would not have to worry. Isagi continues not to see the Emperor at all for a while.

 

He does continue to see his German neighbour, though.

“Hi, Yoichi,” Michael Kaiser always greets in that sing-song way of his, defaulting to his first name with a casual friendliness that has Isagi scrambling to figure out how he’s supposed to address him back. It’s like after that first time meeting down in the basement, Isagi keeps running into him - doing their laundry at the same time, waiting for the janky elevator that gives onto the floor splitting towards the different wings of their buildings, or out in their balconies, opposite each other. 

 

They only manage to speak to each other for pockets of minutes at a time - the fifteen minutes Isagi spends on his balcony tending to his plants, or the brief handful of them as they ride the elevator up together. He’d found Isagi with a half-eaten pain au chocolat that Bachira had brought him at the elevator, another in a paper-bag, and Isagi, whose friends trade food with him all the time, had just unthinkingly offered it to Kaiser when he’d commented with a twinkling little smile that Isagi looked like he’s enjoying his treat. 

 

Kaiser’s surprise had registered strongly enough that Isagi had immediately started to feel silly, but it’s not like he could take the offer back now, so he’d thrust the paper bag at Kaiser as they’d stood cramped together in the tiny little elevator, babbling, “It goes really well with milk!”

 

And he’d felt he’d learned Kaiser a bit better when the latter immediately made a face at that, and explained that he hates milk. He comes away from that interaction short one pain au chocolat but seeing Michael Kaiser as a little more human than the impeccable ( intimidating ) supermodel charm he oozes.

 

(He offers him coffee instead - it’s a good excuse to put a dent in the frankly ridiculous amount of coffee beans Reo has gifted him after realising he’s perhaps the most caffeinated person on campus at any given time… and the ridiculously extravagant espresso machine he’d given him for his birthday after Isagi tried to return some of the bags saying he doesn’t have anything to brew them with. Kaiser likes the coffee so much that Isagi sends him home with a few bags of his own.) 

 

Kaiser explains his rose tattoos to Isagi too, one day, when he’d come out to the balcony to find Isagi having a one-sided conversation with his plants (‘ Oh, look at you! You’ve grown so well!’ ‘You’re going to look so pretty with a haircut’ ), trimming them like the dozen YouTube videos he’d watched about encouraging healthy growth had taught him to. 

 

“Does that help?” Kaiser had asked, a smile curling up the side of his face, head tipped in question, as Isagi tried not to catch fire from embarrassment. “Talking to them?”

 

Isagi, feeling how red he is in the face, admits, “I… don’t really know. It’s just…um…therapeutic?” Wow, he must sound so pathetic, right now - 

 

Laughter. “Cute.” Kaiser comments, with a bitten down smile slanting sideways, and Isagi has half a knee-jerk reaction to point the nozzle of his spray bottle of water at him as a bizarre fight or flight reflex. 

 

He does end up splashing his own face with cool water after escaping inside though, when, while Kaiser’d been explaining the significance of the colour blue to him, he’d thoughtlessly blurted out that light blue is his favourite colour. And Kaiser had given him such an impish little grin as he’d said, “Well… I’m glad I have that going for me.”

 

Isagi does not know how to begin to unpack that. 

 

Their interactions keep multiplying in ways like this, until Isagi brings it up offhandedly to Bachira and immediately regrets it because Bachira latches on to this information like he gulps up the sorts of obnoxiously sweet drinks that Isagi, even with his own incurable sweet tooth, can’t get down. 

 

“How do you spell his name? Let’s stalk him online.” 

 

“Bachira, no. ”

 

And as much as Isagi has trouble reading Michael Kaiser and those pseudo-flirtatious remarks of his that he can’t tell are just a German thing or a Kaiser thing, he thinks it’s surprisingly easy to talk to him. 

 

Surprisingly enlightening, in a way, too. 

 

For instance, when they’re on their respective balconies talking about their day jobs, Kaiser figures out very quickly that Isagi enjoys his part-time jobs, far more than the internship - before even Isagi’d figured it out in such concrete terms. 

 

“You make it sound exciting,” Kaiser says, leaning up against the balustrade, the neckline of his robe gaping in the sort of way that makes Isagi have to devote extra brain-cells to maintaining eye-contact instead of eye-to-collar-bone contact. “Way more exciting than I’d imagine working at a diner to be.”

 

Isagi, who’d been in the middle of a very spirited re-telling of how the entire girl’s volleyball team of a nearby highschool had ended up creating havoc at the izakaya showing up the same day a small company decided to treat all their staff to dinner there, just eyes him dubiously. “I don’t know if you’d call the head chef cussing everyone out while keeping twelve different orders straight in your head and figuring out how to fit fifty people in a twenty seater diner exciting .”

 

Kaiser laughs. Isagi observes, not for the first time, that he has a really nice laugh – his shoulders shake with it, and the corners of his eyes crinkle, softening out the perfect edge of his red eyeliner. It feels…odd, sometimes, more familiar than it is, in a way Isagi can’t pin down. “I mean, okay, putting aside the brutal workflow… it just sounds like you enjoy being around the people. Or…,” Kaiser tips his head thoughtfully at him, and maybe it’s just how blue his eyes are that make Isagi feel so completely seen through, “it’s that you enjoy being among them.”

 

Isagi thinks about it later that day, during his shift. Finds himself paying attention to the things he’s used to noticing without noticing. The way an elderly couple would exchange the bits of their dishes that the other person likes better without speaking, or how highschool friends come in hands clasped the way Bachira clings to him to this day. The crackle of energy and tuned-high spirits the group just coming back from a football match bring into the room, buzzing as they relive their moments on the field and getting indulgent with their orders to celebrate or commiserate. Families that come in once in a while as a break from eating at home and navigating menus for kids and spouses squabbling over what they should and should not be putting in their bellies, ‘ Honey, you KNOW the doctor said to cut out the salt’ - ‘But how am I supposed to eat that WITHOUT salt?’ 

 

And he realises, for however much he hates being nagged at by his manager, and the stress of the dinner service… that he actually does . Like being around people. It’s brief moments like this, he thinks, that people’s lives intersect, and their stories overlap, and he gets a tiny window into their lives - what makes these people tick, what makes them human. 

 

What makes people, just…extraordinary, everyday people, worth caring for, even if he’d never know them all personally, and some not for more than a few fleeting moments as ships passing each other by.  

 

He thinks about it all the more when he walks to work and passes by the shuttered storefront of the liquor shop, and wonders how the old grandpa is doing. 

 

If anything, he thinks, he clings to it more, these days - his time in the chaos of the diner and the calm of the library, briefly connected to people as just people, being their natural, human selves. 

 

As though he needs it, to balance out the law firm internship. Where, every day, he quickly grows more and more disillusioned about the function of the law in the first place. Where people who need the protection can’t afford it, and people who can buy off the best lawyers to glibly sweep their offences under the rug, with what these professionals call impartiality, walk in with their heads held high. 

 

He finds himself stumbling as he tries explaining this to Kaiser, afterwards - getting self-conscious at how corny it sounds as he attempts to put it into words. But Kaiser just gives him a long, considering look, before gently shaking his head and murmuring something Isagi can’t hear, all the way across from his balcony.

“Sorry?” Isagi asks, sheepish now and regretting saying anything. 

 

“I was just saying,” Kaiser tells him, louder, a smile that looks as knowing as it is unreadable playing at one corner of his mouth, “that you’re a good person.”

 

Isagi’s heard that before. 

 

He’s such a good boy, his mother would gush, chatting to her circle of other mums clustered together, waiting for their kids to come out after classes when Isagi had still been the age he held his mother’s hand to school. 

 

A sweet boy, attentive to his classmates and always polite and respectful with his teachers, the sort of feedback that would come printed in his end-of-semester reports in some configuration of those words, throughout the years.

 

Idiot goody-two-shoes, is what his friends sometimes call him, because he’s gone a mile too far, to be helpful. 

 

And that masked nuisance who seems to have inexplicably disappeared from Isagi’s periphery when before he was constantly darting around the edges of it… “Bleeding heart”, he had called him. 

 

That stupid fucking masked menace, who Isagi hasn’t seen stalking around him of late, but seems to hover nonetheless, in the fringes of his mind. In question marks and thoughts that go nowhere as the headlines turn the cycle and latch on to the newest piece of sensationalism they’ve caught to milk for all its worth.

 

A good person. 

 

Isagi doesn’t know if that’s true . 

 

What does it mean to be ‘good’? Helping old ladies cross the street, and always saying please and thank you, and being mindful of the people around him - were those the sorts of attributes that made one morally correct? 

 

What did it mean, to be good ? What sort of responsibility came with that adjective? What tipped you toward or away from being ‘good’?

 

The grandpa at the liquor store, Isagi thinks, is good. His wrinkled little face spoke of hundreds of thousands of smiles that have left traces behind. Beloved by the neighbourhood, by all these people whose lives have crisscrossed at that specific point at some time, at that liquor store and the dimply little man cracking jokes with a wheezy little laugh contagious enough that you’d leave with some of it falling out of your own mouth. People coming together and carrying away a tiny fraction of each other, fitted into the larger mosaic of their own selves, so much so that when misfortune fell upon that friendly, sweet old man, there were enough people around to feel that pang of remorse and sympathy for him from within themselves. Enough that there’d been talks, efforts, to raise some money, whatever they can, just to help the shop stay afloat, help ends meet. 

 

That, Isagi thinks, is collective good. Coming together to make a difference, stacking one action on top of another until it multiplied and became big enough to make a change. Even if it was a small change. Even if it wasn’t enough -

 

Certainly not enough to fill up a gym bag with brand new bank notes, in cash.

 

Isagi doesn’t know where that money could have come from. If he’s being honest, he’s actively kept himself from trying to think about it. What does it mean, to be good? What does it mean to acquire a vast sum of cash that you have to hide inside a dumpster and retrieve in the dead of the night, and what does it mean that your store that has been around for thirty odd years closes down overnight, and that people say, in the way news makes its way through that intersecting thoroughfare of people who know people who know people, that the liquor store owner and his son are now in the countryside, the old ancestral home that someone thinks they vaguely recollect him mentioning once or twice, that no one really knows the location of? 

 

All he knows, though, as he passes by in front of the shop, steel shutters locked out front, is that he feels relieved. Glad, like, probably, everyone else talking in whispers and stolen asides about how it seems the grandpa posted for bail not too long ago, and the case was dropped not long after that, and no one knows how, but plenty can make guesses. 

 

So maybe it doesn’t matter. What ‘good’ really means. Whether the means by which the old man saved his family was what would fall under a neat definition of ‘good’, or whether Isagi, who’d somehow become complicit in that act, witnessing something he wasn’t meant to and keeping it a secret, had done a ‘good’ thing. 

 

Because, maybe, nothing has done a better job completely dismantling Isagi’s concept of these definitions as cleanly as trying to be good. Trying to do the right thing.

 

His social service degree, his internship at a law firm. The theory printed in all his textbooks and debated to death blown apart the second a client with the natural advantage of money and influence and power walked through the doors. A rigid legal system with its archaic tenets sometimes failing to do what it was made to do, in the name of impartiality - endangering the vulnerable, safeguarding the unworthy. 

 

It’s come up, in a weird and roundabout way, with Rin of all people.

 

“Just quit.”

 

“I can’t just quit, ” Isagi argues back, “It’s a mandatory internship, I have to finish this if I want to get the credits, and I need the credits if I want to graduate.”

 

Rin snorts. They’re in Isagi’s tiny kitchenette the morning after he’d stayed over, and Rin has just hip checked Isagi out of the way from in front of the sink, which in Rin-speak (Rin…non-speak?) is probably his way of saying thank you for the food. Isagi dries up the dishes as Rin washes them, and he vaguely thinks it’s nice to have company over in a space he tends to spend most of his time alone in. 

 

“You wanted to work at that firm because you wanted to, what was it again? Make a difference?” His imitation of Isagi’s voice, squeaky and childlike, makes him swat at the taller guy with his dishrag, disgruntled and feeling foolish because those are definitely words a past version of him had said out loud, “If it’s not what it’s cut out to be, and you’re not doing what you wanted, either do something about it or quit bitching.”

 

“What do you want me to do? It’s a literal law firm, if I step out of line they could probably sue me. ”

 

“And if you don’t do something, how is it any different than being part of this problem you’ve been dying to solve? How is working yourself to the bone to be part of that system helping?” Rin is harsh, and Isagi can feel the frustration welling up from within him, not because Rin’s words are hurtful, but because he’s right . No one is quite as brutally honest with him as Rin is, but that’s his own brand of caring - Isagi knows this, because after a while in that strained silence, he hears Rin mutter, “Didn’t take you to be lukewarm.” 

 

So, yeah, it’s been getting to him.The feared futility of everything he’s trying to do, how powerless he feels in the very institutions that are supposed to equip him with the tools he needs to do something. It’s been getting to him for a while. For a long, long time. 

 

And maybe, the appearance of this…guy, this faceless manifestation of the mass of grey between the black and white print of his law texts, had been the catalyst to send him towards his breaking point. 

 

It’s another of those nights that he is dragging his feet home. 

 

He’s so tired - exhausted down to his bones, and worn so thin by it that he thinks he’s just barely holding together from the emotional toll of the day. 

 

Just that afternoon, he’d had his supervisor at his internship chew him out. And as a twisted form of powerplay, been forced to work at the office overtime, sorting through outdated, excessive, unnecessary paperwork, knowing his efforts were pointless, knowing that more than the paperwork, this was punishment.

 

For disrespecting a valuable client.

 

A valuable client whose daughter is a violent bully and abuser.

 

But bullies and abusers don’t have the sorts of tells that label them as what they are. Isagi learns it in the sort of way the real world can startle you when it jumps out of the constraints of your phone screen into actual, tangible existence in front of you. Unlike North Ward’s gritty downtown where people tend to wear their offences as badges almost as protection, as warning, when the lights go down, Isagi has come to realise that the criminals that walk through the law firm’s spotless lobby during office hours wear impeccably tailored designer outfits and expensive perfume instead. They smile at you as you hold the door open for them, and thank you politely for the water you bring them. 

 

And maybe, he thinks, as he starts towards the network of side streets that would take him home, and into the numbing grip of sleep… maybe they also dress in skin-tight suits and masks and stupid cloaks, with the power to make a difference, and making the choice not to. 

 

“Darling…,” he hears that robotic voice chirp, jaunty and familiar, for the first time in a while , “Fancy seeing you out here.” 

 

And Isagi had just felt himself…crack.

 

“I don’t have time for this,” he’d muttered, first, feeling the undertow surging beneath his skin. The last place he’d wanted to have a breakdown is here - in this dreary, nondescript back alley, indistinguishable from the dozens criss-crossing through downtown, and in front of him. His footsteps had picked up as he’d attempted to just side-step him, head down, heart in his throat.

 

An arm had shot out to stop him in his tracks. 

 

“Wouldn’t go that way if I were you,” is what the mechanical rasp tells him. “There’s trouble there.”

 

The ugly, upsetting feeling that had been brewing in his chest, scalds as it starts to singe its way up his chest, into his throat. Stinging in his sinuses. 

 

“...would you work for an abuser?”

 

There’d been a distinct pause that told Isagi how left-field his question was, one that seems to stretch itself out as Isagi himself takes stock of what he’d just said, before he hears, his eyes still trained down at the ground and seeing nothing, “What?”

 

“I said, would you accept a job from an abuser?” Isagi repeats, louder, and he can’t help the way his voice cracks - can’t tamp down the way the heat of it bubbles out now that the dam’s broken. He thinks about the desperate, begging letters of the victim, a first-year college student who had moved into the city from the countryside, had sent the firm - emails, at first, to the general inquiries address that kept getting wiped off the server, and then physical letters, with printed photographs of proof, that he himself had opened as part of the regular mail before his supervisor had snatched it out of his hands and told him to forget what he just read if he knew what was good for him. “If you knew someone was physically and emotionally hurting others, but they were fucking rolling in money and could pay to cover it up, or save themselves from the consequences, would you… would you still work for them to keep them safe?”

 

The words chafe on their way out, leave him feeling raw inside, and the shame of it - of coming apart like this, of his rage boiling over until he can’t hold it in like this, his utter helplessness to do anything about it, exposed in front of a man who he can’t see through at all, feeds into the trip-wire tightening in his gut. He feels ready to blow.

 

“Hey,” it’s a quiet thing, a crackling and a fizzling out, “are you - ”

 

Isagi tries to twist his face away when those gloved hands find their way to his chin again, trying to lift it up.

 

“Just answer my question,” Isagi grits out. If he’s going to shatter here, he may as well at least prick him while he does one last time before he purges this from his life. His skin feels tight with the need to channel this burning anger of his somewhere, this awful sense of helplessness to do anything, anything at all, witnessing good people get hurt and finding himself stuck in the system that enables it, that was supposed to help Isagi do the right thing, the right way. 

 

“You refuse to help victims right in front of your eyes because you’re not being paid for it - so do you accept payment to keep people as victims as well?”

 

He’d been so focused on keeping his own breathing from tripping out of control that it’d taken him a while to notice how tense the person in his space was. For the first time that evening, Isagi blinks away the mist gathering in his eyes to look up at him.

 

The Emperor stares back down at Isagi, and although all he can see are the black and silver of his contacts, there’s something in them - something that feels too open in comparison to how perfectly masked everything else about him is. The helmet glints as he throws a look over his shoulder, urgent, and then back down at Isagi, and Isagi remembers his earlier warning. He’s on a job. 

 

“Forget it,” he hears himself say distantly, starting to back away. “I’ll take a different route out so you can just -”

 

“Wait. Hey - Yo -” A hand around his wrist stops him again, and Isagi has already reached into his pocket for the pepper spray Bachira insists he carry with him because if he’s going to make sure he never sees this glorified criminal sellout again he might as well blind him some in remembrance of their last meeting - but before he can enact his plan, he hears the Emperor let out an agitated Tsk, and then an arm is wrapped tight around his waist and Isagi finds himself yanked up and into the air for the second time. 

 

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? ” Isagi’s growling even with his knees buckling, a graceless landing compared to the light click of heels with which the Emperor stabilises them on the fire escape of an apartment side wall. The fish hook pull behind his gut at having his bearings thrown off has him dizzy - he clutches on to the Emperor’s forearms for balance, and then, getting back into himself, grabs at the balustrades instead.

 

“Did something happen?” It’s an urgent query, and there are hands at his face again, and Isagi loses some of the words that he’d been about to throw at him. 

 

Eyes, the only part of him bare to Isagi, the part of him that’s leaving Isagi feeling flayed open and vulnerable in a way he hates, bore into his. 

 

“It’s none of your business,” Isagi tells him through his teeth. “Let go of me so I can get the fuck out of here before you have to strangle someone else for extortion money -”

 

Isagi can hear the inhale of air the Emperor takes through the filter of his voice changer.

 

“No.”

 

Isagi thinks he can feel his own eyes bugging out of his head in disbelief. “Are you…are you going to hold me hostage up here right now?”

 

He sees the fucker roll his eyes at him. 

 

“The answer to your question is no. I wouldn’t accept a job from someone I know is a violent abuser.”

 

Isagi says nothing. The hand he has braced against the rusting metal rail of the fire-escape is cold and coarse under his palm. 

 

“And no, I don’t take jobs that let fuckers like that get away with that shit, either. Now, tell me…,” this time Isagi doesn’t manage to react in time to the pull of fingers against his jaw, angling his face up for those eyes. “Did something happen?”

 

There’s an edge to that question that immediately has Isagi’s nerves on alert. He scans what little he can see of the Emperor, and feels the urge to shrink away at how it’s barely anything, against how exposed he feels. 

 

“It doesn’t matter,” he repeats, slower and shivery now. Like the heat of the moment has peaked, a fever broken, and with it working out of his system, all Isagi feels is the exhaustion - the shame, of breaking down like this, the shame of his own helplessness - start to crash down on him. 

 

“You’re upset.” The hands against his face are large, cupping his cheeks in a grasp that feels firm but alien. There’s warmth, but not the kind from skin against skin - the leather is a barrier, as synthetic as the voice, the smooth opaque surface of the mask. A film over everything that Isagi could hold on to and trace to find the person underneath, and any truth in any of the things he says. 

 

“Don’t you have work to do?” Isagi asks dully - clasps both his hands around the wrists braced against his face, yanking them off. 

 

Or trying to, because he doesn’t get far before his own wrists are caught in a tight grasp, and he’s being stared down. 

 

“I’m telling you the truth, you know.”

 

Isagi’s heart thumps, once, dull and hard.

 

He should insist on being let down. He should shut this down once and for all. 

 

He should really, really stop thinking about every act of kindness this man he barely knows has chosen, when it comes to him. 

 

“Why should I believe you?” is what he hears himself ask, in a hush. 

 

There’s a breeze, whispering through the laneway, gently rattling windows in their panes. Isagi should be more concerned about the fact that they are suspended up the rear of a building, and someone could look outside and see them. The Emperor seems to register the same thought, because suddenly he’s being turned around with his back to the cool brick next to a window’s edge, crowded in until, he thinks, they’d both just melt into the shadows of the unlit side-street to the eye of an unaware observer.

 

A hand returns to the side of his face and Isagi feels his gut twist at how tender the touch feels, even though its warmth can’t reach him all the way. 

 

“Because it’s important to me.” 

 

“What?”

 

“It’s important to me that you believe me,” the words are spoken so softly that they’re barely intelligible through the modulator, but Isagi is straining hard to be able to hear them. He’s so close that Isagi feels the heat coming off of him like a blanket, wrapping around him. 

 

As the breeze kicks up again, Isagi wonders if he’s imagining the scent of roses, carrying in the wind. 

 

“Tell me who’s upset you.”

 

There are so many questions Isagi has. So many whys , that demand to dig through this screen that keeps him from understanding this person - because this is a person, and their lives have overlapped enough times that Isagi doesn’t know where to begin untangling them, to claw through until he hits something that feels real. 

 

He doesn’t have time to sort through any of that, though, because his ears, straining as they are to pick up the slightest shift in his breathing, catches what is undoubtedly the muted crackle of a radio. 

 

There’s garbled words, too faint, only audible because of how close they are - Isagi can’t make them out, the syllables running into each other and disappearing in static, sounding like an alien language. But they’re definitely words, and Isagi looks up sharply at the two eyeholes, can see through them that the Emperor knows Isagi’d just heard that too. 

 

There’s the briefest of pauses where neither of them seem to breathe, and then Isagi swears the warped sound he hears next is a groan. 

 

“Eight,” Isagi hears the guy say, touching something to the side of his headgear, and knows he’s not talking to him, “run interference. Get me another five minutes.” 

 

Another pause, and then a crackly “Roger that” that Isagi hears loud and clear.

 

“There’s more of you,” Isagi mumbles, his shock stark in his own voice, eyes wide as he stares.

 

He startles when a palm braces itself hard against the wall next to him, caging him in, and next thing he knows he’s got this giant hulking mass of a person slumping over him. 

 

“You are such a handful, you know that?” The words grumble out of the speaker and this close, Isagi wonders whether he could hear his actual voice, whether he could make the sudden loud thudding of his heartbeat go down enough to listen for it clearer. 

 

“I’m going to drop you off down the block and you’re going to go straight home, understand?” the Emperor rasps, and Isagi wants to protest being ordered around but his tongue feels too heavy in his mouth when the man’s visor is so close his nose is almost touching its smooth surface. Eyes hold his, unblinking. “But before that, let me make something clear to you, angel.” 

 

Those hands again, tipping up his head, cradling his face delicately.

 

“You’re important to me. And I might not always tell you the truth, but I have never lied to you.”

 

---

 

Isagi is reeling, still, from that entire…thing, that’d just happened, that’s left his stomach in knots, his head more confused than ever, when he gets to his apartment building. He goes through the motions. Takes a shower. Eats some of the leftovers in his fridge. Tries to sleep. Can’t. Thinks about vacuuming his entire living space just to have something to do to numb his thoughts, and remembers that it’s the dead of night and he doesn’t want his neighbours coming after him. 

 

An hour and a half later sees him hauling his laundry downstairs to the basement, and fifteen minutes into that, he’s startled out of the unseeing stupor he’d fallen into, watching his clothes spin, by a presence approaching the door. He turns in his chair just as it opens, and Kaiser stands across the threshold, a bundle of clothes held in one arm. 

 

He didn’t bring his laundry basket today, Isagi thinks, wondering if he was in a hurry to get those clothes washed or something, as Kaiser says, “You heard me coming over the sound of the washing machine?”

 

“Uh -,” Isagi blinks. 

 

“It’s crazy how you do that,” Kaiser walks over, gives him a smile, and tosses his clothes into the other empty machine, getting it rolling. Isagi is still blinking up at him, puzzled, when he pulls up the seat next to Isagi’s and drops down into it. He looks tired and a little out of breath, like he’d taken the stairs today - he’s missing his red eyeliner, too. “How was work?”

 

The weight of his day comes crashing over him in the next instant, and it must show on his face, because Kaiser hums, softly, “Not good?”

 

“No, not really.”

 

“Wanna talk about it?”

 

Isagi shakes his head, watches the clothes spin until he starts to get dizzy.

 

There’s a commiserating hum, and it feels a little awkward. A little strained, and Isagi feels bad, because this man has been nothing but nice to him, and Isagi’s head is just so full and he’s so tired he can’t hit the buttons to do social interactions properly, and then suddenly, there’s a hand with a crown tattoo filling up his vision, holding something up in front of him.

 

“Snack?”

 

It’s a chocolate bar. Isagi tries to decline, polite, but Kaiser insists, and Isagi eventually concedes, breaking the bar in half so they can share.

 

And even as his dopamine receptors tingle with the warm taste of cocoa on his tongue, his neighbour sitting right beside him in this slightly humid space, the mingling scents of fabric softeners and something that smells familiarly floral clouding his senses, his mind is far away.

 

Specifically, on a balustrade several streets away, and the hooded figure who might still be somewhere around it. 

 

Now

 

Thunder rumbles overhead as Isagi stands his ground, shivering under the downpour. 

 

“A favour.” 

 

“Yes,” Isagi says through almost chattering teeth - it’s not the cold, he thinks, rainwater starting to cling to his eyelashes. It’s his nerves. It’s the weight of what he’s about to do. “I…don’t think I can afford what you usually get paid, but -”

 

“Angel,” the robotic voice sounds somehow more eerie like this, muffled by the hiss and sizzle of rain all around them. Isagi can see him less as a figure and more as the afterimage he leaves in the downpower, where the pouring droplets meet solid mass on their way down. “What is this about?”

 

Isagi reaches inside his jacket, hands shaking. These may be the last few seconds he has before he has the chance to turn back. 

 

He already knows, though, that he won’t. Knows from the hours and hours this has gnawed him up from the inside, that this moment is little different from running directly into a mugging, or a convenience store hold-up. That one way or another, he thinks, as he pulls out a plastic folder of photocopied papers, he would have ended up here, or somewhere else, some how, doing something potentially extremely stupid - because he can’t stand by and let what’s happening happen. 

 

“I need your help,” Isagi hears himself say as though from somewhere outside his body, the rain swallowing his words up - his caped companion is standing right inside of his space, leaned toward him to hear. “To expose an heiress who’s getting away with violent physical abuse.”

He’s soaked to his skin now, shaking as his clothes weigh down on his frame as they absorb the pouring rain, when he sees the Emperor’s shoulders begin to shake. 

 

He’s laughing at him. Anxiety and panic, desperation and nerves, roll together and churn in Isagi’s stomach, the next clap of thunder booming through his bones. 

 

“I…I know I can’t pay you what your usual clients do, but I -” wet leather makes contact with Isagi’s cool cheek, and the words wick off Isagi’s tongue when a thumb just barely presses down against his mouth. 

 

“You could get into trouble for this. These are from work, yes?” Another gloved hand, tapping at the plastic folder.

 

The Emperor could already know so much more about Isagi than Isagi can imagine, or he could just be making a very smart guess. It doesn’t matter. Isagi’s out on a limb now. 

 

“I don’t care,” Isagi says, urgently, “I know that she’s guilty, and if she doesn’t get exposed, she’s going to get away with it, and the victim will… the victim will…”

 

There’d been other letters at work. His supervisor swipes them away before Isagi can open them as part of the day’s incoming mail, invitations to speak at universities, sponsorship requests for corporate events, news digests for legal professionals.

 

But the idea had baked itself into Isagi’s head. And in a moment of daring - or maybe pure stupid, recklessness - when his supervisor had been out for lunch, he’d gone into his office. Tidied up his desk, knowing there was a camera in here. ‘Accidentally’ knocked some of the paperwork over. And snatched the envelopes, tucking them inside his jacket, before straightening and returning the rest of the documents in a neat, orderly pile on the desk. 

 

He’d returned the envelope to the desk after making copies of it, sneaking it in with the evening newspaper.

 

The entire time, he’d been so tense he was nauseous with it. Isagi has put himself in some god-awful situations before, situations where he could have gotten badly hurt, or worse. But somehow, knowing that he’s playing with open fire right now, playing with the sort of terrifying power money and influence can have, the horrible things they can do to people who challenge their entitlement and privilege without anyone ever even finding out… Isagi had felt as afraid for his life - even more, maybe - than when he had a biker gang chasing him down. At the very least, he knew what they would do to him if they caught him. The sorts of thugs he’s pitting himself against right now… are formidable, vicious, dangerous in a completely different way.

 

The Emperor echoes his sentiments.

 

“This is a very risky thing you’ve set out to do, darling.”

 

“I know.”

 

“And you’re asking me, even though you hate my methods. You’re desperate.”

 

“I am.”

 

“If they find out, they’re going to ruin your life.” 

 

“I know.”

 

“What makes you think I won’t take this and go right to this rich little heiress of yours?” the Emperor rumbles, his thumb stroking cold streaks of water away from where they gather, at Isagi’s cupid’s bow. “I’m sure she’d be much better able to pay my asking price than you could in three lifetimes.”

 

Isagi knows this. He knows all of it. He has mapped every possible scenario, thought of every single outcome. Going to the police, who are already in the mother’s pocket. Going to the journalists, and having his connection to leaking the news getting discovered - losing the internship and potentially a lot, lot more. He could get kicked out of school, get slapped with a lawsuit. Which doesn’t even begin to capture the extent of cruelty the little princess sitting pretty under her parent’s protection and wealth is capable of, the things Isagi’s read in those letters. 

 

“This is the only option I have,” Isagi tells the Emperor, his hand coming up and holding on to the wrist at his face. He blinks the rain out of his eyes, refuses to look away from the barely there glints of light he can make out in the eye-holes of his headwear. He’s made up his mind - whatever the consequences will be, he accepts them, because not doing anything is so much worse. Steeling himself, gritting his teeth, he says, “Trusting you is the only option I have.”

 

For a moment, it’s just this - just them, carved out of the world by the heavy hush of rain obscuring the rooftop, the twinkling lights below, anything that exists beyond them, out of sight. 

 

And then - 

 

“Oh, angel,” the pad of a gloved finger, tracing the shape of his lips, “How could I say no when you look at me like that?”

 

This, Isagi thinks, is how he comes to sell his soul to the devil. 

Notes:

if i had a cent for every time i had a climactic kiis scene happen in the rain i'd have two cents

 

rin is unintentionally so hilarious to me - sometimes i just read his egoist bible entry when i'm in a bad mood coz like wdym he likes owls, horror media, and wants to spend his last day on earth fighting a man?? he's just like me FORREAL

(i read isagi's egoist bible entry to die from cuteness aggression this boy is so sweet and pure when he's not verbally scarring people for life)

the last ch is going to take a bit, since i am exceptionally bad at the work-life balance thing ;-; i will try my best, thank you for reading, and for your patience, i hope it's not a total trainwreck x

Chapter 3

Notes:

1) so after weeks of denial i had to change the ch count from 3 to 4 because kaiser wouldn't stop flirting long enough for the plot to happen and isagi wouldn't stop having a crisis over it. i'm so sorry.

2) i am horrified by how long this update took and even more horrified by the length of it, i'm so sorry AGAIN. usually, i work on fics after work and during the weekends, but for the past several weeks i've been doing a lot of overtime, and work over weekends, and have had some general upsetting life stuff happening which made focusing and being kind to myself and anything i could do creatively near impossible. if you have been waiting on this, i am so very sorry for the time it took to update and i hope that you won't be disappointed

3) thank you so much for the lovely words and acts of support across this profile i started just this year. i have been so bad at responding and i promise i will try my best to get back to everyone, but coming back to lovely feedback here for a space that's become a little creative and cathartic outlet has been such a source of positivity in an otherwise very rough late march-early april. thank you <3

Now

 

“Sloppy,” Isagi comments as he watches the Emperor complete a less than perfect landing a few feet away. 

 

He’d had to raise his voice, calling over the low whistle of the wind sweeping over the rooftop today, the creak of the mesh wiring fringing it masking the usual sound of the cable wire pulling taut that signals these arrivals. He hears the answering snort at his words loud and clear, nonetheless.

 

“You try to stick the landing every single time,” the Emperor approaches where Isagi is sitting with his customary saunter, the wind pulling and tugging at the cloak behind him and adding to the sense of drama Isagi has started to realise clings to this man. He wouldn’t be surprised if the innate theatrics were a deliberate part of his outfit’s design - opens his mouth to ask, but feels the words dissolve into nothing when the Emperor folds himself into the space beside Isagi with a barely audible grunt. “And after I came all this way to see you, too.”

 

Isagi doesn’t speak right away - buys himself some time taking a bite out of one of the curry buns he’s brought up to the rooftop with a half-mind that they might taste better up here, where it’s quieter and he has the room to breathe. It’s much earlier in the evening than the other times he’s found himself up here, the diner still busy and thrumming with life a few layers of brick and concrete beneath his feet. In another thirty minutes, he’ll have to go back downstairs before they start missing him, his shift still ongoing, the quick break for an early dinner over. It’s reckless, he knows it’s reckless, to come up here during rush hour and toy with the risk that someone will come looking for him but -

 

“Is it even safe?” Isagi wonders out loud, “To go propelling yourself everywhere like that? What if your dumb grapple gun breaks?”

 

Another snort, quieter this time. The two of them are sitting with their backs against the bricked-up perimeter of the rooftop. There’s so much space on either side of Isagi, and yet, he’s conscious of the friction of the man’s cape against the bare skin of his forearm. “Only a fucking amateur would be swinging around without taking inventory of their gear in the first place.”

 

“You’re speaking like there’s some kind of industry standard for masked men running loose or something,” Isagi mutters, and keeps to himself the forum posts he’s got crowding his browser bookmarks, engineers and self-proclaimed weapons specialists theorising the potential components of a functional grapple gun, the physics of it, where, potentially, you might get something like this commissioned. The general bafflement over how gear like this has even managed to work this often without at least one documented accident or incident is a shared concern across many of these posts.

 

“Well, there could be an industry standard, if you’d just -”

 

“ Stop with the recruitment spiel.”

 

A mechanical sigh. “Why must you be so difficult? We’ve already established how much easier we could make each other’s lives - and besides, I’ve already figured out what our duo name would be.”

 

Isagi chokes on nothing. “Oh my God , you -”

 

There’s a shoulder, bumping into his, a move light and playful enough that it knocks the rest of his words out of him. “I’d tell you, but since you’re so good at puzzling things together, I’ll let you figure it out yourself. I’ll be nice and give you a keyword, though -”

 

“Did you come up here to harass me with riddles?” Isagi cuts him off, hasty, because this is not the discussion he wants to be having right now, not with the less-than-clear state of his own mind these days and how successfully the Emperor keeps getting inside his head and under his skin. It terrifies him that he is not more terrified by the idea that he keeps letting him. “I was just minding my business, having a nice break -”

 

“That little tsundere act of yours is adorable, angel,” another bump of shoulders together, and another sigh - Isagi keeps still, somehow conscious of every microsecond of the figure beside him leaning a little more soundly against the half-wall at their backs. “If you didn’t want to see me, you wouldn’t be up here so often.”

 

Even with the brightly lit storefronts and lampposts a couple floors below at street-level, it’s still so dark that Isagi can’t make out any of the words of the unlit rooftop billboards nearby. He hopes that it’s dark enough to hide the rush of heat and colour he can feel burst up in his face at that comment.

 

“You’re too full of yourself,” he hopes he’s coming off as haughty. “I’m still on the clock and I’m only here for some peace and quiet until I have to go back downstairs.”

 

“Oh yeah? You seem to have become quite suddenly attached to this place over the span of a week then, since you’ve been up here every day since -”

 

“Stop right there, you absolute creep, have you been stalking me?!”

 

“It doesn’t count as stalking if you want to be found, darling.”

 

Isagi considers shoving his still slightly steaming curry bun, heated up in the diner’s microwave before he brought it up here, into the eyeholes of the mask currently inches away from his own face. He only barely manages to hold off, he tells himself, because that would be a waste of a completely good and delicious curry bun. 

 

“I realised this place has a nice view and no one else comes up here and I can take a breather without anyone screaming about egg fried rice or trying to get me on drinks duty even though my break hours aren’t done,” Isagi rattles off almost in one breath, aware of how defensive he sounds and taking a mutinous bite out of a second curry bun to cover for it, “so feel free to leave me alone when you’re on your rooftop parkour escapades. And also the eyeholes in your mask are a glaring safety hazard.”

 

“We’ll get back to why I know you don’t mean that in a second, but - what?”

 

Huffing, Isagi takes a belligerent swig at the banana milk he’d also brought up to wash down his food. “Anyone knows that the eye is one of the most vulnerable parts of the body, and somehow you’re out there calling yourself a pro without any eye protection,” he rolls his own eyes as he says this, “You know how close I’ve gotten to pepper-spraying you, multiple times? Like I don’t care how high-grade your grapple gun is, it’s not like you’d be able to get anywhere if you can’t see .”

 

It aggravates Isagi that his tirade only seems to have amused the Emperor - even without turning around, he can feel the shake of his shoulders. He doesn’t even really think about it before shoving at the guy, with little enough force that he doesn’t think too much about how solid that impact was and how it budged nothing. 

 

“Glad legitimate safety concerns are so funny to you,” Isagi is grumbling, two grouchy swigs of banana milk later. “But what else can I expect from someone whose preferred mode of transport is ziplining and yet he wears a cape as part of his stupid uniform, like, have you never seen The Incredibles? Doesn’t that thing snag on shit all the time? What if it, I don’t know, caught fire, or -”

 

It takes Isagi a second to decipher that the sound that makes him interrupt himself this time is a laugh. 

 

An outloud, real-life laugh.

 

Filtered through a voice modulator, crackling like audio over a bad radio signal, but unmistakably a loud bark of laughter, so obvious and startling that Isagi can’t catch in time the thought that he’d like to hear it clearly for himself, before it slips past.

 

It’s a blessing and a curse that he doesn’t get to sit with that for very long. 

 

“You’re so cute when you worry, angel,” Isagi hates that he’d been expecting the hand at his jaw, coaxing his face to look to the side, and he thinks for the umpteenth time in the last few weeks that he really must have lost his mind, allowing himself to come to this - allowing his attention to be steered to his side with ever so slight a touch to his face. 

 

“The only one I’m worrying about is whichever poor unfortunate soul might be under you when you fall because your grapple gun broke or your cape got caught on a utility pole.” 

 

“I didn’t hear you complaining about the cape when you were snuggling under it -”

 

“I didn’t snuggle -”

 

“You looked so adorable, too,” a sigh, and a posture more relaxed than Isagi is used to seeing, a bizarre anomaly within the nature of their encounters - almost slumped back against the wall, one leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee with an arm resting loosely on the kneecap. “It’s okay, angel. I know you care.”

 

And as though he’s anticipating Isagi’s loud, spluttering protests, “And you know I care, too.” 

He can feel the eyes on him even before he moves to properly look. They draw him in with the snap of magnets and hold. 

 

“Don’t you?”

 

Then

 

“Okay,” Isagi hushes, more to himself than to the man in front of him. 

 

“ Okay, ” he repeats, louder. As though trying to be heard over the rain coming down so hard around them that Isagi can barely see a foot away from where they stand. As though trying to orient himself into the reality where his insane request to this equally insane individual is actually being entertained. He’d barely allowed himself to think this far ahead. “So now…what?”

 

“Now,” Isagi can’t help but start as the Emperor swoops to his side, and suddenly there’s an arm wrapping around his shoulders, steering him towards the doorway leading up to the roof, “we decide on our terms.”

 

Just inside the doorway, the thundering rhythm of the rain outside softens ever so slightly - enough, for Isagi to pick out the crazed thumping of his own heartbeat, the panicked ringing in his head louder and clearer now that it’s not being swallowed by the downpour outside. He doesn’t have time to dwell on any of these things, though, because between one moment and the next, he’s watching with complete bewilderment the Emperor smoothly unclip his cloak off his back, and then just as smoothly, send it fluttering through the stairwell as he swings it to drape around him.

 

“What are you doing?!” Isagi stutters, even as the Emperor places both his hands on Isagi’s shoulders and pushes him firmly downwards until he’s seated on the top step of the stairway.

 

He’s still staring at him, completely dumbfounded, as the Emperor neatly folds himself down into the space beside him. It’s a tight fit - the stairway is narrow, and Isagi can’t help but keep shooting uneasy looks in the direction of the turn that leads to the second set of steps, which would give directly on to the passage with the doors leading into the kitchen and out back. People only come up here for the occasional lunch or smoke breaks, and with the rain, it’s unlikely anyone would be passing by, but still - 

 

“You’re completely soaked through,” the Emperor tuts, tugging at the lapels of the cloak and pulling it more snugly around Isagi. Swathed in this sudden warmth, Isagi realises that the inner lining of the cape is not even a little damp - watches droplets rolling off the surface of it instead of sinking through. “And I doubt you’re going to agree if I ask to postpone this discussion until you’ve found a way to get yourself warm and dry. Yes?”

 

Isagi can’t even fathom the idea of having to walk away from this situation without settling matters first. The nerves he’d battled making up his mind to do this had been bad enough - sitting heavy in his gut, corroding through him until he’d felt hollow inside and ready to cave into himself. He doesn’t know how he’d survive, prolonging this stress. 

 

He grumbles a little and avoids looking at the Emperor as he pulls the cloak tighter around himself.

 

The resulting hum is a mechanical purr. “Good boy.” And then, “But let’s make this quick, before you get sick, you little idiot. Though, I must say, waiting in the rain for me is rather romantic.”

 

“Shut up,” Isagi grumbles, ears feeling particularly steamy as he tries to edge away from the Emperor, so close to him that their knees are knocking together, and feels his shoulder blade meet the wall. “How the fuck else was I supposed to find you, it’s not like I can beam a bat signal in the sky -”

 

“What do you think that card I gave you was for, you clown?” Isagi immediately wants to snap at him for the name-calling, but he really must have lost his mind, if even through the voice modulation Isagi thinks it’s starting to sound the same as the endearments. “I know you figured out how to use it.”

 

“Hell no,” Isagi shakes his head furiously, feels the wet strands of his own hair fly at the violence of the motion and cling to the sides of his face. “Go on to your site so you can, what? Track down where I study or live?”

 

A sound that’s most definitely a snort. “Darling, I don’t need to mine your browsing data to figure out where you live. If I want to find something out, I have plenty of ways to do it. And you know that, too. That’s why you’re asking me to help.”

 

The jitters take another tumble in Isagi’s stomach - he squirms, under the surprising heft of the cloak, wearing it as awkwardly as he wears this bizarre situation he’s found himself in. “About that… aren’t we… supposed to be talking about, um, the terms?”

 

The Emperor lets him change the subject, and they do just that. 

 

Isagi answers the questions asked of him feeling half as though he’s in a dream - it certainly feels like it, unchained from logic and reason, removed from time and space like this, in the dim-lit stairway. The rain continues to whisper against the sides of the building, muffling through, as Isagi lays out what he is asking, 

 

Number one, whatever the Emperor chooses to do, it can’t hurt the victim.

 

Number two, there has to be irrefutable, concrete proof against the perpetrator - the crazed bitch who gets her kicks out of hurting helpless people. 

 

More conclusive proof than the letter Isagi’s filched a copy of, along with those pictures of wounds and cuts that have burned themselves into Isagi’s retinas, the horror of them, the cruelty of them. These alone can’t get the girl and her mother behind bars, especially with the police chief vanishing evidence for them, or the university’s chairperson colluding with them to suppress anything or anyone that might expose the truth to the public. 

 

And number three… 

 

“Just…stop them,” the words feel childish as he says them. So simple, so naive. The way he’d see the world in such definites when he was a kid, and looked at police officers and firefighters and paramedics as heroes, as people who were doing the right thing, who were catching the bad guys and saving lives. The cognitive dissonance of what he’s asking and who he’s asking it of makes him cling harder to the hem of the cloak, wrapping himself up in it almost unconsciously, seeking a warmth and safety he’s not known since the blissful ignorance of childhood. 

 

He repeats, “Stop them. Please, just make it so that - they can’t hurt her anymore. I don’t know how, I don’t know if you can… blackmail them, or get something on them that would get the media to kick it open, but… it has to be absolute. It has to be completely absolute in a way that she can’t ever do anything like this. Ever again.”

 

The Emperor has been watching him, knees drawn up closer to his chest because his legs are too long to stretch comfortably over the steps, head tipped as he listens. When Isagi finishes his piece, trailing away almost sheepishly, he asks, “No other terms?”

 

Isagi slowly shakes his head. “N-no.”

 

Straightening, the Emperor pulls up the plastic binder Isagi had handed him earlier. “None for yourself? You’ve done something illegal, angel. Usually, my clients like to frontload their requests with personal safety.” 

 

He’d not thought about that. Isagi blinks. “Uh -”

 

“But of course, you would forget all about that,” without the extra volume of the cloak around him, Isagi can see clearly the way his shoulders hitch as he laughs. They’re broad shoulders, and Isagi wishes he didn’t have it in him to notice the way his torso tapers out into a narrow waist and muscled thighs without the cape obscuring it from view. 

 

“It - it comes with the territory of none of this getting traced back to the victim,” Isagi defends immediately, turning his body around and resenting the strange fluster that’s crawling under his skin, a constant warmth in his face that he doesn’t want the Emperor to be able to see. “They can’t know that it’s her letters that were the lead, they can’t know… they’ve threatened her family, her younger siblings, her education, her reputation, they’ve threatened to ruin that girl’s life whenever she’s tried to go to the cops or go public. Whatever happens, they can’t have the chance to get back at her.”

 

“They won’t,” the Emperor says, and Isagi thinks it sounds like a promise. What is wrong with him? When did he start attributing traits to this blank canvas of a man? 

 

He keeps his eyes fixed to the bend of the stairwell, knowing his own face is an open book his family and friends read his fibs, or at least the whispers of them, right off of. He doesn’t want to be read through right now, doesn’t want it to be known that he’d almost forgotten to think about his own involvement getting discovered because a part of him had simply accepted that the Emperor wouldn’t let it get discovered.

 

God, maybe he’s right about me. Maybe I am a fucking clown.  

 

“Now then,” the Emperor claps his hands together, the sound muffled from the impact of leather on leather. “Here are my terms. I’ll use whatever methods I see fit to service your conditions. Agreed?”

 

Isagi thinks for a second about the scope “whatever methods” might entail and starts to feel a headache form at his temple. This isn’t the police. This isn’t someone beholden to the law to do things properly - Isagi is here because the proper way isn’t working in the first place. “...as long as no one else gets hurt,” he concedes. He’s probably better off not knowing what these methods are anyway.

 

“Second, you will not try to interfere with my work. I better not catch you anywhere near any of these people.”

 

There’s enough of a scolding tone to this that Isagi feels himself bristle. “I wasn’t going to, anyway!”

 

“Please, you have a nose for trouble and you physically can’t resist meddling. Look at what you’re doing, literally right now.”

 

“ I -”

 

“How did you even find out about the university chairperson? It’s not mentioned in the letters.”

 

Isagi lets himself be sidetracked, because this is important. 

 

“I was looking into the mother, and she’s an alumnus of the school and part of the board,” Isagi tells the Emperor - he pulls out his phone, wakes the screen up as he taps into the burner account he’s logged into, just as an extra measure of security as he crawled through these people’s social media history. “She’s a keynote speaker or guest of honour at multiple events at the university so I wanted to look into it and it looks like she’s very close with the chairperson? And so I was looking into the university’s yearbook from the year she graduated, and they may have been good friends since then, I think they were each other’s bridesmaids when they got married, back in the day and - what? Why are you looking at me like that?”

 

Head still tilted at him, head resting against his gloved palm, the Emperor asks, “Like what?”

 

“Like…,” How does Isagi describe it? He can’t even see his face. But the eyes he feels on him are probing and… familiar, and for a second a strange wave of deja vu sweeps over him. He’s getting to his elastic limit with the stress, he thinks - he’s a hair trigger away from snapping from it. “That… no, never mind. Are you even listening?”

 

“Yes, yes, I’m listening, user number#1noafan .”

 

It takes him a second before he yelps a little self-consciously. “Shut up, ” Isagi scolds, and scrolls until the screen slides past his display name and the adorable chibi Noel Noa profile picture he’d chosen for his private account, centring one of the posts he’d bookmarked instead. 

 

“Anyway… um. Yes. The mum is very close to the chairperson, and the letters don’t mention any of the board but do mention someone on campus that’s looking out for the heiress and possibly threatening her? The girl’s parents are quite public about their involvement with the university, are big private donors, and they specifically are funding this one scholarship for women in STEM from underprivileged families and I’m…” Isagi starts to tap around on his screen, navigating through his bookmarks to pull open a separate post, “99.9 percent sure that the victim is a scholarship holder. I think that’s maybe how they met?”

 

On his phone screen is a photo of something that looks like a gala event. There’s a banner in the background overhead, proclaiming the name of the scholarship fund, the names of the sponsors in large and visible display underneath. A middle-aged couple, in pristine, obviously designer brand clothes, smile benevolently front and centre in the picture, holding one side of a large presentation cheque. 

 

On the other side is a girl. A sweet looking girl, likely no older than Isagi himself. With a kind face, and a kind smile, dressed simply but smartly. There used to be a tag on the photo, with the name visible, but the account seems to have been deactivated. Isagi hasn’t been able to find any trace of her online, even as he swallowed back the feeling of acting like a complete creep as he searched her name, her picture, anything that could give him an inkling of who she was and maybe how to reach her. 

 

But there was nothing. No corresponding name matching the dead link on the social media post of the scholarship’s official webpage, showcasing all the other scholarship recipients just fine. He’s tried, with his limited internet sleuthing experience, to find any archived pages that might have what he’s looking for, and has drawn blank after frustrating blank. It’s like this girl, who Isagi knows to exist, has simply been erased from sight. 

 

Or been forced to erase herself from sight. The letter itself was unsigned, as though a last ditch effort at forethought if it was leaked or discovered by the wrong people, the lack of a name a flimsy buffer against retaliation. Because a lawyer would coach for caution. A lawyer would advise against acting recklessly.

 

And that might have bought them some time, but Isagi knows there’s not much of it remaining. The girl must, too. Isagi can tell the pains she took to write and send these letters, careful enough that her identity is not immediately evident to anyone not involved firsthand in this case. He can sense, too, he thinks, the immense courage it must take to gamble on a risk like this when the odds are so heavily stacked against her, and the desperation that would push a person towards it. 

 

Up until the last second, she’s fighting back, Isagi thinks, and even though he’s absolutely terrified - for her, for himself, taking a leap of faith in the dark where everything and anything could fall out beneath their feet, he has to do something. He has to. 

 

He forgoes self-consciousness as he tells the Emperor all this. He doesn’t care, at this point, if he’s made fun of for it, if he gets called gullible or naive, or has to empty out his savings for even a sliver of help. There’s a desperate enough part of him that’s ready to drag Reo into this, if he has to, what with his friend’s bubbling fascination he’s increasingly having trouble keeping down when it comes to the Emperor, and the bank balance to qualify as his regular clientele. He doesn’t want it to come to that, he doesn’t want to involve the people he cares about in his messes, the mere thought of it makes him feel physically ill - 

 

But if he runs out of options, if there really is no way out…he’ll sell his soul to Mikage Corp if he has to, if he needs to pay back that debt. He’ll -

 

“I can almost see the steam coming out of those cute little ears from how hard you’re thinking,” and Isagi jolts, as a fingertip pokes at the shell of one of those ears. “Don’t look so hopeless, darling. All the hope you need…” the finger at his ear dances a light path down the curve of it, along the line of his jaw, to tap lightly under his chin, “...is in the fact that I’m around, and nothing else.”

 

So much arrogance. Isagi is used to this, from him. He is also used to his own biting retorts, unable to stomach such conceit, and is aware enough of them even more now, when he can’t muster any. 

 

Oh, he thinks, as though from somewhere far away - as though he’s left a part of himself outside, getting drenched in the rain, I want to believe him. 

 

“Is there a guarantee?” Isagi asks, quietly. “I mean, what is this… what is this going to cost me?”

 

“Well, for starters,” Isagi feels his eyes flutter as the pad of a leather-covered forefinger lands whisper-light on his forehead, and begins to slide its way down. It smooths over the frown lines Isagi hadn’t realised had crumpled up between his brows, “the deposit. As a guarantee of our pact.”

 

“R-right,” Isagi begins, ready to stake his savings. He’s not going to involve Reo in this, not yet, not unless he has absolutely no other resort and absolutely not without speaking to him first, and opens his mouth to name a price before he has the words jammed back down his throat as the Emperor continues. 

 

“In five minutes, there’s going to be a car outside. It will be a plain black sedan, but you will see this on the number plate,” a hand is suddenly holding Isagi’s, flipping it until there’s a piece of card laid upon his palm. It’s a familiar shape and feel, the same matte texture as the card Isagi’s kept tucked inside his wallet, driven by a strange sort of compulsion not to just throw it away. On it, embossed in silver, is the figure eight. “It’ll drop you off to any location you choose. Take it home.”

 

Gripping the card by its edge, Isagi says, very eloquently, “Huh?”

 

“You’re not walking back in that,” the Emperor points over his shoulder to where they’ve pulled the rooftop door closed, the staccato rhythm of rain still steady and audible beyond. “You’re not going to be able to get a cab, not with the weather like this, and even if you do, I get the feeling you’re going to be stingy about the high fares they’ll be charging with the traffic and everyone else looking for a ride home. And also,” there are eyes peering at him critically, and he watches them scan all over his face, “you look like you’re about to drop dead any second. You look like you haven’t slept in days” 

 

“Stop assuming things about me,” Isagi retorts immediately, heated. He doesn’t want to unpack how it’s less to do with the assumptions, and more to do with how accurate they are. 

 

“That’s my condition, sweetheart,” the Emperor continues, and then there’s a hand holding on to his again, while the other stays at his chin, tipping it up with a single finger. “I’ll collect the rest of my dues later, but to seal the deal, you have to agree to this.”

 

“Why would I get into a strange car sent by a suspicious masked man?!” he hisses, even while painfully aware that he’s making no move to shake the guy off. The Emperor has leaned in closer, Isagi realises distantly, and is immediately troubled that he’d not noticed sooner. God, he’s lost his mind. When did he get so accustomed to being this close to this guy without all his self-preservation instincts screaming?

 

“Because I don’t trust you not to go barrelling into the next problem you run into between here and home,” is what the Emperor admits, glibly, and there’s a light tap of that finger to his chin that is such a minute gesture but so playful it makes Isagi stumble. It feels like he’s in a good mood, Isagi thinks, eyes scanning that impassively blank, visored face, the light-less enclosure of the stairway not letting him see anything more. “You don’t have to take the car all the way home if you’re still being silly about your location getting outed. Just take it close enough home then. There’s an umbrella in the car you can take the rest of the way.”

 

“And if I say no?”

 

“Then deal’s off.”

 

Isagi raises a curled fist to his forehead, kneads at it with his knuckles as his headache starts to pound harder and sharper. “...are you being serious right now? This is your deposit?”

 

He swears he can hear the glee in his voice when the Emperor speaks next, and against himself, unable to help it, his eyes fly back to him as though if he stares hard enough he can see through the mask and get to it himself. “Consider it a very special, exclusive discount. For my favourite client.”

 

“There has to be a catch,” Isagi accuses, squinting distrustfully, even as he has himself grabbed above the elbows and hauled back to his feet with the kind of strength that he immediately files away in his mental I can’t handle this right now folder. “What’s the catch?”

 

“Hmm…,” and then there’s a fingertip at his face again, and Isagi cannot guess what shocks him more, the tap of it against his nose, or the words, “ You are.”

 

Five minutes later, Isagi finds himself under the awning of the diner’s front entrance, feeling dreadfully obvious out there in the open. Few people are out on the street right now thanks to the relentless downpour, and those who are, are too focused on hurrying out of it. But still, Isagi is questioning all of his life decisions as he shudders and tries to avoid the chilly spray bouncing off the pavement and towards him, missing the warmth of the cloak. 

 

He’d given it back when they’d shaken on their terms - at the Emperor’s insistence, with Isagi suspecting that the guy was just having fun with this now. 

 

“You can keep it. I like seeing you in my clothes.”

 

He’d flung it at the guy’s face and stormed down the stairs feeling so warm he didn’t think he would be needing any extra outerwear anyway. 

 

Now, uncloaked and flinching away from the rain, Isagi plays an elaborate game of mental gymnastics not to overthink everything that’s just happened or about to happen as he squints through the shimmery curtain of rain parting to let through a plain black car, slowing as it approaches him. Passing by just close enough that Isagi can see the barely misshapen “8” in the string of numbers on the licence plate, identical to the card he’s tucked safely into his wallet, in his bag retrieved from the employee lockers. It comes to a stop a ways down from him, and Isagi has a half second more to hesitate before he throws the last of his caution to the frigid winds and hurries towards it. 

 

Inside, it’s toasty warm, and Isagi sighs as he settles into the seat before immediately stiffening. “Ah! Sorry, I’m getting everything all wet.”

 

In the driver’s seat, there’s a guy - around Isagi’s height, he thinks, and similar to his build, too. He’s wearing a beanie crammed low over his head, a broad face mask that covers practically everything else. Isagi peeks at the rearview mirror, but can’t see much of his face.

 

His driver doesn’t respond, merely revs the car up, and then Isagi is being ferried away by an unknown vehicle driven by an unknown man and wondering how on earth he’s allowed himself to be caught up in the perfect venn diagram of stranger danger one could possibly conceive. 

 

As the guy nears the exit road, he taps at the screen of his GPS. 

 

“Ah, location -,” Isagi rattles off the address of the closest bus stop to his place. That should be safe enough, he thinks. It’s not too far from where the Emperor had intercepted him that one morning on his way to work, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that he wouldn’t live too far away. He wonders for a split second if there’s any point in being this careful about masking his whereabouts when he’d just handed over a folder of documents that would surely lead back to his workplace with some digging, making that not one but two of his jobs that this guy and potentially his associates would know about. 

 

Speaking of associates…

 

“Um,” he hems as he speaks. They’re idling in traffic, and Isagi has been entirely too keyed up whenever he peeks the high-visibility vest of a poor traffic conductor out in this weather directing the flow of vehicles. The windows aren’t tinted, and the person driving him, from the back at least, would just pass for a particularly vigilant moonlighter wary of contagious passengers, but Isagi thinks that probably lends to the art of hiding in plain sight. In these parts, tinted windows would likely draw more attention, when right now he could just pass for being in the back of any old Uber. “Are you… are you Eight?”

 

There’s no response. Isagi feels tremendously awkward. God he can’t even see what this guy looks like. What if this is the wrong car? What if this was all part of an elaborate kidnapping ploy or a trafficking ring and he’s about to get thrown into worse trouble than even he’s managed to entangle himself in? Even if he manages to escape, he wouldn’t even be able to identify this guy in a line-up. 

 

The part of him speed-running every worst-case scenario he can think of sits a little ways apart from this other part of him, the part that he doesn’t want to examine too closely, that seems to be oddly secure in the notion that the Emperor wouldn’t put him in harm’s way. Probably. Right?

 

God, if he could just hear the guy’s voice, maybe he’d feel less like he should actually throw himself out the car door at the next available opportunity. Clearing his throat, he attempts again,  

 

“Or do you by chance…go by…the Magician?”

 

It’s an immediate reaction. Isagi can tell from the suddenness of it that it’s kneejerk, the guy’s head jumping up towards the rear-view mirror to look at Isagi in the reflection. 

 

It’s just for a split second, but Isagi knows he’s right. 

 

“You do, don’t know?” Isagi presses on. His phone, gripped in his hands, is still open on his most recent search tabs. One, reverse image searching the card - this had shown up blanks, just different typefaces for numbers and a couple of 8-balls, including the emoji. Did that mean this was a behind the scenes guy, if his card isn’t searchable? He seemed to be doing comms for the Emperor the last time… He’d searched the number 8 and the word Emperor together, and found nothing of note, and the number 8 and tarot, quickly glancing through the card for Strength . There’s some confusion, about the numbering of the cards depending on the deck, and it just feels a little off compared to how precise and irrefutable the Emperor card had been. Isagi’d still been scrolling until he’d stumbled upon one particular result, of the eight lying on its side, and on a hunch, searched, 

 

“ infinity sign tarot”

 

About 2,450,000 results (0.27 seconds)

 

The Magician (Tarot Card) 

 

“…Waite's magician features the infinity symbol over his head, and an ouroboros belt, both symbolising eternity. [...]”

 

Settling back into the seat, Isagi somehow feels a little better from a successful deduction in a situation where he knows so little it leaves him floundering. He unlocks his phone to read through the overview of the Magician card again. “It’s cooler sounding than the Emperor anyway.” 

 

He startles when he hears the guy snort. It’s an actual snort - human sounding. 

 

He’s not wearing a voice changer?! 

 

“He would hate to hear you say that.”

 

It’s husky, but a little comically so - like someone with a lighter, cleaner voice affecting sounding gruff and deep. 

 

“Oh, I’m sure he would,” Isagi has an alarming flyaway thought about making a point to tell him personally, the next time. 

 

The next time. Like he already knows there’s going to be another rendezvous. 

 

We have unsettled business, of course we would see each other again, Isagi reasons, and has trouble believing himself. 

 

“You should tell him, next time.”

 

For a split second of blind panic, Isagi wonders whether the Magician is actually a magician, capable of plucking his thoughts right out of his brain. 

 

“Uh -” 

 

“He’s very…sensitive about what you think of him.”

 

What… does Isagi even say to that? How does he respond? 

 

All Isagi can hear are the hush of the rain and muted swipe and click of the windshield wipers. 

 

And whispers of words spoken to him that he’s tried not to think too much about. 

 

You’re important to me. 

 

It’s important to me that you believe me. 

 

And right before he’d left him, tonight -

 

I will make sure you never look at me in doubt again. He’d felt the confusion on his own face, and the Emperor must have read the same off of it, too, because he’d murmured, the crease of leather against the side of his face, It’s this, right? This is why you were so upset, that night in the alley. 

 

It’s one thing to hear these things from behind an impenetrable mask. 

 

It’s another to hear them like this, with some of those layers removed, from someone who knows that man. Someone else in the world who cements his existence as something far more concrete and real and capable of being known than the phantom of an idea he is on blog posts and forum threads and Reo’s conspiracy theories. A…person.

 

Because, increasingly, Isagi has been thinking about him that way. Less as a concept, less as this entity, and more as the human being that exists beneath the veneer he’s put together. The person who teases him and tells him to be careful on his way home and always seems to be touching him somehow, and a treacherous thought blooms before Isagi has the chance to stifle it, wondering whether he feels a corresponding pull when they’re together, a frustration at the barriers that always lay between them, no matter how close they are. 

 

Who is he, when the sun is out and he’s not got his helmet and cloak on? How do these people know each other? How many more of them are there? Why do they do this? Why did they start? 

 

And why, out of everyone in this city, does he continue to bend his rules for him? 

 

He’s been told the answer, or at least the one that the Emperor wants him to know. 

 

Is it that Isagi has come to believe him, or is it that he’s come to want to, so much that he can’t tell the difference?  

 

It takes them another half an hour to get around to the main thoroughfare where Isagi has asked to be dropped off. Most of the ride has gone by in silence - a part of Isagi stays vigilant, attuned to the directions the car takes, mapping their route in his mind as the precautionary instinct wired into him to be alert, just in case. Another part of him stays lost in thought, lost somewhere in the city with a lonely, scared girl and with a man made up of mysteries flitting through the night. It takes him a second to respond when his chauffeur unclips his seatbelt and turns around to offer him something. 

 

It’s an umbrella.

 

“Oh, I don’t think I need that,” Isagi peeks out the window - the rain has slowed to a drizzle. Were it not for the flecks of rainwater ever so occasionally peppering the glass, he wouldn’t know it was still going. 

 

“Take it,” Eight shoves the umbrella in his direction. “I have explicit instructions to make sure you take this with you.” And when Isagi hesitates another moment, “ - he’s going to be insufferable if you don’t.”

It is so, so surreal, to hear about him talked of like this, like a person that is… known - to degrees that Isagi cannot fathom, and is finding increasingly difficult to pretend that he didn’t wish that he did. 

 

“...hey,” Isagi manages, curling his hand around the umbrella’s handle, hesitating a little but pushing through. “He’s not…ziplining around in this weather, is he?”

 

He’d asked the Emperor himself that. 

 

“There’s no visibly out there and you’re not wearing eye protection or anything and I just - why are you laughing?!”

 

A whirring, mechanical coo. “Are you worried for me, darling?”

 

“You’re going to cause an accident flying around blindly in that!”

 

“Well, I’ll just have to be extra careful, don’t I? Now that I know you’ll be fretting about me.”

 

Eight is still holding the umbrella by its head as Isagi loosely grips the handle. It’s too dark to tell, but he thinks the guy seems to be searching his face in the dark, and Isagi wishes for once he wouldn’t be the one left blind in these situations. 

 

“He’ll be fine… he has other ways of getting around,” he’s told, lightly. Isagi was right - Eight’s real voice must be something light and clean, and it filters through even with his attempts to mask it, as though he’s not used to having to. “He’s going to be over the moon that you asked, though.”

 

Heat explodes into his face. “Are you supposed to be telling me all this?” Isagi, always wishing he knew more, is aware of the irony of almost wishing now that he wouldn’t. Because what is he meant to do with the knowledge that they talk about him? What is he meant to do about the fact that he talks about him, enough that Eight reads how he will react so easily? “Isn’t that violating some code of confidentiality for you incognito people?”

 

Laughter. An actual giggle. Isagi blinks. The sound isn’t disguised, and it’s a quiet, huffy thing. 

 

It sounds cute. That is not a word Isagi would have predicted occurring in any way, shape, or form in anything he’d expected to happen tonight.

 

“He gave up on being discreet a long time ago when it comes to you. He does what he wants, and my job is to assist him in doing what he wants. Go on, take the umbrella and make sure you get ‘dry and toasty’ as soon as you get home. His words.”

 

---

For all the precautions he takes - scalding shower as soon as he gets home, some of the chamomile tea Reo had set him up with after getting scolded by Chigiri for enabling his caffeine dependency - he wakes up the next morning with a stuffy nose and closed up throat. 

 

Groaning, feeling like someone’s replaced all his muscles with stiff, unwieldy rubber while he’d been sleeping, he drags his arm, suddenly weighing more than the boxes of produce he hefts without a sweat at the diner, to grab at his phone. 

 

There’s nothing in the news, he confirms after a cursory scan of the headlines. Figures - there’s just been a few hours between last night and the morning news cycle. He’s not even really sure what sort of approach the Emperor is planning on taking, has waived his right to getting involved in his methods. 

 

He just lays in bed for a few more seconds, head stuffed with cotton, his entire body aching like he’d climbed a mountain the day before. A cold is one thing, but the thought of dragging his lethargic body all the way across town to work and sit in that office pretending that he’d not done something criminal right there the day before is so unbearable it sits on him like a physical weight, pushing him deeper into the mattress.

 

In the end, he has to message both the law firm and the izakaya to call in sick. It makes him uneasy, the idea of missing work the day after he’s done something seriously incriminating, something that could come back to bite him in the ass. But as he wobbles on his feet, head spinning, gravity doubling its hold on him as he braces himself against a wall to not fall over, he doesn’t think he has much of a choice. 

 

i told u, i TOLD u this would happen >:( 

 

u never realise you’re burning yourself out until you get sick

 

im telling your mum >:( 

 

and im coming by later with food and meds 

 

AND I BETTER FIND U RESTING >:((((((((

 

He texts Bachira back to tell him he doesn’t need to do all that, that he’s fine, it’s just because of the rain . A part of him always worries when his friends make their way around to this part of town, with the way its faces change when the sun starts going down. It doesn’t help, either, that he feels so miserably helpless right now, and without his wits around him, a part of him is scared Bachira will be able to tell something’s wrong just by looking at him.

 

Another part of him, though, alone and left to himself to steep in the events of the day before and everything leading up to them, thinks he might be grateful for the company. 

 

He doesn’t usually feel lonely in his one-person apartment. He doesn’t have time to. He’s out the door before the sun’s fully up, and some days only gets back while it is about to complete another of its full cycles through the horizons. It’s where he sleeps, mostly, cleans up, looks after his plants. Where he does his assignments and eats hastily warmed meals in the forms of leftovers he gets to bring back from the izakaya or convenience store lunch boxes grabbed on the go. 

 

It feels a lot bigger than it is, today, as Isagi shuffles towards the couch in his tiny open layout LDK flat, feeling a little out of place in his own home. He’s so disused to being here at this time of day - and more disused yet being still. It’s dangerous, he thinks, the surreal events of the night before catching up to him in the crystal clarity of daytime, without classes or work or his friends to distract him. 

 

Without the rain running static through his thoughts, without the shadows obscuring his view, it’s too…much. He feels so wired, and he can’t unplug himself even though he should. He can feel the piled-up anxiety and stress from the days leading up to this cut slack and descend upon him, now that he’s done something about it, and it’s all hit him at once. He’s just so, so tired.

 

He almost falls asleep again like this. It takes a lot of willpower, but he manages to extract himself from the couch cushions to drag his feet into the kitchenette and start some water for tea. Inspects the bare innards of his fridge. He doesn’t like to keep it too full because having to throw away produce that starts to go bad when he doesn’t have time to use it actually pains him. Right now though, the sad two slices of white bread in their crumpled packaging, an untouched container of natto that’d come with a takeout meal he’d gotten lord knows when, and a lone can of tuna are not exactly tempting either. Still, he needs to eat - he has ramen somewhere, and the warm soup sounds nice for his scratchy, congested throat. Maybe he can throw the tuna into it too.

 

While the water boils, Isagi dithers about the wet clothes he’d peeled off himself and dumped on the bathroom floor the night before. The thought of hauling himself down to the basement right now is as unpleasant as walking barefoot through thorns - but he also hates the way clothes start to smell musty when they’re damp overnight. Maybe he can just hang them out in the balcony to get some sun for now, and then when he’s feeling better - 

 

“...Yoichi?”

 

Isagi squints, the brightness of the day, like glass polished clean after the rain last night, stinging at his eyes. 

Michael Kaiser is stood on the balcony opposite, staring at him.

 

It occurs to Isagi that right now, with his balled up clothes, possible bed hair and ratty pyjamas, he probably looks like a nocturnal animal caught prowling among the garbage. 

 

“Uh, good morning,” he says - or tries to say, because what actually comes out of his mouth is a warbly croak. 

 

Across the way, Kaiser has started to frown. “You’re sick.”

 

“Yeah, it’s nothing, I just… got caught in the rain yesterday.”

 

“Have you had any medicine? Anything to eat?”

 

“Uh, I’m just about to eat -”

 

“What are you having?”

 

Kaiser has his head tipped to the side, his stare clear and unwavering and boring into him, and Isagi feels a very, very strange wave of deja vu. 

 

“Um,” Isagi is sheepish, considering whether he wants to admit it because he knows how pathetic it’s going to sound even as he says it; but then he spends so much of his time fibbing these days that he physically doesn’t think he can handle another lie, “...ramen.”

 

“Yoichi.” He’s never seen his neighbour look so completely unamused before.

 

“No, I know,” Isagi hurries to explain, “I just haven’t done groceries yet and I don’t have much else right now, I’ll go get something proper after I’ve -”

 

Kaiser cuts him off from across the way - he’s already shifting back towards his apartment as he calls, “Wait there. I’m coming over.”

 

And well, that’s not something Isagi had gambled for. He barely has time, in his panic, to shove a disposable face mask over his nose and mouth and throw the balcony doors fully open in an attempt to ventilate the place in case he’s carried home something contagious, before he has a Michael Kaiser - dressed in a casual tank top revealing more of his tattoos than Isagi has had occasion to see, hair pulled up in a half-bun - at his doorstep. He elegantly steps out of his shoes in a way Isagi didn’t think was possible, holding one of those reusable grocery bags they sell for change at supermarket checkout counters.

 

“I didn’t know what you had on you so I brought a bit of everything,” Kaiser explains as though this makes anything even remotely clearer to Isagi, who is now having to rapidly adapt to the presence of the German neighbour who has only mostly existed in the basement laundry room and several feet away in an adjacent balcony, inside his apartment. 

 

He’s about as incongruous here as the ridiculously fancy coffee machine eating up his counter space courtesy of Reo, and the thought niggles at the back of Isagi’s mind again, why Kaiser chooses to live here . But he doesn’t get to dwell on it, not when Kaiser is now emptying the contents of his bag on to his kitchen counter and Isagi is seeing carrots, potatoes, a whole red onion - 

 

“Wait, wait, wait, what are you doing?” 

Kaiser tilts his head at him. He’s still got his glasses on, oh God. 

 

“I’m cooking for you.”

 

He proceeds to categorically refuse to listen to any of Isagi’s near-panicked protests - that he really does not need to do that, Isagi is definitely, definitely going to do groceries once he’s had a meal and some medicine, really, I’m not even that sick, and Kaiser just steers Isagi by the shoulders into his couch and gives him a look when he’s not able to get himself back up again.

 

“I feel so bad though,” Isagi continues to whine, his throat feeling a little better because Kaiser had pushed a mug of warm water with the ginger and honey that he’d also brought over from his flat with him just in case , “Can I at least help?”

 

“You can help by sitting still and getting some rest,” Kaiser tells him from where he’s now commandeering his kitchenette - he’s had Isagi tell him where all his pots and pans are, and has produced a mandoline slicer Isagi’d forgotten he even owned, part of the assortment of things his mother had moved him in with. He’s also wearing Isagi’s apron with the little stitched lobster on the front pocket and the visual is entirely too much for Isagi’s borderline delirious brain to process. “Seriously Yoichi…when was the last time you took a break?”

 

“I’m fine, ” he insists, and his own voice sounds sleep-slurred and totally unconvincing to his ears. He’s twisted himself around in the sofa just enough to be able to see Kaiser expertly chop up the onions and carrots until they’re finely diced. It’s unfairly impressive. “I feel so bad having you take care of me like this -”

 

“You’re not making me do it,” Kaiser points out, with that half smile on his face that Isagi’s grown more familiar with, over time. “If I remember correctly, I barged into your apartment myself and now I’ve taken over your kitchen. It’s just soup and it’ll take twenty minutes, max.”

 

“But what if you get sick too? I don’t want you to catch something from me -”

 

“You’re not coughing or sneezing, I don’t think you’re contagious - ”

 

“But still, I -”

 

Kaiser has started to come back around to the couch and Isagi hurriedly shoves the mask he had slipped off to sip at his ginger tea back over his nose as he appears in front of him. The height of him looms over Isagi even as he bends closer, Isagi squirming back into the couch cushions as though physical distance would keep the germs from getting to Kaiser.

 

And he really must be half delirious, because when a hand starts to come up by the side of his face, Isagi stills and forgets where he is. 

 

“You’re a little warm,” is Kaiser’s assessment, a palm laid over Isagi’s forehead and completely unaware that that heat is probably the immediate aftereffect of Isagi clocking that he’d expected the touch of leather against his chin, and he doesn’t know how to start unpacking that, or the dull thud of his heartbeat coming down after that anticipatory spike. “but I don’t think you’re running a temperature or anything.”

“Please wash your hands!”

 

Kaiser is laughing at him. “Isn’t it hard to breathe with that on your face?”

 

It is. Isagi’s breath is wheezing out of him, with his nose all blocked, and he glares petulantly over where the mask sits at the bridge of his nose. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

 

“I don’t get sick easily,” and then Isagi almost jolts at the touch of fingertips against the curve of his ear, gently unhooking the face mask’s straps so it falls away from Isagi’s face. “But it’s cute of you to worry. I just wish you’d do a better job worrying about yourself half as much as you worry about others.” 

 

“Kaiser,” the whine sounds especially pronounced with how nasal his voice is right now. He considers lunging for the mask now in Kaiser’s hand, but none of his limbs are obeying his brain signals, “The mask - I mean I’d feel better if I was wearing it so -”

 

“I’d feel better if you were able to breathe properly,” Kaiser tuts, and then he’s got those large hands back on his shoulders, pushing him back into the couch cushions. “Besides - I like being able to see your face when you’re talking.”

 

He doesn’t know what said face of his does at this, but Kaiser quirks an eyebrow at him, part amused, part questioning - he’s still almost leaned over Isagi like this, hands braced at his shoulders. His eyes are such a clear, beautiful blue behind the frames of his glasses. “Hmm?”

 

“Nothing,” Isagi mumbles quietly, and lets himself be settled against the couch cushions, warm behind the ears and conscious of the heavy pounding inside his chest and the half a dozen flyaway thoughts germinating in his head like rogue dandelion saplings. “I… like seeing people’s faces when they’re talking too.”

 

Kaiser doesn’t push. “ Rest, ” he tells him, one more time, and returns to the kitchen.   

 

And Isagi realises, as his futile follow-up attempts to at least help Kaiser out in the kitchen taper away at the man’s stubborn insistence he just stay put, that he’s maybe forgotten how to do that. To rest. When the last time was, when he was utterly relaxed, without a care or worry gnawing at his spare brain cells. 

 

He nurses the warm mug of ginger tea, sipping it slowly and enjoying the warmth soothing the itchy dryness in the back of his throat, the steam against his now mask-less face. At some point, Kaiser has come by and turned on the TV, volume dialled down low, and Isagi doesn’t realise when he begins to sink beneath the stillwater of that place just between sleep and wakefulness. 

 

It feels like such a familiar, cosy place - nostalgic, the background hum of some silly cartoon he liked the designs of as a kid mingling with the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of a knife against a chopping board, of a stove top clicking on. Gradually, a warm aroma starts to scent up the air in Isagi’s apartment, something savoury and delicious that makes his stomach rumble even as he drifts in and out of this in-between place where he’s aware he’s in his apartment, but also someplace that’s less…physical, less a place, than it is a feeling - 

 

Of being…home. Of being in the one place where you can always come back and feel safe, and cared for, and unconditionally cherished. Of falling asleep on the couch with the TV on while your mother fusses in the kitchen trying to cook up a nice warm meal because you’ve come home sopping wet from a soccer match with friends and the only worry you have is that you might get sick and there’s a test tomorrow. Of your dad writing a letter to the school the next day requesting that you get to take the test later while you sit at the breakfast table wrapped in a blanket, your mother checking your temperature, and your friends coming by after school with homework and pudding and manga and games and making you almost forget how miserable you were, lonely in bed with nothing to do and nothing to focus on other than how dreadful you felt. 

 

What a warm, magical feeling it is. Ordinary, mundace acts made extraordinary by the care that people hold for you.

 

In the way Bachira insists Isagi text him when he gets home, whenever that is, and the way he will nag him the day after if he forgets. In the way Chigiri continues to offer to stay up so they can video-call when Isagi has to walk back home late just so he doesn’t have to be alone. In the way Kaiser’s cooking is soaking through the Isagi’s home and warming away some of the chill he’d carried back in his bones last night before he’s even had the chance to taste it, dipping in and out of sleep.

 

In the way there’s an umbrella sitting by his entryway dripping the last of its rainwater on to the plastic bag Isagi had laid out to catch it, and the warmth he still remembers of a heavy, surprisingly comfortable cloak wrapping him up as he halved his worries and passed them over and walked away lighter in a way he can’t, in his loose-limbed, barely-conscious state, deny. 

 

Maybe it’s that, Isagi thinks. The lull of safety when he’d been at his wit’s end, not realising how badly he wished for someone to split his anxieties with, someone he could go to for help. Maybe it’s the fact that that masked man is the only person who knows this part of Isagi to its rawest extent, his recklessness and his stubbornness and his inability to let go. The one who can meet him right there, at rock bottom, for who he is, for who he can’t help being.  

 

And maybe that’s why he wants so badly to trust the Emperor. 

 

So badly, that the voice in his head has gone from screaming that he doesn’t even know this man, to wondering who he is. 

 

Isagi blinks back to reality and registers clear blue eyes peering down at him again. 

 

A concentrated burst of something smelling positively divine wafts under his nose - as Isagi settles back into his own bones and remembers where he is, he realises Kaiser is holding out a bowl of soup for him. 

 

“Sorry to wake you,” Kaiser says, making sure Isagi’s got a solid grip on the bowl before he lets go and seats himself down next to Isagi. “But you need to eat.”

 

It’s piping hot, a pleasant warmth against Isagi’s palms. He takes the first tentative sip, pouting around Kaiser’s warnings to be careful and not burn his tongue. 

 

The taste of it almost makes him cry.

 

“It’s so good, what the hell,” Isagi has his nose nearly inside the bowl as though he can inhale the flavour while he waits for it to cool to a less scalding temperature.   

 

He can hear Kaiser laughing. “It’s a twist on a German dish - a potato soup.”

 

“Oh my god,” Isagi groans appreciatively, melting as he slurps up more and more mouthfuls. It’s a thicker consistency than the soups he’s used to, thanks to the potato, and he can taste garlic and something savoury, probably broth base, all the knowledge he’s absorbed about layering umami flavours at the diner kicking in as he appreciates each spoonful. The heat is a relief against his throat too, smoothing over the scratchiness there, and he’s almost going boneless in the couch as he feels it warm him all the way through.

 

“Well, if your sense of taste is still intact, you’re probably not that sick,” Kaiser teases. Isagi does not feel like he’s in his right mind, muddled still from sleep and sickness and exhaustion, or he’d feel more self-conscious about how the guy looks just content to watch him chow down with less restraint than normal. It feels strangely familiar, maybe from how frequent their time spent opposite each other has grown, or maybe from the clinging remnants of Isagi’s dream, details of which he can’t really remember right now other than the feeling that he thinks he’d been back home, in Saitama. Even Kaiser sitting here with him, so close with his posture relaxed and casual, feels familiar in his fuzzy state of mind, even though this is Kaiser’s first time hanging around in his apartment.

 

“Aren’t you having any?” Isagi asks, almost two–thirds of the way through the bowl before he thinks to ask. 

 

“Hmm? No, it’s okay - there’s a lot more though, if you want seconds.”

 

Isagi knows he will want seconds, but still - “Have some too. Please? I’ll feel bad if I’m the only one eating.”

 

He means this, and watches as Kaiser’s eyes scan his face, blinking. He wonders what kind of face he’d been making, when Kaiser gives his head a little shake. 

 

Kaiser does grab another bowl for himself when he leaves to get Isagi his seconds, bringing back a glass of water on a tray he’s unearthed from somewhere, along with a strip of painkillers.

 

“Thank you,” Isagi mumbles for maybe the eighteenth time; his belly is comfortably full and he’s warmed all the way through, tossing back the medicine, before he says, “It was really, really yummy, Kaiser. Thank you so much.”

 

His neighbour handwaves the gratitude, latching on instead to - “I’ve told you before that you can call me Michael.”

 

“Yeah, but, I - it’s hard for me!”

“We can practise,” Kaiser hums smoothly, knocking their knees together. He’s sat closer now than he had been initially. “It feels so formal when you call me by my last name.”

 

“Um -”

 

“Or you can shorten it, if that’s easier to say. How about Micha? That can be a cute nickname.”

 

At the mention of nicknames, Isagi’s mind flees him without warning elsewhere for a split second, and he’s instantly conflicted, at how easily it does. 

 

“I’m sure you run into lots of people here who struggle to pronounce your name,” Isagi stalls. Kaiser’s been calling him by his first name since the beginning, and they literally just shared a meal together, Kaiser tending to him while he mostly napped and lost his mind over soup. He thinks that maybe, from a European standpoint, that does warrant being on first-name basis, though the syllables feel a little foreign still when he imagines testing them out on his tongue.

 

“Oh, all the time,” Kaiser shrugs, and musses his hair up a little as he settles deeper into the couch. Isagi pretends he can’t see his biceps flexing at that simple move. His shoulders are kind of as wide as - Yoichi, stop. “Most people just call me Kaiser though.”

 

“Oh. What about like, classmates and colleagues though?”

 

“There’s only one…colleague who calls me Michael,” Kaiser tells him, back to leaning against his hand and looking at Isagi like he does not feel the need to blink. “He’s German too, though, so he doesn’t have trouble with it. I’m not that close to many others to be on a first-name basis here.”

 

That surprises Isagi. “Really? I thought you’ve been in Japan for a while, though.”

 

“It’s been about four years, yeah. But hmm, let’s say that I’m not really approachable?” 

 

Isagi can’t pretend that Kaiser doesn’t give off that sort of vibe at first glance. He wears an air of effortless elegance that commands attention even without his striking features – the gold dip-dyed hair, the red-lined eyes making their blue stand out even more, the austere line of his jaw and cheekbones, those striking tattoos. 

 

But this is also the guy that teases Isagi about his tendencies to baby his plants yet nonetheless went to check on them while Isagi was snoozing, emptying out the excess water that’d collected in some of the pots from the rain outside because Isagi’d told him before about root rot from excess water. Who carries snacks in his pockets that he seems too happy to share with Isagi whenever they run into each other doing the laundry or at the lifts, who is kind and patient as he listens to Isagi talk about work and life and people. Who just took matters into his own hands to get his sorry, helpless ass fed and medicated, the drowsiness already starting to set in with his baseline exhaustion in the mix.

 

He points out as much, and Kaiser laughs. His shoulders, bare save for the straps of the tank top, dance as he does. 

 

“I don’t exactly go around doing that for everyone, though.” 

 

“Cook for people?”

 

“Cook for people… care for people.” Kaiser is still smiling, still that tiny barely there thing, but his eyes are steady in a way that makes Isagi stand to attention. “I don’t go out of my way to look out for others, the way you do.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“In fact, I rarely bother. There is only a very, very small number of people who I care for,” Kaiser continues, and there’s an air of significance to the way he speaks, in the way he holds Isagi’s eyes as he does, like he doesn’t want him to miss any of the spaces between the lines, “So, I don’t know if you’re right about me being kind, or patient. I’d say I’m rather selfish, actually.”

 

For how out of it Isagi’s been all day, the meds starting to kick in and turning his thoughts fuzzy at the corners, Isagi doesn’t miss the subtext of what he’s saying. His friends accuse him of being dense in the romance department all the time, but even he can’t not notice how much Kaiser flirts with him. He’d been attributing this to his nature, though. And right now, the man sitting on his couch mere inches from him, telling him that these sides of him, the caring, sweet, playful sides he’s come to know, are not the sides most others do… 

 

“I think…” Isagi says slowly, weighing the thought out carefully as he tries to put words to what he’s thinking, his head getting muggier as the painkillers work through his system, “I think caring for people is…inherently…I think it’s inherently selfish. I think one has to be a little selfish to care for someone enough to want to act on it. Because you…can’t stand the idea of someone you care for getting…hurt, or being sad or upset or sick. And being able to make that choice, acting on that care, even if that’s one person… I think that’s still…choosing kindness.”

 

There’s silence for a while, and Isagi starts to find it hard to blink his eyelids open with the growing weight of them.

 

Kaiser huffs a tiny laugh. “That’s a very generous assessment of it.”

 

“Maybe,” Isagi mumbles. Maybe it’s generous, or naive, or just wishful thinking, born out of a desire in himself to find kindness, to find good , the capacity of it, in others. To believe that his choices, sitting in the nest of secrets he hoards from his loved ones with the guilt of it crowding inside him and straining under his bones and his skin, is kindness too. His selfish determination not to repay their care with his carelessness, not to hurt them with this part of his nature that he can’t stifle or stomp down. 

 

As the drowsiness wells gently up and starts to drag Isagi below the undertow, he finds that maybe he doesn’t have it in himself to really care if he’s being naive, right now. If he’s selfishly defining kindness the way it favours him best. That gives meaning to the choices he keeps making, and the choices others make, when it comes to him. His mind strays to the sweet, smiling girl in a picture he’s never met but has started to feel like he knows. “But it doesn’t matter… if it helps. Even just one person. Just one person who’s alone and…struggling… and choosing one act of kindness makes a difference.”

 

The tail end of his sentence gets swallowed up in a giant yawn. Isagi has the tiniest bit of sense to cover up his face halfway through so Kaiser doesn’t have to watch what must not be a particularly appealing sight. When he brings his hands back down, though, he feels his heart let out a little kick at the… look on Kaiser’s face.

 

Something strangely open, soft. 

 

Something close to tender, close to fond. 

 

His synapses try to splutter, half-hearted, back to life as he struggles to stay afloat and process that, let it connect with the other ways he has with this man, who is charming and sweet and playful, a kind man with a beautiful smile who should be the perfect person to fall for, that he can see himself falling for. Would, if he just let go. But there’s that tug of resistance, the drag of the undertow holding him back, and Isagi paddles against the current, helplessly, even as Kaiser laughs lowly and says to him,

 

“It’s okay, you can sleep -”

 

“But –”

 

“We’ll talk about it later.”

 

That appeases him, a little, because somewhere in his core, he knows it’s very, very important that they do. He starts to drift, thinks he must already have slid farther down the slope to sleep than he’d realised, because he thinks he hears someone say, Rest well, angel, and then he’s out like a light. 

 

---

He dreams about a smooth mask cracking open. About half smiles. About the pleasant warmth of a cape that smells ever so faintly of roses.

 

The scent lingers as he starts to surface, tugging him back into the world as though from underwater - voices snapping into focus, indistinguishable from dreams at first, because the combination of them don’t make sense.

 

“... an Aries, by the way. Which matches his personality a lot, and his name too. Yo-ichi. Number One.”

 

“It does suit him.”

 

“It does , doesn’t it? Plus, it’s a combination of his parents' names, which is so sickeningly cute. His parents are adorable, you should meet them some time.”

 

“...Bachira?”

 

A flash of black and yellow blurs into existence next to him in an instant and then his best friend is leaning right into his face. 

 

“Isagi!” he wails, and clamps a hand to his forehead, “Okay, you still don’t have a temperature, thank God! I brought food, and we couldn’t figure out what sort of meds you’d need, so I think Reo got one of everything? To cover all our bases. How are you feeling?”

 

He’s feeling… better, he realises. Unlike last night and the hazy half-nap in the morning, he feels better rested, the fog in his head lighter, like it’s no longer pushing against his skull trying to force its way out. 

 

“Better,” he croaks, and thinks his voice sounds worse than it actually is this time. 

 

“That’s good,” Bachira smiles a little at him, and Isagi realises he’s knelt down beside the couch from where he must have been sitting - behind his shoulder, he can see the two chairs from his kitchen arranged opposite the small coffee-table. Kaiser is sat on one of them. He’s almost turned around by the thought that Kaiser’d stayed while he slept into - judging by the light - late afternoon, when he catches Bachira’s smile sharpen into a grin, “I see you had someone taking very good care of you.”

 

“Ah, yeah,” Isagi pushes his brain to fire the right commands so he can sit up, and as he does, he realises at some point someone had draped a blanket over him. This isn’t one of his, he thinks, confused, and realises that it smells ever so slightly floral. “You must have met my neighbour um - this is -”

 

“Yes, we’ve met,” Bachira says brightly, dropping himself into the empty space next to Isagi now that he’s sitting up. “Though I was very shocked when the door opened to a tall blond tattooed man just like Rin-chan was -”

 

“ Bachira!” 

 

“But then I figured out, oh it must be that nice neighbour of yours, and he’d fed you and given you your painkillers and look,” Bachira squishes both of his hands around Isagi’s face, “You don’t look like actual death!” 

 

“I’m okay, I told you I was going to be okay,” Isagi has to fight not to whine as he pulls his face free of Bachira’s hold, utterly embarrassed and increasingly horrified by the glint in Bachira’s eye that never spells any good. “How - long have you been here?”

 

“Hmm? Oh, I just got here like fifteen or so minutes ago.” 

 

He was telling Kaiser about my star sign and meeting my parents after just 15 minutes of knowing him?!

 

Isagi turns to stare wide-eyed and alarmed at Kaiser, who is - 

 

Biting down a smile. Twinkling eyes. 

 

It’s entirely too impish and makes Isagi want to break the proverbial fire alarm glass.

 

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep like that,” Isagi starts apologetically, scrambling around for where his phone must have gotten lost in the couch cushions. He’s been out for two to three hours at this point. “I’m so sorry, you didn’t need to stay, I -”

 

“It’s okay, don’t worry about it,” Kaiser assures him, and starts to get up. Isagi does not know what to do with the little lurch his heart does, realising that he’s about to leave, or the sharp pinch of guilt that follows immediately after. Well, fuck . “You needed to rest, and I wanted to make sure you weren’t actually running a temperature. I got some work done while you were asleep, it’s okay.”

 

Work… Isagi hadn’t seen him bring over a laptop or anything. But then again, he’s plenty sure this blanket, gossamer soft and the perfect degree of light for the summer, belongs to Kaiser, and he doesn’t know when this got inside his apartment either. 

 

“Okay,” he says, a bit dumbly, because what else is he supposed to say? He probably could figure something out, or give in to the compulsions to say what he wants to more easily, if he wasn’t conscious of Bachira eyeing their interactions with a fearsome interest. 

 

Kaiser packs up to go - at some point, he has served up the rest of the soup into some of Isagi’s tupperware and stocked it in the fridge for him. At this point, Isagi does start reciting his thanks again, wants Kaiser to know that he means it, and Kaiser laughs in a way that leaves Isagi feeling so, so conflicted because - 

 

“He’s completely into you,” Bachira sings, loudly enough that Isagi hushes him in a fury. He’d just come back from seeing Kaiser off, a strange light in his eyes. They’d lingered near the doorway for a bit and Bachira had come back with the sort of gleam in his gaze that Isagi associates with Rin-taming. He’s scared to ask. “Like, soooo into you.”

“Stop,” Isagi mumbles, weakly. He doesn’t think his friend is misreading the situation, doesn’t think he’s making the mistake of reading too much into people’s faces and actions the way he does sometimes. But the more concrete this concept becomes in his mind, the more he is starting to agonise over it, because - 

 

Because Isagi’s still holding his phone, unlocked hastily the second Bachira had offered to show Kaiser out, scrolling through the news again, checking, searching, waiting. 

 

Waiting, waiting, waiting, for whatever it is he had started last night to start showing its consequences. 

 

Would Kaiser still be interested in him if he knew this part of Isagi? 

 

The reckless, obstinate part, the part he could not - and has realised he will not - hold back? The one that runs on fury, that is so much more selfish than Kaiser can imagine with the way he cares, with the way he cannot compromise when he has to act upon it? 

 

Add to the mix the stupid, stupid masked man that seems to have taken to haunting Isagi’s thoughts as much as he haunts him in real life, and all his stupid endearments and his stupid acts of care and the way he sees him the most clearly when it’s the darkest and this is a whole new abnormal development for him to lose sleep over.

 

Bachira plops down onto the couch beside him. 

 

“Hey, Isagi.”

 

Isagi’d been absently doing some light stretches, bending and unbending his legs to get the circulation going and thinking he actually feels good enough to go take a shower and feel less like a vegetable. “Yeah?”

 

“Are you… is there something bothering you?”

 

Ah. 

 

“Why do you ask?”

 

The look Bachira gives him is piercing. Not so much critical as it is… probing. No one makes him feel as thoroughly known as Bachira does. And it makes lying to him the hardest. 

 

“You’ve been so overworked and stressed out and I just… I feel, sometimes, that there’s something on your mind that you’re not sharing. Something that’s got you really…I don’t know. Worked up? Stressed?” Bachira sighs and leans back into the couch, stretches his arms up over his head. “I know you’re trying not to worry us, but… you burn yourself out like this only when things are really bad in your head.”

 

Isagi thinks about the girl whose letter he has memorised word for word. Whom he thinks about, all the time. Where she is right now, how she’s doing. If she has someone to make her a warm meal and bring her painkillers, someone who cares . 

 

Someone she’s keeping secrets from, just to keep them safe.  

 

Selfish. It’s so selfish. 

 

“It’s just…work, you know,” Isagi starts to say. Even with Bachira sitting right next to him, he suddenly feels alone again. “It’s a lot less… impact, than I had hoped for. A lot of bureaucracy, a lot of powerplay, a lot of awful people with money getting away with awful things, and feeling like I’m not making a difference. And then classes and the other jobs and just…”

 

Bachira drops his head onto Isagi’s shoulder. 

 

“I wish you’d let me help you more,” Bachira mumbles, and Isagi feels his heart cave. “Even if it’s just to hear you vent about work, or like, draft up a resignation letter because can’t you just do a make-up semester later for the credits? Rin-chan was saying that you…” He seems to think better of this, and changes tracks before Isagi can let the alarm of Rin and Bachira talking to each other about him snap into shape. “Okay, I know your workplace sucks and I know it’s eating you up to have to swallow it. And I feel like you really want to do something and can’t and it’s stressing you out. So, I don’t know…what if we…started leaving horrible anonymous Google reviews for your workplace? Or I could send some treats to your office and spike it with laxatives? Like I could probably fistfight your manager for you. I just wish…” the head against his shoulder butts lightly against the bone there, “you’d let yourself rely on others a little more, Yocchan.”

 

The weight of that head on his shoulder is nowhere near the anchor-pull on his heart. The thing is, Isagi knows this. This is the same guy that broke a boy’s nose kicking a soccer ball into his face for trying to pick on Isagi in middle school - the same guy who got himself suspended from high school for a week along with Isagi when Isagi decided he was going to be enough on his own to stop a school gang they’d run into picking on the first-years for their lunch money and smartphones. 

 

Isagi knows that Bachira would help him hide a dead body, if he had to. He knows that Bachira would probably strangle him if he found out the sorts of trouble he’s been involved with that he’s kept to himself, but he also knows that if Isagi runs in, Bachira would follow without asking questions. 

 

So how could he do that to him? To any of these people he cares for? How could he get any of them involved when he himself knows he’s toying with fire ninety percent of the time, without any guarantee that he can get out of the situation unscathed? In the light of day, even the thought that he’d entertained last night, of involving Reo, fills him with disgust at himself.

 

He’s held off on thinking about it, his own self-preservation instincts holding it at bay as though sensitive to his fragile state of mind lately. But he wonders what would happen if everything goes wrong and the trust he’s placed in a masked stranger turns out to be a terrible mistake. If his attempt to leak the evidence gets discovered by the same people who have thoroughly silenced the victim, dangling an ever present threat over her head and over the heads of their loved ones. He imagines his parents getting dragged into the sort of psychological torment he’s only had the letters and his own deduction to piece together, his friends getting sucked into the mess. How would he ever live with himself if his actions dragged the people he wants to protect the most into disaster?

 

And then, there’s him…

 

How would he handle it, if this god-awful problem he wishes he’d never met sometimes, turns out to have been toying with him this whole time? 

 

“I’m…okay,” Isagi feels hollow as he says it, feels exhausted from all the pretending he keeps having to do, and resents the way he thinks, again, of the Emperor, and who he is in the daylight, if he’s living a double life as well like this. If it wears down on him, not to be his truest self in front of people that matter to him, and hates himself a little, because even now, he can’t help but try to relate to him, and can’t help but grow distracted, even as people sit beside him with their care for him and ask him to count on them too. “I know it doesn’t sound convincing, and I know I’ve been doing a shit job at not making you worry, but I… I’ll be better. I think… I hope… soon, things will be better.”

 

Bachira loops both his arms around Isagi’s and hugs it to himself. “Okay,” he concedes. “But if ever… if ever you feel like you can’t handle it anymore, and even when you feel like you can, promise you’ll tell me?”

 

Isagi wishes he didn’t feel so awful as he says, “I promise.”

 

His kindness is so selfish. 

 

They sit in silence for a bit. And then Bachira goes, 

 

“Let’s internet-stalk your hot neighbour.”

 

“Oh God. ”

 

---

 

Bachira stays the night, and as much as he is torn over it, half-worried Bachira will get sick too but twice-worried about letting him walk back home too late, Isagi allows himself the satisfaction of keeping his best friend to himself that evening. 

 

With Bachira abusing his laptop and internet connection sleuthing after Kaiser (“This is so dumb…who wouldn’t have social media in this day and age…” “Uh…me?” “You see? More reason you’re perfect for each other”) and getting distracted not long after, putting on a Ghibli marathon starting with My Neighbour Totoro, Isagi stays mercifully distracted. 

 

At the back of his mind, as he fights a losing battle to stop Bachira from jumping on him after he’s successfully procured an identical pair of pyjamas from his closet, he’s more thankful than he thinks Bachira could ever know. He’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, knows that it will, the consequences of his actions imminent, whatever the outcome will be. But at least with Bachira here, he can allow himself a few moments without agonising over it. If everything does go to shit the next time he wakes up… at least he’s had this.

 

What he isn’t expecting, though, is that when the other shoe does drop, it cuts through with the weight and precision of a guillotine.

 

---

 

“What do you think, darling?” are the words that greet him as Isagi turns in time to the disturbance in the air behind him. “A perfect execution, no?”

 

Isagi doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what exactly he’d been expecting - the not knowing had been part of the nerves, the space left empty for possibility taking twisted and foreboding shapes as he tried to imagine the best case scenarios. Maybe blackmail, forcing the heiress to back off. Maybe enough compelling proof to force through a restraining order, and even pose actual legal threat. Maybe enough pressure on the potential of a public fallout that would make that horrible family restrain their psychopath of a daughter. 

 

Instead, he’d woken up that morning as though to the aftermath of a category 5 hurricane, ripping through the city - maybe even the country.

 

At midnight sharp, four nights after Isagi had last met this man on this very same rooftop under the pouring rain, video footage shot to the top of every social media site, every forum page, the algorithm pushing it higher with how quickly it doubled in engagement. 

 

And the people, scandalised, shocked, morbidly entertained, did the rest. 

 

There were a couple of videos. Posted from default user IDs and channel names, reappearing as many times as they got suspended, until it wasn’t even clear whether the uploaders were the original person or the slew of copycats who had downloaded the footage and were now circulating it wider, faster, harder, until by the next morning, millions had already seen the rich dainty little heiress who often appeared on brand event red carpets and was a minor luxury influencer sadistically torturing a poor hapless girl on university grounds. 

 

The victim’s face and any identifying characteristics were censored - but public focus snapped to attention at the ghoulish nature of a tycoon’s only daughter, her biting, crass taunts, her sickening amusement at openly hurting another person, captured irrefutably on camera. 

 

And it hardly ended there. Leaked text messages, phone conversations. Between the paid police dog and the mother. Between the university board chairperson and the mother. Her connection with the university as one of its biggest private donors unearthed by, first, the internet detectives, and then the journalists. 

 

It becomes very obvious very quickly that there’s no coming back from this for those people. 

 

In just one day, the university chairperson had been fired, her public apology torn to shreds by the internet lynch mob. Stocks for the family-run company gilding the heiress in the sort of privilege that allowed her to think she could get away with her fucked up hobby, with impunity and no consequence, plummet, their public relations department scrambling, their social media platforms forced to turn off their comments and replies with the deluge of scathing criticism and condemnation piling on top of them. The Deputy Commissioner General has made a statement, at national level , that the North Ward’s law enforcement’s track record of corruption and criminal mishandling has necessitated a full-blown investigation from the top.

 

And at work, the manager who’d confiscated the evidence that had started it all is refusing to pick up phone calls from the same person he’d been ingratiating himself to so sickeningly shamelessly just days beforehand.

 

Isagi’d heard murmurs in the staff break area that he might be losing his job. 

 

It’d taken him all his self-control not to ditch work, burning for the chance to come up here, hardly questioning why he was so sure he would find the Emperor on this rooftop no matter when that would be. Had barely kept it together, his mind skipping off the edges of his tasks at firm and then downstairs, in the diner, with how keenly he’d been following the developments in this story. 

 

But now that he’s up here, all he can do is stare up at the Emperor.

 

“Oh, speechless? I’m flattered,” the Emperor hums, and there’s something playful in the way he bends a little near eye level to Isagi, tipping a lot more to the side than his usual head tilts. “This is some of my finest work, even if I do say so myself.”

 

“I…,” Isagi finds his voice, but not the words he wants to say - there’s just so much, that’s happened so quickly, and the implications of it all, the fact that overnight, things have changed so much on a scale Isagi could hardly have imagined or dared to believe, that he doesn’t imagine words could even contain it all. “You…do you realise… I think you’ve changed North Ward? Maybe even Japan ?”

 

The guy’s laughing at him. Laughing at him, as though - 

 

“I’m being serious,” Isagi has the last-minute sense to not stomp his feet, but his fist shoots out of its own accord to punch without force at the Emperor’s arm anyway. “You…you…” Another punch. “There’s a national investigation about to happen for the local police, and that university is completely reshuffling its board, and there’s been all these special interest groups in the news about forcing stronger litigation about bullying, and other victims speaking out and other cases coming into light because of this one and -” Isagi thinks it’s all swelling out of him, the ripple effects ballooning beyond his brain capacity to even grasp in one go. The Emperor catches his next punch in his palm, even as Isagi wavers, “the…all those messages of support to the victim, and all those people lobbying in front of the campus gates so she gets justice, and - you did that.” 

 

And in the spill of it, the words he’d been looking for come out too, “ Thank you. ”

 

He forgets to be self-conscious about saying it out loud, or perhaps he just doesn’t care, not in the face of how huge all this is. How much it means. To that lonely, scared girl who had no one to turn to for help. To all those people out there finding a voice and the strength to speak out with it thanks to this.

 

And to him. 

 

Who’d started to think that the world would grind the hope out of him, and shatter his delusions that anything could ever change. 

 

He’s holding the Emperor back, he realises, fingers loosely slotted together, when the hand in his tightens its grasp.

 

“Silly darling. Don’t you get it? This was you . ”

 

“No, I didn’t -”

 

“It was you, ” the Emperor insists, the grip on his fingers firm and strangely grounding. “You realise that I wouldn’t have gotten involved if you hadn’t asked, right? All I did was follow your conditions and your leads. This was all you.”

 

Isagi shakes his head, keeps shaking it because it doesn’t make sense to think of it like that, not when he’s been so utterly helpless to do anything of more consequence than haplessly take risks and make himself physically ill with it. “You were the one who…I didn’t think you’d take an approach like this. I didn’t think…I thought it was going to be. I don’t know. Localised impact. Affecting just that family. But this is…this is so much more than that. This is so much good. You’ve done so much good.”

 

“Ah, sweetheart. Didn’t you call me the spawn of Satan one time?” 

 

Isagi doesn’t remember, but it does sound like something he would say. “You deserved it! Probably.”

 

“Oh, I absolutely did. Because I don’t want you to mix things up here, angel. I didn’t do what I did out of the goodness of my heart. Every job I’ve ever done, I’ve picked for myself, including this one.”

 

“How?” Isagi fires back, because he doesn’t believe his words. He can’t, not anymore, not after all this. Because between one night-time meeting on this rooftop with this man and the next, he’s crossed the bridge from wanting to believe in the good in him, to believing in it. “You didn’t take any money for this, and you went beyond anything I asked you to do. You saved that girl’s life. You… you started so much change, and all of this can add up and do more good, is already doing more good. That’s plenty for the common good for someone who claims to only care about himself - ” 

 

“I would argue that it’s the opposite, angel,” the hand curled over his fist pulls at him, and Isagi finds himself pulled into the Emperor’s space. “I do only care about myself, and mine. Do you really want to know why I went all out on a job like this, a job that would cost a client enough to make over the entirety of this city ten times over, for free?” 

 

A thumb brushes over the backs of Isagi’s knuckles. 

 

“It’s because I wanted to show off.”

 

Isagi stares up into silver and black lensed eyes, “...what?”

 

“I did it to show off. I wanted you to see what I can do,” he watches his hand, knotted together with a large one encased in black, supple leather, pulled towards that masked face and held near where his mouth would be. “What only I can do, for you . What you can do with me .”

 

There is cool, smooth metal under the palm of Isagi’s hand as his thoughts descend into static and his hand is laid flat against the side of a masked face. 

 

“So, how does it feel, darling? To be in my dimension?”

 

Now

 

“D-don’t you have work to do,” Isagi stutters out as a belated curveball, shuffling backwards a little under the guise of brushing off the crumbs on his clothing. “Are you being paid to hang around bothering people on diner rooftops?”

 

How does that even work, he wonders. Does he get paid by the hour, or an upfront charge based on the objective? There has to be some kind of costing involved for resource use, on-field activity, and room for negotiation and adjustment given the risks and discretion he expects to be involved in these jobs, room for error if things don’t go as planned - 

 

It’s not like he would know, because the Emperor has waived all these discussions from their one deal together. There’s that now familiar thump in his chest again, the one he’s getting so terribly bad at not listening to, especially when the alternative is listening to the voice in his head getting increasingly demanding and restless with the need to know . To know more, to know everything. 

 

“I always have time for you, darling ~”

 

“Ugh.” Isagi drops his face into his knees if only to hide more effectively the colour he knows is high against his cheekbones now. “Can you go two seconds without all the obnoxious flirting?”

 

He doesn’t have to look to hear the pure delight bleeding out of the Emperor’s tone and through his stupid mask microphone when he says, “Of course I can’t. You give me so little time, I have to make the most of every second.”

 

“Don’t think your clients would appreciate that.”

 

“Didn’t I tell you that you’re my favourite client? Consider this an after-service perk.”

 

“Can I opt-out?”

 

“So mean. And this after I did my best work, just for you, and came all this way to meet you because you looked so lonely, hanging out on the roof by yourself -”

 

“I told you I just come up here for breaks so you can just zipline by and leave me - !”

 

“Well, I’m here for a break too. This job is so demanding, you know? It’s nice to recharge, especially when there’s a cute guy who’s into you, even though he’s trying to play hard to get.”

 

Isagi makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat as he targets the deadliest glare he’s capable of at the Emperor, hates that it thaws at the edges seeing him with the line of his shoulders relaxed in a way he’s never seen before, that makes no sense for every other adrenaline-laced situation they’ve met each other in. He’s leaning back against the rooftop’s border wall, like there is no rush to take him away today. How long has he been at work this evening? Does he take breaks to sleep and eat? He doesn’t imagine the outfit and logistics of manoeuvring around town makes it easy, though maybe Eight can help and - 

 

“You can ask, you know?” the Emperor interrupts his spiralling trains of thought. “I can practically see you shuffling the puzzle pieces around in your head. Ask.”

 

Isagi’s tongue feels the weight of the sheer volume of things he has that he wants to. The question he does ask is not one of them. “Will you actually answer?”

 

There’s something significant in the way the Emperor holds his stare. “I told you before. I won’t lie to you.”

 

“You might not tell me the truth,” Isagi reminds him. 

 

“But I will also not lie,” the Emperor asserts again. He’s straightened up a little, like what he’s saying is serious enough to smooth out the loose lines of his shoulders and limbs from just a moment ago, and pull them straight. “If you really want to know more, know everything… you know what I’ll ask of you in return, right?”

 

Isagi knows. Of course he knows. It’s not like there has been a single moment he has not been thinking about it.

 

About two or three days ago, the girl who Isagi had only known through letters and a dug-up photograph on social media had come forward as the victim of violent harassment and bullying by a rich heiress currently awaiting trial. There’s a lot she has shared, in a post published on a revived blog that holds several of the brilliant write-ups that had qualified her for the STEM scholarship in the first place, and the subsequent testimonies shared with the police and the media. About the extent of cruelty she’s suffered at the hands of not only her bully but all the people who enabled her and those who stood by and did nothing. About the scars she bears on her body and the ones she’s taken to her soul, that she is not sure she will be able to heal from any time soon. And the fact that the only thing that is giving her strength right now, when she thinks she’d died, while there had been breath in her body still, is the fact that someone, someone out there, someone she doesn’t even know, had cared enough to save her life.

 

The police have raised concerns, already, about the dubious nature of the leaked videos and phone conversations, buried as they are under the flood of the public outrage that cares less about the legal implications of someone even having access to such private information (and potentially the surveillance camera footage that the chairperson had confiscated a long time ago). But the girl has been clear about her stand. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care who it was or how they did it. All she cares about is that they saved her life, when no one else with the power to, did. To her, they are an -

 

“Angel.”

 

“What?”

 

The Emperor is tipping his head at him, and Isagi thinks he sees his eyes crinkled, as though with a smile. “The keyword. It’s angel. ”

 

---

Isagi manages to hold off all the way until he gets home. His internal monologue for the rest of his hours at the diner is just an extended pep talk to be better than his impulses, better than his recklessness that has now started inviting trouble directly on to his backyard - or at least, as a repeat visitor to the rooftop of the establishment he works at multiple days in a week. There’s a part of him that worries that he’s already sliding down the steep incline towards inevitability and has just not allowed himself to accept it, yet. That he’s made a decision and it’s only a matter of time before he takes that final step, from which there will be no going back. 

 

It’s all buzzing beneath his skin and weaving around his bones when he powers up his laptop and wrangles with the part of him that is begging caution of him and the part of him that hungers to know. 

 

And this newer, third part, that reacts the second his browser opens on to the blog post he had read twice as many times as he’d read the letters by the same person. 

 

He makes to bookmark it, realises he has already, and closes the tab, just because he anticipates that seeing this all the time is not going to help him not make an impulsive decision. He taps open a new browser tab, apologising to his laptop for the sheer number of them he’s kept open over the last few days as some sort of visual representation of the absolute chaos his headspace has been in lately, and types up, angel tarot

 

There’s no tarot card by that name. He narrows his searches down to cards featuring angels - the first one he finds is Temperance , named after the virtue itself. Which, well… he doesn’t think that’s it, unless the Emperor is trying to be ironic or make fun of him. 

 

There is an angel on the card for Judgment, too, and Isagi is frowning, because it feels a little too conceited to label yourself as the herald of the day of reckoning (but then again this guy went ahead and called himself the Emperor so maybe) - 

 

And then he finds a third card with angels, knows immediately that this is the one that guy had meant, with his ‘codename for duos’ pitch, and nearly chucks his laptop away. 

 

Lovers.

 

“He can’t be serious,” Isagi tells the universe and also no one in particular. He can tell his entire face is on fire and it’s only a mild blessing that no one else is around to see it, as he scans the description of the card and has to force himself not to slam the laptop lid shit. “Oh God, he’s not serious. Is he?” 

 

Isagi has at least three different voices in his head trying to tell him their opinion, and one of them sounds like Bachira, and he really does not have the bandwidth to deal with that right now. He closes his way out of the tab, and starts closing the rest of the tabs populating his browser window while he’s at it, as an exercise of mental cleansing and just for the sake of something to do that is not thinking.

 

It’s in this process that he comes across some of the tabs Bachira had left open the last time he’d been here. As though he’d needed any further fuel in the blazing wildfire of his emotional turmoil - he’d emptied out Kaiser’s soup, delicious even when reheated and such a refreshing change from takeout and store-bought food that a part of him has been wanting to ask him for the recipe, and to return the blanket he’d left here, smelling softly of roses, and just in general, lingering in the hazy-gold warmth of the memories of that day. 

 

They feel like they belong to a different time, or to a different person, and Isagi is torn. So, so torn, between how soft and sweet that warmth is, how he’s kept an eye out on the balcony whenever he is home these days just to catch a glimpse of Kaiser, and talk to him, and thank him, and just hear his voice… and the intrigue and pull he cannot deny he feels towards the Emperor and how dangerously he seems able to tempt Isagi away, chipping at his resistance as Isagi lets him. 

 

Both of these people get to see only a half of Isagi, a version of him that is not the whole. Would he ever be able to show either of them, or anyone at all, any of the people he cares about, the whole that he is? Would that care that he’s come to receive and come to hold back be the same if he does? 

 

He closes the tabs Bachira had open on different social media platforms, hunting for Kaiser’s accounts, and then the general searches he’d run to at least try and find any pages about him as a doctoral student in linguistics in one of the universities of the city, an exercise in misery as he wrestles with the guilt. 

 

And it is here that he stumbles upon one search inquiry for michael kaiser etymology - 

 

With a search preview result a couple hits down the page that translates to ‘god’s chosen emperor’.

 

Notes:

- it's almost as though something possessed me just to work that 'the only hope you need is in the fact that i'm around' quote into the plot somehow

- names are a pretty important theme/motif in the fic, hence the shakespeare reference in the title (i toyed with calling it 'a tale as old as time', but i think the title functions better as a romeo & juliet reference than a beauty and the beast reference what with the, you know, rose-tattooed man and falling in love with someone in a mask, and the furious reconciliation of (ideological) opposites in the name of love and, um, the drama, the balcony romance, and of course, names and nicknames)

- i am taking a chance here but hmm i am maybe working on a fluffier, sillier, in-canon fic for kiis and i am maybe in need of someone that speaks a little german for a couple lines that i don't trust google translate with so if you'd be willing to run your eyes over 5-6 lines of dialogue, please let me know!

Chapter 4

Notes:

i'd suggest keeping an eye out for the tense changes in the 'then' portion of this chapter, since she jumps around in time a bit

(and if you've noticed the ch count change, i'll explain at the end - thank u for waiting x)

Now

 

Isagi cringes into himself the moment the girl - the convenience store clerk he’s run into while she’d been on the job a few times - gives him the most openly sceptical look he has ever been on the receiving end of.

 

So, okay, maybe jumping the gun and offering to walk her home out of the blue at almost midnight wasn’t the smartest move. He hurries to explain, “I live close by here, so I mean, I can walk you at least part of the way… especially with those guys out there…”

 

His voice trails off awkwardly, because his explanations sound tepid to his own ears, so he can’t even really imagine how it must sound to her. Isagi’s only thought to approach in the first place was because he’d noticed she’d been hesitating near the exit, clearly apprehensive. Out in the small parking strip fringing the convenience store, a couple of guys with motorbikes were just barely visible, but they didn’t need to see them to know they were there. Their voices, loud, raucous, carried through the quiet of the night and eddied uneasily into the store. Apart from the young kid who had just shown up to relieve this girl for the graveyard shift and Isagi himself, there was no one else around - not even one of the policemen Isagi’d started to see patrolling the area sometimes, though they looked even less prepared to handle a group of clearly intoxicated maybe-thugs uncaring about the public disturbance they were causing, in clear view of the cameras outside the convenience store. 

 

“I can wait them out,” the girl says, polite in the way people who are trying to refuse a door-to-door salesman are, and Isagi considers for a second just showing her his ID so she knows he’s not lying about who he is and where he lives before realising that no matter his intentions, the more he insists the more suspicious he will probably come off. 

 

After all, in her shoes, would he be willing to trust a complete stranger to walk home at this time of night? Here, of all places? Downtown has always been the hotbed for the ugliest that North Ward had to offer, but these days, as summer heaves itself over the city and smothers them in its vicious heat, Isagi can sense an almost animal unease as he walks through the streets, like the neighbourhoods themselves are jumpy and twitching at each small noise. One would think, with the provincial police actually going through the reshuffle mandated at national level, things would start to improve, but…

 

Isagi steps out of the store, the chime of the automatic doors making him flinch as the noise carries through the carpark. He doesn’t stop to see whether the sound attracts the attention of the bikers - Isagi can’t even really tell if they’re one of the gangs that had been terrorising the place or just an ordinary gaggle of young people high off their minds on the drugs selling in downtown for dirt cheap these days. 

 

He does manage to get out of the compound without attracting attention to himself, his white-knuckled grip on the taser he’s taken to carrying inside his jacket pocket loosening only slightly as he rounds the corner. But then… 

 

That kid who’ll be working the closing shift at the store must be, what? Nineteen? Just starting college, and like himself, forced out into troubled nights with his safety on the line so he could survive as the net closes slowly around the people at the bottom of the barrel first. The girl too, surely she couldn’t be that much older…

 

Fuck this. He can’t just leave them there. Isagi hovers near the exit of the compound, fully aware that this is only going to make him look more like a creepy stalker if the girl just walks out right now, but hesitating just in case he hears the electronic chime of the automatic doors in the distance, signalling she’s left. 

 

A minute passes, then two, then nothing. She’s waiting them out, Isagi realises, and bites down on his lip, because who knows how long they are going to be there, who knows if they plan to actually venture into the store at some point, who knows the number of ways things can go sideways considering, by how slurred and loopy those loud voices sound, none of them are in their right minds right now. 

 

There’s just too many things that can go wrong, and Isagi already knows that he’s not going to be able to simply walk away, when the faintest shift in the air sends him into full alert.

 

To his credit, he doesn’t even twitch as the Emperor swoops into a silent landing next to him. 

 

“Really?” Isagi whispers askance at him. “At street level? You want to be seen?”

 

“I’m doing lovely, too, angel,” comes the electronic response, the volume turned down so low Isagi has to strain just a little to hear him clearly, “Fancy running into you like this.”

 

Isagi bypasses the small talk. “Are you going to help?” he asks, pointing in the direction of the convenience store car park. A couple of the guys have started singing, rowdy and toneless, and Isagi makes a face when they start to swap out the lyrics for something decidedly tasteless. They definitely do not make him feel any better about those kids having to walk past them alone at night…

 

“Help with what?” the Emperor dips close to him so his head is at the level of Isagi’s shoulder. “They’re not doing anything.”

 

Isagi’s mouth settles into a thin line. That’s the kind of half-ass argument he’s gotten from security guards and patrolling police men before too - the refusal to defuse a situation that could be dangerous just because it hadn’t become dangerous yet. He expects it from the Emperor at this point, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it.

 

“There’s people in that store - college kids, probably younger than me,” Isagi tells him in an urgent undertone. “One of them is a girl who’s supposed to be leaving but can’t because those guys are right in the way.”

 

“And you want to help.”

 

“I want to help,” Isagi repeats, staring him down. 

 

A crackly sigh. “When are you going to learn, darling…”

 

“Listen, if you’re not going to do something, can you leave?” 

 

“And what exactly are you planning to do?” 

 

“I’ll figure it out.”

 

“See, this is why I can’t just leave you. The last time I found you in front of a convenience store causing trouble, you crashed a motorbike into a wall.”

 

The memory of that encounter, so, so long ago when the Emperor was a little more than a disease born out of the rot that festers through North Ward to him, pangs through him, a tuning fork ringing. They’d butted heads immediately afterwards, he remembers, in another shadowed alley, about Isagi’s childish heroics. 

 

It may be childish, Isagi thinks. But he is also not the same person he was, back then. 

 

And if anyone knows that, it should be this guy. 

 

Isagi considers for a second, and then without a word starts to stalk towards the side of the compound, the enclosure wall twisting around the back of the convenience store lot. 

 

“Have you given up?” the Emperor asks, and Isagi doesn’t have time to stop and wonder whether he sounds surprised. He’d pulled his phone out, tapping into YouTube and searching for a moment, muting the audio as he pulls open what looks like a good enough option for what he’s about to attempt. 

 

“Darling?”

 

“Shh.”

 

And with that, Isagi amps the volume back up to maximum, prays that the acoustics of the still night air will work in his favour, and taps the audio of the police siren to play.

 

Then

 

Chigiri takes one look at him and baulks. 

 

“You,” he almost smashes the side of his iced americano to Isagi’s face, and Isagi shudders from both the relief and the sharp twinge of pain sparkling down his jaw, “What the fuck did you do ?”

 

“I didn’t do anything,” Isagi defends, miserably, and groans at the stiff movement of his mouth, pain receptors blinking sharp and loud at the slightest touch. 

 

And for once, this is true. Isagi had been making his usual walk to his bus-stop, taking one of his short-cuts, when he’d tripped over something - he’d assumed that it was another of the bags of garbage people sometimes disposed of in these narrow streets instead of bothering with recycling - but then the pile of trash moved. 

 

Some thirty minutes later, Isagi finds himself plied with painkillers and an ice compress held to the side of his face by a very displeased Chigiri, who’s hustled him into the nurse’s office, deciding for the both of them that they’re skipping class.

 

“Did you call the police?” Chigiri asks him critically, applying pressure on Isagi’s bruise just until Isagi flinches. The pinch of pain fades under the numbing cold of the compress, even though the nurse had clucked her tongue and informed them that this is going to develop into one nasty bruise, especially since he didn’t treat it right away.

 

“No, of course I didn’t call the police,” Isagi mumbles, Chigiri leaning in to hear him better given that he can barely move his mouth without it hurting like hell, “It was just a homeless guy, and he was literally high out of his mind.”

 

“He assaulted you!”

 

“He didn’t know what was happening, he probably thought it was self-defence!”

 

“Isagi, oh my God,” Isagi can tell that Chigiri is fighting the urge to push the ice pack harder into his face, and has to be grateful that his friend loves him more than he wants to cause him bodily harm, “He decked you in the face! Your jaw’s going to be swollen like a balloon after this, are you even going to be able to eat?”

 

Isagi, who’d been looking forward to that day’s tempura lunch set special, feels a renewed surge of sadness at this realisation. 

 

“Seriously…,” Chigiri huffs, and instructs Isagi to hold the ice pack to his face and not move before he flits out of the nurse’s office. He returns not long after, having procured a thick yoghurt-blueberry smoothie from somewhere that he sticks a straw into with some unnecessary violence, before holding it up under his nose with an order to Sip. 

 

It doesn’t get any better throughout the day. The pain, which had been ringing up the side of his face, against his eye sockets and the backs of his teeth and needle-sharp in his temple, shrinks only to concentrate right at the point where his jaw hinges. By the time they make it to lunch, Isagi has a pounding headache, feels like he has a tennis ball stuffed into the side of his mouth, all made worse by the concerned questions he gets before people realise it physically hurts him to talk. 

 

Chigiri, who he shares the most classes with, becomes his self-appointed interpreter for most of the day, telling off people who prolong conversations a little too long, Can’t you see he’s injured, dumbass?, while Isagi cycles through multiple ice packs and the irony that the one time he does manage to get himself severely hurt isn’t even when he’d been doing something stupid.

 

Reo makes a sympathetic noise as soon as he sees Isagi - the bruise has deepened into a disturbing splotch of red and is purpling quickly. He’d been talking a mile a minute when Chigiri and Isagi had found them in the cafeteria, and it’d been clear from Nagi’s face, eyes dead and mouth pinched into that unhappy pout of his, that he was being subjected to a Reo Rant. 

 

“Here, I got you this,” Reo now says, as he produces a giant, fancy looking box, all black matte and gold detailing along the side. “I couldn’t remember which anko dessert you like though, so I got all of them.”

 

Isagi gags on the pain a bit when his jaw falls open at the contents of the box. There are individually portioned packs of kintsuba, but also mochi, mini taiyaki, anko jellies, what look like red-bean filled madeleines… this is probably enough to cover the snack cravings of a family of five for a week. 

 

When he looks up, Nagi is wearing an expression that seems to say I tried to stop him , and Chigiri is wearing a face that seems to say, How’s he supposed to eat that with a broken jaw, you idiot.  

 

But the intent behind the gift, just like the coffee beans still populating Isagi’s cupboards and his cafe-standard espresso machine, is too obvious and pure for Isagi not to melt a little, Reo waving off his stilted efforts to thank him. 

 

“What were you guys fighting about?” Chigiri asks, as they settle down to eat after Isagi’s insisted they share some of the desserts among themselves. 

 

“We weren’t fighting ,” Reo says, even though he’s already scowling. “One of my professors shot down my capstone project pitch.”

 

Both Isagi and Chigiri’s brows hitch up in unison. Reo is a star student - always at the top of the honour roll, outperforming in practically every class. It’s almost unheard of for him to have trouble with schoolwork, especially with professors who seem to by and large adore him.

 

“What project was that?”

 

“It’s for that Digitizing Social Welfare class,” Reo is still grimacing, stabbing a chopstick into his steak. “Mind you, my proposal is one of the most actionable and practical solutions to have large-scale impact that came out of the cohort…like how much help do you think a campus buddy system app is going to be beyond campus?”

 

Reo’s proposal, it turns out, had been about crime-fighting robots.

 

“They’re not robots, ” Reo snaps when Nagi blandly summarises the project for the rest of them, “They’re androids!”

 

“What’s…” Chigiri’s frown has barely left him this whole day, “What’s the difference?”

 

“The difference is that they are far more sophisticated, have a much more complex intelligence system, and they are, importantly, completely objective, so there won’t be any of that unfair bias happening,” Reo explains. “Do you guys remember the project I mentioned about the AI football training stuff we were working on?”

 

Isagi, a chilled plastic cup of green tea held against the side of his face, nods. Reo had, unsurprisingly, been interning at Mikage Corp, and one of the things he’d been involved with had been the ridiculous semi-physical hologram training simulators that Japan had adopted into its national football initiatives. From what Isagi’s managed to gather after sifting through the corporate marketing language of all the promotional content and Reo’s own impassioned, excited rambling, these AI training partners had almost limitless capacity in learning from the real-life players using them and adapting to their playstyles, personalising increasingly challenging training regimes to push footballers to their limits and catalyse growth. 

 

Their collective mania for football is what they had bonded over, initially - Reo and Nagi eventually folding into the trio of Isagi, Bachira, and Chigiri as two sets of school friends who met first in classes and then in their free time on and then off campus. It’s maybe because he’s seen Reo pouting because he lost at a crane machine game twelve times in a row and spent many free periods in between classes dissecting Manshine and Bastard Munchen matches with him that it still catches him off-guard, sometimes, remembering that Reo isn’t just his friend with the clumsy yet endearing habit of showering people with expensive gifts to show that he cares about them. 

 

It’s still that Reo sat at the table with them now, who’d somehow hurried to get Isagi his favourite dessert after no doubt finding out about his eventful morning. But he is, also, at the same time, the heir to a multi-billion yen corporation, whose reality diverges from the rest of them in ways that they definitely overlook, sometimes. After all, his father had not so long ago been in the news for dropping millions into a project developing real-time translators because he wanted to talk to aliens someday, like this is a normal way to fulfil an outlandish whim that most of them left behind in childhood. 

 

That’s probably why, hearing Reo describe his ideas about adapting the AI tech of those holographic goalies to supplement, if not replace, law enforcement sounds so openly absurd, despite how earnest Reo clearly is talking about it. Isagi finds himself staring blankly at him for several seconds by the time he’s done. 

 

Reo takes in their stumped faces and visibly deflates. “You think it’s dumb too.”

 

“No, no, it’s not -,” Isagi hurries to say, forgetting that he has a ping-pong ball sized bruise locked into the back of teeth. He winces, and then in a quieter voice, says, “It’s not that it’s dumb, but how would you… I mean how would it work, practically?”

 

“I mean, for starters, the technology is there, it would just need to be adapted,” Reo reasons - beside him, Nagi seems to have zoned out of the conversation altogether. Isagi suspects he’s heard Reo go through all his talking points and more multiple times today alone. “Second, clearly there’s a need for assistive technology here. Sure, maybe launching the product to market is going to be challenging, it’d be an uphill battle convincing governments to invest in this technology, especially because it might replace a whole ton of jobs in the short run. But in a support capacity? The police are clearly not managing, even with the reshuffle and expansion of the force. Like… you’d think that this sort of thing would happen less now that they’ve done the police reform they’ve been so smug about on the news, right?” He motions at Isagi’s injured jaw.

 

And… well, he’s not wrong. The provincial police force has undergone complete reform, and there are more patrols hitting the street than Isagi’s ever seen since he moved to North Ward. More police boxes are popping up, there’s been an uptick in arrests, and there are already reports of a record high in the crime clearance rates in North Ward, significantly steeper than any previous recorded year.

 

But a high clearance rate doesn’t automatically mean there’s no criminal activity, no matter how many fluff-pieces by paid-over media outlets want to optimistically spin it. After all, organised crime might be a social ill but it had, for the longest time, been a profit-making machine for some people, and the entire livelihoods of others. Of course there is resistance. Of course there are side-effects. And now, with the police actually trying, it’s obvious to anyone on ground level that they’re overwhelmed. 

 

So, outlandish as it is, he gets where Reo is coming from. Maybe law enforcement could benefit from better technology, better resources that can help support floundering manpower. But the question, then, becomes of scope. 

 

Because Isagi gets it. 

 

He’s spent nights and nights, alone and staring out into the world from the rooftop he keeps climbing up to, and wondering if the choice to make a difference in it is sitting in his hands, offered to him again and again, and his hesitation is just as bad as choosing to do nothing. It’s not a new dilemma - but it is a changed one, one that has metamorphosed in size and scale until it hulks over him and his conscience. 

 

Because the extent of the difference Isagi had made before, while large to a person or two, just in that moment, in the middle of a pickpocketing or an attempted convenience store robbery, is so little, so much less permanent, compared to the extent of the difference one choice of his had set off throughout this city. The exact kind of difference that has Reo dreaming up robots to take to the street to handle all the problems crawling out of its dingiest orifices, forced to the surface from the agitations of attempts at change. The droids could eliminate unfair bias, Reo’d argued. But would they? Because Isagi is sure that once deployed, the droids would take to the streets of downtown, and not the fancy upper-class suites and hotels and skyscrapers where the root of the problem often lay.

 

He’s still thinking about it as he folds himself into what has obviously become his spot on the diner roof tonight. About that possibly-homeless guy and his shabby, threadbare clothes and the discarded syringes littered around the nest he’d been sleeping in, syringes that he suspects now cost less than a day’s meals would, and how he cannot imagine that he chose that life for himself. 

 

He’d hedged about coming up here today, he thinks, feeling the breeze lightly tussle his hair - it’s not even like he’s in the mood to eat, considering his one attempt at chewing anything solid had nearly made him cry from how sharply it hurt. But he can admit he’s come to like it – come to enjoy just sitting under the open sky, even with its layer of smog covering what lay beyond, glowing a dull greenish-grey as it reflected the lights of the city back to him. The breeze is a relief, makes the heat he can feel threatening to creep up on them soon enough before summer unleashes itself more bearable. 

 

Climbing up and out from the humid, hectic confines of the izakaya to this place has almost started to feel therapeutic. Like he’s stepping away from the world and its troubles, like for a second he gets to pretend they don’t belong to him, that he can exist just on the outskirts without the flow of life eroding at him as it passes by. An impermanent daydream, he supposes, a hypocritical one too considering he can’t help but involve himself, but he thinks he can’t be grudged a break when he spends all eighteen of his waking hours stressed out of his mind over one thing or the other. 

 

He’d not been expecting a visit tonight, but he straightens up ever so slightly at the sound of feet hitting the ground behind him. 

 

And then there’s that dramatic swish of the cape being flicked off to the side before the Emperor sits himself down beside Isagi. Too close, as usual, even with all this space all around them, made wider under the endless stretch of unseen sky. Under the low rattling of the mesh-wire in the wind, Isagi hears the dragged release of an exhale, the mass of a person next to him deflating into the space like a car tire losing air. 

 

“Tired?” Isagi asks lightly. 

 

The Emperor ignores his question to ask one of his own, “Darling, are you sick?”

 

Almost unthinking, Isagi’s hand flies up towards his face - the disposable mask he’d slipped on because he’d gotten sick of the stares and the questions halfway through the day sit snug just below his nose, pulled down so he can breathe easier. 

 

A part of him wonders whether that’s why the Emperor chose today to stop by.

 

“Something like that,” he mumbles, the sound muffled.

 

A raspy sigh. “Why don’t you take better care of yourself, you little idiot? And what are you doing out here, go home.”

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“You’re stubborn, is what you are. Do I have to call the car for you again?”

 

“Oh my God, seriously, I’m fine -”

 

“You’re not even eating today -”

 

“I ate downstairs.” A lie. Food hurts his face so bad he’s been sustaining himself on Pocari Sweat since leaving campus. 

 

The Emperor stares hard at him for one long, unblinking moment. Head cocked to the side.

 

(It’s the same. It’s the same each time.)  

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing.” And then, “Just miss seeing your cute face.”

 

Instantly, Isagi feels himself colour, the heat trapping itself inside his mask and making everything feel suddenly humid. “Well. See how you like it talking to someone you can’t see.”

 

A scoff, and then its silence. Isagi’s grateful for it, because he’s not much in the mood for talking - and it’s only partially to do with the splitting headache he gets every time he opens his mouth.

 

“...I bet you’ve been busy.”

 

“Hmm?” 

 

Isagi peeks to the side, and doesn’t know what to do with the sight of the Emperor just… sitting beside him. Legs folded, posture relaxed. Loose and easy, the way the nights up here have started to feel, such a far cry from how they’d started. 

 

“I - guess you’ve been busy.”

 

There’s that coy tilt of the head again, as the Emperor stretches his legs out in front of him, leaning back on his palms planted on the ground behind him. 

 

“You miss me, angel?” he sounds like he’s smiling. 

 

“No, I just… imagine business must be good these days,” Isagi measures his words, careful, mouthing them out around the pain. “Lots of people who are keen to… to tie up loose ends these days. What with all the police crackdowns… and everyone being scared about their dirt getting leaked next.”

 

There’s a long pause before the Emperor admits, “You could say that.”

 

And after another pause, “Does that make you mad, angel?”

 

It should make him mad. 

 

It should make him furious. 

 

After all, this is the thing, isn’t it? This is fundamentally why, no matter how well-meaning any reform is, no matter how well-meaning Reo’s crime-fighting robots are, it will always land sideways because the world they live in is skewed in favour of one side. That’s why downtown is beset with vandalised shops and families disappearing overnight and a worryingly escalating drug problem and throngs of people losing livelihoods setting up flimsy homes in its cracks to evade police patrols while security doubles and triples upstate, and people like the Mikages ferry their way from place to place with secure cars and bodyguards. 

 

But it’s not easy to condemn things so… so definitively. Not anymore. Isagi has himself tasted what it’s like to wield power, and the responsibility that comes with it, the consequences that follow after it. One choice of his, made right here, on this rooftop, the trigger offered up to him like a gift, had ripplied out through this city and changed everything. 

 

Power had done that. The power to make a difference that Isagi had so badly craved, power that he is not naive or self-important enough to imagine is his. 

 

But for a moment, it had been, and he had used it without even understanding the scale of what he was going to do. 

 

And there’s these people who had this power, all the time. Legislators, politicians, governors, educators, businessmen. Who had the ability to make a choice, choices which had consequence, a lot of which could be good. 

 

Some people, like Reo, are trying , but they’re working within a system that’s so much bigger and so much more convoluted than the clear-eyed, diametric reasoning of what is right and what isn’t, who is right, and who isn’t, that it’s difficult to imagine their efforts succeeding easily. 

 

And there are others, like this man, sitting next to him, exploiting those complications for their own gain. 

 

So Isagi should be mad. 

 

But that would make him a hypocrite, wouldn’t it?

 

“I’m always mad at you,” Isagi says at last - quietly, as he hugs his knees to himself.

 

Suddenly there’s a hand, light, against his hair. 

 

“You really must be sick,” the Emperor has leaned in, peering into what he can see of Isagi’s face - Isagi bats away at the hand he can sense try to come up for his mask, “You’re not even yelling at me.”

 

That makes him huff. “I mean, I knew what I was getting myself into when I asked you to help.”

 

There’s more silence. Isagi huddles into his knees. 

 

“Are you regretting it?”

 

“What?”

 

Silver and black glint at him in the darkness. “Asking me for help.”

 

And for all the things Isagi is conflicted over, for all the ways he’s aware that his childish dissection of good and bad has almost disintegrated into nothing, for all the ways he’s paralysed, not knowing if he isn’t doing more because he can’t or because he won’t, his answer is decisive when he says, “No.”

 

There’s a letter in his browser bookmarks, tens of thousands of views recorded on it, meant just for him. A letter he’s read dozens of times now, a letter of a life that exists somewhere in this city right now, unburdened at last of its darkness. 

 

It calls him an angel.

 

There’s so much that Isagi does not know. What makes something, someone, good or bad. What is wrong and what is right. That’s what he’d been trying to tell Reo, earlier today. That he doesn’t resent the man who’d lunged at him in a panic, words slurred and eyes panicked and bloodshot, springing out of his flimsy bed of rags thinking he was about to get accosted. That he doesn’t resent the old man who used to own a Japanese spirits store on this street, who’d once hidden a gym bag full of crisp banknotes in a dumpster behind this diner and then disappeared into the night for the sake of someone he loves. That he doesn’t resent Reo, who is a product of the same privileged, elite class that Isagi had so simplistically blamed so many of the problems infecting this flawed, broken world of theirs, but who has also quickly become one of his dearest friends.

 

If they, as people, could not tell apart what was good from what was bad, what was right from what was wrong, how could a robot? 

 

So he looks at this man - this shadowed figure whose job it is to profit off that moral ambiguity, but who isn’t just that, who he has started to think of in more depth than the black void he carves out of the night when he appears - in primary colours, dots on a map, pictures in windows, the sense of safety that envelopes this rooftop - and thinks about the life they’ve helped save together. 

 

“I don’t regret it at all.”

 

---

At home, he texts Reo. 

 

Thanks him again for the desserts - he’s shared plenty at work, and parcelled the rest into his freezer to extend their shelf lives to indulge in when he regains the ability to chew things without feeling like dying again. 

 

And then, he asks whether Reo could think about reframing his robot ( oh, sorry, I mean android) proposal.

 

What about deploying them for disaster relief

 

First responder support

 

Basic first-aid

 

Testing risk-prone crime scenes 

 

Something that could be programmed to specific scripts

 

Specific, clear outcomes

 

Some of this technology already exists, Isagi knows. Traffic speed readers and surveillance drones and more in Japan’s push to lead the global tech race. But as Reo responds enthusiastically, texting back that with the capacity of the AI of these hologram robot things, they could greatly improve city surveillance and mobilise action a lot faster, and that one of the points in his proposal had been about using the droids as the first contact for incoming crisis calls and  streamlining all that surveillance data so that law enforcement forces had a much clearer idea of how to allocate their resources instead of running all over town responding to 119 and 110 calls, he thinks about how naive they’ve both been. 

 

The room they both have to grow, as they learn that simply having power does not mean you can sculpt the world to your vision overnight. 

 

It’s as he’s helping Reo finetune his presentation slides, the focus now shifted towards the much clearer parameters of how androids can reduce property damage, minimise the risk to the lives of civilians and first responders, and relieve pressure on the police force to stretch its resources with case studies to support his points, that his doorbell rings. 

 

And Isagi, not thinking to put his mask back on, pulls it open and registers Michael Kaiser on the other side of his door holding a pot by the handles at the same moment as Michael Kaiser spots the ugly, blue-grey bruise swelling up half his face.

 

“Yoichi?”

 

Those bright blue eyes are blown open with shock behind their thin rimmed glasses and Isagi is too stumped to think when he has the pot, steaming lightly through the holes in the lid pushed into his hands. 

 

And then there are fingers on his face, coaxing it to the side as Kaiser stares down at the bruise. 

 

“Kaiser -”

 

“Who did this?”

 

Isagi starts. 

 

He’s never heard Kaiser sound like that before. 

 

“Um, listen, it’s nothing -”

 

“Did someone hit you?”

 

“Well, I mean, yes, but -,” Isagi stammers out, managing to ease his face out of Kaiser’s hands to look at him better. 

 

And then he’s swallowing around whatever he’d been about to say at the way those crystal blue eyes go frigid. 

 

“Who was it? What happened?” Kaiser demands, and Isagi backs into the hallway as he steps towards him. When he trips over one of his own shoes, kicked off carelessly in the hallway when he’d come home earlier with how absorbed he was talking to Reo, an arm comes up around him to steady him, and Isagi is suddenly as hot as whatever delightfully smelling dish Kaiser had brought him. 

 

“I was on the way to class and I kind of tripped on a guy sleeping in an alleyway,” Isagi rushes to explain, unable to help his grimace at the way the effort hurts. Kaiser notices right away, and relieves Isagi of the pot, walking them both back further into the apartment with the arm he has kept around Isagi’s back. He can feel the heat of bare skin soaking through the thin fabric of his shirt, and has to force himself not to fixate on it. “And he kind of freaked out and. Yeah.”

 

Kaiser frowns down at him, scanning his face. “Really?” he asks, finally.

 

Isagi blinks. “Yes,” he says, and then, a little more slowly, “Why… I mean, do you think I’m lying?”

 

Bachira had thought that he was, at least for a little bit. Bachira’d immediately assumed he’d gotten into a fight trying to meddle - you always fucking meddle - had jumped to a clean conclusion because Isagi was simply statistically more likely to get involved in situations he shouldn’t be on purpose than get involved by accident. 

 

But as he watches the furrow against Kaiser’s brow deepen, the turn of his mouth unhappy as he wraps one hand around the side of Isagi’s neck and the other under his jaw to scrutinise the bruise, his touch hotter from having held the dish he’d brought over, he thinks that it should be strange for Kaiser to think that. 

 

Kaiser, who he has tried and failed so badly to make a good impression on. Kaiser, who should know nothing of his proclivity to get mired in tricky situations, who he had categorically kept that part of his character from and feared revealing. 

 

Kaiser, who asks, instead of politely saying no like Isagi would have imagined he would, when he was just that neighbour on the balcony opposite, “You didn’t get into a fight or something, did you?”

 

“No,” Isagi tells him slowly. Truthfully. Takes the moment to study his face, expression so serious, as his own gets studied in turn. “I really did just stumble on the man, he was so still I didn’t realise he was there. And then he lashed out and ran away.”

He stands under the unblinking scrutiny of those blue, blue eyes - sharper now than he’s ever seen them. Almost cutting, in the way they take him in, head cocked to one side. “When was this?”

 

“This morning?”

 

“Where?”

 

“Is this an interrogation?” Isagi jokes, but he isn’t smiling either.

 

“Yoichi.”

 

“In the alley leading out in front of the 299 bus-stop.”

 

It’s the same alleyway, he thinks, where the Emperor had caught him on the way to work once. 

 

The day he started calling him angel. 

 

He’d not realised it then, but it had been very soon after he’d met Kaiser for the first time. 

 

Kaiser sighs, a deeply unhappy scowl on his face. “Did you get this iced?”

 

“First thing when I got to campus,” Isagi tells him. “I took painkillers, too.”

 

It’s clear that Kaiser is frustrated - concerned and agitated and struggling with what to translate that to. He’d seen Chigiri and Bachira like that all day. 

 

“What’s this?” Isagi asks finally, addressing the fragrant pot of steaming something sitting on his kitchen counter. 

 

“Ah,” Kaiser refocuses, and as Isagi lifts the lid off to inspect the contents, the aromatic steam almost instantly transporting him to the time he’d had this bubbling over his own stovetop, as he slipped in and out of consciousness, vulnerable but safe and looked after and secure. “It’s the soup you liked. I made too much, I thought you’d like some.”

 

The pot is nearly all the way full. 

 

“Huh,” Isagi says, softly, and his heart is a warm, aching thing in his chest, overpowering his mind and the pieces still missing in this puzzle he’s building. Thick with the weight of the care that people can have for each other, person to person, one to one, a single spark in a blank night sky, one pinprick of hope when you are lost. Letters of gratitude and red bean sweets and acts of care where maybe the magnitude is all relative when it couldn’t change the world, maybe, but could change someone’s world. “It’s almost like you knew I’d need this tonight.”

 

---

Several nights ago, Isagi had sat on his couch, staring blank and uncomprehending at the text on his laptop screen and a browser tab that he best friend had left open. 

 

Coincidence. 

 

That’s his first thought.

 

It’s a coincidence. 

 

A complete coincidence. 

 

It’s just a name. Just that name.

 

So absurd it’s laughable. 

 

That’s what he’d been thinking as he pushed the laptop lid closed. 

 

As he crossed over to the balcony, peeked out at the apartment opposite through the gaps of his curtains. 

 

There were no lights on. Of course there weren’t - it was so late at night. 

 

And Kaiser, he’d learned, from what he had shared and from the cyberstalking Bachira had done, is a doctorate student on a grant, funding himself with a research assistantship. He lives here, for pity’s sake - a place where no one with a better alternative would choose to live. Even Isagi is renting here at a fraction of the market price because his flat is a stigmatised property. Someone who was making bank off of rich people would not be living here.

 

It’s absurd.

 

It’s insane. 

 

The logical gap between the two is so wide that Isagi will fall in if he tries to jump across.

 

And yet, he’d found himself on the doorstep of Kaiser’s apartment, picking his way there for the first time with the layout of his side of the floor flipped in his mind, at the most human hour of the morning he’d managed to wait for. 

 

He was going to return the blanket. 

 

He was just going to return the blanket he’d had waiting on his couch since the time Kaiser had come over last. 

 

The blanket he’d been forgetting to give back.

 

Yeah, that’s all. 

 

That’s the reason he’d kept rehearsing in his head even as he doubted and second-guessed what the hell he’d thought he was doing - even as he sealed himself to whatever happened next with the ring of a doorbell. 

 

There’d been nothing, for a while, and Isagi dithered violently, wondering if Kaiser was still sleeping, wondering whether he was already out. He’d seen him on his balcony around this hour before, and he’d been paralysed for exactly one second before he’d caved and rung the doorbell again, thinking he’d have to agonise over this all day otherwise, when the door started to open -

 

And all thought in Isagi’s head died a swift death in the face of a robe-clad Michael Kaiser with a wild tangle of gold and blue around his head, wearing a fearsome glare that fell off almost comically fast when he clocked who exactly it was that rang his doorbell. 

 

“Yoichi -”

 

“Oh my god,” Isagi whispered, horrified, “Did I wake you?”

 

“Uh -” Kaiser’s voice had been hoarse, vocal chords clearly jammed still with sleep, and a deep furrow in his forehead as he squinted like he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. 

 

“I’m so sorry!” Isagi rushed out immediately, holding the blanket out like an olive branch or a talisman. “I just… um, I wanted to return this before I left for the day - sorry!”

 

“It’s okay -,” Kaiser had starts to say, sleep slurred, a low guttural sound that had friction against Isagi’s eardrums, and he’d moved as though he was trying to take a step towards him - 

 

Except he’d still been holding the door by its side, and his foot caught at its edge and then Isagi was dropping the blanket in his rush to try and steady the large, barely-clad man and his compromised centre of gravity before he toppled over the threshold. 

 

“Careful, careful,” Isagi found himself huffing out in muted panic, pushing Kaiser upright and immediately thinking of Nagi, the deadweight he becomes when he’s half–asleep on his feet, all his motor functions and high-level thinking on snooze. How does Reo carry him around like this? “Are you okay?”

Kaiser had only managed a light groan, and Isagi’d looked up at him from where he’d bent down to pick up the blanket again. The man was half leaning against his doorpost, his expression pinched as though he’d been slighted by the world. 

 

“...not a morning person, huh?” Isagi’d asked lightly, and hadn’t been able to help the grin at the distinctly petulant face Kaiser made at his teasing. 

 

It was… something of a revelation, he’d thought then, seeing this side of him, fondness and something else, something with wings and warmth, tearing tenderly in his chest. Robe messily tied around his torso, face creased up with the effort to stay conscious. Softly lit under the morning light filtering into the corridor, an imperfectly beautiful mess. He looks so fluffy, Isagi thought, a bit deliriously, even as he grabbed one of Kaiser’s arms, tucked the blanket into its crook, “Here - go back to sleep. I’m sorry I woke you up!”

 

Isagi was already backing away, knowing that the mortification will slam into him soon enough, the stupidity of entertaining whatever it was he thought he was going to find coming here like this mingling with this quiet, raw thing stinging soft and bleeding warm inside at the sight of this Kaiser - ruffled and messy and such a far cry from his usual elegant poise and yet so solid and real and there for him to see - when he swore he heard him mumble, 

 

“S’okay, darling.”

 

---

<< Hey

 

<< Do you remember when you came over to stay at mine?

 

<< And you saw my neighbour?

 

He nearly yelped in shock when the phone immediately started to buzz in his hand - it was on silent, but the vibration was shocking enough to have him fumbling, especially when the call was coming from Rin, who is notoriously awful at texting back, let alone calling. 

 

<< I’m in class!!!! 

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

>> why

 

Isagi had stared in disbelief for a second before he typed out, 

 

<< What ‘why’? 

 

>> why are you asking 

 

Isagi snuck a glance at the lecturer, droning on about ethics and interpretation in legislature, and sideways at Chigiri, who seemed to have logged out of the lecture altogether, tapping at his phone from behind the cover of his laptop. He’d tried to think of a way to ease into this conversation, to try and steer it where he needed it to go naturally, before giving up almost immediately. 

 

This was Rin, after all. The direct approach was the best one.

 

<< I was wondering why you told me to stay away from him?

 

>> why

 

Isagi’s eyebrow had started to twitch. 

 

<< Is that all you can say?

 

>> i’ll kill you 

 

<< Wow, real mature

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

>> why are you asking after all this time 

 

Poised with his thumbs over his smartphone screen, Isagi cursed a little internally at how valid a question that really was. 

 

<< I was just curious 

 

>> but why

 

<< Are you going to tell me or not????

 

>> this is because of what blunt bob said isnt it

 

Isagi didn’t have to ask who - he’s pretty sure he didn’t even have to ask what , not when he’d been actively trying not to think about the fact that Bachira and Rin apparently talk about him when he’s not around to hear. So, there was a high chance that after the last time Bachira was at his apartment…

 

<< What did Bachira say? 

 

>> that you have the hots for him 

 

On second thought, Isagi should have just sucked it up for the rest of the four hours of classes he had left and tried to initiate this conversation when he wasn’t at risk of being looked at funny. Chigiri was already frowning at him, and Isagi didn’t even know what was going on with his face.

 

>> well ?

 

<< It’s not like that 

 

<< I just 

 

<< I mean I remembered that you were super particular about him being

 

<< Idk

 

<< Shady?? 

 

<< And i just wanted to know why 

 

<< I mean I live across the guy and I run into him pretty often 

 

>> and youre only wondering now why i told you to stay the fuck away from him 

 

<< I thought you were just being judgy! 

 

<< Because of his hair and his tattoos and all 

 

>> and now ?

 

>> what do you think now

 

>> why are you asking me NOW 

 

God, this boy was so fucking stubborn. Isagi had half a mind to duck out of the lecture hall so he could actually call him and yell for a bit. 

If it came down to being difficult, he knew that neither of them were going to budge, that this conversation would go nowhere. If anything, it would circle its way back to Bachira, and the last thing he needed was Bachira getting on his case again, as though it wasn’t Bachira’s stupid meddling and Bachira’s stupid browser tabs that had started this mess in the first place. 

 

<< I’m curious about him 

 

>> why 

 

<< Because i would like to know him better

 

>> why 

 

Because he shares a name with someone I should definitely not be involved with, but am. Because I don’t know what that means, or if it means anything at all. Because I don’t know if I’m losing my shit because I think it could be true, or because a part of me wants it to be true.

 

And it was there, in the middle of a lecture Isagi would have to cram into his head the night before an exam weeks later because he didn’t absorb, let alone retain, anything that was going on, that Isagi finally let him face the thing that had been staring him in the eye from the very beginning. 

 

<< Because 

 

<< Why would someone 

 

<< Who’s lived in North Ward for a while 

 

<< Who looks like

 

<< That 

 

<< Who’s the most likely to attract the wrong kind of attention

 

<< Continue to live in a place where everyone else is trying to be lowkey 

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

[Rin is typing…]

 

>> call me after class

 

The lecture wrapped up with thirty minutes to spare and Isagi had already muttered some excuse about needing the washroom as he sped away from Chigiri. Rin had picked up on the first ring. 

 

“So you actually have more than one braincell.”

“Shut up,” Isagi groaned, ducking into one of the smaller empty classrooms and closing the door behind him for good measure. 

 

“You’re the one that called me.”

 

“You called me first!”

 

“Wow. Real mature,” Rin parroted his reply from earlier, somehow managing to make his normal disinterested monotone sound extra sarcastic and Isagi had to pause, count backwards from ten to remind himself not to just hang up on him. 

 

“So, is that it?” Isagi made himself ask after he’d calmed down a bit. “You were wary about him because he stands out too much?”

 

“He stands out WAY too much,” Rin corrected, with emphasis. “To the extent that makes no sense for anyone who lives in that shitty neighbourhood of yours, where people don’t even own cars because they might get vandalised.”

 

And Rin…was not wrong. That was a question that had snagged in Isagi’s mind multiple times, but he’d always shrugged it off, a part of him thinking he’d get around to asking, eventually. He’d always written off the directions his and Kaiser’s conversations took as products of their wildly different backgrounds - Kaiser was always direct, curious, asking questions, probing, listening, taking Isagi aback with his bluntness sometimes, and Isagi, for all his curiosity, managed a polite restraint, programmed with the manners his parents and the society he’d grown up in instilled in him. 

 

Forced to think about it now, forced to think about after last night and this morning, and Isagi found himself fixating. 

 

Kaiser had a grant and an assistantship with his university as a PhD student. Was that meant to cover accommodation? Were the rates downtown the only thing it could? 

 

When Isagi mused it out loud, Rin snorted with pointed derision. “You wouldn’t think he’s on a budget with that dumbass robe and attitude he had on.”

 

Isagi, with the visual of an artfully rumpled Kaiser with said robe barely hanging on around him, all bare skin and tattoos and chaotic hair fresh in his mind, spluttered. 

 

“It’s not a crime to want to live well even if you’re not living in the best part of town, you know.” 

 

He bristled a bit, hearing Rin scoff on the other end of the line. He had twenty minutes before he had to get to his next class - Isagi took a gamble and pulled out his laptop, flipping the screen up and navigating his way to the North Tech scholarship page.

 

When his browser predicted his search query in purple, he realised another association he’d somehow missed before.

 

He’d crawled through these scholarship pages before. North Tech was the same university being flogged mercilessly in the news right now for covering up the bullying case.

 

“I don’t know how smart your PhD guy actually is, if he stands out there every morning like he’s asking for trouble. Foreigners are easy targets as it is here, and then there’s this guy tatted up like wannabe yakuza -”

 

“You’re being way too judgmental,” Isagi scolded, digging through a separate set of links than the ones he’d gone through before as he searched his way into the social sciences faculties, hunting for the department covering linguistics. There was a dull thudding in the back of his head, a distant panic that had not entirely pushed to the forefront yet - a blind, as yet unacknowledged part of him that was both desperate and afraid of whatever it was he was trying to find out. “Aren’t the Europeans all about self-expression? It’s probably more natural to him to be like that than, I don’t know, try to keep a low profile and fit in.”

 

The scholarship page didn’t specify grant amounts for doctorate students, though he did find a couple of upper limit figures with a bit more searching around. The admissions pages reminded applicants that the bulk of the funding would go directly towards their research project, if the university chose to fund their study, and Isagi was already knee-deep inside the fine print of the terms and conditions of assistantships when Rin, quiet but almost accusatory, said, “You’re being really defensive over him.”

 

There was no one around to see Isagi flush. “He’s nice! You spoke to Bachira, right? I’m pretty sure Bachra told you he’s nice too.”

 

“Yeah, that’s what they also say about plenty of serial killers.”

 

Isagi, even in the middle of his paranoia-induced internet sleuthing, had to roll his eyes at that, before continuing his hunt through the text in search of any condition or clause about accommodation for postgraduate students that could tip his suspicions one way or the other a little more definitively. After all, he’d always imagined the Emperor lived in some kind of exclusive, remote penthouse, heavily guarded with all the best security that money could afford. It was stupid to even entertain that someone who had the financial alternative, especially someone who stood out like the exact kind of magnet that would attract scammers and extortionists looking for an easy target, would choose to live there. “You’ve been watching true crime documentaries again.”

 

“Because I actually want to be aware of the kind of shit that could get me killed, unlike your oblivious ass.”

 

Rin didn’t even know the extent of truth in that statement, and it dug so close to home that Isagi cringed. Ten minutes before class - Isagi swapped to a new browser tab, tried to remember the message boards he used to frequent when he was researching universities for himself. He typed out all the combinations of keywords he could think of, hoping the search engine optimisation of these pages would take care of the rest, and - 

 

“Hey. Say something.”

 

“I - yeah, hang on,” Isagi responded, absent-minded as he scrolled through an archived message board for North Tech prospects, trying to figure out finances and tuition for a doctorate degree. The response with the most upvotes was pinned at the top, from a self-proclaimed alumnus of the university, saying that apart from a full grant covering the cost of any research, the university also guaranteed on-campus accommodation for its PhD students.

 

Three minutes to class. His brain felt like an over-saturated sponge, too full to even digest this information, let alone what this meant, how it changed things. Chigiri was already texting him, asking where he was, the chat popping up at the corner of his laptop screen. He had to go now if he didn’t want to risk being late, or having Chigiri suspect that there was more wrong with him than his bowel movements. 

 

“Hey, listen - I have to get back to class, I’ll talk to you -”

 

“ - know him that well.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“I said,” Rin began again, impatiently, “When I was staying over at yours you said you didn’t know him that well.”

 

Isagi thought back to the last time Rin was in town. It felt like it was an eternity ago. The city itself had changed face since then, and at least some small part of that was because of Isagi himself and because of…

 

“Yeah…I mean, I’d just spoken to him a couple of times then.”

 

“Well, he wasn’t acting like it.”

 

“...what do you mean?”

 

“I mean,” Rin stressed out that last syllable like he loathed every word he was having to force out of his mouth. “Why would someone who only kind of knows you look so shocked to see another man on your balcony?”

 

He walked into class late, Chigiri quirking a questioning eyebrow at him that he answered with a muttered “Indigestion” while taking his seat, waking his laptop up again and trying not to appear suspicious as he closed down the browser tabs still left open on the forum boards about North Tech scholarships.

 

He could admit, then, that the trip he’d made that morning to Kaiser’s door had been a poorly disguised attempt to look for… something. Some shred of proof, some clue, something that could disprove this stupid little idea burrowing deeper into his head the more time passed by. 

 

Instead, he had only succeeded in confusing himself further. 

 

So, okay, Kaiser’d called him an endearment he had only ever heard from the Emperor. 

 

But it wasn’t an uncommon endearment, and Kaiser had been outrageous with the flirting up until now - sometimes said just his real name with the kind of suggestive drawl that had butterflies tumbling in Isagi’s stomach. 

 

So it could just be nothing. Just like his choice in housing could be nothing, just like Rin’s instant misgivings could be nothing. All these little things, tiny associations, all nothing. There were ways to explain it all away. 

 

But in order to do so, Isagi had to dig in instead of disengage. 

 

That day, he’d arrived at his shift at the library a little early, with a plan in mind. The perks of working at this place meant that he knew exactly where to find what he was looking for, and exactly how to commandeer one of the bigger scanners to make a large copy of what he needed. It was too large for him to carry in his backpack, so he rolled it up and spent his entire trip home trying not to accidentally crumple it. 

 

And that night, holed away at his desk at home, Isagi laid flat his newly-acquired map of North Ward, grabbed a handful of coloured markers, and started pulling up every post he had saved over the months, documenting a sighting of the hooded figure who had largely faded into an urban legend of late. 

 

He got to work.

---

Now, as he sits opposite his neighbour at his kitchen counter with the piping hot bowl of soup Kaiser is trying to cool down for him, coaxed into staying to have dinner, Isagi thinks about the map he has tucked away at the back of his closet out of sheer paranoia and about how tired Kaiser looks, creases at the corners of his eyes under the unflattering glare of his kitchen lights. How he slumps just a little bit in one of Isagi’s chairs, and how it stands out anyway because his posture is normally so impeccable.

 

He thinks about his colour key - red for alleged sightings, yellow for all the sightings he can confirm himself, blue for the times he’s been directly involved. Primary colours, dots on a map. 

 

He thinks about how stupid he’s been, not thinking it sooner - for focusing on the nitty gritty of the details so closely that he didn’t see the bigger picture, the patterns, not right away. And now… 

 

And now -

 

“What did that guy look like?” 

 

Isagi, about to dig into dinner, gives Kaiser a look. 

 

“Why?”

 

“I just want to know.”

Isagi stares at him a moment longer and says, “No way.”

 

The frown’s back on Kaiser’s face. “Why not?”

 

“Because you literally look like you want to go punch him?” 

 

He feels a tiny bit triumphant when that gets the first smile of the night out of Kaiser - is able to admit to himself that he’d missed seeing it, all those days he’d spent dodging him and excusing himself from conversations midway, half terrified and feeling unfair that he would look at him, this delightful, maddening, charming man, and try to find the outlines of someone he wasn’t. “I mean, it does sound appealing.”

 

Isagi bites down his own smile around a spoonful of soup. “That’s very chivalrous of you, but please leave that poor man alone. Some people are just bad at waking up suddenly.” And then, because there’s something in this moment that makes him a little daring - something about the clarity he has slowly been piecing together, in his purpose, in the future he wants to believe in -  “You’d know, right?”

 

It takes Kaiser exactly two and a half seconds to realise what he’s talking about, and then he’s dropping his face into one hand with a groan. The crown at the back of the hand gleams a deep inky black under the kitchen lights. 

 

“Please don’t remind me,” Kaiser mutters into his hand. 

 

“You were so out of it I was wondering if you even remembered,” Isagi probes.

 

“I didn’t,” Kaiser pinches the breadth of his forehead between forefinger and thumb. “I remembered after I woke up the second time holding the damn blanket and realising it wasn’t a fucking dream.”

 

Isagi can’t help the laugh he lets out then, even when it’s followed by an immediate Ouch of pain. 

 

“See? Now imagine you just got stepped on out of nowhere, I would probably throw hands too.”

 

He knows that Kaiser is about to say something diabolical the second his hand drops away from his face and that slow smirk climbs up one corner of his mouth. “Well… I wouldn’t mind if it was yo -.”

 

“Kaiser!” And then, again, “Ow - damn -”

 

“Sorry, sorry,” Kaiser murmurs, and Isagi tries not to jolt in his seat as fingertips cruise over his tender skin - so lightly they barely register as sensation, but so present that Isagi has to try and keep eye contact as Kaiser tips his head at him in a motion so familiar now that Isagi thinks he knows the exact angle of it. “...want me to kiss it better?” 

 

Isagi glares at him, and it makes Kaiser laugh. That silent laugh, the one that makes his shoulders dance. The first time he’d seen it, after the cursed Google search that had turned everything on its head, Kaiser calling out to him from the balcony while he fussed over his plants, he’d felt almost electrocuted. A bunch of sleeping nerves sparking to life all at once, lightning-struck in a desperate frenzy to make things make sense . 

 

He’d chalked it up to his brain trying to force patterns between things, trying to find associations in these big gaping holes in his understanding. Overcompensating for what he knew was there, buried and ignored, the part of him that was trying to fit the puzzle pieces into a picture he had prematurely envisioned. Even as he pored over his map, working his way through it chronologically, charting coordinates that scattered across parts of the city and clustered in others. 

 

Coincidences, he’d kept telling himself. 

 

Misfires of chance. 

 

Except how many coincidences are too many? 

 

Isagi had been trying to logic himself out of this. Had tried to rationalise, the dots spreading across his map - first clustering around this neighbourhood and a few adjacent ones, then emerging, spread out and scarce, uptown, and then zigzagging back and forth, back and forth, in broad strokes around the North Tech campus. A pattern emerging like radii rippling outward from their epicentres. 

 

And Isagi’d tussled with it, for days on end, snatches of a picture slipping past him before he can see, trying to pull it all together so it makes sense. But in the process, he thinks, he’d forgotten that logic was only one part of the equation. 

 

The other part was - had always been, for him - intuition. 

 

And with all these coincidences, all these mirrored moments and cycles of deja vu, Isagi cannot ignore that anymore. He’s only been able to move forward when he’s listened to his gut, right? 

 

He’d only managed to force a solution by going in headfirst.

 

So he listens to his gut, marries logic to instinct, and asks Kaiser, “Tired?”

 

The second time around this evening gets him an answer, a smirked, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to fall asleep on you.”

 

“I just figured it would be busy,” Isagi says, moving their now empty bowls away to his sink, and grabbing an assortment of the treats he’d brought home for Kaiser to choose from, “since it’s almost summer break.”

 

“Kind of… the commission work is more time-consuming than anything else really.”

 

“What are you working on?”

 

“Books, papers…,” Kaiser hums, contemplating a package of mochi. “A bit of everything. The faculty accepts a lot of projects for media in one language that needs translating into others for archival or research purposes. Others for cross-border marketing, distribution…”

 

“Sounds… corporate.”

Kaiser smiles. “Makes money. They need to fund a bunch of hapless scholars in the liberal arts, after all.”

 

Isagi decides to just go for it. “...can I ask… why did you pick North Tech?”

 

Kaiser, chin resting against the palm of his hand, stare unreadable, asks in turn, “What do you mean by why?”

 

“I just mean…,” Isagi shifts his hands off the countertop and drops them on his lap so they’re not openly fidgeting, the homemade ice compress he’s fashioned out of a kitchen-cloth and some ice cubes held against his cheek, “Kyoto is our university city, and it’s got the best schools for liberal arts. I guess I’m just wondering why you’d choose to study in a place like… this.”

 

“Hmm,” Kaiser drums his fingers lightly against the side of his face. His expression is a little thoughtful. A lot inscrutable. “It’s not a very glamorous reason, honestly.”

 

“How come?”

 

“It was for the scholarship,” Kaiser confesses. “North Tech was the only university I qualified for, for a scholarship.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Kaiser gives him a dry smile. “Funding opportunities for foreigners are pretty slim, especially for something as niche as linguistics. I got lucky.”

Isagi digests this - reminds himself that he’d promised to see it through, no matter what the outcome. “What scholarship was it?”

 

He’s not sure if he imagines it, the slight pause, the moment’s hesitation, before Kaiser says, “The Mikage Language Program Scholarship.”

 

Now

 

The second Isagi taps his screen, the sharp, urgent wail of the audio blares out of his phone, making him wince hard in spite of himself - it is loud, louder still considering how quiet everything else is, making those voices from the parking lot carry farther and higher and more grotesque than if there was more life around them, absorbing some of the din. 

 

Those voices, Isagi notes almost immediately, cut off in the middle of the singing. He can’t make out any words, not over the top of the shrieking police siren blasting out of his speakers, but the sudden urgency in the yelling and barking that follows is definitely full of panic. 

 

Isagi starts to skirt back around the compound, the sound shifting with him to hopefully appear as though the police car is coming closer. It might not work on someone fully sober, but if these people are high enough…

 

And sure thing, the collective, spluttering revs of motorbikes being kicked into life splits through the night air. Isagi holds his breath, flush to the side of the wall, as he tunes into the sounds of the bikes shredding out of the compound and peeling in the opposite direction, and he almost doesn’t let it out again until the noise starts to fade into the distance. 

 

They’re probably too keyed up with the thought of escaping without being caught with drugs on them to pay attention, but Isagi keeps the police siren blaring out of his phone for a while just in case. The noise is loud enough that he, for once, doesn’t notice the Emperor coming until he can feel the heat of him behind his back, the crackle of his voice changer warbling in Isagi’s ear, “That was a fun trick, darling.”

 

“Thanks,” he mutters back, trying not to be too obvious about how still he’s gone, all that heightened awareness of proximity, “I learned it from an insane person.”

 

He just has enough time to register the broken sounds of robotic laughter before he’s suddenly swatting at the guy with an urgent, “ Someone’s coming, go! Go!”

 

And then he’s face to face with the shop store clerk earlier, the two of them staring at each other wide-eyed while Isagi’s phone still screams out the police siren. 

 

He nearly drops the thing in his flustered rush to turn it off, thankful that the Emperor had grapple-hooked himself out of there in time, when the girl asks, 

 

“Was… that you?”

 

“Um…”

 

She points at his phone. “The police cars… that was you?”

 

Isagi can only respond with a dumb, “Uh. Yes.”

 

And then, cringing at how awkward it looks that he’s still here after she’d seen him leave the convenience store what feels like hours ago already, he starts to step in the opposite direction with a stilted, “I’ll just be going then -”

 

“Um. Wait.” 

 

Isagi stops. The girl, in the dim light of the streetlamps weakly shining down on them and somehow managing to make the shadows deeper, is wearing an openly conflicted expression on her face. Isagi is wondering if she’s thinking of actually calling the police on him when she says, 

 

“I… need to go that way.” She points behind herself - down the direction the bikes had gone. 

 

“Ah.”

 

The girl is visibly fighting herself over something. It doesn’t take much for Isagi to guess what that is. 

 

With the adrenaline of the moment still coursing through him, he’s a little more forward than he would be when he sighs, plucks the taser out of his pocket, and holds it out like an offering for the girl. 

 

“I’ll walk you, if you like,” he says, as the girl - soft brown hair pulled into a low ponytail, bangs hanging in front of her eyes - stares at first the taser and then at him, “And if at any point you think I’m being shady, just zap me with that.”

 

“Zap you?”

 

Isagi switches the thing on with an electric hum to demonstrate to her that it works. “Zap me.”

 

It’s probably a combination of how late at night it is, the come-down from the nerves of that bunch of rogues making a break for it, and Isagi actually pulling out his wallet to show her his ID, giving her his full government name, where he studies, and where he lives, that convince her to let him walk her at least as far as the bus-stop closest to where she lives. She doesn’t tell him the actual location, which Isagi approves of - a healthy dose of scepticism is probably one of the most basic of the survival instincts they can rely on in these parts. 

 

She does, however, stare at him incredibly dubiously when he suggests they cut through a shortcut to get to her stop - in hindsight, given that his shortcut is a completely unlit alleyway, this is again a warranted reaction. 

 

“The roads up ahead are all bike roads,” Isagi explains, apologetically, “and I don’t think there are any police patrols going round through there. If we cut across here we will end up right opposite a police box, and your bus-stop is just a block away.”

 

His companion hesitates, and Isagi sighs, again. It’s been a long, exhausting day, and this detour is going to cost him at least a couple of hours of the sleep he would have been getting had he already made it home. The plastic bag containing what he’d planned for his late dinner is probably going to sit untouched until breakfast tomorrow, if he even has enough time to eat before he has to leg it for class. 

 

“Just zap me if you’re scared, yeah?” he says tiredly. 

 

And he’s not sure what it is about that that makes her snort, but finally acquiesces with an, “Okay.”

 

“I didn’t even know this shortcut was here,” she says as they walk in single file through the thick darkness of the alley, Isagi taking the lead.

 

“There’s loads of them,” Isagi tells her back, focusing on making out any potential silhouettes they need to avoid running into in the darkness, “I’m always getting home late, so I tried to figure as many of them out as I could to avoid… well, you know.”

 

“Why do you get home late? You live on the opposite side of downtown, too…”

 

That’s basically shorthand for the seedy, sketchy side of downtown. Isagi grimaces. “Work. I get off late, and well… rent’s cheaper on that side.”

 

There’s a pause, and then a hum that sounds a little commiserating. 

 

And that’s the thing, isn’t it. Isagi’s story isn’t unique at all. He’s probably one of millions with identical profiles, trying to scrape together an existence in this place.

 

It doesn’t help that all the fail-safes that are built to supposedly look out for them have a tendency to miserably backfire. Isagi isn’t even surprised to find that the police-box they pass by is empty, even though it doesn’t stop him from grumbling exasperatedly.

 

“Didn’t they say they expanded the police force?” the girl chimes up. She’s more talkative now, which is a relief - it makes Isagi feel a little less desperately self-conscious about not coming off as a creep when he’s just being awkward instead. 

 

“They did, but I think…,” Isagi scans the street, and notes the graffiti splashed in a lurid red right opposite the police box, “I think the problems have gone up too, and they’re struggling to keep up.”

 

“The drug problem,” the girl says quietly, and Isagi just nods. They fall into silence again, and Isagi picks their way down the street and into the road that will give way to the bus-stop. 

 

In retrospect, Isagi should have seen this coming. After all, illicit drug rings had always been a problem in North Ward, and with the suddenness and scale of police intervention, what else could have happened apart from the fallout hitting here the hardest? It was almost always the case that the people at the fringes were the ones caught trying to hold on in the surge of any current of change, while the bigger fish swam to safety. 

 

The newly-instated police force overseeing North Ward had cracked down with commendable speed on plenty of crime rings, and from the outside - at least, through the picture painted by the suddenly uncritical media, which flips to filling headlines with praise about the positive reform sweeping the city - it looks like this is a very good thing. There have been plenty of arrests, plenty of people awaiting trials, the breaking-up of illegal gambling dens and money laundering schemes.

 

Less obvious is the fact that a lot of people who must have been investing heavily in these things in order for them to be a lucrative way to double, if not triple profits were now suddenly keen to divest themselves of any connection with them. 

 

And that meant, among other things, that a lot of illegal drugs had been pumped into the most vulnerable markets for petty change, in a very short amount of time. 

 

They’d talked about it in one of his lectures, the problem becoming pertinent enough that it warranted a class discussion that had felt like an exercise in mounting, frustrating futility. 

 

How do you crack down on the drug epidemic while sifting out the victims from the perpetrators? How do you protect people turning to substance abuse because they’d already slipped below the flimsy safety net of a job that provided at least enough to afford rent and food? People who build a reliance on the stuff as a relief to the stark, unforgiving reality of living everyday? People who cannot access the education programs the government is proposing to pump millions into because they cannot afford that education? 

 

It wasn’t surprising that Reo’s initial, bombastic pitch for digitised crime fighting droids had been shot down. Because objectivity and lack of bias was one thing, but the only thing that can redeem them all, Isagi thinks, is conscience. Pure, human conscience, the ability of people to care for other people. 

 

“Thank you,” the girl murmurs, as they reach her bus-stop, “Isagi… san? I -”

 

“It’s okay,” Isagi waves off her thanks before they can start to get awkward again, “Keep your phone on you and maybe have a police siren audio ready on your phone, in case you run into anything. And the taser.”

 

“Oh, you - don’t want this back?”

 

It hadn’t come cheap, but his conscience would be better at ease leaving her here if she had something to defend herself with, especially considering the subsequent nights she had to walk home alone. “No, it’s okay - you can keep it.”

 

“Are you sure?” the girl frets, “You were heading in the other direction to me, you’ll have a longer walk back -”

 

“Oh! Oh, yeah no worries,” Isagi has already hit reverse, holding up his hands to appease her. Somewhere above him, he’s aware of the mass that’s just a shade darker than the night itself glide in silence from one rooftop to the next as he starts to mentally calibrate the best route he can take home. “I’ll be okay. You take care, uh -”

 

“Kawasaki.” 

 

Not expecting it, Isagi blinks in surprise. 

 

“My name,” the girl offers, and then, for the first time that whole night, she offers him a small smile. “Thank you, Isagi-san.”

 

It takes Isagi fifteen minutes to walk back home, because he’s faster on foot when he’s by himself, and he’d mapped out a pretty nice combination of shortcuts to get him where he needs to go. 

 

The entire time, he’s aware of the large shadow that moves quietly alongside him, just out of his line of sight - swooping over and across and in between buildings. They get as far as his own bus-stop - the one the Magician had dropped him off at on a rainy night that feels forever ago when it’s just been a few weeks - before Isagi turns into the secluded little alley where he’d gotten punched in the face and waits for the Emperor to drop down in front of him. 

 

“Are you planning on following me all the way home?” 

 

“When did you notice I was there?” the Emperor approaches, boots crunching against the grit of the tarmac. 

 

Isagi scoffs. “The whole time, you idiot.” 

 

His shoulders dance with his laughter, the way Isagi’s almost become used to, now, and yet has to fight himself to not fixate on. “Of course.”

 

Isagi’s heart is in his throat as he asks, “Do you know where I live?”

 

“Why?” The Emperor leans into his space, his posture playful, “Do you want to invite me home, angel?”

 

“Don’t dodge the question,” Isagi warns. He squints up at that domed face, trying as much as he can to peer into his mask. “Do you?”

 

And before the Emperor can frustrate him with any more non-answers, he reminds him, tersely, “Don’t lie to me. You were the one who said you never lie to me.”

 

For a moment, the Emperor says nothing. 

 

“You…are so unfair,” he exhales, eventually. Isagi swats at the forefinger he knows is coming up for his chin before it gets there, “You realise that?”

 

“You don’t get to say that,” Isagi retorts. “I feel like I deserve to know if the strange masked man who has been stalking me all over the city knows where I live.”

 

“You’re going to hurt my feelings. I thought we’d be closer after everything we’ve been through together.” 

 

“You’re not saying no,” Isagi sidesteps what the Emperor is intimating completely - that’s not what he wants to discuss right now, least of all in some nasty side-street where he can hardly see. “If you’re not saying no, that automatically means yes.”

 

“Surely you’re not that binary in your thinking.”

 

“Surely you don’t think I’m going to take the chance and walk you directly up to my apartment.”

 

“You already think I know where you live.”

 

“And you not telling me whether you do or not is a fucking red flag, you creep,” Isagi snaps back. “I know you’ve been following me. Almost every morning, I’ve seen you sneaking around here.”

 

He doesn’t add that he knows exactly when it started, too. The very next morning after he’d run into that sleeping man in this alleyway, with the sun still pushing itself up over the height of the buildings crowding the neighbourhood, Isagi’d noticed the quiet movement of something large, like a winged bird, out of the corner of his eye. It’d followed him as far as the bus-stop, and it had kept doing so, every single day since then. 

 

Obvious. It’s too obvious. Too obvious to be the truth. 

 

But hadn’t the Magician already told him that this guy wasn’t trying to be discreet? 

 

In the opaque black of the alley, the Emperor stands like a cutout, stock-still, discernible to Isagi’s eyes only because he keeps seeking out his outlines - learned by heart, he thinks. In the daytime and at night. When there is no response, Isagi pushes, bullish, “No answer means yes, too.”

 

“You’re so difficult, have I told you that?” the Emperor mutters, Isagi thinks he can definitely detect a note of complaint in it. Seconds drift past, and Isagi realises that the Emperor isn’t going to outright answer this question. 

 

That perhaps he can’t. 

 

What had he promised Isagi? That he may hide things, but he would never lie. 

 

That he would never let Isagi doubt him again. 

 

And Isagi, blind in the darkness, yet only just beginning to see, thinks about power. About how relative it is, the magnitude of the difference he can make.  

 

“I’m going to go home now,” Isagi starts to say, and begins inching around the Emperor back towards the opening of the alleyway. “Don’t follow me.”

 

“I wouldn’t even be here if you weren’t going out of your way to take on unnecessary trouble -”

 

“But that’s the thing, right?” Isagi says, “I won’t stop.”

 

“What?”

 

“I won’t stop,” Isagi tells him - affirms, really, because, “And you know that. You keep telling me to team up, but you know that I won’t agree, right?”

 

“Is this is a rejection, angel?” the Emperor asks softly, and its a whisper as he takes a step towards him again. “Are you going to break my heart?”

 

Isagi shakes his head. Collects his wits into his hand, the clarity he’s only managed to find after he’s found he’s convictions. “Your whole business model relies on rich people needing you to clean up messes, whereas my goal is to help people who absolutely cannot afford that help. And you know this. You know that I would never work for you, not when it would mean enabling… this. ”

 

“Are we really circling back to this?” All Isagi can see are the dual foci of light where his eyes are, swallowing what little of there is around to reflect back to him. “After you’ve seen what you can do with what I’m offering you, you’re going to turn back to throwing yourself at things as what? Bait? Distraction?”

 

“No,” Isagi tells him, “I’m not. I’m going to help. One person at a time, because there’s just one of me. Whenever I have to, wherever I can.”

 

“You really don’t learn - you -”

 

“And you’re going to help me.”

 

“...what?”

 

“I said you’re going to help,” Isagi repeats, heart pulsing in his ears. Everything’s a question mark, nothing makes sense. But for once, for the first time since Isagi has met this man, he feels like he’s on level ground with him. “Because you want to help me, right?”

 

The silence, Isagi decides, sounds shocked. 

 

And with his heart in his mouth, Isagi wields this thing that he has, this power that’s his own, and says, firm, “I am going to go home now. And I am… I’m trusting you to not follow. Okay?”

 

He’s retreating, intent on turning away and legging it as quickly as he can if only to mask how hot he can feel his face is, heartbeat a chaotic thing, when he thinks he sees those broad shoulders dance, ever so slightly. 

 

Imagines he hears a crackly So unfair follow after him as he turns on his heels and makes his way home. 

 

---

“I found your guy,” Reo greets triumphantly as soon as Isagi makes his way over to where they’d decided to meet, a little hole-in-the-wall breakfast spot on campus, arriving a half hour earlier to avoid running into Chigiri and his suspicions. “Here.”

 

Isagi takes the Mikage-issued tablet, swipes through the list of recipients of the scholarship the company has been awarding to recruit talents from around the world to fuel its ambitious translator tech project. 

 

Kaiser’s face stands out right away - he’s unsmiling here, austere in his elegance, almost strange to see when he nearly always sports a smile in front of Isagi. 

 

But he’s not the one Isagi is looking for. 

 

He swipes further, and finds him. 

 

Alexis Ness

Engineer - Electric & Mechanical

 

“Why is a mechanical engineer working on a translation project?” Isagi asks, though he thinks he can guess. 

 

“Oh, they pooled a lot of guys from the university’s engineering department to develop a working model for the buds - you know, how it’s supposed to take the sound in one language, translate it on-input, and output it in another language? With the extra challenge of keeping it as close to the original voice as possible. No one’s really cracked it yet, but I think this guy came close. Apparently he’s from a long line of scientists and is something of a prodigy…he’s made some pretty sophisticated prototypes for audio modulation that, I think, can rework sound and output differently or something -”

 

“Like voice modulation?”

 

“Not really, but that could be one of the applications of that technology, I guess.”

 

Nagi, who has been calmly sipping a smoothie and whom Isagi adores right now for his infinite capacity to be disinterested, intones in a completely flat monotone, “The power of science is amazing.” 

 

“Yeah,” Isagi thinks, head spinning until he thinks he might get vertigo, sitting still while a hundred thoughts swirl in a giddy kaleidoscope around him fast enough that they’re almost starting to blur together into an image. “It is.”

Notes:

yes, that was a pokemon reference

x

the vision was to have each of the friend group get their own times to shine & next time it will be nagi

the vision was also to have this done MONTHS ago. but between several medical emergencies, hospital trips, complete burnout, absorbing the responsibilities of resigning team members into my job with much unpaid overtime, and getting sick of corporate enough to start working towards grad school again, i have been, how you say... fighting for my life? i didn't feel creative, hated every word i wrote, have 7.5 (im not joking) discarded drafts for this ch because i just couldn't stand my own work. am i happy with this? short answer is no. but i realised that i would never be able to post anything if i was pursuing perfection, and the progress i did make after things started to get better (bc i am better now! much! dw!!) was getting slowed by me feeling like i HAD to knock the rest of this out in one last chapter. so, i hope that if you are reading this for the first time or have been waiting for this for months, you'll understand me changing the ch count - i think breaking it up favours the plot and pacing and also helps me psychologically trick myself into feeling more comfortable and flexible with writing. ik that's weird idk how to explain it either. realistically though, she should wrap in about another chapter or two, and i'm aiming to get it down by the end of the year. i hope you will be patient with me as i work on this, and i hope that the wait and the journey are both worth it. if you've made it this far, thank you!

Chapter 5

Notes:

bet u didn't expect the next ch this soon after ch4,,,,, i didn't either,,,,, i was afflicted by madness after 284-285 is all i'm gonna say it was either i write this version of this chapter or take a bite of my screen/tattoo that final panel of 284 onto my forehead,,,,,,,

this thing is also far more massive than i'd anticipated it would be and i can only hope that the length is proportional to the enjoyment you may get reading it - i am genuinely stumped by the warm welcome back with this fic and just how amazing and sweet people have been with their support and encouragement. thank you, thank you, i appreciate you so much, i hope you enjoy this x

Now

 

“Is your head not cooking inside that thing?”

 

“You know, a hello would be nice - a how are you, or I missed you, or -”

 

“Listen, I really don’t have time for this,” Isagi tells him sternly. He’s only been up here for a couple of minutes and he already wants to go downstairs and park himself inside the walk-in freezer. “Can you give this to Eight, please?”

 

The Emperor dips his head to look at the umbrella Isagi is holding out, but makes no move to take it. Isagi really doesn’t want to prolong this beyond what is strictly necessary - he shakes the thing a little aggressively to make a point.

 

“Just take it,” he repeats, “He might need it anyway, the sun is so bad these days and I think this is one of those UV-reflecting ones, I keep forgetting to give it back -”

 

“Angel,” a breathy sigh. Isagi is already starting to dread that he won’t be able to cut his meeting short with the way the guy saunters towards him. It’s like he’s physically unable to forego the drama that has to underscore each of his arrivals up here - and of late, Isagi has come to suspect that that is the point. “I’m going to get upset, you know. I come up here to see you after all this time, and you won’t stop talking about another man?”

 

Too warm to have time for this, and feeling uncomfortable just looking at the skin-tight bodysuit the man has on, Isagi groans. “Isn’t this other man your partner or something? Anyway, that’s not the point - can you take this -”

 

The Emperor tuts. Isagi is starting to lose his patience. 

 

“Always so cold. And when I brought you a gift and everything, too.”

 

He pauses, as though for dramatic effect, or to cue Isagi to ask him what the fuck he’s talking about. 

 

When Isagi doesn’t play along, he sighs again. “Come now. Can you be a little more excited? I’ve been carrying these around forever, because you didn’t tell me when you were going to come up here -”

 

“Like I said, I only came to return this -”

 

“And it’s a bother, you know? I like to travel light, and it’s an issue when I have to be weighed down by things. Even when it’s a gift - or rather, shall I say, gifts, because I am that generous and thoughtful -”

 

“So generous and thoughtful that you can’t stop complaining about it,” Isagi snarks, arm holding out the umbrella starting to get tired. When the Emperor just crosses his own arms with a visible huff, Isagi almost has to resist the urge to bang the thing on his stupid metal head. “What is it, then?”

 

“I’m glad you asked,” suddenly chipper again, the Emperor steps smoothly towards him. “Here, give me that -” 

 

The umbrella gets tugged out of his grip and suddenly there’s something both warm and cool in the palm of his hand.

 

“Is this -,” Isagi examines what he thinks must be a deep blue leather handle, “is this a knife? ”

 

“A Swiss army knife,” the Emperor tells him, sounding obviously pleased with himself. “Very multifunctional little thing, everyone should have one. Especially people who tend to find themselves in situations they might have to stab their way out of.”

 

Isagi nearly the drops the knife in shock. “I’m not going to stab people with this, are you crazy?”

 

“You don’t have to actually stab people, darling. But as long as you wield it confidently, people might think you could and you would, that’s the important part.”

 

“You…,” Isagi gapes at the knife. The metal glows almost blue in the dull light up here, even the shine and the weight of it sitting in his palm feeling expensive. “You want me to… wield a knife at people… confidently.”

 

“You don’t have to sound so scandalised. How is it any different than scaring people off with a taser? Speaking of which -”

 

An unbearably hot leather grip wraps around his wrist, and then Isagi is gripping the butt of what must be a brand new taser in his other hand. 

 

“What in the world -”

 

“Do you like them? I thought you’re the type to appreciate practical, thoughtful gifts. Personally, I would have liked my first present to you to be something a bit more romantic, but - darling?”

 

Isagi, dumbfounded and holding a knife in one hand and a taser in the other, can only say, “Huh?”

 

“Why won’t you look at me?”

 

Then

 

Isagi manages to last forty minutes on his commute home before he cuts abruptly out of his normal route and turns into the mouth of a side-street. 

 

He’s waiting there, arm’s crossed, the frown twitching against his forehead as he watches the bumper of a black sedan creep into view. 

 

And then he’s making eye contact with the driver and Isagi allows himself a grim moment of satisfaction at the way twin brows fly up in surprise over the rims of dark glasses, the car jerking to an obviously unplanned stop. 

 

The deadlock lasts just for a bit before Isagi, fists balled and face flushed with agitation, marches up towards the car window, fully intent to hammer against it - 

 

It rolls down before he can, and then the masked, sunglassed-up driver is telling him to “Get in.”

 

Now Isagi’s brows jump in surprise. 

 

Looks like the Magician got himself a voice changer too. 

 

It must be pretty compact, he thinks, hidden indiscernible enough under his face mask that he can’t tell there’s anything under it. Isagi deliberates for a second and scowls when he’s met with an impatient Hurry up. Striding around the front of the car, he keeps his phone in hand so that if someone does happen to look at them, it might seem like he’s boarding a car he booked, instead of inserting himself into a vehicle that has been tailing him for the better part of an hour. 

 

He wonders if there’s even any point in putting on the show. The fact that there’s a car like this, nondescript in city traffic but standing out like a nice, sleek machine of humming metal and money twenty minutes away from where he lives is already likely to draw eyes. 

 

It’s partly this, and partly because he wants answers and he’s determined to have them, that gets him to grab the door handle of the passenger seat instead of the back. Stubbornly holding on until the Magician, body language visibly displeased, unlocks it from the inside for him. 

 

“Why are you following me?” he hisses as soon as he’s slid into the seat - clips in his seatbelt just to shut up the polite female voice rolling through her instructions telling him to. 

 

“Don’t start with me,” the Magician says, and he’s markedly less pleasant than he’d been the first time they had met each other. Isagi decides he sounds kind of testy. Even through the voice modulation - his sounds eerily smoothed-out compared to the static that crumbles through the Emperor’s words. “I have plenty of other things I ought to be doing instead.”

 

Underneath the baseball cap he has thrown on, Isagi notes, his pulse missing a step on the way down, his hair shines purplish-red where light from the streetlamps outside manage to sneak in. 

 

“So why ?” Isagi starts impatiently, and then, as the engine purrs back to life with a smooth hum, adds, “Go the other way.”

 

The Magician doesn’t say anything, but Isagi can sense the large, annoyed question mark radiating from him just from the way the guy turns his head towards him. 

 

Isagi groans. “You’re practically sitting here asking someone to come strip this thing for parts!”

 

“Do you think I want to be here right now? This compromises me too,” The Magician sits alert and straight in his seat, both his hands wrapped around the steering wheel. He’s conflicted, Isagi can tell. “I’m… was… supposed to follow you up until the bus stop from last time.”

 

Isagi can start to feel his own face start to go slack from disbelief - and pre-emptive mortification - as he asks, “...Why?”

 

He thinks the Magician must know that he knows too, because there’s something deeply unamused about the way he tips his head to look at him. Isagi can just barely see through the lens of his glasses into his eyes. “Because you won’t let him do it.”

 

At least a dozen different emotions scramble to be known at once as Isagi’s jaw works uselessly and he tries to handle them working through his system in the span of a second. What does, ultimately, come out of his mouth is a strangled, “Oh my God.”

 

Five minutes later finds them cruising in the opposite direction to Isagi’s neighbourhood. Isagi almost feels bad for the Magician - had done so even as they devolved to near bickering as Isagi obstinately refused to be ferried any further toward his block, (“For the love of - I dropped you off there last time, didn’t I?” “Yeah, MUCH earlier in the evening when you could get away without drawing attention!” “You’re being paranoid.” “I was literally followed for nearly an hour along all my bus routes. So yes, I’m paranoid.”) 

 

Now, they sit in silence while his tense companion approaches the turn that will set them back towards the town square proper. It would take Isagi another hour - two if he’s unlucky and misses one of the more sparsely-spaced apart buses that run this late at night - if he gets off even as close as the stop at the edge of the block to get home. His nerves are already fried from the sustained alertness they’d been stretched to, wondering if he’d been imagining the car parked out front by the diner that had looked like so many other cars in the city, crawling into motion right as he passed by. 

 

By the time he got to his first bus-stop, just in time to see his ride pull up with its noisy exhale and the automatic doors folding open, he was sure that he was being followed. 

 

And between the second and third stops, he’d managed to see the licence plate, too. That subtly misshapen figure 8 glinting under the backlights of the bus’ rear carriage, his terse suspicions proven true. 

 

As Isagi finds himself getting further and further away from the merciful embrace of his bed, he smashes the back of his head against the seat rest and groans, “This is so fucking stupid.”

 

The sound of the resulting snort beside him makes him jolt, sharp and abrupt through the voice changer.

 

“You’re the one who’s been ignoring him, so -”

 

“I wasn’t ignoring him,” Isagi corrects immediately, muffled from the way he’s buried his hand in his head. “I was trying to make sure he wouldn’t get caught by hanging around the same places all the time.”

 

“He says you haven’t been coming to see him.”

 

“Yes? Because my colleagues were starting to wonder where I disappeared to during my breaks and it was probably only a matter of time before one of them would try to check?” 

 

He doesn’t try to elaborate that his decision to minimise his trips to the rooftop had been sealed when he’d nearly dropped the dinner he was going to carry upstairs at one of Bachira’s sudden, unannounced visits. He’d brought a large box full of that day’s unsold pastries, strutting through the kitchen like he owned the joint and greeting everyone in his way, while Isagi scrambled to school his expression and wipe away anything on his face that could make his best friend suspect that his first reaction hadn’t been pleasant surprise at seeing him. 

 

If he’d been a minute faster, he would already be on the roof, and Bachira would undoubtedly demand to know where he’d gone until he found him. And while the Emperor never stopped by every night, it’s risky enough for a guy like that to keep circling in specific places, the probability of getting caught higher the more he does - 

 

The strip where the diner sits is dense with marker ink on his map at home and it stares at Isagi like a bull’s eye.

 

“Well, if you’d managed to communicate that with him -”

 

“What I communicated to him, in the clearest way possible, is that I didn’t want him to follow me home -”

 

“He’s not following you, though.”

 

Isagi glares, hoping that it’s not dark enough that the Magician misses how deeply unimpressed he is. “Just because he figured out a loophole doesn’t mean he isn’t still being a creepy stalker.”

 

“I mean, given how bad this place can get these days, and your track record for being a walking magnet for trouble -”

 

“Why are you defending him?” Isagi cuts him off hotly, now pissed off and embarrassed because he doesn’t even remember most of the time that if the Emperor knows about his own exploits around town, the Magician would know too. Is there anyone else? Any other tarot-themed covert operative galavanting around the city right now? Isagi had the foggy image of a secret society in his head when he’d first heard the crackle of the Magician’s voice through the Emperor’s head-piece… But right now, a copy of Reo’s slides in his phone… he’s not so sure. “He’s got you driving around town following me when you could, I don’t know, be doing whatever it is you people do instead! Isn’t disturbance in the city directly correlated to good business for you?”

 

“I told you that my job is to do whatever he wants,” the Magician reminds him as they slow at a red light, and Isagi is keenly aware now of how far they’ve come from his last stop. He should’ve just broken into a run and zigzagged his way back through the side-streets to leave his pursuant behind, at least by now he’d be in his apartment instead of caught in this conversation, “... even if what he wants is asinine.”

 

Isagi grabs on to that with quickness. “Exactly! So you agree he’s dumb.”

 

“I did not say that.”

 

“I cannot imagine a smart person whose MO is supposed to be staying incognito repeatedly showing up in places where people can see him.”

 

The car rumbles into motion again as the light overhead turns green. The Magician shrugs, “He’s pretty good at hiding things in plain sight.” 

 

And Isagi flees himself for just a moment, a split second - returns to the balcony opposite his and to the person who frequently occupies that balcony, stark and noticeable, so bright he’s almost blinding, so bright Isagi’d been too dazzled to ask himself why for the longest time, and says nothing. 

 

They’re probably five minutes away from the next bus stop, with the scant traffic on the streets this late, when Isagi says, “Let me down over there.”

 

“Absolutely not, are you crazy? He’ll be furious.”

 

“I do not care, he’s not supposed to be following me - or having me followed - in the first place!”

 

“Tell him that yourself, I am just trying to do my job.”

 

“This is the stupidest fucking -,” Isagi can’t even continue, choking on the absurdity of the situation and the audacity of that man . “Is he planning on chaperoning me from place to place every night? Does he think that’s going to keep me from doing what I want? Does he think people are not going to notice that a lowkey bougie car keeps dropping me off in the sketchiest neighbourhood of the whole city? I’m more likely to get mugged at this rate.”

 

“Wouldn’t be a problem if you just let him do what he wants.”

 

Isagi can feel his eyes bugging out of his head. “You can’t be serious.”

 

The Magician, maddeningly, stays silent. This is the kind of situation in which the Emperor would have responded with something glib and sly and utterly infuriating, and the non-responsiveness feels even more jarring with the realisation that a part of Isagi has come to expect it. 

 

The car glides quietly past the bus stop, standing isolated in black and yellow in a street corner. Isagi seriously considers just sideways rolling out of the car at the next turn and counting on his mental cartography of this place and all its hidden pathways and passages to get him home without being chased down. 

 

“Why is this happening?” he bemoans, massaging at his temples with his fingertips.

 

This time, the Magician does deign to speak. “You should know why.”

 

And the thing is, Isagi does know. As much as he’s got all his hackles up and he is already planning to plant himself on the diner rooftop tomorrow night itself so he can give that caped moron an earful for the monkey’s paw logic…he doesn’t need it spelled out to him why the Emperor is doing what he’s doing. 

 

After all, he had also hesitated - done loop-the-loops out of his way, just to make sure a convenience store clerk he’d not even known the name of at the time got home safe. 

 

So he knows. He doesn’t need it broken down for him. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to protest, even if he does so while flustered and hot in the face. 

 

“Ugh, this is so - I am a grown adult, I can go home without supervision. Does he think I haven’t managed before he fucking ziplined into my life?”

 

Again, the Magician chooses silence, and in the space it leaves for speculation, Isagi can’t help but start to brood over something he’s been mulling over for some time now. 

 

Because the doubt he’d had fogging his judgement has all but evaporated - because the improbable is not impossible, and even the impossible is just a challenge to be overcome, a prize to be attained, for the person in question. The person who’d told him he’d seen him out on his balcony and heard of him from the landlady long before they’d exchanged words the first time. 

 

Or what Isagi had thought had been the first time. 

 

He tries not to wonder, as he starts to butt heads again with the Magician over the moving-car hostage situation he’s managed to walk himself into, whether that prior awareness of him had driven the Emperor’s interest in him to begin with. What was it that made him approach that first time? And what kept him approaching, again, and again, and again? 

 

“Listen, he’s already insufferable because of you,” the Magician is stern, talking over Isagi’s sudden spluttering, “Just fucking - just talk to him! Just let me drop you off so I can be done with this and talk to him. ”

 

“I never said I wouldn’t!” is Isagi’s sullen retort, even as he starts to deflate into his seat in what he will pretend is not resignation for a few seconds longer. “And why’s he getting other people involved, what is wrong with him?”

 

In the smoother cadence of the speaker the Magician has hiding under his face mask, Isagi thinks he can detect something grumpy as he begins to manoeuvre the car into a U-turn, “Ask him that for yourself.”

 

They begin to retrace their route, and Isagi has to talk, if only to distract himself from how the situation has him remembering the last time he was in this car, shaken from both the chill of the rain but also the enormity of the choice he’d just made standing under it. The choice he’d made to entrust something that mattered so deeply in the hands of a complete mystery. How he’d squirmed in the backseat, consciously trying to remind himself to keep his wits around him, to sidestep the part of him that had already started sitting back secure in the gut feeling that the Emperor wouldn’t put him in harm’s way. 

 

It’s more than a gut feeling now, he thinks, pulse kicking into a little hummingbird dance even as he asks, “...is your voice changer new?”

 

“What?”

 

“I mean… it, uh. Sounds a lot clearer and smoother and… less mechanical than that guy’s.”

 

“You can tell, huh,” Isagi’s not sure if he just has more cues to read off of this guy, covered up as he is still - if not by his baseball cap, shades, and mask, then by the darkness draped across the spaces between passing streetlamps. “We upgraded recently. Figured I was gonna need it anyway if I have to be out in the open.”

 

Isagi, still feeling kind of defiant and unhappy with that roundabout dig at the circumstances, wriggles as subtly as he can to get more comfortable in his seat. “Money must be good these days, then.”

 

He feels the look being thrown at him more than he sees it. “Is that resentment?”

 

How much do they talk about me? Isagi wonders, warm around the ears from the self-consciousness. 

 

And to his own surprise… envious .

 

A part of him can’t help but ponder whether things would be… if nothing else, a little easier, a little less confusing and daunting, if he had someone to talk to. Openly, fully, without the constant side-stepping and slithering between the lines, about all these outlandish situations he finds himself in the middle of. About him. 

 

Instead, he deals only in fragments - parts of the truth, that he trades with his friends and his family. With the shadow on the roof and the light across his balcony. Just being able to talk to Rin the last time, to have another mind to bounce his suspicions and worries off of, had felt like an incomplete but grounding reassurance. Even if he hadn’t found all the answers he had been looking for, and even if Rin couldn’t know there was so much of the picture he was keeping from him. 

 

He sounds a little subdued even to himself as he mumbles, “Just an observation.”

 

“...it could be worse.”

 

That gets Isagi’s attention - floats him to the top of his swirling, conflicted thoughts. “What could be worse?”

 

The Magician is beating a tempo with the fingers of one head across the steering wheel. It looks agitated. 

 

Isagi isn’t about to let him ignore the question though. “What could be worse? Is… is there something wrong?”

 

Gold reflects off the Magician’s glasses as he looks at him, streetlights washing over them through the windshield, turning the lenses opaque. Isagi can’t tell what he’s thinking - what he’s reading off Isagi’s own face.

 

Whatever conclusion he reaches makes him sigh - a whispery sound through the speakers. “Nothing’s wrong,” he says, turning back to the road. “We’ve just been a bit… selective with our work lately.”

 

“Selective how?”

 

Another look to the side. Off the way the Magician holds himself alone, Isagi gets the sense that he’s not too pleased with all these questions. He pushes, “Should I ask him, then?”

 

The dancing fingers clasp around the steering wheel and the Magician sighs. “He’s probably gonna tell you anyway,” he mutters, almost more to himself than Isagi, before he confesses, “He’s been profiling our clients… extra carefully, lately.”

 

“Okay…?”

 

“We have been… turning down a lot of people lately, too.”

 

And that’s not… that’s not what the Emperor had said the last time. Except… he hadn’t really said , had he…?

 

Spine hunched against the backseat, fists curled a little against his knees, Isagi hardly breathes as he starts to ask, “What kind of… who…?”

 

“Drug lords, for starters,” and Isagi jolts even as the car covers level, unbroken ground. 

 

“Oh.” 

 

“Yeah.”

 

“But there would be… I guess there would be a lot of money in that. Especially now.” Drug abuse exposés had started to hit closer in the more affluent parts of town - there had been two instances that month alone when the police had raided a nightclub and a rich idol junkie’s penthouse that had started to double as illicit substance peddling dens. He’s sure there are plenty of people nervous about their involvement in high profile cases erupting into the headlines, now that they’d started to creep much closer to home…

 

“There would be, yes.”

 

The implications sit between them like a third passenger, square in the middle. 

 

“You said for starters …”

 

“Look,” the Magician sounds a little irritated, and Isagi has to wonder whether he’s… unhappy with the Emperor’s recent business moves. Wonders, for the first time, how much this guy had to participate in that mass leak incident that had tumbled down an entire family legacy, and how much his role in this equation is being affected just by Isagi being in the picture. “It's a very case-by-case basis, okay? He’s just being very… particular about the people we work with.”

 

There’s a rush in Isagi’s ears even as he asks, “He’s always bragging about money being the biggest common denominator for the jobs you take, though.” 

 

Except… that’s not true, is it? He’d sworn to Isagi, in a dark alleyway where he’d held Isagi’s fury and helplessness and heartbreak as they spilled beyond Isagi’s capacity to hold himself, that there are lines he would draw. That he wouldn’t help abusers hide their abuse. Even if those same people would have been able to offer him a thousand times more in value than what Isagi could to take them down. He hadn’t had the bandwidth, emotionally or mentally, to wonder why someone who spent half his time taunting Isagi with the kind of money he could make on the side of the morally bankrupt had been so… definite about this, back then. Before Isagi had even asked him to help. 

 

He hears himself ask, nonetheless, “Why the…change of heart?”

 

The sound of the Magician’s laugh translates into a bizarre chirp. It startles them both, and the Magician mumbles a “Sorry, that needs more work…” And then, “but change of heart … that’s appropriate.”

 

And Isagi really, really wants to ask. Almost does. 

 

Where do you get your tech?

 

Do you build own your gear?

(Is this because of me?)

 

But a part of him worries. Holds back. 

 

For people who rely on their secrecy and their subtlety to run the operation they do, they’ve been particularly lax around Isagi, and Isagi has gone past the point of questioning why. Thinks that he would certainly combust if he attempted it right now, especially with what the Magician is intimating. 

 

But he is almost completely sure that neither the Emperor nor the Magician could know that he might have put more together than they think. 

 

He may not have proof - he may not have hard evidence, not yet. But Isagi is almost completely sure that for all the times he’s talked about his friends in front of Kaiser, he’s never mentioned the Mikage surname before. He’s not even sure if he’s mentioned Reo by name, the coffee beans and anko treats he’d shared labelled as ‘gifted by a friend’. The hesitation with which Kaiser’d shared the scholarship name could have just been him pausing on the cusp of revealing a truth about himself, something specific, a crumb Isagi could follow a trail of to lead him towards the answer - but could he know that Isagi’d already been closer to it than he might imagine? Closer than he might be ready for?

 

Months have gone by, and he hasn’t called the police on the Emperor - has shared time and space and a large secret and plenty of smaller ones with him. The Emperor cares about his trust, cares about keeping it, even when he’s straddling fine lines of the boundaries he draws to get what he wants too. But does that mean the Emperor trusts him back? Or just that he thinks he’s harmless enough with how much he knows that he’s not a real liability? 

 

The Magician’s hair keeps catching the light of passing shop signs and street-lamps - Isagi’s committed its exact shade of magenta, in fluffy curls over a bright friendly eyes, to memory from a picture he’s not supposed to have. 

 

What happens if either of these masked men find out that he’s pretty sure he knows exactly who they are? And ‘who they are’ happen to be ‘wanted by the law’, on top of any of the powerful and unconscionable people out there who might not appreciate them refusing to capitulate to their influence?

 

He considers the extra lengths the Magician has gone to disguise himself this time around, and whether it’s just the regular passersby, the standard trouble-makers and cops, that he’s being cautious of.

 

Thinks about the balcony opposite him, the smile that greets him from across the way under the bright morning sun. 

 

Thinks about the smoke and mirrors, misdirecting the eye. The people in that building who would vouch up and down if ever it came to it that Michael Kaiser was a model tenant who had lived there for ages and always paid his rent on time, was respectful of his neighbours and the community spaces, who they’d seen out and about in the laundry room and his balcony and would be the last person you would ever suspect to be involved with the gritty, grimy things that crawl out when the sun goes down, because the picture he paints in their minds is grand and complete enough to fill up any blanks that don’t make sense, overwrite any other image that tries to assert itself.

 

And Isagi, closer now to the stage, close enough to see the chips in the paint and the tricks of the light, to the curtains and the shape of the truth behind them, grows wary. That one careless action, a sudden move of his, could magick it all away before he has a chance to understand, a chance to see, all the way through.  

 

The tilt of the Magician’s head is questioning when Isagi digs into his bag and presents him a handful of small palm-sized parcels once they’ve arrived at the last bus stop. 

 

“Um, it’s all I have on me so…,” he mutters a little awkwardly. “They’re sweets. Red-bean flavoured, they’re from a fancy shop and ah - thank you and… I’m sorry for the trouble, I guess. And oh - I still have your umbrella from the last time, I didn’t know how to give that back -”

 

The staring goes on a bit longer. At last, the Magician sighs. Reaches out to accept the treats. 

 

“Give it to him,” he says at last. “The umbrella. When you see him next.”

 

Adds, completely unprovoked, “And try to do it soon so I can go back to actual work instead of tailing his crush all over town.” 

 

He ignores Isagi’s wheeze of shock as he adds, “Besides, he’s been looking forward to… uh, showing you something anyway.”

 

And when Isagi gives him a blank, almost fearful look in response, he giggles. The laughter makes them both flinch from how unnatural it sounds. Isagi remembers it sounding boyish, the first time he’d heard it. It suits the face that Isagi is so, so sure now sits under the mask and the glasses.

 

“Don’t worry. He just wants to show off.”

 

Isagi doesn’t have to wait long to find out what that was all about. 

 

It becomes blatantly obvious the very next evening, as he whips around on the rooftop, umbrella in hand, to give the Emperor a piece of his mind as soon as he hears him touch down. 

 

The scolding evaporates from his tongue when he sees him though.

 

“Uh…” 

 

“What do you think?” Isagi startles, his ears pricked up at the gap between what he’s grown used to hearing and what he is hearing now. His hands curl into his sides in some kind of instinctive effort to clamp down whatever other kind of reaction is trying to manifest physically through him. The Emperor bends with a subtle grace until his face is level with Isagi’s “Like my new look?”

 

Isagi stares at where the eyeholes used to be, and sees just a smooth, barely reflective plate curve over them instead. The surface gleams ever so slightly in the minimal light up here, but Isagi can make out that it’s not completely opaque - and yet, it’s tinted enough that Isagi can’t see through it. 

 

Between this, and the fact that there’s no cape on right now to leave the height and the breadth and the shape of this man just to Isagi’s imagination, and Isagi finds his mouth moving in search of words he hasn’t managed to think of yet. 

 

“Ooh, speechless?” Another shock to his nerves, the open delight he can hear in the rounded, clear syllables of his newly donned voice. The guesswork that’d become instinctual to him lays uselessly to the side as Isagi tries not to gasp, the Emperor dipping his head even closer. “Aren’t you happy I took your feedback seriously?”

 

In spite of himself, even though he realises it’s futile, Isagi’s eyes search for where a mirror pair should be. It’s…unsettling, not to be able to see them.  

 

With a shake of his head, Isagi takes a step backwards to put some distance between them. “I mean… am I supposed to be proud that you’re taking basic safety considerations into account for your stupid costume?”

 

“It’s not a costume ,” and wow, this is really going to take some getting used to, not needing to read cues from what little Isagi had learned to read off his voice - the alteration feels uncanny somehow, ironic considering that the rasp he used to speak with before had hardly sounded human. “I thought you’d be happy, darling. Now you don’t have to worry about me getting into accidents or being pepper-sprayed in the eyes anymore.”

 

“Bold of you to assume that I worry -”

 

“Darling, aren’t you tired of pretending?” the Emperor tuts. Closes the space between them again, and Isagi thinks his entire brain is alight with awareness at every muscle that shifts, that he can see shifting underneath that skintight suit, at that millisecond of movement. The grapple mechanism is more compact now, affixed to a narrow waist, with a sleek, high-efficiency utility belt and its economical compartments holding who knows what. “My…ah, accomplice told me last time that you were worried about how I was getting around in the rain. You’ve not been coming up here recently so I wouldn’t get spotted either, right?”

 

“I also told your accomplice that I don’t appreciate being followed,” Isagi hisses, and finds to his dismay and horror that he can’t tap into any of the ire he’d saved up just for this confrontation. Instead, he grips at the wrist of the hand now cupping his jaw in a loose hold - tries to pull it away as he scrambles a couple of more steps back. 

 

The Emperor sighs. “I’d thought you’d be pleased - I changed my whole look to account for your feedback.” And with a cheekiness that is unmistakable, so blunt and open that Isagi feels himself steaming all the way through, “Like a good partner should.”

 

“Stop acting like you’re trying to appease me after literally having me followed and not updating your look so you can actually do your own job better. You’re supposed to be low-key and subtle, aren’t you?”

 

A scoff. “I also understand the merits of personal branding.”

 

“Personal branding that has people instantly recognising you because there’s only one person crazy enough around to be flying about like a giant bat - who keeps showing up at the same places, mind you - doesn’t have many merits. Ever heard of the criminal always returning to the scene of the crime?”

 

A scoff, and another step towards him, and another step Isagi takes backwards, defiant and glaring to cover for how disarmed he feels. He keeps searching for his eyes. “I’m hardly a criminal, angel. Unless the crime was stealing your hea-”

 

Isagi cuts him off by clapping both hands over his ears with a chagrined, “ Nope .”

 

The wire mesh jangles as Isagi’s back meets the edge of the roof and the clanking covers his gasp as he finds himself caged. The Emperor glides into his space, into his air, an arm coasting past his waist to hook fingers into the gaps in the thin metal. “Why so shy? You were so forward coming onto me last time -”

 

Isagi thinks he can almost see his own reflection in his stupid upgraded mask, jaw dropping open before he lets out a scandalised, “You’re recalling things very differently to how I remember that conversation going -”

 

Another arm snakes past his other side, and now Isagi is fully cornered. He hardly dares breathe, lest it disturb whatever it is that is beginning to sizzle between them, frying through his neurons too quickly to hold back the thought that he just wishes he could rip the eyegear off and see him . “Oh? Because what I recall is you wanting to team up.”

 

“That’s - I mean that’s not exactly what I -”

 

“I’ll be honest, you really caught me off guard there, sweetheart,” the Emperor hums, and even though his voice through whatever new disgustingly expensive machine he’s using is clearer than what Isagi’s used to, it sends the hairs on his body standing on end as it travels the excuse of distance between them like something physical. “But then, you’re always full of surprises. I’m glad you’re finally coming around, though.”

 

“I think you are forgetting the part where I explicitly said I would never work for you. ”

 

“You’d work with me, though,” there’s such palpable glee in the way he says it. Heat boils around Isagi’s collar, curls up his neck as Isagi tries and fails not to keep his stare roving all over that completely masked head. He can’t help it - it takes over like an itch, a hand clawing for purchase against a slippery slope, and he finds that he resents it - how close he is, how close he gets, only to remind him of the degree of separation between them that he was not allowed to cross. “I think that’s progress.”

 

The Emperor has always loomed over Isagi in height, but right now he is practically towering over him. If someone were to come through the rooftop door right now, they wouldn’t even be able to see him, shielded as he is completely from view, even without the bulk that the cape added to his silhouette. 

 

“It’s almost impressive how good you are at cherry-picking things I say,” Isagi says at last. The fingers of his free hand have knotted through the mesh behind him, if only for the illusion of the stability he’s still trying to find in the situation. “What did you think you were doing, sending your… accomplice after me when I explicitly asked you not to follow me? Are you trying to be clever?”

 

“I fancy myself to be pretty clever -”

 

“Don’t change the subject. I wasn’t going to be okay with that, you must know that already.”

 

Isagi watches as that head completes its little tilt as the Emperor leans closer. The absence of the eyes unsettles Isagi the longer he has to keep staring at his now-featureless dome. Like shuttered windows, drawn blinds. For a second, he flashes back to his apartment - all the time he spends, these days, peeking out of his window, across to the ones opposite his. The gap in the curtains that hardly move unless the person he keeps expecting to see appears on the balcony. 

 

“Then you must also already know that I wouldn’t be happy just letting you waltz around with your guard down in the most unsafe sector of the city, especially when I know you will go out of your way to do something stupid.”

 

“I know it’s dangerous. I know it’s dangerous and that’s exactly why I can’t ignore when people are - you know, what?” Isagi cuts himself off abruptly, the flare of frustration more familiar, more easy to fall back into, “We’ve gone through this a thousand times. I already told you that I am not going to stop.”

 

“Oh, I’m sure,” the Emperor nods, “That’s specifically why I need to keep an eye on you.”

 

Isagi glares and it feels useless, like it’s just bouncing off his stupid helmet. “Don’t you have a business to mind?” he tries to make it as scathing as possible, but it rings false in his own ears, “One that involves being undercover , and not showing up out in the open again and again where people could see you? I thought you were laying low.”

 

He realises he’s made a mistake the second the guy’s posture, almost draped over him as he crowds him against the roof’s edge, straightens a little. “What makes you say that?”

 

Shit. “Just…I mean you haven’t been in the news recently, and you’re not showing up on the literal dedicated forum boards people have documenting your sightings, which I’m sure you must be aware of because you strike me as the kind of guy who would Google himself -” 

 

“Darling, you’re so cute,” Isagi can’t even dodge the fingers that come up to pinch at his cheek in accompaniment with that coo, “you don’t have to be shy about the fact that you’re keeping tabs on me. That makes me happy. I keep tabs on you too. It’s okay, I know it’s because you care.”

 

“...do you even hear the words coming out of your mouth,” Isagi grumbles, but lets the teasing wash over him. It’s better than him cottoning on to the fact that Isagi may or may not have very casually probed Reo about whether he’s been hearing a certain nickname inside of his circles lately.

 

Oh, you noticed he’s gone dark too? Reo had shared immediately, lighting up the way he does when anyone shows interest in his hyperfixations, he’s still active, from what I hear, but I guess maybe he’s built enough of a clientele that he doesn’t need to publicise his work as much - or maybe the people he’s working for need him to be extra covert.

 

Or maybe… maybe he’s just watching his own back, stripping down the trappings of his larger than life persona despite it being a dramatic signature he’s proud of, because the wrong eyes are looking too.

 

“You don’t have to be worried about my worklife, angel,” the guy is still squishing at his face. “I excel at what I do, you have firsthand experience.”

 

He’s pretty good at hiding in plain sight, had been the Magician’s input. The Emperor had been pretty unfazed, openly pleased if anything, from the beginning as Isagi let on that he’d been looking into him. Had practically encouraged him to do it, the card he’d handed him that lays unused like a smoking gun every time he flips his wallet open for something, both a test and a clue. 

 

But that was when he had control over what he was letting Isagi - or really, anyone - see. 

 

What would Isagi have been signing up for if he had just… agreed to this guy’s constant pushes for them to team up? Isagi is settled in his choice, knows that he would never be able to stomach allowing himself to be used as a tool for the privileged, no matter how ‘selective’ they had started to be with their client base. But a part of him, one that he’s been happy to shove into the farthest, darkest corner of his brain, can’t let go of that what if. 

 

That impossible scenario where he did agree, and maybe, finally, did get allowed behind the curtains.

 

“My firsthand experience is you being stupidly reckless,” Isagi finally pulls the fingers off his face - the Emperor lets him. “I don’t know if seeing your antics would inspire confidence among your clients if you’re spending all your time on the clock stalking people.”

 

“ You don’t get to accuse me of being reckless,” and then, with quiet laughter that starts at his shoulders and doesn’t crack out of the speakers the way the Magician’s had, “but I guess that’s what makes us such a good match, right? We have so much in common.”

 

And while Isagi makes a point to openly gag at the things he’s saying, he adds, “But, well, if you really want to make sure I don’t endanger myself by being seen out and about… you know what you have to do, right?”

 

It takes a second before the disbelief crawls up slow and hits hard, and Isagi almost forgets to be self-conscious as he straightens to stare the guy down, his dumb bucket-head and all. “Are you for real? Are you trying to guilt-trip me?”

 

“I’m just reiterating what you said yourself, angel,” the light disappears as the Emperor leans over him again and he’s so, so close Isagi can hear, blinking unseeing into a pure black, the air the microphone is picking up and puffing out, “If you get involved, I get involved. So if you really want to keep me out of harm’s way, which, by the way, is so attractive of you -,” Isagi senses more than sees his quiet laugh shake through him as Isagi starts to cough, “ - you just need to keep yourself out of harm’s way.”

 

“You’re assuming I care enough about -”

 

“But you do,” his protests, weak, unconvincing, useless even as he tries to muster them, disappear as the familiar tap of a leather-covered forefinger dances at his jaw. “You have, for a while now. Am I wrong?”

 

And Isagi, the tables turned on him so absolutely, high up under the sky instead of swathed beneath shadows and surrounded by exposed brick and raw tarmac, realises the equilibrium he’d thought he reached is only possible if what goes around comes back around. The cycle would only move if they both made it move, and would only keep moving if they kept it moving, in this give and take of theirs. 

 

He means it as he grits out, “...you are so fucking impossible . ”

 

“I’m glad you think so,” there’s something so sharp and so pleased about that answering purr - the warm friction of it as the Emperor dips down near his ear to whisper, “since you don’t like to do what’s easy anyway, do you?”

 

---

It’s already hours later when he gets home, the umbrella he’d completely forgotten to return and only realised after returning to the kitchens downstairs resuming its place next to his shoes. 

 

This had… not gone as he had planned, at all. 

 

He slides his sneakers off, leaving them haphazardly in a bad habit he has the sense he’s cultivating but is too frazzled to do anything about, trailing into his LDR unit with feet dragging against the tile. Over to the couch as he drops himself down into it more heavily than he’d meant to. 

 

The message on his screen when he unlocks his phone is the same as the one he’d seen just as he was boarding his first bus on the commute home. 

 

♛: hi angel 

 

♛: guess who 

 

The notification had thrown him off at first, before he’d even read the message - with justified alarm, given that it’d been an incoming message to the burner account he’d made to stalk a psychopath and her parent, who are now both facing several years in prison. 

 

number#1noafan : Are you fucking serious?  

 

♛: now now, angel

 

♛: don’t break your word

 

♛: text me when you get home!

 

Isagi’d sat in his window seat, an older salaryman beside him, acutely aware that if any of the passengers around him with an excess of curiosity tried to peek over his shoulder, they’d think he’s texting his - 

 

He’d locked the rest of that thought away as abruptly as he locked his phone. 

 

At the very least, he’d thought, as he got off at the next stop and eyed the wait times for the connecting bus, a couple of minutes late tonight - the guy had kept his word. He’d made it all the way home without being followed - by ziplining shadows or sleek black sedans. 

 

“This is going nowhere, we’re just talking in circles -”

 

“And whose fault is that?”

 

“Stalking is a criminal offence!”

 

“You keep calling me a criminal, and yet you and I both know you’re not going to call the cops on me.”

 

“You wanna test your luck?”

 

“Oh, so scary. I love how feisty you are, angel, but since we can’t reach an agreement, how about we… compromise?”

 

“What do you mean, ‘compromise’?”

 

“You know, the basis of every healthy, long-lasting relationship?”

“... I wish I still had my taser.”

 

“Rude. Speaking of which, I’ll get you one. If you won’t let me keep an eye on you the least you can do for me is exercise basic self-defence habits -”

 

“Wait - are you… you’re agreeing to not stalking me?”

 

“That’s your non-negotiable, isn’t it? You really got me with that, last time, using my own words against me. That was devious of you.”

 

“Not like you listened, so it’s not even like you respected -”

 

“Darling, don’t be unfair. You know for a fact that if your trust was so cheap to me I wouldn’t have had any problems following you right up to your doorstep.”

 

“So your solution was to have Eight follow me instead.”

 

“It was a compromise. Just like the one I’m asking you to make right now.”

 

“Which is…?”

 

“That I will not follow you home on condition that you contact me - immediately, no hesitating, no trying to handle things by yourself, no hiding or lying - the second something happens that could be dangerous. Got it?”

 

“I’m not using your website, I -”

 

“I’m not asking you to. This isn’t about work, and I don’t need Eight in our private conversations, you get along too well already -”

 

“But then… how…”

 

“The next condition -”

 

“I didn’t even agree to the first one!”

 

“If I’m around, and I can see you and I’m keeping an eye on you, I’ll let you know. Full disclosure, both ways. Fair?”

 

As Isagi flops back into his couch, pulling one of the pillows to hug to his chest, he isn’t even sure if he got hoodwinked into that deal. The guy had been so persistent, not budging, not letting Isagi move even when he threatened to kick him in the nuts, only joking about his filthy mouth until Isagi had gone red in the face. He’d pushed and pushed and pushed until Isagi had genuinely started to worry that he would be late getting back to his shift and someone would come up to find him. 

 

By the time he’d been forced to shake hands on the deal, a callback that feels almost intentional, only the heavy rain and the heavy stakes it’d unspooled under it missing, Isagi is flustered, the Emperor sounds annoyingly pleased with himself, and Isagi isn’t even sure if that played out in his favour even a little bit.

 

But he really had not followed him, tonight… and Isagi had been extra, extra vigilant trying to make sure he hadn’t, too preoccupied to take any of his more winding, compromising detours. 

 

And…he’d promised. Gave him his word that if he was around, he would tell Isagi, even though he’d never expected him to establish contact like this. Is Isagi the crazy one for thinking that makes their dynamic a little more even, when he’s basically now just secured permission to snoop around him, so long as he admits to doing it first? Does that count as stalking? Damn that asshole and his stupid, stupid loopholes.

 

Staring at the unanswered message, Isagi, very, very reluctantly, has to admit to himself that if nothing else, the Emperor has never broken a promise he’s made him before. 

And isn’t it better that I know the guy is nearby than having to catch him sneaking around? he reasons, rolling himself and his pillow into the back of his couch, phone still glaring its light into his eyes in the still-dark of his living room. 

 

That’s not the last of the questions he reasons through with himself, even as he finally texts back with a single home. 

 

Even as he nearly smothers himself into his pillow at the black heart emoji that appears in response, even as that’s followed up by a goodnight, darling! 

 

say it back appears a couple of seconds afterwards, as Isagi stays on the chat and says nothing and pretends that he is not actively going insane, pretending that this mundane, ordinary interaction that he shares with his mother and with Bachira every night is not throwing him off completely with someone who’s only been accessible under the conditions of distance and time before. 

 

say it, appears next, this time with a frowning emoji, and Isagi makes a strangled noise. 

 

Complains a This is so stupid at the ceiling. 

 

Sends his reply, and hides the equally stupid grin threatening to morph his face into something incriminating even with no one to see into his pillow.

 

number#1noafan : Goodnight  

 

♛: 🖤

 

And maybe, yeah, it’s reckless. 

 

Maybe they both equally are. It almost feels illegal, exchanging these messages on the same device he uses to call home and watch videos about cats and plant-care and swap memes with his friends. Like an illicit portal they’ve opened, one that completely disregards the rules of time and space they’ve had to abide by before just to talk to each other. 

 

And maybe Isagi lets it be, because the door’s being held open on the other side for once. Because at least to some extent, the Emperor is choosing to trust him too.

 

***

Summer squats over North Ward like a lid stifling it, a humidity that is so thick the air feels uncomfortably moist the second Isagi steps beyond his apartment doors. He’d started off trying to ventilate with the windows open, and then leaving bottles of ice in front of the table fan he’d retrieved from where he’d dismantled and stowed it under his bed last winter, improvising his own makeshift air-conditioner. The goal had been to try and use the actual air conditioner his apartment comes outfitted with sparingly, because electricity bills were looking egregious enough with the little time he already spent at home, but that had pretty quickly gone out the window as Isagi found himself taking ice cold showers every day and gasping awake in the middle of the night drenched through the sheets because of how smothering the heat got. 

 

It’s not just him summer is getting to either. Some of Isagi’s plants have started to wilt, despite everything he’s tried to maintain the moisture and pH levels of the soil and all the nutrient sticks he’d bought on the way home to try and nurse them back to health. 

 

“It’s the humidity,” Nagi tells him when Isagi coaxes him into a video call, “The air’s too wet for them. If you’re not watering them too much it should still be okay, but like, sometimes when it’s all hot and wet, there could be fungi… or the roots could be rotting…”

 

Isagi’s distraught silence tells Nagi what he needs to know. “Sorry man,” and he does sound apologetic; Isagi sees him search for something to say before he asks, “...want me to tell Reo that you’re looking for a dehumidifier?” 

 

That snaps Isagi out of it. “Do not tell him I need a dehumidifier.” And then, because he’s learned recently to speak in extreme specifics. “Don’t tell him I need anything!”

 

He realises that this had been Nagi pulling his leg when the boy just goes, “Hmm, okay.” Followed by, “Then you have to cheer up before you see him later.”

 

“Yeah, yeah, fine.” And after a pause, because Nagi’s face gives so little away, “I’m serious, don’t tell him anything about dehumidifiers.”

 

But still, Isagi thinks, kneeling by the plants worst affected by the sun and examining the damage, wondering if he should dig through the soil and figure out whether there really is something wrong with the roots, he can’t help but be a little heartbroken. He’d not been a natural at plant rearing by any means, but there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes with carefully, patiently, nurturing something out of the soil, seeing it grow bit by tiny bit, getting excited pulling his curtain open to see a new stalk or a new leaf. His monstera had grown so well he’s trying to propagate a part he’d very, very carefully cut off in water, the pothos too which had been flourishing with abandon. But his larger succulents are starting to look yellow, their jade surfaces losing their rich shine, and when he pokes around in the soil, there’s a pang of distress when he realises the roots do look discoloured and diseased.

 

He’s not really sure what he can do about that before he has to head to campus, though. One of their professors had had a heat stroke and cancelled their morning lecture, so Isagi had been taking his time, actually managing breakfast with a couple of the taiyaki he’s got stocked in the fridge, re-toasted with butter and delicious enough that he’ll overlook his own madness, eating something piping hot in the kind of weather they’re having. 

 

This and the extra time he gets to spend with his plants also mean he has plenty of time to keep an eye out on the balcony opposite.

 

It’s close to noon already and he hasn’t seen Kaiser at all. 

 

One of the first notifications he’d seen that morning, though, had been a message reading good morning angel

 

As he digs around for the lightest shirt he can find and swaps out jeans for shorts because he’s not trying to sweat out all the water in his body out there, he finds himself preoccupied, again, by how little he knows about him. As his neighbour, that is. Between his easy friendliness and his larger than life presence, do the rest of the people he might run into in this building, the colleagues Kaiser’s shared he’s not too close with, also get dazzled enough that they see only as much as Kaiser lets them? 

 

He thinks about wild bed hair and grumpy frowns and sleep slurred words and how the moment the smoke clears can be just as magical as the tricks it plays on your eyes at first and has to shake his head to clear it before he walks right into a pole on the way to where his friends are waiting for him.

 

Reo is already waving him down at their usual table at the cafeteria. Chigiri is already there, staring at him strangely - he had just tried to phase through a wall, after all - and Isagi is saying his hellos and taking his seat when Reo is already pushing his tablet into his hands. 

 

For a split second, Isagi panics. He’d pointedly not said anything beyond the fact that he’d been looking into a neighbour who’d mentioned the Mikage scholarship when asking for his help, gambling that if he told Reo not to tell anyone, he’d just come off more suspicious. Did he find something else about Kaiser that he wants to show him? 

 

His eyes capture the screen faster than his brain can make sense of it.

 

And in that one blinding microsecond of pure panic, before he manages to make sense of what it is he’s seeing, Isagi breaks out in a fever-cold chill. 

 

“Reo, what… is this?”

 

The excitement and glee in Reo’s voice are palpable as he grins, “The prototypes.”

 

Isagi doesn’t have to ask - he recognises the silhouettes, the AI-powered robots the same sort of build he’d seen in the Blue Lock promotion videos. There’s text in the margins, breaking down the features - movement sensors, high–functioning cameras, a million different grooves and joints to configure split-second outcome detection and nimble responses. 

 

But what snags Isagi’s attention and has his mouth running dry is what he asks about first. 

 

“But…why do they have grapple guns?”

 

“Well…,” Isagi is still scrolling through the prototype designs, far, far too detailed for a class project that they need to pitch and execute by the end of this semester. The holograms are dark blue with accents of grey and red, but Isagi cannot shake off the absolute shock his system had just received looking at them, hurrying to fill the cognitive gaps with the similarities they share with a costume upgrade that he’s inadvertently responsible for. “I guess you could say I drew inspiration from a certain caped crusader.”

 

He’s got a simplified version of his pitch for the class, Reo explains, while Isagi feels his brain deconstruct inside his skull. He already has the lab working on a prototype he can exhibit to the professor, with basic abilities just to showcase the potential of his pitch, and everything he’s saying is wild enough for Chigiri to ask him if the faculty would even accept his project since they’re supposed to create or build it themselves, to which Reo points out that the brief is about leveraging their resources to build the final product, and Reo is very much using his resources to execute his vision.

 

“And if that first trial run is a success, well - we can scale it up.”

 

“By giving them grapple guns?”

 

“For mobility,” Reo argues, “I wanted to fit them with jet packs too, but that would probably be dangerous in crowded places.”

 

“Isn’t that illegal?” Isagi thinks he can hear the frown in Chigiri’s voice and he does not dare look at him. “I feel like that should be illegal.”

 

“I mean, no one’s had to make laws about grapple guns because no one has been using grapple guns except one guy who allegedly uses one, so…”

 

“The flying robots may necessitate that,” Chigiri interjects, and then, probably sensing that that had been a bit sharp, follows with a “Are you… I mean, are you serious about going commercial with them?”

 

“We’d obviously do extensive tests and build in plenty of failsafes, especially when deploying them for disaster relief or civilian safety - and a project of this calibre would take years of development before it’s fully operational, so really my first goal is having something in shape to show investors,” Every word coming out Reo’s mouth is making Isagi feel lightheaded, “Market availability is still a far off prospect.”

 

It may be far off, but Isagi is still spooked by the time Reo wanders off to see whether he finds any of the lunch specials interesting, bringing Nagi in tow since if he didn’t Nagi would simply not bother to eat. 

 

“When he was talking about this project, I didn’t think he was actually planning to have pseudo-humans running loose - I thought it was gonna be like the robots at the airport or like, construction sites or something…,” Chigiri’s pondering out loud, shaking his coffee cup to see how much of it is just ice at this point.

 

“This… I mean once technology like this is in the market,” Isagi starts to say, “It’s probably going to have other companies trying to produce their own versions, right…?”

 

Chigiri takes a few seconds around thoughtful sips of his drink before he admits, “Given how corporations have been moving since the age of first-gen computers and down to new-age smartphones, I’d say yeah.”

 

“And even if Reo doesn’t fit his robot with a jetpack, someone out there might not care for civilian safety enough to… not fit their robot with a jetpack.” In fact, if the level of sophistication of Reo’s prototype designs come close to what Mikage Corp’s R&D were capable of building, anyone with the right capital could configure these things for anything - surveillance, theft, covert movement of illicit goods - 

 

“I’m sure by the time tech evolves to that capacity, litigation would also have developed to make sure that doesn’t happen…like, I can’t imagine a human-sized robot starting a rampage without consequences.”

 

Isagi can only take that with a heapful of salt, though, and he senses from the smidge of doubt in Chigiri’s voice that he agrees. His own deep cynicism toward law enforcement aside, he can’t think of a time when the law has been able to successfully anticipate massive booms in technology and digitisation to put up guardrails protecting the people at large. 

 

Bring in high-functioning, near-independently thinking robots , and in the hands of the wrong bidders - 

 

“Reo wouldn’t let the tech be misused,” Isagi says aloud, and it almost sounds like he’s trying to reassure himself. He does believe this, does know that his friend’s intentions are genuinely good, that his ambition and his lived experiences make his reality a far more convoluted one that Isagi can hope to parse with just a PowerPoint presentation. He could afford the best legal team possible to bulletproof the terms of how the product would work, who could use it, how, secure the patents and tip disputes and challenges in his favour, with the leverage his family has. He’d be discerning about the investors he would approach, wouldn’t lock himself into capitalistic interest, has spent enough time helping out and looking over the first pitch Reo had presented and had greenlit to know that he is deeply sincere about his intentions to truly help, to make an objective, positive difference in the world from the position of power and responsibility he sits in. 

 

So yeah, he trusts Reo. It’s not Reo that he’s worried about. Dupes of smartphones hit the market weeks after a large brand launches their newest product, and while it feels ridiculous to imagine that happening with fully fledged semi-holographic robots that can be programmed into the fucking Transformers - 

 

He’s brought back down to earth by Chigiri snapping his fingers in front of his eyes. 

 

“Relax,” Chigiri tells him, arching an eyebrow at him as Isagi blinks himself out of his head. “Stop envisioning every worst case scenario possible when the boy just said that it will be years before the thing can even be fully developed. They’re just ideas for now, some of this might not even be feasible. He hasn’t even pitched this to his dad yet, I’m sure he would have something to say about giving robots grapple guns and jet packs.”

 

It takes Isagi a while to find his voice and say, “Yeah.” And then, with a little more confidence, a little more guilt in letting his pessimism colour what is, objectively, a genuinely cool thing for Reo to attempt to develop, something that he’s clearly excited about that could make a real difference, another “Yeah, you’re right.”

 

“More importantly,” and Isagi’s just managing to come back into himself, just reminding himself to stop doing that, stop going on mental doomsday simulations at the slightest provocation, when he nearly spits his green tea out a second time as Chigiri asks point blank, “Why did you just stop talking about the Emperor?”

 

To Isagi’s credit, he doesn’t think he comes off as suspect when all he can do is stare at Chigiri blankly, because he doesn’t have to fake the reaction. “Huh?”

 

“I mean, you haven’t brought the guy up in weeks. You don’t even follow up when Reo brings him up like the obsessed little fanboy he is,” Chigiri continues, and Isagi has to devote all his willpower into not doing anything incriminating under his critical eye, “What gives?”

 

“But…you… I mean, you’re the one who told me not to -”

 

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually listen,” Chigiri cuts him off impatiently.

 

All Isagi can say, again, is “Huh?”

 

Chigiri actually rolls his eyes. “You are obsessive yourself, you know? You had me scouring the most obscure forums on the internet trying to figure him out. Reo might be the guy with the inside scoop on his activities but you’ve actually met him. And you just let that go? You never let things go!”

 

This rationale is so utterly wild to Isagi that all he can do is stare dumbly at Chigiri as his brain stutters and stops in search of rebuttal. “I don’t get it - you wanted me to stay away, so why are you mad I -”

 

“It’s just weird,” Chigiri interrupts again, and Isagi is starting to get the sense that he’s had this outburst percolating for a while, with how keen and targeted it feels. “It’s weird for you to just let go of something of this scale when just two minutes ago you were probably prophesying every single way Reo’s crime robots could contribute to the end of the world.”

 

Isagi almost starts dissociating. 

 

The enormity of the lie this thing has grown into is too huge for him to reconcile, especially on the spot and in the moment and caught completely by surprise like this. It feels like a time rift, like he’s accidentally tripped back into the past and is speaking to someone who’s still in the library, figuring out an ankh-embossed calling card and feeling the stretch and density of everything that’s passed in between there and now and everything he’s come to know, everything that he’s been led to know by the mystery man himself. Everything he’s changed into, since. 

 

He blinks at Chigiri and for one, frightening, chilling moment, almost feels like they don’t recognise each other. 

 

“Do you…like, I don’t… do you want me to -” 

 

“Just…,” Chigiri starts up in frustration, then simmers down almost just as fast - his friend has always been quick-tempered, but he’s also intentional about reigning it in, Isagi knows, because he never wants to hurt the people he cares about. “ Are you? Still keeping up with him and stuff? Have you seen him again since?”

 

“Uh,” He messages me good morning and good night every day and also when he’s literally following me in between bus stops. Oh, and I also have the equivalent of a conspiracy board in the back of my closet where I’ve been tracking every movement of his that had eye witnesses, and a good fourth of them are just me. And I’m 99.9% sure he’s my neighbour. “Yes?”

“Yes, you’ve seen him?!”

 

“Yes, I’ve been keeping up with him,” Isagi says, and thinks guiltily that it’s less a lie than an omission of the truth. Thinks he gets what he’d put the Emperor through now, in that alleyway where he’d made his ultimatum. Thinks that maybe sometimes as close as they got was as close as they could get with the secrets they both carry between them, theirs and not-theirs, whether that closeness was measured by the rasp of leather and mask or the distance between two balconies. “He’s not been in the news or anything at all much, though.”

 

Chigiri stares at him near unblinking for seconds that feel longer than they are, and Isagi deliberately tries to keep his head free of thought - the less he’s thinking, the less is likely to show up on his face. He’s just computing the uncanny similarity of Chigiri’s staring face to the cat he and his sister are raising together when Chigiri finally harrumphs, “Okay.” 

 

And then adds, “But tell me about this shit. It freaks me out when you’re not freaking out more than when you actually are.”

“What does that even mean?”

 

“Just that you not acting like yourself makes me feel like you’re… I don’t know,” Chigiri has a deep frown crinkling up his forehead, and Isagi can’t look him in the eye, “Like you’re up in your own head, and ten times more likely to do something stupid.”

 

They sit in silence for a while. Over the heads of the cafeteria crowd, Isagi can see the tuft of cotton that is Nagi’s head, a tad lower than his height should make him, and guesses he must be slouched over Reo’s back as the purple-head drags the both them along in a slow, patient circuit to look through the meal options they have today. 

 

“I don’t know how I feel about you just assuming that I’d be doing something stupid,” he says finally, and his voice is light when his heart is anything but. He thinks about a not-dissimilar conversation he’s had with Bachira on his couch, his heart lighter having him there, and the relief he’d felt, momentary and partial as it was, getting to puzzle through some of the questions and doubts in his head with Rin. How reassuring it’d felt, right at the beginning when this mess had started, to have someone know. To have Chigiri know, and help, until Isagi’d decided that he couldn’t be involved anymore. 

 

A part of him knows, even though he doesn’t dare to acknowledge it yet, that this isn’t sustainable. That he’s starting to fear the inevitability of this juggling act falling apart -

 

And that maybe, somewhere deep inside, a part of him, exhausted and impatient with all the different versions of truth he’s living with all these different people, is starting to want it to.

 

Chigiri snorts at him. 

 

“That’s just who you are,” he says frankly, and gets up to toss his empty cup in the trash, leaving Isagi to fix the hair he ruffles up with a rough head-pat. And to stew in the easy acceptance packed into that statement - 

 

Along with the envy and isolation he can’t unfeel, remembering the clear sense of the connection he could sense between the Emperor and the Magician, just from the way the latter spoke about him. 

 

---

Isagi’s switched from Japanese to Latin alphabets, finessed Google into thinking he’s in Germany with a free trial VPN, tried filtering his searches by date using the approximate times he can tell the Mikage Language Program started, hunting for anything he can find that can clue him into their backgrounds. 

 

Try as he might, he can’t find a shred of information about Michael Kaiser or Alexis Ness anywhere.

 

Considering who Isagi is now all but certain they are, that’s not unsurprising. They clearly have the ability to manipulate information online - and if he were running an operation like theirs, wouldn’t he also wipe the internet clean of anything that could be traced back to him? It might be easier if he had any kind of modifier to guide his search for Kaiser - where he used to live, what school or university he went to before here. As it were, there are a shocking number of Michael Kaisers in Germany.

 

Now Alexis Ness’ family - that’s a different matter.

 

The Ness household seems to have a particular talent for producing scientists - both parents, their severe and serious faces pictured in a couple of news articles and their research profiles, hardly look anything like the magenta-haired boy himself, the cutely smiling picture of him in Reo’s deck a contrast to Kaiser’s humourless, almost cold expression. The professional and academic histories of the parents are a mile long, and there’s enough public information about them that Isagi can at least verify that Alexis Ness is a real person - his name comes up as a footnote in one of the articles, from what Isagi can gather after the auto-translate tool is done cobbling the German together into some approximation of Japanese. His name is mentioned alongside those of two siblings’, but there is little else that Isagi can glean from these pieces, more focused on the exploits of the parents than the kids. 

 

What Isagi can glean, though, is that they are loaded.

 

It always seems to come back to this question, then. The scholarship. Kaiser had pretty openly admitted that he needed a scholarship to come to Japan and that this was his only option, and there’s more to this that maybe, someday, Isagi will have the chance to learn. 

 

But why would Alexis Ness, coming from the background he does, need a scholarship? Why would he even need to study in Japan when he’s a homegrown German prodigy? And why would he then spend at least a part of his time moonlighting as the right hand man for thr Emperor.

 

There’s not enough evidence for any of this for Isagi to comfortably call it a hypothesis - but he does wonder if these two had known each other before the program. There’s trust there, there has to be. But it’s more than that. Isagi thinks about how indulgent the Magician had been the first time they’d met, and how begrudging the second. And yet, despite not sounding pleased with it, he had kept going along with the Emperor’s whims. It can’t be money motivating him, given his background… 

 

There’s more that he has been able to find about Kaiser in the period after the Mikage Language Program had officially launched, though. Thanks to Reo’s deck, he knows how Kaiser is spelling his name, romanized and otherwise, as a scholar, and once he localises his searches for those, in journal databases and publication repositories, a couple of results come up immediately where he is credited as one of the translators. That also lines up with what Kaiser had said, about the faculty accepting a lot of commissioned projects. 

Apart from a few plays he’s credited for translating back and forth, between German and Japanese, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of solid throughline in the books and articles Kaiser has worked on. 

 

Between all of that and his obligatory involvement in Reo’s dad’s translation tech project, it makes Isagi wonder what Kaiser’s own research is even about. What the product of his labour and his goals and his focus is. It’s come up in conversation, just casually, because Kaiser’d been working on the thesis the night before, or because it’d kept him busy, and Isagi had just never…pushed. 

 

In hindsight it’s easy to overthink everything, to question whether that had been his own Japanese upbringing holding him back from expressing a deeper curiosity towards someone who had still effectively been a stranger, or whether Kaiser had just been that good at changing the subject without Isagi noticing. Without Isagi suspecting anything. 

 

He eyes the tiny digital clock at the corner of the screen and then across the breadth of the apartment from where he’s sitting at the kitchen counter. He hadn’t drawn the curtains tonight - had kept them just open enough that he thinks he must be visible to any of the apartments directly opposite him. Apart from the lights directly above him, the space is in darkness.

 

It’s a little past eleven, but Isagi is too wired to sleep.

 

His fingers tap a distracted crescendo across his keyboard. The sliver of gold he can see through the crack of the curtains in the apartment across from his balcony had flashed into life roughly thirty minutes ago. And thirty minutes before that, he had arrived home himself, and grudgingly typed out as much into a chat window, if only to get the spamming to stop. They’d never discussed this being part of the deal, Isagi grumbles to himself, even though he has no one to convince here. Even though he’s had to catch himself from automatically messaging an i’m home to this menace of an individual unprompted yesterday.

 

Search drawing blank after blank, brain too awake to try and wind down, Isagi decides that he’s going to test something out. 

 

So, with the drapes at his windows still wide open, Isagi powers his laptop down. Grabs his laundry hamper, not yet full, and his handheld electric fan for good measure. Pockets his phone, and lets himself out of his apartment. He swaps the kitchen lights out for the ones in the hallway on the way out - his steps brisk, as though to outrun the part of him that is trying to tell him that he’s being ridiculous.

 

It’s just as damp and uncomfortably warm as he’d been afraid of in the basement - the ventilation is just a tiny window jammed where someone had tried to open it (or close it, who even knows?) and the muggy heat coils around him as Isagi gets one of the machines going, electric fan on as he takes one of the two chairs sitting waiting in front of them. 

 

The irony of the situation does not escape him. Waiting, below brick and cement instead of out beneath an open sky, uncertain if the person he’s anticipating is going to show up. He tries not to think about it.

 

Some minutes have already passed when, over the steady trundling of the washing machine and the buzz of his electric fan, Isagi thinks he hears footsteps. He’s already turned towards the door when it opens and -

 

Though he’d been expecting him, his heart still leapfrogs off his ribcage as Kaiser enters the space, blinking at him as their eyes meet.

 

And there’s that smile again, tucked up into one corner of his mouth. An arched eyebrow as he asks, “Heard me coming again?”

 

We’ve had this conversation before, Isagi thinks, and eyes the clothes Kaiser has brought along. This time he’s brought his hamper, but if he remembers correctly, the night that he’d been sitting here, spiralling himself away along with the turns of the laundry he’d been doing as a distraction from the breakdown he’d had hours before, Kaiser had just brought a bundle of clothes tucked under his arms. Hadn’t had his eyeliner on, had been breathing a little hard like he’d been in a rush before appearing there.

 

Isagi had just not… thought about it. 

 

He doesn’t know how much more there is, that he just hadn’t thought about, because he’d just mistaken being able to see Kaiser to… knowing him. 

 

“All good?” Kaiser asks, once he’s started the second machine and taken the seat beside him.

 

Why wouldn’t it be? is the response that jumps to his tongue immediately, but that feels unfair. Especially when he thinks that if Kaiser had been looking out of his window, what he had probably been seeing would have been Isagi, head bent over his laptop, frustrated.

 

“I’m fine,” he says, “You?”

 

Maybe it’s because, for once, he’s actually alert, not half-lost and wandering from an encounter he’s had on a roof top or a dark street corner or foggy from painkillers, but he thinks there’s something intent about the way Kaiser watches him for a second, before he answers, lightly, “Not bad.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

Is he reading too much into things, or did the guy just start a little. “Yes? Why?”

 

“No, it’s just - ,” Isagi makes a vague motion at him with the hand holding his electric fan, “You’re all red.”

 

There’s a split second where Kaiser just stares, and then he barks out a laugh. “Well, the weather has been pretty awful.”

 

Isagi thinks about how he’s had this conversation too, in another shape, another form, first thing this morning. Messages in his phone, in a chat window he probably still has opened, that’d been the first thing he had woken up to after he’d swiped his alarm quiet.

 

♛: good morning angel [06.01 am]

 

♛: forecast says it’s going to be really hot today [06.53 am]

 

♛: stay hydrated 🖤 [06.53 am]

 

number#1NoaFan : Worry about yourself first [07.04 am]

 

number#1NoaFan: You’re the one running around with a tin can on your head [07.04 am]

 

♛: darling!!! [07.04 am]

 

♛: you do care 🖤🖤🖤 [07.05 am]

 

Isagi hadn’t responded to that. Not that that had stopped the guy. 

 

♛:  thought i saw an angel get off at Stop #83 [20.03 pm]

 

♛:  you look ravishing in those shorts btw [20.03 pm]

 

number#1NoaFan: You are such a creep, you know that? [20.05 pm]

 

number#1NoaFan: Allowing your harassment was not part of the deal [20.05 pm]

 

♛: I’m just being honest [20.06 pm]

 

♛: and appreciating you [20.06 pm]

 

♛: would love to appreciate those cute little shorts up close [20.07 pm]

 

number#1NoaFan: I’m going to mute this, bye [20.09 pm]

 

♛: have a good shift, honey [20.09 pm]

 

♛: text me when you’re home ~ [20.11 pm]

 

“Do you want to cool off while this finishes?” Isagi points at the machines. It’s generally not the smartest move to just leave one’s laundry unattended here, which had necessitated these chairs in the first place, whoever their donor had been. If anything, it’s a miracle the chairs themselves haven’t been nabbed - maybe because it’d be too conspicuous on the way up? “I’ll watch this for you.”

 

“No, no,” Kaiser waves him off. The lighting isn’t the best down here, dim and yellow and gloomy like much of the rest of the building’s communal spaces, but it’s enough for Isagi to see the red flush high against Kaiser’s cheekbones, and the very slight sheen of sweat shimmering against his skin, “I’d hate to leave you here all alone.”

 

“I was all alone here to begin with,” Isagi points out - chides, almost, as the tiny burst of triumph he’d felt thanks to his successful test fades to give way to concern. They don’t have summers this bad in Germany, do they? “Seriously, go back before you get… I don’t know, before you get heat exhaustion or something.”

 

“Come on, it’s not that bad.”

 

“You’re almost as red as your eyeliner.”

 

“Wow, you’re going to hurt my feelings.”

 

“Yeah, well, you’re going to hurt more than your feelings if you keep sitting here for -,” Isagi checks the timer on the machine Kaiser is using, “- the next thirty minutes. Seriously, go upstairs, cool off. I’m gonna be here anyway.”

 

“Yoichi,” Kaiser insists, “I’m fine, it probably looks worse than it is, you know, on account of being a white man. I just colour easily, that’s all.”

 

What you are is stubborn, Isagi wants to say, but it jams against his teeth. Feels both natural and yet completely unnatural, not the kind of blunt he’s completely used to being around Kaiser. 

 

Except that makes no sense, does it? Has he not been… a lot worse than blunt with him? 

 

Even that feels like an unnatural, uncomfortable thought, and Isagi squirms a little in his seat, warm only partly because of the humidity, 

 

For all the ways he’s rationalised who this man is , conceptually, who he must be with all the pieces of the puzzle he’s managed to spin together so far, it feels utterly bizarre to try and reconcile the person who’s forced him to mute his notifications so his friends and colleagues don’t keep asking him who is blowing up his phone these days with the guy beside him. 

 

His chair inched a polite distance away, wanting to keep him company with that signature, charming insistence. 

 

If this was a rooftop, and the figure beside him was fitted out in a bodysuit and mask, Isagi thinks he might have tried to sit on his lap if he thought he could get away with it. 

 

And it’s almost a little scary, the grim conviction with which Isagi forecasts this imaginary scenario. How easy it is to conjure it up, when what is happening right now, in the moment, is still a question he’s figuring out as he goes.

 

When did the masked man become easier to read than the person sitting open and exposed, larger than life, golden and blue, right beside him?

 

“Use this then,” Isagi manages at last, and angles his fan directly at Kaiser’s face.

 

With its tiny battery-powered gust turned up to max, blue and gold bangs hanging loose around his eyes fly directly into his face.

 

“Ah, sorry -,” Isagi toggles the thing to a less powerful setting - can’t stifle his laugh as soon as he looks up. “Oops.”

 

It’s nowhere as bad as the chaotic tumble of his bed hair, the image of which has permanently moved into Isagi’s mind. But it’s close enough that Isagi can’t hold back his grin, which only grows wider when Kaiser starts to pout.

 

“Your hair’s very… temperamental, huh?” Isagi can’t help himself. Kaiser is frowning a little balefully - and then Isagi watches as the blue sparks wide and bright and open beneath a mess of gold. 

 

Isagi’s hand is still poised where it’d moved of his own accord, to brush back his bangs.

 

They just stare at each other for a second, and Isagi thinks about how little they touch. 

 

Which, God, why did he have to think of it like that - he can feel the self-consciousness start to pool warm and red in his cheeks. But it’s not… a strange observation, is it? He’s felt Kaiser’s hands at his shoulders, his jaw, his waist, but these have all been such…restrained touches. Steering him into the apartment, getting him to sit down. Angling his face so he can see, eyes hard, the bruise purpling ugly aginat his jaw. 

 

That alone had been overwhelming when Kaiser was just Kaiser, his neighbour whom he had slowly started harbouring a moon-eyed crush for, someone he’d been so anxious about making a good impression on. 

 

But as the moment hangs between them for a second too long, Isagi is suddenly conscious of it, in a way he’s not had cause to before - that careful, polite distance, that line that Kaiser has maintained, in the breadth between balconies or the space between chairs or the distance between one end of a couch and other. Collapsing little by little but not all the way through.

 

“Sorry, I -” Isagi begins, awkward, as he starts to withdraw his hand. 

 

“It’s okay,” Kaiser says. It’s quiet, and almost a whisper. “I - go ahead.”

 

“Huh?”

 

Isagi cannot read him at all when he repeats, quietly, “Go ahead.”

 

Kaiser’s hair is soft to the touch - slipping through his fingertips as he tries to get the mussed-up strands to obey gravity again. It’s frizzier than he thought it would be, an aftermath of the humidity, fine threads clinging to his fingers from the static, and Isagi holds his breath, feels like he’s trying to touch water without causing a single ripple. His hands are almost clumsy with how timid they are, but he can’t get them to be any bolder - it feels wrong , somehow. 

 

Feels like he’s being dishonest. 

 

And that’s a complicated, messed up enough feeling to unpack, when Isagi’s brain isn’t even really done reconciling the man who has gone so still under his touch he hardly appears to be breathing himself with the guy who doesn’t waste a minute to start pawing at him. 

 

Does Kaiser feel it too? The… novelty of this moment? The fragility of it, the disarming consciousness of the fact that if Isagi pushes just a little farther, his fingertips will graze over Kaiser’s heat-warmed skin. No barriers, no masks, nothing between them. 

Isagi’s hand is a whisper of suggestion as it lightly brushes Kaiser’s hair back into place. 

 

He can’t do it. He can’t make himself do it. It’s so fucked up it almost makes him want to laugh, or maybe even cry, maybe both at the same time. 

 

It feels like he’s being unfair if he indulges the way his entire being is begging to. To the Emperor, to Kaiser, separately and as one, because they don’t know . They don’t know that he does, and when he says, “You really should go cool off,” he’s thinking about Michael Kaiser, sitting here sweating through his clothes in the claustrophobic summer heat, and also about the Emperor, who’d spent at least three or four hours outside all but saran-wrapped in his disguise in this disgusting weather.

 

Kaiser huffs lightly. “What kind of a gentleman would I be if I just left you here by yourself?

 

“No one’s asking you to be a gentleman,” Isagi tells him seriously, “You don’t need to be a gentleman, so please just -”

 

“No?” Isagi wonders, with a disquieting lurch, whether this is how his friends feel when he tries to cover for what he won’t tell them with humour, with his casual affectations of normalcy, with little distractions. “Do you prefer bad boys then?”

 

It’s flirtatious, he almost always is, but - 

 

“I prefer boys who don’t give themselves unnecessary heatstrokes,” Isagi says, a level of sass that feels bizarre even as it comes out of his mouth because he absolutely would say this and worse if this were a rooftop and his opponent were hiding behind a mask. But it feels so forward here, like he’s crossing a line they’ve only danced along before, face to face. 

 

The fucking irony of it all. 

 

Kaiser almost gapes a little, catches himself just in time, and Isagi tries not to openly fidget when he hums out an “Unfair, Yoichi.”

 

By the time they have both collected their washed and dried laundry, because of course Isagi hadn’t managed to persuade Kaiser to leave, and they couldn’t both leave with their things still in the basement, Kaiser’s hair has started to stick up from the static.

 

“You look like a dandelion,” Isagi cannot help himself - the giggles come out whenever he looks at him.

 

Kaiser passes a self-conscious hand through his hair, and succeeds in making it worse.

 

“Well, at least it’s gotten you to cheer up,” he grumbles. Isagi doesn’t point out that he hadn’t been needing cheering up in the first place. What he needed - still needs - are answers.

 

But for all the times he’s charged straight into the heart of the problem, he can’t bring himself to do it now. Can’t bring himself to just ask . To hint, to let him know that he knows , that they can stop with the courteous side-stepping of questions they’re trying to figure out but can’t, not directly. 

 

After all, the Emperor is someone who has, for all intents and purposes, disappeared into myth. In a couple of more months, he might just fade into an obscure urban legend the likes of which crowd top ten lists in forum boards, if his notoriety had even managed to reach beyond North Ward.

 

But Michael Kaiser couldn’t just disappear, could he? He’d signed a lease in this building, working and researching under the city’s most prestigious university. People know who he is, where he lives, where he works, how he looks. He has more to lose if he’s compromised.

 

Maybe that’s why Isagi starts to become so much more aware of how cautious this guy is - and how good he is at hiding it.

 

Starts to feel guilty, a little, about the limits he’s pushing that same caution to.

 

“Who is that? ” Kawasaki asks Isagi the second he’s walked up to the cash register. He’d seen her ogling them the moment they’d entered through the automatic sliding doors, arguing.

 

Or at least, Isagi had been arguing, because Isagi’s reasoning for being out this late might be inane (“I wanted popsicles”) but Kaiser’s just sounded so unlikely it could only be the best he could come up with at short notice.

 

“Why would you want to go for a walk this late?”

 

“You’re out late, too.” Deflection. Isagi is not happy. He hadn’t even left the curtains open tonight. Had actually tried to be discreet when his combined lack of sleeplessness, the leftover adrenaline of an eventful day at work, and the endless doom-scrolling through Michael Kaiser’s entire bibliography in search of something had culminated in a restlessness he didn’t think could be contained in his apartment. 

 

Fortunately, he’d caught Kaiser behind him before they had gotten on to the main street proper - he’d been wary enough of the men he could see huddling in the bend he would have to pass by to head straight into the convenience store. With the thick smoke they’d been breathing out curling above their heads like phantoms in the white-gold glow of the streetlamp they’re under, Isagi had made the decision for the both of them, rounding on Kaiser and hustling him away. 

 

He’d just fallen into step with Isagi then, and all Isagi could do was stew in whether this guy didn’t have time to switch into incognito mode to catch up with him, or whether he figured it wouldn’t void their stupid deal because Isagi was going out after he had already gotten home.

 

It’d been aggravating enough that Isagi had been turning about to openly scowl at Kaiser -

 

Only to catch him peeking at his bare knees.

 

“Is he an actor?” Kawasaki asks now, leaning a bit over the counter so she can whisper. “He looks like a stage actor - wait, are those tattoos real ?”

 

Isagi counts out the exact amount of change he needs for his popsicles and says, “He’s my neighbour.”

 

The look Kawasaki gives him at that is so dubious Isagi feels a little validated. “You said you live in that part of downtown.”

 

“I do,” and then feeling reluctant even as he says it, “he lives opposite me.”

 

And yeah, maybe he gets it. The subtle cageyness he’s come to notice about Kaiser, and only because he’s suddenly forced him closer than maybe he had intended to be. Watch a trick happen enough times and you start to figure out the math behind the magic, especially when the magic only works when you’re seeing it for those brief bursts of time, at a distance. 

 

Because the closer you get, the more you know, and the more there is at risk. And Isagi, who knows a lot more than he’s supposed to, is objectively that - a risk. 

 

As Isagi tries to hand over his cash, Kawasaki holds up a finger to stop him. 

 

“Actually, can you… wait a minute?”

 

She disappears through a door behind the register and returns half a minute later bearing a cardboard box that she plonks on to the counter. 

 

“As… you know, a thank you,” and Kawasaki is being almost as awkward about it as Isagi feels, going pink in the face as she pushes through, “For last time.”

 

“Oh, no you don’t need to -”

 

“I want to though, I’ve been hoping you’d come by - I never got your number or anything -” and they both realise how that sounds at the same time because Isagi is sure he’s wearing a mirroring awkward crimson on his face as the colour taking over hers. At least this makes them even for the last time he was here embarrassing himself. “T-to! Thank you that is! So, um, please accept this -”

 

“You really don’t need to do that - this is -” Isagi eyes the box, the bright cartoon illustrations of the same popsicles he had been trying to purchase along the side with a big “24” printed in a corner. “Won’t you get in trouble for giving away stock like this?”

 

“Don’t worry, I get an employee discount,” Kawasaki hurries to assure him, “and besides, this is nothing compared to the taser - unless you want that back -”

 

“No, seriously, you can keep it -”

 

“But I looked up how much they were and it’s expensive and I -”

 

“It really is okay, Kawasaki-san -”

 

“Then please take these as a gift,” she shoves the box towards him with surprising force, even though Isagi is pushing at the other end in an attempt at resistance, “I insist! You can share them with your -” Her eyes slide over Isagi’s shoulder and back to him and she giggles a little when she adds, “your neighbour.”

 

Isagi is about to propose as much to Kaiser when he gets back to him, suddenly two-dozen popsicles richer, but the guy beats him to it.

 

“Did that girl just ask for your number?”

 

Blinking, Isagi can only say, “Uh… yes?”

 

Kawasaki had offered to add him to a groupchat of some other people she knew who lived and worked around here late. A kind of buddy system, she’d explained, saying that it’s only people she or other folks in the chat personally know, and that it’s handy to shout out requests if someone in the area needed help getting home or company when out late. Isagi, obviously, had recited his digits immediately - and now finds himself staring down an unblinking Kaiser, instinctively unwilling to tell him about it because he knows he’s not going to like it. 

 

The pause steeps for a second before Kaiser mutters, “That’s… awfully forward of her.”

 

Another pause, and Isagi’s blustering out, “What - no. No, no, she’s um - an acquaintance, and we didn’t exchange numbers the last time, so -”

 

“And your acquaintance just gave you a box of ice cream for free?” 

 

You know who she is, though. You can probably guess why I just got these!

 

“I did her a favour… she’s just saying thank you.”

 

He watches Kaiser carefully. The moment feels surreal - this is the first time he’s seen Kaiser in a space that isn’t somewhere inside their apartment building. The nerves and his mounting aggravation at the tiptoeing he’s being forced into had distracted him enough while they were on the way here, but it’s like his brain is still struggling to make sense of him like this. Stark and bright and stunning, managing to look like a dream even under the most unflattering indoor lighting known to man. 

 

What Kaiser does say, at last, is, “Let’s go home before these melt through the box.”

 

And Isagi turns away, towards the door, if only to school the disappointment out of his face.

 

The trip home feels longer than it actually is. Isagi has his ears perked, attuned to everything from the distant yowling of an unseen cat to the squeak of a bicycle tire carrying from several streets over. At one of the junctions they need to cross, Isagi swears he hears something scuffling in the darkness - something too big to be an animal, from the… mass that sound had, but as though Kaiser can sense his interest, a hand comes up at the small of his back to hurry him past the alley. 

 

It falls away once they’ve moved on, and Isagi, warm behind his ears, cold all down his front where he’s hugging his box of ice cream, finds himself resenting the whole situation. 

 

They’re just going around in circles. 

 

It feels like they’re only ever going around in circles, and moving nowhere.

 

He peeks at Kaiser, the flush in his face, and nudges the box into his hands. 

“It’ll keep you cool,” Isagi says by means of explanation, and Kaiser scoffs but eventually accepts the load.

 

“You always seem to be receiving gifts of food,” Kaiser comments eventually.

 

Isagi sniffs. “It’s inappropriate to judge how people are eating, you know.”

 

“Oh,” and Kaiser actually looks alarmed, “I didn’t mean to -”

 

“I was just kidding,” Isagi interjects. “Just kidding.”

They fall into a silence, and where Isagi would have been too busy feeling awkward by himself before, he senses the awkwardness coming out of the guy walking quietly beside him. 

 

He decides he hates it. “Besides, you’re just as guilty, you know.”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“Gifts of food? Your ‘leftover’ soup fed me for multiple meals. It was delicious and - I never got to thank you for it.”

 

“You don’t need to do that.”

 

He’s not in the mood for another roundabout conversation like the one he’s just had in the convenience store. “No, but I’d like to. I’m not… I’m not an amazing cook, but um… can I treat you to a meal sometime?”

 

That’s how he manages to ask Kaiser for his number, so they can figure out a time that works for them both. Kaiser teases him, of course he does, implies something about food being Isagi’s love language, the receiving and the giving of it, and Isagi lets him, because it’s not like he’s wrong. 

 

And the entire time, typing in the digits Kaiser recites into his phone and saving his contact, giving him a call so Kaiser can save his number back, Isagi strains at his own seams because he really, really doesn’t like it. 

 

Pretending. 

 

Pretending that they’re newly establishing contact, pretending that they hadn’t already been texting back and forth, earlier that day itself. 

 

♛: darling

 

♛: what the hell was that 

 

number#1noafan: Please don’t

 

♛: saying ‘please’ isn’t going to help you right now 

 

♛: you almost ran into traffic

 

number#1noafan: You’re exaggerting 

 

number#1noafan: It was a dine-and-dasher

 

number#1noafan: We get them sometimes but this guy stole a phone

 

number#1noafan: That poor girl was about to cry 

 

♛: so you’re just going to just run after a guy twice your size because some girl CRIED 

 

number#1noafan: I know this is a big ask of you 

 

number#1noafan: But have a heart please

 

number#1noafan: She was breaking down, it was a new phone and everything 

 

number#1noafan: Her dad had been saving up to get it for her 

 

♛: and you managed to gather all that intel before you took off chasing him?

 

number#1noafan: Ugh

 

number#1noafan: Ok, I found out after I got it back but 

 

number#1noafan: The phone wasn’t even dinged up! 

 

number#1noafan: And the girl gave me these coupons for a parfait place as thank you 

 

number#1noafan: And you helped, so you can have one if you want 

 

♛: i don’t know what you’re talking about 

 

number#1noafan: I saw you 

 

number#1noafan: I saw you grapple hook that dumpster that fell over in front of him 

 

number#1noafan: I wouldn’t have been able to catch up to him if you didn’t do that 

 

number#1noafan : So thank you, I guess

 

♛: you

 

♛: are infuriating 

 

♛: what would you have done if the guy didn’t give up 

 

♛: what would you do if he tried to fight you for the phone 

 

number#1noafan: He didn’t, though 

 

number#1noafan: I’m not hurt

 

number#1noafan: Really 

 

♛: this time, sure

 

♛: i asked you to tell me if something dangerous was happening

 

♛: i asked that you tell me right away 

 

number#1noafan: How was I supposed to do that?? 

 

number#1noafan: It happened so quickly

 

number#1noafan: And I wasn’t in danger, the phone was in danger

 

number#1noafan: Or am I supposed to send you an alert every time there’s property damage or theft or something 

 

♛: if you’re getting involved 

 

♛: then yes

 

number#1noafan: But I WILL be getting involved

 

number#1noafan: Are you offering to help when I do?

 

♛: you’re fucking impossible, you know that?

 

number#1noafan: Lol

 

♛: oh is this funny to you now?

 

♛: are you laughing?

 

number#1noafan: Yeah, kinda 

 

♛: come outside

 

number#1noafan: What, you wanna fight or something

 

♛: i want to see your laughing face 

 

♛: bet you look real cute right now 

 

number#1noafan: And he’s back to being creepy again 

 

♛: :( 

 

Is he the only one, he wonders, as the two of them stand a measured foot apart in their dinky little elevator, who feels that they’re more honest when they’re like that? Behind screens and under darkness and with a mask that keeps them just enough apart, all these failsafes in place that they don’t have to worry about getting too close?

 

The Emperor has been tempting Isagi in for the longest time, with promises of revelations and confessions, enticing him with a look behind the curtain. Even though Isagi is sure that he has to know by now that he can’t woo him over completely into his world, he hasn’t stopped - if anything, he’s just gotten more intense, more insistent. More… more. 

 

He must plan on Isagi learning who he is eventually. He must…Isagi tries to keep his head down, tries not to let it show on his face, as the thought crosses his mind - he must see a future for them, one that he’s committed to enough to court the risk in the first place. This slow-drip of factoids Isagi’s offered, the voluntary openings he creates for Isagi to explore. The crown emoji he’d chosen for his profile, such an obvious visual shorthand that he must at least suspect Isagi would think of that association. 

 

So, yeah. He must intend for Isagi to know, eventually. He just can’t figure out what the conditions are to get them there. Would he be allowed that knowledge if he did agree to link up with the Emperor - all their cards on the table, a mutual exchange of confidence and complicitness? It’d give him a guarantee, if that’s what he needed, that Isagi wouldn’t go rat him out if he found out who he was, who he really was, what would drive a linguist who had arrived in Japan some three or four years ago to start cavorting around in such a high-risk business venture that only seemed to have come into existence in the last year.

 

But he didn’t even seem to mind all that much that Isagi had flat-out refused - did he still think he could sway him? Or was he… was he thinking about another ‘compromise’?

 

This sudden, uncharacteristic shift of priorities in his undercover work, when from an objective standpoint there was no better time than now to mooch off of rich druglords trying to cover their tracks.

 

Isagi watches the thin sliver of light that cracks through the tiny gap in the elevator doors as they pass the floors between theirs and the lobby. Slicing through that near tangible space between them as they go. 

 

What might happen if he were to cross that line? What are the stakes here? 

 

Kaiser turns down his offers to take half the popsicles with him - he denies disliking the flavour, says there’s too many things in his own freezer and he doesn’t believe in sweets after nine at night, but Isagi has a sneaking suspicion this has nothing to do with the popsicles and more to do with the person who had gifted them to him. He’d almost wanted to tell him that Kawasaki had been gushing about him looking like a stage actor when he - 

 

Wait.

 

Wait.

 

Back in his apartment, he just manages to stuff the box somehow into the freezer before grabbing his laptop, tapping impatiently at his countertop as he waits for the poor, overworked thing to wake itself up. 

 

The articles he had been working his way through clog up his browser history, and Isagi clicks as many of them open as he can without the device seizing up on him. None of these pieces had been originally written by Kaiser - it had been almost maddening as it had been appropriate, how distant he felt to Isagi even as he was reading his words. About the loan word exchange rate in popular culture, the challenges of modern day translation in an era of ever-cycling slang and trendy lingo, all the while knowing that these ideas, abstractions, opinions, thoughts, were not his. That the words on the page were conduits transferring meaning from one language to another, with himself as the vessel. 

 

There are papers he’s contributed to in Japanese, in English, in German, and Isagi isn’t unfamiliar at this point with the dual emotions of awe and disappointment swamping him as he skims through the ones he’s able to access without purchasing the article, amazed at the expanse of the world Kaiser worked within that he had barely scratched the surface of and guiltily resentful of how little he actually got to learn about him through them. 

 

But what if - 

 

He wishes he’d been a bit more particular when sorting his findings the first round. But within an hour and a half, he thinks he’s managed to round up all the publications he could find that connected with a singular theme. 

 

Stage plays. 

 

Specifically, Japanese stage plays. 

 

Kabuki , Isagi reads, scrolling through the images of vivid red face paint drawn into exaggerated expressions, and noh .

 

Masked theatre.

 

These aren’t journal articles or scientific papers - Isagi scans through the previews of the files, confirms that they are translations of the source material themselves, documented scripts and instructional handbooks, guides and journals kept by the mask-making families who had handed down the artform through generations of craftsmen and performers. 

 

They’re all in either German or English, and they’re all behind a paywall.

 

Isagi eyes the price tag. Looks again at the auto-translated excerpts of the plays in its previews, with extensive notes adding context to the contents of its text. The translator’s notes, the bridge he’s built to ferry meaning from the unique intricacies of a language that goes beyond words to a different form altogether.

 

Hesitates just long enough to decide that he doesn’t really need the new taser he’d been saving for anyway.

 

Now

 

“I am looking at you, unfortunately.”

 

“You’re avoiding my eye.”

 

Isagi’s temper, a volatile thing playing pretend, flares. “I can’t see your eyes!”

 

A pause. Isagi can tell that he’s about to say something annoying when he lives up to his expectations with, “Darling, do you miss looking into my eyes?”

 

Isagi had really, really tried to make this trip a short one. The goal had been to hand over the umbrella and get back downstairs and get a popsicle into his system, or three. He glowers balefully at the Emperor for a second before turning away in frustration. “I feel like I’m talking to an egg.”

 

The answering squawk, which Isagi’s sure is offended, sounds like a bird. 

 

“You’re never happy,” the Emperor is complaining, “I go through a full makeover for you, and you -”

 

“No, it’s good that you did, okay? It’s good that you are actually trying to be sensible - though I don’t know if being microwaveable is sensible, like do you - you have gadgets inside that thing, right?”

 

“Gadgets? What is this, a sci-fi cartoon?”

Isagi rolls his eyes. “Your… voice thing. And I’ve heard you talking to Eight through there before, and I imagine that’s how you text too, speech-to-text or whatever because if you’re actually carrying and using a smartphone in this get-up you are more cooked in the head than I thought - ” 

 

“You’ve been thinking that much about what I have on underneath? Darling… you’re making me blush.”

 

Isagi throws up a middle finger on reflex, even with the heat-flushed red of Kaiser’s face, an uncomfortable burn of a colour against pale smooth skin, fresh in his mind. Why won’t he just go? Just the thought of being confined inside a form-fitting bodysuit is making Isagi want to inhale all the ice cubes they have in the premises. 

 

“What I’ve been thinking about is that if lightning struck your head or water got in there you would be fried alive.”

 

“What do you take me for?” the guy knocks lightly against the side of his headwear, “This is built to handle the apocalypse.”

 

“Good. Is it built with an air-conditioner too? Because if not electrocution, heat exhaustion is going to get to you first.”

 

“I know this is your peculiar way of looking after me, but can you be a bit nicer about it? Maybe if you added a please, or gave me a smile -”

 

“I don’t want to hear anything about being peculiar from the man who just handed me a knife to stab my way out of my problems -”

 

“I was going to show you how to use it too,” the Emperor interrupts, and between a moment and the next he’s in close, gloved hand hot around Isagi’s wrist. It’s the kind of weather, balmly and clinging, that makes Isagi want to squirm away from any and all contact with another human being, and he tries but - 

 

The other hand reaches for the knife by coming around him, and Isagi finds himself looped into the circle of his toned arms. Fingers snap the blade out of its handle, while the ones at his wrist angle his grip. “How about I teach you a few nifty moves, darling? I’m a great teacher, just so you know.”

 

There’s an infinitesimal inch of space between Isagi’s back and the substance of the Emperor behind him. 

 

He’s always so quick to come close like this. Always so quick. At the very beginning, Isagi used to think it was physical intimidation - he’s so much more imposing than Isagi, his strength and size a silent reminder that in a physical tussle Isagi had no hope of winning. 

 

And somewhere along the way, he’d started to think it was to tease - to tempt and entice, to relish in his fluster, in the power he was cultivating over him that didn’t need him to use his strength to make Isagi falter. 

 

Lately, though, Isagi’s been wondering whether it goes the other way too. Whether this closeness is an indulgence for a man who can’t come closer - won’t come closer, any other way.

 

Isagi takes a deep breath. Twists his wrist sudden and without warning. It’s a trick that’s been drilled into his head from the self-defence classes Bachira had dragged him to God knows how many moons ago. Rotate towards the thumb - quick and sudden, and the element of surprise plays in his favour, gives him enough time to duck under the loose hold of the Emperor’s arms until he’s a foot away, right hand automatically gripped tight around the handle of the knife.

 

He doesn’t get the chance to gloat - the Emperor recovers annoying quickly. 

 

Starts to laugh, even.

 

“Well, aren’t you always full of surprises?” he says lightly, and starts to move.

 

Not towards him though. 

 

The distance between them stays the same, but as Isagi keeps him in his line of sight, he finds himself turning a slow arc on his heels, the warm leather and cool metal clenched in his palm as he does. “Did you think I wouldn’t at least know basic self-defence?”

 

“I think basic self-defence starts with avoiding situations where you could get hurt, darling,” and Isagi’s shoulders are tense, his fists clenched around knife and taser, the man in front of him circling him with a deliberate slowness. “You don’t act like you’re trying to keep yourself safe.”

 

“What’s that supposed to -”

 

“If I lunged at you right now I’d knock you clean off your feet,” the Emperor tells him - Isagi stands in the epicentre of the circuit he’d just drawn, and he’s conscious of the space, the deliberate carving of it, like he is of the static radiating out of the earth before a lightning strike. “You’ll sway backwards on the heels of your feet and by the time you recover your footing, I could knock you clean down into the ground.”

 

Without the cape, there is nothing to hide the shift and motion of the man as he starts to glide his measured perimeter around Isagi again. His movements are fluid - almost graceful. 

 

“I know you think I lack self-preservation skills -,” Isagi ignores the noise the Emperor makes, like he’s putting it mildly, “But I’m not about to go putting myself in physical fights where that would happen.”

 

“No?” the Emperor’s head tilts to one side and Isagi can’t see his eyes and yet can feel his stare pierce right through him. Is he imagining it or has he come closer? “What if the physical fight came to you?”

 

When he cuts across the distance, Isagi definitely sees him coming. Sees that exact microsecond when he’d broken out of his prowl and braced against the soles of his feet, launched himself forward.

 

He sees him coming, but he’s not fast enough to dodge him - 

 

And the next thing he knows, his wrists are captured in gloved hands, and with a painless flick, his own fingers release the knife he’d been holding. 

 

The Emperor cleanly grabs it out of the air, clicks the blade back into the handle, and then presents it to Isagi with a little flourish. 

 

“Now then,” he says, soft and almost sweet, “Shall we practice?” 

 

---

“I think you’re trying to kill me,” Isagi deadpans from the floor some fifteen minutes later.

 

“The blade wasn’t even out, you little idiot,” the Emperor retaliates from where he’s sat himself down - he’d been closer, but Isagi had wriggled away, the body heat coming off him so unbearable he thought he might die. 

 

“I’m talking about forcing me to physically exert myself like this in this fucking weather, ” his throat is dry, his clothes are drenched through, and he truly just wants to lie down on the dirty roof floor and hopefully melt through it until he is no longer sentient to feel any of it. 

 

There’s a pause, and Isagi is already expecting something horrible when the guy starts to say, “If you want me to physically exert you -”

 

“I will fucking tase you. I really will.”

 

Isagi’s head flops to the side, the tips of his hair damp as it clings to his face, to watch him laugh his silent laugh. “You might actually manage it. You’re a quick learner.”

 

The lunge hadn’t worked on him the second time. By the fourth time, he’d been able to plant his feet apart fast enough that he wouldn’t get rocked backwards by a charge, and by the fifth, he’d even been able to hit the Emperor back - lightly, the butt of his safely folded knife just barely clipping his shoulder.

 

Hot in the face for different reasons than the fact that all his organs are trying to recover from the shock he’s just put them through, Isagi mumbles, “I don’t know how smart it is of you to teach me ways to cause you bodily harm.”

 

More laughter. 

 

It looks laboured, though. Isagi can almost hear him wheeze, his shoulders heaving up a little more than usual. If Isagi’s lungs are struggling to take in air, out of shape as he is compared to the man physically propelling himself around the city as a part of his job, then he can’t even imagine how unbearable it must be under that godforsaken mask. 

 

Isagi starts to heave himself up off the ground. 

 

“Hey…”

 

The Emperor, legs folded where he’s settled himself on to the ground, looks up at him. 

 

“Can you wait here for a minute? I’ll be right back.”

 

“Where are you going?” 

 

“To call the cops,” Isagi deadpans, and sees the Emperor laugh again as he flits out the door into the stairwell, closing it behind him. Thinks he’d be stupid, actually stupid to still be waiting up there by the time Isagi goes back - if he even manages without being spotted first. How is he going to explain the fact that he looks like he decided to spend his break going for a jog? 

 

He does manage to get into the walk-in freezer without being spotted, somehow. Manages to grab what he needs from the box he’d stashed there earlier that day, for the staff to share.

 

He’s back up the stairs and through the door as fast as he can manage without his exertion-warmed muscles just giving up on him. 

 

And he’s still there.

 

The Emperor, sitting there, conspicuous as anything, just waiting for him. 

 

Stupid, stupid, Isagi condemns, everything inside warm and fluttering and choking, and it’s unclear if he’s talking about this guy and the ridiculous, risky trust he’s putting in him, or about himself.

 

“Here,” he holds the popsicle out to the Emperor with almost the same belligerence he’d been waving an umbrella around with earlier. “You can…I mean, um, you should cool off. When you leave or - I’ll leave and you can - or I’ll watch the door from the outside. Yeah, I’ll - I’ll watch the door from the outside, if you want.”

 

He can’t see his eyes. Isagi doesn’t know what he’s thinking, but the longer he stands there, the more he thinks that this is just all so, so stupid. 

 

So he bends and grabs the Emperor’s wrist, smacks the popsicle into his hand, and turns to leave.

 

He senses the Emperor get to his feet, but can’t turn around fast enough to do anything about it. 

 

And then there’s a hand curling around his upper arm, a firm, assertive grip, pulling him down towards the ground. 

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“Sit,” the Emperor says simply, even as Isagi’s legs collapse under him with little persuasion, knees creaking from all the exercise they’ve been through today.

 

And then - 

 

The Emperor sits too. 

 

Behind him. 

 

Back against his, touching. 

 

Isagi’s heart almost gives out when he hears a hushed, “Watched the door for me, will you darling?”

 

And then the very, very faint scent of roses floats up to him, and Isagi can tell, without needing to look, that he’s taking his mask off.

 

“You’re insane,” Isagi husks out, cold and hot and everything in between, all at the same time. He can feel his brain shutting down. “You’ve gone insane.”

 

He can feel movement against his back, can tell it’s shoulders dancing in a quiet laugh against his own, and thinks he’s gone insane too. 

 

He sits, barely breathing, staring straight ahead so hard that his eyes almost start to go foggy. Listens so hard that he can hear every ragged thump of his own heart, and the soft, hardly there sounds of a popsicle getting licked clean. Thinks if he tried to move now, he might break something he can never fix. 

 

There’s nothing stopping him from just turning around and looking. 

 

There’s everything stopping him from turning around and looking. 

 

In the breathless, dizzy three and a half minutes it takes the Emperor to finish up his popsicle, Isagi Yoichi finally feels the entire weight of the trust that is being placed in his hands at the same time as he realises that he would rather live blind than jeopardise it.

 

So he sits, frozen, vision blurred and heart a frightened, electrified thing, as he hears the soft crinkling of a popsicle wrapper being crumpled, as he feels the shift of the body that had been leaning against his, relaxed and loose, until it leaves him. 

 

And then returns. 

 

An arm curling careful around his middle, a mechanical voice whispering close to his ear, 

 

“Thank you, angel.”

 

He doesn’t think - no, he knows - that this isn’t about the damn popsicle. 

 

It takes him a long minute before he can find his voice, and it leaves him shaky and low. 

 

“Who’s being unfair now?”

 

---

On his first bus ride home, Isagi reflects that he’s managed to find a completely new appreciation for Kaiser’s job. 

 

His… day job, at least.

 

The dozen or so PDFs he has testing his phone’s storage capacity to its limits are dense enough to parse in Japanese - they come close to teeth-grinding when he has to run them through auto-translators, whole fractions of the text becoming incomprehensible once filtered through to something he knows how to read.

 

At least he’d been able to start with a couple of actual Japanese texts first. These had been less intimidating and more accessible, but also far more enlightening. Not the scripts of the plays themselves, or the guides and handbooks accompanying them, but the little notes in the margins where Kaiser made meaning out of the spaces in between words, turned the unspoken into language that could traverse the unsaid. Innuendos, subtext, the significance of a certain prop or a certain note of an instrument, the weight of a pause - the meaning they all carry, the care Kaiser puts into containing them. Bringing them over from where they are visual shorthand for the culture that birthed them, communicating meaning without saying a thing, to this place, this country, for people like Isagi to understand and appreciate. 

 

The return voyage, kabuki and noh swapping places for pantomime, for musicals, for classical comedies and Senecan tragedies, is less easy to interpret, sieved through a language barrier until he only understood maybe a third of what he was trying to read. 

 

But the plays were not the only places Isagi had been hunting for meaning along the margins. 

 

He’d found his modifier. 

 

Had spent hours and hours digging, for days and days. Had nearly given up a couple of times. 

 

But he’d found something. 

 

A boy, unnamed, from a prominent family of scientists who had run away from home to join a travelling circus. 

 

A travelling circus where he worked as a magician. A travelling circus with a troupe of performers and actors and gymnasts. 

 

Almost completely made up of young, underage boys, runaways and vagabonds, who disappear into obscurity somewhere in the story once the ringmaster of the circus is apprehended for running his extravagant, mobile crime ring. 

 

There’s so little here, the news contained enough that it only appears in one national newspaper and a smattering in the city where the arrest occurred. There’s so little, but there’s also just enough. 

 

It’s all so ridiculous. So absurd. 

 

But it all made so much sense.

 

Judging by the date, Alexis Ness would have been fourteen or fifteen around the dissolution of the circus. Too young to be apprehended, attached to enough important people that he could be quietly removed from the matter altogether. 

 

Long enough ago that no one would think to dig that far into his background when considering him for a prestigious scholarship in a country far away where hardly anyone would speak German - especially if they didn’t know what to look for.

 

But if…

 

If he did get found out - an engineer instrumental to the Mikage Corp, a foreigner no less. The police were perhaps the lesser threat, considering how many other powerful people they’ve done business with. 

 

How many other secrets depended on them staying secret. 

 

And now, they depend on Isagi too. Parts of them, at least. Have, for a while now. 

 

There’s so much Isagi still doesn’t know - but he does know what a lonely burden a secret can be. 

 

Can see it in the way it holds Kaiser back from saying too much, coming too close - in the recklessness that spills out of him as fallout when he thinks he can risk it. Stupid, stupid, stupid, to risk so much and yet not being able to help it.

 

Isagi knows it all well. He’s guilty of all those things himself. 

 

And with the weight of a pocket knife folded lovingly into his pocket and the heat of a person who has disappeared into the night lingering against his skin, Isagi decides that he’s had enough.

 

Chigiri calls back almost a minute after he sends him the text.

 

“What happened?”

 

“Nothing happened,” Isagi says back, letting himself in through his apartment door and kicking off his shoes - turning back to nudge them out of the way and into place instead of cluttering up the hallway again. “I just wanted to see if you were sleeping -”

 

“Yeah, but you never text this late - and even if you do, you never ask if I’m free to talk.”

 

“Yeah, well…,” this is so, so deeply uncomfortable. But Isagi stares out the curtains of his window through to Kaiser’s, and thinks that maybe a lot of the most important things are. “I wanted to… to ask you for your advice about something.”

 

“What is it?” The worry is loud in Chigiri’s voice even though he isn’t. How much concern has he caused these people that he loves by keeping things to himself to avoid this very exact thing? 

 

“I…,” the lights across the way are off, and he doesn’t think Kaiser would be back by now, but he still squirms self-consciously. “I wanted to ask you about… um. About approaching… someone. Someone that… um. Someone that I would like to know better.”  

 

“...who?”

“My neighbour.”

 

There’s a pause. Isagi manages half a second of breathing exercises before he hears Chigiri say, 

 

“Oh thank fuck,” And then, “If I ended up being the last person you told, I swear I was going to kill you.”

 

The equivalent of a brain freeze stupefies Isagi just long enough that he doesn’t think at all when he blurts, “Huh?!” 

 

And then, even more unwisely, “Wh - how - did Bachira tell you?”

 

“Bachira? Bachira knows?” Chigiri’s voice is now actually loud in his ear, and Isagi is so, so lost.

 

“Who did you hear from?”

 

“Nagi.”

 

“ Nagi?!”

 

And as Isagi starts to dissolve into his own molecules, he hears Chigiri say, in a tone that spells disaster,  

“Are you fucking telling me I am the last to know?!”

Notes:

pls excuse typos/mistakes im so sleepy and i wanted to get this out before the week started because ik i'm gonna be busy - big presentation week, big 'i am scared who let me be an adult' week

ik there was supposed to be more nagi this ch (i have his scenes written but this thing got SO LONG because a certain duo wouldn't stop flirting and/or threatening to flirt) HE WILL BE IN THE NEXT ONE. PROMISE. also next ch is the last one, but as someone who's frequently wrong about her own ch counts, let's take that with a pinch of salt

i am also deeply thankful to everyone who has been cheering this fic along and all your words of support - i promise i will make time to respond if/when i manage to survive this work week ;-; actually what's the etiquette for responding to comments from a while ago is it okay if i reply even though it's been weeks i have been gone SO long i really really appreciate everyone who takes the time to leave their thoughts!

Chapter 6

Notes:

........you know that one screenshot of an ao3 author's note that kinda goes 'prayer circle this ends with the next chapter' and the note in the next chapter going like 'no one participated in the prayer circle'? yeah. no one participated in the prayer circle.

i'm just gonna leave this here and go back to hacking away at the finale in shame. in exchange for my complete inability to plan my own fic's timelines, though, i'll be updating the % progress on anything i'm writing on my profile here, so at least the folks waiting don't have to feel uncertain about when to expect the next ch. I'M SO SORRY TuT.

Now

“Come on now,  you can do better,” comes the taunt from somewhere behind him - this guy is so fast , taking advantage of every sliver of darkness to glide out of his sight even as Isagi marks him. 

 

He never has trouble finding him, that’s not the problem - his chest heaves as he fights off the urge to double over and brace his hands against his knees a moment, to catch his breath. 

 

The problem is being fast enough to catch him. 

 

Once again, one palm clasped around the butt of his knife, blade carefully folded away, Isagi feels the gap between mind and body - the bridge between what he wants to do and what he’s capable of physically doing. 

 

Of course, the asshole in full costume as he slides around Isagi, slippery as an eel, isn’t going easy on him. 

 

Isagi swipes at the sweat collecting on his brow, scrubbing at the frown he can feel growing there. He’d hate it if the Emperor did take it easy on him. But, scowling as he straightens and plants his feet apart, the weight concentrated in the instep of his foot so he can propel himself into forward motion, he decides that he hates the smugness radiating out of the man as he dodges another lunge that leaves Isagi plunging at thin air once more.

 

“Don’t just focus on the run,” his flailing around for balance is cut short with an abrupt grasp on his wrist, another at his waist, righting him before he can fall. The voice in his ear, artificial velvet, reminds him, “You need to keep thinking at the same time as you move. You have to switch gears mid motion. What happens if I dodge? What happens if I trip?”

 

The heat, almost scorching against his back through the thin cotton layer of his shirt, withdraws and Isagi fights back the urge to shiver. Fights back the urge to run his hand down the back of his neck, where he can feel his skin prickling from how conscious it still feels, remembering the closeness of him. 

 

Get it together, he tells himself, sternly, lucky that at least the relentless heat is a good excuse for how red he must be. Focus on his openings. 

 

But it’s not easy. He isn’t making it easy. He’d been less of a moving target their first “lesson” - correcting Isagi’s grip, his stance, his wind-up, with lingering touches that solidified into firm, until Isagi could shave away some of the distance between the movement he’s envisioning and the movement his body manages to execute. Today, Kaiser’s far less generous - he coils and twists and slides away, and Isagi has to test his awareness to its max, to pinpoint where he is, where he will go next, the slightest bit of opportunity in between those options. Pushed to keep thinking ahead, keep reading and predicting and hedging his bets on his next move and the branching paths of the moves that come after it.

 

He moves with such precision, calculated down to the smallest motion, that Isagi has to shove away the part of him that wants to still and appreciate it more than it wants to wrench it to a stop.

 

It’s a lot, he broods, huffing for air, as another lunge ends with his arm arcing through empty space, his brain registering where the Emperor is going before his body can catch itself mid-motion to angle itself towards him. It’s a lot of input, it’s too little time to think and decide and act, at least right now, at his current level. He feels more than hears the guy laughing at him when he wildly flails to right his balance after his next charge is cut off by a foot tripping him, and glares as much venom as he can muster while both his lungs malfunction, catching sight of the starless, smog-blanketed sky before he’s yanked upright again.

 

Focus on the openings. 

 

Well, he’s fucking trying, he thinks, glum. The guy is being so serious today - Isagi’s not sure if it’s because he’d specifically requested this ‘lesson’, or because it’s insurance. For the both of them. His ability to defend himself, if he absolutely has to. 

 

God, he does not have time for the fluttering all warm and horrendous in his stomach at that thought. It’s a bizarre thought to begin with, bizarre in ways he won’t be able to report back to Chigiri, who’d coached him on a different sort of opening altogether.

 

Then

Isagi knows he can’t change the world. 

 

He’s not trying to. He’d thought he’d had that reckoning with himself already - understood and accepted that in the fabric of a large, unforgiving universe, he’s just a tiny blip of light. The best he can do, and the best he’s devoted himself to doing, is to shine enough that he can change something, enough, as much as he can reach around himself. 

 

Enough that it can reach beyond him, in aftershocks bigger than he is. 

 

But even here, Isagi thinks, kneeling beside his worse-for-wear succulents, he thinks he’s been naive.

 

Has been - is being - selfish.

 

Daybreak is right around the corner - the sky is a deep indigo fringed in pink and pale orange where the sunrise will start to poke through. 

 

Entirely too early for gardening, but he’s fried through his own patience laying in bed, a handful of hours of sleep to his name, and desperate for something to do.

 

It’s always two extremes with him, he thinks - he’s got the floor just beyond the balcony doors carpeted with old newspaper, to catch the falling debris as he re-pots the plants. Either he’s paralysed by overthinking, or eager to move, eager to act, eager to do something. There’s a balance somewhere in the middle, a tightrope walk that he knows people manage for their own peace of mind, to go through life as functional human beings. Isagi, trying to push away the videos he’d stayed up late watching the night before, of brightly-clad acrobats swinging through the air in graceful arcs, as comfortable in flight as people are on the ground, imagines that he would not be very good at tight-rope walking. 

 

The roots of the plant he has just coaxed out of the earth are a sorry sight - discoloured and withered in places, mushy in others. There are still a couple of tendrils that look like they could make it, though - and Isagi doesn’t think there is any more time to waste, doesn’t think he could wait a second longer even if he had to. With the pair of gardening shears he’d purchased from the hundred-yen store long before he’d fully understood what he’d been signing himself up for, tending to life, he begins his surgery.

 

It’s strangely calming, bits of dead root and earth raining on to the newspaper with every snip of his scissors, louder than anything in the still quiet of the morning. The first cut had been the hardest, the one he’d dithered over the most, but once he commits… the rest goes by easier. It’s a small respite, barely morning yet already hot - hanging like moist mist in the air. 

 

Isagi reminds himself to focus, be careful, pay attention. Tries not to dwell too much on how this could all be futile. The plants could still be too weak to recover from the transplant shock, or the oppressive summer heat could finish them off the rest of the way. Even if they survive, what about the turn of the season, and the cold that would seep through North Ward eventually, inevitably? He’s not had the plants long enough to nurture them through winter.

 

It might already be too late, Isagi thinks, in spite of himself, and not entirely just about the plants. 

 

But he has to try anyway.

 

“Please don’t give up on me,” he whispers almost in prayer over the newly re-potted succulents, looking almost comically small in the large tubs of earth they have been rehomed in, chunks of ruined stalk carefully removed. Nagi’s been telling him that there’s little he can do to combat the worst of Japanese summer, unless he’s got some spare cash lying around to invest in a greenhouse, and Isagi understands that he’s done what he can within his means, but it haunts him anyway. 

 

Whether he’s done enough. 

 

Whether he’s been good enough. 

 

A voice startles him from across the way.

 

“Good morning, Yoichi. You’re up early.”

 

Isagi has to take a moment to just stare. Kaiser must have made some effort to tame his hair before coming out into the balcony - Isagi imagines he didn’t have much time for it, because strands of it are still sitting messy over his head, sticking in odd angles, the sides of his robe a little skewed as though carelessly tied together. 

 

“Yeah, I… needed to do some gardening before I left for the day.”

 

The last of dawn is starting to drain from the day, the sun - still hidden somewhere behind the patchwork of concrete buildings all around them - beginning to paint in the colours of the city as it rises.

 

“Is everything okay?” He’s frowning, Isagi thinks, because he’s not wearing his glasses. Maybe that’s why the furrow against his brows looks more intense than his usual concerned frowns, like he’s trying to telescope into Isagi’s face from afar. Or maybe he’s just adjusting to waking up at an ungodly hour, too early in the morning. 

 

Or maybe he’d not slept well last night, either. 

 

As Isagi’d laid awake in bed barely an hour ago, moments before he’d belligerently rolled himself out of the mattress in search of something to do , his phone screen had lit up with a text message, wishing him good morning. 

 

“Yeah, it’s just that…,” Isagi has to drop the eye contact - has to stare instead at the newspaper he’d been in the process of folding into a makeshift pocket for all the loose soil and bits of plant he’s going to throw out. As morning pushes night out of the way, Isagi feels it start to chase out the phantom he’d been haunted home by last night - the press of a warm back against his, no distance to speak of. Leaning on him, trusting him, letting the mask fall, for a just moment. Letting him in. “I think my plants are dying.”

 

Isagi glances up, and the distance his eyes have to travel to find Kaiser’s face again, on the other side of all this empty space, gives him whiplash.

 

And he understands again how naive he is. 

 

How selfish.

 

Greedy, because now that he has had it, he wants more. Resents it fleeing out of his fingertips like this, like a dream lost to the city as it wakes up from a fitful sleep.

 

Across from him, Kaiser is looking concerned. “I’m sorry… it’s probably because of the weather.”

 

“It probably is,” Isagi hears himself say, though he sounds unconvinced.

 

Kaiser can hear it too, maybe, because he says, “I’m sure you did everything you could.”

 

Did he? Maybe if he had forked up a little for a mini dehumidifier, or kept a better eye on the garden, or not gotten so ahead of himself, thinking he’d be able to take responsibility for the wellbeing of life he’s been nurturing, under his hands, in his care, so caught up in his own judgement of what is good and right that he’d not paid attention to what it had been trying to tell him -

 

Chigiri had sounded mad on the phone last night. 

 

Bitter, too, as he’d bitten out a “You’re so dead to me.”

 

“Chigiri.”

 

“SO dead to me. You’ve known Nagi all of what? Two years? I’ve known you for twelve, and somehow he knows about important things happening in your life before I do?”

 

“I don’t - I don’t even know what Nagi knows?”

 

“That you were asking for the German guy working on Reo’s dad’s alien tech. That you seemed really interested because it's your neighbour.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“Yeah, ‘oh’. And you’re saying Bachira knows too?!”

 

“I - I mean Bachira knows him. Bachira knows everyone I know, everyone at work, all of my groupmates…”

 

“...yeah whatever. So I’m still the last to find out.”

 

“...there wasn’t anything to find out until now. I wasn’t… I wasn’t going to do anything about it.”

 

“...and you want to now?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Oh. Wow.” A pause, like Chigiri’d not been expecting him to outright admit it. Isagi hadn’t, either, not quite like that. But the moment had been so fraught… and the only thing Isagi could think of to repair it had been honesty. “Holy shit… Isagi, do you… like this guy? As in, romantically?”

 

Isagi, staring out at Kaiser but hardly able to see him with the way daylight is finally starting to push through, in between the slices of space between buildings, slanting into his eyes until all Isagi can make out is his silhouette, thinks about how that had been the first time he’d said it out loud. 

 

Heard himself say it, and it had taken shape - solidified, like a fact. Like the truth. 

 

“Yes,” he’d said, and the confession had been as heavy as it had felt - ever so slightly - freeing. 

 

“Wow. Wow, I just - okay. And you wanted to talk to me because you want to do something about it.”

 

“Yes.”

 

Chigiri had agreed to hear him out. Refused to take the conversation further over the phone, told him, imperious, that they’re going to talk the next morning, before class.

 

And the belated swarm of nerves and doubt, that he’d set himself on a path of no return, that he’s risking more than he’s willing to, had been about to descend on him, when Chigiri had added in a far more uncertain tone than he’s used to hearing from his friend, “Is that… okay?”

 

He’s been so unfair. So selfish. 

 

Can he even resent the man on the other side of his balcony, pretending like this, even though he cares, Isagi knows he does, when he’s been guilty of the same? Keeping the people he cares for at arm’s length, choices made on their behalf to keep them safe, to keep them close and yet out of harm’s way, oblivious to this nature of his that is morphing him into something they might no longer recognise, if he’s not careful - 

 

Without stopping to ask. Without seeking to understand what it is that they wanted. That they needed. Because it goes both ways, and Isagi, hogging the reins, unwilling to confront it, only realises the slope he’s led them down once they start to slip. 

 

“You’ve done a great job with the rest of the plants,” Kaiser is telling him - assuring him, trying to make him feel better. “They’re doing great, right?”

 

“Yeah,” Isagi admits a little heavily, and wonders what would happen if he just… came out with it. Just wrenched the curtain off and exposed the stage and its machinations for all that they are. Shatters the make-belief, in an attempt to break apart this wall that sits between them right now when Isagi wishes he were here, beside him, solid and real and present, someone he could lean on and feel less alone, in all of this. To have him lean back, and say what he means. “But I’m kind of an all-or-nothing guy.”

 

He watches Kaiser’s eyebrows heft a little at that - wishes he could just open his mouth and ask what he’s thinking and receive an answer, an honest one. 

 

But that would be unfair and selfish. Greedy and hypocritical. It matters too much to risk by being reckless, and he can’t demand honesty from Kaiser without offering the same.

 

So, even with his stomach knotted over in nerves at the prospect of facing Chigiri soon, he pushes himself to his feet. Makes use of all this extra time he has on his hands for a long morning shower. The water, pulled down the plumbing from the building’s giant rooftop tanks, is still mercifully cool enough right now, not the lukewarm heat he’ll find when he showers again at night, warmed through by the day’s sun. 

 

He stands there, under the chill spray, and lets his eyes fall closed. Lets the discordant patter of water against tile and the bad acoustics of the space shroud him in white noise. 

 

Body warming itself to adjust to the bite of the cold, water weighing onto his eyelashes, Isagi can almost imagine that he is somewhere else, right now. 

 

In a memory, on a rooftop, stood under a relentless downpour, curved into something solid by the contact of water against his edges. At a dead end that he’s decided to turn into an opportunity, because he can’t do this alone, and neither can the person he’s making this gamble for. 

 

Still, it’s one thing to tentatively hope Chigiri can give him what he’d called relationship advice, sending Isagi into a coughing fit, and another to figure out how he can manage it. After all, the truths he is contending with now aren’t all his to give, and he’d thought he could get away with being vague, could trace along the outlines of it without scribbling it in, filling out the details mapping the Emperor’s territory. 

 

What he’d not accounted for is Chigiri already knowing, and worse still, knowing at the seams of the truth, at the place where Isagi wants to start peeling to look inside and know for himself. 

 

Michael Kaiser, a German linguist on scholarship in Japan. Even Bachira doesn’t know all of these details yet, the scholarship program, the degrees of separation he is from someone they know. Isagi’s been careful not to let him, because if Isagi is indecision between incisiveness and instinct, Bachira is pure instinct. 

But Chigiri knowing… God, why hadn’t he just sworn Reo and Nagi into secrecy when he’d gone prospecting for information?

 

Nagi’d seemed utterly absorbed by his console that day too - Isagi hadn’t imagined that he would have been paying attention. The anxiety continues to prickle, the rough edges of all the question marks tumbling around in his gut as he hurries out of the apartment and in the direction of his first bus stop. How and why would it come up in conversation? Had Isagi been that obvious that Nagi, who measures his words because conversation gets tedious for him sometimes, had found his curiosity not only worth retaining but also repeating?

 

Caught up as he is with his worries about what is waiting for him, he almost misses the black car idling by the bus stop. 

 

It takes him a second, and then half of another one, and then he’s doubled back abruptly towards the driver’s side of the car. 

 

“Are you serious?” he’s already rattling out in an undertone, even as the window rolls down enough to reveal the Magician - beanie pulled tight over his head to cover every possible sliver of magenta, large sunglasses and face mask covering the rest. “What are you doing here in broad daylight?”

 

“Hurry up and get in,” is what he gets in return, and Isagi grits his teeth, instantly annoyed. There are too many people around, students and office workers heading out to start their days, and he has to conclude very quickly that he can’t exactly argue with him right now without drawing even more attention. 

 

He makes it very clear that he’s not happy about it as he clips himself into the passenger side seat.

 

“What are you doing here?” he hisses, unceremoniously, and digs around in his bag for a face mask of his own. For once he wishes that the car did have tinted windows - he doesn’t need people around here to identify him as someone who rides around in nice cars more often than he can stand to think of. 

 

“I’ve been asked to drop you off at your last bus stop of choice so you can get to class,” answers the Magician. It would almost be impressive how stoically he manages it, if Isagi isn’t trying to keep his own eyes bugging out of his head in disbelief. 

 

“ Why?”

 

“He wants to make sure you’re okay?”

 

“Again, why? ” Isagi pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps immediately into one of the apps he relies on for the news. “Did something happen?”

 

The top item on the page is a stark headline about a public school gang of fifteen to seventeen year olds being apprehended in a drug-related incident, a little more uptown but not too far away. 

 

It’s not too uncommon a headline to read these days, even though they’ve grown more worryingly frequent, the city’s drug problems spilling and staining parts of it as though the circuits they run in are struggling to contain them

. Isagi’s still looking for something that might have happened between here and his university, though, pausing at a headline, tucked away two pages into the day’s news, about an alleged crime ring operating not too far from the izakaya, when the Magician says, 

 

“You won’t find it on the news.”

 

“Then?” 

 

Silence. 

 

Isagi rolls his eyes, and decides that the next time he sees this car waiting, he really is going to run as hard as he can in the opposite direction. At least that would save him from being strapped in and stuck fuming. “What, is it too top fucking secret for me to know?”

 

“He’s just worried about you,” the Magician shoots back, testy, and Isagi has to wonder why the Emperor thinks they get along when the times they seem to agree the most is when neither of them want to be there. 

 

“But why? Unless there’s some kind of public threat that you think is going to happen - which by the way, the police need to know if there is?” Isagi sits up ramrod straight in his seat as the thought occurs to him. God, what if it is a public incident they’ve gotten wind of? It would be like the Emperor to decide not to interfere at all - and also like the Emperor to interfere just enough to get him out of it. 

 

“Can you relax? I can’t drive when you’re badgering me like that,” the Magician snaps at him, and Isagi strongly resists the urge to curse at him. 

 

He feels a lot less resistant to tapping into his phone, however, realising that in all his distraction he’d not replied to the message from that morning. 

 

He ignores it completely in favour of typing, Why the hell am I being chauffeured again today you asshole 

 

Adds, In broad fucking daylight?

 

Three bubbles pop into the bottom of the screen and Isagi has to force himself to stay patient for the reply - force himself not to think about Kaiser, in his apartment with his messily tamed hair and messily put-together robe, texting him back. 

 

♛: good morning angel

 

♛: a second time that is

 

And it’s probably the wild cartwheels he’s been making inside his own head, afraid of toppling one way or the other, straddling the line in this tug of war where he’s unwilling to let go of either his life, his friends, and him , that his mind flies to Kaiser on his balcony this morning first before remembering the text message he’d not responded to.

 

number#1noafan: Stop fucking sulking 

 

number#1noafan: What’s going on? 

 

number#1noafan: Is there something wrong? 

 

number#1noafan: Is something going to happen?

 

♛: darling, calm down

 

♛: these notifications are making my head ring

 

Kaiser isn’t usually very receptive to loud noises first thing after waking up, that much Isagi’s learned in person. Has had it impressed right into his skull from how often he’s thought back to being on his doorstep and the nickname that had slipped out and the most unguarded moment of honesty he’s had from this man the whole time they’ve known each other. 

 

And he’s texting back something, and then tapping it away because somehow it’s hard to be as harsh as he normally would be when he’s imagining the wild lion’s mane of hair and groggy eyes, when his head snaps up. 

 

He swears he’d just seen a large shadow pass over them. 

 

“What was that?” he asks out loud, and thinks he can sense the Magician sitting just a little more tense next to him. 

 

The guy doesn’t answer, but Isagi ignores him back as he squints up towards the roofs of the buildings they’re passing - from the east, they cast long, intermittent shadows where they block the throw of the sun, and Isagi could have been mistaken but - 

 

There. 

 

Right there. 

 

Several storeys above them, a large dark mass - sleek, without the excess of a cape to play tricks on the eye, it flies through the sky with a nimble grace, leaping from the rooftop of one building and disappearing on to another.

 

It happens in a matter of seconds, if even that, but Isagi can’t help his own volume when he groans, “ What the fuck is he doing?!”

 

The Magician flinches, but Isagi doesn’t give him a chance to shoot a catty reply back before Isagi starts furiously typing into the chat. 

 

number#1noafan: WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT IN BROAD DAYLIGHT LIKE THAT

number#1noafan: YOU LUNATIC

 

♛: what

 

♛: did you see me

 

number#1noafan: HALF THE STREET CAN SEE YOU, MORON 

 

It takes an inhuman degree of effort not to keep looking up through the windshield, out through his car-door window, scanning the tops of the buildings they pass. Instead, he channels the paranoia that everyone in the street must be looking at him wondering why he keeps staring skywards into scanning the street instead, desperately searching for anyone who might have noticed the dark shadow slinking away in full light of day. 

 

♛: you’re the only one who can tell, darling 

 

♛: it’s almost like you have an extra set of senses just for me 🖤

 

This time Isagi does curse out loud. 

 

“Relax,” the Magician tells him again, though he actually sounds like he’s trying to calm him down now, “I keep telling you, he’s good at this.”

 

“I noticed him right away!”

 

“That’s because you’ve got, like, canine senses -”

 

Isagi ogles at the side of the man’s head in utter disbelief. “Are you comparing me to a dog?”

 

There’s a pause, and then, “He likes dogs.”

 

“You know fucking what,” Isagi snaps his mouth shut, swallowing down the multitude of swears frothing up his throat that that asshole swinging around under the sun won’t even hear, “I’m calling the police.”

 

He types those exact same words into the message box of the chat, even as the Magician, at least far more responsive to his threats than his partner, turns to him with a shocked, “What - why?!”

 

“What do you mean, why, like why is he out in broad daylight? Why am I being driven to university? Something is clearly happening, something probably dangerous, and since the two of you like to be so secretive -”

 

“It’s not like that!”

 

“Then what is it?” Isagi has made sure that his phone is angled enough that the Magician can see the police hotline he’s typed in, ready to call. 

 

His gamble pays off - the Emperor might be deft at brushing him off, his reply of if stealing hearts was a crime they’d catch you first, angel 🖤 all but making Isagi want to chuck the phone out of the window - 

 

But the Magician takes him more seriously. Isagi can just barely see the hint of magenta fly up over the tops of those opaque sunglasses as the Magician hurries to say, “Listen, I’m serious! He’s not on a mission!”

“Then what is it?” Isagi hovers his finger over the call button like it’s the trigger of a gun. 

 

“Oh my fucking - god dammit ,” the volume cracks as it pitches through the voice changer. “He’s just worried about you!”

 

“ Why?”

 

“Ask him!”

 

So Isagi does.

 

Eight says you’re being insane because you’re worried about me 

 

WHY

 

He stares at the bottom of the chat screen, waiting for the bubbles. 

 

Instead, the Magician winces again next to him, and says out loud, “ I didn’t, though!”

 

Isagi, straining his ears, thinks he hears the faint crackle of a voice back. 

 

So he had earpieces in under the fucking beanie - 

 

“I mean, he was threatening to call the police - I mean - no, I didn’t know he’s always threatening to call the - you are the one always worried he’s gonna get himself in trouble trying to help people, obviously I’ll think he’s going to call the police if he thinks there’s a bomb threat or something - no, I didn’t tell him there was a bomb threat!”

 

Isagi, in his admittedly short life, has found himself in quite a few absurd situations. Several of them have involved one or both of the people he’s playing this bizarre game of telephone with. 

 

But as he feels a vein start to twitch at the corner of his forehead, fuse dangerously close to burning out, he leans right into the Magician’s space and snaps, loud enough that it should get through the speakers to the idiot cavorting along the skyline, “Can you shut up and tell me why I need a car to get to my damn classes?!”

 

There’s a terse second of silence. Isagi hears the crackle of a response from under the Magician’s beanie, but he can’t make out the words. 

 

He can make out the Magician’s deep reluctance, though, when he grumbles out a, “He’s saying he can’t shut up and tell you why at the same time.”

 

Isagi almost wants to strangle this man, as though it could transmit his rage to the Emperor directly. 

 

Instead, he glares right up at the tops of the buildings as they creep into the idling traffic at an intersection, and sure enough, there he is - body cutting elegantly through the air like it weighs nothing, coiling and uncoiling effortlessly as it comes to a stop against the side of a tall building - not a single wasted movement, not the slightest fumble, even the landing executed with subtle poise. His perch is tall enough that Isagi, less paranoid now that he’s certain that there is no bomb threat - or other public safety hazard - that he has to worry about, can just barely make out the ledge he steps onto before gliding up and over the lip of the roof, disappearing from sight. 

 

“Fucking idiot,” Isagi growls under his breath and scoots back into his own seat, mad enough that he doesn’t even want to directly talk to him anymore, worried enough that he feels nauseous. “He doesn’t even have the nighttime to hide him if he fucking falls - what if the glare of the sun gets into his eyes -”

 

“I’m telling you not to worry,” the Magician insists, and he’s muttering too, like he’s keen to take this conversation back to just the two of them. “He’s more used to being up there than he is on the ground.”

 

And, well. Isagi knows that the Magician can’t imagine how telling that is. He can’t know - he has no clue that Isagi has spent hours watching every clip he’s been able to find, of circus acrobats in their skin tight suits and stark primary colours, dizzyingly high with nothing but ropes and swings and empty air between them, showman smiles as bright as the sequins sparkling and catching all the spotlights trained on to them as they swing through the air like they’ve learned to fly long before they’d learned how to walk on even land. 

 

They must have been in their teens, when that circus finally disbanded. Teens who spent their youth training to perform under the eyes of the cheering spectators, to capture and hold attention, to mesmerise and mislead the eye. Kids, raised to live double lives, growing up learning to make a tawdry living off of a life of crime behind smoke and mirrors and spectacle. 

 

What must it have been like for people with such abnormal childhoods trying to adjust back into normal society? 

 

He starts to tap at his phone again, and then sets it down before he can push Send. 

 

Asks out loud, instead, softly, “Why is he worried about me?”

 

He doesn’t know if it’s because of the plea in it, or if Alexis Ness is just more of an honest person than Michael Kaiser is, but he answers, “He was just…worried about whether you were okay.”

 

Adds, as though passing over something confidential, and Isagi doesn’t have to guess to know that his speakerphone is off when he whispers, “He thought there might be something troubling you.”

 

It rises with him again, a thick foam, his personal cocktail of contradictory emotions. Does the Magician know about last night? About this morning, and the distraction and distress that must have been apparent enough for this ridiculous man to decide he’s going to step out into the sun because he’s more comfortable being honest under a hood than he is bare and exposed? 

 

Why can’t you just ask me if I’m okay, you fucking idiot, Isagi thinks, morose - mad . Why can’t you just ask if it’s about last night?

 

The longing, humiliating in its hunger, thawed out by this stupid man and his stupid overreactions, his overdramatic acts of care…

 

All to circumvent the simple honesty that they’d shared just for a moment the night before. 

 

The envy churns bitter through him again. 

 

Not only because Kaiser has someone to share his secrets with, while he leaves Isagi to flounder and fumble alone. 

 

But because, for the briefest of moments, he’s had that trust placed into his own hands too. Something breakable - something precious. 

 

And he’s greedy. Unfair, and selfish, and he wants more of it. Knows he’s a hypocrite for it, knows that he can’t push, for the same reasons that Bachira and Chigiri and even Rin turn cautious and careful when speaking to him because - 

 

They’re afraid of pushing too far . Pushing until that something breakable, something precious cracks under one careless moment.

 

So isn’t this also his fault? There seems to be a trend these days, of people reading into him. Beyond the surface, into his stupid lapses of judgement digging for information about his neighbour. His stupid lapse of emotions on his balcony, afraid of the things he might have already ruined or is afraid of ruining that go far, far beyond the plants he’s trying to help bring back from the edge of life. 

 

People jumping to wild conclusions behind him because he doesn’t leave behind a tail for them to grip and follow. Because he can’t . 

 

That’s what it means to care, Isagi thinks, glaring at his phone screen even though the emotion crackling in him isn’t anger. 

 

Selfless acts for selfish reasons, selfish acts for selfless reasons. Just the human folly of caring. 

 

number#1noafan: If you thought there was something wrong you could have just have asked 

 

number#1noafan: I told you I would tell you didn’t I 

 

number#1noafan: If there was a problem

 

number#1noafan: The next time you send this car after me 

 

number#1noafan: I promise you I will run away. I really will

 

He pauses, a second, bites down on the tip of his tongue before he types, 

 

number#1noafan: And I forgot to say this last night

 

number#1noafan: But thank you 

 

Whether he imagines that it’s for the knife and the taser, or the thing he’d gifted him a hundred times more precious than a hundred of each combined, Isagi will just have to leave it to Kaiser to figure out. 

 

---

“So you like him enough to want to do something about it,” Chigiri holds up one finger. 

 

This conversation is a lot more mortifying in person, Isagi decides. 

 

He wants to shove the iced cup of matcha latte that Chigiri had brought for him against his own face but makes himself force out a “Yes,” instead.

 

“And you think he likes you back.”

 

Why is this somehow more gruelling than his commute to campus had been? “Um, y-yes.”

 

“But you think that he’s not ready to date?”

 

“Um!” Isagi hadn’t phrased it like that at all - doesn’t think he’s even thought along those lines. The not yet flies past too fast for him to catch or do anything about, because Chigiri is staring him down critically enough that Isagi has to gather his wits and answer. “It’s not that, it’s more like… I think that he has… reservations.”

 

“Why? Is it ‘cause he’s older?”

 

“He’s not that much older -”

 

“Yeah, he doesn’t look that much older, either,” Chigiri agrees, and Isagi’s heart sinks like stone for a second because Chigiri must have seen Reo’s deck too. He tries to smooth out the panic immediately - it’s not like Michael Kaiser’s been trying to hide, Bachira and Rin have both seen him, as have other people he knows, including Kawasaki. But his protective instincts are on overdrive, all the more so because he’d not had the chance to define the terms of this conversation, hasn’t had the chance to be selective about exactly what he lets Chigiri know. “Makes sense that you’d go for the mature type though.”

 

They’re both caught off guard when Isagi almost snorts his matcha out of his nose. 

 

“What?” Chigiri’s face is a mix of both disgust and concern as he shoves at Isagi’s face with a spare napkin that’d come with the muffins he’d brought to share - they’re sitting outside one Chigiri’s favourite coffee spots on campus, huddled around one of the small plastic tables. 

 

“No, it’s just that -,” Isagi thinks about men with a natural flair for dramatics forced into the shadows, men who grow up reckless balancing at the razor edge of risk, with a bravado that seems insane to expect from an ordinary person only until you accept that they are anything but ordinary. “I wouldn’t exactly call him mature. ”

 

“No?” Chigiri props his elbow on the table, tucks his chin into his cupped palm. The tiny little crease against his forehead has smoothed and his eyes are intent and curious as he asks, “So what’s he like?”

 

“Dramatic,” Isagi says immediately, almost in spite of himself, and Chigiri blinks in surprise. 

 

“What, really?”

 

“Really. Very dramatic, and just kind of… ridiculous? He’s also kind of…”

 

“Kind of?”

 

“Kind of unfair,” Isagi intones, and steeps in his matcha and the goddamn irony of it all, “kind of selfish.”

 

Chigiri is back to frowning, only now he looks perplexed. “Okay, wow,” he says, tapping his straw against his lips before taking a considering sip. “Not what I’d expected from your type.”

 

The question must be obvious on his face, because Chigiri elaborates with a shrugged, “You know. Kind. Smiley, and cheerful. Someone who laughs a lot.” 

 

Isagi tries not to let himself get taken away by the vision of shoulders dancing in soundless laughter. Lopsided smiles curling sly and teasing. 

 

Grand, absurd acts of kindness, reserved just for him. 

 

He’s hot in the face as he confesses, softly, “He’s… those things too.”

 

He can’t look Chigiri in the eye but can tell that his stare is keen as he nurses his latte in his hands. Narrowly avoids it going up his windpipe a second time when Chigiri huffs, “You’re really down bad, huh.”

 

“That’s not -!” he starts to protest immediately, heated, when he sees the teasing look on Chigiri’s face - watches it melt into a laugh as Isagi flaps around and glowers at him. “I just want to… get to know him better.”

 

“Sounds like you know him plenty.”

I’d like to know him more. He almost blurts it out, too. But it burns on the way out and fizzles away on his tongue. 

 

Not because he doesn’t want to say it, Isagi realises, a little startled as he opens then closes his mouth. 

 

Not because it’s the truth. 

 

It’s just because it’s… embarrassing. 

 

And that feels like such a manageable, obvious emotion that Isagi has to sit with it for a second before he manages to say, “The thing is… it feels like he tries a lot to… pretend. Like he’s not those things.”

 

“Dramatic and childish?”

 

“Yeah. And when he does act that way, and then switches back to being all gentlemanly, it just feels like -”

 

“He’s giving you mixed signals?”

 

Isagi, uncertain, jerks a little in a way he guesses might be a nod. “It just feels like he’s not ready or doesn’t want me to know him like that. Or, no, that’s not it…more like, I don’t know what exactly he wants when he’s…like that.”

 

“But he’s been obvious about liking you.” 

 

Isagi, phone chirping in his pocket with the unique notification he’s set for an app he uses to talk to just one person, nods once. 

 

It’s a little easier to admit this time around, especially as Chigiri just nods as well, thoughtful, and goes along with it. 

 

In fact, all of this has been - a lot easier than Isagi’d been dreading. Chigiri had pounced on him almost as soon as he’d seen him with a scoffed You don’t have to look like you’re facing the gallows , but he’d also thumped him reassuringly on the shoulder and pulled him by the arm to sit at the table where he’d laid out their breakfast spread. If anything, as Chigiri works through his questions to understand what Isagi is asking of him, and Isagi lists off his answers, he almost feels…

 

Light. 

 

To be asked and get to answer, even if he keeps the specifics to himself - it’s an airy, carbonated feeling, fizzing up through his head in relief. Devoid of that constant paranoia of lying and hiding and hurrying away.

 

Maybe it’s this - combined with the very eventful morning he’s had, burning through his mental reserves before the day’d even begun, and the lack of sleep that will have him start dissociating during his afternoon classes - that have him letting his guard down when Bachira texts the group chat asking if anyone’s already on campus. 

 

Maybe it’s because it’s only once he loosens up a little that he realises how much he’d been straining, trying to keep himself together pretending like he wasn’t falling apart. 

 

Whatever calm haze he’d been descending into, the green tea in his system keeping him alert without the jitters, flees immediately when Bachira jogs lightly over to them, asking what they’re talking about, and Chigiri simply responds, 

 

“His crush.”

 

He watches the instant realisation on Chigiri’s face that maybe he shouldn’t have said that at the same time that Bachira exclaims, “Oh my God! ” He rounds on Isagi, grabs him by the shoulders, “You told him about Hot German Neighbour?!”

 

There’s a foot kicking urgently at Isagi’s shin from under the table. And Isagi’d told Chigiri that Bachira already knew - Bachira’s known all along. He searches within himself for his panic, for the impulse to shut down or deny or withdraw. 

 

Instead, with the strange, alluring airiness from moments ago still fresh on his tongue, Isagi just confesses another simple truth, “… yes.”

 

Bachira lets out a strangled little cry, which at the very least sounds excited, even at the risk of people’s heads turning in their direction. 

 

“He told you he has a crush on him?!” Bachira’s head snaps in Chigiri’s direction for confirmation. 

 

“Yes?” Chigiri answers, though it’s phrased like a question. Bachira lets out another little squawk. 

 

“Oh my God, finally!” Bachira is too worked up to sit now, bouncing a little on the spot as though he’s the one who’s had a hit of Chigiri’s double-shot espresso. “I gave that Kaiser guy his shovel talk weeks ago!”

 

The blood drains from Isagi’s face.

 

“You did what?” he gasps, at the same time as Chigiri goes, “Who?”

 

And now both Bachira and Isagi are looking at Chigiri.

 

“Kaiser?” Bachira repeats, tipping his head at Chigiri, “His neighbour?”

 

“Wait… I thought his name was Alexis Ness?!”

 

Isagi feels his own jaw unhinge at the same time as Bachira lets out a scandalised, “ Yocchan! You two-timer!” and Isagi, in the middle of spiralling at an alarming speed, thinks that the universe has chosen this day in particular to have all his half-truths catch up to him in one fell swoop.

 

***

“Nagi! Thanks for nothing!” 

 

To Nagi’s credit, all he does is blink his large eyes blankly down at where Chigiri is sitting, fuming. 

 

“You told me that Isagi was super interested in the Ness guy!” Chigiri snaps. “That’s not his crush at all!”

 

“Wait, Isagi has a crush?” Reo, who’d gone over to borrow two of the chairs from one of the neighbouring tables, stares around them in turn, at a loss. The pair had shown up here a couple of minutes ago, having clearly read Chigiri’s text to Bachira in the groupchat, telling him where they were. 

 

The logistics of it is the last thing on Isagi’s mind right now - as his friends crowd around a table definitely too small for five people, it’s all he can do not to self-destruct when Nagi simply says, 

 

“How was I supposed to know? He’s the one Isagi was asking the most about.”

 

Reo is frowning in confusion. “I just thought he was interested in the language program? I was gonna ask if you wanted to intern with us later, with your brain you’d get right in.”

 

He levels this at Isagi, as though Isagi can handle what had just sounded like a job offer from the Mikage Corp from the heir to the company himself, on top of everything else going on. 

 

“It was the other guy, the other German guy - Reo, give me your slides again, I didn’t even look at the other guy -”

 

Isagi, brain grasping dumbly for reason, turns to Nagi. “Why’d you think I was interested in Alexis Ness?”

 

He notices that Nagi doesn’t quite meet his eye when he answers, “He’s the one you talked about the whole time. I figured he was your type.”

 

“I thought that too!” Chigiri is impatiently tapping at the tabletop while waiting for Reo to retrieve his tablet. “He’s got the whole cute smile and kind eyes and everything!”

 

“I feel bad for Kaiser,” Bachira comments, faux-sympathetic, from somewhere behind Isagi, making everything worse. 

 

“This is your fault too! You didn’t tell me anything!”

 

“Listen, how was I supposed to do that when this guy was going through active decision paralysis all by himself? I’m impressed he actually called his crush a crush. ”

 

“He didn’t call it a crush, I called it a crush, and you clearly knew because you’ve already given him the shovel talk!” There’s an implicit Without me tacked on at the end of the sentence. Isagi thinks that if he lets go of where his fingers are clamped to the sides of the table, he might just float away. 

 

“When did you even do that?” he manages, in Bachira’s direction. 

 

“Oh, the day I came over. When I was seeing him out.” The answer is so casual it’s like Bachira is telling them where he got his bumblebee graphic tee from, rather than the fact that the evening he’s mentioning had been so long ago - long enough ago that Isagi’d been too busy fretting himself sick about what the Emperor had been doing, not knowing he’d been in his tiny LDK, nursing him back to health and chatting about horoscopes with his best friend.

 

“Wait,” Chigiri turns towards them so sharply Isagi feels himself sit straighter on instinct. “How many times have you met him?”

 

“Just once!”

 

“ You met him once and already gave him the shovel talk?”

 

Isagi does, actually, start dissociating then. 

 

Just sort of falls back inwards, head so loud he can’t hear a thing. 

 

Inside the din, it’s surprisingly easy to grasp one quiet thought. 

 

I wonder what he’d think if he heard about this. 

 

The thought ripples out once, then twice, and then, to his own horror, Isagi realises that he’s about to burst out laughing. 

 

“ - I wouldn’t have said anything if I knew this was going to become a thing,” Nagi is grumbling around a cross-mouthed pout. 

 

It’s like trying to speak through a sneeze that’s gotten stuck somewhere in his sinuses. Isagi manages to make it work, with a jerky, “How did this even come up in the first place?”

 

Chigiri, worked up and apparently upset that the basis off of which he’d been interrogating Isagi had been all wrong to begin with, answers on Nagi’s behalf. 

 

“We literally watched you almost walk into a pole from how inside your head you’ve been lately. I just asked if he had any idea why you’ve been so out of it and he just goes Maybe he’s thinking about his German boy. ”

 

“I mean, Isagi never asks for favours…,” Nagi sulks, pout intensifying. Bachira cuts in with an emphatic, disapproving He really doesn’t as Nagi adds, “So I figured he must be really into the guy or something.” 

 

“Why’d you not tell me?” Reo is demanding from Nagi, looking put off. 

 

“Why’d you not figure it out?” Nagi deadpans back. “You’re supposed to be smart.”

 

“You literally got it wrong yourself!” Chigiri snaps, massaging at his temples. 

 

“So is that it?” Bachira asks suddenly, and Isagi has to exert some effort to come back into himself from whatever state of suspension he’d entered, losing his grasp on the conversation entirely.

 

“Is what it?” 

 

“You’ve been so out of it because you’ve been thinking about your German boy?”

 

Even as Isagi’s mouth opens, to protest, maybe, or to disagree, he feels something snap into place. 

 

The pieces he’s been fumbling with, the truths and lies and admissions and omissions, turning just enough that suddenly, they interlock. Very distantly, he thinks it’s almost as poetic as it is ironic, having this epiphany at a cramped plastic table while his friends pick apart his biggest secret as though it’s the most extraordinarily ordinary thing to do.

 

Because it’s true, isn’t it? It’s not solely the Emperor, or his neighbour, or the child runaway whom he knows only in between the lines of German newspapers run through Google translate, fuelling Isagi’s distraction. It’s just that it’s all of him - all his interlocking pieces - clasping on to his own, across every single one of Isagi’s distractions in recent memory. 

 

It clicks together in that moment, quiet and emphatic and Isagi just… gets it. 

 

Accepts it, because it’d long since stopped being about just secret identities and morally ambiguous business practices.

 

It’s just been about him.

 

And it’s honest, completely so, when Isagi admits, “... yeah.”

 

Bachira lets out another tiny shriek at his confession. “Oh my God, I didn’t think I would live to see the day,” he looks like he’s about to start levitating out of his seat, “Wait - I have to tell RinRin!”

 

“ Do not tell Rin!” the flare of panic as Isagi bounds to grab Bachira’s phone-wielding hand almost covers Chigiri’s enraged Are you fucking telling me RIN knew about this before I did?

 

“Rin-chan’s been telling him the guy might be a serial killer,” Bachira contributes to the conversation helpfully. 

 

Chigiri’s wearing the face he does when he’s about to get a migraine. “Why do none of you sound like you’re talking about the same person?” he complains, and Isagi can’t take it anymore. 

 

He bursts out laughing. 

 

He’s not even sure if it’s because it’s funny, or because he’s just been pressure-cooking in the sheer insanity of this morning and everything that’s led up to it for so long that he needs an outlet before he explodes. 

 

“What’s so funny, you little punk - ” 

 

It’s Chigiri’s hand, roughly ruffling through his hair, avoiding the little sprout he’d tugged nervously upright on the way to campus. He can read the sullenness even while he’s doubled over wheezing, just as much as he can read that there’s not a shred of actual malice or resentment in it. And Isagi, laughing, helpless against the tide of it, feels so… free.

 

“It’s… it’s just that…,” Isagi has to try and steady himself with a deep breath. “I think he’d hate finding out you thought I was into Alexis Ness.”

 

Saying the words out loud cracks him up even worse. Isagi’s lungs heave as he tries not to simply dissolve into the condensation left on the table from his drink, while Chigiri lets out a, “What, is he the jealous type?”

 

Isagi thinks about Kawasaki, and about the Magician, about Rin and whatever it is that he’d seen Kaiser being that had birthed an instant grudge. 

 

Has to choke out, “He… I don’t know. He acts like it sometimes but I don’t know if he’s like… genuinely serious?” Isagi wouldn’t put it past him, even though it feels conceited to just take it as fact -

 

“He looked pretty mean when he opened the door for me, before he realised I might be his future brother-in-law,” Bachira says thoughtfully. 

 

The look on Chigiri’s face almost sends Isagi over the edge again as he says, “... why does he sound like he has a bad personality?”

 

“He kind of does, sometimes,” Isagi has to admit. “I don’t… hate it though.”

 

“Oh wow - wow - who’d have thought you would be into bad boys -”

 

“He was such a gentleman while I was there, though -”

 

“You just said he was mean when you met him -”

 

“He wasn’t being mean , he was just kind of cold, you know? Like, haughty and a bit arrogant. He was fine after he realised I wasn’t there to steal his man - ”

 

“Because he’s trying to make a good impression, dumbass. See, this is why he should have come to me first for relationship advice -”

 

“And what, gotten stuck in the talking phase like you and that guy who went into his emo phase halfway through second year of college?”

 

“Shut up! He’s going through shit!”

 

“...what a bother.”

 

“You think everything’s a bother.”

 

“...but you’re a bother.”

 

“You two stop that!” Bachira taps out of squabbling with Chigiri to bat at where Reo is stuck as though he’s not sure whether he’s offended or flattered, halfway through cutting fruit he’s been sliding Nagi’s way, while Nagi just blinks into the distance. “We’re talking about Isagi’s love life right now!”

 

And as the three of them are distracted, Isagi feels a pressure against his knee, under the table. It’s Chigiri’s hand, squeezing at his kneecap, and in a moment of stillness that takes him back to a dark staircase, the patter of rain beyond a closed door and the warmth of a cape snug around him, he understands what Chigiri is asking. 

 

You okay? 

 

And yeah, maybe he’d not expected that he’d end up having this conversation with all his friends. 

 

Or that it would take the sorts of turns that will be leaving him dazed and disbelieving for hours to come.

 

But he doesn’t think too long - doesn’t think at all - when he nods in the affirmative. 

 

Because nothing’s gone according to plan, and yet he’s having a hard time not feeling okay about it. 

 

Because he’d not realised how big of a part of his life this had become until he got to talk about it with some of the people he loves the most. 

 

Because now, even though it’s not the whole truth, because the whole truth is not his to give, he’s managed to split at least some of his share evenly around the table, instead of the uneven scattering of it that had led to this trainwreck of a morning.

 

And he feels freer than he’s felt in a long, long time. 

 

“So,” Chigiri zeroes in on Bachira, with the air of one about to ask something very serious, “does this guy have killer thighs?”

 

---

♛: hi darling 

 

♛: stop #83

 

♛: might i just say 

 

♛: you look radiant this evening

 

♛: something good happen?

 

Number#1noafan: Something like that 

 

Number#1noafan: [Draft] Can I ask you something 

 

Number#1noafan: [Draft] I wanted to ask you something 

 

Number#1noafan: So

 

Number#1noafan: When’s the next lesson

 

---

A week. He’s not going to be able to see the Emperor for a week, which is an utterly bizarre thing to contend with as a fact, when their meetings on the rooftop are things of chance. Lighting signal fires and waiting. 

 

Instead, he has to deal with the absolute horror of the Emperor beside himself with glee even through his messages.

 

darling 

 

you just can’t stay away from me, can you?

 

And while Isagi’s on a campaign of honesty, coming anywhere near that question with the truth makes him feel like he might throw up some of the angry butterflies building a colony in his stomach. 

 

It’s a very complicated feeling. 

 

Especially because even though he’s not seeing the Emperor for another week, he sees Kaiser every day. 

 

“How’re the plants?” he asks without fail every morning, until the question starts to sound like shorthand for something else.

 

Isagi can’t tell. His morning routine involves a couple of minutes carved specifically out just to inspect the moisture levels of the succulents, checking the stalks for discolouration, the soil for moss. 

 

“They’re not dead yet,” is the only thing he can say in response, and it’s maddening. 

 

Having to wait like this, not knowing what sort of outcome he’s heading towards, flailing around in the margins trying to shift it in his favour and not knowing if it’s working. 

 

In these moments, Kaiser feels especially far away, even though he’s right there. 

 

And it’s driving Isagi insane.

 

Because Isagi knows now. He’s sure. He’s sure of what he wants, what he wants to ask for. The restlessness builds inside of him until it grows into something Chigiri can read off of his face. 

 

“Why do you need to make an appointment?” Chigiri demands, impatient, “You literally live directly in front of him, just go knock on his door!”

 

“I can’t,” Isagi, ashamed, whines into where he’s burrowed his head into his arms, flopped over his desk. “It feels wrong somehow!”

 

And that’s a non-answer, and also the complete truth. It feels as freeing to just come out and say it as it feels utterly miserable.

 

“Oh my God, look, I understand that you want to respect his boundaries, but how are you going to make any progress if you’re constantly second-guessing yourself?” Chigiri isn’t letting go.

 

“I’m not, though,” Isagi emerges from the cocoon of his own arms, ruffled. “I’m not… second-guessing myself. I just want to do this… properly.”

 

And that’s about as close as he can get to verbalising the gut feeling that it has to be like this. On the rooftop, under the night sky. It feels right, to face each other the way they do when they are the most unabashedly themselves, even at - especially at - their worst. It feels right, that Kaiser gets to have his mask on, and gets to make the choice to take it off again. 

 

He doesn’t know how to explain this to Chigiri though - not when the particulars aren’t things he can share anyway, and definitely not when he’s trusting his intuition here more than he’s trusting reason. 

 

But it’s hard. 

 

It’s hard, just sitting around and waiting, when Isagi’s so zoomed into the goal that it’s taking him every bit of restraint not to charge at it. Because Kaiser might slip in and out of his personas with ease, but Isagi can’t. Is so bad at pretence that it’s had his friends staging interventions before he starts trying to walk through brick again, had incognito cars and masked men trailing after him on the off chance he’s found some new problem he’s got himself ensnared in. 

 

And now that he’s here, so close , and so sure of what he wants, the impatience crawls through his nerves until he worries he might do something reckless if he doesn’t keep the balcony encounters short. Worries that he wants so much that it’ll be obvious, worries that he could ruin something by being too hasty.

 

Somehow, it’s easier to handle being called eager by the crown emoji on his phone, where he gets to curse back all the expletives he can manage without breaking the autocorrect, than it is to stand on that balcony and pretend that he doesn’t know who’s sending them. 

 

If you want him to make the first move, you have to let him know that you want him to make the first move, had been Chigiri’s input, and Isagi’s trying, he really is. It’s taking all his self-control not to blurt out that he knows, just so they can stop playing charades, just so he can stop having to improvise his performance off the cues of his stage partner, and God, he is eager. He really is. So much so that if he’s not careful he’ll outrun caution and forget that Michael Kaiser is wanted by the law, by the gangsters turning downtown into even more of a sinkhole for drugs than its been in recent memory, has at the very least a juvenile delinquent record back in Germany that he might not want resurfacing. 

And it’s all consequential, it all matters, even though it’s not Isagi and this newborn want of his that it matters to.

 

So he waits. His friends help keep him busy - Reo ropes him into helping with the pitch he’s working on to showcase his robots to his dad, the closest to nervy he’s ever seen him. Then there’s Bachira, who decides to help by being so chaotic Isagi is too distracted trying to defuse the disastrous video call he’d pulled Rin into to waffle and worry. If nothing else, watching the look of pure horror bleed into Rin’s face as he realised what the call was about made Bachira get stitches from laughing too hard whenever he remembered it, so he could never tease Isagi for too long about it. 

 

It’s still an utterly humbling experience. Reo’s well-meaning tips about navigating future workplace relationships as though Isagi’s accepted a non-existent job offer, Nagi’s completely unsolicited Well, at least he’s hot once Chigiri finally gets someone to show him what Kaiser looks like, the demonic glee Bachira is getting out of openly messing with Isagi - he’s averaging at least three embarrassment-induced spirals a day, bombarded constantly by this idea of -

 

Him. 

 

Of them. 

 

Their casual, easy acceptance of a thing Isagi has kept in the shadows for so long, behind lock and key, like something forbidden. Whittling it closer to something real and tangible with every off-hand comment and awful joke and embarrassing morsel of advice.

 

And it feels so easy. 

 

So easy that he almost feels like he should be suspicious of it. How they whittle him close to himself again too - sloughing off the parts of him warped and misshapen from all these months spent hiding and lying, all his secrecy and stress. 

 

He only realises the mass of it once he starts to let go. 

 

And once he does, it’s like letting air out of a balloon. Like he can’t take it back. Like he doesn’t want to.

 

It just feels so… good, to not have to keep it all to himself. To get to place this part of his life that he cannot stand to let go off out into the sunlight and let it breathe - snuck around in hushed whispers in class or lost somewhere in the three different conversations happening at any given time when all his friends gather for a meal or homework or to kick a ball around for stress relief. No longer needing to expend all this energy that he has been, all this time, dissecting himself into halves for his friends and for the person who has, for some ungodly reason, managed to get him emotionally invested in the kind of way Chigiri is still trying to rationalise.

 

“Maybe it makes sense,” he eventually lands on, “You’re weirdly compatible with high maintenance people.”

 

“Aren’t you just reverse-engineering an answer now?” Reo asks, while Bachira declares, You are the most high maintenance of us all, and that sets off another three-way argument. 

 

Isagi is content to sit there, though, next to the other non-participant in the conversation currently speedrunning whatever limited-time in-game quest he has to clear for ten thousand gemstones before their next class. Sit, and muse over how surreal it feels, the intimacy of being known . 

 

So simple, and so freeing, that it’s almost dangerous. 

 

That it almost tempts him to disclose more. 

 

It seems to be a theme with him. Wanting more, the more he gets. 

 

He’s distracted enough that the thought almost catches him off guard when it appears. 

 

Wondering whether he feels this way too. Whether that’s why, despite all reason, he’d simply not been able to help himself. 

 

Exposing himself, more and more, until Isagi could start to know him. 

 

How much of it had been intentional? How much of it had been pure happenstance? What changes if he finds out Isagi knows ? 

 

They’re Kaiser’s secrets, and they’re Kaiser’s choice to share. But Isagi, the weight of some of his own carried by this table and the people squabbling around it, wants, and he’s greedy, and he cannot help himself . 

 

He learns a thing or two from his friends, though. From their patience, from their restraint, everything he’s noticed now that he’s finally started to watch them back again. How they come in close enough for him to know that they’re there but far enough that he knows they will back off if he’s not ready. These people - some of the most assertive, stubborn, uncompromising people he knows - waiting, as they’ve been waiting for a long time, not forcing him against his nature but reminding him regardless that they’re always there for what he’s willing to let them help him with. Watching for the fumes if he burns himself out with his own stubborn resistance.

 

So he waits. His friends keep him busy, relearning how to meet them in the middle, how to exist where they find his outlines.

 

So do his plants. They demand a patience out of him, forcing him to slow down. Humbling him with their tacit reminder that all his thrashing around will not hurry them along to the outcome he wants.

 

And so does his buddy system group chat.

 

❄️ Guys, watch out for the intersection by Stop #49 

 

❄️ There’s this group of delinquents hanging out 

 

❄️ Friend narrowly avoided getting mugged today 

 

🌊 oh noo  

 

🌊 are they part of those gangs

 

🌊 the drug dealers? 

 

❄️ Worse :/

 

❄️ High school delinquents

 

❄️ Typical dyed hair, piercings, untucked shirts

 

🎮 lol i thought that only happens in manga 

 

❄️ Pretty sure this lot are young enough that their version of reality IS manga 

 

🌊 seriously… 

 

🌊 don’t we have enough things to worry about…

 

🦈 just don’t go out alone. alone 

 

🎮 luckily for me i do not go out At All so

 

❄️ lol

 

❄️ They tend to pick on people who are by themselves 

 

❄️ Pickpocketing or harassing students walking home 

 

🌊 classroom bullies on the streets basically

 

❄️ Basically 

 

🎮 what happened to doubled police presence in downtown lol 

 

🎮 you’d think this is LESS likely to happen now 

 

❄️ They’re all busy keeping the rich fuckers safe 

 

❄️ Did you see? 

 

❄️ That nepo baby idol got out on bail 

 

❄️ Apparently he’s vacationing on some island now  

 

🎮 wow

 

🦞 Isn’t stop #49 close to the park? 

 

❄️ Yeah, I think so 

 

🌊 that’s kind of worrying… neighbourhood kids go there to play all the time…

 

🌊 there should be some kind of alert going round at least 

 

❄️ Well, we could go to the schools to get them to dispatch a message during homeroom

 

❄️ Or have them contact the parents

 

🎮 don’t you think it might make it worse though 

 

🎮 especially if these gang kids are from those schools 

 

🎮 like these are adolescents we are talking about 

 

❄️ You sound more scared of the teenagers 

 

❄️ Than the actual crazy people running around here

 

❄️ More than usual these days, at that

 

🎮 lol i’m sorry but have you MET a teenager before?

 

🦈 they’re scary. scary.

 

🦞 I’m gonna stop by the park after class 

 

🦞 Just to have a look 

 

🎮 dude be careful 

 

❄️ Do you want me to come with? 

 

🦞 No it’s okay

 

🦞 I mean if it's dangerous I can probably shake them off

 

🦞 Lots of shortcuts around there and a police box not too far off

 

🌊 isagi-san is very good at shortcuts

 

🎮 so you keep telling us :p

 

🌊 he is! 

 

🌊 [Kawasaki A. is typing]

 

❄️ Let us know though, i live close by 

 

🦞 Will do! 

 

He has just enough time in between his last class of the day and his shift at the izakaya to double back home - and that’s what he does. Takes his usual route all the way back to his building, three bus stops and a decent stretch of walking to get back to the apartment. It feels a little odd - he leaves so early, usually, and comes back so late, that he’s more used to the place in shades of blue and grey, the sparse scattering of people about to start their days or returning from ending them. The afternoon is bright and golden, as awfully hot as ever, and Isagi takes advantage of his pitstop home to freshen up a tad, get into a change of clothes. It’s nice, almost makes him wonder if he ought to try and make more of the hours in between his classes and work, but the break in routine still feels unusual. 

 

And clearly he’s not the only one thinking so, with a message pinging on his phone about it. 

 

♛: Stop #83

 

♛: going home so soon darling? 

 

♛: are you not feeling well? 

 

So he’s clingy, had been Chigiri’s verdict, after he’d spent a little more one-on-one time trying to better profile this elusive Michael Kaiser in his brain. It’s a shade better than stalkerish, so Isagi’d rolled with it. Again - high maintenance. 

 

I need to go grab something, Isagi types back, and settles in for the bus ride, wondering whether the Emperor has been having an awful lot of work that spans the parts of town he frequents the most on a weekday, or whether…

 

It occurs to him that he can just ask. 

 

Why were you around my busstop at that time of day? 

 

Have you been following me? 

 

He tucks his backpack into his chest with one arm, waiting for the response. The late afternoon sun is warm against his face, a shower of dust motes sparkling where it hits the air inside the bus. 

 

♛: how rude, darling 

 

♛: you should be flattered

 

♛: i’m as attuned to you being nearby as you are to me 🖤

 

number#1noafan: Creep

 

number#1noafan: Stalker

 

♛: are you heading back right after you grab what you need

 

♛: your shift doesn’t start for a while 

 

Isagi doesn’t even really know when he figured that out - is somewhat resigned to the fact that of course he has. 

 

His thumbs hover over the sides of his screen, arms squeezing the backpack into place so it doesn’t jerk out of his lap at a sudden stop. Thinks that he really is a creature of momentum as he lets the honesty he’s been trying to be so mindful with run through him as he types back, 

 

number#1noafan: No, I’m going to go to the park first

 

♛: why 

 

A non-answer, and the complete truth - I like going on walks, he types out, and pushes Send.

 

number#1noafan: Usually don’t get the chance

 

♛: aw how cute 

 

♛: i got to learn something new about you 🖤

 

Isagi bites down on his lip. Patience. Be patient. Don’t hover around the plants, don’t poke too much at the soil, don’t touch the leaves and stalks too much, don’t snip off too much, don’t water too much. Don’t ruin something in your haste when you know that time will take you where you’re heading anyway. The bus will get him to his stop - his impatience won’t make it move faster.

 

But… 

 

number#1noafan: And you? 

 

♛: me?

 

♛: are you asking me if i like going on walks?

 

♛: darling! 

 

♛: you’re trying to get to know me better!

 

It should be alarming how easily he can read him through the screen. Isagi buries the colour rising into his face into the top of his backpack. Makes himself type back, 

 

number#1noafan: You literally know my whole timetable

 

number#1noafan: All my commute routes

 

number#1noafan: You know a lot about me

 

number#1noafan: Isn’t it only fair? 

 

♛: you don’t have to rationalise it angel

 

♛: i’m thrilled that you’re being so eager lately 

 

♛: you’re making it hard to wait for our date 🖤

 

number#1noafan: Are you going to tell me or not? 

 

♛: what exactly are you asking

 

number#1noafan: Idk

 

number#1noafan: What you like to do when you’re not cosplaying Batman

 

♛: and for that

 

♛: i won’t tell you 

 

♛: rude

 

Isagi catches a glimpse of his own reflection against the mirror he’s sitting next to. He’s glad that because of the odd hour, the seat next to him is empty - it would be a whole lot more awkward to catch himself grinning to himself, hunched into some kind of brace position like his backpack is a parachute and he’s a thrill-seeker, unable to help diving at the most ridiculous of heights. 

 

The thought makes him wonder, as he’s found himself wondering often these days, what the world looks like from up there.

 

Up so high, where Kaiser’s learned to fly. 

 

number#1noafan: Did I hurt your feelings?

 

♛: you can make up for it 

 

number#1noafan: How?

 

♛: wait

 

♛: you’re actually willing?

 

number#1noafan: I mean I asked so 

 

The bubbles appear and disappear for a moment. Kaiser’s out and about right now, he’d seen Isagi take the second stop at the very least, so he must be using whatever speech-to-text feature is installed inside his headwear. He stares at the bubbles and wonders if the guy is under his helmet, stammering. 

 

you’re being awfully direct lately darling 

 

Read through, just like that. Not that Isagi’s not being obvious, but for once… 

 

For once Isagi thinks, fighting off the welcoming visual of crawling in through the zippers of his bag and curling inside the darkeness, he doesn’t… hate it. Even if he feels pathetic, even if the heat on his face isn’t entirely the sun warming the thick, scratched plastic of the bus seats. 

 

He doesn’t want to have to pretend, here.

 

number#1noafan: I like to go on walks when I have free time 

 

number#1noafan: It helps me clear my head 

 

number#1noafan: And I don’t get to do it often

 

number#1noafan: I’m sure you can guess why 

 

number#1noafan: So

 

number#1noafan: Now, your turn

 

number#1noafan: What do the kids call it?

 

number#1noafan: Trade offer?

 

♛: darling 

 

♛: haha 

 

♛: why are you talking like you’re an old man 

 

♛: you realise you pass for a kid yourself right

 

♛: with that cute little baby face

 

Isagi has to disentangle himself from that little haha before he can figure out how to respond. Had he laughed out loud? Loud enough for whatever mechanism Ness had built into his helmet to catch on and spell it out?

 

He buries his own runaway thoughts, the fact that he’d like to hear it too, that close, with his reply.

 

number#1noafan: What an insanely creepy thing to say 

 

number#1noafan: YOU sound like an old man

 

♛: hey!

 

♛: it was a compliment!

 

♛: i was complimenting you! 

 

number#1noafan: I’m not so sure about that 

 

number#1noafan: What the fuck 

 

♛: don’t make it weird sweetheart

 

number#1noafan: You made it weird first

 

♛: i was just commenting on your youthful features 

 

number#1noafan: It’s getting worse

 

number#1noafan: Please stop talking 

 

♛: i thought you wanted to know what i do during my free time 

 

Isagi hardly dares to breathe. Watches the bubbles dance, buffering on his screen, building his anticipation. 

 

♛: i like to read

 

The thick, textured nylon of his bag scratches at his teeth as he burrows his smile into it. Embarrassed, with no one to see how big it is. How giddy he’s gotten from just this - just this one morsel of honesty proffered, willingly. Not figured out, not puzzled through, but just given to him . 

 

Chigiri’s right. He’s down bad. 

 

It’s awful. 

 

He can’t stop smiling.

 

number#1noafan:  Wow

 

number#1noafan:  He can read

 

♛: very funny darling 

 

♛: might i remind you that we’re texting 

 

number#1noafan:  I’m texting 

 

number#1noafan:  You’re probably dictating things like ‘black heart emoji’ to your helmet 

 

♛: you little brat

 

number#1noafan:  Sorry old man 

 

number#1noafan:  That was disrespectful of me 

 

number#1noafan: Don’t hurt your joints jumping around like that <3

 

The bubbles burst into the screen and then disappear for a solid minute before he gets a text back. 

 

♛: you’re such a menace.

 

Errand completed and backpack a little heavier on the return trip, Isagi makes it to the park in fairly good time. It’s already past the time most schools have wrapped up classes for the day, and even from the distance he can see the smattering of kids across the grass, the younger ones scrambling all over the playground equipment in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, the older ones kicking a ball around trying to get it through two wheeled-over recycling bins functioning as a goalpost.

 

He can’t see anyone suspicious around - there’s a food cart wheeling past selling croquettes, and a guy smoking a cigarette relatively far away from the children that Isagi can’t get mad about it. 

 

He also can’t see any sign of a dark, defined figure, an inkblot splashed on to a colour page.

 

The chat window still open behind his lockscreen remains on the last couple of messages they’d exchanged.

 

♛: you’re going to the central park right 

 

number#1noafan: No?

 

♛: then?

 

♛: which park are you going to?

 

number#1noafan: Do not follow me you jerk

 

number#1noafan: In case you haven’t realised, there aren’t any tall buildings you can hide on in the middle of a field 

 

♛: which park?

 

number#1noafan: For fuck’s sake

 

number#1noafan: The one close to stop #49

 

[...]

 

♛: oh

 

That last oh is annoyingly cryptic in a way that maddens Isagi. Does he mean oh, I understand which park you’re talking about? Or oh, I might be aware of potentially dangerous activity around this park? 

 

If it’s the latter, Isagi needs to be more wary. The number of incidents around the area have creeped back up, slowly and steadily enough that it hasn’t caused the same degree of alarm as the higher profile cases dominating the headlines these days. The nepo baby who’d allegedly fled the country to dodge legal repercussions for illegal substance peddling has disappeared off the map, and his parents have made the decision to abandon their citizenship and invest heavily overseas for a foreign passport and the protection that comes with it. The news is so busy lambasting them and their selfish cowardice, rehashing the controversy from every angle, that the more molecular incidents - the increasing cases of drug-related violence on the streets, substances creeping their way into lower-income households, into schools and colleges, is going untapped. 

 

Isagi has seen it all play out before, and he has a grim idea of where it is going. Another case of the city overtaxed by its own incorrigible ills, unable to crack down on a problem simmering below the surface until it froths violently over.

 

It’s this, he’s hazarded, that has been keeping Kaiser so busy that he hasn’t been able to make it to their rooftop sooner. It’s hard not to think about it, even harder not to let himself be carried away trying to patchwork the picture he can only slightly see. Ness had assumed that Kaiser would tell him, eventually - shared that they’ve been turning down work from the syndicates trying to cut their losses in the drug market, weaselling away into the woodwork for now.

 

It’s hard not to wonder whether the fever the city’s running lately has something to do with it. Agitated under the summer heat and these irregular breakouts of incidents, driving under the influence, hospitals reporting overdosed patients rushed in by strangers, arrests of foot soldiers who knew nothing of the kingpins running the show, just of the grunts they employed to do their dirty work. It’s leaking into parts of the city that have previously been immune to this sort of disturbance, or at the very least better able to shrug it off. Little of it is showing in the papers, but there’s been an unease creeping into the neighbourhoods around the diner - murmurings of a clandestine criminal presence. 

 

There’d been that one incident where two visibly sketchy looking men had walked into the diner itself, to demand beer and steaming bowls of rice, and the entire place seemed to have held its breath, staff and patrons alike, until they’d left. The manager had refused, with an uncharacteristic kind of silence, to entertain any of the gossip that had prickled into life the second they’d been out of earshot. It could have been nothing. They could have just been two normal guys. It could all just be another symptom of how jumpy everyone seems to be lately, twitching at small noises, looking nervously over their shoulders if they sense someone walking a little too close.

 

Is Isagi imagining it, or is the fallout happening a little more quickly than he’d have guessed? Like some kind of failsafe has fallen through. It worries him, for more reasons than one. He’s starting to spend a lot of time looking over his map, the density of the little markings he’s made on them, unsure if he’s trying to solve a riddle that doesn’t exist.

 

He takes another sweep of the park - it’s still early enough, the light is still out, and he hasn’t seen anything unusual yet. Either in the form of high school kids playing at running gangs, or the idiot who keeps trailing him everywhere when the smartest thing for him to do would be to sit tight and wait for this crisis to pass over. If he’s gallivanting around this freely, then it must mean Isagi’s just overthinking it, right? It could just be a coincidence, a hectic escalation under the legitimate effort the police force, stretched too thin as they are, are exerting to get the situation under control. He could just have regular business around where Isagi usually frequents - he could be making it regular business to hang around where Isagi usually frequents.

 

Ridiculous , he thinks, heart twanging pathetically. Stupid, stupid, ridiculous man. What are you even doing? 

 

Isagi lets the group chat know that he’s made it to the park and there doesn’t seem to be anything strange around. There’s a slew of responses, relief, a couple of jokes, a few thanks for checking it out! There’s one very good suggestion to see if he can find a security guard or police man patrolling near the area, in case they know of any trouble, and Isagi sets out to do just that. 

 

Even though he’s dressed lightly, his skin burns a little under the sun anyway, and he can’t tell if the sunscreen he’s lathered on because Chigiri will not lay off about it is even doing anything for him. Still, it feels nice to be out here. He’s not had the chance to just… go for a walk, in ages. The movement helps, even if it’s mostly an idling - nowhere particular to go, nothing particular to do. 

 

He just likes being in motion. 

 

The buddy system helps with that, too. With how cramped his schedule typically is, he isn’t on there all the time, but there’s something reassuring about a band of almost strangers coming together over a cause. Even if it's something as minor as looking for anyone in the area to walk home with, or dropping a tidbit of news they’d heard down the grapevine. Isagi hadn’t even known about the school gang issue, and it’s alarming to think that the incidents are so many in number these days that one so close to home slipped him by. 

 

It’s a small sphere of influence maybe, the only impact he’s had the occasional times he’s played human GPS, pointing out shortcuts and mapping out routes for the folks in the chat or the family and friends they are asking on behalf of to take. But Isagi likes to imagine it rippling outwards - likes to think of an act of good trickling out and turning into something bigger the more people it manages to reach. The little multiplier effect of it, Kawasaki and her taser and the little web of people he’s found himself connected through it, no matter how fine and fresh and new that string.

 

He has about two hours before his shift at the diner tonight and tallying the commute times, he’ll have to make his move pretty soon. The twenty-ish minutes he’s spent here have been incident-free. Still, he hesitates before making his decision, hitching his bag up securely onto his shoulders before approaching the kids playing football. 

 

Up close, he even recognises one or two of them - they live close by, he’s pretty sure. 

 

The wails of disappointment and denial are definitely familiar to what he hears chasing children back home before dark, anyway. 

 

“It’s still light out,” one kid complains, shaved head gleaming under the sun, dewy with sweat. Isagi catches himself thinking that he can’t understand how these children are running around in this kind of heat and really feels his age - it’s not like the sun had ever stopped him when he was a schoolkid about ready to plant himself into the playground earth so his parents wouldn’t drag him home. 

 

“It is, but there’s bad people roaming around here,” Isagi tries to reason. 

 

“That’s okay,” one of the kids, quiet, eyes hidden by his overly long bangs, tells him. “I know kung-fu.”

 

“That’s great, but I don’t think you can kung-fu a whole gang of them by yourself,” Isagi tells him seriously.

 

“But we only just got here,” comes a whine, and Isagi truly has to give it up to his parents for their patience, years after the fact, because he’d been here long enough to know that they’d been on the grounds for far longer. 

 

“And you’re about to get heatstroke if you stay any longer, look at all of you -”

 

“So is it heatstroke or bad guys,” chirps one of the kids, little smart ass, while a couple of them snigger. Isagi feels a vein start to throb at his temple, and decides he can only handle one mouthy guy on any given day. He’s had enough encounters with kids to know that every time he acts the adult - mostly by telling on them to their parents - they end up resenting him for it. So he’d come today with a back-up plan. 

 

“Okay, let’s do it this way,” he says - he shrugs the backpack off, swinging it back around to his front so he can unzip it and show them the contents. It’s stuffed to the brim with all the leftover treats from Reo, too much for him to finish up even after he’d traded them away with his friends and at work. “If you go home now, I’ll give you these.”

 

The treats are visibly fancy enough that he can see he’s intrigued some of the kids. “They’re very, very good,” Isagi goads, “They’re from an exclusive shop in Tokyo that all the celebrities go to.”

 

The self-proclaimed kung-fu master gasps quietly. The mouthy one, suspicious, asks, “How come you have so many of them? Are you rich?”

 

Bless kids and their complete lack of brain to mouth filter. “I’m not, I got them as a gift from someone. And I’m willing to give them all away - if you promise to go home before sunset.”

 

The mouthy one catches on to the caveat unnervingly fast. Isagi has to remind himself that what he’d learned after moving to North Ward, these kids have learned off of its streets growing up. “Just today?”

 

“Everyday.”

 

“Are you going to bring us treats everyday?”

 

“No, do I look like I’m made of money?” Isagi grumps back, and one of the children closest to him, who’d crept in to have a better look at his haul, giggles. He makes a mental note of the fact that children seem to appreciate the honesty too. 

 

“Then no deal,” the mouthy one decides, crossing his arms primly. 

 

Isagi solemnly zips up his bag. “Then no treats, I guess.”

 

There’s a mixed cacophony of voices at this - some in dismay, others whispering urgently to each other, while the self-proclaimed spokesperson of the gang sticks his chin out at him, lofty, “You shouldn’t try to bribe children.”

 

Why, you little - 

 

Feigning a smile around the now throbbing pain in his temple, Isagi returns, “You shouldn’t talk back to adults who’re just trying to look out for you.”

 

He realises he’s made a mistake playing the adult card the second half of their faces transform into the kind of unimpressed stubbornness that spells disaster for his commute timings if he doesn’t figure out a way to wrap this up quickly. 

 

He looks around for inspiration - his eyes land on the ball. 

 

“So… who’s winning?” he asks, pointing at it. 

 

“We are!” the one with the shaved head yells immediately, instantly excited and very loud. “Four to three!” 

 

“Great work,” Isagi nods approvingly. The ball is a tattered thing, and it must be a pain to kick around, visibly dented in places, the stitches dirty and coming apart. The thing is a few hard kicks away from deflating completely. “How about… the team who scores five goals first wins? And in exchange, you get a prize.”

 

“We don’t want your grandpa desserts -” the mouthy one starts immediately, before Isagi cuts him off, the smile plastered onto his face so fake it feels like a physical mask. 

 

“ In exchange , if you wrap up and go home, tomorrow I’ll bring you a better ball.”

 

It works. He can tell it works, from the way the loud kid’s face, all scrunched up in rebellion, falls slack in shock. An excited murmur sweeps through the little gaggle of children crowded around him. This time, Isagi feels a lot more confident about pressing his advantage as he cajoles, “That’d be neat right? I can’t imagine you get to play well with that ball, it’s losing air.”

 

“Do you like football, Big Brother?” pipes up the kid who’d been inching slowly towards him. Isagi has a feeling that even if he got coldly rejected here, he might have been able to bribe - persuade, he’d have been able to persuade - this one with snacks.

 

“I love football. I’ve been playing since I was six.”

 

“Who’s your favourite team?!”

 

“Basterd -”

 

“Is your favourite player Noel Noa?!” 

 

“Yes, he’s -”

 

“Chris Prince is cooler,” Isagi snorts almost at the same time as the mouthy one does at that comment. This time when they look at each other, there’s an unspoken understanding that passes between them, and Isagi has a split second to reflect on what he’s doing with his life, getting into football debates with children, before he recites their respective league performances off the top of his head.

 

“It’s going to take Prince at least five years to catch up to Noa,” he tells them, “But it’s going to take you just a goal or two to get a new ball. It’s a name-brand one too, I don’t use it much anymore.”

 

They’re tempted. He can tell that they’re really tempted.

 

“It’s a great deal,” he continues, trying not to sound overly door-to-door saleman-like, “you get to play longer, and you get a better ball out of it. Better still - I’ll throw in the treats too. As a deposit to seal the deal, until I come back with the ball tomorrow. All you need to do is promise that you’re going to go home before it gets too dark.”

 

The mouthy one contemplates that deeply for one second. His small face, in the process of losing its baby fat, is scrunched up in thought before he yells for a group huddle. Isagi takes a respectful few steps away and has to face the other direction so he doesn’t give away that he can hear all of their whispering clearly. 

 

In the end, they take him up on the deal, and Isagi has to resign himself to the fact that he’s going to get yelled at later for being late to work. But at least he’s going to be yelled at with a peace of mind, he decides, when the kid gunning for the treats shuffles over to pull at his pants, tilting his head back to stare at him with huge eyes his face hasn’t grown into yet, asking, “Big Brother, will you be the referee?”

 

The ball was the right incentive. As the light gradually darkens around them, gold turning orange, the kids go at it with a renewed vigour, the air in the field ringing with their voices, pitched high from how seriously they’re taking it and the fact that there’s time to go before they start breaking in their vocal chords for adolescence. They’re pretty good, too, Isagi has to conclude, watching them make a tight game out of it, some skill needed to make that deflated old ball work at all. 

 

He’s so caught up in it, taking his job as a referee seriously enough that he’d folded himself on to the ground to watch at a better level, that he startles almost violently when he feels the air beside him shift to make way for someone sitting down, right beside him. 

 

And it’s almost like some part of him knows who it is, the pings on his phone he’s been ignoring in favour of keeping track of the game, before he turns to look. 

 

Still, his own voice is pitched high in shock as he gapes and asks, “What are you doing here?”

 

Michael Kaiser, golden under a setting sun, smiles at him. “I was taking a walk, and I saw you here.”

 

Later on, he’s going to curse himself for not checking his phone sooner. 

 

Isagi opens his mouth. Closes it again to hold back the Are you stupid?! and the Do you think I’M stupid? right behind it. 

 

Whatever he does end up trying to say gets cut off with a sudden yell of, “Oh my God, is that yakuza?!”

 

“Hey! That’s rude!” Isagi fires back, horrified, in the general direction he thinks that yell came from. Some of the kids have stopped in their tracks, heads whipping to the side to look for who their friend had been talking about. 

 

In the middle of it, the mouthy kid peels past and kicks the ball semi-gracefully between the two trashcans. 

 

Isagi tucks his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his mouth and blows his makeshift whistle. “Team A wins.” 

 

He’s prepared for the screech of “That’s not fair!”, louder than the whoop of victory and the handful of voices trying to tell him the team name was something like Cobra or Hydra or whatever kids that age find cool, but it still makes him flinch. “Hey, look, it’s your own fault getting distracted in the middle of a game -”

 

Some of the kids swarm him immediately, red in the face and panting from all the exertion, kicking up a ruckus trying to argue. With the way they’re all yelling over each other, Isagi has to credit his skills at making out and keeping up with individual orders shouted out in a packed diner when he manages to pick up the whisper-yells of, 

 

“Is he a foreigner?”

 

“Is his hair really blue?” 

 

“How tall are you, Big Brother?”

 

“Don’t be rude,” Isagi scolds mildly, shooting Kaiser an apologetic look, before he remembers that he’d chosen to walk into the situation all by himself and immediately feeling less forgiving about it.

 

“Your tattoos are so cool,” gushes a kid in a knock-off Basterd Munchen shirt, completely ignoring Isagi, “Did they hurt?”

 

“…they hurt a little bit,” Kaiser answers almost tonelessly, and at least half of them gasp in shock realising the foreign man speaks perfect Japanese. 

 

“Your Japanese is good, did you grow up here?!”

 

“Are you a model?”

 

“Why’d you get flowers? My uncle got dragons because he’s tough and no one messes with dragons. But Mum says it’s because he’s a thug.”

 

If Kaiser is overwhelmed or bothered about getting bombarded by the artless curiosity of a bunch of noisy kids, he doesn’t let it show. Isagi, despite being deeply unhappy about him even being here, so visible and larger than life and out in the open, has to intervene. 

 

“Roses are cool too,” he tells them, “Blue roses are very cool, go look up what they mean when you’re home. Now do you want the snacks or not?”

 

It takes some three minutes for him to distribute the last of the treats - he has to defuse a fight when two of the kids decide they both want the last remaining madeline over the mochi because even kids understand scarcity demand even though they don’t know what it is. It ends with Isagi trying to split the thing as evenly as possible so they both get a half of the madeline and one whole mochi apiece. By the time he and the mouthy kid have shaken on their agreement for the new ball - Isagi’s deeply aware of what the scene is reminiscent of to the bystander watching it all happen, deals sealed with a handshake, terms and conditions apply - the dusk is all but upon them. 

 

As he watches the kids go, calling after them to walk in groups or at the very least in pairs so they’re not going too far alone, he’s squirming a little bit inside because he’s going to be so, so late to work. 

 

He’s not even done here yet. 

 

He turns to Kaiser, ready to ask him why he goes on walks at such strange times in such specific locations, when Kaiser beats him to it. 

 

“Did you know that there have been school gangs running around in this area?”

 

Isagi, mouth already open with the question he doesn’t get to ask, swallows it down before he can answer this one back. “I… heard something like that, yeah.”

 

Kaiser tilts his head at him, considering. The setting sun is behind him, dipping slow but steady into the tall horizon of buildings across the park, beyond the road outside the chain-link fence. The shadow it throws over the grass, in need of a good mowing, stretches farther and farther towards them - makes it hard to see his face, other than where the dying light catches in his eyes and glints back at him. “Is that why you were here?”

 

He thinks about the deal - because he imagines Kaiser must be thinking about it too. 

 

Does he think he’d been expecting danger here, and had walked into it without telling him as he’d promised he would?

This is the second time that week alone that Kaiser’d come after Isagi without Isagi telling him anything. Did he not trust him to actually reach out if he really was in trouble? 

 

“I just came to check it out,” he says, and hates that he sounds defensive. But he wants him to know - he wants him, Kaiser, the Emperor, to know that he didn’t mean to go behind his back. That he’d been telling the truth, about liking taking walks, even if he’d left out the part that he’d specifically chosen this park for his walk to scope the area for any potential risks. It must have been obvious, anyway, if he’d somehow made a point to show up. “I thought that if I did see something, I could…”

 

“You could?”

 

Tell the group chat. Run to the police box. 

 

Would he have told the Emperor? 

 

With the way he worries about how brazenly reckless this guy is clearly willing to be, he’s not so sure if he would have. Not right away, not unless he’d exhausted his options.

 

The guilt almost all but anchors him to the spot.

 

“I could let someone know,” he finishes lamely, and then hurries to add, “but there wasn’t anything. So I just walked around a bit and tried to get the kids to go home.”

 

He can hardly see Kaiser’s face right now. Hears him say, evenly, “Looked like you brokered a deal with them.”

 

Isagi huffs a little, uneasy. Is he mad at me? Another lapse of judgement, caught in his omissions, leaves him frazzled and fidgety in a way he’s not used to, defiant as he usually is with the Emperor. For all his progress, habits are hard to break - especially when the instinct they branch from has less to do with privacy than this fierce need to protect. “They shouldn’t be out this late anyway, not… these days.”

 

Kaiser says nothing for a little bit, then - “Well, I see what the landlady had meant.”

 

At Isagi’s quizzical look, he elaborates, “She’d told me about you. How you help around the building, keep an eye on the neighbourhood kids.”

 

Ah. Isagi remembers now. He’s talking about their first meeting - except it hadn’t been their first meeting, had it? It hadn’t occurred to him then, but he can’t help but ask himself, now, whether the landlady is in the habit of going around telling her tenants about the boy who helps her carry her shopping bags once in a while and corrals any straggling kids he finds outside too late back indoors. 

 

Or whether Michael Kaiser, who’d known of him before Isagi had known of him back, had gone asking about him.

 

About the boy who’d seen him choking out a full-grown man with one hand suspending him off the ground, every encounter of theirs since chipping away at the word ‘coincidence’. 

 

“It’s not like I’m running a neighbourhood watch or anything,” Isagi grumbles back. He feels strangely anxious. Wants Kaiser - Michael Kaiser, the Emperor, the guy he really should have been checking the messages of just so they didn’t land themselves in this situation - to know that he’d not been trying to break the terms of their deal. Wants it enough that he doesn’t have time to think about how, just a couple of days ago, he’d done something similar - snuck out into a loophole, only to be trailed after by this man and his stupid blatant excuse of a walk. He’d been annoyed - impatient, sure. But he’d not felt guilty, like he’s been caught doing something wrong. “I just… they’re just kids. They’re the most likely to get into trouble, if there is trouble.”

 

“That’s what their parents are for.”

 

“Their parents are probably not even home,” Isagi argues back. Folks in this part of town are usually dual-income households - almost everyone has more than one job, just to keep the bills paid. “And even the neighbourhood association is -”

 

“Home isn’t always safer.”

 

The rest of his sentence vanishes into thin air. Sharp, as Isagi says instead, “What do you mean?”

 

Kaiser is quiet. 

 

In the silence, a suddenly sizzling thing as Isagi’s eyes struggle to adjust in the twilight, he feels a chill zip down his spine even in the muggy summer heat. His head snaps in the direction the kids had gone, with an urgent, “You don’t think they’re -”

 

“No,” Kaiser says softly. Isagi turns back towards him, an anxious little drumbeat inside his chest. “They’re not.”

 

His voice is an urgent hush as he asks, “You can tell?”

 

The pause is a heavy one, humid and dense as the air around them, no reprieve even as the sun finally disappears out of sight. “Yeah.” And then, as though he feels the need to tack on an explanation, quietly clumsy in its delivery, “I… grew up in a bad neighbourhood.”

 

“Oh,” Isagi manages, dumbly.

 

What else can he say?

 

I’m sorry? 

 

What happened?

 

Is that why you ran away?

 

It’s one thing to dig through old newspapers in a foreign language, about runaway children from troubled homes. Kids who grew up with crime, living life on an edge, a literal one, up on tightropes and trapezes - but also a figurative one. On the run from the law, learning from a very young age to snatch what they can get from the world for themselves, to look out for their own survival because no one else will. 

 

It’s one thing for Isagi to hypothesise, to imagine, on his own separate quest from Chigiri’s to try and make sense of Michael Kaiser and all his absurdity.

 

It’s another to have it confirmed by him. 

 

Like this, the moment straining around them, like something flimsy and close to breaking apart.

 

All he can say, after a while, is “I hope… they’ll be safe at home.”

 

He can feel more than see Kaiser’s eyes on him. It’s familiar, as much as it is almost disconcertingly new. 

 

And perhaps it’s because of that, in that in-between, that Isagi realises why he feels so unsettled.

 

It’s the perspective. The angle he’s been getting to see turned around. He’s always on the outside, trying to figure his way in. Into the problem, and through it. It hadn’t even occurred  to him, preoccupied as he’s been trying to help whoever he can from the big bad world of North Ward’s ills, to wonder if they are any safer in their homes than they are outside of it.

 

The shame is a bitter pill to choke on. A reminder that for all the time he’s been trying to figure his way into Kaiser’s head, he’s not spent nearly enough time understanding how could invite him outwards. Not forcing that gift of trust, but earning it.

 

“They might not even be heading home,” Kaiser tells him. 

 

“I know.”

 

“And they might be back tomorrow, or the day after.”

“I know.”

 

“You can’t come here everyday to chase them away,” Kaiser continues. His tone is as unreadable as if it were being fed to him through a microphone. Isagi wants to see his face.

 

“I know that,” Isagi tells him. “You know I do. But I can’t just… not try.”

 

The streetlights around the park, sparsely spaced out on the roads outside, are starting to flicker on. Isagi squints in the feeble light, trying to see - up at Kaiser. And back out, through the fences, on to the pavement. 

 

He can’t see any stragglers, no groups of people. Can’t hear the chime of any bicycle bells or the rev of a motorbike, just the distant, amorphous din of traffic.

 

“I should get going,” he starts to say, when he really means, You need to get out of here.

 

“I’m going to get into trouble if I’m late for work.” I don’t want you to get into trouble because of me.

 

I want to tell you what I mean. Can I? Will you let me? 

 

He can’t tell. He resents it. Off-balance even with all their deals and negotiations, because Kaiser gets to just trail him everywhere if Isagi keeps things to himself, but Isagi doesn’t know how to funnel his own brand of care, this forceful, wilful thing, without disturbing something he has no right to disturb. That Kaiser, at least right now, so reticent in the tight line of his mouth, the missing inflection in his voice, may not even want to receive.

 

They make it out of the park, and Isagi strikes in the direction of town while Kaiser walks in the opposite direction. Isagi wonders if he’s going to have to double back now - make the trip back to his apartment or wherever he goes to change, and then swing back towards the city centre. He doesn’t have to wonder why he’s come all this way in the first place.

 

Reckless. Stupid. Unable to stay out of it even if it’s risky, even if it changes little, if anything. So obvious. 

 

They have more in common than Isagi can stand to think about. Maybe that’s why they only ever chase circles and head nowhere.

 

He pulls out his phone.

 

♛: darling [5.04 pm]

 

♛: are you done with your walk? [5.04 pm]

 

♛: don’t you have work later? [5.33 pm]

 

♛: why aren’t you responding? [5.46 pm]

 

number#1noafan: Sorry [7.32 pm]

 

number#1noafan: I got caught up refereeing a football match [7.32 pm]

 

number#1noafan: And then I was trying to chase these kids home [7.32 pm]

 

number#1noafan: And right now I’m super late for work [7.32 pm]

 

number#1noafan: Is Eight free?? [7.33 pm]

 

number#1noafan: I could really use a ride to the diner [7.33 pm]

 

As he hurries away, heading one stop over from stop #49 because while the high school delinquents might not have shown at the park, Isagi’s not in the mood to find out if they are in the area still, he tries his own little tightrope walk - one that’s still new to him, one that he’s trying to get used to.

 

Because while relying on others doesn’t come easy to him, he only seems to mess things up when he doesn’t.

 

Eight is palpably annoyed when he comes to pick him up, not too long after - he must have been in the area, and Isagi doesn’t bother trying to theorise that he might have been the one to bring the Emperor here, this fast, from the last spot he’d been texting Isagi from. But at least he’s not too mad about it, as Isagi straps himself in and offers him the one anko-flavoured wagashi that had somehow escaped the grabby hands at the park, falling deep inside his bag, as a peace offering. 

 

Something about I don’t know what you did, but he’s calmed down.

 

And so, Isagi realises, as they get farther and farther away from the park and back into the city proper, has he. 

 

It’s not much - he’s guessed more than half of it himself, the love of reading, the troubled childhood. But it’s been shared with him - given him, entrusted to him. Even if it’s just a crack in the door. Not letting himself inside, no, but revealing just a sliver of what lay within. 

 

It helps him endure the rest of the time he has left to wait.

 

Because he’s decided, already. It’s not like he’s going to change his mind. 

 

He’s going to make the first move. Knock at the door and wait - like he’d done on the threshold of an apartment many mornings ago, like he had on a rooftop under the rain.

 

And then the ball will be in Kaiser’s court - and whatever he chooses, however he decides to take this ahead, Isagi will play along.

 

Because he’s unfair, and selfish, and he doesn’t want to let him go. 

 

Now

 

Take the cue from him, see how you can bring it up naturally , had been Chigiri’s advice.

 

Why don’t you just say it? Had been Nagi’s, who seemed utterly put out by Chigiri’s if/then model and the effort it demanded.

 

Just give him a mwah, he’ll get the message, had been Bachira, and Isagi’s not even going to think about it. He’s not thinking about it, for God’s sake -

 

“Too slow,” the Emperor cuts away and Isagi tries to twist to follow him, but fumbles his footing, and almost eats rooftop ground. A strong arm belts around his waist and yanks him, a grip that barely seems to register his body weight as it sets him on his feet again. “Need a break?”

 

“Fuck you,” Isagi rattles out around his chaotic breathing, and only because he can sense how smarmy that offer had been. He’s supposed to be up here to make a breakthrough with him - but right now, he’s struggling to find an emotion that doesn’t involve breaking through his stupid helmet with brute force.

 

The Emperor makes a scandalised noise. “Never on the first date, what do you take me for?”

 

Isagi, brain starting to go silent from all the neuron-activation, white hot as it steams inside his skull, bites down on his lip so hard he almost cuts himself.

 

Somehow, asking if this seriously is a date feels like too much of a cue.

 

It’s almost tempting to call it quits and run away, plaster himself with cooling patches on every exposed bit of skin on his body downstairs. But he can’t - he really can’t. The longer he goes without getting to reach out and grab what he’s chasing, the more reckless he can feel himself getting. He can’t afford to mess this up before he’s pelted himself forward without thinking again. 

 

Slow down. Take a deep breath. 

 

Watch. 

 

He always favours the right. Whenever he starts circling Isagi, he naturally takes the right. Isagi scans him quickly, all over, taking in the angle of his body, just slightly turned to start that circuit all over again. Too subtle to be obvious, but two nights of this is enough for Isagi to pick up that slight tell. The big question is what comes after - what happens once Isagi times his next attack, whether he should risk losing his own footing by attempting a feint and then cutting in the other direction, or whether he ought to try to lunge with an extra burst of speed to catch him off guard.

 

That’s what he needs. To catch him off guard, just for a split second - that split moment’s opening he’ll need to think . 

 

“You’re too tense,” calls the Emperor, all but sauntering around him. “You won’t be able to control your movements if you’re that tense.”

 

It pisses him off to admit, but he’s right. Isagi breathes in again, slow. Deep. Lets it out, slow. Deep. Lets the tension melt out of his muscles as he does, limbs loosening until they feel a little more malleable, a little more willing to bend to the picture he’s starting to visualise in his mind. 

 

Don’t make it obvious, he tells himself. Watch him and don’t make it obvious which way you’re trying to go. He’ll catch on in a second, but in that one split second, Isagi needs to make his choice.

 

It’s the matter of a single blink, the weight of his foot kicking off the ground and pushing him into his forward charge, but Isagi can already tell from that fraction of a millisecond that this is a strong surge. His balance is good, his timing is good, the speed is good, and ah - there it is.

 

His opening. 

 

Just a second, just one tiny second of surprise to read where Isagi’s going and respond and -

 

He turns exactly at the same time Isagi does, right into where he’d been expecting him, and Isagi grabs at his forearm, captures it in his palm.

 

Forgets the knife in his other hand entirely as he grips tight and hears himself say, breathless, giddy, “I got you.”

 

And again, as the smooth material of the body suit’s sleeve scrapes against his palm, sliding the length of the forearm it barely manages to encompass in it until his hand locks around the wrist instead. 

 

A half-wheezed, “I got you.”

 

“Yes, you did,” comes a quiet murmur, sounding amused - he’s pliant under Isagi’s hold, not breaking free as he easily can, Isagi knows, with his stupid strength. “Good job.”

 

And it sounds genuine, the praise, even though Isagi shouldn’t be able to tell. Voice changer and mask and all. 

 

But he can, doesn’t think to think otherwise, and he can’t help it -

 

The breathy little laugh that escapes him, bubbles escaping the tab of a just-opened soda can, fizzing over with the sweetness of his triumph.

 

He senses the arm under his touch still, just a little - just a little, but enough to make him look up into the impassive screen of the Emperor’s headgear, and ask, “What is it?”

 

There’s a pause, a small one. It might be the sweat cooling against his face now, that tingling sensation all over his skin,  but it’s almost as though Isagi can feel his eyes on him. 

 

And then his cheek is being pinched, thumb and forefinger squeezing just hard enough to make him squawk, and an almost accusing, “You’re fucking adorable.”

 

Isagi, abruptly conscious of how close they’re standing - how close he’s holding himself to him - yanks his hand away. Uses it to pull the fingers off his face, already scowling as he chides, “Stop that.”

 

“Can’t help it,” the Emperor lets his hand be pulled away, only to close in and squeeze with both of his palms, hot and textured from the leather as they knead at his face. “Cute little thing -”

 

“I’m not a puppy, you weirdo -”

 

“You’re far cuter than a puppy, darling. And cuter still when you smile. Smiling keeps you young, you know?”

 

“And there you go again, sounding like a creepy old man,” Isagi tries to shove at him with both his hands, pushing against his arms. They don’t budge, even though the palms cupping his face are gentle now, regardless of how loud Kaiser’s immediate, offended whine is. 

 

“I’ll have you know that many people believe older men make better lovers,” and Isagi really has to try not to gag outwardly, if only because he’s spewing such mortifying things with such shameless ease. In some ways maybe the stupid mask is making this easier for the both of them - he imagines Kaiser’s face babbling these words out at him with the same casual, comfortable ease as the guy leans closer to him - visualises melting through his own clothes if he had to see that roguish little grin in permanent residence at the corner of Kaiser’s mouth. “Many people prefer mature partners, you know - they have life figured out, they’re reliable, they’re capable -”

 

“What I’m getting from this is that you do identify as a creepy old man,” Isagi deadpans, when what he’s really thinking is that reliable and capable are exactly what he’d pictured Kaiser as, what he’d presented himself as at the very beginning of their acquaintanceship. He still is those things, sweeping in to solve Isagi’s problems, even the ones that cannot be solved, just to prove a point. And yet, at the same exact time, he’s also this - childish, temperamental, doing things because he can. So fucking impulsive Isagi can never tell what absurd thing he could get up to next. Someone who has grown up and yet remains as brazen and reckless and untethered as the teen Isagi can imagine running the show on gaudy, brightly lit stages miles and miles away, on a different continent. 

 

“Don’t be an ageist, angel. That’s not nice.”

 

“Whatever, old man.”

“What, so do you prefer them younger?” 

 

Rin’s face decides to pop into Isagi’s head, glare screaming murder, and Isagi half-hysterically wonders what he would have to say if he got to hear this conversation. “No.”

 

“Then that makes older guys your type by default,” the Emperor decides with a kind of imperiousness that comes through in the voice modulation, and Isagi is about to point out that people his own age exist when his follow-up question cuts Isagi off, “So, what else do you like in a romantic partner, angel? Good listener? Someone who pays attention to your every need? An acts of service kind of guy?”

 

And Isagi turns, looks the Emperor right in the eye. He’s not sure when it’d stopped throwing him off, left him fumbling in the dark, unable to actually see the silver and black that hid that bright fiery blue. 

 

Thinks, Ah, there’s the opening and hears himself say, “Sure.”

 

He can see the directness of his answer’s caught the Emperor by surprise. He stills completely for a moment, before a “What else?” purrs out softly in invitation. 

 

“Someone who is…,” he searches around in his head, Chigiri and Bachira’s database of his personal type a recent mental shortcut, “Tall and… athletic, broad shoulders. Great…thighs.”

 

A shocked burst of laughter. 

 

“So you are interested in the physical part too, huh.” 

 

Isagi ignores him - has to, gathering all his mental faculties just to keep speaking. It’s a tightrope walk. “Someone who has pretty, but strong eyes… and light hair that shines in the sun -”

 

He can see, just from the Emperor’s body language, that he is hanging on to each of Isagi’s words. And it feels - 

 

Good, Isagi realises, with too little concern considering the leap he’s feeling himself winding up to make.

 

Thrilling.

 

To have him waiting on Isagi’s words and Isagi’s secrets on tenterhooks. To know that he can capture him just as much as he feels captured, back - a small reassurance that this isn’t just him, that this doesn’t just end when the mask comes off. Isagi stands still, but the rush is right there, the nerves scored through with an electric edge Isagi cannot deny he’s too enthralled by to stop.

 

“Maybe European,” he admits, lightly, and examines the complete stillness with which the Emperor is regarding him. 

 

“That’s… awfully specific, darling,” comes the reply, a quiet thing, still in the air between them. They’re so close to each other - Isagi does not let himself drop his own gaze, and maybe it’s a little conceited of him, but he thinks there’s a pair of pretty, strong eyes staring at him unblinking from behind that visor.. “You sound like you have someone in mind.”

 

He takes a deep, bracing breath. 

 

“I do,” Isagi confesses, and his heart rabbits away in his chest as he tries and fails to keep the stupid grin he can feel growing on his face as he says, “It’s Noel Noa.”

 

There’s a single second of stunned silence before the Emperor curses, loud, and Isagi bursts out laughing. 

 

“You - you little brat -”

 

Isagi tries to twist himself out of reach, succeeds in dodging two of the lunges, now uncoordinated and frazzled, before he’s doubling over too much in laughter to avoid the third. Somehow, as he finds himself trapped in a loose headlock, he starts to laugh even harder.

 

“Horrible,” the Emperor is saying next to his ear, and he sounds so plainly annoyed that Isagi thinks he might have honest-to-God tears in his eyes from how hard he’s wheezing, “ Horrible, you are so terrible -”

 

“Lots of people have a celebrity crush -”

 

“Isn’t that man ancient ? ”

 

“Weren’t you the one telling me not to be ageist two minutes ago?”

 

“Fuck that - what do you see in that pasty old man -”

 

“I mean, I wasn’t entirely lying, you know.”

 

Isagi isn’t sure whether it’s what he’s saying or the fact that he’s stopped trying to squirm out of the man’s hold that gets his attention. Whatever it is, Kaiser stops his raging long enough to ask, almost cautiously, “About having a crush on a goddamn French footballer?”

 

“No,” it’s there, the moment, an opening Isagi can’t resist, all his caution, every word of advice stored in his head, disappearing. It crystallises between them, delicate and fragile and precious, the inevitable second of nothing before hurtling into the air. Isagi stills for that one final, helpless moment, yearning for the rush of freefall. “About my type.”

 

He feels the arms holding him in place freeze. Doesn’t hold his breath, counts the seconds as he inhales and exhales, loud and long, keeping his head empty, until - 

 

The arms let go, only for hands to grab at his shoulders and spin him around, and then they’re facing each other.

 

“You - what are you saying?”

 

An urgency, a quickness. The grip against his shoulder is intent, the fingertips digging into his flesh.

 

“Whatever you think I’m saying,” Isagi returns, because he’s grown just as good at skating around the truth. 

 

Outlining the shape of it without spelling it outright, not yet, because - 

 

A thumb and a forefinger appear at his jaw. Grab at his chin. A little more forceful than usual, the tug of them pulling his mouth a little open as his face is tilted up towards that smooth, masked head. 

 

“Baby ,” the nickname blindsides him completely. He doesn’t know if it’s the newness of it, or the way it’s uttered, a low, crackling rasp into the inches of empty air between them. It zips white-hot down his spine, the trail blazing and hazy in its wake, “You’re going to make me do something stupid.”

 

Melting between his ears, Isagi manages to stutter out a “Sounds on-brand for you, though.”

 

The thumb dares its way higher - catches against his lower lip, tugs at it. Isagi can feel the attention on it, the eyes focused on his mouth, an intent, piercing stare, even without needing to see. 

 

“Fuck…” 

 

Isagi, eye level with a broad, defined chest that he does not want to be caught gawking at, watches it heave, slow and measured. He’s counting his breaths, too, Isagi thinks. In the midst of this fevered moment, the cusp of this thing they’ve found themselves at, a choice that could tip them one way or another, it grounds him a little, even as they rock, back and forth, together. Because that’s how it feels, for once. Standing there, clasped into the moment, at the brink of the fall, together. “Darling…”

 

“Though I’d like you to… not. Do something stupid, I mean. I - I’ve been meaning to tell you that maybe we shouldn’t meet up here, it’s only a matter of time before you’re seen and…” he can feel the words accelerating, speeding and skidding off his tongue in their rush to get out, like he cannot physically stand prolonging this any longer. “We. Um. You know where else to find me, so…uh. Think about it?”

 

He winces at the way that last syllable pitches up and wavers, suddenly uncertain. The nerves puncture through at the last moment and now he can’t even look at him - is so warm and frazzled and anxious as the high of his gamble settles that there are lights swimming in front of his eyes, like he’s gotten up far too quickly. His heart’s a leaden thing, thumping out each beat with an aggressive effort as he wriggles himself free of a leather-gloved hold, unsure how to feel at how it falls slack and lets him go. 

 

Maybe that was too much, he frets, immediate, belated, electricity between his ears. 

 

Maybe this isn’t the kind of first move Chigiri had been talking about, because Isagi has no restraint, and he’d been trying, he’d really been trying to insinuate - hint, enough, scatter obvious breadcrumbs that he could choose or not choose to see. 

 

He’s about to turn tail and run, the uncertainty of the moment suddenly suffocating, when one of the hands that had released him captures him by the wrist again. 

 

Isagi, in spite of himself, utterly ashamed at how quickly his self-control falls apart at just this, feels his whole being yearn in the direction of that touch. 

 

“Angel…”

 

It almost comes out in a squeak as he answers with a quiet, “Yes?”

 

Another pause, a measured one. It sits between them like a moment waiting to happen - there again, that commanding, inevitable final second before a jump. 

 

A body already in motion before gravity claims it. 

 

“...Yoichi.”

The air is sharp as it all but stings its way into Isagi’s lungs, so sudden his gasp. 

 

“Yes,” he says again, in a hush - a single syllable holding the weight of a confession. 

 

He’s not sure which of them it is that staggers a little, like the ground has tilted beneath their feet, just slightly - maybe it’s neither of them, and just the moment itself, disorienting as they change each other yet again, beyond repair. 

 

The hand holding his wrist is tight, almost tight enough to roll the bone around. Isagi twists at it, with hardly any force, and it lets go. 

 

“I won’t tell,” he hushes again, his pulse rushing so quick it can’t be healthy but volume climbing over it because he can’t help himself from saying it, it’s too important not to. “You know I won’t. B-but I’d like to… I’d like to help you. If you want. So it’s… it’s up to you, so just… think about it.”

 

Kaiser is all but stone, he’s standing so still. In the unmoving silence, the full weight of what he’s just done settles on Isagi, and it feels like vertigo. Halfway down the tightrope remembering how far there is to fall.

 

He needs to sit down. 

 

He needs to get somewhere quiet and - 

 

Isagi stumbles backwards, staring at where Kaiser is stun-locked, towards the door. 

 

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he repeats.

 

And then he turns and flees, because that last request is for the both of them. 

 

Or at least -  

 

He - 

 

Tries to - 

 

Because he’s no sooner at the door, fingers barely grazing the rough metal of the handle, when the earth below his feet disappears.

 

All of gravity concentrates in the arm locked strong and firm around him, keeping him from falling yet again. 

 

Isagi hardly has the time to see the sky above as he loses his footing, the stars choked out by the light and smoke spewed by the world below, before that’s all there is left to see - the grey overhead and the grey underfoot, the arm around him clasping him tight into the body it belongs to until he feels himself yanked free of the gasp he lets loose and leaves behind.

 

And then, they are flying.

 

---

Isagi has been imagining, lately, what it must feel like to fly. 

 

He’s never been on an airplane, never gone farther from home than Saitama to this city, foreign even with all the time he’s spent learning to grow into its grooves. 

 

The only experience he can reference, feet leaving the ground, body soaring through air faster than his brain can comprehend, are the two times he’s been lifted up and away, in brief bursts of disorienting movement so quick it throws off all his equilibrium. All his senses upended and unsure and scrambling to right themselves, plucked out of place by a force as unpredictable and unstoppable as a gust of wind tearing suddenly through, gone before you know it. 

 

This time, the wind does not stop. It lifts and carries, a one-armed grip wound all the way around Isagi, secure as steel. The air rips past them and whistles in his ears and Isagi can’t even scream in his surprise, in the sudden primal terror of his legs dangling with nothing to land on, arms clutching blind for purchase until they loop as tight as they can manage behind a strong neck. He wants to scream but they’re moving so fast they’ve already left that impulse behind by the time his body’s managed to remember how to do it, everything swinging and swaying - a sudden jerking stop mid-motion like a fish-hook’s sharp tug, the terrible sensation of suspension, the midair moment of falling, before there’s another light jerk and Isagi can feel the breeze in his air again, whipping it around his ears and into his eyes even though they’re squeezed shut and he knows even with himself curled into the harness of the body holding him that they’re climbing higher. 

 

By the time Isagi feels his feet touch down on something close to solid, he can’t even remember how to make them work anymore.

 

Has to feel himself come back from where he’s left it scattered behind them, dripping back in degrees - shaking legs trying to remember how to hold him up, locked arms remembering to unwind from where they’d caught around shifting, strong shoulders - dancing against him. 

 

He’s laughing, Isagi realises from somewhere far away and then slowly closer. This fucking jerk is actually laughing after near throwing him off a roof and - 

 

Isagi doesn’t even have the chance to take stock of where it is they are, barely has the chance to fully grasp that they are, certainly, no longer at or even around the diner. Is still blinking away the tears that’d sprung into eyes with the wind pushing away in futile resistance wherever he’s bared, catching at his clothes, cutting at his skin, trying to find where he’d left his voice so he can let out the yell still locked up inside him when - 

 

All his scattered awareness catches up to him, all at once, when he sees the man before him reach for his own head with both hands. 

 

“What are you -” he starts, a screechy wobble, the panic on a zero-point-two second delay - 

 

And then the mask is off. 

 

Legs shaking like a newborn fawn’s, Isagi nearly topples over.

 

Doesn’t get to, because he’s steadied in place, and staring, uncomprehending, into the face of Michael Kaiser.

 

“What -” it sounds muted, like it’s gotten lost somewhere inside his throat, or somewhere in all the space they’d just come hurtling through. “What - what are you -”

 

“Yoichi -”

 

Isagi’s blinking and making no sense of what he’s seeing even though this is exactly what he’d expected to see. Gold hair almost bleached silver under the night, pulled tight and flat over his head, strands of it sticking up like fine threads from the static in the air. Pulled tight at the base of his neck, the blue showing up in slivers, the pallor of his skin almost marble-white against the smeared charcoal of the sky. 

 

And those eyes.

 

Those eyes. Staring into him until he feels see-through, overbright.

 

“What -” Isagi stutters out again, the wind still howling in his ears even though they’d stopped flying ages ago. It feels like a dream. Surreal enough that it might as well be, the dream-logic of events playing out with familiar pieces in unfamiliar formations. 

 

“Yoichi,” purrs the voice of the man holding him still, shivering through the layers of leather between the touch of his hand against Isagi’s skin. “Angel -”

 

It jolts through him like lightning - resuscitates him out of his shock. 

 

“What are you doing? ” Isagi yells, regaining his motor functions enough to push at the guy, eyes flying around wildly. He has no idea where they are - just that they’re on a rooftop, far, far higher up than the diner’s judging by the fact that he can’t see any adjacent roofs around them. There isn’t even a doorway here, a place to lead back downstairs through whatever structure he’s carried them off to, “I need to get back, they’ll come looking for me -”

 

“Darling,” and it’s so much that it’s too much, the endearment, in his voice, the naked call of it, and Isagi can’t even look at his face without his brain defaulting to emergency mode, firing signals like he’s in mortal peril, “It’s okay -”

“It’s not okay!” he hisses back, and feels insane. “I just told you not to do anything stupid and what do you do? Run around taking your mask off! You’re literally wanted by the police - and why are you laughing?!”

 

His voice shoots up the octave in outrage, and the whole situation is outlandish enough that he can ignore the corresponding manic fluttering in his stomach at the soft buzz of laughter he can hear , unfiltered. Just… there.

 

All of him, just there.

 

“Why are you laughing, ” Isagi croaks again, and has to grab on to the arms braced on either side of him as he knees buckle once more, “What’s so fucking funny about being out in the open where anyone can see you -”

 

“No one is going to be able to see us up here sweetheart,” The nickname makes him spasm, the faintest pulse of shock, but with how close they are, he can tell this absolute lunatic could feel it. His smile, this sharp, stunned little thing, dark with a kind of wonder, curves up the side of his face. Isagi jolts, because it looks pleased - if ‘pleased’ had teeth and looked ready to bite. “Not unless they’ve got helicopters.”

 

Isagi scans the perimeter again, if only to avoid having to look directly at him. He has no idea where they are - there are no landmarks at eye level to help him figure out their location. Muddled as he is, settling back into himself, it feels like they’re nowhere - like they’ve left the world itself behind. 

 

He shakes his head, violent. “I need to go back - they - my coworkers are going to come looking if I’m late, what am I going to tell them -”

 

“Just tell them that you needed some air -”

 

“In the middle of this awful heat? Who’s going to believe me? They were already weirded out when I showed up like I’d run a marathon the last time -”

 

“Then just go home. Say you were feeling sick -”

 

“That’s not the point - I literally, two minutes ago - what did I tell you? Don’t do something stupid. What did you do? Something stupid! It’s like… do you even have a sense of self-preservation?”

 

A snort. Isagi can hear him. God, he can see him. It’s like before this moment, he’s never seen him before. His head is swimming and he really needs to sit down. “You don’t get to say that to me, sweetheart.”

 

“No, I actually do. Because guess what? You’re the one the police are looking for. You’re the one that, maybe, even these… fucking drug cartels have it out for. You should be in hiding -”

 

“Who told you about that?” That horrible, wonderful look he’d been wearing, like he can scarcely believe what’s happening, like he’s… exhilarated, somehow, falters a little under a frown. “Was it Eight?”

 

Is there even any point in pretence anymore? 

 

The gig is up - the curtains pulled partway through the finale, so sudden and so shocking Isagi is still trying to orient himself back into reality. This hardly feels like said reality. 

 

“I mean… yeah. I was badgering him and he kind of… he implied that things have been…”

 

Kaiser tsks . The discontent sits on the straight line of his shoulders, but Isagi can see it too. On his face. He can see him. “You two are getting along far too well.”

 

“On the contrary, he probably fucking hates me because you keep putting yourself out in the open because of me ! Why are you being so fucking carefree if you’ve actually ticked off a couple of druglords… worse, desperate druglords who’re clearly dumping off all their product into the city to try and wash their hands of it, while you’re just - stop laughing , you ass - ”

 

“You’re worried about me,” says Kaiser, simply, and grins like he can’t help himself. Not a question, or even a statement. Something like an affirmation, to himself as much as to Isagi. 

 

Isagi’s never seen him grin like this before. Almost boyish and almost giddy, but almost a little…depraved, to be truly innocent. 

 

If he weren’t fascinated, Isagi might have been disturbed. 

 

“ You should worry about yourself!” Isagi’s so aggravated he’s almost struggling to get the words out, “Someone just figured out your stupid secret identity, shouldn’t you be more fucking worried about that?”

 

“Well, this does complicate things…this is long before I had intended, too - I had a whole plan of how I was going to do the reveal, I have these tarot cards -”

 

“ Before you had intended - you weren’t even trying to hide! Showing up everywhere like that -”

 

“Only because you weren’t being transparent with me -”

 

“I was being plenty transparent. I’m supposed to tell you if I’m in trouble. Was I in trouble? No!”

 

“Not like I can count on you to gauge what trouble is, so -”

 

“Then what’s the point of the stupid fucking deal anyway? Leave me alone and go into fucking hiding -”

 

“I didn’t bring you up here to talk about work, darling -”

 

“You shouldn’t have brought me up here to begin with!” Isagi, strength back in his limbs, stamps his foot into the ground in pure consternation, “What are you even doing ?”

“Whatever I want,” answers the Emperor. Kaiser. Mask loosely gripped in hand, the other bracing Isagi even though he doesn’t need help standing any longer. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

 

“The point is to not get caught, what is the point of a secret identity if you can be found out? If I can figure it out what makes you think the guys who can afford to hire you can’t -”

 

“But you’re special, darling. How many other people do you think get to come close enough to even try?” As if to make a point, as if he can’t help himself, Kaiser swoops closer. Close enough that Isagi can suddenly smell roses, and is instantly light-headed. “...when did you even figure it out?”

 

“That’s not -”

 

“No, it very much is. How long have you known for?”

 

Isagi squirms. Kaiser just secures his arm a little more firm around his waist and all but tucks him into himself to keep him from trying to flee. “A… while.”

 

“And how long is a while?”

“I kind of… had an idea. Since around our deal? Maybe a bit before…”

 

A whistle. Slow, low, and so close that Isagi can almost feel it against his face. “You sly little -”

 

“Let me help you,” Isagi blurts out. It takes him a second to wrench his eyes up to look at Kaiser, conscious of the irony of how badly he’d wanted to, and how hard it is now that he can. Those blue eyes shine almost silver in the dim night, whatever light lays below the edge of this roof a barely-luminous ocean at the edges of this little stage. “I… I can help you.”

 

For a second he thinks he’s about to get teased again - those eyes, hardly blinking, slide down to half-mast until their blue glows back at him in slits. Instead, he gets a quiet, “I’ve got this under control, darling. Don’t worry.”

 

“But it must be dangerous -”

 

“About as dangerous as swinging around with a grapple gun,” Kaiser quips. Whatever he sees passing over Isagi’s face makes him add, “That is to say, I can handle it.” 

 

“Can you though?” Kaiser’s eyebrows shoot up at the open incredulity in his tone, but Isagi can’t help himself. “Why are you putting yourself in positions where people who might be looking for you can find you? Why are you… why are you always around ? I know that you’re stalking me like it’s a full-time job but -”

 

“Hey -”

 

“Is there something happening?” Isagi interjects, urgent. “Something happening here ? Around the diner, somewhere in these neighbourhoods? Are you keeping an eye on something?”

 

Isagi realises even as the deluge of questions, kept inside too long, spill over that Kaiser isn’t going to answer. Sees the screen slide into place because he’s seen it before, that smooth veneer he wears when Isagi sees him around the apartment building, smiling and debonair but impenetrable. Sees it better, because he’s seen what’s underneath it at last.

 

“Yoichi - I told you. I’ve got this under control. Don’t try to get involved in this.”

 

“But -”

 

“No buts. This is why you weren’t supposed to find out, I knew you’d get nosey -”

 

“You do a terrible job hiding, which is exactly why I think you need the help -” Isagi starts hotly. The forefinger that comes up to press on his lips is gloved, still, but the look it accompanies almost feels indecent as it traces where the hand touches.

 

“That’s your own fault,” Kaiser croons down at him. It’s teasing, but there’s an undercurrent to it, rough. It sounds a little… dark. A little… “You make it so difficult to stay away.”

 

Hungry. 

 

“Are you a child?” Isagi starts, tone berating even though his throat’s gone dry and he can feel his face doing something awfully incriminating, “You’d think that someone living with such high risk would have better impulse control -”

 

“But what’s the point of taking a risk if I don’t get what I want?” Kaiser rebuts, simply. “Why do you think I’m doing this?”

 

“Because you’re a morally reprehensible, opportunistic bastard -” Isagi starts to list, without wasting a breath, and Kaiser laughs, and he sounds so delighted, and Isagi really needs to stop startling everytime that happens. 

 

“Sure,” he hums, as though indulging him. He hooks his fingers around Isagi’s chin in a familiar hold, thumbs at his mouth as he speaks. There’s something about the way he looks at Isagi that makes him break out into gooseflesh - like every nerve is its own little crackling fire of awareness. “Let me rephrase the question. What do you want? What is the grand driving force behind your actions? Your existence?”

 

“You wanna have a philosophical debate about existentialism now ?” Isagi has no idea what time it even is - only that enough of it must have passed that they would notice his absence in the kitchens. He doesn’t even have his phone on him - left stowed away in the employee lockers. “You might be able to get away with doing whatever the fuck you want, but some of us have an honest living to make -”

 

“It’s a simple question, angel,” Kaiser taps at his lips again with a finger. He hardly blinks as he peers down into Isagi’s face. Daring and… a little dangerous. Like Isagi’s only been seeing him from a distance all this time, through a screen, and is only realising, watching these familiar features morph into something unfamiliar yet known , that he’d hardly seen the whole of him…until now. 

 

“What is it that you want ? Not what you think you should want -” he cuts through when Isagi starts to speak, “Not what you want for the world or for society or for whichever cause you’re bleeding your sweet little heart out for right now. What do you want? For yourself.”

 

Isagi’s mouth, forming around at least half a dozen retorts - between wisecracks and the kind of earnest reaffirmations of his moral compass that people find naive or laughable or trite - clicks closed.

 

“I’ll let you think about it,” Kaiser concedes. Slides himself to the side a little, his arm still clasped around Isagi’s waist. The grip no less intimate than all the touch he tries to get away with usually, but feeling a little… a little possessive, as it jerks him into his side. Isagi doesn’t know how he’s supposed to think about it, think about anything really, when the single point of his consciousness seems to have elastic-band-snapped down to where the breadth of that large hand folds over his hip. “You can figure it out on the ride back.”

 

That gets the gears going again. “Oh God - can’t I just - take the stairs,” Isagi glances back out over the roof. Now that he’s got more of his wits around him, he can make out something low and raised up, a bricked little enclosure, near the other edge of the roof - maybe that’s where the stairs are? Mentally, he scans the tallest buildings he can think of in the radius of the diner - thinks they must be on top of the tall office building that devotes several of its floors to the corporate headquarters of travel agents and banks. That’s still a fifteen minute walk away - Isagi’s seen the guy propel himself around before but the speed at which he can move when he’s trying still confounds him, because he doesn’t even know how much time they’d spent in the air to get here. “I’ll just walk ba - oh.”

 

He’d been led to the edge of the building now. 

 

And laying out beneath them is the city.

 

Out as far as the eye can see, stretching into the horizon - the black veins of its streets and the dark shapes of its buildings disappearing into the distance until all that remains, all that appears to exist, are the lights. 

 

Tiny, golden pinpricks, bobbing in the slow winding stream of distant, indistinguishable traffic. Streetlamps, window lights, gold and red orbs, sparkling and tiny and far away. 

 

Like the night sky Isagi’d never seen since arriving in North Ward - all its stars in the black ocean below them instead of heavenward.

 

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” is the murmur in his ear - warm air curling into the shape of it, warm mouth a whisper near his skin. Isagi pushes down a shiver, still feeling a little breathless at the sheer expanse of existence, just sprawled out underneath them, the idea of it - how massive it is, the magnitude of life of it, too incomprehensible all at once. “Not many people get to see this. Like the entire world is right here - at your fingertips.”

 

“Is… that what you want?” Isagi manages to make himself say, at last. It’s quiet, and curved into a question, and yet is almost sure as he asks, “The world at your fingertips.”

 

The puff of laughter near his ear is a touch waiting to happen, nothing to keep it from him as even the physical sensation of it coasts over his skin. Isagi feels himself almost creak towards it, the want a wretched, starving thing. “You get me so well, darling.”

 

Isagi confesses, half a whisper, “I don’t get you at all, I think.”

 

“But I think you do, Yoichi,” he’s heard him intone his name so many times, and yet the sound of it, the intent carved around its syllables, make him wonder if he’s ever really heard it right before. “We’re not so different, you and I.”

 

Dazed as he is - there’s just something about the… scale of the world, at this height, the reckoning of how immeasurably vast it all is, the perspective that for all the anxiety and worry that consumes his own existence, he is nothing but a tiny light in an ocean of them - he still snorts.

 

“Don’t laugh,” there’s a smile in the voice in his ear. It is a languid thing. “I mean it. It’s only as complicated as you make it.” The arm not tethering Isagi to this roof, the only thing keeping him from floating away into space, makes a little sweep of the scenery before them. There’s a flourish to it. Theatrical. “I want the impossible. The world in the palm of my hands. I go after whatever I want that will let me have it. Who is to tell me no?”

 

“It’s not like you listen when someone does -”

 

“It’s not like you do either, my silly little angel,” comes the rebuttal, and what can Isagi say? He’s not wrong. That’s how he’s landed himself here, isn’t it? Against all logic, and all reason, against every warning sign along the way that he could have heeded and let turn him away. How much can he blame this incorrigible, impossible fool for his indulgences when Isagi has been just as bad? “So what is it? That you want of this world?”

“I -,” Isagi hears himself say, with a conviction that should feel stupid - foolish. Childish and arrogant. But it doesn’t. Only sounds like the truth. “- want to change it.”

 

---

“There we go - ”

 

The landing is the reverse gut-pull of the descent - the jolt of impact quivers through Isagi’s bones almost, where moments before, gripping on to Isagi with every limb like an octopus, the plunge had felt like the nasty shock of walking into empty air. 

 

He’d had time to brace himself for it this time - Kaiser had been particularly insistent that he needed to adjust his arms and legs all around himself like a human harness for safety, even though Isagi could tell he was full of shit even with his mask back on - but he’d still not been able to make himself look as Kaiser pelted them out and over the edge of the rooftop, and they’d started to plummet, the speed of it snatching away Isagi’s ability to do anything but hold on for dear life.

 

By the time he manages to untangle himself from Kaiser, he’s too jelly-legged to even kick at him when he ‘helps’ by smoothing down his sides, down to his hips. 

 

“What - time is it even -,” Isagi takes a moment to brace against his knees again, winded for a different reason this time. He closes his eyes tight, wills the world back into order. “Don’t you have a clock inside that thing?”

 

“Very fucking funny,” Kaiser retorts, dry. Over the strain of his own breathing, Isagi thinks he hears the tiniest little click, and then faint, familiar static. “Eight, what time is it?”

 

When he repeats it to Isagi, all he can do is groan. 

 

“I’m going to be in so much trouble,” he eyes the door leading back downstairs, forlorn. It almost seems bizarre to be looking at it now, to think about going through it, into the diner proper to resume the regular beats of his life. The city lights are afterimages still blinking behind his eyelids, and he feels like he’s zoomed back in, back down to ground level, too quickly to do anything but reel. 

 

“Just go home, tell them you’re sick - you’re red enough that you could say you’re running a temperature.”

Isagi smacks at his general direction. “I’m not doing that in the middle of rush hour -”

 

A scoff. “Always so thoughtful, my little angel. Go home and text that you weren’t feeling well, who’s to know any better?”

 

“Easy for you to say - you get to do whatever you fucking want -”

 

“Oh, you think I’m not going to get an earful when Eight finds out my cover’s blown?”

 

Isagi straightens. “Is he going to be mad?”

 

“He’s going to be… upset. Eight worries.” Kaiser shrugs in a way that immediately annoys Isagi. 

 

He eyes the door, listens out for anyone who could be coming up the stairs. “You could be a little fucking considerate for his sake, at least - the poor guy has to keep dealing with your bullshit, like he seems to actually take the stakes seriously and instead you have him driving around after me - ”

 

“Stop worrying about him ,” the mask may be on, but Isagi can distinctly hear the petulance in that remark, “If anything, you should be worrying about me.”

 

“I am worrying about you,” Isagi takes his eyes off the door for a second to glare his frustration through the layer of metal between him and Kaiser’s skull. “That’s why I want to help -”

 

“You can help by keeping your cute little ass out of trouble - ah-ah don’t give me that look,” Isagi doesn’t stop scowling though, even as Kaiser finishes, “If you just sit tight and stay safe, I can focus on work.” 

 

“No one’s asking you to look after me,” Isagi begins, now petulant himself, and almost automatically exhausted by how many times they’ve had this exact conversation. He’s starting to realise, maybe, that it will never be the end. Can’t visualise them agreeing when they’re both bullish and stubborn and so very selfish, always clashing with the greed to snatch what they can from the debris than coming together . “If anything, I keep expressly telling you I don’t want you to -”

 

“And yet you’re offering to help me, darling,” Kaiser cuts him off. A gloved finger traces a coquettish path up his throat to tap below his chin. “Even though you hate the kind of work I do, and the kind of people I work for. You don’t even know what I’m doing, and yet you’re offering to help me - because you are worried about me.”

 

There’s no point in trying to deny it. Not when his entire face, on fire, is a dead giveaway. “We’ve already established that fact, so -”

 

“So, you know exactly where I’m coming from when I tell you to stay put. Let me take care of this -”

 

“What even is this - ”

 

“Don’t pout like that -”

 

“Then what even is the point of the stupid deal - it’s supposed to make things fairer between us, isn’t it? So why do I have to be the person who has to sit still and hide while you get to do whatever you want?”

 

“Because it’s dangerous, darling,” the shock bleeds onto Isagi’s face, he can feel it, at that uncharacteristic, direct admission, cold as it grips him inside. “Not for me - for you. And if you get yourself wrapped up in things that are bigger than you, then well - you’re going to get me wrapped up in it too. You understand, don’t you?”

 

“You won’t even tell me what it is I’m meant to be afraid of -”

 

“Because I know you, little clown. I know that chances are, you’re still going to try and find out, and I’m still going to have to keep an eye on you so you don’t go nose diving into a gang war or something -”

 

“I won’t,” Isagi surprises himself when he says it. How obstinate, and sure, he sounds. He can tell he’s surprised Kaiser too, with how still he goes. “I - I won’t be careless. I won’t make it more difficult for you. But then, at least -”

 

The words taper away. This is how it’s always going to be, isn’t it? Always a battle, for every inch. Isagi, headstrong, humiliated, forces himself to say, “If I have to tell you when I’m in trouble, then at least - at least you have to tell me when you’re in trouble too.”

 

“Darling -”

 

“Because I’ll worry,” Isagi hurries to add. So abashed he can’t see straight, so determined he already knows that he could lose his job today but won’t leave until he gets at least this. This inch. “I’ll worry otherwise, and I’ll come looking.”

 

There’s a long, long pause. Long enough that Isagi, ears strained to their limit as he tries to pick up any noise around them, can even hear the near non-existent rattle of the chainlink fence as it sways in a barely-there breeze. 

 

“Yoichi,” he sighs at last. It sounds almost melodic. “You’re so fucking unfair.”

“That makes two of us,” he quips back and massages at his elbow for something to do with his hands. “So… will you? Tell me if you’re in trouble?” 

 

Another pause, and a heavier sigh. There’s a current of frustration running through it. “How am I supposed to say no when you look at me like that?”

 

“Then it’s a deal?” he holds out his hand. The scene must remind Kaiser of the same thing Isagi is thinking of, because it makes his shoulders dance, just a little. As though the laughter is begrudging. 

 

A large gloved hand takes his, anyway, far larger than the one Isagi’s shaken at a park, for a football changing ownership, and more evenings than he’d accounted for refereeing children playing football. It squeezes, and gives him a firm shake, “Deal.”

 

“Okay,” Isagi breathes out - the relief is so immense, the breath he’d been holding in so large, the release of it nearly leaves him lightheaded. “Okay, then -”

 

“Ah, darling, you’re forgetting something.”

 

He blinks up at Kaiser, confused. “What is it?”

 

“The deposit.”

 

Immediately, Isagi’s wary. He suspects the guy is going to try to weasel away some loophole for collateral, and it must show on his face, because Kaiser laughs a little harder this time. 

 

“Don’t look so suspicious, you’ll hurt my feelings.”

 

“Do you want it in writing or something -”

 

“No - I just want you to close your eyes.”

“What? Why?”

 

Still holding on to his hands, lacing their fingers together in exaggerated tenderness, the man in front of him tilts his head as he says, “Trust me?”

 

And Isagi…

 

He does.

 

So he closes his eyes.

 

And for a long moment, there is nothing. The hand holding his retreats, and as though to fill in the blanks where his eyes can’t see, Isagi finds himself listening more intently. Feeling, more intently, like he can imagine Kaiser is moving off the vibrations he thinks he feels against his skin. 

 

And then he knows that Kaiser is moving, because the bulk of him, a wall of tangible heat, is suddenly right in Isagi’s space, and his eyes fly open at the exact moment that warm lips, a little chapped, brush a teasing trail against the side of his jaw.

 

“There,” Kaiser coos, sweet and sinful. Mask off, eyes gleaming like they could devour him. Retreats and lets out a laugh, a harsh exhale of air, like he’s having trouble believing it all for himself. 

 

A single finger traces over the hot, hot curve of Isagi’s ear, the cool touch a reminder of the fact that he burns . “Now you.”  

 

---

 

Isagi’s manager does start to yell when he sees Isagi minutes later, before cutting himself off with an alarmed, “Good lord, did you get a heatstroke? Do you have a fever?”

 

And Isagi will think later that when he says Yes and lets himself get fanned at while his temperature is taken and then hurried home, that maybe it doesn’t count as a lie if he doesn’t remember what he’d been saying in the first place. 

 

All he remembers is the devil beaming down at him.

 

The mass of all the want he’d been carrying inside of himself, this fermenting awful greed, and how it’d exploded at very last.

 

The Give him a mwah in Bachira’s voice the last delirious thought he remembers having before he’d grabbed Kaiser by his stupid hair bun and pulled him in.

Notes:

the next one is one hundred percent absolutely without a doubt the last chapter it's literally titled 'a rose final final final for real this time pls god' in my drafts - thank you as always for your patience and i'm going to ask for a little more of it as i try to conclude this fic with care, for the characters and also for the incredible ppl who've stuck through with it this far. you have no idea how much you motivated me through every single slump i've run into with this behemoth, thank you, SO MUCH.

Chapter 7: Chapter 7, Part 1 (Posted 15.2.2025)

Notes:

IMPORTANT i swear i tried to post the final chapter in one go but ao3 told me it's too long so i'm posting the final final FINAL chapter right after this so it's one continuous read like god probably did not intend, happy belated valentine's day

Chapter 7, Part 1 | Chapter 7, Part 2

Now

Even in the throes of the cold, biting panic that all but paralyses him under the tepid breeze of a waning Japanese summer, Isagi can’t ignore the irony that it is here, again, that he finds himself waiting. 

 

His fingers dance in agitation against his phone screen every couple of seconds, waking it up before it has a chance to darken, scanning the chat log it is open on as though keeping it in sight will get a response sooner. 

 

In his other hand, he grips a card, its sturdy matte shape a little worse for wear already from how tight Isagi has been holding it - how many times today he’s palmed it out of his wallet and then later, from his pocket, shoved inside for easier access.

 

The trill of his phone almost makes it slip out of his hand before he grasps it tighter and answers an octave higher than he means to. 

 

“Hello?”

 

“Yoichi Isagi,” his full name jams something silent inside him for a second, a solid knot in his chest that takes a moment to loosen as the voice on the other end continues, “What are you -”

 

“The rooftop,” the words burst out all at once, and the anxiety that had been bristling beneath the surface thrashes out as he rushes on, “You can talk to him right? Tell him - tell him to come to the rooftop, he can hide here, there’s a storage room no one goes to during rush hour and he can -”

 

“Wait - how - ,” on the other end, the Magician - Alexis Ness, he already knows, he knows, though now is not the time to broach how , “ How do you know that he - ”

 

“It doesn’t matter!” In his fist, the piece of card with the ankh is crumpling beyond repair, “It doesn’t matter, he’s - he can hide here until the coast is clear. Or you can come get him, he can just, I don’t know, leave as one of the guests?”

 

There is silence for a while, a fraught, tense silence that does nothing to ease the almost violent beating of Isagi’s heart. It becomes too much too quickly, and with the plea in his voice loud in its whisper, Isagi decides to put all his cards on the table, all at once.

 

“Alexis Ness,” he thinks he can almost hear the reticence to speak switch to stunned silence over the line, “The Magician. I know - I know about you, and I know that you got the entry I made on your dumb website. I know that he -,” A horrible quaver that nearly swallows his voice down. “He’s in trouble. I want to - I can help. Let me help. ”

 

He’s panting as though he’s run a mile now, his pulse too loud to keep reading into the quiet of this new pause that follows. And then -

 

“He’s injured,” the Magician - Ness - shares softly. Isagi does not know what he was expecting, but the admission runs the blood cold through him. His breath is shallow, his questions fragile things threatening to break as Ness quickly continues, “ Not bad enough that he can’t still manoeuver, he can’t get down to ground level right now anyway, but -”

 

“Where is he?” Isagi asks. The urgency warps his voice into something that doesn’t even sound like him. “Is he close by?”

 

“Twenty… thirty minutes away?”  There is an edge that Isagi had not been able to detect, right at the beginning, over the less than great connection and the rush of his own pulse. “At the intersection, I don’t think -”

 

“Okay, okay,” The syllables trip over each other in their haste to come out, frantic little things. “The intersection near the shopping district, right?” 

 

Isagi whips his phone away from his ear, throws a look over his shoulder at the door to the rooftop stairs, and then switches the phone to speaker so he can pull up his maps, “Let me think - if he’s… okay, if he’s anywhere near the bank, or if he could get there, there’s a whole network of alleyways at the back that have been cordoned off because of that raids - police might be patrolling there late at night but right now is still rush hour and they don’t have enough people so I think there’ll be just the bank’s security guards and one cop patrolling, at most , so if he can cut across from -”

 

“ Yoichi -,” Ness interrupts, and Isagi realises for the first time during their call that this is his real voice, filtered as it is through his phone speakers - the tone he was affecting in the car is gone, as is the smooth mechanised one it’d swapped places with, replaced instead by a tension bleeding into the pauses, a tension Isagi can feel match the confusion and dread and uncertainty setting his teeth on edge, “Yoichi, I don’t know - ” He cuts himself off with a frustrated sound. Isagi thinks he catches a muttered phrase that, maybe, is not in a language he knows. 

 

“Fuck it,” Ness hisses finally, “stay on the line, okay? I’m patching you directly to him.”

 

The line goes silent, and everything else - the rattle of the wire-mesh around the roof, and the rattle of Isagi’s heart bruising itself against his ribs - becomes ten times louder.

 

And then he’s scrambling to put the phone to his ear again, as he hears the sound of breathing - heavy, belaboured breathing, that immediately churns the anxiety in his gut to something worse.

 

“Hello?!”

“...Angel? ”

 

And Isagi wishes, wishes there was time . To ask what happened, where he is, how he got hurt, how bad he’s hurting. If he’s okay, if he’s going to be okay, why would he even do this, even though Isagi thinks he knows. 

 

But there isn’t time, and Isagi gathers his wits around him as he stretches his mind to try and visualise, as clearly as he can, the intersection where he must be - the shopping district laid out in its broad, sensibly planned landscaping, and deeper and closer still, into the thin lines existing in between the buildings and streets, where the light doesn’t always reach. 

 

“You stupid fucking idiot,” Isagi tries to breathe through the words and the fear, when he really wants to say Michael , “Tell me where you are right now.”

 

Then

 

Isagi sometimes thinks of North Ward as the self-conscious product of its own mutually assured destruction. 

 

He leans back into his bus seat, jerking as the thing lurches over a speed bump too fast. The lights on the other side of its tall windows catch where the condensation sweats against the glass, the struggling air conditioning inside working hard against the heat pressing in from beyond. 

 

In that sliver of space where the two meet, the night lights swim, vague and shapeless through the fogged-up screen. And Isagi finds himself wandering back again to that view from the skyscraper. 

 

So high above the world it seemed to no longer belong to it. 

 

The pulse of all this life, its unrelenting flow, spread out below him. Ceaseless as it moves and lives and breathes in its delicate balance. It's an act of containment, a disease that never breaches into an outbreak, poised where anything could upset this careful balancing act. The gang leaders who battle it out for territory but never allow the mistake of all-out-war, crime rings that slip in and out of the glaring loopholes that justice blinds her eyes to, the police doing enough that they know they’re doing something, but not so much that there’s critical, lasting change . Because change can be a damning thing - change can alter the topography of this place altogether.

 

It simmers and simmers and simmers but never boils over, because it knows. It restrains itself just enough, its politicians arrested for corruption knowing not to drag all their shadowy enablers into the mess, its gangs knowing just how much provocation they can get away with without guaranteeing a retaliation that would burn through both ends of the match. 

 

The city, this living, breathing thing, knows its own twisted symbiosis. It knows how much is enough and how much is too much, too far, because if it tilts more than a little one way, it knows the whole thing falls apart. Everyone loses.

 

Lately, Isagi’s started to think of himself and Kaiser along those terms, too. 

 

A mutual deterrence, because of what they mutually stand to lose.

 

“ - how did you even find out? What exactly do you know?” Kaiser’s voice presses over the phone, through a number Isagi had saved on to it but never texted. 

 

Kaiser’d teased him about it too. Since it was taking you so long to make the first move, he’d said after he’d called, and Isagi had told him, well, they’d been talking the entire time anyway, hadn’t they? Did it matter whether it’d been through default avatars on a social media app or through their phone numbers?  

 

There’d been something in Kaiser’s silence there that had made Isagi push back with a quick, What is it? Spit it out. 

 

He hitches the strap of his backpack more securely onto his shoulder, steps brisk as he follows his well-practiced route from the third bus-stop towards home. Kaiser had called almost as soon as he had hopped off the bus, laughing through Isagi’s vocal suspicions that he’d been following again, that he might have been riding the roof of the damn vehicle for that spot-on timing, even though Isagi’s seen nothing of him on the way here. 

 

Kaiser would not tell him how he had known when the bus arrived. But Isagi guesses that he’d had the app downloaded or something, tracking its arrivals and departures like all the rest of the passengers. Tracking Isagi’s arrivals and departures all day long. 

 

Stalker. Creep. 

 

He’d just laughed through the name-calling, that obnoxious, intentionally annoying laugh, and Isagi’d swallowed away his relief that Kaiser can’t see him, and see his own reluctant smile bitten down anyway, as a matter of principle.

 

Nothing, Kaiser’d said, as Isagi pushed him about it, what he’d wanted to say earlier. 

 

Had diverted the conversation, brought them here instead with How was I to know that you knew who you were texting? 

 

How did you find out? 

 

What do you know?

 

“I’ll tell you if you tell me what’s happening that has you prowling around the diner,” Isagi bargains, again. He hears Kaiser groan on the other side, and feels a grim sense of satisfaction. Good. If he has to feel frustrated about being kept in the dark, it’s only fair that he gets to elicit the same feelings back. 

 

“I thought we agreed on this already, darling -”

 

“We didn’t agree on this, ” Isagi corrects. On the offensive in an instant, so quick to jump to the attack. “We agreed that I’d tell you if there was trouble, and that you’d tell me if there was trouble -”

 

“And since there’s no trouble, there is nothing to report -”

 

“If you want information from me, I demand information back,” Isagi tells him, stubborn and dogged and surly as he quicksteps his way through town. 

 

There’s the sound of a slow release of air, an exasperated noise in Isagi’s ear. 

And then, “Fine.”

 

Isagi’s heart leaps. He almost topples, feet coming to a sudden halt and his leftover momentum nearing knocking him off them. Almost disbelieving, he says, “You’ll tell me?”

 

And then the high comes crashing down in an instant as Kaiser taunts back, “Of course I won’t, darling. I meant fine - keep it to yourself.”

 

It’s not the smartest thing to do, linger on the sidewalk on the phone late enough at night that there’s just a pedestrian or two to share the street with, barely any traffic passing through. He’s had attempted phone snatchings happen in less dubious circumstances. 

 

Still, Isagi can’t immediately make himself move again, not when - 

 

“Are you… are you serious?” He's as incredulous as he sounds. “Don’t you want to… I don’t know, properly investigate how someone could figure you out like this? If it’s happened once, it can happen again -”

 

“But it won’t -”

 

“Just because you’re too arrogant to believe -”

 

“It won’t, sweetheart.”

 

“It already has. ”

 

“And it won’t again. We’re taking precautions.”

 

“Taking precautions, my ass,” Isagi hisses heatedly in the direction of the speaker. He darts a nervous look around the street as his own volume crescendos, and forces his feet back into movement, picking out the way to the apartment on auto-pilot. “There’s a whole person who knows your stupid secret identity walking around free as anything. You should be more worried about that than you are!”

 

“You’ve already said that you won’t tell anyone, darling. I recall you insisting on it right after telling me that I’m your type .”

 

He’s trying to fluster Isagi, he can tell. It’s a good thing he isn’t physically around to see that it’s working, like every reminder of that encounter on the roof does. 

 

If he’s not careful it’ll singe again. A need gasping to life, gulping down air and space and touch, desperate hands and desperate mouths and the strength it took to peel away, messy, tangled tape and fumbling fingernails and Kaiser’s hands clutching at his jaw like he didn’t know if he wanted to wrench him closer or shove him away.

 

Go before I fucking eat you, he’d hissed, steam against his mouth. A promise and a warning all at once. 

 

With some effort - with a lot of effort - Isagi forces it away. All of its heat and fever and its giddying highs, clouding the judgement he needs right now. 

 

“You just have my word for it,” Isagi reminds Kaiser. Is aware of the irony of it all, the fact that he’d craved so badly to be trusted with the truth, and yet now that he has it, he’s almost appalled by how carefree the giving of it had been. “You’re… aren’t you going to try and work out some kind of guarantee that safeguards you? You’re just… you’re just going to believe that I won’t give you away?”

 

There’s silence on the other side for a while. Isagi finds himself searching inside of it, for a clue, for a sign. Isn’t sure if the idea of Kaiser’s resistance bothers him more than his capitulation - doesn’t know what he wants, all these stupid contradictions he’s juggling clumsily because of this one infuriating man. 

 

Isagi grips the phone tighter, pushes it flush to his ear, holding him there.

 

“If I’m going to believe in something,” Kaiser says at last, and there’s a ring to how he does, about his voice as he does, quiet and a little strange, that makes Isagi almost stop breathing to hear it better. If he has his mask on, Isagi’s hearing him directly, from beyond it. Beyond the voice changer, through its pretence. “Then I think I could believe in you.”

 

That’s about as illuminating as these poorly-powered streetlamps are, shabbily lighting Isagi’s way home as he makes his final turn, the facade of their apartment building coming into view. 

 

And yet - 

 

“What does that even mean?” Isagi finds himself murmuring. As though he could miss it if he speaks any louder, whatever response Kaiser will give next.

 

“It doesn’t matter. I know I’m in safe hands,” and that effectively shuts down Isagi’s own protests, halfway-formed and swallowed down. “Am I not?”

 

“I - I mean,” Isagi stammers, blinking owlishly as his eyes adjust to the relative brightness of the building’s entryway. “Yes.”

 

It’s a decisive yes. Sincere in a way that’s so telling Isagi feels like he’s being seen through, even though there’s no one here to do the seeing. But even though he isn’t here, Isagi thinks he can hear the pleased smile in Kaiser’s voice anyway after he tries to announce, a little louder than necessary, that he’s home. 

 

Demands that Kaiser tell him when he’s back too.

 

It’s not exactly what he’d hoped for, what he’d only realised he’d wanted underneath the anxiety that had been at the forefront of his mind, anticipating and dreading the meeting on the rooftop, not letting himself dwell so much on the outcome as the act itself. Chigiri might have cautioned him to take his cues from how Kaiser took his approach, and Isagi thought he had, but he’d already known exactly what he wanted, right?

 

Is there really any other way to say it than admit that he’d wanted everything?

 

Complete disclosure. Complete trust.

 

He doesn’t mean to get mopey about it - feels guilty and ashamed that he’d received as much as he had and somehow still come away wanting more. Chigiri had been blunt with him, even as he patted him roughly on the head in consolation. 

 

Getting to know someone over time is the point of dating , he’d been admonished, you damn overachiever.

 

To which Isagi had barely avoided a meltdown at the question of Are we even dating?

 

He’s not sure. It’s not like they’d talked about that - even though, he supposes, glancing away from the thought as quickly as he acknowledges it like he’d reached into a naked flame - considering how that night had ended, they might as well be. 

 

They’d just not… talked about it. There’s a lot that they still haven’t talked about, and Isagi, greedy, impatient, is starting to realise that maybe he doesn’t get to call Kaiser clingy when he might be just as bad.

 

All he gets to work with is that Kaiser is busy, has been making do with text messages all hours of the day as though trying to compensate for the lack of physical presence, the absence of time. Missed me? he’d crooned, when Isagi had picked up the phone after a single ring, registering the name glaring up at him on the screen. I miss you too, angel.

 

Busy doing what, though ?

 

Kaiser might have locked him into a stupid stalemate, his guarantee of involvement if Isagi got involved. But it’s already taking everything out of Isagi to hold still. Does Kaiser really expect that Isagi is going to manage without at least knowing what he’s doing, what dumb covert operation he’s got himself preoccupied with and why? 

 

Does Isagi? 

 

It’s their goddamn mutually assured destruction. A guarantee of deterrence existing solely because if Kaiser is involved, Isagi wants to be involved, and if Isagi is involved, Kaiser will be involved. 

 

An act of caring that feels like an act of war.

 

Freshly showered, Isagi does one last check on the succulents for the day - maybe he’s imagining it, but one of them looks a couple of shades greener than he remembers it being the day before. He wriggles himself into the light summer covers, unable to drift off without the weight of something over him even though he might wake up sweating in the middle of the night, and reaches out for his phone. Is feeling around half-blind for the charger cable when he notices he’d received a new message while he’d been in the shower.

 

♛: honey ~

 

♛: i’m home

 

“Dumbass,” Isagi says out loud, into the nothingness, and there’s no one around to hear it. Its frustration and its fondness, and it’s a quiet selfish relief. 

 

It’s so little, but it’s something, and Isagi tells himself that he can live with it for now. This brand new degree of openness and trust, something no longer contained by phone screens and balcony windows, something that feels far more mutual and equal and fair than any of the deals they’ve struck before. 

 

For now, this will do. For now, he’ll take it. 

 

Until the next time they butt heads, haggling for what they can get. That seems to be how it works best for them.

 

---

 

number#1noafan: [IMG000154.png]

 

number#1noafan: LOOK

 

number#1noafan: LEAF

 

number#1noafan: Wait, you’re at work right now

 

number#1noafan: Don’t look, you might smash into a building 

 

number#noafan: But one of my succulents grew a baby stalk!!!!!!!

 

♛: sweetheart

 

♛: you really do have magic hands 

 

number#1noafan: Okay why does that immediately sound creepy

 

♛: sigh 

 

♛: i am being sweet and supportive

 

♛: why must you doubt me 

 

♛: we need to do something about your dirty mind 

 

number#1noafan: I immediately regret coming to tell you 

 

♛: don’t be like that darling 

 

♛: darling?

 

♛: angel come back 

 

♛: i’m really glad you managed to save it

 

♛: hated seeing you all sad  

 

♛: just like you to defy nature itself to save something 

 

♛: well done 

 

number#1noafan: [...]

 

number#1noafan: Thanks

---

 

♛: shouldn’t you change your username now

 

number#1noafan: ?

 

♛: why do you have a random man’s name in the username you use to talk to me 

 

number#1noafan: Because I’m a huge Noel Noa fan?

 

♛: :( 

 

number#1noafan: Come on 

 

number#1noafan: I grew up watching him play 

 

number#1noafan: I wanted to be a football player just because of him 

 

[Read: 05.32 pm]

 

number#1noafan: Well what the fuck is it

 

number#1noafan: You can’t seriously be mad about this 

 

[Read: 05.44 pm]

 

number#1noafan: I can see the read receipts asshole 

 

number#1noafan: You know what, fuck you 

 

[‘number#1noafan’ changed their username to ‘41’]

 

41: Happy now?

 

41: You giant baby

 

♛: your baby?

 

41: How do you block people on this stupid app

 

---

“To the park? Again?”

 

Isagi doesn’t have to hear his voice over the phone to know he’s less than pleased about it. “Am I supposed to just sit indoors when I don’t have a chaperone?”

 

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’d like you to do, actually.”

 

“That’s not going to happen,” Isagi seethes quietly. It’s earlier in the evening than that first phone call, squirreled away in Isagi’s head in a list of firsts, and Isagi is one stop over from Stop #49. He’s not seen anything out of place, maybe given the time of day - he doesn’t suppose kids running a school gang would be enticed to hang around when there are too many people, and fewer easy targets. If anything, that’s good news, and he tells Kaiser as much, adding, “I can’t just stop living my life because something might happen, you know.”

 

“If you want to live your life, go read a book or something. Go to a museum, or watch a movie. Instead you’re running around using up your own time to look out for other people’s lives.”

 

“What makes you think I’m not doing this for myself too?” Isagi retorts. 

 

Keeps to himself that Kaiser might have a point. 

 

When was the last time he’s done any of those things? Read a book, or gone to the movies, or just… lived life as a normal young person? Decompressed, in a way that didn’t involve either being snagged up in his friends’ plans or sitting spacing out on a rooftop, borrowing a palmful of time out of the day to just stop and breathe. 

 

If he pauses long enough to think about it, he’ll just see the ways his days segment into what he spends at school and what he spends at work and what he spends in between, just… searching. Watching, wary, trying with what he’s got of himself left over to do something that counts. Something that feels consequential. 

 

Change the world, he’d said, cringing at how bold that declaration sounds now, down at street level as he walks among other ordinary people, living their ordinary lives. How much of what he’s ever done to try and make a difference is even visible at that height? 

 

To Kaiser, he just says, “I did mean it when I said I like taking walks, you know.”

 

“We both know that’s not why you -”

 

“And besides, because I knew you’d have a lot to say about it, I’m not going alone.”

 

A pause. “You’re not?”

 

“No. I’m meeting up with someone and we’re going to just walk by the park and see how the kids are doing, try and get them to leave before it gets too late, and then I’ll catch the evening bus back in time for work.”

 

Does that make you feel better, he almost asks, rolling his eyes at the urge. It chafes at him, the constant, neverending battle between his own nature and the compromise he’s agreed to, that he’s not going to make this any more difficult for Kaiser than it needs to be. The only thing that makes it easier to swallow is the fact that he knows exactly what it is to worry about someone you can’t always be around to protect.

 

“Who is it? Your friend who came over?”

 

“Bachira?” It hits the back of his teeth as he says it. That’s… a topic that needs broaching, doesn’t it? He doesn’t know how to bring it up, any of his friends, the fact that they’re expecting to actually meet Kaiser for themselves eventually. Least of all when the few times he gets to talk to Kaiser these days go like this - arguing. Negotiating. Urging each other into safety and secrecy. “No. It’s someone I got to know fairly recently - he lives around here and he goes to the same university as me, same program too. Just a year older.”

 

“You met this person recently and you’re already going on walks with them?” Kaiser’s lack of amusement at this information rings clear through the phone. Isagi’s almost at the rendezvous point - they’d agreed to meet up in front of the convenience store, and Isagi’s a little bit early, so he thinks he might duck inside and grab something for leverage for the kids since he’s already here. Kawasaki won’t be in at this time, though, still working the closing shift. 

 

“I know them through someone else I know,” Isagi deflects, “Despite the state of this city, most people are actually nice , I know that’s a foreign concept to you.”

 

“Very funny,” Kaiser drawls. He sounds unhappy. “Who is it?”

 

“Why should I tell you?” Isagi fires back, even as he steps in through the convenience store doors and the prerecorded welcome message plays out. 

 

Shit. 

 

“Are you at the convenience store?” Damn it. “Is it that girl?”

 

“... it’s that girl’s friend,” Isagi has no choice but to admit, unwilling. 

 

“Yoichi, you…,” Kaiser trails off. Isagi has to remind himself to move out of the way of the store’s entrance, hurrying deeper towards the back. 

 

For some reason, hearing Kaiser say his name these days still gets to him. Like it’s a reminder, one that Isagi sorely finds himself needing sometimes, that the masks have come off. 

 

That they’re Isagi Yoichi and Michael Kaiser first.

 

But…

 

Who is Michael Kaiser?

 

The question, its parameters undefined, catches Isagi off guard as he lingers against the back of the store, where the freezers are. Ice cream is out of the question, it’d all be melted puddles in plastic by the time they get to the park. But more importantly -

 

“What is it?” he probes in an undertone, keeping his voice lower now that he’s indoors, and there’s too many people around in close proximity to hear.

 

“Nothing,” Kaiser says, and the grumbling of it belies the answer. “... do you really just go around getting chummy with everyone you meet?”

 

“It’s called being polite,” Isagi single-handedly scoops up some potato chip bags, the buy-one-free-one deals enticing him and his wallet, the hole in it trying to remind him that bribing children into going home early every other weekday isn’t sustainable for his finances. “Novel, isn’t it?”

 

When Kaiser doesn’t jab back, Isagi dithers - steps back to let other customers head towards the counter as he hangs back. “Seriously, what is it?”

 

“Nothing,” Kaiser says again, and Isagi’s starting to hate that word. How often Kaiser shuts him out with it, just when he’s starting to adjust to the window they’ve thrown open between them. At least, if he were here, Isagi would be able to read something off his body language, if not his face. But he’s not been getting to see much of him lately, either, has he? “Nothing. It’s just… I don’t see what the point is.”

 

“The point of being polite?”

 

“The point of…” he retreats again, leaves Isagi stumbling around in the empty spaces behind him. What is he trying to say? Isagi gets the impression that Kaiser’s not sure, himself, when he signs off instead with a, “Text me when you’re heading back. Text if anything happens.” 

 

Text me… everything, is how he hangs up, and Isagi can only stare at the disconnected call screen on his phone for a second before he’s ushered up to the counter to pay for the potato chips.

 

---

 

41: On the way back to get to work 

 

41: I figured out a trick to get the kids to go home early 

 

♛: plying them with snacks? 

 

41: No

 

41: My poor bank account 

 

41: I just started counting backwards from 10

 

41: I don’t know WHY that worked

 

41: But they were scrambling to leave by the time I got to 3 lol 

 

41: I shouldn’t do it too much though or they’ll get used to it

 

♛: [...]

 

♛: you’re planning to keep doing this 

 

41: I mean 

 

41: Why not?

 

41: It’s nice to get some air 

 

♛: and your 

 

♛: friend?

 

41: Oh he’s really nice! 

 

41: I don’t know how I’ve not met him around campus before

 

41: Apparently he models for a couple of magazines 

 

41: He’s fun too, he played with the kids for a bit 

 

♛: hm

 

41: What’s that supposed to mean

 

41: Hello? 

 

41: God, what are you sulking about now? 

 

♛: i’ll go with you next time 

 

♛: to the park

 

41: But 

 

41: You said you’re not going to be free for a while 

 

41: I told the kids I’ll be back tomorrow 

 

41: And Bachira and another friend said they’ll come with me 

 

41: ??

 

41: I can see the read receipts asshole 

 

♛: let’s have your next lesson soon 

 

---

“You’re not going to find anything,” Kaiser tells him over his shoulder, knowing. “I cleared it out before bringing you over.”

 

Isagi scowls, but still probes, “Cleared it to where?”

 

“ None of your business, my nosey little sweetheart,” comes the annoying, obnoxious trill, and all Isagi can do is trail after him into the apartment, feeling a little wrong crossing into the LDK space - an inversion of the layout of his own - with his shoes still on. 

 

You’re going to need it. Safer when we’re training. 

 

Isagi had been staunch about not meeting back up on the diner rooftop, no matter how much Kaiser teased and cajoled about it being their special place. It was just too risky. The brunt of their recklessness, how just a single second could have upset this whole flimsy secret they’re playing ball with, had only set in after he had left the diner that night, and every night after that he’d spent fighting off the urge to go back up there. It’s chased him home, along with everything else - hounding him into the shower and into bed, a fever he can’t shake off. 

They’d been way, way too careless. Isagi refuses to let them do it again, not trusting Kaiser’s restraint, and certainly not trusting his own. 

 

“Not enough space,” Kaiser comments, as he leads him into his home - past the threshold Isagi’s left himself hovering at for weeks, stuck on a memory, and into the space he’s only glimpsed from afar. Isagi wonders if Kaiser feels it too, the irreversibility of it - how quietly momentous it feels that he’s being let in. “But it’ll have to do.”

 

It appears larger than Isagi’s apartment does, but only because it’s been hollowed out. The coffee table the place had come furnished with is pushed up against a wall, as are the kitchen chairs, clearing a wide enough berth of space for the two of them to stand in the middle of, a good distance apart in their starting stances. 

 

“Darling,” Kaiser calls, playful. “Focus.”

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Isagi mutters, his body dropping into the right stance, but his head on a two second delay. Still scanning every inch of the room he finds himself in, obvious and unable to help himself. “You could buy yourself some shelves, you know? With all that money you’re making.”

 

There are books everywhere. Piles and piles of them, stacked up on the floor, leaning up against each other and against the walls in precarious slopes, and weighing down almost every flat surface Isagi can see - not that there is much else furnishing the space apart from the basic set the apartment had come with. He’s not sure what he’d been expecting, when Kaiser had finally settled on his apartment for their new training space, unhappy that Isagi kept shooting down his offers to fly them up to the skyscraper again, all that wide open space for them to make use of. 

 

Somehow, even though it’s not this, Isagi finds he’s not entirely surprised.

 

Not even when Kaiser just shrugs, and tells him, “Don’t really need them. It’s just more things to keep in here. Now -”

 

Between a blink and the next, Kaiser blurs out of where he’d been standing right in front of Isagi, and Isagi can barely react as he loops around behind him - one arm clamping tight over his torso, capturing both his arms in a straitjacket hold at his sides, the other coming up to graze teasing fingertips, bare contact that makes Isagi tremble in spite of himself, along his throat. “ - someone has you from behind, with a knife to your throat. What do you do?”

 

For all his teasing and toying, Kaiser is surprisingly serious about the lessons themselves. He doesn’t let a single slack movement, a single fumble, pass - is methodical as he corrects Isagi’s stance, how he positions his weight, how he angles his body to twist himself free. 

 

That seems to be what most of these exercises are for - get himself free. Escape.

 

“Why would someone even try to fireman-carry me away,” Isagi complains - as much as he can, heaving for breath where it’s been knocked out of him by Kaiser simply picking him up and throwing him over his shoulders. One second he’d been on his feet, centre of gravity solid so he won’t get knocked down, arms braced on either side of him so he can react no matter which side Kaiser chose to come at him from. And then the next second the man had just charged, and before Isagi could process a single thing the living room had tipped over on its side and he’d found himself dangling, flung over Kaiser’s shoulders and clamped tightly into place. “Let me down -”

 

“Get yourself down,” comes Kaiser’s flippant response, only hitching Isagi more securely into his hold without a breath out of place. 

 

Isagi doesn’t even know how he wants to feel about that. 

 

Starts to flail, knocking his fists against Kaiser’s shoulder blades, kicking his legs as furiously as he can. His stomach swoops, and it’s only slightly from this state of semi-suspension - he can feel the dancing shoulders underneath himself, where one of them digs into his side. 

 

One of his feet nearly catches Kaiser in the gut before he gets let down.

 

“Graceless,” Kaiser says to him, while Isagi tries to get the blood that had rushed to his head hanging half-upside down for too long back in circulation. “But I guess it’ll do since it’s enough to break free.

 

With a frown, he adds, almost to himself, “Maybe I should teach you how to drop and roll too.”

 

“Again,” Isagi wheezes, overly warm already from exertion, “What exactly do you think is going to happen out there to necessitate all of this?”

 

Their lessons so far have been intense enough, with all the attention - all of that intention of Kaiser’s, placed squarely on him. Somehow being able to see him - his face, those eyes, thorough and fixed on him, the blue roses a vivid splash of colour against all that pale, glowing skin, just there for him to look at - it’s a lot. He’s so stark, so undeniably there, sauntering around in the black tank tops he seems to favour when he’s not lounging in a robe. 

 

It makes everything a whole lot worse. Isagi’s having trouble remembering where to look.

 

“Who knows with you?” Kaiser tuts back. “You might just get yourself carried away if I’m not paying attention.”

 

“I told you that I’m going to be careful,” Isagi grumps back. “... is it that you think I’m lying, or is it really getting worse out there?”

 

There is something about the way Kaiser’s eyes catch the light in the darkness, evening descending on them outside of the building, that reminds Isagi of an animal’s. The unblinking, almost eerie glow of them standing out brighter than anything else in the room as they stare him down. 

 

“Stop doing that, darling,” It’s soft and warning, and Isagi has to remind himself to stand his ground as Kaiser all but stalks towards him, “Stop trying to read between the lines like that.”

 

Isagi doesn’t protest being called out. “What else am I supposed to do?” he asks, openly, because hasn’t he earned at least this? The light in the room wanes as evening sinks over them. Soon enough, he’s going to be running back to his apartment to hit a quick shower before he can get himself back on a bus and towards work. It feels like he’d just gotten here - made quiet headway, let inside Kaiser’s domain for once, for the first time - and it already feels like time is running out. It always feels like that, these days, this uneasy race they’re running, all these pit stops and no finish line in sight. “You won’t tell me anything. I don’t know… I don’t know anything.”

 

“And we’re both better off that way,” is what Kaiser says to him, softly, before he breaks out of the slow strides closer into a charge that Isagi only barely manages to flee. Deflects and diverts until it’s time for Isagi to leave, and yanks him back by the wrist just as he’s about to step out through the door.

 

Brushes his lips over the backs of Isagi’s knuckles, eyes gleaming as they watch him, hypnotic and hypnotised. Holding himself so still as he does - like he’s indulging and holding back, something innocent and something depraved, everything and all at once. 

 

It takes all three bus rides to get to work for Isagi’s pulse to return to normal. 

 

“He still giving you mixed signals?” Chigiri asks, not very many days later, with the kind of uncanny precision that makes Isagi wonder if he’s just wearing his feelings clearer than ever on his face these days, or whether his friend is turning psychic. “You’re looking extra out of it. I thought it’s been going well.”

 

“It has been,” Isagi tells him. “We’ve been… talking.”

 

“But?”

 

“But I still…,” Isagi tries to place it, this unsettling feeling that’s starting to needle at him, growing despite his efforts to reason it away. He finds himself up on the skyscraper again, looking down. The lurching vertigo of all that empty space between where he is and where he should be. “I still don’t know what he’s thinking.”

 

“Then ask him,” Chigiri tells him seriously. Isagi blinks at him in confusion, because that’s a bit more of the Nagi approach than the Chigiri approach, or at least, the Chigiri approach he’d been trained up for in his opening move. But where Isagi is still learning to commit judgement to immediate action, Chigiri is already there, decisive as he tells him, “If… I mean if you guys both mutually like each other, and you’re talking, but he’s still not opening up to you… I hate to say it, but that’s not very sustainable, you know?”

 

I don’t want to have to see Bachira maul him, Chigiri had joked, trying to take the sting out of it, like he’s conscious that he’s come off too direct and too damning. 

 

But Isagi knows he’d not meant it as a joke. He’d reassured Chigiri that that’s not going to happen - it’s an exercise in embarrassment, confronting just how sure he is of Kaiser’s feelings, as sure as he is of his own. 

 

But is that enough? 

 

The thought sneaks up on him anyway, faster than he’s able to shake it off. 

 

---

41: [IMG000157.png]

 

41: The kids got me a whistle 

 

41: And one of them brought me hand coloured red and yellow cards

 

41: I almost cried 

 

♛: can’t you get them to just keep themselves at home instead 

 

♛: you know there were 2 more muggings round there 

 

♛: this week alone

 

41: I would’ve done it if I could 

 

41: They’re kids, they’ll want to play 

 

41: And 

 

41: I feel more secure if there are people around them while they do 

 

♛: i’d feel more secure if you weren’t where the muggings are happening

 

41: I wouldn’t worry about it

 

41: There’s usually enough people around that I don’t think anyone would try anything

 

41: At least around the park

 

41: Besides

 

41: I know someone who knows kung fu

 

He has to clarify that over the phone afterwards, on his quick walk back to the bus-stop to catch the ride in time for work. I was kidding, it was a joke, it’s something one of the kids said to - yes, he actually does go for kung fu classes, he’s a baby yellow belt. How do I - I mean I asked him? He’s really into martial arts and gundam and animal facts - well, by talking to him. How else am I supposed to know? 

 

He struggles to place what exactly it is that he can sense off of Kaiser these days, when it comes to calls and messages like this. The discontent, he can tell, but why? It’s not… it’s not just the clinginess he’d played up before under the cover of the Emperor, or the turns of possessiveness that he sometimes can sense when Kaiser grows openly surly because he’d just mentioned Kawasaki or anyone else from the buddy system group chat. 

 

At first, he’d thought it’s just his protectiveness, bordering on paranoid in a way Isagi can’t criticise without facing a mirror. But there’s… something else. 

 

Something else he hasn’t managed to figure out yet. 

 

And he’s starting to wonder if he isn’t the only one at a loss.

 

“ - but actually, dinosaurs weren’t big lizards at all, they were closer to big birds.”

 

“That makes sense,” Isagi nods solemnly. “I saw an ostrich at a zoo once, and I could imagine it being a dinosaur.”

 

The kid, bright green eyes glinting through the thick curtain of his hair - Isagi’s attempted to sweep it back, worrying that having it hanging in his face would be bad for his vision, only to have it all flop back two minutes later - gasps a small, quiet gasp

 

“Are they really big?!”

 

“It was as tall as me,” Isagi tells him, “Though it was a couple of years ago, so about -” he stretches his hand up into the air, higher than his head since he’s cross-legged on the grass again, “This much?”

 

The kid gasps again, the one vivid eye still visible now sparkling behind all that dark hair. “Did you know that ostriches are really, really fast?” he starts to say excitably, “I saw a video on my mum’s phone where this one was chasing these people on a bike -”

 

Isagi shudders. “Scary.” 

 

“Yeah! But it’s okay,” the kid beams up at Isagi, and he can’t help his own smile watching him. Niko is the youngest of the kids here, the sibling of one of the older boys tagging along to play. He’d been wary and pretty shy the first couple of times, approaching Isagi with what he must have figured was stealth, while Isagi pretended he didn’t see him scooching closer and closer when he forced them to take breaks for water. “I know how to beat them!”

 

“You know how to beat - an ostrich? Like… in battle?” 

 

There’s a snort next to him. Isagi, as subtle as he can without taking his eyes off the little ostrich expert, elbows Kaiser in his side. 

 

“Yeah, if they attack you, coz their beaks are really big -” the kid springs to his feet, and then adopts what Isagi can only call a battle stance. His face is scrunched up in how serious he is with his demonstration, miming holding something between both his hands for a wild swing, “you gotta hit it with a stick from the side. The neck is their weak spot!”

 

“Wow, that’s so cool,” Isagi tells him, matching his enthusiasm. “I feel a little reassured now that I know what to do, in case I ever run into a wild ostrich.”

 

The overt praise - and Isagi does mean it, he’d had no idea he could take on an ostrich in single combat - has the boy simmering down some, his body language growing a little more timid again. “It’s okay…,” he says, shyly, “I can tell you how to win against lots of animals.”

 

“I’ll be sure to ask you if I ever need help,” Isagi tells him. “Ah - looks like they’re starting again.”

 

Niko turns over his shoulder to look, and then scrambles back to where his friends are playing rock-paper-scissors to decide the teams for the next round of scrimmages.

As soon as he’s out of earshot, Isagi turns to Kaiser. “You okay?”

 

The look Kaiser gives him is almost indecipherable. “What do you mean?”

 

“I just mean…,” Isagi searches for the words. It’s not really so much anything Kaiser’s done, or said, but Isagi can’t shake off the feeling that he’s not entirely comfortable here. “I don’t know. Maybe you’d rather go back home?”

 

Blue and gold swing and catch the late afternoon sun as Kaiser tilts his head. “Will you be coming too?”

 

“I’m staying until they’re done.”

 

“Then, no.”

 

Isagi frowns, unamused, and Kaiser only shrugs at him, annoyingly unfazed. 

 

“I told you that you didn’t need to come along,” Isagi reminds him. He’d been quite insistent, actually. It’s not like at this stage he’d expected Kaiser to have warmed up to the idea - there’d been intermittent cases of high school gang activity throughout the surrounding neighbourhoods, and Isagi is well aware that if Kaiser had it his way Isagi would be spending his weekend cooped up inside his apartment. 

 

When Kaiser had joined him at the lifts on their floor, sunglasses and a baseball hat on, he’d only raised an eyebrow at Isagi’s ogling question. Isagi hadn’t even known he’d been home - and that had sat wrong within him a little, the fact that they’d been metres away and even then, Isagi’d been in the dark. 

 

Why were they not training today if he was already at home? Why weren’t they meeting up? 

 

Weren’t they supposed to keep each other in the loop? 

 

“It’s not like I could have stopped you from going,” Kaiser had said, as he stood back with an overly-gentlemanly curtsy by the juddering lift doors, “After you.”

 

Isagi hadn’t resisted. Not as much as he normally would, because he’s also come to grudgingly accept that it’s not like he could have stopped Kaiser from coming along either. But - 

 

“Aren’t you… I don’t know, you seem kind of tense, though?” Isagi asks quietly. The word doesn’t seem entirely fit for the gut feeling he’s been getting, an unease radiating off of Kaiser and his unnatural quiet, but it’s the closest he can manage. “Is there… like are you expecting something bad to happen?”

 

Isagi cranes his head around as he speaks - behind them, back where the low brick wall serving as the park entrance is, and all the way around. There are a few people out on the street, heading wherever they need to go, a couple more walking slow and leisurely along the thin paved paths of the park itself. Across the way, a group of grandpas and grandmas are doing group exercises, colourful mats laid over the grass as they follow their equally colourful instructor, her bright voice carrying over to where Kaiser and Isagi are sitting. 

 

It feels… utterly mundane. Comfortingly so, in the sort of way it makes it difficult to imagine something bad happening in a place that is so absolutely ordinary. 

 

An intersection of lives playing out in one space, just for a while. 

 

The kind of view you only get to see when you’re a part of it.

 

Kaiser looks like he wants to tease. Scans Isagi’s expression once, then sighs and seems to think better of it. Says instead, “It seems clear. I had Eight do a round of the place.”

 

Isagi’s immediately chagrined. “He’s working right now?!” Isagi swears he hadn’t seen the black sedan on their way here or anywhere nearby - which meant that Ness is being extra cautious to keep out of sight. “Why’re you making him do overtime over the weekend for a visit to the park -”

 

“Darling,” Kaiser taps him under the chin to quiet him down. It makes Isagi sneak a quick, furtive look at the children yelling and running around mere feet from them, because it’s one thing to have Kaiser be touchy when it’s just the two of them, but another when he is easily the most visible thing in this park, regardless of hat and sunglasses. Somehow, the situation feels both maddeningly real and utterly surreal at the same time - like they’ve been ad-libbed in here, plucked out of one scene and placed into another. “You’re going to make me upset. I’m right here, sitting next to you, and you’re still thinking about Eight -”

 

“Please grow up,” Isagi tells him, though he can tell, a little bit, that this time Kaiser’s just acting up to get Isagi to drop the subject. “... but if it’s safe here, what are you worried about? Is it… like are you afraid of being seen around, or…”

 

“You’re being paranoid,” Kaiser scoffs lightly, ignoring Isagi’s incredulous I’M being paranoid? This new reality of theirs has been some time in the making, and some time in the existing too - yet, Isagi finds himself still adjusting to the fact that he can hear the tone of Kaiser’s voice for what it is as they whisper, no longer sieved through something electronic. Can see it in the slight exasperation on Kaiser’s face, building up slow but not mean over the course of Isagi’s ongoing anxiety since they’d stepped out of the apartment building. “You realise this is the best disguise possible, right?”

 

“A hat and sunglasses?” Isagi asks dryly. Now that he thinks about it, Kaiser and Ness have the exact same idea of a public disguise.

 

“The foreign white man not making an effort to be anything other than a foreign white man,” Kaiser corrects, tapping under his chin again. This time Isagi does push him away, and tries not to look him in the eye as his smirk grows when Kaiser links their fingers together instead, settling their hands down on the grass between them. “The last thing anyone would expect the Emperor to be is me. ”

 

“Hmm,” the sound Isagi makes is dubious. His own perspective is skewed now, all the things he can’t un-know, but it’s not all that long ago he’d been there as well. Even the idea of these two disparate identities sharing anything in common may not have crossed his mind, were it not for a name. “Then… what’s wrong?”

 

Because something is wrong. 

 

Something is off. 

 

Out in the open, in broad daylight instead of a night sky, Kaiser, all gold and blue and red, stark primary colours, draws the eye of everyone passing by without even trying. Somehow, the reality of him carved into existence under the stares of all these people, he feels even more impossible to Isagi. Sitting beside him, not on the chalky floor of a rooftop hidden away from the eye but out in the evening sun, all of Isagi’s awareness heavy in his lap - of Kaiser, of how extraordinary this is in this ordinary little tableau of a neighbourhood park, living its life in the dozens of lives within it, going through its motions even though streets away there have been muggings and beatings and thefts.

 

Isagi’s used to it - to him being so loud, in existence and action. Used to him being undeniable, carrying the gravity of a black hole, a sensory overload.

 

That’s all the more reason why, as Kaiser withdraws, even if it’s a little bit, the quiet sounds even louder, and it unnerves Isagi.

 

“Kaiser,” he starts off lightly, unsure. “Are you -”

 

“Big Brother!” comes a shriek, and Isagi’s head whips to the side in alarm. It’s followed by relief almost instantly though, because it’s the kid with the shaved head furiously waving him down, the ball stamped in place under his foot, “Watch this!” 

 

This ends up being some kind of wind up shot the kid takes with the ball that Isagi cannot recognise as any football manoeuvre he’s seen before, that sends the thing at a sharp angle through the air to collide with one of the two bins serving as the makeshift goalpost.

 

The kid lets out a loud noise of dismay, while the mouthy one snarks out a “ Ha! Dumbass.”

 

“Hey!” Isagi calls out immediately, deeply disapproving. “That’s not nice.”

 

The mouthy kid immediately starts to sulk. 

 

“Yeah, whatever,” he mutters, looking back down at the ground with the defiance of one who’s clearly aware they’d done something wrong but don’t want to own up to it. 

 

“These little brats -” Isagi is saying under his breath, when Kaiser tells him, 

 

“I thought you’d be chasing them home already.” 

 

“Hm?”

 

“It’s later than usual,” Kaiser points out. That’s true. They’re closer to twilight than they normally are when Isagi starts the uphill battle of convincing these kids to head home. Words are cheaper currency than footballs and fancy sweets, though they’re what Isagi can afford with the financial bandwidth of a college kid working two part-time jobs. 

 

Isagi lets his gaze wander out over the park. There’s a couple in the distance, walking their little dog, a ball of fluff tumbling over itself to sniff at everything, its loud, squeaky yips carrying over to where they sit. The grandpas and grandmas have packed up after their evening group exercise, but there are a couple of stragglers, just sitting back against the old park benches - one of them is scattering a handful of something that’s drawing a tiny tornado of birds keen to peck. The familiar jingle of the croquette cart rings somewhere off to the distance. 

 

An intersection of lives, one corner of the view of the skyscraper zoomed in. It’s so completely ordinary - a scene that must be playing out at a dozen parks across the city, hundreds more across the country. 

 

But here, at this moment, Isagi is here , and Kaiser is here, and Niko and the kids are here. All these people he doesn’t know the names of are here, and they are living through it, and doesn’t just being have its own significance? 

 

“It’s the weekend,” he says at last, with a small shrug. 

 

“Didn’t know trouble operates on a five-day work week.”

 

“Hey, you’re the one that said there didn’t seem to be trouble around today,” Isagi reasons back. “Besides, it’s not like…it’s not like we can just stop living because there’s bad people around.”

 

“And yet here you are throwing your Saturday away to babysit a bunch of snot-nosed brats -”

 

“Oh, leave me alone,” Isagi shoves at him. It’s a light shove, as little fight in it as Isagi has in himself as he watches the still-furious battle the kids are raging to get in one last goal before the sun sinks. “There’s only so much time kids get to have to be kids, anyway.”

 

There’s a long silence, and in it, Isagi catches the rebound of the words he’d just said. 

 

It feels almost heavy, this quiet. Like it’s conscious of all the space in it, all of its unsaid words. He rolls around his share in his mouth for a moment, hesitating. Opens his mouth to say, a little uncertain, “When… you said last time… that home might not be safe -”

 

“They’re fine,” Kaiser beats him to it. It’s short - not… curt, Isagi thinks. Not hurried or hasty, just…

 

Isagi, blinking up at the side of Kaiser’s shuttered face, thinks he means to reassure him.

 

To divert him. 

 

Isagi stands on his end of this delicate balance of theirs, their hand-fought compromise, and wonders how long he will be able to endure this, when his greed only grows the more he gets.

 

“Okay,” he acquiesces, quietly. Let’s himself be turned away, but not entirely. Not yet. “But… what if…” He stops. Kaiser’s face is smoothed free of expression. And maybe Isagi’s just gotten used to having him be all over, overwhelming, that even this slight retreat of his leaves him alert and a little anxious. He changes tracks. “If it’s not… if it’s ever not okay, and you realise, you’ll tell me, won’t you?”

 

The evening light shines back silver off his eyes as Kaiser regards Isagi. 

 

“What would you do if I did?” he asks at last, even though that doesn’t seem to be the question he’s asking. 

 

“I…don’t know,” Isagi admits quietly. “But I guess I’d do something.”

 

“Hey, we have to go soon!” the still high-pitched voice Isagi recognises without looking is Niko’s rings out, and the groans that follow are a lot more dismayed than they are the defiance Isagi’d been met with, the first few times. 

 

He almost misses Kaiser and his quiet, “...I imagine you would.”

 

And that’s that, he thinks. Feels the conversation close there. 

 

He doesn’t need it to be spelled out - Isagi won’t make him spell it out. Not when whatever this is feels… private. The kind of vulnerable that makes Isagi want to protect more than he desires to pry, standing out only because Kaiser shines so bright that when his light dims even a little, Isagi, allowed closer than he has been for months, closer than he’d almost not dared ask for, can sense it immediately.

 

It doesn’t matter, he decides, dusting off the loose bits of grass sticking to his shorts as he gets up and loudly announces, “Ten!”.  The kids scatter all at once, almost comically, rushing to grab the ball and put the bins away, to clear up the trash from the snacks one of them brought today for their friends. “Nine, eight, seven -”

 

The past, the childhood that must have shaped Kaiser at least somewhat into who he is today… Isagi doesn’t need it told to him, not when it’s something that Kaiser is clearly not ready to talk about. It doesn’t change what they are right now, especially when right now involves Kaiser reaching out a hand to help him balance as he gets his shoes back on. 

 

He’s there, beside Isagi, hand firm in his, unapologetic as it knots their fingers together. And that’s quiet too, but loud in its own way, and it might be nothing but a candle in the wind to the kids gawking and hollering, forgotten by the time they reach home, and nothing at all to someone peering down at the grass from one of the tall buildings around, seeing nothing but moving specks against the deepening green.

 

But it’s consequential to him , it matters to him, and Isagi is grateful to have it.

 

Even if he has to smack at Kaiser two seconds later when he’s picking a fight with a child who’d been examining his muscles, concluding haughtily that his older brother would win against him at arm wrestling. 

 

“My grip strength is eighty kilograms,” he tells the kid flatly. His natural charm apparently just evaporates when it comes to children, because he looks one hundred percent serious about it too. 

 

“How much is eighty kilograms?” One of the kids whispers to another.

 

“That’s like… eighty bags of rice.”

 

“A bag of rice is way heavier than one kilogram, you dumbass -”

 

“ Stop it, he’ll get mad at you -”

 

“I can lift a bag of rice,” Niko declares with a mild confidence that completely belies his current status as the tiniest of these boys, nowhere near his growth spurt yet. 

 

Isagi can tell from Kaiser’s face that he’s about to say something completely inappropriate, so he diverts the conversation hastily. “Oh yeah? You must be a great help to your parents when you’re shopping!”

 

Niko looks pleased at that comment. Smiles a shy little smile under his bangs as he mumbles a little “Yeah.” 

 

Isagi waits until the kids are a good distance away before he smacks at Kaiser’s arm again. “Why are you picking fights with children?!”

 

“The pipsqueak was picking a fight with me -”

 

“Yes, you, the so-called ‘mature older man’”, Isagi snarks back. He pats over himself to double-check he’s got his phone in his pocket, and scans the now dark grass for any rubbish they might need to throw out on the way back. 

 

“But you like me like that, sweetheart,” Isagi shrugs once to try and shake off the arm that comes up and over his shoulders, and then doesn’t bother when it returns, snaking around his waist. “I’m your type. ”

 

“Never said that. Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

The bickering feels a lot more natural than the quiet that’d sat between them earlier. 

 

And Isagi lets it be. 

 

Gets the sense that Kaiser finds it more comfortable too.

 

Like he finds the rhythm a lot more familiar, a lot easier to ride, now that it’s just the two of them again. 

 

Lets it be, and reminds himself that all of this is still new, to the both of them. That perhaps all they need is time to wear their way into it. 

 

That while he is figuring out his place in Kaiser’s world, so is Kaiser in his.

 

---

One of the succulents is on the way to recovery, fresh baby green stalks poking out as it grows. One maintains its state of stasis - it looks like it’s okay, seems to be gripping on to the soil just fine, and Isagi is too scared to disturb what might actually be working to dig around in the earth and check the roots.

 

One of them dies.

 

It’s beyond saving, even though it takes Isagi a while to let himself accept it. Photo comparisons with references online and another video call that Nagi surprisingly doesn’t resist getting into, and then scooping out the soil for himself, inspecting the roots, the deep rot that had probably started killing that plant long before Isagi’d started trying to save it - 

 

“We could go get a new plant,” Kaiser tries. Isagi knows he’s trying to make him feel better - could sense the helplessness off of him as he transits from the adjacent balcony to Isagi’s because he couldn’t get through to him at that distance. Isagi can’t blame him - he knows he’s being irrational, that he’s lucky a couple of them even survived to begin with. 

 

But there’s something so damning, so final, about this dead plant refusing all his attempts at revival. 

 

It’s already a dour, depressing note to have to start the morning, silently wrapping up this living thing that he’d brought home with so much enthusiasm, had tried to care for as much as he’d been able, into its newspaper coffin. It almost feels inappropriate and wrong to discard it the same way he would his trash. 

 

Kaiser doesn’t make fun of him for it, even though he thinks he should. 

 

Kaiser just stands by, offering him condolences and comfort, then distractions. Listens to Isagi’s newborn anxiety over the rest of the plants, about the fact that summer is yet to end, that even if they make it, what happens when the seasons turn and it starts getting colder?

 

“You can’t control the weather,” he reminds Isagi, but he’s not unkind. He rests his palm against the side of Isagi’s cheek and it grounds him a little, that real, living warmth against the side of his face quieting the frantic white noise buzzing around in his head, that chronic doomerism Chigiri’s always telling him to do something about. “You can’t fight nature. You did what you could, Yoichi. You kept all these ones alive, didn’t you?”

 

“Yeah, but…I don’t know. It’s set to get even hotter before it gets cooler for autumn, and I don’t… if it gets any more humid than this, I don’t know if I can save the other two.” 

 

Kaiser is quiet for a long moment, and Isagi, distracted inside his head, has to slingshot back into himself when Kaiser asks him, “...should I buy you a dehumidifier?”

 

And Isagi thinks about the list he’d recited to Chigiri, that little profile of Michael Kaiser, fresh off the foolish escapades he’d been roped into that morning. Childish and immature, kind and thoughtful. Adds ‘clumsy’ to the list, balanced on the other end of the scale to charming and poised, charismatic and graceful. Unexpectedly awkward with feelings, the ones that are too human and too helpless. 

 

The ones that know better but can’t help themselves. 

 

They’re both the same. Isagi struggling to accept the quiet grief of losing something he’d cared for, Kaiser struggling with the idea that he can’t just magic the problem away for him like he’s done before. 

 

“You don’t need to buy me anything,” Isagi tells him, giving his head a little shake. Somehow the offer helps clear the fog of his own foaming-over anxiety. “Especially not with your sketchy money.”

 

“That’s mean,” Kaiser teases back. Lets his hands drop to Isagi’s sides, tickles lightly there because he’d figured out, over the course of their ‘lessons’, that Isagi is a lot more sensitive to touch when there are no gloves in the way of the contact. Doesn’t let up until Isagi manages a smile, a small reluctant one, almost against himself. “I’m trying to make you feel better. You took the knife and the taser.”

 

“You can have them back.”

 

“Absolutely not.”

 

Kaiser gets the dehumidifier anyway. Probably anticipates the fuss Isagi is going to kick up if he tries to make him accept it, because he installs it in his own apartment.

 

For the books, he says. The pages were starting to curl and discolour from the moisture damage, he says, so glib that Isagi almost feels bad about pointing out that he didn’t seem to care so much about that until just recently. You can keep your plants in here too if you want. 

 

And so Isagi does. Brings over the succulents to Kaiser’s living room, just inside of his balcony, and gets to leave them there. 

 

That feels a little momentous too. Getting to leave something of himself behind.

 

He checks on them during the couple of hours he spends in Kaiser’s apartment every week - it becomes more of a regularity than a thing they only do when they have time for the self-defence training. 

 

And even though Kaiser has had it cleared away of things Isagi might be able to sniff out ( “Stop talking about me like I’m a dog, for fuck’s sake ”), Isagi decides it’s still revealing in its own ways. 

 

For starters, Kaiser lives a far more spartan lifestyle than Isagi would have imagined, even with the odd, out of place conclusion that he doesn’t seem all that interested in spending the cash he must be making, a hired hand for the city’s elite. The equation doesn’t make sense no matter how Isagi tries to balance it out. Choosing to stay here, he can argue away for the sake of optics - no one would think to associate the foreign man living in one of the city’s seediest areas on scholarship funds and translation commissions with the guy allegedly brokering information and business for the wealthy and powerful. 

 

But from the inside, the apartment is just… normal. Comfortable, the basic necessities where he appears to have splurged. A well-stocked pantry, an upgraded kitchen - no fancy bells and whistles to speak of the ‘expensive tastes’ this guy used to allude to, when he used to lure Isagi in with the promise of the money he could make working for him, the power that could come with it. He’d kept the functional pieces the apartment had come with, had swapped out the mattress in the bedframe for one of his own - Isagi has categorically refused to acknowledge all of the asshole’s wheedling that he’s free to come test it out with him whenever he likes. 

 

If there’s anything he actually appears to spend on, it’s the books. 

 

Tsundoku, Kaiser tells him, a smug bit of trivia as he soaks in Isagi’s grudging awe of his collection. A Japanese word he quite liked, that had gone a bit international from how universally relatable its meaning seemed to be. Buying books and letting them pile up, unread.

 

But these books are certainly not unread.

 

Kaiser doesn’t mind him poking around, confident that he’s removed anything incriminating, so Isagi does just that - finds himself cross-legged on the floor, flipping through the tomes, some in English, many in German and Japanese. The contents surprise Isagi more - there are volumes on theatre, plenty about plays, about the symbolism and preservation of traditional kabuki , scripts and adaptations modernising those classic epics for a contemporary audience. But there are also books about philosophy, history - a battered copy of Nietsche, a name that sparks the kind of distant recognition one associates with someone famous but not personally relevant enough to be remembered for what. Plenty of books about psychology.

 

“To understand humans,” Kaiser’d shrugged, and left it at that, when Isagi had asked about them.

 

It’s an offhand answer, but Isagi will think back to it later as the key. A hint that helps him understand better.

 

Kaiser, when he’s like this, that is. Quieter in ways that only stand out because he’s just so loud, in existence and action, in all other ways. 

 

It starts to feel as though the books tell Isagi what Kaiser won’t. 

 

Maybe can’t, a strange sort of awkwardness arising anytime Isagi points to a quote he’s highlighted in some play or collection of poems to ask why he’d done so. What had caught his interest.

 

“Aren’t you a little too interested in me, Yoichi?” he tries to deflect, at times like this, that simpering teasing that he’s used to. And Isagi, greedy, not wanting these little windows to be taken away from him, lets him get away with that too. 

 

Contents himself with the books, not the substance of them, dense with meaning, diverse in thought, but… revealing. The way the translations Isagi’d been gorging through in his hunt for exactly this are, a piece of Kaiser left between the lines. 

 

They tell him, where Kaiser won’t, of his own curiosity - about people, their lives, their minds, their mechanics. How he dissects into the meat of them to study them piece by piece. They tell him about Kaiser’s own incredible memory, quotes and phrases and observations jotted down along the margins of books and passages, referencing other books and other passages. A seamless stream of understanding connecting the ideas mapped across all these words, in all these languages. 

 

He has a knack for that, too - the tightrope walk between dialects, the passage of meaning from one end to the other and the careful juggling to lose as little as he can of the essence along the way.

 

A genius, Isagi thinks to himself, flipping through a book about noh, and reading the passages he’d scripted along the sides, his annotations beside the meanings of the masks, these vessels that transform ordinary men to extraordinary beings on stage. An almost spiritual transformation as you step into the role - your voice, the music, the stage, everything warping together until the reality in the room is the perception spun together in it. Not fiction, not make-belief, but this near-tangible experience . Real, because for a moment, both the player and the audience believe in it. The careful thought put into it, the meaning and intention it’s meant to be infused with, so that just the play of the light against the carved, unmoving features of those wooden faces shift under the eye, and then there are demons and ghosts and vengeful men. There are fools and beasts and heroes.

 

Isagi looks up from where he’d planted himself on the ground, deep inside the book - inside its inked-in footnotes and margins, twining like vines and thorns through the print, and then up at where Kaiser is, fixing them a snack after Isagi’d stumbled over his own feet earlier. 

 

Kaiser catches his eye and raises a questioning eyebrow.

 

A precocious genius, Isagi thinks, and can’t help the aching fondness pushing through his fault lines at the thought. At the sudden alarm with which Kaiser’d caught him right before he’d collapsed, raked his eyes over Isagi’s glazed ones, and then the thing halfway between stricken and scowling that had passed over his features as he’d muttered to himself about pushing Isagi too far, Your blood sugar’s dropping, didn’t you eat this afternoon you little idiot?

 

Rough words, rougher hands, but so careful as they steered him away to sit before he started burrowing through his kitchen to get him water, something to eat. 

 

Isagi takes the book over to the kitchen and asks him point blank if he got the idea of his first mask, the silhouette he’d made of himself, cape and all, from theatre.

 

“...it’d been part of the inspiration, yeah,” Kaiser admits, with a kind of self-consciousness that’s also completely new to Isagi. That seems to be new to Kaiser himself, as he turns away to putter about in his kitchen, putting together sandwiches for them to eat before Isagi has to make his way back to the other end of town for work. 

 

It makes Isagi hold the book a little more careful. 

 

Makes Isagi wonder if Kaiser feels as revealed in these pages as Isagi finds them revealing, an actor caught mid scene-change, the immersion broken. Caught in ways he does not know how to express himself in, the script a work in progress, read before it’s been perfected, all its flaws and frayed endings exposed for Isagi to see. 

 

Kaiser doesn’t pull the curtains closed. 

 

And Isagi, greedy, wants more. Wants to see everything.

 

---

“I’m gonna go grab a drink!” Bachira announces out of the blue, too-cheery, and Isagi realises with dawning horror what he’s doing the second he switches off his camera and mutes his mic. 

 

And then it’s just him, left alone with Rin. 

 

The silence that stretches between them, punctuated only by the ambient noise of the zombies Rin is mowing down stone-faced in the co-op game Bachira had all but forced Isagi into, is strained.

 

At least, it is on Isagi’s part. 

 

Rin hasn’t exactly been forthcoming on the conversation front. 

 

It’s an overreaction, Isagi grumbles to himself, not knowing what else to do other than manoeuvre his character behind Rin’s as he single-handedly clears out a path of the undead horde swarming over his screen. It’s just Rin overreacting. According to Bachira, he’s just sour because Isagi hadn’t told him up front - because in some juvenile kind of way he’d taken offence at the fact that Isagi had done the exact opposite of what Rin had been cautioning him, in his own weird way, to do. 

 

He’s only stung because he cares, Bachira’d told him, prescribing patience, like everything else seems to be in Isagi’s life. It’s… he probably just felt left out of your life. 

 

He’d said it lightly, but Isagi thinks he reads something a little personal in Bachira’s tone as he says it. Like he’s speaking from experience too. 

 

And that wracks him with guilt, makes him try harder to reach out to Rin through his unresponsiveness, makes him want to believe Bachira when he says that Rin’s just throwing a tantrum and he’s going to come around eventually.

 

But then again, he’s not sure how much he’s supposed to trust Bachira’s judgement when he’d clearly not had the patience to wait for things to work out by themselves either. 

 

So he sits, fidgeting as he empties his ammunition into a stray zombie or two, occasionally glancing at the screen where Bachira’s profile picture grins back at him, beside the little window where Rin’s face is lit stark by the blue light pouring out of his screen. He’s hardly blinking, the reflection of his screen making his eyes glow a brighter green than they are in real life, lower lashes stood out in sharp relief against his washed-out face, ashy white in the dark room he’s sitting in. 

 

Isagi has the feeling Bachira’s not coming back anytime soon. And well, he’d been trying to talk to Rin, hadn’t had any of his messages or calls go through, so -

 

“Um…so…,” why is his throat going dry? This kid is younger than him, he shouldn’t have to feel so wary talking to him, “How’ve you been?”

 

He is fully expecting to be ignored. The sharp snort in response catches him off guard.

 

And derisive as it might have sounded, it’s still a response - still acknowledgement, which in Rin-speak is all but a glowing invitation to keep talking.

 

“Bachira said that you might be coming up to town again,” Isagi tries again.

 

Nothing. 

 

“If you needed a place to stay -”

 

“I don’t need to see that guy’s smarmy face opposite me, thank you.”

 

And it’s awfully harsh, but it’s the standard level of awfully harsh Isagi expects from Rin, and Isagi nearly grins with relief. Spasms just a little from it and sends his in-game avatar headfirst into an alley choked full of some kind of parasitic enemy type, squiggling around. 

 

“You don’t even know him,” Isagi counters once he’s managed to shake off the giant worm-like creatures that have depleted a good half of his health. Rin, who must clearly have seen it all happen, hadn’t made a single move to save him. “You can’t judge a person after just seeing them once -”

 

“You didn’t introduce him to anyone.”

 

“ - huh?”

 

“Bob-cut said. No one’s met him yet.”

 

“No, I mean…,” Why does it always catch him by surprise like this, the fact that he exists outside of himself? Isagi angles the table fan towards him so the breeze hits him better, a little too warm. “Bachira’s met him though?”

 

“By coincidence,” Rin’s stare is fixed on his own video game screen - the group call set up on his phone or tablet or something, carelessly propped up against what Isagi thinks must be his PC, from the layout he remembers of Rin’s room in his family home. “No one’s met him since after you started…”

 

He trails away, but he doesn’t need to finish his sentence. 

 

“Well, he’s a pretty busy guy,” Isagi tells Rin. Has to wonder, in split-second hindsight, whether that had sounded defensive. Whether he feels defensive, caught unprepared, “And -”

 

Rin snorts again. “Fucking lukewarm.”

 

In the screen of his own phone, propped up next to his laptop as the poor thing overheats itself a couple of minutes closer to its ultimate demise from the pressure of running a game this size, Isagi can see his own frown grow into his face in real-time. 

 

“Rin -,” he starts, though he’s not entirely sure where he’ll go with it.

 

“You’re serious about him.” Rin interjects again. In the game, Isagi watches him execute a perfect headshot on one of the burlier zombies, the bullet-sponge kinds that Isagi usually has to empty several rounds into before they even start to stagger.

 

It’s not even a question. 

 

Isagi says, anyway, “Yes.” It comes a lot easier than it had the first time, like the muscles working it have done it enough that it’s habit, and Isagi lets that ground him.

 

Rin, with the same kind of clinical precision with which he’s no-scoping enemies left and right, fires back, “And he’s serious about you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Then he should meet us,” Rin swaps out his shotgun for the high-precision sniper rifle. For a wild second Isagi thinks he’s pointing it at his own character, but a belated growl, one of the handful of enemy death sound effects the game loops, plays behind him alerting him to a zombie he’d not even noticed in his blind spot. 

 

“I…,” Isagi is at a loss. Takes the guise of fighting off the three grunt-level enemies he can easily run away from to conserve ammo to gather himself up. “I’ll… ask him.”

 

It slides off his tongue, tasting like it lacks conviction, and slips through the cracks Isagi has been trying not to pay attention to. 

 

At last - for the first time since Isagi’d clicked his way into his call - Rin looks at him. 

 

Blue and white stream off the large screen he’s playing on and over his face, and in that cold light, Rin’s bright green eyes are as sharp as knives. “ Tell him.”

 

“I told you he’s busy -”

 

“You said he’s serious about you,” Rin reminds Isagi. 

 

The conviction that had flagged there, for just a moment, holds firm as Isagi confesses, “He is. I know he is, so -”

 

“So tell him that we want to meet him,” Rin says, firm and final. It’s not the first time since they’ve known each other that Rin has acted like an entitled, haughty little prince, every demand an ultimatum. “Simple.”

 

Except it’s not, is it?

 

It’s so not-simple that it’s still gnawing at Isagi the next morning, when Kaiser finds him repositioning the planters farther into the shade that his balcony manages in its tight little space. 

 

Sees his face and immediately asks, “Are you okay?” 

And then “Is it the plants?”

 

Isagi looks down at the pots near his feet. He’d swapped out the last few cheap plastic ones for the heavier, more breathable clay pots - had found roomier beds of soil for the ones growing so large they needed bigger homes to grow into. 

 

And yet, one of his succulents is dead, and the fate of another hangs in uncertain limbo. 

 

“It’s going to rain today,” he calls out to Kaiser instead. “So be careful when you -,” he catches himself at the last moment, remembering where they are, balconies and windows on either side of them. An entire apartment building, all these people, this miniature world, all around them. “When you’re out.”

 

---

41: Please tell me the truth 

 

41: Don’t lie to me 

 

41: Did that stakeout two blocks over have anything to do with you?

 

The aftershocks have trickled all the way out to the diner - Isagi’d arrived at work to a huddle already assembled at the back of the kitchen, taking advantage of the temporary lull before the dinner rush began to gossip. The police had come by, apparently. Door to door to every business for a good radius around the epicentre of the building they’d showed up with a search warrant for, only to find it completely gutted. Apparently, the old lady who lived next door had panicked in the middle of the night before, noticing figures skulking in the tight space between the two buildings and phoned the cops, scared that she was going to get burgled. 

 

Unsurprisingly, it had taken the police a while to get there. But whoever had been using the building - an old, cramped little warehouse for a bedding business that had shut up its doors to relocate to a better plot - must have had the alarm raised, because by the time the cops did arrive, the whole building had been wiped clean of whatever and whoever had been inside of it. 

 

There is no official news about it in the papers, but according to one of the other servers who lives around the area, the most obvious clue about the fact that something shady had been going on there had been how clean the premises were when the police got there. 

 

No evidence, no fingerprints, nothing. 

 

A clean escape. 

 

And Isagi has no proof that this connects to Kaiser in any way. Nothing, aside from the vague understanding that whatever business he’s working on has him frequenting this area so often that the map Isagi’s got at home is almost opaque with marker ink, clusters of sightings around the little nucleus of the diner and… Stop #83.

 

That building is just down the street from that stop. And Isagi, a creeping sense of nausea prickling just below the surface, is thinking about the apartment opposite his, lightweight in its belongings, all its personality contained in stacks of books. Wiped clean of evidence. 

 

♛: what are you meddling in now 

 

41: Just tell me please 

 

41: Did you have something to do with that?

 

♛: no

 

41: Do you know who did 

 

41: What happened? 

 

♛: none of your business angel 

 

41: So you do know what happened

 

♛: you’re doing it again 

 

♛: trying to deduce things around what i say

 

41: Because you won’t fucking tell me anything 

 

♛: i had nothing to do with it 

 

♛: you can trust me on that 

 

♛: there 

 

♛: now you don’t have any reason to go getting yourself involved

 

♛: we have a deal don’t we 

 

♛: darling? 

 

Isagi stares at the phone, almost unseeing. He believes Kaiser. He really does. He trusts him, trusts that he really had nothing to do with the incident if he says he didn’t. But - 

 

It takes him a minute - and the sight of the manager he’s been trying to avoid stepping on the toes of, emerging from his office with a solemn expression that doesn’t bode well for the mood in the kitchen tonight - to type out his response. 

 

41: My shift’s starting 

 

♛: are you mad?

 

41: Does it matter?

 

41: Not like you’ll tell me anything 

 

He shoves the phone into the locker, even with the answering tone letting him know of the reply - the slew of them, really. The that’s not fair angel, or the i thought we had an agreement , or the i’m trying to keep you out of trouble. The kickback of his own childish outburst makes him push away from the locker, leaving behind the phone to get himself busy with the dishes out back, a sudden, urgent need for space and distance setting him on edge.

 

He’s being unreasonable, he knows, and he’s already sorry for it. It eats away at the back of his mind throughout his shift, takes all his willpower not to duck out in the middle of service to go check his phone and the messages waiting there for him, to send a couple of his own, if only to purge this dreadful feeling of discomfort. It’s nowhere near the first time he’s been snippy or rude with Kaiser, and perhaps, through the filter of the phone, Kaiser wouldn’t even read it as anything other than his usual ire. 

 

But it feels wrong. It just feels wrong, no matter how much Isagi tries to rationalise it away, even when he does finally get to his phone and respond in what he thinks is normal for him, sloughing through the accumulation of spam, snide and entreating, dramatic and sincere, that’s built up while he has been gone. Grumping out that if the guy is so busy bothering him he’s more likely to trip midair, or some variation of the harmless insults he flings to calibrate them in this uneasy equilibrium, that disquieting sense of wrongness not dissipating as he does. 

 

Sinking slowly into the pit of his stomach and settling into the bedrock, because even though he’d felt awful, and even though he hated having to feel it, he can’t un feel it either. 

 

This uncertainty, this frustration, this floundering around in the darkness where Kaiser has to leave him to do whatever it is he’s doing, that Isagi is not allowed in to.  

 

The next morning he opens his door to a bunch of fresh blue hydrangea placed carefully against the threshold, toppling on to his doormat the second he’s about to leave for class. 

 

There is no card, no note, nothing to tell him that Kaiser’s been here, other than the flowers themselves.

 

And maybe it’s because Isagi’s so used to having to read between the lines for Kaiser - has read what he writes between lines himself - that he goes back inside to find a large enough mug for the flowers, pinching out the seconds by which he might miss his bus, before dashing back out the door. 

 

On the way to the stop, he looks up what blue hydrangea, in season in Japanese summers, possibly plucked fresh that morning from the plump stems and dewy petals, mean. 

 

A depth of emotion. 

 

Devotion. 

 

Remorse. 

 

It folds Isagi in over himself, a roiling, tossing mass of quiet emotion. Fondness and frustration, at this dramatic man and his clumsy attempts to get through to him when he couldn’t lean into the fanfare and the spectacle to get it across.

 

That’s where he’s most comfortable, Isagi thinks. Up on a stage. Up on a tightrope, high, high above the world. Impossible. Untouchable. 

 

Isagi, feet against the hard ground, so iron-hot in the sun he can feel it through the soles of his shoes, thinks of it almost as a different world. He wonders what it feels like to be the one that descends - like an astronaut, reentering gravity, tripping a little where everything else had its own balance and its own place, made its own sense. A set of rules that everyone already seemed to know but that you maybe forgot, maybe unlearned, maybe never had a chance to learn, adapting to a life untethered from other lives. 

 

♛: good morning angel 

 

♛: did you like the flowers 

 

Isagi thinks about Michael Kaiser, disgruntled and bleary-eyed early in the morning. Thinks about the time he must have needed to make, a precarious feat, because which florists are even open at this time? Thinks about how sure he is, how keenly certain, that Kaiser cares about Isagi. Cares with the same greed, the same selfish selflessness, the same selfless selfishness, as Isagi cares back. 

 

41: What’s the occasion 

 

♛: do i need an occasion to bring you flowers 

 

♛: can’t have you thinking the most romantic gift i can manage is a multifunction knife

 

The chuckle Isagi lets out, a puffed out, watery thing, fizzles out against his lips. It’s not as reluctant as it used to be. Falls out easy, and fades away leaving a reminder of it being there. That fleeting, sweet ease. 

 

They’re disharmonious harmony, the push and the pull, both equally necessary to keep the wheel moving. 

 

But where are they going?

Or are they even going anywhere? Are they spinning in place? 

 

Isagi can’t tell. And as the newness of it all, breaching into each other’s worlds, settles into something closer to familiarity, Isagi can’t push away the uncertainty as easily as he’d been able to at the beginning. 

 

Because he’s done this before. Stood on the slope with people he cares for, trying to dig his heels in to keep things from changing, while gravity takes him towards a reckoning. 

 

How much longer can they do this? What are they even doing? Self-defence lessons and self-report sessions and dancing around an idea of them that isn’t eventuating into anything. Not yet, at least, not while Kaiser is so busy doing whatever he’s doing that the only conversations they manage to squeeze in are their non-negotiables.

 

“So I saw those high school thugs everyone keeps talking about -”

 

“That’s it. I’m sending the car, don’t you even -”

 

“No, listen to me. Let me finish. I saw them, and I asked Yukki - the guy I mentioned last time - if he was free to come with me -”

 

“Come with you to do what?! Pick a fight with the -”

 

“I wasn’t going to! I didn’t. I just asked if he could come with so we could at least see what was going on, and he brought two of his friends -”

 

Isagi cuts himself off here, half-expecting Kaiser’s protests and complaints, scolding him for running at the problem again instead of away, telling him in no uncertain terms that Ness was on his way to pick him up. Preemptively, he hurries to add, 

 

“We weren’t going to approach them. Just see from a distance what they were actually doing. I just saw a couple of them from afar, hanging around a corner store and smoking but… they’re really just kids. Like… they look so young. Baby-faced, a few of them, with their ridiculous popped collars, and it’s just…,” 

 

Isagi doesn’t know how to get across how seeing them from the other side of the street, after weeks of hearing about the gangs causing trouble around the neighbourhood, had felt. A little anticlimactic, seeing the scrawny builds of most of these kids and their youthful faces - a couple of them clearly hit the gym or at least the sports grounds, when they aren’t bunking classes. They might be larger and broader, but the group of them just looked like any gaggle of young people should look, aside from the jarring little details. That particular hairstyle, the untucked shirts, the graphic tees peeking out at the back through the translucent white fabric of school uniforms in need of a good ironing. One of them had a baseball bat he kept swinging over his head with. 

 

When a middle-aged gentleman had been passing by, keeping a wide enough berth around them that it was obvious he was trying to avoid them, the kid had suddenly arced out a wild swing that had made the man almost duck and cower. They’d burst out into uproarious laughter at that. 

 

“It’s…sad,” Isagi says at last. Not the most eloquent of descriptions, but possibly the most accurate. The forlorn mood lingers over him with the kind of weight that the clouds are beginning to have, gathering low and thundering over their heads in another of the summer storms broiling over the city lately. It feels like the mood of North Ward of late - a brooding thing, crackling with barely-leashed tension. “They should be… I don’t know. They should be playing soccer at school and planning out their futures, they should get the chance for a better one -”

 

“You’re saying this as though someone is forcing them to be thugs running rampant on the street.”

 

“Maybe not, but it’s not like… I mean, there’s obviously a failure in the system here, right? If they had other, better options -”

 

“That’s for their parents to worry about. The schools that can’t keep them in check. The fucking police force stationed minutes away from where these hooligans are running amok, who’re so toothless that these kids don’t even worry about being a public threat. This isn’t something you can solve, angel.”

 

Isagi’s frowning. It doesn’t feel so much a frown as this pinch of emotion he’s keeping at bay, with all his might. It comes out a little anyway, when he says, “It’s still sad though.”

 

There’s silence for a second, long enough and quiet enough that Isagi can start to pick out the hardly-there tremors of thunder overhead. It’s going to be a heavy downpour when it finally breaks - Isagi quickens his pace, keen to get to the bus stop before it does.

 

And then Kaiser sighs heavily in his ear and asks, “So what did you do?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Don’t play dumb with me, sweetheart - I know you didn’t leave there without doing something.”

 

It sounds reproachful. It sounds fond. It sounds all too familiar, the wash of emotion that sweeps through him every time he opens the door into his apartment and is greeted by his improvised vase of hydrangeas. They’d started to wilt, even though Isagi had been careful about replacing the water, snipping at the stalks diagonally the way he’d always seen his mother do it. Of course they’d started to wilt - flowers wither, that’s just how it works. 

 

And yet, even though he understands this, gets it on a fundamental level, Isagi can’t let go, can he? Won’t let go. Had procured twine to wrap around the stems of the flowers, hooking them upside down in his closet, one of the homemade dehumidifiers he’d tried to use for his plants tucked in amongst his clothes. It’d taken a couple of days, but they’d dried all the way through - petals brittle to the touch, the vivid blue faded into watercolour, but there still. 

 

Preserved and waiting for him at home, where he would look at them and think of their giver and experience anew the length of the lifeline that binds Isagi to the person who’d gifted them to him. 

 

“I… told you. I asked Yukki - my friend from the other time - I asked if he was free to come stop by, and he brought two of his friends. I guess it’s true that these kids only like picking on people who can’t fight back… the - Yukki’s friends, I mean, they kind of went ahead being all noisy and loud and those guys cleared off when they saw us coming.”

 

Even the pause before Kaiser speaks sounds unhappy. Isagi hazards, “...I swear I didn’t go running up to them. Like this time it actually wasn’t me.”

 

And then, when the pause drags on, “...and I’m coming back right away now, because it’ll be raining soon so the kids won’t be at the park anyway.”

 

Eventually, Kaiser lets out another sigh - it’s long and sounds exhausted. “I guess I should thank the weather for that, at least.”

 

“Don’t thank it yet, it’s going to be pretty bad, I think,” the wind has picked up, and howls through wherever there’s space, warbling whistles that whoosh out of the narrowing alleyways Isagi crosses through. It’s rushing in faster than Isagi had guessed, and he half-sprints in the direction of his stop, “Don’t try rappelling down buildings in this weather.”

 

“Aye aye,” Kaiser says and Isagi can tell he’s smiling. They’ve traded words enough at this point that Kaiser doesn’t bother teasing him about the fact that he worries - sounds pleased about it nonetheless, every time. “And you’re on the way back?” 

 

“Yeah, I’m almost at my stop.”

 

“Good,” and then, with a light scoff, “Can’t you get your neighbourhood watch to take up park duties for you?”

 

Of course he’s still bitter about that. “They do,” Isagi tells him, not bothering to correct the ‘neighbourhood watch’ term anymore. If anything, he supposes the buddy system chat has slowly evolved into something of the sort. “That’s why I don’t have to come back every day.”

 

“Would be great if you didn’t need to come back at all -”

 

“Unless you can propose a solution to make this area safer, then that’s not happening, sorry.”

 

“You managed to get away this time, but those punks aren’t going to hesitate to pick on you when you’re alone, you know that right?”

 

“Luckily I’ve not been alone -”

 

“So you keep saying,” Kaiser sounds sour about it. “Are these new extras you’ve picked up models too?”

 

That makes Isagi trip a little over nothing. Not so much physically as over a thought, an observation. The jealous type, Chigiri had called it - and Isagi isn’t oblivious to the way Kaiser objects, whenever he brings up Ness in something close to thoughtful, whenever Kawasaki or Yukimiya or even sometimes the kids come up in conversation. He plays it up all the time, the clingy, possessive attitude, but as pretence gives way to familiarity, Isagi’s noticed it more and more - the way Kaiser seems to close off a little, when other people are involved. 

 

When other people are involved relative to Isagi. 

 

Is it… mild hostility, or just childish sulking? It doesn’t feel quite right, doesn’t fit the shape of the feeling Isagi gets from Kaiser sometimes.

 

It only truly sinks in in the middle of a different phone conversation, a couple of days later, that finds Isagi hurrying down the street in the opposite direction he usually goes to take his bus home from the diner. 

 

“ - don’t do anything crazy, I’m going with Bachira,” Isagi warns again for the umpteenth time. He can’t actually see nor sense Kaiser anywhere nearby as he takes the sidestreets at a brisk march, timing himself just enough that he can reach a different stop to his usual for the next ride over, to where Bachira will be waiting, “And because it might end up being late, I might just stay over at my friend’s.”

 

With all the pedestrians he’s darting through, and the rumble and din from the traffic on the street, he only manages to catch Kaiser’s words in snatches over the phone. “ - at this time… what kind of emergency - do you need the car -”

 

“No, I do not need the car,” Isagi responds immediately, “How am I even going to explain the car to my friends?”

 

It hits him belatedly, the weight of that statement. 

 

His friends keep hinting they want to meet Kaiser. 

 

Some of them aren’t just hinting anymore.

 

“ - it’s so fucking late - can’t you see tomorrow -”

 

“Listen, Na - the friend who texted us hardly ever messages and never messages like this,” Isagi cuts him off forcefully. 

 

It’s part the panic that’d burst to life when he’d grabbed his phone out of his locker after work to find two messages from Nagi in the group chat - help and emergency.  

 

And it’s part the fact that it’s one thing when Kaiser’s grumbling about the people he’s running off to meet because they’re coordinating self-appointed patrols of the neighbourhood, and another when he’s grumbling about Isagi’s people. 

 

“I’m worried. I need to make sure everything’s okay.”

 

All he’s managed to gather is that Nagi is waiting at his own apartment, and that Reo’s there, and it most certainly has something to do with Reo, because he’d heard his voice in the background when he’d called Nagi up, harried. Nagi, who all but exclusively responds to texts with stickers, and who usually lets Reo handle communication on his behalf. 

 

“What do you think happened?” Chigiri had asked over the phone minutes afterwards, Isagi quickly planning out the most efficient transits to get them to Nagi’s dorm - one of the student apartments close to the university campus. In case they needed to stay over, Chigiri’d jogged over to the convenience store near his place, grabbing dental kits to bring along for Isagi and Bachira. 

 

“I don’t know but…,” Isagi had wracked his mind desperately and could come to only one conclusion, “Wasn’t Reo’s pitch supposed to be today?”

 

Maybe his pitch hadn’t gone as planned, maybe it’s a repeat of how the first round of it had gone, before he’d worked it down into its latest angle. The guy had kept on adding to the slide deck with a zeal that had grown almost disturbing - an edge of desperation to him that Isagi has never seen in Reo before. It’s evident that Reo - self-assured, suave Reo who knows how to get his way - had been nervous about his first major independent project that he might get to pilot under the Mikage brand. That there’d been an almost visceral hunger burning through him for approval, for acknowledgement from his old man. 

 

Isagi doesn’t know how he might have reacted if the presentation went anything less than perfect. 

 

Guilty as the feeling is, it’s a more comforting thought to imagine Nagi’s calling in reinforcements because he can’t handle an unstable Reo by himself than to worry that there might be something worse going on. Why couldn’t Nagi just put them out of their misery and explain over the goddamn phone - 

 

“ - get you.”

 

“What’s that?” Isagi had almost funneled himself inwards, catching himself at the last second before he swirled away in his overthinking. 

 

“I don’t get how you have the energy to keep doing this - every single day, running after people’s problems -”

 

“They’re my friends,” Isagi says. It’s almost steely, the way he does, like a fullstop forced down someone else’s sentence. 

 

He suspects something about the tone throws Kaiser off, because it takes him a beat before he responds, “Fucking everyone is your friend. The landlady, the neighbourhood children, the convenience store clerk - ”

 

“My closest friends,” Isagi insists again. It sounds quiet and loud to his ears at the same time and for a second he feels like he’s trying to push a thought through a membrane, a film that is so fine he almost doesn’t sense it there, until he’s against it and trying to get through. A degree of separation so thin it’s almost incorporeal, but then it pushes back with resistance where you expect give. He pushes harder. “They’re my closest friends.”

 

He doesn’t know if he means to sound so grave, but does nonetheless as he waits at the crossroads, watching the red man blinking in the traffic lights across the street. Someone’s already pushed the button to his side requesting to cross, and every second resounds with the heavy beat of the countdown before he can move again. 

 

He thinks Kaiser must also have picked up on it, the undertow below his words. Can he tell too? Or is it just Isagi, aware that something’s brewing underneath the surface? Like the rain just before it falls, clouds hanging heavy with the storm they hold inside, all ice-cold and contained lightning lidding away the sky. 

 

It feels inevitable, and Isagi is almost afraid - he’s afraid of what it will force him to face. 

 

It’s a while before Kaiser manages, “ - I don’t get it.”

 

His voice is hard still, but not with the irascible edge it’d held when he’d called, seconds after Isagi texted him saying he might not be going home tonight. 

 

“Get what?”

 

“You -,” Kaiser starts and then stops short. Through the humdrum ambience of a busy city thoroughfare, Isagi tunes himself into the silence as he listens to Kaiser search for what he wants to say. “Doesn’t it exhaust you -”

 

“Hey,” Isagi says, when really, he wants to say his name. Out here, waiting for a red light to turn green, hemmed in on all sides by people moving to the tides of their lives - it stings, the fact that he can’t. The fact that it’s not safe, the fact that he doesn’t get to know when it will be or if - 

 

Isagi stops himself short. 

 

Kaiser seems to have picked up that Isagi doesn’t appreciate his line of questioning - seems to be struggling to phrase what he wants to say into something that sounds less harsh than his tone is saying it. 

 

“Aren’t you - don’t you just - ,” A frustrated sound. Isagi thinks about the eloquent prose he’s read, in the fine print of published journals, in Kaiser’s own handwriting cramped into the edges of pages and between lines. Thinks it's ironic that none of that eloquence exists here, as Kaiser finally blurts, “I just don’t get how you… care this much, all the time. For everyone. Why you keep going this far.”

 

“You don’t get to say that to me.”

 

“I only go that far for you,” It’s said without any of the usual tongue-in-cheek flair, a fact instead of a dramatic declaration, and Isagi’s heart lets out a pathetic, helpless thump at it. The lifeline tightens, the light turns green, and Isagi feels at least a little more stable as he quickly crosses to the other side of the street, wading through the currents of his own feelings as he goes. “You’re just… every person you meet, their problems end up becoming yours -”

 

“It’s called empathy -”

 

“It’s called bleeding yourself dry and worrying me sick. I just don’t get -,” this time Kaiser does finish the thought, though the words sound like cheap substitutes for the feelings he’s trying to put into them, “ - how you can care that much.”

 

The moment of clarity that hits Isagi then has been a long time in the making, and it looks like the city splayed down below him, its people, its light, all of its good and bad, zoomed out until everything is swimming lights in an ocean of darkness. A large, dark web, crisscrossing as far as the eyes can see, its strands tangling lives together that are utterly unaware of how their actions tie and untie it, reshape it, sustain it. 

 

It unsteadies him for a moment, almost, that remembered vertigo, before he shakes his head clear. Clearer than it’s been for a while. The feeling slots into place, his remembered discomfort on that rooftop, that alien view. How removed and impersonal the world is from so far away, unable to sink its claws in to hurt you, but outside of your reach too. Studied like a specimen in a petri dish, notes and conjectures penned into paper like an observer, roles switched from performer to spectator, always on the outside. 

 

In the end, maybe it’s not about Kaiser being the ‘jealous type’. Maybe it’s about him being just as new to this thing of theirs as Isagi - maybe newer still, on the terrain that Isagi knows in person as well as Kaiser knows the skies.

 

“They’re my friends,” Isagi says again, and they’re as simple as Kaiser’s words, almost rudimentary - unable to contain the depth of what he means. But he tries regardless, “I can’t… help how much I care about them. And they care about me just as much.”

 

“The random people you’re running up to all the time to help -”

 

“ - probably don’t, I know,” Isagi finishes for him. Somehow he feels steadier than he’s felt in a while, like he’d strayed off and away from what he knows and understands, what he can trust. Into the grey fog of his own anxieties, filling up the spaces he hasn’t mapped yet, doesn’t understand. 

 

But at least he thinks he does understand Kaiser a little better as he continues, “That’s okay. I’m not asking them to. I just can’t -”

 

“ - help yourself. I know.” It makes him smile, Kaiser parroting him like that. He thinks maybe Kaiser’s understood a little something about him just now too, and he should feel more pathetic than he does, how easily this crumb appeases him. How easily Kaiser can disarm him into defying his own nature, staggers him enough that it takes a while more to recover. A while more of their uneasy peace, one Isagi thinks they’ll need to renegotiate sooner rather than later. “Ah, what am I going to do if you keep being so cloyingly sweet to everyone? You’ll have nothing left over for me.”

 

He says it jokingly, but Isagi thinks he’s not wrong about how genuine that statement sounds as he hears it. How.. honest. 

 

It doesn’t feel like it’s jealousy, or possessiveness. Feels like something a lot more… innocent. 

 

Clumsy in the handling of it, unfamiliar and nerve-wracking in its infancy. Something a little insecure. 

 

Something a little human. 

 

Something that’s received care, and cannot stand the thought of losing it. 

 

Perhaps it’s this epiphany of his that drives Isagi’s quiet confession - a vow, an open secret, but as true as the ground beneath him. 

 

“I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

 

It’s still ringing in Isagi’s bones long after the call ends.

 

Probably not the best state of mind to be traversing rush hour traffic in, he thinks, lost somewhere in between the tall cityscape looming above him, Kaiser’s territory, and whatever is waiting for him at Nagi’s apartment. 

 

In his distraction, he almost backs out of a collision too late - overcorrects his step back and is grasped roughly by his arm to keep him from stumbling.

 

“I’m sorry -,” he starts to say to the person he’d almost gone barrelling into, but the guy barely stops moving - keeps walking on, without looking back. 

 

Normally, this would be grounds for Isagi to furiously pat himself down under the assumption that was a pickpocketer - but Isagi had managed to hit the brakes before any actual impact, and the only person who’d gotten near enough to him is the grandpa he recognises runs the newsstand at the corner of the street, the one who’d grabbed him before he could topple over. 

 

“Watch it, boy,” he’s told gruffly, though not unkindly. 

 

And Isagi, even through his apologies, can’t stop himself looking back over his shoulder at the man who’d almost bulldozed through him. Is trying to place his face even as he gets shooed away and sternly told not to beeline into trouble, and even as he meets up with Bachira at the bus stop they’re both going to get up at.

 

They’re almost all the way to Nagi’s apartment before it clicks, that face. 

 

It’s one of the two shady guys who had come into the diner, not so long ago.

 

---

It becomes abundantly obvious as soon as they get there that Nagi’s ‘emergency’ had, in fact, been about Reo’s pitch.

 

Which had gone far more poorly than Isagi could have imagined, because Reo’s foul mood is an almost palpable thing, souring the air of Nagi’s small single student dorm room by the time he and Bachira get there. 

 

Chigiri has already arrived, not too long ago by the looks of it, because he’s in the middle of exclaiming, “You almost did what -” in the background as Nagi is letting them in.

 

“Who did what?” Bachira is already half inside the cramped little living space, the other half rushing to get his shoes off in the tiny threshold by the door. 

 

“No one did anything -,” comes Reo’s voice - Isagi, behind Bachira currently hogging up the entrance, can’t see him yet. But he can see Nagi, and the completely unimpressed look on his face as he says, 

 

“He almost set his robot loose in town.”

 

“He what? ”

 

The pitch, as it turns out, had gone very badly.

 

Very, very badly. 

 

So badly, Isagi manages to put together, between Reo getting so fired up he chokes on the words and Nagi’s monosyllabic contributions, that Reo hadn’t even managed to get his dad to sit through the first subsection of his meticulously prepared slides. 

 

“He kept asking about fucking shareholder value, about profit margins -”

 

“That’s rich coming from the guy who’s trying to monetise his alien communications technology -” Chigiri starts, incredulous.

 

“He’s self-aware enough to have brought that up himself,” Reo snorts out, and it’s an ugly, bitter sound. “His product is multi-purpose, is ‘exploiting a gap in the market’, is going to change everything from diplomatic negotiations to international sporting events.”

 

“So is yours - I mean, there’s nothing like this on the market -,” Isagi attempts.

 

Reo, now that he’s spluttered enough to build up steam, rolls right through, “Apparently no one’s going to be interested in investing in my glorified bipedal ambulance -”

 

“He didn’t say that,” Bachira, who has a higher tolerance level than Isagi and Chigiri combined for snark, is visibly appalled.

 

And it is appalling. It’s one thing to be shot down by a professor or a superior at work, but Isagi cannot begin to imagine how humiliating this would be to digest coming from Reo’s own father. Someone Isagi’s only understood him to respect and look up to, who envisions great things for Reo’s future. 

 

“He said worse. Said I’m wasting company resources trying to reinvent the wheel, told me to stop trying to fix what’s not broken -”

 

“But,” Isagi’s at a loss. By the looks on everyone else’s faces, he imagines he’s not the only one - Chigiri working himself into a deadly glare, Bachira with his eyes huge. Even Nagi, who rarely lets on what he’s feeling other than when he’s in a sulk, is sitting up a little straighter today, radiating an alertness and gravity that to Isagi feels almost protective. “How can he say that…? North Ward is broken - it’s so broken it’s extreme and it’s so extreme it’d need something equally extreme to try and fix it -”

 

“Not in his reality,” Reo says darkly. “It doesn’t reach him so it doesn’t fucking exist.”

 

Isagi thinks about the towering Mikage Corp skyscraper he’s been to on two other occasions. So tall that Isagi couldn’t even take in all of it in one glance, craning his neck as he’d been herded towards the security check all visitors had to get through to enter the building. It’s as excessive on the inside as it is on the outside, sophisticated opulence in the mirror shine of the sparkling tile and the sleek black of the elevator doors, the honest-to-God chandelier hanging inside of it. 

 

Reo’s apartment - the entire floor he gets to himself that’s five times as large as Isagi’s abnormally large studio apartment - isn’t the highest floor in the building, but it’s still high enough that the view from it reduces the city below into paper-mache replicas of places.

 

It doesn’t reach him, so it doesn’t exist.

 

“He’s closer to the aliens up there than he is to the honest to God problems in this city -,” Reo is ranting, and this time Chigiri cuts in before he can rampage ahead. 

 

“Is that why you were going to release the robots?” It’s an urgent, wary question, and it appears to defuse enough of Reo’s rage that he actually looks a little self-conscious about it. 

 

“It’s just a prototype, it’s not ready for practical use,” he hedges, and somehow that tells Isagi what Chigiri must have concluded too, because he pushes, 

 

“But were you going to do it?” 

 

“I was just worked up, okay - I didn’t even get the chance to demo the thing -”

 

“ Reo. ”

 

“No -”

 

“He totally was,” Nagi butts in. 

 

“Nagi,” Reo turns to him, an admonition and a request and a warning rolled into one in those two syllables. 

 

Nagi, completely unfazed, just repeats, “You were totally going to do it.”

 

“I’m not insane - like I know I was angry but -”

 

“It’s not anger,” Nagi tells him simply. Reo just stares at him, bewildered. “It’s… I guess pride. Your ego.”

 

It’s so blunt that Isagi almost winces, but it’s not said bluntly. Nagi is so matter-of-fact about it he might as well be commenting on the fact that the fried chicken they’d ordered in, sitting untouched on his tiny little coffee table, looks spicy. 

 

“You taking shots at me too, now?” Reo snaps. He’s starting to look agitated again. 

 

Sensing the tension, Bachira moves as though he’s about rise from where he’s seated himself on the floor, “Hey, hey - no fighting -”

 

“I’m not,” Nagi returns evenly. He doesn’t look bothered by Reo’s temper at all. “You have reason to be proud. You’re smart and you made a cool robot, and you’re angry ‘cause you didn’t get the chance to show it off.”

 

As though disarmed by Nagi’s frankness, Reo fumbles a little, his fluster more obvious next to Nagi’s composure. He retorts, “Don’t make me sound like a kid throwing a tantrum because I didn’t get a sticker on my homework -”

 

“That’s not what I said. I’m mad too. You worked really hard on this.”

 

Isagi catches Chigiri and Bachira exchanging looks with one another, and Isagi gets it too, he thinks. 

 

Nagi being mad is not a concept any of them have really had to wrap their minds around - 

 

Nagi, who prefers to exist at the lowest baseline of the emotional wavelength and dislikes anything that could ask more of him. 

 

But now that Isagi’s had it framed that way, now that he has perspective, he realises it’s true. 

 

Nagi is upset. He’s upset on behalf of Reo, the video games he’s half-absorbed in usually nowhere in sight. Sitting up straighter just enough that Isagi relearns the height of him and realises how much he slouches when they’re just sitting around. 

 

There’s nothing remotely distant or disinterested or distracted about Nagi today, as he continues, “But you can’t send that prototype out - it’s not ready.”

 

Chigiri finally finds his voice - speaks too quickly and starts coughing. “ And the fact that it would probably be very illegal? Don’t you need permits to be able to demo it in public?”

 

“Am I even going to get the chance?” the way Reo throws his hands up in the air is jerky and spastic, nowhere near the enthusiasm when he’s talking with his hands and animatedly running through something he’s passionate about. 

 

It stings to see him like this, haggard and dishevelled, hair falling limply out of the ponytail he’d tied it up in, bags under his eyes. It’s especially so when Isagi’s had first-hand experience of how hard he’d worked on the project, how eager he’d been to truly create impact, do something that could potentially change the public safety resource issue North Ward is constantly facing. They’d done case study after case study of use-case scenarios, several of the real-world incidents plaguing the city at an ever-worrying frequency, a goldmine of opportunity where the technology could make a difference. 

 

So much work, and so much thought put into it - Isagi’s never met Reo’s dad in person, but the dislike that lighter-flicks into existence at the thought that he’d not even had the patience to get to those slides is burning and angry. 

 

The only counterpoint strong enough to override it right now, though, is concern, as Isagi reconfigures Chigiri’s question to ask it again, “You weren’t going to send it out to prove your point, were you?”

 

Nagi answers before Reo can stall. “He totally was.”

 

“Reo.” All Isagi manages is his name, but he thinks enough of his own alarm comes out with it that Reo feels the need to defend himself. 

 

“But I didn’t ,” Reo reminds them, as though he’s not confirming the intent of it in the same breath. “Nagi’s right. It’s not ready. Last thing I need from the old man is an I told you so. ”

 

“And bail money, because sending it out, ready or not, is illegal, Reo,” Chigiri reminds him again, severely. “It’s - these things are supposed to be done in controlled environments, it’s not safe -”

 

“Don’t know how I’m supposed to do that when he’s going to shut down my access to funding,” Reo snaps. He actually snaps and Chigiri backs off for all but a second, stunned - it’s enough of a second that Reo collects himself and apologises, once and then again until Chigiri waves him away. He throws himself back into the couch, breathes in long and deep. Two times, three, a breathing exercise he must have picked up somewhere, rubbing the heel of his palm into his tired eyes a little too harshly. “I got one shot to sell him on this idea and - am I just supposed to give up? I can turn this into fucking shareholder value if he and his stiff-necked board of directors could just see what this thing can do -”

 

“Were you just thinking of releasing it to go - what? Direct traffic?”

 

“Obviously fucking not, I just -” Reo stops suddenly short. Too sudden to be anything other than suspicious. 

 

“What?” Isagi asks, fending off the dread that’s settling in before he even gets to hear the answer. “What is it?”

 

Reo’s reluctance is an obvious thing - he’s gone almost rigid with it. But with three pairs of eyes stuck on him in almost unmoving apprehension, and a fourth pair seemingly waiting for him to crack, he finally admits in an unwilling mumble, “... I was going to try and see if I could smoke out a drug den.”

 

The sequence of words they’d heard Reo speak is so completely bizarre that Isagi’s brain takes a long minute to add them together in a way that makes sense.

 

Bachira gets there faster, and it’s saying something that Reo’s got Bachira’s eyes bugging out of his head in shock. “You were going to what? ”

 

“Told you it was an emergency,” Nagi adds to the discussion, unperturbed if not for the way his hand grips around the can of soda he’s snapped open and is yet to sip.

 

“It wasn’t going to be anything crazy,” Reo protests, starting to go a little red in the face under all their collective counfoundment, “I just - look, the drug situation is getting fucking out of hand here, right? And the police are doing jack all about it until after the fact -”

 

“But what did you think you could do about it?” Chigiri hinges his jaw back from where it’d fallen open in shock to demand. “Reo, you have one, half-complete prototype robot, what was it going to -”

 

“I think I know where they’re operating out of,” Reo says. 

 

Chigiri goes dead quiet. 

 

“You - what? How?” Bachira picks up the baton - snatches it from Chigiri for the sprint, if anything. 

 

Isagi can only stare, dumbfounded, as Reo hurries to correct, 

 

“Okay, it’s not like - I don’t know exactly where they’re headquartered. But I have heard - I do know - that there’s at least one gang that is trying to expand its business. It’s like… I don’t know all the details but it’s like an elaborate money laundering scheme where I guess they want to embed themselves right into the commercial engine of the city, so they get protection from the vested interest of these people to prevent too big a shock happening to their own business ecosystem, you know? The only reason they’ve not been ratted out already is because they have enough of a network to leverage it in the first place.”

 

Isagi only realises how slack his face has gone when he tries to recover enough to ask, “How do you even know all of this?”

 

To this, Reo simply shrugs. “People talk. It’s business.” Whatever he sees pass over Isagi’s face makes him add, “Yeah, I don’t like it either. That’s why -”

 

“But you said you don’t know exactly where they’re operating out of,” Bachira blurts out, like he can’t let the conversation derail.

 

“I have a general idea,” and Isagi thinks he knows what Reo is going to say before he says it, feels it in his gut, the same kind of intuition that kicks in before the rain, “It’s around where you and Isagi work.”

 

Chigiri only baulks at the information, apparently stunned silent, while Bachira argues, “But that’s a pretty broad area still -”

 

“That’s where the prototype would have come in handy,” there’s a glint to Reo’s eye now that unnerves Isagi. 

 

It’s not the same as the fervour with which he’d devoted himself to the project but something else, an excitement that Isagi found infectious and even a bit endearing. 

 

No, this is something else. Something bolder and more brazen, something more impetuous than eager. 

 

And looking at it, Isagi thinks he understands why Nagi had called in back-up. As though he’d sensed, better than any of the rest of them, how capable Reo is at putting idea into action. How little he would hesitate to do it, the power, his own, ready to detonate at the push of a button. 

 

“The police can’t act because they don’t have evidence. I doubt they’ve ever pulled off an undercover sting operation and if they make the slightest mistake they’d alert these people. But with something like this…” 

 

Reo grabs up the tablet lying face down on the couch none of them are using - taps at the screen to wake it up, scrolls along his deck a little too worked up. “Surveillance. Manoeuvrability. Agility. Split-second decision-making, without human risk. It could get in and out undetected, it could record conversations, it could fucking plug itself into an unattended laptop and make a copy of the fucking hard drive. This thing could upend an entire underground crime ring operation if the stupid fuckers in charge were not so little in their thinking -”

 

“That’s not what they’re programmed to do,” Isagi interjects, and can’t keep how rattled he is out of his voice. It’s too much - this is too much information to process, especially considering… “Reo, you didn’t program them to do that, right?”

 

“No,” Reo admits. The glint is still in his eye, an unwavering little light. Overbright. Isagi’s seen it before. “But I could.”

 

“No, you can’t,” Chigiri finally manages to find his voice again, and he doesn’t hold back the sharpness of it as he says, “Because if you didn’t get thrown in fucking jail you’d have a druglord come after you. Reo, what the hell?!”

 

“I can’t, because the prototype isn’t complete,” Reo doesn’t budge - that’s almost the worrying part, if Isagi wasn’t already so overwhelmed with worry he doesn’t know where to look first. “But if I could -”

 

“It would still be fucking illegal. Reo, you can’t get radicalised into vigilante justice because your dad said no to you for conceivably the first time in your life,” Chigiri does not mince his words. It’s probably testament to how worried he is that he’s not holding anything back. “You getting arrested or sued is the best-case scenario in this situation!” 

 

He turns sharply towards Isagi, “Tell him!”

 

It takes a long minute for Isagi to understand what Chigiri is demanding of him, crimson eyes all but drilling their will into him. Down and through, back to all the fears that had welled up when Reo had introduced them to the original conceit of his - all the things he’d prophesied, the sheer drop of the risk involved if even one thing went wrong, if the robot malfunctioned or fell into the wrong hands or sparked its own slew of customisable copycats. 

 

It takes him a long minute to remember, because it’s the least of his worries now.

 

And it’s a minute too long.

 

“Isagi,” the sound of his own name startles him. Bachira is looking straight at him, eyes unblinking and almost feline in their intent, “You’re not - what are you thinking?”

 

Of course.

 

Bachira’s always the first, and always the fastest, to notice.

 

“I’m… I was thinking that…,” his throat’s dry. He’s not had anything to drink since he’d arrived here, since he’d left the diner, and the sudden thirst decides to make itself uncomfortably known as he makes himself croak out, “I was just thinking, the other day there were these two guys that came into the diner and they just looked… off? I was wondering, if all this is going on in our area…and then there was this warehouse a couple of blocks over that got wiped clean right before a police raid…” He remembers the face of the proprietor at the diner, the haggard look plastered over it all of that night. He’d chalked it up to one of his bad moods, especially since the night shift guys had been speculating that the police had come interrogating down their stretch of turf earlier in the day too, and he must have had to speak to them, but what if…

It’s fragments of a picture coming together - shapes and slots shuffling themselves around into something that makes more sense . Something that explains the slow creep of trouble closer and closer to the izakaya, a slow enough creep that it’d happened almost without notice. 

 

Almost.

 

And Isagi doesn’t have any proof - not about the guys at the diner, the one he’d almost run into earlier just that evening, or whether any of this is connected with why Kaiser’s work seems to concentrate so much around the diameter of Isagi’s workplace - but it makes a lot more sense than the blanks Isagi’s been sitting around unable to fill in. It’s too late to think before he’s already latched on, roots sucking up moisture after days of arid nothingness, and -

 

“You,” that’s Chigiri, and he’s looking right at Isagi too. His expression has shifted to one of warning, “Don’t you get any funny ideas either.”

 

“I’m not -”

 

“I’m serious,” Chigiri repeats, “Don’t… if there really is trouble that close by -”

 

Bachira finishes, “Don’t go looking for it.”

 

And Isagi doesn’t know what to say. Feels, more keenly than ever, the seam between the worlds he’s been tiptoeing over, all this time. 

 

Because on the one hand, now he knows . It might not be exactly what he’d been trying to figure out, and it might not explain away everything, but he has something to hold now, the outline of the problem, and he sees that spark in Reo’s eyes, the barely restrained desire to do something, all that power that he’s amassed for himself crackling through him for an outlet. All the power Isagi’s wanted to change the world, right here in this room with them, sat like a decorative weapon behind a glass display case. 

 

Dangerous, as weapons should be, deadly in the wrong hands, but if the problem itself is deadly, and so deceptively close …

 

But it’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

 

If they’d not arrived, if Nagi had not managed to keep Reo in check long enough, if Reo’s better judgement had lapsed for just a second against his own wilful defiance, the thing that Isagi can see none of them have put a dent in -

 

There are too many variables, too many possibilities, it’s too unpredictable - and yet Isagi’s gut is knotted over with nerves at the idea that if the bot could have managed to get to the druglords, it could have gotten to Kaiser too. 

 

Surveillance. Manoeuvrability. Agility. That thing could access places that a normal person could not. And even if it didn’t manage, even if it broke down somewhere in the street or had to be recalled for underperforming - 

 

Isagi imagines the silhouette he can see on Reo’s screen, that shape navigating the city’s hotspots and the near-certain chance that it would be spotted, and breaks out into an ice-cold sweat. It has him excusing himself for the glass of water he so desperately needs, conscious of the way Bachira and Chigiri follow him with their eyes, alert. Concerned. 

 

How ironic, Isagi thinks dimly, mechanically moving himself out of the room, that the world he’d thought seemed so removed from theirs now feels close enough to touch. Too close. Too close for comfort.

 

Nagi follows to show him where he keeps the glasses, shuffling in his indoor slippers behind him. Isagi can’t help himself - pulls him deeper into the tiny kitchenette with a hand at the crook of his elbow and whispers urgently -

 

“Do you…,” he pauses - takes the glass Nagi is pushing into his hands with more insistence than he does anything normally and sips at it. Hardly feels the relief of the water soothing down his parched throat, “Do you think he’s serious?”

 

He doesn’t specify about what - Nagi doesn’t ask him to, either. 

 

What he does ask him, with a vacant stare that Isagi’s starting to understand is very, very deceptive, is, “What do you think?”

 

Isagi can hear the other three still talking. Can hear Reo saying something like A practical demonstration is the most reliable sales pitch and the decidedly stressed, scolding tone of Chigiri’s voice telling him to have a more normal rebellious phase than potential vigilantism. Remembers the light in his eye, steady and overbright, the kind he’s seen and can place easily in the electric blue of Kaiser’s. 

 

A will so strong it’s inevitable. 

 

“He is,” Isagi says quietly. “He’s… serious.”

 

Nagi simply nods. 

 

“Shouldn’t you stop him?” An urgent, distressed whisper.

 

Because Nagi hadn’t been trying to. 

 

This is his intervention, sure, and it’d been his resistance that had maybe grounded Reo long enough to not impulsively release a half-built robot into the city. 

 

But he hadn’t been trying to stop him. 

 

Isagi’s known Nagi for around two years - met him at the exact same time as he’d met Reo. In his head, the two of them have always been something of a set - a symbiotic unit where Reo leads and Nagi follows. Reo’s unstoppable force to Nagi’s immovable object, a pair that just seem to click because of their differences rather than in spite of them. 

 

Over the time they’ve known each other, Isagi’d gotten used to the sight of Reo commandeering Nagi around so he’d actually eat and get to class on time and finish his homework - had gotten used to Reo being the bigger personality in the room, Nagi content to let him have the spotlight.

 

Right now, though, Nagi turns to him with a gravity Isagi’s never felt from him before, something both simple and profound as he states, “But I can’t stop him.”

 

Says, with a small shrug, like he’s stating a fact he understands like some bygone universal truth, “It’s Reo. He’s going to do what he wants, and telling him to stop isn’t going to change that.”

 

Says, as he fixes that clear, near-unblinking stare at Isagi, “You should know - you’re the same.”

 

And it’s not the first time Isagi thinks he’s missed something fundamental in his understanding of Nagi. Has learned his lesson once already, the revelation that Nagi is far more attentive than he comes off sometimes, is more thoughtful than he lets on. 

 

But there’s more to it than just that. There’s more to his and Reo’s dynamic, their resonance, than Isagi thinks he’s fully grasped. 

 

“What if he… I mean, he could get into really big trouble,” Isagi says in a hush. They can still hear the voices of their friends in the cramped little space outside the kitchenette, too small for five fully grown adults. Their voices bounce around, Reo’s fluctuating between stubborn and aggrieved, Bachira and Chigiri taking turns trying to talk him down from anything too extreme. 

 

Nagi nods again. “But Reo’s smart,” Nagi tells him. Again, with the complete confidence of someone who fully believes in what they’re saying. “And he’s calmed down now, which means he’s not going to do something stupid.”

 

The phrasing of it almost makes Isagi flinch in recognition. 

 

A different situation, two different sets of people. 

 

The words are the same, but the sentiment isn’t - because Nagi sounds so sure. 

 

Like he understands, and knows, everything he needs to. 

 

Like Reo lets him, in quieter ways than he lets Reo, but still just as sure. 

 

The latter’s voice pitches from behind the thin wall between him and the two of them in the kitchenette, “ - well, if he can’t see the need for a solution, what’s wrong with bringing the problem to him ?”

 

“Reo,” Chigiri’s voice, wavering under the duress of forced patience. “Reo, look, I get where you’re coming from and that’s highly noble of you, but your method is where we have a problem -”

 

“I mean, I’m not actually sending the robot out yet -”

 

A groan. “Don’t say yet -”

 

“Fine, okay. I’m not sending it out until it’s ready, how about that?”

 

“Your dad cut the funding -”

 

“I have my own savings you know, and this is a project worth investing in -”

“It’s okay,” Nagi tells Isagi - he’d not appeared to have been watching all that closely, but Isagi doesn’t imagine it’s difficult, reading the stress off of him. “That’s why I wanted you guys to come - you can reason with him.”

 

“But you don’t think we can talk him out of it,” Isagi whispers back. It’s more so reiterating something he thinks they’re all starting to understand, to some degree, than it is a plea to be proven wrong. 

 

“No,” Nagi agrees. If Isagi looks closely, he can see how tuned in Nagi is to the conversation next door, listening and processing, present in the moment with the kind of alertness he’s only ever seen him show during a particularly difficult boss battle or a split-second’s display of crazy reflexes, like the goal he’d ad-libbed the very first time the five of them had played soccer together. 

 

He makes it look… simple. Instinctual, almost, like he has reached some kind of complete acceptance of the situation they’re in, his purpose clear, and keenly responsive to it. 

 

And even though it’s not ideal, it makes it easier for Nagi to remain calm as he stands there, too large for this tiny kitchen, telling Isagi, “But it also means that if he does do something stupid, at least we’ll know. That’s better than finding out from a mugshot in the papers, right?”

 

---

“I can’t tell if it’s dying or not,” Isagi says, mournful. He can’t even muster the energy to feel frustrated - it’s a weary grunt of an observation as he pushes himself back upright from where he’d been crouching next to the plants. 

 

Kaiser helps him up to his feet with a large hand at his elbow. Trails it down the length of his forearm to ghost gentle over the backs of his knuckles. “It’s not dead yet, so I think that’s a good thing,” he reminds Isagi, as light as the touch. Meant to be reassuring, Isagi knows. “Look, the other one is doing well.”

It is. The blunt stump of the plant has birthed a couple of fresh new buds, the recovery speed seeming to jump once it had moved into this new space. 

 

Kaiser had asked him how he could look after them so they didn’t have to wrangle their schedules to let Isagi come over every other morning to check on them. 

 

I might be leaving early for a while, he’d said. 

 

Why? Isagi had asked. Had known, somehow, that he was not going to get much by way of an answer. 

 

It’s still on his mind, a dour dark thing, as he starts to shuffle towards the door. The whole trip had lasted barely a couple of minutes, and it’s already his cue to exit, stage left. 

 

“Niko was asking about you,” he says - stalls, in the doorway, fumbling to get his shoes on, “The Big Brother with the Blue Roses.”

 

Kaiser snorts. “And which brat is Niko?”

 

Isagi scolds him once for that before answering the question, “The kung fu master. The little one with the bright green eyes.”

 

Recognition makes Kaiser roll his own, electric blue. “The one that’s always hogging your attention.”

 

“He’s just an eager kid, don’t be mean,” Isagi snaps, thwacks the back of his hand against Kaiser’s bicep almost automatically. “He… said he did go home to look up what blue roses meant. I guess he wanted to ask you about them.”

 

Laces done, Isagi glances up at Kaiser to see that vague air of discomfiture he’d learned to sense from him sometimes, in these morsels of moments he’s been threading together. Something that almost comes off as indifferent, or apathetic, but you look a little closer, and it’s like thin ice, the see-through kind. Hiding its awkwardness just beneath the surface, like he doesn’t quite know how to react. 

 

“I couldn’t tell him when you’d come by, since…,” Isagi trails off. “Well, you know.”

 

He watches in real-time as the frost smoothing out Kaiser’s expression thaws a little, and something teasing grows there instead. 

 

“Darling,” he simpers, and when did that get so familiar? So familiar that it feels like it could break his heart, Isagi already almost out the door, even though I just got here. I just got here, and it’s almost time to go. “Is this your way of telling me that you miss me?”

 

“You couldn’t shuffle around any of the things I just said to make it say that, ” Isagi quips back curtly. Hates that this is easier for the both of them than just saying what’s on their minds. 

 

It’s hard stopping himself from traipsing back in time, into Nagi’s tiny kitchen, Reo just beyond the wall ranting at full volume. How he’d learned, maybe for the first time, what it looks like to completely know someone, and to have such faith in what you know that you can stand beside them even when you don’t see eye to eye. 

 

“I know I’ve not been giving you enough time, sweetheart,” Kaiser tells him - plucks up his hand from his side, tangles it lightly with his own. A thumb brushing soft over the back of it. “Work’s been rough, you know? But I promise, soon I’ll -”

 

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Isagi hears himself ask. A rhetorical question, because he suspects he already knows. “You’ve been busy because it’s… it’s been getting worse.”

 

Something is… wrong with North Ward. That’s about the same as observing the wetness of water, the blueness of the sky. But it feels near-tangible now, as thick and humid as the summer air, as loud and feverish as the hidden cicadas and their strident chorus wherever there is enough foliage to hide them. Isagi’s not sure if its frequency illusion, or recency bias, or some other trick his brain has conjured up to try and make sense of it all. If he’s mistaking the uptick of incidents, how close they feel, unable to shake off the knee-jerk impulse that every little thing that goes wrong in his vicinity is somehow mired in this larger web. 

 

Doesn’t know if it’s the shift in perspective he’d walked away with from that night at Nagi’s, a lens he can’t help himself from looking through at the state of this city.

 

All these arrests, these crackdowns and raids, instances of sweeps at schools and workplaces, substances peddled out of legitimate businesses, distributed through a network so dense and disconnected that it’s a chore for law enforcement to try and narrow down a trail they can follow… 

 

His map’s being repurposed these days, like some kind of abstract visualisation of his scattered state of mind, the smear of these incidents across a place that’s always been rife with crime and corruption. Is it just because he’s expecting to see patterns, or are these things really swirling tight, a hurricane closing in, around this very place? 

 

With Kaiser right in the eye. 

 

This time, the mask that falls over Kaiser’s face is one of the ones he’s perfected. Clear of anything Isagi can read or gauge. One that he hates. “It’s all under control, darling. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

 

You don’t know anything, Isagi thinks in his head, near screams it, loud and accusing, and unable to work his tongue to get it out. How can he? What is he supposed to say? That last week there’d been a non-zero possibility that Reo’s half-actualised crime-fighting robot might have run into him? That even if it didn’t, if enough people saw it they could easily mistake it for the masked figure who’d taken the internet by storm months ago - could reawaken that search among a police force already overwhelmed by the ways the city has risen to the challenge, to the order all those reforms had meant to instill?

 

“How do you know?” he asks, instead. Quiet and sombre and worried . “How can you know ?”

 

Kaiser grips his hand firmer. Seems to realise how troubled Isagi really is, smooths his fingertips ever so lightly against Isagi’s jaw, a familiar caress. 

 

That’s another thing Isagi’s noticed, over all this time between their last encounter on the rooftop and here. The…restraint with which Kaiser approaches, and touches, the distance he maintains like there’s still something for them to be afraid of, some resolution he’s inching them towards. 

 

Isagi, in the dark, is finding it harder and harder to sit still and just wait for it to happen.

 

“It’s my job to know,” Kaiser tells him. He’s being serious, locks his fingers with Isagi’s and tells him again, “It’ll be okay soon.”

“What’ll be okay soon? What is wrong to begin with?” 

 

“Darling,” a warning. “Listen to me. I know I’ve been absent and obtuse for a while, and I know you’re probably working your head into a little tizzy trying to figure it out. But I promise, just a little bit longer. This is why I didn’t want you to find out yet -”

 

“Did you mean for me to find out at all?” Isagi asks back, surprising Kaiser. Surprising himself, too, because he’d not imagined the doubt to exist so clear and undeniable that it would just burst out, despite all his reassurances and self-reminders that Kaiser’d told him that he did, that he would, with time. 

 

And he trusts him. He does trust him. He trusts that whatever Kaiser is involved with right now, he’s not working with the drug cartels. 

 

The details Reo’s shared are sparse, hearsay filtered down through his sources, but if he thinks about a secret drug ring seeking to set up base underneath one of the city’s most well-established commercial hubs, then a lot of these sporadic bursts of chaos sneaking closer and closer into the heart of it made sense. 

 

But… the proximity of it… all these text messages pouring in when Isagi’s in this area, and the slow-drip of Isagi’s acceptance that Kaiser’s not just spending his days stalking him. He’s working there - and there might be no correlation whatsoever, but he’s jumped wider leaps in assumptions before and stuck the landing, hasn’t he? 

 

“Are you saying you don’t believe me?” Kaiser’s voice is strange as he asks it - toneless, almost, were it not for the tension underneath. 

 

“I trust you,” Isagi tells him, and it’s the truth. 

 

But is it enough ?

 

“I…” He’d made the choice of honesty for the sake of the people he loves, hadn’t he? “I heard from someone that there’s gang activity - to do with drug trafficking and money laundering - happening in the city. Around where I work, around…” where you message me from. He can’t say it - if he does, a part of him worries that Kaiser won’t let him have even that.

 

Were they not supposed to be past this already? Hadn’t that been the deal? Something two-way. Something reciprocal. But as Isagi stares in dismay at the way Kaiser’s face clouds over, he fears he might have been deluding himself. 

 

“Where did you hear that from?” 

 

The question makes Isagi bite down on his tongue, and he thinks it’s so ironic - so ironic that he’d spent all this time lying and hiding because he’d wanted to keep the people he cares for isolated from danger, when now he’s pushed to hide on their behalf. 

 

Because how is he supposed to tell Kaiser about Reo - about his friends? It’s been sitting festering at the back of his mind, Rin’s clear, simple demand, Chigiri’s increasingly less-discreet questions about when they’re finally going to properly meet Michael Kaiser.

 

But can they meet him? 

 

All of him? 

 

Can they ever know of him? 

 

It’s crushing, to stand at the seams of his world and Kaiser’s, crushed in the slow collision of the two. Isagi’s at street-level, tossed about in the turbulence of the lives around him, and Kaiser’s so high above, looking down at an upended night sky, unspooled like a dream below him. 

 

They cross over into each other’s realms all the time, but just as Isagi stands at the threshold of Kaiser’s apartment and tries to gather up and ground himself, he can’t help but think that those moments never seem to stick. 

 

Fleeting, like the hydrangeas, dried until crisp, sitting on his kitchen counter and fading in colour every day, their blue disappearing into a dull grey. Despite his best efforts, they’re starting to droop, too, the extra moisture sticky in the air weighing down their delicate, now paper-thin petals. Isagi wishes he’d had the foresight to take pictures of them when they were bright and fresh and dewy - wishes, when he’s not holding himself firmly in the present, that he could have just captured them and all their sweetness, how simple they’d been to fall in love with, and deny them their goodbyes.

 

“Is it true then?” Isagi counters with a question of his own, because he can’t implicate Reo. Not when Reo is all but ready to implicate himself, the only thing stopping him being the fact that that robot of his is nowhere near completion. 

 

But isn’t it just a matter of time before it is? Before Reo or something or someone tilts the axis a little too far and the mutual deterrence that balances the city in its flimsy suspension falls apart? Until this balance game Isagi keeps playing with everything he wants to keep for himself, his friends and his purpose and Michael Kaiser, all these misfit pieces that don’t go together, tumble out of his hands?  

 

Leaving Nagi’s place the night after their sleepover, cramped limbs and stiff muscles from squeezing into a too-tight space with four other grown men, mind exhausted from the circles it’s spun all night, Isagi’d felt as though he’d woken up after a long night’s sleep.

 

The kind of sleep that leaves you feeling more tired waking up than you had been getting into bed. The kind that makes your soul itself ache with the wish to remain under the covers, where you are warm and at rest, where you feel safe, a feeble, make-belief protection against the reality already waiting for you with its claws out. 

 

He’d woken to good morning messages from Kaiser that day too, asking how his trip went - how his friend was, and he’d not known what to say to him. 

 

Yes, it might be far-fetched to actually imagine Reo’s robot even mildly functional for the foreseeable future, especially now, with his dad’s active interference to get him to can the project. 

 

But for a split second, it had not been. For a split second, it’d been close to reality, and even though he’s made Kaiser swear that he would tell him if he were ever in trouble, would Kaiser even know that he might be before it’s too late? How many other things could be out there, incubating themselves into existence without their knowledge? How could anyone predict a threat like this, when North Ward itself could never have predicted Michael Kaiser? 

 

When one of the reasons the bot exists is a direct consequence of him, of Reo’s awareness of him. 

 

And Isagi believes in Kaiser, but Isagi also believes in Reo. In Reo’s cause, in Reo’s purpose. 

 

Nagi’d been right. Chigiri and Bachira, high-strung and handling Reo like a bomb disposal squad, sneaking asides to him like he’s somehow complicit in Reo’s madness, are right too. 

 

Isagi’s just like him. Bristling with every new wave of illness the city throws at them, knowing that they might have an answer, a solution, something that could help them gain momentum enough that they could break the stalemate. A win decisive enough that they could right the scales properly, and for good. 

 

He sees Reo’s bitterness and his helplessness, the choice in his hands to do something and yet have to hold off because he has to worry about shareholders and profit and vested interest. 

 

Because he has to worry about what else might go down in the blast when he sets off the fuse. 

 

It’s poorly poetic, isn’t it? Isagi blinks up at Kaiser, terse as he is with worry and near-suspicion that Isagi’s plotting something dangerous, mirroring every wild, misfiring worst-case scenario Isagi’s capable of conjuring in his head. The people closest to you, scrambling to stop you not because they don’t see the merit of your idealism but because they worry what it might cost you. 

 

The curse of this city, its mutually assured destruction mandating mutually assured deterrence. 

 

Acts of caring that feel like acts of war.

 

He leaves Kaiser’s place with no more answers than he already had while there. It’s not even really a confirmation, Kaiser’s reaction to the idea of the drug ring presence around the diner. Reo might be volatile right now, slighted by his father and stinging from having the cause he genuinely believes in dismissed so easily, but he’d clearly been sitting on the knowledge of these rumours for a while. Enough that they’d sprung clearly to mind as the most decisive way he could prove to his father what they could do, the impact they could create. They might have been naive, all of them, to imagine Reo would just dismiss the core idea behind the concept of the robots in the first place.

 

There’s so much that could go wrong. The thing could malfunction, it could cause property damage, people could get hurt. It could be pilfered for parts by people who’d use the tech for awful reasons, it could create so much legal trouble for Reo that even the Mikage Corp’s platoon of lawyers wouldn’t be able to bulletproof him from the consequences.

 

But it could also create change. An impossible, implausible, outlandish idea - but maybe something impossible, implausible, and outlandish is exactly what North Ward needs. Something to shock it out of its fugue state. 

 

Something - someone - like Kaiser. 

 

But he can’t make Kaiser act against his own nature - he can’t make Kaiser serve the greater good when that is not the goal that drives him. 

 

Just as Isagi cannot make himself betray his own nature, not for much longer. The itch to move is a rash chafed raw under his skin, unbearable - demanding that he do something. Do more than patrol the park and run after pickpockets and purse snatchers and dutifully report all his movements to someone he can’t even introduce his friends to, even though Isagi knows he cannot let him go. 

 

He leaves Kaiser’s place knowing that if tomorrow Kaiser’s safety were on the line, he would do anything to keep him safe. Whether the threat is Reo’s robots running loose, fast enough to chase him down or smart enough to crack into wherever he’s relocated his hideout to, or something else.

 

But then what? 

 

What are they when they’re not pushed to the extremities of impossible choices - when they’re not backed into a corner and forced to retaliate?

 

He’s almost started to be afraid of the answer. 

 

---

♛: left a surprise on your doorstep angel

 

♛: ask the brat to look it up too 

 

♛: there’s a japanese legend about it that i like

 

Niko gets Isagi to pull out his phone and search up the blue hydrangeas, the stories around them, like a kid dazzled by a special mission just for him. Has to push down the horrible lump in his throat as he reads out the one about the Japanese emperor who, stricken with guilt when he is unable to give his lover time with all the business he has to tend to, gifts her beautiful blue hydrangea to express his apology and his gratitude instead.

 

“But why can’t he just make it up to her? He’s the emperor,” Niko asks, a deep little frown crumpling up his little face, visible from where Isagi has gelled his hair back today to keep it out of his eyes. He’d been shy and delighted, and Isagi’d only had to persuade him a little bit so he could take a picture and show him how great he looks. 

 

Now, Isagi pats his head, careful not to mess up the hairstyle. 

 

“I know right,” he grumbles, though he thinks this is another thing he’s starting to understand about Kaiser.

 

How all the quieter feelings, the softer, gentler things, are harder for him to say without the drama and a mask on. 

 

Isagi does toss out the older bunch of hydrangea that day, their petals having grown soft and mushy to the touch, mold cropping over the stems despite his best attempts to freeze them in time and attracting tiny little bugs Isagi can’t identify. It doesn’t feel as haunting to throw them out as he’d feared and dreaded, though, not when he’s making room for the fresh bouquet at the same time - a bright splash of colour in the middle of his apartment, drawing his eye every time he enters the space. The sight of them blooming afresh the thought of Kaiser in the most uncomplicated, effortless ways he knows to think of him. 

 

There’s a lesson in there for him to learn, he thinks, one he’s too stubborn to actually accept just yet. He’ll try to dry these again, too - he’ll try to keep them longer, even though he doesn’t know if it’s going to work. 

 

41: Niko says if you want to apologise do it properly 

 

41: And his older brother says not saying what you mean is not manly

 

♛: that little punk 

 

41: The kids think blue roses are cooler anyway 

 

41: ‘Making the impossible possible’ goes down better with this crowd

 

41: Than sorry and thank you 

 

♛: [...]

 

♛: do you like it 

 

41: Like what? 

 

41: Blue roses?

 

♛: that too 

 

Isagi takes a moment to peek over the top of his phone at the flowers sitting on his kitchen counter. Bright and blue and beautiful, making Isagi breathe easier simply by being nearby. 

 

Thinks about how he’ll have to grab the twine again, double up on the charcoal pellets in his homemade dehumidifier and attempt to do a better job preserving them, because he’s incorrigible. Because he can’t accept giving up, he can’t accept letting go. 

 

Maybe that’s just what it means to be human. Incorrigible even in the face of the unanswerable, the unsolvable. Humans hadn’t simply accepted that blue roses didn’t exist in nature - they’d attempted to bend nature itself to their wills to grow an impossible dream. Some may even say they’d achieved it - Japan’s lab-grown ‘blue rose’, more lilac than blue, but touted triumphantly as a victory of man and his hubris and the nature of his that battles the nature of the world, in search for the impossible.

 

I like it, Isagi types out, and sends, They suit you.

 

And then, quickly, snapping a picture of the mug doubling as a vase on his countertop

 

41: I like these too 

 

41: [IMG000159.png]

 

41: Thank you 

 

41: Next time say it to my face

 

---

41: Hey

 

41: I’m telling you now so you don’t do anything crazy 

 

41: But I’m not getting off at Stop #83 today, I had to take a different bus 

 

♛: why

 

♛: did something happen 

 

41: I’m not sure, but I think there was some kind of accident 

 

41: Somewhere along the regular route

 

41: There’s no news but they had the bus driver take us back to the stop before

 

41: I’m fine though 

 

♛: thank you darling 

 

♛: for letting me know 

 

♛: i appreciate that 

 

41: Do you know what might have happened 

 

♛: whatever it was clearly happened just now 

 

♛: haven’t heard anything yet 

 

41: Can’t Eight, idk

 

41: Tap into the police lines and find out or something

 

♛: angel 

 

♛: just focus on getting yourself to work

 

♛: i’m on this, so don’t you run around trying to find out 

 

41: I kind of have to though? [Message deleted]

 

41: That’s the route I take home [Message deleted]

 

41: If I take a different bus it could take me an hour longer [Message deleted]

 

♛: eight is driving you home today 

 

41: This is exactly what I was trying to avoid 

 

♛: i’m serious 

 

♛: he’ll be in the area, it’s fine 

 

In the area doing what, Isagi’d texted back, and received only an unamused stop that back. 

 

It’d almost be refreshing, how he’s managed to badger Kaiser into dropping the usual taunts and teasing, the playful diversions, through tenacity alone. 

 

It had been for a while, too. Each crumb. Every little revelation, an equally coveted thing, greedily slurped up and hoarded. Extending the bar of his depleting patience another inch, letting him believe, truly believe, that maybe, with time, he will receive more. 

 

Isagi shakes his head, shakes away that train of thought and where it’s heading. 

 

It’s suffocating enough to be inside his head like this, hemmed in with the doubts he doesn’t want to deal with, can’t right now - it feels ten times worse packed up with all these people, the regular passengers of this bus and the spillover of the other routes blocked off for who knows what reason. Isagi’s been lucky enough to snag a window-side seat, and he looks outside instead, down this less familiar route. 

 

They’ve had to go the longer way round to get close enough that he can walk the rest of the way to work. It’s the inversion of his usual view - the bus crawls past in the slow-moving traffic of the evening rush hour, on the wrong side of the two-way lane to where the diner is. It’ll go all the way down to the end of the street, and Isagi will have to walk the length of it back up again to the nearest pedestrian crossing. 

 

Kaiser’d probably been right about whatever traffic incident had necessitated this rough detour being too recent - he can hardly count on the news for timely updates, but even the social media pages that repost reports about traffic mishaps haven’t picked up on what exactly has happened here yet. With nothing to find online, Isagi can only resign himself to locking his phone and putting it away, staring at the other side of his usual view as it slides slowly past, the bus shuddering to a pause along with the rest of the cars at another red light.

 

It’s a street he’s more than familiar with. The izakaya might be on the other side, but the storefronts around here all date themselves back at least a decade - a line of family businesses or old, established businesses that have become as synonymous to the street as the names of the people running them. Isagi supposes that the photos that would appear of this thoroughfare on Google Maps would have looked almost the same years back, when Google Maps didn’t even exist. 

 

He tries, staring out at the unassuming storefronts, to picture the corruption Reo’d been speaking of sprawling underneath the surface of this place. Tries to conjure up the face of the man he’d bumped into on the street, second-guessing whether he’d even recognised the right person. Whether it’s just his brain firing strays again, flaring in the darkness in search for connection, in search for sense.  

 

He’s not sure entirely what it is that catches his eye.

 

Maybe it’s the fact that it is the lone storefront shuttered down while all its neighbours buzz with the evening crowd, neon lights and backlit signs and doors thrown open to welcome patrons or see them out. 

 

Or maybe it’s Isagi’s mind snagging on the association as it passes by, head so full of the secrets squirreled away in North Ward’s crisscrossing side streets.

 

Isagi wonders how the old man who used to run the sake store is doing. 

 

It’s strange, humanity’s capacity to grow accustomed to things. They’d been so used to that man, a fixture in this neighbourhood, in the fabric of its self-contained existence. His overnight disappearance had been a surprise yet not a shock - had been something that made voices drop a couple of octaves, meaningful looks shared that carried more than the words did. 

 

And yet, time enough has passed that they’ve become used to this, too. 

 

The shuttered store front, the large heavy lock out front undisturbed and likely collecting dust. 

 

They’ve grown so used to it that Isagi is surprised to find himself only wondering now why nothing has happened to that little plot for so long, as they pass it by. 

 

The real estate around this area is high-value - with all the footfall it receives, from nearby college students, office workers rushing through on errands and to make hasty stops for lunch or slower ones after work or after classes, catching dinner, sometimes with family, with friends. It’s a symbiotic relationship that keeps the people coming and the businesses running. Rare, for the same reasons, for a business that’s doing so well to close down. 

 

Isagi would have imagined that now that the shop lays empty, and without any sure sign of the people who used to own it ever coming back considering the circumstances they’d left under, someone would have shown up to claim it. He knows that there are realtors snatching up empty land, whether it’s a house that burned down or an illegal gambling den turned out, circling over cheap property like vultures. 

 

He knows that the folks that that old man’s son must have crossed paths with would have been dangerous enough to necessitate abandoning a family business that’s been there for so long. 

 

Now that he thinks about it, isn’t it…odd? 

 

That at the very least they didn’t show up to claim the property for their spoils instead. 

 

Those debt collectors, or the drug dealers prospecting for business around here… though maybe their modus operandi is to target the running businesses, coerce their owners into loaning their legitimate shops and restaurants as a front of their illicit schemes. Maybe that’s why the manager at the diner seems more keyed up than usual, and why the old man who’d caught Isagi before he’d fallen over on the pavement stands outside his shop during slow hours like he’s standing vigil. 

 

Maybe none of it is connected at all and Isagi’s mind, left idle and deprived of facts to cling to and reason with, is fabricating his own. 

 

He’s lost in thought, just like this, when he finds his head whipping back around to look at that side of the street again. 

 

The bus, released from the traffic choking up the lane, has already moved too far ahead for him to confirm what he’d caught sight of, out of the corner of his eye. 

 

When Isagi hops off the steps - on his feet before the vehicle has fully slowed down in front of the stop, squeezing out through the doors folding themselves open with their shuddering exhale - he scans the length of the street. 

 

Keeps looking, up and down, all across, as he finds his way to the crosswalk to get to the other side. 

 

He doesn’t see the black sedan he’d thought he’d caught a glimpse of, slowing to a stop near the old, closed sake store.

 

He’ll be in the area, the text on his phone reads.

 

Well, Isagi thinks, shooting a look over his shoulder anyway as he starts to make his way to work - he’s seeing Ness later on anyway. Maybe he can glean something then, if he’s offhand and careful enough.

 

---

 

It’s later in the day that he learns what the whole traffic situation had even been about. 

 

Bachira fills him in on the details, on speakerphone with him as Isagi scarfs down a quick dinner in the staff backrooms. 

 

“- a car accident?”

 

“This girl was high out of her mind, and she was chasing down her boyfriend? Who I guess might also have been her dealer? I don’t know.”

 

It still feels strange to be down here, indoors. 

 

Isagi used to take his breaks here before the rooftop had become a habit, and habits are hard things to shake - the familiar room now feels a little alien. Isagi pushes the remnants of his dinner around on the plate he’d borrowed from the kitchens, trying to reason away the desire to go upstairs, out under the night sky. 

 

Light another signal fire, call Kaiser to him. 

 

It’s dangerous, he has to keep reminding himself. It’s dangerous.

 

But up there, he can breathe. 

 

It’s halfway up, Isagi realises suddenly, chopsticks scraping across the ceramic as the thought occurs. 

 

Not quite down here, not quite up there either. 

 

A place in the middle, a temporary ceasefire, neutral and removed and - 

 

Theirs.    

 

Bachira’s voice brings him back down. 

 

“ - I think she crashed into some random person’s car, which in turn slammed into another one, and it caused like… a pile-up? In the middle of the street.”

 

“Shit,” Isagi swears. He can’t place when it’d even happened, but it must have been very close to when the bus he’d been on had been forced to clumsily break out of the flow of cars to crawl at snail’s pace back to the stop. He’d not heard any commotion, hadn’t heard the sirens of police cars or ambulances - nothing but the frantic chaos of the traffic thrown into a frenzy as vehicles attempted to redirect to a better route. “Did anyone get hurt?”

 

“The girl’s badly shaken up and they took her to the hospital, I think. I don’t know about the folks in the other two cars -”

 

“And the boyfriend?”

 

“Ran away.”

 

“Fuck.”

 

“I know. It happened right around when you were nearby, you said?”

 

Isagi can hear the worry in his tone, and knows what he’s thinking. 

 

It’d been just a matter of minutes that had kept Isagi himself from being on that road while this whole disaster played out. 

 

The view from the skyscraper swims in front of his eyes again for a moment. Life flowing along, near insignificant at that distance, happening regardless of whether Isagi is there or not. Not stopping, not for anyone, its disasters and cataclysms barely visible at that distance. But it’s still consequential, isn’t it? Even if it’s far away, even if the wound or the lesion is isolated. It’s still a part of this giant, pulsing organism, too large a beast to be put to sleep by the tears in its ligaments or the fractures in its bones, surviving as it repairs itself, staunching the bleeding, stitching itself closed. Metabolising them all into its organs, as much a part of it as it is of them.

 

It’s a web, Isagi thinks, not for the first time. It’s a giant web, and they’re all tangled up in it, even if it’s too big for them to see.

 

“I’ll take a different route home,” he promises Bachira, doesn’t know how else to allay his worries. There are the things that he can control, the lessons, the knife and taser he carries in his pockets when he’s out and about, the fact that he has some form of grudging security with Ness coming to pick him up later. But how is he supposed to assure Bachira about his safety - assure himself, about anyone’s safety - from some kind of catastrophe that’s beyond anyone’s realm of control altogether? 

 

The thought of the robots pop up in Isagi’s head again and the plate clatters as Isagi sets it away, a little too hard.

 

The solution and the problem. The ward and the threat. A wheel that spins, between the push and the pull, and goes nowhere.

 

“Good,” Bachira tells him, though they both know that it’s not a complete reassurance. “ - anyway, I was thinking of stopping by, we have this huge batch of desserts that didn’t sell today so I thought I’d bring you some.”

 

It’s so strange. Human nature, and its ability to adapt to the most outrageous things. A horrible car crash a street over from where Isagi had been, such a close call, and yet here they are picking up the pieces and continuing with their lives, because they can’t just stop when disaster strikes. They have to adapt. They have to survive. They have to cling on to what matters even more. 

 

Isagi knows Bachira isn’t just coming over because he has leftover desserts to offload. Bachira’s been dropping by more and more lately - he’s less direct about it than Chigiri is, who’s taken to calling him up randomly when he’s sure Isagi’s out of work to ask him what he’s up to. Bachira has his natural spontaneity on his side, always cheerful and easy-going and always welcome whenever he appears at the diner, chummy with everyone, the old staff or the new hires. Chigiri tries, at first, to be discreet, but gives up quickly, reaching a new degree of apprehensiveness after their sleepover at Nagi’s. 

 

Don’t do anything stupid, he keeps saying, to Reo, to Isagi. 

 

Don’t do anything stupid. 

 

It’s harder to listen than it is to dole out it, Isagi thinks. If you just take it at face value, it’s almost trite. 

 

But Chigiri’s already spelled it out for him. So has Nagi. Bachira, too, not trying to lecture him or stopping him, but just being around.  

 

Tell us if you’re going to do anything stupid, they seem to say. I want to know if you’re doing something stupid. 

 

To him, to Reo, to each other. 

 

There’s a wry smile on Isagi’s lips, the feeling warped with warmth and worry as he starts to say to Bachira, “Don’t take the -”

 

“ Yeah, I won’t. I ride the opposite bus anyway, and - I mean, I could walk!”

 

“That might be safer, I don’t know what the state of the road would be like right now.”

 

“Don’t worry about it. But if I’m walking, I can carry less. You have any specific dessert requests?”

 

Isagi’s not partial, too troubled to be enticed by dessert, and he’s about to say as much, when a thought occurs to him. 

 

“Actually… if it’s not too much trouble - only if it’s not too much trouble, okay? Can you bring a couple smaller boxes instead?”

 

---

He can tell as soon as he opens the passenger side door that Ness is not happy. 

That’s not entirely unusual. If anything, Ness’ mood has only steadily deteriorated with every consecutive ride he’s had to give Isagi, whether or not the circumstances under which they happen is within Isagi’s control. 

 

This time though, as he awkwardly settles his cargo of boxes printed with the dainty logotype of the cafe Bachira works at on his lap, he has a sinking feeling he knows exactly why Ness is upset.

 

He’s wracking his brain to think of a way to bring it up as Ness silently releases the engine into motion - but then Ness brings it up himself.

 

“So… you know.”

 

It’s just three words, but that’s all they really need, isn’t it?

 

Isagi can only admit to it, with a quiet, “Yes.”

 

Belatedly, he feels utterly stupid for not anticipating this. He’d been so wrapped up adjusting to this new reality, to the new ways he and Kaiser balance out this equation of theirs, the terms redefined, that he’d all but forgotten the third component. The third person, equally involved in this turn of events. 

 

As they pull into the main street that will cut straight all the way through until they hit the first bus stop, Isagi fidgets as he waits for Ness to say something. For once, under his beanie and glasses, he’s utterly unreadable.

 

“I know you must be… worried. About the cover being blown,” as he says the words, it occurs to him to wonder if either of them realise he knows about Ness, too. Would they assume? Would this be part of the ‘precautions’ they’re taking, considering Ness is the more traceable of the two? “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

 

It sounds lame even to his own ears - the parody of someone bargaining with danger, a thief, a robber, a kidnapper. Please let me go, I won’t tell. 

 

Maybe Ness thinks the same thing, because he lets out a snort. “I think…,” he starts begrudgingly, staring dead ahead into the street beyond. It’s going to take a while for them to make it to Isagi’s last stop, the streets clogged with cars and buses, improvising their routes while trying to manage the overflow of traffic from the still-blocked road now cordoned off with caution tape. “I think that’s true. You’ve had plenty of chances to tell already.”

 

At last, Ness turns towards Isagi. The glasses glint under the sea of headlights they sit amongst, just another speck in an ocean. And yet, the gravity of a solar system seems to weigh the moment down inside this car, as Ness adds, “And I’d know. I would know right away, if you did.”

 

Right, Isagi thinks. Tapping phone lines, siphoning information whenever they want from police radio. Ness, he’s pretty sure, is the one responsible for that elaborate, absolutely overwhelming checkmate of an online information war, destroying a business mogul and his empire and putting his depraved daughter behind bars. If Isagi tried anything at all, Ness would know.

 

It’s not the faith nor the trust that Isagi deals in these days driving Ness’ confession. 

 

It’s reason. 

 

And because it’s reason - 

 

“But you’re still worried.”

 

“ Obviously ,” Ness’ hands are tight, terse, around the steering wheel. His knuckles stand out chalk-white in the darkness. “Obviously I’m worried. This is… this shouldn’t have happened.”

 

You weren’t supposed to find out yet.

 

Then when was he supposed to find out? How? How would it have made things any different? 

 

“Well,” Isagi says. “One of you has to be.”

 

He expects Ness to defend Kaiser, the way he always defends Kaiser when Isagi starts to rant about his asinine tendencies. 

 

Ness doesn’t. Instead he mutters, almost to himself, “One of us has to be.”

 

“What, you’re not going to stick up for him?” Isagi asks. Jokes, even though there’s no humour in it - even though it feels nothing more than a flimsy attempt to diffuse the uncertainty he can feel thickening in the air. What is it that’s making Ness so palpably nervous?

 

“I will always stick up for him,” Ness tells him immediately. Sure, completely certain. It makes Isagi wonder again what their shared history must be like - they’ve known each other for years at this point, maybe as long as Isagi’s known Chigiri and Bachira. Maybe even longer. “That’s not going to change. No matter what.”

 

“You…,” Isagi stops. Gathers the boxes up a little more securely in the seat of his lap. Despite the air-conditioning, he can smell the sugary scent of the contents waft through the cardboard, sweetening the air around them and souring in the tension. “You sound like you’re… do you think he’s making a mistake?”

 

Ness doesn’t answer immediately. The car lurches into movement again as traffic resumes its flow. 

 

“The cover identity is security,” he says at last. He’s looking straight out the windscreen again, the red of the backlights of the car in front of them flooding lurid across the dashboard and over the two of them. “The cover is insurance. If anything goes wrong, it’s as simple as taking it off and discarding it. If anything goes wrong…,” Ness hesitates. Says, like it’s difficult to make himself do it, “We could just get up and go, and no one would know.”

 

Isagi can’t help his sharp little inhale. 

 

Can’t help the way his stomach drops. 

 

“Get up and…?”

 

“But now you know,” Ness says. It’s almost like he can’t hear Isagi, or is too caught up in his own head, too wired by the tension that has his hands clamped so tight around the steering wheel, that he can’t bother with him. “Now you know, and I don’t know what that means.”

 

Isagi doesn’t know what that means either. Isagi is still floundering at what Ness had just said, what he’d just admitted. 

 

We could just get up and go. 

 

That made sense. He’d probably have reasoned the same motive for it, the persona of the Emperor, a disposable mask that they could easily shake off if compromised. Who would ever guess that underneath it was a German man making a living off of translating plays and novels, living in one of the most disadvantaged parts of the city? The perfect disguise for a perfect disguise. An unassuming job, a sparingly furnished apartment, and books with a stranger’s handwriting in the margins, ideas that are mobile even if the tomes, shoved against walls and piled on furniture, are not. 

 

We could just get up and go. 

 

Isagi’s mind has gone so blank that it takes him a while to realise that Ness is trying to get his attention. As he blinks himself back into the present, back into the car seat from that rooftop so high above the world it no longer belonged to it, all he can manage is a “Huh?”

 

He watches Ness give a small shake of his head. Can’t really read him, the way he mutters, “You don’t have to look so scared.”

 

“What do you…”

 

“He’s not going to leave,” Ness tells him. Isagi is almost desperate to recognise the tone behind the speakers as truth. “I’ve… he’s never done this before. I’ve never seen him this…”

 

“This what?” it sounds brusque almost, in the rush Isagi feels to ask it. 

 

“This… attached,” Ness finally settles on. “This attached to another person. I’ve never seen him go this far for someone else . So, no… he’s not going to leave.” The steering wheel spins under Ness’ hands, twisted to the left as the car follows suit, angling out of the main street into one of the smaller roads leading away from the centre. “That’s why I’m worried.”

 

“I’m not going to get him into trouble,” Isagi says again. Hears how decisive he sounds, his own resolve in the words, feels how much he means them. “I don’t… I don’t want to get him into trouble. Not because of me. Not at all.”

 

“...I know,” Ness admits. It sounds unwilling. “I know. He knows too. But then what? You know, and he won’t leave. So then what?”

 

Isagi doesn’t have an answer. Feels as though he’s standing high above the city again, with nothing but empty air beneath him. 

 

Then what? Do they just continue living like this, in this uneven truce of theirs? Isagi allowed Kaiser’s secret, only on condition that he try not to nose out anything else? Not allowing himself to, because it could endanger Kaiser, because they both know the far smarter thing for Kaiser to do would have been to not involve Isagi at all. 

 

He’s gotten this much. He cannot deny that he wants more. So where do they go from here? 

 

“I don’t know,” Isagi admits. It feels damning as it leaves his mouth - whistles out and disappears. Thinks about Nagi and how sure he is in his place beside Reo, and Alexis Ness, sure that he will be where Michael Kaiser is. 

 

Thinks envy is such an ugly, bottomless, hungry emotion, thinks it is a vice he might never be rid of. 

 

Ness sighs. It’s heavy, and gusts out in mangled static through his voice changer. 

 

“Sorry,” he says. He sounds tired, and the apology startles Isagi. “I’m not supposed to… I support him, that’s what I’m here to do. I’m not supposed to question what he does and what he wants, and I guess he won’t be happy knowing I was -”

 

“Why?”

 

Ness cuts himself off at Isagi’s sudden, blurted question. “What why?”

 

“Why do you… I mean. This is a huge risk. Not just for him, but for you too,” Isagi turns towards him, as much as the seat belt holding him in place will allow. He’s earnest and insistent as he pushes, “You’re always saying he does whatever he wants, but it impacts you too, doesn’t it? If he gets caught, you do too. So why do you… why do you still do this? Why don’t you talk him out of it?”

 

“Do you think he would listen if I did?”

 

“Have you tried?” Isagi counters. “Do you even want to?”

 

Ness falls quiet. It’s not the kind of maddening quiet he defaults to when he just doesn’t want to answer Isagi’s questions. Isagi senses something different about it, about him, about this whole conversation. Like this is the first time they’ve spoken to each other as two people rather than two people thrown together against their wills by a wilful, reckless man who does whatever he wants, damn the consequences.

 

“Let me ask you something,” Ness says at last. He flicks one of the handles by the steering wheel, the green indicator arrows blinking on the dashboard with a rhythmic click. “Do you believe in anything bigger than yourself?”

 

The question makes Isagi huff. “What is it about you two and asking deep philosophical questions out of the bl-”

 

“Do you? Something like god, something like a higher power?” Ness ignores his jabs, manoeuvres the car downtown as they leave behind the neater sidewalks, the tidier neighbourhoods. The buildings grow tighter together, trees sparse, the air itself starting to grow dingy as they approach Isagi’s final stop. “Something you believe in, something you want to believe in?”

 

Isagi thinks there’s an answer to this. He has an answer to this, and it sits at the back of his mouth like a word he thinks he knows. At the tip of his tongue refusing to take shape.

 

Ness seems to take his silence for an answer. Tells him, quietly, “I do. I always have. I’ve always wanted to believe in magic. Not illusions or tricks. Real, honest to God magic. The impossible made real, and… the people who make it happen.”

 

The car slows down into its stop as though with a sigh. The same kind of sigh, an exhale of an admission, with which Ness says, “More than anything or anyone else, he makes me believe in that. In the fact that there is magic, just because he wills for there to be.” 

 

---

Can I call?

 

His phone starts ringing in his hands a second after he hits the send button, and it’s deja vu - Isagi kicking his shoes off, stumbling through his hallway and into another choice. Another decision. 

 

Another turning point. 

 

“Hello?”

 

“Is everything okay, darling?”

 

“Yes, everything’s fine,” Isagi’s voice sounds thin to his ears, frayed out by the frenzy of his own nerves as he’d tried to hurry home without breaking into a run. “I just… I brought home some desserts, can you come by and get some when you’re back?”

 

“Darling ~” A teasing coo. “You’re so sweet. Had me worried there for a while.”

 

“Can you?” He asks again, refusing to get turned around. 

 

“I told you - no sweets after nine.”

 

He did say that to Isagi. It almost feels like that interaction belonged to a different person, now. 

 

He presses the phone hard into his ear and gulps down his own mortification as he says, “Can you come anyway?”

 

Kaiser’s wary when he gets there. Isagi, left to his own devices, had beelined for the shower. The water pressure turned all the way up had only somewhat helped. The first burst of cold had been biting, but as his body warmed to combat the chill, Isagi had found himself hurrying through the motions where he would usually take more time, as though rushing would make the seconds move faster too. By the time the bell rings he’s almost so frantic he half rips the doorknob off. 

 

“Darling, is everything -”

 

“Eight’s favourite dessert is sachertorte,” Isagi blurts out. 

 

Kaiser blinks down at him. Long, thick lashes, a darker gold than his hair, fanning over frowning blue eyes. “What?”

 

“Sachertorte,” Isagi repeats impatiently, backing away through the passage in silent invitation for Kaiser to come in. He does, though he’s still wary - seems to be sussing Isagi out as he steps out of his shoes. There’s a red flush against his cheekbones where the red of his eyeliner is missing, and there’s so much skin for Isagi to look at, pale and near glowing where it stands out against the ink-black of his skin-tight tank top. He must have just about peeled off his suit and rushed right here and Isagi thinks if he doesn’t meet the moment a second sooner he’s going to lose his mind. “It’s this rich chocolate cake, he said. I didn’t have any of that, so I gave him just normal fudge and black forest and he told me he likes those too.”

 

“O…kay…?” Kaiser approaches him slowly. His expression is openly concerned now, and he comes closer like he’s trying not to startle a nervous animal backed into a corner. “Darling, is everything alright -”

 

“I know his favourite dessert, but I don’t know yours,” Isagi tells him. Hears his own insanity unspool out of his mouth and can’t help it, not when it has momentum now and if he’s anything he’s a creature of momentum. “Isn’t that… isn’t that wrong, somehow? I don’t know your favourite dessert. You live across from me, and I’ve known you all this time, but I don’t know you.”

 

This would normally be where Kaiser starts to tease, starts to smirk and bait and rile him up. It probably says something about how much Isagi must be visibly spiralling that he does none of that - only throws caution to the winds and hurries closer to Isagi. He only realises he’d been jittering once Kaiser’s hands grab at his shoulders and still him. 

 

“What’s going on? What’s wrong? Did A - Did Eight say something to you?” Urgent questions, fired out quick and low, searching eyes all over trying to read through Isagi’s madness. 

 

But he can’t, and he doesn’t have to, because Isagi can’t keep it to himself any longer. 

 

“I’m just… I’m just trying to understand what this means,” he says. Realises he’s almost hyperventilating, and his clammy hands find their way up to Kaiser’s forearms for the stability he can’t find within himself. “You said that you meant for me to find out anyway but… then what?”

 

This is the most confused he’s ever seen Kaiser. “Then… what?”

 

“Yes, then what,” Isagi snaps, impatient. “You’re still living a double life. You’re still involved in things you don’t want me to know about. You’ve gone from trying to recruit me to practically having me shipped from place to place so I don’t get into trouble. How does this… how do we… how is this meant to work?”

 

Something hardens in Kaiser’s eyes. “What did Eight say to you?”

 

“That you’re attached to me,” Isagi tells him. Bluntly, because he does not have it in him to keep any more secrets. Doesn’t have it in him to go through the guesswork, to juggle a dozen different scenarios around in his head, when the mask has come off and things are supposed to be easier now. He’d thought they’d be easier, he’d wanted them to be easier. The electric blue shoots open wide and shocked at Isagi’s words, but he pushes on anyway, “That you won’t leave. But how can you… how can you be here right now, how can we be anything, when I don’t know you? When I don’t get to know you? Do you not… is this just how it’s going to be?” 

 

Isagi’s not even sure he’s making sense anymore. Is rambling, is conscious of the fact that he is, but with the floodgates thrown open he can’t help himself. Quakes himself out, all his misgivings and his worries, held together only by the two hands gripping into his shoulders, tight with tension, “B-because I told you already. I’m all or nothing.”

 

It’s an ultimatum. He’d not thought that was what he’d called Kaiser over for, didn’t know anything beyond the fact that he needed to talk to him, needed to see him as soon as possible. But now it’s out there, he’s come out and said it, hearing the truth of it even as it rings out loud in millimetres between himself and Kaiser, watching the echo of it warp Kaiser’s expression from concerned to stunned and shocked and - 

 

Urgent, as he takes a moment, seems to deliberate hard a second that lasts too long, and then there are warm palms at his face, against his cheeks. Is Isagi the one shaking or are those tremors in those hands? He can’t tell, as Kaiser begins, “Darling, I need you to -”

 

He stops, starts again, takes a deep breath. Piercing eyes, a blinding lightning spark, an unnatural, unsafe surge of tension crackling through as he pulls Isagi’s face towards himself with those hands. 

 

“I need to go get something,” whatever he sees flash across Isagi’s face at that makes him hurry to add, “I’ll come right back. It won’t even take a minute. I’m going to run to my apartment and I need you to just sit here and wait for me, angel. Calm down and wait for me.”

 

“What are you -”

 

“I need to show you something. It’s important,” Kaiser insists, and starts to steer Isagi towards the couch, arm wrapped against his back in a way that makes it hard to tell, in Isagi’s rattled state of mind, which of them needs the anchor of it more. “Just sit here and -”

 

“Kaiser -”

 

“Please.” 

 

Isagi falters. That’s another new to add to the pile of ‘new’ he’s seen from Kaiser so far, rare irregular gemstones he’s kept hoarding, obsessive as he transcribes value or meaning. Those eyes shine up at him, twin jewels bright with something close to mania, and he asks again, a harried, “Please.”

 

Isagi sits, and that must be answer enough because Kaiser is all but speeding away, calling out another Just wait there as he all but sprints out of the apartment, pulling the door closed behind him. Isagi’s too dumbfounded, too paralysed by the splinters in his own emotions, to think about getting up to see where he’s going or lock the door behind him or any number of logical, mechanical functions someone would be able to pull off if their brain didn’t feel like it had simply given up on them. 

 

All he manages to do is sit there, indeterminate moments of stillness, but he can still tell that Kaiser makes it back in almost record time. His breathing is a little laboured, the red flush high in his cheek again, the faint glisten of perspiration against his hairline, all that gold and blue pulled back into the bun he’d not let down after getting out of his suit.

 

Rushing all the way back because Isagi had called him and asked.

 

Isagi wants to ask for more. Can near feel himself straining against himself for it, to ask, to demand, opening his mouth to say who knows what anymore, when he catches sight of what Kaiser’s holding in his hand. 

 

A… box?

 

Kaiser, noticing Isagi’s attention, holds it up for him to see, and it becomes immediately apparent what it is.

 

A deck. 

 

A tarot card deck. 

 

“Yoichi,” Kaiser starts to say, and Isagi thinks he’s not breathless because he’s been running; this much physical exertion is nothing to what he gets up to every day, “Have you ever had a reading done for you?”

 

What in the world are you talking about? Suddenly, Isagi finds he does not have the energy to make himself ask it. Head full of white noise, he haltingly shakes it no . 

 

“Can I do one for you?” Say yes, is what those eyes seem to be telling him. What Kaiser seems to be urging him to say, asking and demanding at once. The same kind of greed, wilful and irrational and unpredictable, as Isagi might glimpse in a mirror if he could find one right now. 

 

With Kaiser kneeling to get eye level to where Isagi sits, there’s nothing else for Isagi to do except nod. He’d go wherever Kaiser led him, he realises, and is worried that he’s not more worried about it. Even if he doesn’t know where it is, because at least maybe, if he does, they’ll get to go together. 

 

That’s how they find themselves on opposite ends of the coffee table, folded onto the floor. 

 

Kaiser upends the box of cards on to his hand - sets the box to the side with a flick of his wrist that appears too practised to be spontaneous. 

 

“What are you doing?” Isagi asks, because even though he’s following along, he’s still at an utter loss. 

 

“Just be patient, love,” and that’s another ‘new’. What little of his wits he’d gathered back together collapses into static as Kaiser shuffles the deck expertly, each snap of the cards fluttering back into place resounding inside his head. “We’re doing a reading.”

 

“Why -,” Isagi starts again, with a stutter, and then tries to breathe his composure back in. “But why are we doing a reading?” And then, a sudden thought occuring to him, “Is this some kind of initiation ritual, or -”

 

“No,” and Isagi doesn’t get to parse how he feels about that, or what Kaiser concludes he feels about that, because he tells him, “It’s more important than that. Just trust me.”

 

And Isagi, in spite of everything, all the uncertainties, does. 

 

That seems to hearten Kaiser a little, because his actions take on an almost subtle flair as he cuts the deck into three stacks, laying them in a row across the table. He motions at them, the black coiling around his arm and onto the back of his hand catching the light hanging over the table and gleaming like a splash of fresh ink. 

 

“Pick any one of these three. Whichever you like.”

 

They all look identical, the backs of the cards a deep red and gilded in gold. Isagi almost wants to comment that he’d have expected a silver and black deck - on brand with the ankh -bearing one he keeps in his wallet, an unused calling card. 

 

But this deck seems well-used - the edges worn softer from their once-sharp corners, bent in places from maybe years of handling. 

 

Isagi, with no clue as to what else he’s meant to do, reaches out and lets his hand guide itself to the leftmost deck.

 

There’s a showmanship to Kaiser’s actions, simple as they are, as they sweep the remaining two decks out of the way and move the deck Isagi’d chosen to the centre. It’s so natural Isagi catches himself wondering if Kaiser even knows he’s doing it, or if it’s a force of habit. 

 

The thought makes him ask aloud, “...where’d you learn how to read tarot?”

 

It’s another one of their questions posed as something else, and he doesn’t know if Kaiser knows it, habits hard to break, as he answers, “From a friend.”

 

“A magician friend?”

 

This time, Isagi does know that Kaiser knows what he’s talking about. Gives him that same exasperated look he does when he can see Isagi sneaking his way closer to the truth from behind innocuous questions. 

 

“Very clever, Yoichi,” With a single flourish of his arm, he fans the cards out into a wide arc over the table. “Pick any three.”

 

This stupid man and his stupid dramatics. Isagi’s not sure if the complete unpredictability of the situation has toggled him out of his breakdown or if it’s because this is easier, the path of least resistance - letting Kaiser sweep him away into his madness as he has enough times before that he knows he’s safe from falling. 

 

Skating his finger over the backs of the cards, Isagi doesn’t even realise when he’d calmed down enough to start wondering what the odds would be, that he would pull the Emperor. 

 

He draws three at random.

 

The first card he flips over is the Sun. Kaiser hums, and tells him lightly to flip over another.

 

Isagi does, and the millisecond of it feels longer with the urge to understand faster what is happening. Where this is going. At least, if he draws the Emperor, or even the Magician, he might be able to get an answer or two - 

 

Instead, he flips the Lovers. 

 

In spite of himself, his eyes fly up towards Kaiser’s and lock into vivid blue. 

 

Fiery, and fixed on him. Something sly about it even though the smile has not yet started to show.

 

Feeling a little flammable, Isagi turns over the final card.

 

Two of cups. 

 

Not one that he recognises. 

 

Kaiser gathers his picks and examines them closely while Isagi thinks he can’t do anything except sit there and wait , wait for whatever Kaiser’s leading them to, whatever fate he’s sealed himself into with this little ritual.

 

“Hm,” Kaiser begins, pensive, “I am pretty sure this says… that you should ask me out for a drink on a Sunday afternoon.”

 

A second passes before Isagi is even able to find the part of him that produces sound. 

 

“... hah? ”

 

“See? Sun, two cups…” Kaiser’s smile curls fully up one side of his face, sly and a little sharp, familiar yet different somehow. An edge to it that’s never been there before, and Isagi is flames and crumbling ashes in the face of it. “And lovers. Reads like a date to me.”

 

“You -,” there’s so much heat steaming off of Isagi’s face he’s sure he’s single-handedly raising the humidity of the room all by himself, “You - you don’t know how to read tarot cards at all, do you?”

 

Kaiser laughs. He laughs, silent, and somehow all the nervous energy Isagi had amassed inside of himself releases all at once. A silent explosion, the wreckage of himself left smoking and stunned. 

 

“I never said I’m good at it,” he admits, and Isagi watches his shoulders dance while he tries to hold his own molecules together so he doesn’t just disintegrate into the carpet, “Though they do say the meaning of the cards depends on the reading.”

 

And, more smoothly than he has any right to be, he murmurs, “And I think I’m pretty confident in mine.”

Isagi just stares, uncomprehending, at him, and then at the cards, and then back at him. 

 

“Did you…,” the words he’s about to say linger on his tongue for a little in all their bizarre, incredulous glory, “Did you just run all the way back to get this so you can ask me out using tarot cards?!”

 

Kaiser bursts out laughing. It’s the loudest Isagi has ever heard him laugh - it’s the youngest he’s ever seen him looking. Carefree, in a different kind of way than his usual flippant attitude, and utterly devastating for Isagi, who forgets his own aggravation watching him. 

 

He looks - 

 

Happy. 

 

Has Isagi ever seen Kaiser just look this happy before?

 

He’d asked Ness, back in the car, as it eased into a halt near his bus stop while neither of them made any move to disembark, whether he resents Isagi. 

 

And Ness had just… flopped back into his seat. Relinquished that tense, strangling grip on the steering wheel, as though all the fight had left him. 

 

“You make him happy,” he’d said. “How am I supposed to resent you for that?”

 

Now, a loud buzzing taking over as Isagi gawks at that smile, he’s not sure how he can resent Kaiser for this either.

 

“ Au contraire, angel,” Kaiser sings around his smile, like he can’t help the thing, can’t help the way it stretches over his face. “I think you’re the one who’s supposed to ask me on the date.”

 

“You -,” he feels jammed up, like too many emotions are trying to happen at once and he’s wedged in by them. It hits a critical limit and bursts out as he grabs the cards off the table and chucks them at Kaiser, chucks a handful more when the first shower of them simply catches against the air and flutters harmlessly back down onto the table and he glimpses Kaiser cracking up harder through it. “You moron, you - I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you and you’re doing a bit?!”

 

“Not a bit,” Kaiser almost hiccups it out from how hard he’s laughing, and Isagi doesn’t even think it’s to do with humour, right now, thinks the hysteria is contagious from the way he can feel the tension pulled taut inside him go slack all at once, all of it threatening to pressure-cooker-steam explode out of him. “Not a bit.”

 

It isn’t a bit, Isagi knows this too, knows that this is exactly what he should have expected from a guy who’d fashioned his undercover disguise like he’s playing a part in a play than stripping himself down to an idea, smudging himself into darkness. He can’t, can he? He can’t resist his own nature to hog the spotlight, a superstar slipping out of one role into another as easy as breathing, the existence of it made real by the fact that his audience sees him. 

 

The existence in front of Isagi now, breaking out in laughter he can’t seem to help, growing pink along the cheekbones from it, has Isagi breaking and mending a dozen times over at how boyish he looks, how much younger, how utterly free, as Kaiser manages around his own hysteria, “I had it all planned out, I couldn’t waste it ‘cause you keep going off-script.”

 

Isagi can’t believe him. Can’t believe himself, and the strange giddy feeling rising inside his chest, that carbonated feeling, all the aerated nerves leaving his body in waves and pushing his mouth into a smile he tries to resist with all his might as he says, “Yeah, well that’s what you get for not telling me things. How the fuck was I supposed to know if you weren’t going to tell me, and how fucking long was I supposed to wait - hold on, were you planning on just making any reading I got about asking me on a date?”

 

He knows it is as he says it, knows it even more when Kaiser doesn’t bother to answer the question, all but twinkles down at him, annoying and captivating and just awful in the best ways, “You keep getting this part wrong, darling - you’re the one asking.”

 

“Dumbass,” Isagi swears at once, doesn’t even think about it as he fires it off. And then, slower, reluctant and eager and completely embarrassed all at once, “... though I guess - I- I guess I do owe you a meal I never got around to treating you to…”

 

It doesn’t take Kaiser even a moment to understand what he’s referring to. There’s something pleased about it now, the thing that’s halfway between a smile and a smirk, a cat that’s got the cream. “At last… I thought you forgot.”

 

“I had a lot on my mind, okay!”

 

“You had me on your mind,” Kaiser hums, and it’s smug, smug enough that Isagi throws another fistful of the cards at him, the soft noise they make flapping through the air in tandem with his own fluttering heart. Because it’s not just smug - there’s something underneath it, something that borders on almost…amazed. “Right, darling?”

 

"Realising your neighbour is also a rogue mercenary profiting off rich people is a lot to have on your mind,” Isagi growls at him, but it lacks its sting. He realises, with far less horror than he feels he should, that he’s just… accepted it. 

 

For a split second he thinks about Nagi in the kitchen again, and about how in that moment and in many moments since, he’s yearned for what he’d seen in him - his complete clarity, an unwavering acceptance. Maybe he’s had some of it himself all this time, learning it in slow enough degrees that the bulk of it only snaps into focus like this, Kaiser trilling in delight, 

 

“That makes me happy,” and he’s hamming it up, dramatic little fucker, but he’s also not, is he? Not all the way, not really, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes as he laughs a new revelation. “I kept waiting and waiting for you to text and invite me over. Was so excited to have you cook for me.”

 

He’s telling the truth, this transparent, shimmery thing behind the act he puts on, and it almost knocks Isagi’s breath out of him to look at him and see him this completely. Know him, so completely. 

 

And that’s probably why he has to take a moment to collect himself, before he says, “Hey, Kaiser…”

 

“You can call me by my name now, sweetheart.”

 

He’s not even about to engage with that, considering the leap he’s about to take right now - far steadier than the first time, far more ready. “Trade offer - I… I’m going to tell you something. In exchange, you have to tell me something.”

 

Kaiser immediately looks wary again, probably taking a leap of his own towards the conclusion that Isagi’s going to try and ask about something he’s not willing to give up, even now, even like this, cards on the table. 

 

Can see the intrigue too, that makes him hesitate a second too long, long enough that Isagi barrels ahead and says, 

 

“Bachira - my friend who you met - he’d been Googling you on my laptop after he met you.”

 

That tips the scale from suspicion to full on curiosity - Isagi watches it happen, relishes in the little thrill of it, at getting to see him. No masks, no pretence, without the giddying unreality of a starry night sky underfoot. 

 

“And why’s that, sweetheart?” he starts to say, but it’s a little knowing, like he thinks he knows what the answer is.

 

“Why don’t you tell me? You’re the one that got the shovel talk that neither of you felt the need to tell me about,” and God, does it feel stupidly vindicating to get to say it out loud and admit that he knows too. There’s something gratifying even about Kaiser’s reaction, how he startles and catches himself, but doesn’t grow guarded. Keeps listening, like he wants to know more too. 

 

“He’d been trying to… to cyberstalk you I guess, in his own words, but he didn’t find anything and he’d left all those tabs open. And a couple days later, the - the night you… the night you were peddling that stupid pitch about a duo codename…,” He knows he’s implicating himself, his stupid search history that evening, watches as Kaiser puts two and two together as he continues, “I came home and I was closing the pages, and I saw… I saw one of the searches. For your name and ‘etymology’ a-and… I saw the translation.”

 

He sees the impact of this information on Kaiser’s face, the eyes blowing open, their blue bright and their focus intent, right on him. 

 

Kaiser lets out a sharp, startled bark of laughter, and it sounds a little winded too, like it’s been knocked out of him. Isagi thinks he relates - remembers the bombshell of that association as it’d exploded into his understanding of the world, how the fallout of it had changed everything. 

 

“And that’s… it?” he asks disbelieving, has one hand smoothing over his forehead, over the wisps of hair standing up all over where it’d spent too long in contact with the inside of his helmet. “That’s all it took?”

 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Isagi confides, and it’s somehow equal parts harrowing and freeing, just to be able to say it and admit and feel like he’s not making an awful mistake. Risking losing something that’s grown so dear, against all reason. “I… I don’t know if I thought there was a connection or… I wanted there to be. And once I started paying attention it was just…it was you.”

 

It’s almost like he can see the film reel scrolling through Kaiser’s head now, can imagine that he must be mentally tabulating all their encounters between his first visit to Isagi’s home, and the curtain call of their last encounter on the rooftop. The same rooftop he’d sat beside Isagi on, thinking that he had caught a cold, only to come over to his apartment with a different face and a different name and find the bruise under his mask. A part of him had accepted it before that night - that the intuition, the foresight, all these cerebral things he has trouble matching his actions to, catching on before he had. 

 

But that’s all hindsight - this is the present, Kaiser shaking his head a little like he’s trying to catch up to weeks and weeks of realisation in the span of a second, murmuring, “Yoichi…”

 

He trails off and Isagi, restless as ever, rushes in with the cue. 

 

“Now you,” he tells him, a palm on the surface of the table top, for stability. “Your turn.”

 

Kaiser regards him for a long moment - the ruins of Kaiser’s plans laying between them, gold and red tarot cards worn with use. It feels oddly appropriate somehow, that they face each other like this - on either side of a table, like they’re negotiating the terms of a peace treaty. 

 

“I already knew you when I first saw you out there,” Kaiser starts, slowly, like he’s not entirely sure he’s doing the right thing. 

 

Isagi nods, doesn’t want them to lose the momentum and second-guess anything, “I live opposite you, so…”

 

“Yeah. I’d noticed you out there tinkering around with your plants before. It wasn’t… ideal, to be seen by someone who lived right across from me, but you had the foresight to run away that time, at least -”

 

That last part is a very pointed jab, and Isagi has to deflect it. “You were holding a man up by his throat in one hand, of course I ran away, what the fuck? I’m still not entirely sure he made it -”

 

“He did. He was trying to make off with - ah. The spoils of a gambling den one of my clients was running in a penthouse uptown. Don’t bother looking into it,” Kaiser takes a quick detour to tell Isagi. “You won’t find a single thing about it. We were very thorough about that job.”

 

Isagi snorts, even though his heart is racing with all the exhilaration of free fall because for all that Kaiser is still not telling him, he’s told him this without asking. “You were so thorough you were seen, sure.”

 

“Only because you have those freakishly sharp senses, angel,” Kaiser tells him, almost sweetly, were it not for the fact that all this started because Isagi’d seen him gripping a man’s entire body weight off the ground with his eighty-kilogram grip strength. 

 

“You were sighted plenty of times around then -”

 

“Just enough,” Kaiser corrects. “I was sighted just enough that the idea of me got planted in the public consciousness. No one saw anything long enough to grasp any important details - just enough that it could feed the imagination. Just enough that it would get people talking.”

 

“Was this your brand awareness plan,” Isagi asks, and it's dry as much as it's almost impressed, the boldness it takes to even attempt such a thing. 

 

“See? You do get me,” Isagi rolls his eyes at Kaiser and his stupid exaggerated parody of being touched. “But yes - a new business has to be prepared to try new things to crack into the market… and it worked.”

 

“That’s why after a while, you disappeared.”

 

“I’d built the clientele I needed,” Kaiser says simply, “Word of mouth is ultimately the most powerful tool - and exclusivity is the greatest power on your side to set the terms of the deal.”

 

That second part makes Isagi colour a little bit, even though he doesn’t think even Kaiser’s aware of the alternate reading of that statement. The fact that they’re even sitting here, discussing Kaiser’s alter-ego so openly, feels strangely taboo, and yet all the more exhilarating for it. The thrill of something forbidden that belongs to just them - that makes Isagi forget, for a little while, the large open world and all its problems beyond his doorstep. 

 

“So did you -”

 

“Ah-ah. That’s enough of that,” Kaiser laughs lightly at the immediate look of outrage and betrayal Isagi can feel splashed over his own face, “My modus operandi as the Emperor isn’t what I’m offering up in exchange, darling.”

 

“But it’s -”

 

“Besides, you must have figured a lot of this out yourself by now.” 

 

Isagi’s mouth clicks shut, and Kaiser’s shoulders dance as he says, “I get you too, don’t I?”

 

He doesn’t get the chance to contest it before Kaiser starts to speak again. “So I ran into you, and it was a risk, sure. But a minimal one, one we could afford to ignore. But then I kept running into you. Over and over. And it’s like over time, I learned to keep an eye out, because if you were there, there was almost certainly going to be trouble nearby.”

 

“I thought your whole deal was to not involve yourself with petty outbreaks of crime.”

 

“Yes - unless the petty outbreaks of crime directly involved a job I was doing. But you, though… I could always count on you to get involved.”

 

Isagi mulls over this. “Are you… I mean are you saying that you were keeping an eye on me in case I interfered with your work?”

 

“Sure,” Kaiser admits, like that’s an afterthought, “that was on my mind for a while. But afterwards I guess it was just… curiosity.”

 

“...huh?”

 

“That’s what I thought it was, in the beginning. Morbid curiosity. This one helpless guy I kept seeing trying to intervene whenever there was trouble, even though realistically, there was little you could do to help. Realistically, it’d be far smarter for you to turn around and try and get the police or save your skin, even though that’s the less noble alternative.”

 

These are recriminations he’s heard from Kaiser plenty of times, the insults and the scolding and the reasoning, continuing even after Kaiser had reached maybe his own understanding of the fact that Isagi wouldn’t listen. Just like Bachira and Chigiri and their continuous reminders to him to not get into trouble even though it’s like they completely expect him to get into trouble regardless. 

 

That’s why they feel the need to keep reminding. Keep watching out for him.

 

This time, though, Kaiser doesn’t sound accusing. He almost sounds… intrigued, like he’s revisiting those first encounters from where they sit in the present, reliving his own fascination. 

 

Isagi clears his throat, “If you’re trying to tell me you started following me coz you thought I was stupid -”

 

“I did think you were stupid,” Kaiser says, and grins a little at Isagi’s offended chirp. “But then… I got to talk to you. And it’s just… you’re not, are you? You’re sharp. You’re cynical. You know exactly what this city is like, you know exactly how thankless and pointless it is to try and make a difference, and yet, every single time - I watched you leap into the fray anyway. I watched you try to help anyway, like you couldn’t just stand back and accept it.”

 

Kaiser sounds almost reflective as he continues to speak, like he’s still puzzling it through as he describes it, “I couldn’t understand it. How you’d keep seeing an impossible challenge in front of you and you’d still act, how you’d try to think your way out of it even with the impossible odds. How firm you stood on your principles when I offered you a way out, offered you a chance to work for me, because you wouldn’t give up your values even if in exchange you’d find out exactly what I do and who I work for. I thought, if I couldn’t ignore you, maybe I could neutralise you by having you work with me. Your security in exchange for mine.” 

 

It takes Isagi back to a different rooftop than theirs, where Kaiser must be right now too. Feet skidding over shingles as Kaiser, still a stranger, held him steady where he’d set him down while the biker gang Isagi’d been trying to shake off tear up the streets below looking for him. Maybe that was the first deal they’d ever made - Isagi warned into silence in exchange for a safe landing.

 

The memory feels so far away now, the people they used to be back then. Isagi feels winded, like he’s travelled the distance between those two people to the two people trading the truths they’d held closest to their chests in a single heartbeat, as Kaiser continues,

 

“But I couldn’t tempt you with money, or with power, even though you could have used both, couldn’t you? You never bought it - and you never sold me out, even though I kept expecting you to try.”

 

The way Kaiser looks at Isagi makes it hard for him to collect a single thought. Makes him want to know what it is that Kaiser is seeing when he does, as he confides, quietly, “I couldn’t make sense of you. Couldn’t look away.”

 

Isagi releases a breath he doesn’t realise he’d been holding. It leaves him a little lightheaded - the whole situation, the air itself heady with the act of baring oneself like this. “Is that… I mean is that why you introduced yourself to me, as… I mean, as yourself?”

 

Kaiser gives him an odd look, before he nods slowly. “I didn’t plan to. I’d gone down to the basement to try and clear my mind…it’d been an eventful night,” his smile’s a playful thing, bordering on conspiratorial, because he knows Isagi won’t have to ask him to elaborate, “I guess you were there for the same reason. And I couldn’t… I was intrigued. So I spoke to you.”

 

“Stupid move,” Isagi scoffs softly, in a state of wondering himself, “Stupid, amateur move. Why would you openly expose yourself to someone who has seen you way more than anyone’s supposed to see you -”

 

“Couldn’t help myself,” Kaiser tells him, and laughs again, a husked sound that raises the hair on the back of Isagi’s neck in gooseflesh, the friction of it when he gets to hear it out loud. “I wanted to know more.”

 

“You’re telling me you told me your real government name because you have poor impulse control?”

 

“It felt like a fair trade,” Kaiser grins, unbothered, and Isagi thinks he’s insane, thinks, horrified, that he doesn’t hate it, because, “I got to learn yours back.”

 

“You could have found that out for yourself,” Isagi argues back. The memory is floating back up to him through the dregs of a long lost moment in time - Kaiser’s smile and the way he’d looked at him, repeating his name back to him. Isagi Yoichi - the world’s purest. “I’m sure you have your ways… especially when you were trying to go around and recruit me.”

 

“Oh, we do.” Kaiser agrees. It’s flippant, but the affected kind, and Isagi wonders if he’s supposed to be able to tell or if he’s just gotten better at telling. “But I wasn’t… even up until then, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was I was looking for out of it -”

 

“Again, your lack of self-preservation skills is appalling -”

 

“I go after what I want, sue me,” he bulldozes ahead to quiet Isagi’s retort back, “ - but I guess that night kind of sealed something for me. That was… the first time you’d asked something of me.”

 

And Isagi… had not thought of it that way. Remembers that night only in flashes of anxiety and panic. Remembers only the horrible fear when he’d realised who he had been looking at down in the alleyway with the bag of banknotes and what it must mean and why. 

 

In that moment, right or wrong hadn’t mattered. All he’d wanted was to make sure that the old man from the sake shop didn’t get hurt. 

 

He remembers pleading for it. Remembers the desperation of how he’d begged to spare that man, still thinking that it was him that the Emperor had come for that night, rather than for Isagi himself.

 

“I think I understood something about you that night - or rather…,” Kaiser pauses, meditative, speaks as though he’s measuring his words, examining them for their accuracy. It makes Isagi recall his essays, and his books, the careful, considering words tucked in between the lines to try and understand the people they’re about. “I… accepted something about you. That you care about people. You do what you do because you care .”

 

“Is that so crazy?” Isagi asks. Thinks about the view from the street looking up, and the view from the rooftops looking down. “People have got to care for society to function at all -”

 

Kaiser makes a little sound of derision. “People care to the extent of dumping their change in the donation box at a supermarket checkout, or helping elderly people carry things up the stairs. I don’t think people care enough to put their own safety on the line, over and over, without exception, for the sake of strangers.”

 

“Maybe,” Isagi starts slowly, because he disagrees, “Maybe you just… need to give people the chance to show you that they can.” 

 

Kaiser’s answer is decisive. “I’ve seen enough. I know the kinds of conditions people put into their care. It’s not… I guess it’s human. To put you and yours first, to not put the wellbeing of others above yourself. It’s the smarter thing to do, a lot of the time.”

 

“Are you sure you’re not calling me stupid…”

 

“I’m calling you impossible,” Kaiser says quietly, and the weight of that statement lands like something heavy between them. “I’m calling you completely impossible. At first I thought you were just… righteous, just a kid with a cause. That with time that light in your eye would go out the way it does for so many people, who just become jaded with how…,” Kaiser struggles for the right word there for a bit, “how little they are. How much bigger and more unforgiving the world is.” 

 

“But you still want the world at your fingertips,” it’s an observation, and it pictures the scale of that big, unforgiving world turned all the way down, until it fits in the palm of your hand and the reach of your eyes. 

 

“I do. And you want to change it -,” Isagi can’t even cringe at having his words returned to him like that, in a place that feels far more grounded in reality than their perch high above an ocean of city lights. “ - even though you’re under no delusions of what it’s like, just like me.”

 

We’re not so different, you and I. 

 

Isagi doesn’t exactly agree. 

 

He thinks that maybe they’re so different that they circle back around to being the same - that they’re such mirrored opposites they’re parallel lines. 

 

The place where the horizon meets. 

 

“I think… that people deserve more credit than you give them,” Isagi says slowly, “I know the world is… a pretty harsh, cruel, cold place sometimes. But I think it would be far worse if people didn’t care. There are folks out there who are doing far more, giving up far more than I ever have for a cause bigger than them. Activists and firefighters and -”

 

Kaiser is shaking his head. “Sure. But it’s you -,” Kaiser cuts himself off, pauses like he’s deliberating over the thought, over how to best say it. Isagi catches himself in the middle of musing that maybe he’s just not had occasion to try and spell it out to himself, in logic and reason. That he’s so driven by his own will that he doesn’t have to stop to question it, the way he questions the words and thoughts and actions of the people inside his books. “You made me stop and take notice. You kept… defying my expectations, kept surprising me, and I guess I just wanted to know…”

 

“Know what?” Isagi urges, hooked on to his every word.

 

This time when Kaiser hesitates, Isagi can sense a little more of the awkwardness, that clumsy silence he’s seen him fall into when he’s just… dealing with people. The kids at the park, Kawasaki at the convenience store, or just… trying to reckon with all the ways people connect into each other’s lives. This is new to Isagi, all of this is new - he wonders how new it is to Kaiser too.

 

Kaiser doesn’t continue his train of thought - not directly, at least. Takes a detour, expands the notes in the margins as he says, “When I started talking to you, in the basement, at the lifts, and just, there -” he waves in the direction of the balcony, “I tried, you know? I tried to present myself as the kind of guy I thought you’d like. Sensible, mature, capable.”

 

And - 

 

Well. 

There are a lot of pressing questions sprouting from that already, pushing for priority, wanting to be asked first.

 

Isagi manages only a simple, “...why?”

 

“You hated my guts,” Kaiser grins, but to Isagi’s eye, it looks a little less real than all the smiles he’s seen tonight, “I stood for everything you despise, right? So I… showed you the opposite. What I expected you’d like and gravitate to - I’m pretty good at that.”

 

“But you… I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re the bane of my existence,” Isagi pauses quickly to preface, thrills at the way that surprises a bark of laughter out of Kaiser, “But you are also… you can also be sensible, and mature, and capable. You… when you came over the first time, you -”

 

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Kaiser says, and as though recognising the echo of the statement too, adds, “you’re very good at that, messing up my plans.”

 

“You’re just bad at plans -”

 

“But the night before, you’d come to me for help,” Kaiser tells him, and Isagi’s complaints die away on his lips. There’s a light in Kaiser’s eye as he recounts the memory - it is near-identical to the glint Isagi’s seen in Reo’s just days ago. That burning, undying fire. “Me. The only one you could count on to exact your will. And I was so…”

 

Isagi wonders whether it’d be easier for Kaiser to admit all this if he were under a mask right now - if he got to underscore his words with a grandiose performance, as though they’re a more comfortable conduit for his emotions than the act of vulnerability. Like this, sitting across from him, so… transparent, as he says at last. “I was… happy.”

 

“I know,” Isagi tells him. Hears a tenderness in his own voice that surprises him but only a little. 

 

It rings close to the feeling inside of his chest, a soft ache warm with the need to reach out to the man on the other side of this table, who tells himself that he does not care for people but had cared so much he’d near changed their corner of the world, just for him. 

 

Just for Isagi. 

 

Vying for his approval, like Niko, bringing him the referee cards and the plastic whistle he’d won in a gacha machine and his pieces of trivia, being the first to start reminding the children at the park that it’s time to go home these days. Maybe in different ways, somehow both subtler and more bombastic at the same time, whether as the man he presented himself as in the balcony across the way or as the man who’d appeared to him like a spectre in the night. Like he’d been seeking something from him, wanting something from him, buffeted through all the teasing and the flirting because maybe he’d just not known how else to ask. 

 

“I know you were. I was… I was happy too. I’m still grateful. I think… that’s why, when I saw your name, and I saw the meaning of it… I couldn’t let it go.”

 

Kaiser breathes out in a harsh exhale, half a laugh. 

 

“And you want me. You want me, ” he says it like he can’t quite believe it. 

 

Isagi puts his self-consciousness aside because this is important. This is so important that he almost quakes with it, as he answers, “I do.” And then, “All of you.”

 

There it is, his greed. This uncomfortable, unsightly thing that he keeps hidden away from the world, baring itself here, in front of the person who probably understands it the most. 

 

Who looks back at him with a hunger that goes beyond carnal, that yearns towards him with his eyes alone as Kaiser lets out another lungful of air, shakier. He seems a little stunned. “I thought…you…you’re always so nice . To everyone. So willing to see the good in everyone. But you saw the worst of me. You saw the worst of me, Yoichi, and you let me see you the way no one else does.” 

 

Kaiser’s voice is a hush but it rings in Isagi’s ears as he hushes, “And now I can’t give it up.”

 

And Isagi, feeling bolder than he’s ever felt before, holds his gaze, wonders whether the mania in Kaiser’s eyes reflects his own as he says, “Then don’t. Don’t give me up,” he takes a deep, deep breath before this final plunge, “Let me in.”

 

In an instant, he senses Kaiser trying to retreat, senses this newfound openness he wants to drink in until it’s all he knows begin to close off. Scrambles after him, “Please, I -”

 

“It’s dangerous,” he reads what Isagi’s about to say off his face and reverts, again, “Dangerous for you. I mean it, Yoichi. I need you safe.”

 

“How do you think I feel, then?” The rage in Isagi’s voice is not really rage. Just like the accusation in Chigiri’s or the wariness in Bachira’s as they try to figure him out are not those things either. Worried, he’s gets so worried he feels sick with it. “I can tell that things have been getting really bad, I can tell that it’s concentrating around where I work. And you’re always there, am I not meant to worry about that? I -”

 

“I’ll tell you,” Kaiser offers suddenly, and Isagi’s mouth clacks shut. “Once it’s over. Okay? I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing, but only after it’s over.”

 

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, a bitter truth to accept, that after all this headway he’d thought they’d just made here, Kaiser is expecting him to fall back onto their childish negotiations. 

 

“And when is that going to be?” he asks, and can’t keep that bitterness out of his tone. 

 

“Darling, don’t,” Isagi angles his face out of the way when Kaiser reaches for him, and gets off the floor completely when Kaiser pursues anyway, “Don’t be like that. You -,” he makes a frustrated noise, Isagi hearing him get to his feet as he steps away from the coffee table, putting space in between them that hurts to feel grow. “You keep things from people you care about too, don’t you? You keep secrets from people because you care, too.”

 

“That’s not fair,” Isagi says, and it’s a stung sound - wounded out of him, too close to his own core. “That’s not fair, I -”

 

“But you do. You’ve kept me a secret all this time, haven’t you? Because you care about me. Before you even knew who I was, and even when you weren’t sure. You care.”

 

“What if I don’t want to anymore?” Isagi challenges. It stops Kaiser short, and Isagi, the anger that’s not anger twisting through him like a storm, can’t stop himself from spilling over, “What if I don’t want you to be secret, what if I… I want my friends to meet you, and I want my parents to meet you? What if I want you in my life, Kaiser? What if I want more than what you’re able to spare when you’re not doing whatever it is you do that you can’t even tell me -”

 

“Darling -”

 

“Don’t darling me -”

 

“Baby, listen to me,” In that moment Isagi absolutely loathes him, hates him for the way just one new term of endearment dripping in a plea from his lips dazes him enough that it gives Kaiser time cross over to where he is, cup Isagi’s face in his hands, “...you…,” Kaiser’s face is doing something complicated, like the muscles there are trying to configure into an expression he’s not used to. What comes out is a whisper, dazed as Isagi feels, “... you want me in your life like that?” 

 

Isagi stomps on his foot as hard as he can manage. To Kaiser’s credit, he flinches only a little, and muffles his pain behind clenched teeth as Isagi all but wails, “What the fuck do you think I’ve been talking about all this time?! You want me to ask you out on a date and what? Never meet my family and friends? Are you not planning to be a part of my life like that?”

 

“No, that’s not it, I just - fuck. Fuck, ” and now Kaiser looks like he’s starting to spiral, a lapse in composure unlike anything Isagi’s ever seen from him. 

 

There’s a wild look to his eyes as they rove all over Isagi, his hands gripping a tad too hard at his face, but Isagi doesn’t try to make him let go. He doesn’t want him to let go, and he’s still thinking this when Kaiser does, relinquishes the hold on his face. 

 

But in the next moment he’s suddenly tipping forwards with a yelp, his toes leaving the ground as he’s grabbed by his thighs and lifted up. 

 

And in another blink of an eye, the cool surface of his kitchen counter is under him where Kaiser’s hands had been digging into his flesh, the imprints of that white-hot warmth still there as the rest of it trails up his sides, and he mindlessly lets his knees fall away to let Kaiser come closer. The clatter of something glass snaps them both out of the trance, and Isagi’s still trying to orient himself to all the places he can feel Kaiser around him, the arms that have looped loosely around his waist, when Kaiser says, “... you kept the flowers.”

 

And now Isagi cranes his neck too, sees where the hydrangeas sit in a mug permanently transformed into a vase. A less vivid blue than they’d been when they’d arrived, but they’d fared a lot better through Isagi’s attempts to preserve them and keep them than the last bunch. 

 

“I did.”

 

“Did you dry them?” Kaiser’s looking at them as though they’re a lot more than a handful of dried flowers.

 

“Yes,” and because he’s tired of them keeping things to themselves, “I didn’t want to throw them away.”

 

“Huh,” Isagi valiantly attempts to ignore the awful twinge in his heart as Kaiser tilts his face up to look at him, the counter he’s found himself perched on giving him the extra height and a vantage point he’s not used to. Beneath him is a blue ocean, and it beckons as it says, “You’re more of a romantic than I thought.”

 

Conscious of the heat under his skin, Isagi just sniffs. “There’s clearly a lot you don’t know about me - ah, hey! ”

 

His ass skids over the smooth surface of the counter towards Kaiser as he’s yanked in closer by the arm around his waist, clamping him in as Isagi holds himself back from wrapping his legs around him, what are you doing, Yoichi?! at the last possible second. 

 

“Can you stop manhandling me without my permission?”

 

To which Kaiser says, “ - can I manhandle you with your permission, then?”

 

“Oh, shut up -”

 

“I know you like it,” Kaiser crows, softly, and there’s enough of a difference between his usual oily simpering and this other thing Isagi’s started to grow aware of in him, this… wanting, as magnetic as a black hole that could swallow Isagi completely. “I can tell. You like it.”

 

And before Isagi can protest or deny or vehemently agree or whatever else might come out of his mouth without his consent, Kaiser adds softly, “You like me. ”

 

He keeps saying things like that, stating what to Isagi has been obvious for too-long already. 

This whole manoeuvre of theirs has knocked Isagi off-kilter enough that it’s defused his earlier rage, too - has left him listening to it, closer, hearing the disbelief and the greed and the longing of it. 

 

It puts out the rest of the fight in him, too endeared to stay mad as he clumsily lifts his own arms from where they were braced on the countertop to lace around those broad shoulders.

 

“Clearly, I’m insane, so…” he grunts, because he can’t help himself, and can’t hold back the reluctant smile at the way Kaiser’s shoulders jerk under his arms, laughing when he does. 

 

“No,” Kaiser tells him. Reaches for one of his Isagi’s hands and brings it to his mouth, the slip of his rough palm and the press of warm lips into his knuckles making Isagi tremble in a way that cannot be missed, not when they’re twined together like this, “You’re just…”

 

“I’m what?”

 

“Impossible,” Kaiser says, “you’re impossible. And if anything happens to you, I think I’ll go insane.”

 

“Kaiser -”

 

“No, darling, listen. When I saw you with that bruise on your face, I -” Kaiser runs his tongue over his teeth, a storm stealing over that clear ocean blue as Isagi watches him recall it, “I thought I’d fucking lose my mind. It took me everything to - I was with you, earlier that day, and I had no idea, I -”

 

“I told you that wasn’t a big deal, it was an accident if anything -”

 

“But you were hurt . And I -”

 

“What would you have done? You can’t predict the kinds of things that might happen any given day in this city -”

 

“But you don’t make it any better. You’re always - intentionally - hanging around places where something could happen, and it drives me fucking nuts, Yoichi -”

 

“That’s… I mean that’s natural,” Isagi tries to reason with him. Feels how tense Kaiser’s gone against him, feels the physical manifestation of all that frustration pulling tight in his body with the effort to contain it. Kaiser’s still holding his hand near his mouth, and Isagi, tentative, spreads out his fingertips to ghost against his jawline. Thinks he’ll melt through the countertop at the way Kaiser starts to lean into the touch, an imperceptible thing but undeniable with the way they touch. “It’s natural to worry when you care about people. But that doesn’t mean you can… I don’t know. That doesn’t mean you can lock me up indoors to keep me safe.”

 

A soft scoff against Isagi’s palm. He can feel the grudging upward turn of a mouth against his palm and presses it in closer almost involuntarily, tries not to shiver again from the heavy intimacy of the moment as Kaiser tilts his cheek into the cup of his hand, asking . 

“I wish I could.”

 

“I’d hate you if you did that.”

 

“I know. You’re fucking impossible.”

 

“I can’t tell if you mean that as a compliment or an insult anymore,” Isagi complains. His free hand finds one of the blue tails that’s coming loose from Kaiser’s bun, and he can’t help but let it slip through his hand, marvelling at the shade of blue, a bright, electric hue disappearing into the gold. It glides through his touch to rest back against the matching blue roses, inked in like a claim and a promise. 

 

“I mean it as a fact,” Kaiser tells him. “You’re impossible. Upsetting every single one of my plans, every step of the way - ”

 

“Maybe if your plans weren’t awful, that wouldn’t happen,” Isagi’s snippy about it, can’t resist tacking on, “ Tarot cards too, for God’s sake…”

 

“It worked, didn’t it?” Kaiser grins through the shove at his shoulder when he pinches, playful, at Isagi’s waist. 

 

“It was a set up,” Isagi tries to squirm within the unmoving trap of Kaiser’s hold around him - realises he’d lifted him up here so he wouldn’t try to move away anymore. “Don’t know if it counts if you were determined to read anything I pulled the same way -”

 

“I simply believe in taking control of my fortune with my own hands -”

 

“The problem here is that it’s not just your fortune, is it?” Isagi reminds him. Kicks at his side with the back of his foot lightly. “Don’t go around making decisions on your own that affect both of us.”

 

Without giving Kaiser a chance to respond to that, he adds, with another, slightly harder kick of his foot to Kaiser’s side, “Anything can happen. You can do everything right, and still, accidents can happen. The homeless guy in the alleyway or the car accident that happened just a street over from me today… there’s a limit to what we actually have control over. You get to keep an eye on me, but…,” he sighs. Thinks about the panic that had seized him, so sudden and blinding as he sat on the floor of Nagi’s dorm room, at just the mere thought that something could happen to Kaiser out there, something he had no idea about, something he had no means to account for. 

 

Isagi would have found a way to warn him, would have done everything he could to try and help, if he ever found out Kaiser was in trouble.

 

But what if he never even finds out when he is?

 

“The less I know, the more I’m going to worry. You know that, because you’re in those same shoes. You… you said you want to believe in me right? So, please. Please, Kaiser.”

 

Isagi curls his hand along the side of Kaiser’s face, watches him sink into it as though starving, a feline asking for affection, “I want you in my life, but do you want me in yours?” 

 

Kaiser stares at him like he can swallow him whole with his eyes alone. 

 

“Yoichi,” he says quietly, almost a croon - a drooling tone, low and almost - almost needy, “I want everything .”

 

It makes him tremble, the gravity of his want, how he can feel the tug of it, something tidal. Something inevitable. 

 

Starts to lean away from it, from him, resisting as much as he can if only to keep his head clear, palms flat against the cool countertop as he tries not to sway into Kaiser or the way that he follows into the space Isagi leaves vacant like he needs it for himself. Promises,

 

“You can have it. But -,” he has to gulp to clear away the tension thick in his throat as Kaiser looms closer, takes up all the oxygen as he does, “Only if I get everything too.”

 

---

Chigiri raises a single eyebrow at him when he sees him come into class the next morning. 

 

“You look awfully chipper today,” he observes, tone almost suspicious, and Isagi unthinkingly touches his face, like he can feel what must be different on it if he does. “... is it Kaiser?”

 

With his fingers at his mouth, there’s no denying the instant, goofy smile that starts to stretch there at the mere sound of his name. He can’t wipe it away fast enough before Chigiri blinks at him, once, twice, and in a muted cry demands, “Oh my fucking God, tell me what happened, right now. ”

Notes:

head on ever to the next and last ch if for some reason you survived this abomination and still ?? want more ??

Chapter 8: Chapter 7, Part 2 (Posted 15.2.2025)

Notes:

STOP! have you read chapter 7 part 1 which i posted 2 minutes before this one because ao3 puts a stupid limit on how much you can post in one go even though it's madness to post a ch that long?? if not, you must go back!!!

Chapter 7, Part 1 | Chapter 7, Part 2

41: Trade offer

 

41: I’ll tell you my birthday if you tell me yours 

 

♛: you’re an aries

 

♛: your friend said 

 

41: Yup

 

41: But did he tell you the date?

 

♛: [...]

 

♛: he didn’t

 

41: I mean, bonus for you

 

41: I know for a fact you’re going to laugh 

 

♛: [...]

 

41: What is it?

 

41: You stuttering? 

 

♛: rude 

 

♛: you’re going to laugh too 

 

41: ??? 

 

41: I truly think there’s one funny birthday in the whole year 

 

41: And it happens to be mine 

 

41: Come on guess 

 

41: The clues in my name 

 

41: Also my profile here

 

♛: wait 

 

♛: your birthday’s on april fools?

 

♛: haha

 

41: Told you you’d laugh 

 

41: Now tell me yours 

 

♛: you’re being awfully pushy today 

 

♛: you planning another gift for me already? 

 

41: Stop stalling 

 

41: It can’t be worse than a lifetime’s worth of people making the same ‘oops looks like your birth was a joke’ joke 

 

♛: christmas

 

41: Huh?

 

♛: i was born on 25 december 

 

41: Wait for real?

 

♛: yes 

 

41: Do you not like that?

 

♛: [...]

 

♛: [...]

 

♛: i don’t celebrate 

 

41: Christmas?

 

41: Or your birthday?

 

♛: either 

 

41: Well

 

41: That won’t do 

 

41: We’ll celebrate this year

 

41: What kind of cake do you like?

 

41: Now that I think about it you never told me 

 

41: What your favourite dessert is

 

41: Btw Bachira got his workplace to put sachertorte on the menu 

 

41: It’s so good! 

 

41: Eight has good taste

 

41: Hello?

 

41: I can see the read receipts dumbass

 

41: It can’t be that difficult a question

 

41: Mine is kintsuba, I think I told you once 

 

41: ???

 

♛: i like 

 

♛: rusks

 

41: Rusks?

 

41: Like bread rusks?

♛: yes

 

41: Oh

 

41: With sugar?

 

♛: yes

 

♛: sometimes with garlic 

 

♛: and salt

 

41: That sounds good

 

41: OH I have bread at home

 

41: We could try it out!

 

♛: darling 

 

♛: haha

 

♛: don’t tell me you’re planning on feeding me breadcrusts on our first date

 

41: Don’t get ahead of yourself

 

41: You’re only getting that meal if you keep your end of the deal

 

♛: aye aye 

 

♛: can’t wait ~ 

 

---

41: So it turns out Aries and Capricorn 

 

41: Are not compatible

 

♛: what

 

41: According to the internet anyway

 

41: Conflicting egos and stubborn personalities and all that 

 

♛: you’re into astrology?

 

41: Bachira is 

 

41: I was just curious and I looked 

 

♛: well

 

♛: aries and capricorn also have deadly chemistry

 

♛: if they learn to compromise 

 

♛: and understand each other 

 

41: Are YOU into astrology?

 

♛: eight is 

 

41: Oh god 

 

41: Please don’t tell me you’ve dragged him into this 

 

41: Shit you have haven’t you 

 

41: Why do you do this 

 

♛: can’t have you misreading the stars about us darling 

 

41: Oh my god 

 

41: LOL 

 

41: Help 

 

41: Did you know that the tarot card for Capricorn 

 

41: Is apparently the Devil????

 

41: LOL 

 

♛: see?

 

♛: we’re a match made in heaven 

 

41: Well I wouldn’t say heaven

 

♛: you’re right 

 

♛: we’re a match against god himself 

 

41: How do you say these things without cringing 

 

♛: :( 

 

---

Rin does not look in the direction of his camera, the white glare of his computer screen stark over his face as he asks, “So when are we meeting that asshole?”

 

Bachira lets out an immediate, scolding, That’s not nice Rin-Rin, and Isagi, well - 

 

Isagi says, “When are you coming over?” and revels in watching the jaws of both his friends fall open in real-time in the cramped window of his phone screen.

 

---

 

41: Hey can I have Eight’s number 

 

♛: why do you need that 

 

41: Like if I can’t reach you 

 

41: I’ll contact him? 

 

♛: you don’t need that 

 

41: The fuck 

 

41: Have you never heard of an emergency contact before 

 

41 : You’re not always online 

 

41 : What if I’m trying to reach you and I can’t

 

41: And I get worried 

 

41: Eight’s more likely to be able to pick up right 

 

41: Since he’s doing recon

 

41: Answer, you ass

 

41: I can give you Bachira’s number too 

 

41: If you can’t reach me you can ask him 

 

♛: why wouldn’t i be able to reach you 

 

41: Oh my god have you REALLY never heard of emergency numbers

 

41: It’s for emergencies! 

 

41: My phone could die, I could lose it 

 

41: I could be in class or at work and something urgent could come up 

 

41 : Do you want the number or not?

 

♛: [...]

 

♛: [...]

 

41: Oh for fuck’s sake

 

41: Ten 

 

41: Nine 

 

♛: [...]

 

41: Eight

 

41: Seven

 

♛: send it 

 

41: You send me Eight’s first 

 

♛: you have the card 

 

41: What 

 

♛: the calling card

 

♛: you know how to use it 

 

41: Why do I have to solve riddles just to be able to call someone

 

41: Who has time to do all that during an EMERGENCY 

 

♛: it’s a hotline 

 

♛: eight’s always connected to it 

 

♛: i am too 

 

♛: you can use it 

 

♛: since you don’t have to worry about me tracking you anymore 

 

41: [...]

 

41: Does Eight not want me to know who he is?

 

♛: he’s

 

♛: being cautious 

 

41: I hope you’ve not been giving him grief

 

41: He’s looking out for you 

 

♛: i don’t know why you think i’m not capable of looking out for myself 

 

41: Did I say that?

 

41: Don’t get testy 

 

41: You can be inside a bulletproof bunker 

 

41: And people who care about you will still worry 

 

41: That’s just how it is yknow?

 

The thing is, Isagi’s starting to wonder if Kaiser doesn’t know. 

 

Doesn’t quite get it, not yet. 

 

Wonders how many other human connections, lasting, enduring, real ones Kaiser’s made throughout his life, with the exception of Ness. 

 

From what he can guess, Kaiser and Ness shared at least part of their childhood together. And that makes for a bond that’s almost an afterthought, in the sense that you’re so used to looking back and finding it there that it feels like a fixture of how you know life goes. Like being able to recite the phone number of your parent’s house or the muscle memory that guides you towards all the right switches when you’re visiting your hometown after a long time away. 

 

That’s what his own friendship with Bachira and Chigiri is like - it’s just been there for so long that Isagi doesn’t exactly know how to remember a life before he’d known them. They’d been there, sharing enough of his own life that pieces of it belong to them, and pieces of them belong to him, and a complete history of their selves would be incomplete without the chapters that include each other. 

 

It’s less so the case with Reo and Nagi - folks he’d met far later, when the act of meeting and acquainting yourself with people had become much more intentional, much more conscious. They didn’t have the shared memories and experiences of growing up together to fall back on, and Isagi thinks that’s why he often fumbles when it comes to reading these two. He likes them plenty, he’s as fond of them as he is of his childhood friends. But he thinks the depth of that understanding will take time to flesh out. 

 

Maybe that’s the answer here, too, Isagi thinks, at Kaiser’s doorstep holding two tupperware containers that he shakes at him when the door opens.

 

“Rusks!” he declares cheerfully, if only to compensate for how self-conscious and shy he feels presenting his offerings. “This one’s garlic, salt and pepper, and this one’s butter and sugar.”

 

Kaiser all but gawks at him. “Didn’t you just get here?”

 

One of his afternoon classes had been cancelled and he’d finished early, and Isagi couldn’t pass up the serendipity of the chance. They’d managed to squeeze in a training session for today, and he’d had a loaf of bread in the fridge for two days now, risking growing staler than they’re meant to go to work for rusk. It’d taken him a thirty-second video and the handful of pantry items he thankfully already had on hand, and the treats were ready to bring over to Kaiser’s in time for their lesson. He’s not entirely confident in his cooking skills, but they smell delectable, and with base ingredients so good he can’t imagine them being less than palatable. 

Still, the awkwardness nearly cracks him open as he stands and hems and haws at the doorstep. “Um, did you not want them? It’s way before nine.”

 

“I want them,” and they both startle a little, at how forceful it is. Isagi stares in almost-disbelief as Kaiser starts to turn pink over the bridge of his nose - grabs both the boxes out of his hands and turns away to lead him into the apartment, leaving Isagi to scurry in behind him, almost about to take his shoes off before he remembers he’s not supposed to.

 

They save the rusks for after the first couple of rounds of lessons. Kaiser is as stern and particular as ever, all but abandoning the coy, suggestive remarks and touches aside from when they’re going over Isagi’s fundamentals again. With the pretense and performance out of the way, Isagi can feel his intent in how seriously he coaches Isagi through different tactics to dodge, different ways to extricate himself from a bad situation. 

 

“You’re getting better at it,” he comments at one point, handing Isagi a glass of water as he huffs, flushed but pleased that he’s nowhere near as out of breath as this severe of a regimen used to leave him, “Acting without overthinking.”

 

He probably is, in more ways than one. 

 

“Shall we try the snacks?” he prompts, and is willing to back off if Kaiser looks uncomfortable. 

 

But Kaiser just hesitates a moment, and then nods. They sit at the kitchen counter with the chairs pushed clear of their training arena, and Isagi munches into the satisfying crunch of the sugar - it’s melted into the bread now, gooey and soft on the inside with the crisp bite of the sugar crystals on the outside. 

 

“Wow, this is good,” he clears up the one he’d started with in record time. 

 

“Hm,” Kaiser says, biting into his own. 

 

Isagi tries not to look too closely at him as he does. Tries not to think about whether the taste sparks nostalgia in Kaiser, the way Isagi’s childhood snacks do in him, whether the way he licks off the sweet residue off his fingertips is a habit wired into him from a long time ago. Whether that nostalgia is the good kind, or memories he’d prefer to keep locked away. 

 

But then Kaiser coughs a little, and says, “They’re good,” and Isagi thinks he means it. 

 

Thinks he’s not entirely sure what to do with himself, avoiding Isagi’s eye and occupying himself with finishing up the rusk in his hand. 

 

But at least he’s eating them, and maybe, possibly, they could swap one bad memory out for a better one today. 

 

Isagi, happy just to get to share this with him, is content to steer the conversation when Kaiser gets quiet and self-conscious like this. Is finally accepting instead of just understanding that there’s a time and place for movement, for action - and a time and place to sit and breathe in. 

 

The succulents are thriving in their not-so-new home, under their dual care, their joint patience. Surviving the desperate push of Isagi’s action in an attempt to save them, one of them almost back at its original size, the other in stasis still but at least alive. So now they wait, and nurture, and watch for how they receive it, changing the little things around them to give them the best shot to bloom.

 

Some things are delicate and difficult and take time, after all. 

 

In the in-between moments, Isagi allows himself to just be , by Kaiser’s side. 

 

“These are so quick to make, I wonder if I should take some for the kids later,” he’s saying, reminding himself to brush his teeth before he leaves before he offends anyone with garlic breath. There’s still some bread left over in his fridge, the whole bag seeming too excessive for two people - 

 

“No way.”

 

“Huh?” 

 

Kaiser pulls the tupperware containers of rusks towards himself. “Not sharing,” he announces, “especially not with those brats.” 

 

He overplays it, his petulance and childish resistance. 

 

But Isagi gets the feeling that it’s not all an act, not entirely. Means it in more ways than one when he says, just a smidge scolding, “Just because there’s some for others doesn’t mean there’s less for you.”

 

And as he leaves, he wonders whether Kaiser actually gets that. Whether that’s why he tends to get scowly and withdrawn when Isagi’s splitting his time with other people. He’s grown less and less vocal about it, Isagi meeting up with at least one person from the buddy group chat once every week, and the kids at the park a couple of times throughout. When he talks about his day, he sometimes brings up classmates, his friends - talks about something he had to help out with, during his commute, at work. A favour for a colleague or the contact details he had swapped with someone because he had found a fourth year senior selling a bicycle he’s interested in snagging for a pretty decent price. Kaiser complains less, but in the quiet that leaves behind, Isagi can sense… what is it? 

Distaste? Discomfort?

 

It takes him a few days, but he settles on insecurity. 

 

Isagi’s been loved since the second he’s been born, since even before, if all the fond pregnancy stories his parents like to embarrass him with in front of friends are anything to go by. He doesn’t remember a time he’d not been cared for by the people around him. 

 

But Kaiser isn’t the same. He’s short when it comes to avoiding the topic of his childhood and Isagi lets him swivel them away when it comes up, doesn’t resist it. Doesn’t want to push and pry but can’t help but think that if he’d considered running away and letting himself be turned into a spectacle for profit was a better alternative than staying home, it couldn’t have been amazing. 

 

Thinks that maybe Kaiser’s distrust of people is a more enduring thing than whatever conclusion he may have come to, absorbing all their flaws and follies through his books. Engaging with humanity as though through a microscope, his interest scientific and distant, the city he calls home now a glass slide under his exacting lens. 

 

So no, Isagi doesn’t think Kaiser’s the jealous type, doesn’t think he’s clingy, not entirely. Thinks that there’s a little more and a little sadder to the way he sulks when Isagi’s attention is taken away by someone else - as though there’s a part of him, underfed over the years and not yet fully grown, that worries that Isagi won’t have enough care left over for him by the time he’s through. 

 

He wishes for Kaiser to learn for himself that that’s not how people work, not always. 

 

That’s not how he works. 

 

It’ll take time. 

 

Isagi’s gotten better at that, too, he thinks. 

 

At patience, for the things that matter.

 

---

Kaiser sends him a photograph - the first time he ever sends him a photograph - from his phone number. 

 

It’s a close-up of the succulent, still the verdant little stump of a thing they’d carried over to his apartment - and what is unmistakably the tiniest head of a new stalk poking out of the side. 

 

---

“This is so wrong,” Chigiri’s muttering to himself as they line up to get through the security check. 

 

“You don’t have to come along,” Reo pipes up immediately, for roughly the eighteenth time in the past hour. “There’s a really nice cafe on the fifth floor you can wait at -”

 

“Hell no, I’m coming,” Chigiri brushes it off brusquely, and marches forward to get through the sci-fi looking metal detector installed at the entrance of the Mikage Corp skyscraper.

 

It isn’t Isagi’s first time here, but the process is still daunting - the second Reo’s car pulls up to the large automated gates, ornate and sleek and somehow higher-definition against the backdrop of the city centre it sprouts out from, it feels like they’re entering a different world. He fiddles with the strap of his bag, shuffling in the queue at security check behind Bachira and feeling awfully underdressed - everyone around, mostly the people who work here, are tastefully attired in blazers and pant-suits, crisply pressed blouses and cuff-linked shirts. In comparison, he severely regrets his decision to just tag along on this probably-horrible idea in what he’d worn to class that day - just a simple T-shirt and the shorts Kaiser won’t stop complimenting. 

 

Wanna go see the bot after class? Reo’s asked, with all the innocent enthusiasm of a middle school child inviting his friends to play video games. 

 

It’s half that, and half Isagi’s burning curiosity, that’d made him sign right up.

 

He knows Bachira is probably right there with him, not about to pass up the chance to frolic around in the Mikage development labs, especially with the partially-holographic robot. Out of all them, he’s probably adjusted to the idea the quickest - has decided that as long as Reo hasn’t landed himself in jail, he’s not fussed about it. 

 

Isagi wishes it were that simple, shivering a little at the air conditioning inside the cavernous interior of the elevator - he glances up as he always does at the gigantic chandelier, bedecked in dangling crystals, and shoves away the grim thought about how earthquake-safe this thing is. If there are safety regulations about things that can fall on your head while you yourself are inside a falling elevator, well - if anyone can afford it, the Mikages can, right?

 

He leaves the queasiness behind in the lift as the doors swoosh open like a vacuum seal releasing, the thought that maybe the Mikages, at least the leadership here, care just as little about public safety as the thugs and criminals do. 

 

“Ugh,” Chigiri huffs under his breath. He’s visibly tense, unhappy with the entire situation, as they follow behind Reo down a sterile, plain white hallway lit with stark fluorescent lights. “I really don’t like this.”

 

“He just wants to show it to us before the thing gets decommissioned,” Isagi tries to reassure him. 

 

“You and I both know that he’s not going to decommission it,” Chigiri mutters back. Reo is scanning his company ID into a biometrics scanner at another pair of automatic doors, releasing all its air as it gasps open. “Don’t… just don’t encourage him.”

 

“Hey,” Isagi whispers back, just a little wounded at the attack, “If you want to tell someone not to encourage him, tell Nagi -”

 

Chigiri stops him with a hand to his arm. Bachira is on Isagi’s other side, bouncing along lightly on his toes but tuned in to every word of their conversation. “I know but,” the frown that Chigiri seems to be sporting near-constantly these days whenever this creation of Reo’s comes up is back, crinkling his forehead, “You’ve been thinking about it. Ever since Reo’s mentioned the drug ring thing, I know that you’ve been thinking about.”

 

He’s not wrong. Isagi feels like he shouldn’t have to be guilty about it, and replies with, “Of course I’ve been thinking about it. Haven’t you? I mean…it’s a shame to have it scrapped. I’m not saying that Reo’s robot is a practical solution to the problems we’re having these days but… it could be a solution, if he gets to tweak it -”

 

Chigiri groans tersely. “God, you’re sounding like him too -”

 

“I’m not saying Reo should dump this thing out on to the streets, that is not what I’m saying,” Isagi affirms to his friend. “I’m -”

 

“Here we are!” 

 

They’d been following Reo through a cool, barely-lit hallway, the probably-white slats of the smooth walls on either side of them backlit by bright red LED lightstrips. Without windows, and with just the dim glow of the red bulbs casting an eerie glow that seems to just hang in the darkness, they couldn’t see much - now though, Isagi’s eyes suddenly sting as the space floods with bright, almost white light after an echoing click from somewhere up ahead. 

 

It feels like they’ve walked into some futuristic space movie. 

 

“ Wow ,” Bachira breathes out immediately, gold eyes huge in his face. 

 

‘Wow’ is pretty appropriate. If Isagi had to approximate, the space takes up most of the floor, even with those absurd stretches of hallway they had to clear to get here. There are several long white benches hooked up to laptops, impossible tangles of wires and extension cords like thin black snakes twisting over the work surfaces and off the sides, across the floors, some kind of dystopian abandoned workspace. 

 

Scanning the room, the almost morbid thought occurs to Isagi that he’s looking at a crime scene - piecing together the scenarios that must have played out here from the tableaus left standing. Tall, metallic poles spaced equal distances apart, nearly three times Isagi’s height - footholds spanning the entirety of a too-tall wall, like some clinical version of a rock-climbing set-up. An artificial recreation of some kind of road disaster, entire wrecked cars scorched, one lying upside down, the grotesque sight of a little doll visible through one of the windows – it’s been knocked through, Isagi notices, the windshield also completely removed, like there’d been some simulation of a rescue effort here. 

 

There’s a lot, too much to take in all at once or even understand, but it’s hard to devote much more to it when the centrepiece snaps them all to attention the second its dedicated spotlight switches on. 

 

Isagi doesn’t know if it's relief or alarm he feels, seeing it in person. 

 

Up close, it very much does not look like Kaiser at all, not even when he’s completely suited up and blotted out from view. But Isagi gets to say that, because Isagi’s spent so much time watching him - allowed to look, allowed to learn his ticks and body language. 

 

The bot, strapped upright by some kind of large retort stand and secured to two thick cords plugged in at the neck, into the back of the thick metal ring that sits around its throat, and the base of the spine, could still pass for his silhouette. 

 

The domed head, the slight bump in the face where a nose would be, the bulky physique that is still lean, optimised for aerodynamics, for precision and speed. 

 

It doesn’t look like a robot, Isagi thinks as he draws closer to it, the voices of his friends a muted drone in the background as he studies the thing, takes it all in. It’s some uncanny creation that looks neither entirely man-made, nor completely synthetic. 

 

And then his heart almost ruptures violently inside of his chest when it moves. 

 

“Fuck you, Reo!” that was Chigiri’s voice, screaming out in alarm, even as Isagi bounds almost a foot back, some animal reflex kicking in that he doesn’t think he could have pulled off that fast, a month ago. “ Warn us first! ”

 

“Sorry, sorry -”

 

“Wow, that’s so creepy - you okay, Yocchan?”

 

“Yeah, I’m -,” Isagi can’t take his eyes off the thing. “I’m fine.”

 

He’s rattled, that’s what he is - is still trying to regain his footing when he sees Reo step behind his little creation, standing at least a foot taller than him, and reaches to release the band around his neck. 

 

“Oh my God, don’t let it out -” 

 

“Relax, it’s not a dog ” Reo calls out, cheerful. Isagi tears his eyes off the bot for a second to mark where everyone else is - Bachira has scooched in closer to him after Isagi’s frightened leap backwards, Chigiri is standing as far back as he can while keeping them all in sight. Nagi, who has had the least to say throughout this whole situation, is standing two feet away from Reo, almost disinterested as he watches this play out. He must have already seen this, Isagi thinks a little wildly, and turns back to the bot as Reo detaches it from its resting mechanisms. 

 

Right, he remembers - this is a semi-holographic AI bot. And Reo must have activated it, because the second it moved, Isagi’d almost had a stroke, because between one second and the next, it had gone from looking artificial to something else. Like it’s… rudimentary CGI, one of those edited-in caricatures into an older film, oddly absurd and unconvincing. 

 

Seeing it behind the screen is one thing - seeing it in person is almost breaking Isagi’s brain, the burden of trying to accept something so outside the bounds of reality that it’s too much to digest too quickly.

 

Reo, of course, declares, “Time for a practical demo!” And makes everything worse.

 

An hour later, when they find themselves in Reo’s apartment - Baya, Reo’s personal assistant, has furnished his entire overly large dining room table with practically the whole menu of the fifth floor cafe - Isagi slumps in his seat like his life force has been drained. 

 

“That was the scariest shit I’ve seen in my whole life,” Chigiri is muttering into his palms, in an equal state of overstimulation - probably worse, considering the heightened degrees of stress he’d already been under getting there. 

 

“That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Bachira corrects, all but buzzing in his seat. He has an excited fever-glow in his eye, the identical sort of excitement Isagi’d seen in him when the two of them had seen a life-size moving gundam in Tokyo as kids. “The way it climbed the wall? And swung! Like Spiderman!”

 

“It’s pretty cool, isn’t it,” Reo has forsaken the head of the table to sit adjacent to it, letting Nagi hog that space for himself where he’s flopped almost his entire torso down onto it. Isagi isn’t about to make the mistake of imagining he’s just fallen asleep, this time, but he’s definitely the most genuinely relaxed out of all of them. 

 

Isagi, somewhere from the depths of his own dissociation, comes back enough to say, “...yeah.” And then, “You’re not going to decommission it, are you?”

 

Reo’s response is immediate and decisive. He’s recovered a lot more of his spirits since Nagi’s intervention, and it’s reassuring to see - even when he vows, “Absolutely not. Won’t it be a complete waste if I did?”

 

Isagi’d just been saying as much. That thing was - honestly, Isagi doesn’t know how to put it in words. He doesn’t even know how to metabolise what he’d just witnessed. 

 

What is easy to conclude, though, is that that had been probably the most sophisticated feat of technological prowess and human ingenuity Isagi’s ever experienced firsthand. 

 

It’s not perfect. It performs all the tasks it can access the programming script for with almost flawless accuracy - scaling the rock-climbing wall up and down, scuttling over it with the kind of agility that reminds Isagi of a large, metallic spider, feeling vaguely ill at the sight of it. It’d rappelled down the wall, then up again, then propelled itself with a cord to one of the adjacent poles, climbing up it with movements that are just off-centre enough from how a real person would move that it is unnerving to watch. It’s even responsive enough to jump into action when Reo’d flipped on auditory cues at the simulated car accident scene, blaring car horns and fire trucks. The bot had propelled itself into the scene with barely a wasted second, and even in that incomplete second it’d dawned on Isagi the magnitude of impact that time could have - if first-response could be deployed in the near blink of an eye, landing in the midst of the now billowing smoke from fog machines to simulate, he supposes, fire. 

 

They’d watched the bot quickly take stock of the cars, watched it extract the doll from the upside down vehicle, mimicking the motions of safely removing the car glass windows and windshield, even though they are no longer there. The doll’d been removed off the premises, and then, fed the script of the kinds of injuries it had incurred, applied basic first aid - pressure around a wounded limb, elevating it, cooling one of its own appendages as some kind of cold compress to press against a faux head injury.

 

Isagi’d come out of it all like he’s recovering from an extreme out of body experience. And as he finds himself sinking back into his body, regaining his own faculties, the ones he’d seen mimicked with almost perfect accuracy by a thing that was so obviously not human, he says to Reo, “But it… has a long way to go.”

 

Reo’s smile falters a little but he agrees. “It’s still basic in a lot of ways. Honestly, with this kind of artificial intelligence… it feeds off of input. It learns from active feedback from its environment, polishing its response timings and diversifying its set of actions and choices in a pinch but… there’s a limit to what you can teach it in a lab.”

 

Chigiri asks the question they’re all thinking. “So… now what?”

 

“Your dad didn’t even get to see it do all of that?” Bachira follows up.

 

“Nope,” Reo stabs at the blueberry tart in front of him with a sudden surge of violence. “If anything, when I tried to bring it up with him, invite him to the lab he just - well, he basically declared that he wants the whole operation stripped down because we could be using the space for something with more investor value.”

 

Chigiri groans, and Isagi thinks he understands exactly why. It’s almost fascinating how out of touch parents can be with their own kids - how Reo’s father couldn’t see that the one thing he could do to make sure Reo didn’t give up on this project is try to force him out of it. 

 

But then…

 

“Are you going to keep it off-site somewhere?” Isagi asks.

 

Reo shrugs, still scowling. “I have spaces in this building to myself, in my name. I can move it there. It’s not technically office space, so he can’t do anything about it.”

 

“And then?”

 

“And then I have to figure out how to keep working on it.”

 

“But the engineers working on this -”

 

“Were my dad’s guys, I know,” Reo pushes around a broken piece of tart crust, his mood growing dimmer again, “I’ll have to look for other engineers… I was thinking maybe the guys at North Tech would be interested, that Alexis Ness -”

 

The blood drains from Isagi’s head at the same time as Chigiri starts vehemently going, “No, no, no, don’t do that. He’s a scholarship holder for your dad, you realise that’s conflict of interest, right?”

 

“Right,” and Reo’s quietened down again. Surly. Reo doesn’t like hearing ‘no’, even if he recognises it as the most reasonable and logical answer. And Isagi can’t chalk it up to him being a rich kid used to getting his way, when he can be equally terrible at taking ‘no’ for an answer.

 

He’d made Kaiser tell him what he was doing, after all. 

 

Insisted, probed, pleaded, threatened, and even started counting backwards from ten. 

 

Gotten enough out that the picture in his head is a lot clearer now than it’d been a fortnight ago.

 

Kaiser isn’t working for the drug cartel, even though he knows exactly who it is trying to encroach into the shopping district. The ploy is to try and buy over existing businesses already in the area, cash under the table, and run these legitimate operations, many of which have been running out of the area for decades, as fronts for other businesses. Parts of the profit would be split with the businesses themselves, operating as they would normally but while generating an illegitimate income stream right from within their premises.

 

It’s the brainchild of some young gang leader, fresh blood introduced into the leadership in a twist of the seniority that usually dictates hierarchy in these kinds of gangs. With the destabilisation of a lot of the illegal business circuits in the city, there’d seemed to be some kind of reshuffling in this particular cartel - a rallying of troops to try and take the operation into a more sustainable direction than simply offloading their goods for cheap into the market and going underground. 

 

And the idea is almost admirable, on paper - like some kind of bastardisation of the symbiosis that runs the city at large, forging a dependence between the cornerstone of the city’s commerce, the smaller-scale businesses that don’t have the kind of safety net the Mikages do, dedicating entire floors of their high-value real estate for Reo to do whatever he wants without so much as putting a dent in their bottom line. It would provide the cartel security, since these business owners would fear implicating themselves and losing their livelihoods if they were prone to discovery.

 

But Isagi thinks the idea’d been naive. Told Kaiser so, too. They’d argued about it, for a while, Isagi insistent that people who take pride in their work, who’ve been running those shops and restaurants out of that district throughout generations and care about their community wouldn’t just sell out for the money. Kaiser insistent that people have given up far less for the kind of paycheck these people stand to make if they agree.

 

There is resistance, that much is clear, because these efforts have so far borne no actual fruit. But the aftermath of them is being felt nonetheless - the reverberations of disturbances that seems to keep rippling outward from the epicentre of the area, these irregular outbreaks of drug-related incidents, because even if the group has not managed to infiltrate the area completely, it’s managed at least a foothold.

 

Kaiser knows all this, because he’s collecting information. 

 

You do not need to know for whom, darling, he’d been told, not budging no matter how much Isagi tried to get it out of him, Client confidentiality, remember? 

 

It’s something of a relief to know that Kaiser isn’t actively involved in it. Something comforting about the thought that he’s neutral, present in the area to graph its activity for whoever his clandestine client is, but not actually shifting the pieces around himself. Maybe it’s another business person, keen to oppose the corruption of a force that puts the entire sector at risk, or to adapt their own investment depending on how the future of the power play here shapes up. It’s not the drug dealers themselves, and Kaiser’s snort when Isagi’d wondered if it was someone on the side of justice tells him it’s not someone interested for altruistic reasons. 

 

But still. Neutrality makes him feel better about it. He suspects Kaiser’d caved as much as he had for this reason too, to appease Isagi and his panic and his greed, his absolute need to know what was happening, what the nature and the shape and the size and the scope of the danger was.

 

If Kaiser was safe.

 

He’d given Isagi enough to chew on that it would settle him, so he could ask for his own share back. 

 

Stay out of it. If anything happens, tell me immediately.

 

Don’t worry your cute little head about it, it’s under control.

 

Use those smarts to plan the date instead, darling. 

 

I expect to be wooed off my feet. 

 

To which Isagi, still sitting at the edge of the counter in the loose embrace of Kaiser’s arms, had told him to get himself out of this mess first, and then they could talk. 

 

If he’d thought this would dissuade or disappoint Kaiser, he’d been mistaken. Instead his eyes had almost glittered, and he’d swooped in closer towards Isagi, so close that Isagi’d been half laying over his countertop trying to maintain enough space between them. Face steaming away at the almost-suggestiveness of it - almost , because as Kaiser’d sing-songed Is that my reward for doing a good job?, and Isagi’d scoffed out a frazzled, Sure, whatever, he’d thought of the way Kaiser leaned into the kiss to seal their deal a little as a flower turning its head towards the sun. 

 

A longing, starving little thing, seeking out warmth, the way Kaiser does when Isagi touches him the most innocently - a hand at his arm or his shoulder to get his attention, fingers fixing his temperamental hair for him. 

 

Resting across the side of his face, reminding him that he needs to be safe. 

 

He stills in these moments, the simplicity of the connection making his lack of motion feel as obvious as the ways he’d crowd Isagi before as the Emperor, indulgent in Isagi’s space. Like he’s one of Isagi’s plants, parched and soaking in water after a particularly hot day.

 

He has to be safe. He needs to be safe and he has to tell Isagi if ever he’s not. He’d made him swear up and down for it, and it had felt ridiculous in the light of day the next morning, but he thinks, with Kaiser texting him updates like, at work or done with work, and slow day today, he would put himself through it all over again, just to know that he’s okay . 

 

As okay as anyone can be in the lives they lead.

 

That’s why he tries, sincerely, not to shut off when Chigiri sends him a scolding look as Isagi asks Reo, “...have you considered scouting investors for yourself?”

 

Reo’s frowning, “Like outside the non-exec board?”

 

“No,” Isagi shakes his head, “As in… starting your own business.”

 

The way both Reo’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline makes him conclude that he had not.

 

And that makes sense. Reo’d grown up within the Mikage ecosystem, and even in his rebellion, he’s still thinking about a way he can keep his project and make his point to his father.

 

But if this invention of his is ever going to take off - 

 

“You’ll need a lot of investment, and it might take years before the product is polished enough to be able to handle an uncontrolled, real-world scenario. I don’t know if you can just… even if you exhaust your savings into this, that won’t be enough, right?”

 

“I have an investor pitch ready to go but -”

 

“But your dad is obstructing it,” Isagi nods. “It’s just… he’s so resistant, do you really think you can change his mind?”

 

“He might not be if he actually saw what the thing can do,” Bachira points out.

 

“Yes but -,” Isagi falls into thought for a second. “I’m wondering if it’s your dad that you need to convince this about. Would it not be better to pitch this to people who would actually be able to make use of this technology? Like, with tangible evidence that you can reduce response timings, that a whole bunch of critical emergencies can be better managed with the speed and efficiency of something that can… you know, go into a burning building or deploy at the scene of a car crash without further endangering humans. Especially when the tech can supplement the force that’s already on ground and struggling to handle every crisis situation.”

 

“That’s the ideal market, yeah,” Reo’s saying. He’s got a deeply contemplative look on his face. Nagi, from where he’d flopped down onto his front on the table, has flipped his head to the other side so that his cheek is pushed into the surface now, watching him. 

 

“I’m just saying…if you’re not getting the space to work on this project with your dad, couldn’t you… start up your own thing? That way you can involve experts and investors and… get the right legal clearance for what you want to do.”

 

“There’s still the question of whether disruptive tech like this would receive funding if it’s not backed by a big brand…”

 

“But you’re a big brand,” Bachira tells Reo. “You might not be the Mikage Corp, but you’re a Mikage. That should draw some attention already, and then Robocop can do the rest of the talking!”

 

At this, Reo makes a displeased noise. It seems to loosen some of the tension he’d been building up as he says with a grimace, “Please don’t call it that.”

 

“You should dress him as the Black Ranger,” Nagi contributes, half muffled from where he’s fusing into the furniture, “Japan would buy it up.”

 

“Oh shut up, you,” Reo shoves at Nagi lightly, and Nagi simply flops in the direction he’d been shoved. Isagi is ninety per cent sure he’d made that quip just to cheer Reo up.

 

“Honestly…,” Chigiri starts to say slowly, “honestly, that isn’t a bad idea?”

 

“Wow,” Reo looks shocked. “You… actually approve?”

 

The huff Chigiri lets out makes the strand of hair falling over his face, loosened out of his long ponytail, flutter erratically. “I mean, this way you get to do it without facing jail-time, that was my biggest issue to begin with -”

 

“Yeah, if you’re gonna do it, do it so you won’t get caught -”

 

“That’s not what I said -”

 

“But it’s true, Reo. We don’t have bail money for you, so it would be bad.”

 

“Yeah, we’d have to sell Isagi’s coffee machine,” Nagi half-slurs into the table.

 

“Is that a joke?” Isagi asks him - he knows his coffee machine is expensive, but he’s never looked into how expensive. When he sees Nagi opening his mouth to say something, he changes his mind, “Actually you know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

 

“Yes, boss,” Nagi mumbles into the table, while Isagi turns to Reo with a, 

 

“Don’t go to jail please, I like my coffee machine.”

And that goes the rest of the way into making Reo laugh, finally getting over the last of the defensiveness he’d default to whenever the aftermath of his pitch comes up. They do finally tuck into the desserts and the expensive coffee, the same brand Isagi has at home thanks to Reo, Isagi fielding Nagi’s little-shit attempts to try and tell him how much a box of the beans actually cost, Reo arguing that it’s not that much, while Chigiri and Bachira alternate between wondering how much ‘ that much’ is in Reo-speak and exaggerating their comments about rich people and their bougie lifestyles enough that Reo knows it’s all in fun, they don’t mean any harm by it. 

 

The evening turns out far more pleasant than Isagi’d been expecting. Thinks he understands exactly what Nagi had meant, his own calm and composure as he decided that he’d rather Reo be able to confide even his madness in them than find out about it after the fact. There’s something deeply reassuring about it, being able to talk about all the risk and the danger and the temporary insanity of one impulsive decision, regardless of its good intentions - the acceptance of it that sits around the table, the throughline connecting the reasoning and the scolding and the attempts at problem-solving. 

They don’t come to any sort of conclusion by the time they’re all heading out - Reo offers to drop Isagi and Bachira off since they’ll both be working, and frowns when they tell him that even the humblest of his cars would be riskier in that part of town these days than going on foot. But even though Isagi can see that Reo’s still thinking about it, this alternative presented him to go solo, there’s an ease the evening ends with that Isagi’s still carrying along on his way home. 

 

He hopes that Reo’d felt at least some of the relief that he himself had, letting the weight of his worries get distributed around with people who will hold them for him and try to figure it out for him, even if they don’t completely understand or completely approve. 

 

That’s what caring means, isn’t it? Isagi’s head is so full these days with the news, the stuff that comes up in the papers and the stuff he gathers simply by listening, people chattering during his commutes, snapshots of parts of the city floating to the top of his feed on social media apps. The gossip in the kitchens at work or the small talk with classmates before lecture begins, his group chats. There’s no ignoring the fact that North Ward’s afflictions are somehow doubling in number, too many incidents, too much instability. It self-corrects before things go out of hand, but not before there’s enough damage that it adds yet another stain to the fabric of the lives they thread together here. 

 

And in the middle of all of that, Isagi observes his own tightrope walk, his juggling act. This need of his, this want to believe in the kind of thing that Reo is doing, what people like Reo are doing, working on the treatment to the city’s terminal disease, undeterred by those telling them it’s pointless, there’s no use and no need for it, and his caring. Wanting to make sure Reo doesn’t do anything stupid that could end him trouble, content that Kaiser is not an active participant in these problems when he could easily have been for or against these outbreaks instead. Selfishly pacified by the fact that they’re not risking themselves in the process of potentially helping the people at risk, right now, against forces that are beyond their understanding. 

 

So occupied is he that he doesn’t realise until a second too late that he’s being flanked.

 

Fuck. 

 

“Well, well, well,” Isagi has to tamp down the urge to scowl, reminding himself at the last minute that he doesn’t need to aggravate these punks. There are three of them, and the obvious ringleader sounds like he’s husking his voice up on purpose to sound older and more menacing than the adolescent he most likely is. “Hi there, Big Brother. Hard day at work? On the way home now?”

 

Of course, Isagi thinks, of course . It was only a matter of time before he ran into the high school delinquents he’s kept hearing about all this time, wasn’t it? And of course it had to happen the one time he’d allowed himself to relax enough that he wasn’t as alert as he usually is in these parts of town. 

 

“On the way to - ” he starts, wildly searching in his head for some kind of bullshit answer that could de-escalate this before it has a chance to take off.

 

He watches the kid in front of him, his grip on the butterfly knife he’s twirling around carelessly, blink at him from underneath his balaclava. 

 

“Shut it,” the leader of this child-gang hisses - Isagi notices that even though there’s three of them, they don’t bother to fringe him in. His sides are still free, the two supposed-cronies hanging back behind their leader, one of them gripping the butt of a baseball bat loosely. Isagi’s stomach drops. Are these - ? “I don’t care where you’re going actually. I’m gonna take your stuff.”

 

Amateurs.

 

The thought effervesces at the surface where everything else has gone quiet, the kind of alertness Isagi’s scrambled to will together when he’s training with Kaiser. It’s almost reassuring, he thinks, that initial flare of panic settling down, Isagi welcoming the calm as he stakes the situation. Their body language is to intimidate, hulked up shoulders, dark clothes, arms flexed and knuckles cracked, the ringleader inching towards him with another barked order to hurry up.

 

“I can give you the cash I have,” Isagi says cautiously, hovering his hands at his sides. 

 

The balaclava hides it, but Isagi can hear the sneer in the voice as it responds, “We’ll be the ones deciding what we take.”

 

Except Isagi absolutely cannot allow that to happen. His phone, and all of his messages with Kaiser, entrusted to him in a stupid act of recklessness he’ll defend with his life. His wallet, with Kaiser’s card inside. 

 

They absolutely cannot touch his things. And Isagi’s still wracking his brain, desperate, blanking on all the negotiation tactics he’d learned over the internet to wriggle your way out of these situations without resorting to violence when one of them suddenly says, 

 

“Hey - I seen you ‘round here.” 

 

Isagi’s blood runs cold. 

 

It’s the one with the baseball bat - he’s gone from letting it rest over his shoulder to tapping it loud enough to make an unpleasant sound against his palm. 

 

“You’re the guy that keeps doin’ rounds at the park, huh? Plays with the kids?”

 

Fuck. 

 

“Always giving em treats and shit, huh?” The guy steps forward, and the taps of his baseball bat against his palm get a little heavier, a little more intentional. They don’t move around to surround him still, there are so very many gaps in their formation that Isagi’s too-trained-up not to see, and he can run, he should run, but -, “Maybe we should stop by to get the goods too, huh?”

 

That flips the switch.

 

Sends him from idling to moving. 

 

And in a blink, he lunges - 

Grabs the wrist holding the bat by its handle and twists just so that it makes the boy yelp, more in shock than in pain, Isagi can tell from first hand experience. The makeshift weapon drops and Isagi is quick to snatch it out of the air and then hurl it, with every bit of force he can muster in his throwing arm, over their heads. 

 

It lands with a loud, echoing clatter, rolling far enough away that Isagi has time to act before any of them can think about going back to grab it. He dodges a clumsy swipe the one with the knife had made at him, feints another one that effectively gets the guy turned around with his back to him, and then Isagi’s clamped his left arm tight around his torso, pinning one of his own arms in place while he uses his free hand to snap the knife out of the boy’s hold. 

 

The same way Kaiser’s done to him a hundred times, fluid and practiced.

 

“Yeah,” Isagi says darkly, “I don’t think so.” 

 

Normally, he’d be a little more lenient with what are obviously just children . Rookies playing at crime, their inexperience at it even more glaringly obvious to Isagi now, after all his lessons with Kaiser and the keen understanding of what a genuine threat , calculating and strong and fast, is.

 

But that doesn’t change the fact that these children have been running around town terrorising its residents - scaring people, hurting people, robbing people. And children or not, actions have consequences. 

 

Isagi, deadly calm in a way that does not match the fury consuming every fibre of his being right now, decides that it’s never too early to learn that lesson.  

 

“Let me tell you something,” Isagi warns them, evenly. Even through all this wrath, this burning need to protect, he doesn’t want to resort to anything outside of words here. They’re just children, he keeps reminding himself. They’re still just kids. In a different set of circumstances, a lot of them would be looked after by better functioning households and a better functioning social system, able to put them through school and on the path to a brighter future. It’s not their fault that this is the lot they’re born into - that they grow up amongst every other person getting their hands dirty in order to survive, when the rewards of living a good, clean, proper life seem so disproportionate to just grabbing and taking what you can get for yourself. “If you leave now, and cut out whatever bullshit you think you’re doing, harassing people on the streets, I’ll pretend this never happened.”

 

Lies. He’s going to have to do something about the park. Urgently. As soon as he gets himself out of this situation. 

 

But of course, kids this age - kids acting tough, getting a kick out of emulating the adults and the perceived power and perks they see coming out on top of the food chain - don’t appreciate being coddled.

 

One of the ones on his left lurches at him at the same moment Isagi side steps, grabs him by the wrist so he can knock off his balance further. He’s almost shocked by the way the kid crumples when he does - he’d not put much force into it, just wanted to disorient him enough that he could scope his options.

 

Now, as the kid groans pitifully on the ground and slurs out what sound like curses, the two still standing attempt to double team him. 

 

And it’s a small blessing that they really are just children playing gangsters - for all of Kaiser’s relentless training, he doesn’t know how he’d have fared in a one against three if they knew what they were doing. Isagi clasps the knife he’s still holding, reaches into his pocket to bring out the one he got from Kaiser and flicks the blade open - he drops into the stance he’s done dozens of times now, his starting position for a charge, and even though he has no plans to maim children today, he must look enough of a threat that the ringleader of the crew falters.

 

The other moves as though to make a break for it, probably in the direction of his bat, but Isagi drops and kicks out his foot, getting him hard enough in the ankle that he falls. 

 

They’re not used to people fighting back, Isagi concludes, straightening up coolly and watching the way the one still standing follows his hand with his eyes, the stolen butterfly knife flipping open and shut. 

 

Isagi addresses what must be the leader, the one he thinks he can reason with. Decides that he’s going to steal another trick out of Kaiser’s playbook. They must have seen him around but they don’t know him - and he can take advantage of that. 

 

“You recognise me,” Isagi starts, heart jackhammering so hard he’s almost impressed how composed he sounds, “Which means you must know my friends, too, right?” Yukimiya, and the two rowdy guys he brings along sometimes, the crass one with the accent and the ostentatious flirt - louder, larger presences, threatening enough that Isagi’s seen them back off when they approach before.

 

He clenches his hands around the handles of both his knives, feeling almost absurd doing it, the kind of sight that a twelve-year old would think is badass but only makes him feel like a clown.

 

“If I see you out here again,” Isagi tells them quietly, “And make no mistake - I remember exactly what you look like -” He only kind of vaguely remembers what they look like, their near-identical haircuts and the general bad practice of staring like you’re trying to invite trouble keeping him from looking too closely, “ - I’m gonna be asking them to come along so we can settle this like the adults you’re running around pretending to be. Clear?” 

 

The kids stare at him, bug-eyed through their balaclavas. 

 

For the briefest flash of a second, Isagi thinks about that first iteration of a mask, silver and black lenses behind it. Partly inspired by a theatre mask but… 

 

Did it not also look like a balaclava?

 

He shakes that thought away. Now’s not the time. 

 

Expertly flips the knife in his right hand closed, flicks it open, and makes it dance a telling slash through the air, just like Kaiser’d taught him, and makes as if to zigzag right at them.

 

The trio bolts. 

 

“At least take your knife,” Isagi calls after them, taunting, as he watches them skedaddling. 

 

They just keep running, cartoonishly turning a corner, but not before one of them manages a grab at the fallen baseball bat again. Isagi’s going to be watching out for that, he thinks, breathing harder than he’d realised he was. He’s going to physically drag a police man over to the park if he has to. He’s going to pitch a fucking tent there, he’s going to collect those children and personally herd them back to their doorsteps if he has to. And the next time he sees these hooligans out in broad daylight, he might just take matters into his own hands.

 

When he sighs out, it’s not in relief. The stress and panic of that whole situation starts to bleed out, even though the nausea remains, at the idea of those kids getting hurt - getting hurt because these ones might come looking for him. If he didn’t really manage to scare them off, if they come looking for revenge, if they bring their friends.  

 

He absolutely cannot let that happen. 

 

As he tries to get his breathing back in order, he examines the blade he’d snatched from the kid. It’s nowhere near as heavy or high quality as the knife currently weighing reassuringly in his other palm, Kaiser insisting that he learn to be comfortable handling it in both hands. The casing of his newly-acquired weapon is chipped, scratched plastic, the blade has seen better days, and he half-considers throwing it away - decides against discarding sharp objects carelessly around here. 

 

The flick of the battered old knife, as he snaps it open and closed with a now-practised snap of his wrist, makes him feel a little steady. 

 

It’s a weird emotion to have, considering he’s holding a blade someone’d been using to threaten him, but he isn’t really thinking about it as he pulls his phone out to text Kaiser, already imagining how much more upset he’d be if he found out Isagi got himself into trouble and held off on telling him. He should be more pleased that his lessons have been paying off - Isagi doesn’t even have a scratch on him. 

 

Regardless of that confidence, though, the text messages he sends placating as he taps one-handed at the phone he’s exchanged for Kaiser’s army knife in his pocket, the scream that pierces the air two minutes later still makes Isagi’s blood run cold. 

 

Instantly, all the hair on his body stands on end.

 

That wasn’t just a scream of alarm or anger.

That was…that was pain. 

 

And it had come from the direction the boys had gone running. 

 

Isagi is running before any of the warning bells in his head can tell him to stop. 

 

Straight down. Sharp right. A riot of voices - words indistinguishable, the spiking sharp-sour note of them unmistakeable. Isagi skids to a stop at the mouth of an alley just in time to hear another scream -

 

This time paired with the visual of the ringleader who’d been taunting him bent on the ground, on his knees, his arm twisted behind him in an unnatural angle. His friends cower close by, their postures taut with terror. 

 

The man who’d caught them - because this is a man , not the lean, lanky build of a teen - he’s taller, burlier-built, flecks of grey in his close-cropped head - adds pressure to his one handed hold to the ringleader boy’s wrist and Isagi is moving before he has a chance to see reason or feel fear or hear back every single one of Kaiser’s warnings to not do exactly what he’s about to.

 

“Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

 

Bad move. 

 

You’re already antagonising him - 

 

What if the opponent is twice your size, angel? 

 

The man looks up. The boys all look up too. Isagi finds himself mapping the situation in the blink of an eye. The two torn between escaping and trying to help their friend still have their masks on, but the one with his shoulder dislocated has had his ripped off. It lies in a grey heap at his knees, left to reveal the trickle of blood dripping down the kid’s jaw. His face, contorted in pain, shiny with rivulets of sweat - Isagi can picture the bruise that will bloom, dark and ugly, over his eyes with time. 

 

He looks barely fifteen, and Isagi feels as though his insides are on fire.

 

“What was that?” The bigger man asks Isagi, almost courteously. 

 

His voice is oily, slick with malice, and it snakes over Isagi in a way that breaks out over his skin in cold gooseflesh. If anything, it makes the jaunty little beat with which that kid had tried to approach him, that faux friendly shot at intimidation, even more laughable. 

 

There’s nothing to laugh about right now. Isagi is so cold, down to his fingertips, that he thinks he’s breathing out ice.

 

“I said,” Isagi feels himself say, cold in a way that chills his own blood, even though his heart is pounding so loud he can barely hear himself think. “What are you doing to these kids?”

 

Darling, stop it -   

 

The man chuckles. “Are you new around here? How about you run along and pretend you didn’t see anything, little boy?”

 

“How about you stop picking fights with children?”

 

- you’re going to get hurt.

 

It goes quiet. Everything does. Even Isagi’s pulse seems to have slowed until it’s barely there - or maybe it’s sped up so fast that the ringing of it is drowning out all other noise. 

 

“ ... I don’t think I appreciate that tone, little boy. ”

 

He’s dropped the kid’s arm. There’s a whimper of pain, and Isagi, as though from somewhere outside of himself, a consciousness that is devoid of feeling, watches clinically as the one that’s not about to topple over rushes forward to gather their friend, hauling him to his feet. Good. Get out, now. 

 

Between a second and another, the man shifts gears from stomping towards him to barrelling right at him, one hand outstretched like a claw. Isagi side-steps the charge, but just barely. Everything’s happening too fast. This has always been his fatal flaw - speed. 

 

This, and the fact that self-defence classes don’t prepare you for thugs launching themselves at you bleeding murderous intent. Self-defence classes teach you de-escalation - they teach you to put a safe distance between yourself and the threat and call the authorities. 

 

There’s a singing in Isagi’s ear as he stumbles from his barely-managed first dodge and feels the next blow coming before it connects. He registers the dull pain in his side at the same time as his arm cuts an arc upwards and the man lets out a sharp shriek. 

 

He’s gotten turned around in the tussle, but he can sense that the boys have actually managed to escape - he might not have figured out what to do with their knife, but at least, buried in the arm of this fucker, chest heaving and eyes bugging out like a beast’s, it’s bought him some reprieve. “You little fucker - !”

 

Run. Yoichi, RUN. 

 

He’s going to. He wants to. The kids should have gotten far enough away now that he can attempt his own getaway, but with the spike of adrenaline or absolute stupidity or whatever it was running heady in his skull simmering down, Isagi’s quickly becoming aware of how hard he’s shaking - he barely knows if his knees will manage a couple of steps away before he gets pummelled into the pavement. 

 

He’s going to swing. He’s going to charge again. If I can just get to the alley - The fist, large, square, bruised as though they’re used to connecting with flesh and bone on a regular basis, rises up in front of his face as though in slow motion and even though Isagi can see it coming, it’s like he’s suddenly detached from his own body, unable to make it move out of the way.

 

And then, milliseconds before that fist connects with his jaw and throws him ragdolling onto concrete, something happens. Isagi will later go over that moment again and again, trying to extract the individual events tumbling into each other, catalysing this chain reaction, and feel like he’s trying to grab on to the dregs of a dream. 

 

A shift in the air like a mass of empty space right behind him, eaten up in a moment. The soft, barely-there sound of leather-booted feet hitting the ground. A shadow falling over his shoulder just as he gathers the last of his physical strength and heaves himself to the side. The muted thump that he feels reverberate on the ground that he’s fallen on to, not from the impact of his own body hitting the pavement but from the crumpled form of the thug he’d just stabbed, blinking stupidly up at the unmistakable form of The Emperor looming over him. 

 

Isagi’s breath rattles out of him as Kaiser swoops over the crook, and he bites his own tongue down to swallow a yell when he twists the knife still embedded into the man’s upper arm so hard that another scream, bloodcurdling, echoes out against the grimy backs of old, unkempt apartment buildings. 

 

“You have two options,” the mechanical film over Kaiser’s words can’t contain the cold in them. For the first time in a long time, it sounds like someone Isagi doesn’t know. “Either you pick yourself up and leave, and never show your face around here again… or -”

 

A heavy booted foot lands with a sickening crunch on the man’s torso as he flails around on the ground - Isagi registers in a daze that he’s coughing blood, and, with a shock he feels down in his bones, that he’s got teeth missing. 

 

“ - I will make you a new one to show off around these streets.”

 

Isagi’s still trying to catch his breath, bring the pounding in his ears and his skull back down to his chest, as the man, now with a handful of teeth missing, staggers away, his gait drunken were it not for the smatters of blood he leaves behind dotting the ground, nursing his mangled arm. Distantly, he thinks he should feel more afraid when Kaiser shifts his attention to him - feeling the brunt of the stare even though he can’t see the eyes.

 

“You fucking fool. ” Hands grip his elbows tight and pull him to his feet so sudden and quick Isagi thinks he can understand how one blow had landed that thug on the ground so hard he’d barely managed to get up again - the movement makes his side, where the punch had landed, sting in pain. “What the fuck do you think you were doing? ”

 

He’s mad. He’s so angry Isagi can feel the hands that grip at him trembling. 

 

“He… he was hurting a kid -”

 

“And what were you going to do about it? Take him in a fight? What is the point of all that training if you don’t fucking use to get away ?”

“But I -” Isagi stares. At him, at the blank surface of the mask, and down the length of the street. He can see, under the feeble light of the streetlamps, the smatter of dark, glistening stains gleaming against pavement. 

 

The man behind the mask makes a sharp, distorted noise, falling out of his voice modulator. There are hands, large ones, patting down at his arms and sides, and Isagi is about to squirm away, needing a moment, needing to withdraw and still and take stock of everything that had just happened, and when they touch down against his ribs. 

 

The spike of white-hot pain on contact is near blinding. 

 

He hisses, the angry flare of bruised nerves and muscle almost bringing him to his knees. 

 

The Emperor stills. “He hurt you.”

 

“I’m fine - ” 

 

Venom. Dark and horrible and devoid of all his warmth, “I’m going to kill him - ”

 

“ No, you are not.” Isagi snaps back immediately. “Besides, I stabbed him, so I think we’re even.”

 

It’s as he says it that the statement really sinks in. 

 

Stabbed him. 

 

Isagi’d stabbed someone. 

 

It had happened so quickly that he doesn’t think he registered any of it, and yet it comes back to him now, in sickeningly slow detail - the give of flesh under the push of a blade. 

 

He thinks he smells something metallic in the air in the warm breeze, and the bile sours thick and nauseating at the back of his throat.

 

“Yoichi -,” Alarm, panic, audible even through the voice changer as Kaiser steadies him when his knees start to give out. “Yoichi, what - where are you hurt, you -”

 

“Not -,” Isagi manages thickly, around the dry heaves wracking his body suddenly. He feels hot and cold, clammy all over suddenly, thinks he might throw up. “No, just… Just feel kind of sick -”

 

Noise. He picks up on the ruckus slowly, through the filmy confusion fogging up his senses, slow to reorient themselves even as Kaiser tries to get him on his feet properly, “Let’s get -”

 

“You have to go,” Isagi starts to say urgently. He can hear, clearly now, an approaching commotion, probably people who’d heard the ruckus, or seen that stumbling, wounded man staggering out of the alley, or encountered the kids who’d bolted out of here, one of them with a broken or at least dislocated arm. “You have to get out of here -”

 

“I can’t leave -”

 

“I’ll see you at home, just go -”

 

Kaiser is about to ignore him, is about to snatch him up by his side again and likely yank them both up the side of the nearest building, but stops dead still when Isagi yelps, the sharp yip of a puppy whose tail has been stepped on, the second he grips at him. 

 

The spot where the punch had made contact, against the side of his ribs, throbs with a pain so intense, hot until it’s unbearable, it nearly makes Isagi keel over.

 

Gritting his teeth through it, eyes smarting from the pain and maybe even from the sheer terror as just the span of seconds passes them by, Isagi shoves at Kaiser. “ Go. I’ll c-call someone to take me home, I’ll see you there.”

 

“Yoichi -”

 

“ Please, Kaiser,” the warble in his voice sounds like tears, and there’s a wetness streaking down his face, hot, whether from the pain or the panic he doesn’t know, “Please, go. ”

 

---

His missive to the buddy chat system sends help in the form of the tall, pleasant boy with the twangy accent whose voice Isagi finds oddly calming. Hiori You is a friend of one of Yukimiya’s friends, who’d apparently been the reason the guy - closest to this spot out of the rest of the gang - had hurried over. He’s a lot more soft-spoken in person than he is over text, Isagi learns, after he’s done explaining himself to the strangers who’d hurried over to investigate the alleyway. An intoxicated violent man, a clash with some of these high school delinquents running around. They imagine Isagi’d just gotten himself caught in the crossfire, the ugly bruise twisting like a chunk’s been taken out of him at his side adding credence to that assumption, and Isagi, almost a little delirious from the pain and the spiked-up adrenaline running havoc through him, isn’t too keen to correct them. 

 

He just wants to get home. He needs to get home. 

 

Progress is a little slow - you don’t really realise how interconnected your entire body is until a fraction of it stops working how it’s supposed to. Isagi gingerly feels along his side with a hiss as he wobbles beside Hiori, all the wounded nerve-endings there radiating heat, trying not to bite down on his tongue from the unexpected flares of pain when he accidentally jostles his body too much. 

 

It takes him twice the time it normally would to get to the apartment, and Hiori is patient and understanding and attentive through all of it. He insists on accompanying him upstairs, waving away the concerns that now he has to go back by himself, says that he’s already texted another friend nearby who’ll make the quick dash over so they can walk back together. 

 

Isagi’s still trying to apologise and insist that he can wait at his place until his friend arrives when the juddering elevator lets them out onto the landing of his floor, and they take the turn towards Isagi’s door - 

 

Where Kaiser is already waiting. 

 

Isagi should’ve expected that, he thinks, his entire side on fire, an unrelenting, burning pain, a constant reminder of what had happened not even an hour ago. He’d texted Kaiser to let him know he was in safe hands and on the way back with someone, but for some reason, even though he’d been anticipating - dreading, in the purest most concentrated way he can - facing him, he’d not expected to find himself on the same side of the door. 

 

Kaiser hardly looks at Hiori and barely acknowledges him as Isagi makes his hasty introductions. He’s scattered enough that he only sort of registers the curious look Hiori passes between the two of them when he mentions that Kaiser is his neighbour, that odd little spark of recognition he’s not going to understand until weeks afterwards. 

 

For now, Isagi’s attention snapped on to the first-aid kit Kaiser is carrying and Hiori making his excuses to leave, Isagi hurries to say he doesn’t have to, he can wait up here. 

 

“No problem,” Hiori grins with that Kansai accent of his, pleasant and calm, “My friend’s already downstairs, and you’re in good hands, so -” 

 

He gives Kaiser another look this time, Isagi missing the transmission completely, startled when Kaiser does speak. Addresses Hiori directly, to say, “...thank you. For helping him back.”

 

“Of course, my pleasure,” Hiori’s grin widens and he starts to reverse towards the elevator. He’s not even fully turned around to walk back to it, steps brisk, calling out a cheerful, Sure to Isagi’s requests that he let him know when he gets home, when Kaiser sticks out his hand in silent demand for the keys. 

 

Isagi bravely tries to push down his wince of pain when he reaches into his pocket for them, the trepidation that rises from that… look on Kaiser’s face. 

 

So impassive and blank, like a plain, emotionless mask. 

 

Kaiser leads the way into Isagi’s apartment, flips on switches like he’s already used to the layout, already used to the auto-motions of entering his space. Ducks, suddenly, and nearly throws Isagi off balance, but Isagi realises what he’s trying to do when he steadies his hands at the back of his shoe - gripping it firmly in place so Isagi could pull his foot out without needing to bend. 

 

Heart in his throat, he does, croaking out a soft, “Kaiser…”

 

Kaiser doesn’t say anything. Simply repeats the process with his other shoe. The light gleams over the top of his gold head until it shines silver, plastered down because it’d been under his mask just moments ago. Isagi wonders when he must have gotten back, how, and how quickly. Where he must go to strip off his suit normally, because either he doesn’t do it at his own apartment or he’s made a point to conceal it whenever Isagi’s gone over to his flat. Imagines him darting around his apartment in a panic, grabbing the first aid kit that sits beside him where he crouches in front of Isagi, so silent and still and unnerving. 

 

Isagi can’t read anything off him right now. Not anger, or fear, or distress. He’d been frigid, like the jets of ice-cold water splashing out of the taps in winter, so cold it burned, when he’d discovered Isagi with the bruise on his face, demanding to know how. 

 

Tonight, as he leads Isagi towards his kitchen, switching on the overhead lamp as he goes, he’s almost so cold he’s frozen.

 

“Kaiser,” he tries again. 

 

Kaiser only holds Isagi by the hips, a firm grip, and steers him towards the counter - avoiding touching or moving his torso any more than necessary. Bends slow enough that Isagi understands he’s about to get picked up again, giving him time to brace his hands at Kaiser’s shoulders as he moves to lift him, grip firm under his thighs.

 

“It’ll hurt a bit,” and Isagi jolts a little, from how thick and stiff those words sound. 

 

“I’m okay,” he says mindlessly, even as he holds back his hiss as he’s lifted and placed on top of the counter, the motion jostling the side that hurts regardless.

 

Somehow that seems to be what gets a reaction out of Kaiser. Sends a crack through the smooth surface of his mask, twists something awful through it. 

 

Kaiser places his first aid kit down beside Isagi - instructs him, in that same toneless way, to hold his arms out straight and out of the way, as much as he can without it pulling where he’s injured. Once Isagi’s followed the instructions, Kaiser grabs the hems of Isagi’s shirt and pulls it softly up.  

 

Isagi’s not sure whether he’s the one trembling, or if Kaiser’s hand quivers as it ghosts over the angry red mottling along his side. Just the sensation of touch, light as it is, just fingertips grazing, sends electrical tendrils of pain zapping through the ruptured nerves and blood vessels there. Kaiser’s touch grows a little more firm, too intentional and clinical to be anything other than probing, yet gentle enough that even though Isagi can’t read his face at all, bent towards his injury and hidden from view, he can tell that he’s trying to cause him as little pain as possible.

 

“Nothing’s broken,” Kaiser says eventually. 

 

“Oh,” Isagi says stupidly, “Um, that’s - that’s good.”

 

He has to resist cringing at that, the pointlessness of the statement, when he doesn’t think anything about the situation is good - when he doesn’t think Kaiser is about to be appeased by the fact that he’s not gotten hurt worse. 

 

“But it probably impacted against your ribs, so that side is going to develop a large bruise,” Kaiser continues. There’s something almost robotic about it as he does. “It will get blue and black, and feel hot all the time to the touch. It’ll be stiff tomorrow morning and hurt every time you have to move. You’ll have to lie on your back - any sudden movements could set off the pain.”

 

The detail in Kaiser’s descriptions unsettle Isagi, and not because he’s apprehensive about how much worse this is going to be to deal with when he wakes up tomorrow. 

 

“Why…” Isagi starts, the quiver in his voice an antithesis to the emptiness in Kaiser’s.

 

“A cold compress can help for now, bring down the swelling of the blood vessels and numb out the pain,” Kaiser continues mechanically. “But tomorrow may- maybe-,” and something cracks through, right there, some faultline, bleeding out the emotion Kaiser’s been keeping at bay all this time. “Maybe a warm compress can help with the stiffness and getting the blood circulating so it can heal faster. A hit like that will take a long time to fully heal though, so -”

 

“Kaiser,” Isagi finally manages. Moves the arms he’d been holding at his side, stiff and motionless, to cup his hands around Kaiser’s jaw, try and coax him to look up at him. He resists, and Isagi breaks a little inside, even as he asks, “...how do you… why do you know …?”

 

For all those self-defence lessons, Isagi’s never known Kaiser to fight. All these times he’s spotted him or hunted down accounts of others who have, he has never known him to involve himself in fist-fights or brawls. But maybe that’s just another of his stupid omissions - another thing he’d failed to account for when considering the nature of Kaiser’s work. For a second the scene in the alleyway flashes through his eyes again, the blood, the macabre sight of loose yellowing teeth specked with dark red laying on the gritty tarmac. Thinks about that first night, the wads of cash papering the ground at Kaiser’s feet as he lifted another man off of his by his neck. 

 

Kaiser must know violence, what it must look like, as the one meting it out. Is gearing up to hear him say it, for the reality of it to cement itself into words, and is gearing up to accept for himself that even like this, shivering with the memory of how his hand had driven a knife through the solidity of another person’s being, it changes nothing, when Kaiser says instead, 

 

“I used to get beat up.”

 

All thought shuts down. 

 

“Wh-”

 

“When I was a kid,” Kaiser continues, and licks his lips, as though they’re too dry to talk through. Even with Isagi’s hands around his face, he won’t look up at Isagi - keeps those eyes fixed on the bruise blooming large and hot and impossible to ignore at Isagi’s side. “My… old man. Used to beat me a lot. And then when I left home…”

 

He doesn’t continue, but Isagi knows. The circus. 

 

A different kind of pain, far more different and far less bearable, begins to crack open inside the shell of Isagi’s rib cage. It wrings the air out of him, lungs working furious, desperate, to get it back, to think , to speak and say something -

 

“I got pretty good at figuring out how to deal with them -”

 

“Kaiser -,” Swallowed into a vacuum, the hollow opening large and empty within him at Kaiser’s words, his tone, his existence so large in front of him but feeling suddenly so small under his hands. 

 

“And I even got good enough to dodge, at some point -”

 

“Kaiser, please -”

 

“But you can’t dodge all of them,” Kaiser hushes out, and Isagi can’t tell, stricken, smarting with it, who he’s talking to, “You can’t dodge em all and when it connects it still hurts the same -”

 

“ Michael, ” Isagi pleads at last, letting his hands fall from Kaiser’s face only to pull at the fabric of his shirt, the neckline of his tank-top. “Please. Look at me.”

 

Kaiser does, and Isagi thinks this must be heartbreak, a shattering inside, the shards of it as sharp and unforgiving as any physical bruise. Worse, maybe, because the hurt Kaiser keeps smoothed out of his face, stony and unmoving, shows only in the faint glistening in his eyes, the moisture that’s gathered at the corners of them. It starts to slide down the side of his face, as Isagi holds his jaw and leans into him, the pangs radiating up his side be damned. 

 

“I’m sorry,” he hears himself babble, the press of his forehead and the perspiration that’s sprung there from the pain that’s throbbing through his whole body touching down against Kaiser’s. “I’m so sorry, I -”

 

Kaiser’s breathing is a muffled death-rattle this close. “I swore, when I left, I swore that I would never let anyone hurt me like that. Never again. I made sure no one ever did. So why… why…”

 

Pushed together like this, Isagi is conscious of the way Kaiser shudders. Like he’s holding himself so still, so stoic, that he’s vibrating from the effort, the feeling too large to contain. 

 

And nothing else matters, not the pain, not the junkie in the alleyway, not Reo’s robots. 

 

Nothing but the scared man holding the pieces of the boy he’d grown up trying to protect, wrapped in his arms and learning, perhaps for the first time in his life, that to care for another is to hurt for them too. 

 

When Kaiser starts to pull away from Isagi, he almost yanks him back, panic flaring - but Kaiser doesn’t go too far. Swipes at his face roughly, before he flips his first-aid kit open. Rummages around Isagi’s fridge for ice, makes a cold-compress out of it with a kitchen towel. Holds it there himself, not letting Isagi take over - one-handedly rifling through what he’s brought for painkillers, getting Isagi a glass of water to down it with. Once the redness subsides into a bright, almost glowing pink, he stars to dab on ointment, one that burns the way something that chills does, and its numbing enough that Isagi just sits and soaks in the temporary relief, holding up his shirt with the hand on the uninjured side as Kaiser methodically, but so, so carefully, tends to him. Dabbing at his skin with barely any pressure, forehead furrowed so deep the creases hold their own shadows in his concentration, that dreadful turn of his mouth every time Isagi isn’t able to hold down a whimper of pain. 

 

Kaiser leaves only to return after evidently gutting out his own fridge, requisitions Isagi’s kitchen without asking to put together probably the quickest meal he can think of. Isagi’s not even sure what he eats, between the drugging exhaustion that begins to descend over him as the painkillers kick in and fighting against them to stay conscious and present. Jerking alert every couple of minutes like a ripple of wakefulness in light sleep, searching for Kaiser nearby, afraid to lose sight of him.

 

Afraid and wanting him there, so much so that as the clock ticks closer to the end of the day, he grasps at Kaiser’s wrist and asks him to stay.

 

It’s probably not the way either of them had expected to end up in bed together, but Kaiser can’t even muster any of the slimy jokes he would in far more innocent scenarios. He helps Isagi get into a more comfortable shirt to sleep in, helps him lay down, on his back, with minimal jolts to the soreness speckling over his ribs. 

 

It’s uncomfortable - for one, Isagi doesn’t sleep like this usually, favouring his side or even his front, but right now his body revolts even at the suggestion of turning just enough to plug his phone into its charger. For another, it’s hard to ignore his self-consciousness at having Kaiser, larger than him and somehow a different degree of solid, lying on his too-small bed.

 

But he’ll deal with it. He is dealing with, shuffling towards the side to make more room for Kaiser ignoring his barked demands that he stop that, and patting the space right by his shoulder for him to come up. 

 

He does, and at least it’s a little comforting that Isagi isn’t the only one stumbling through this - Kaiser’s movements are awkward and uncertain. 

 

“Lie down,” he whispers to Kaiser, patting on the pillow again. 

 

He does. 

 

A polite distance away. 

 

It’s so unnatural it lies between them like a veil. 

 

Isagi’s patience lasts about a second. 

 

“Just -,” he grabs at the collar of Kaiser’s tank top again, and tugs until he’s forced to move in, options limited with how little space there is already on the bed with the two of them, and with how careful he’s trying to be not to shake Isagi around, “Come here .”

 

Here ends up being with Kaiser fidgeting himself in against Isagi’s side, his head coming to rest tentatively at Isagi’s shoulder. The contact brings Isagi some measure of stability, like the weight of him absorbs some of the leftover anxiety leaking out of him. 

 

And after a couple more seconds, he imagines it might be the same for Kaiser, because after long moments of holding himself stiff as a board, Isagi feels him start to thaw out, relax a little more deeply into the mattress.

 

It’s then that Isagi repeats, again, softly into the darkness of his bedroom, curtains drawn on the world, “I’m sorry.”

 

His head’s at an awkward angle, Kaiser’s too, resting against his shoulder. So Isagi can’t turn enough to look at him, but feels the heaviness of the exhale he lets out like it’s releasing through himself. 

 

“I’m sorry,” he repeats again. 

 

“I -,” Kaiser’s so close that Isagi thinks he can almost hear him grinding his own teeth together, the edge of his emotions brittle and breaking against them. A hard breath out through his nose. “I almost saw - that guy was going to hurt you. He was going to hurt you worse.”

 

The whole thing had passed in a matter of seconds, and those seconds are a spinning, sickening blur in Isagi’s memory, but of this he has no doubt. If Kaiser’d been even a second late - 

 

He buries the thought with a vengeance. 

 

There’s no point thinking about something that never eventuated. 

 

But still, the uneasy silence endures for a bit too long, as Isagi tries to figure out if he should thank him or ask what he’d been doing there or apologise.

 

Kaiser makes the decision for him. “What were you thinking ?”

 

“He was hurting those boys,” Isagi tells him, and where his bruised ribs have settled into a dull, heavy throb to his side, the horror of the situation blooms back to life like a fresh gash as the picture swims behind his eyelids. That boy, just a kid, knelt on the ground with his arm twisted at a horrific angle, “I - I think they must have tried to mug him, but he just -”

 

“No, Yoichi,” Kaiser stops him, “You were supposed to run. The knife, the lessons… you. You were supposed to run .”

 

Half of Isagi is here, trying to squirm his arm under Kaiser’s head so he can hug it to himself, the other half on that alleyway yet again. 

 

“But I couldn’t,” he confesses into the silk of Kaiser’s hair, remorse raw in his voice, just as much as his resolution, “I wouldn’t.” 

 

Kaiser expels another long, heavy puff of air. Isagi can feel how torn he is, how agitated and upset, maybe even angry. “You’re supposed to -,” A false start, hitting a wall. He tries again, “You’re supposed to be safe. I swore…you - you were supposed to be safe. I keep trying to keep you safe. ”

 

“But you can’t,” Isagi tells him. It’s a harsh statement, no matter how softly he says it. “You can’t. We can do everything right, but we can’t control the ways the world can hurt us.”

 

“You could have run, ” Kaiser insists again, lifts himself up from where he’d tucked himself in against Isagi, stares down at him. Those blue eyes gleam sharp and feline, like something primitive locking him in place in the darkness. “You should have run.”

 

“And what would that do?” Isagi challenges him - keeps his arm hooked around his neck anyway, needs that anchor across this rift between them, their worlds, their diverging philosophies. “What would that change? I can run, but that doesn’t change what I’m running from. It only… it only puts a little space between me and it, until it catches up again. Am I just… am I supposed to keep running away? Am I supposed to let other people get hurt instead?”

 

They’re rhetorical questions, and he knows that Kaiser knows it too, saying nothing as he hovers above him, the grim set of his mouth a deeper shadow in the darkness Isagi’s eyes are slowly adjusting to. 

 

They’re rhetorical questions, but Isagi answers them anyway, “Because I can’t do that. I can’t look away and pretend I don’t see how awful and cruel this place can be. I can’t just stand around pretending like I don’t see it until it catches up to me. Because it will . It will keep getting worse and worse until it’s too close to run from. I could do everything right, and still end up at the wrong place at the wrong time.” 

 

The car accident that Isagi’d avoided so narrowly yet had barely grazed him because he’d not physically experienced it, the run-in with the delinquents weeks in the making. The split second’s difference Nagi’s being there had made for Reo’s impulsiveness, the split second’s difference Kaiser had made, showing up just when he did tonight. They can work on themselves all they want, but so much hinges on chance. Bigger than him, than them, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things whether they are standing high above the world under the illusion that it’s small enough to fit into your hand or in the throes of its fickle tides, forgetting that there’s more to it than what it is right around you. 

 

“We can’t control the world,” Isagi tells Kaiser, braced next to him with his weight carefully balanced on to his forearms, face closed and complicated. Tells himself, at the same time. “We can’t change it. But we have to try. For the sake of the people we care about, we have to try.”

 

---

Isagi falls asleep first, even though he tries to keep himself buoyed just at the surface of it, just enough that he’s foggily aware that Kaiser doesn’t get much sleep that night. 

 

But he stays. 

 

He stays and dozes off at some point, because Isagi wakes up to a cotton cloud of gold and blue in his face, strands of it sticking into his mouth. It takes away almost all of the sting of his conscious brain registering the blinding, near-crippling pain blinking awake at his side. 

 

Kaiser stirs when he senses Isagi moving, and Isagi’s heart all but ruptures in a pathetic little explosion in his chest at the sight he makes, lifting his head like it weighs too much to move properly, until those bleary blue eyes are looking at him. Scowling, a little, when Isagi starts to laugh, giggle really, a quiet, almost awed sound even to his own ears, under the thrall of the misty blue of those sleepy eyes.

 

What he’d only imagined plays out in full in front of him, Kaiser letting out a grunt that cannot pass as clear enough words for Isagi to understand, clumsily feeling around Isagi’s side with a hand as Isagi tells a little white lie, just to hold the moment here a bit longer, that it’s fine, it doesn’t hurt that much this morning. And maybe it says something about how out of it Kaiser is that he seems to accept him, making a grumbling little noise before he all but flops back down on to the bed, on the uninjured side he’d laid claim to through the night, tucking himself in and out like a light before Isagi has the chance to do more than discharge some of his overflowing fondness in a gentle press of lips into that nest of wild hair.

 

He has to email his professors about needing to miss classes, call work about the shifts they’ll need to cover. Endures three separate phone calls of various degrees of worry and panic as he explains to his friends why he won’t be seeing them today, diluting the truth as much as he can out of habit but decanting it enough that he’s not lying to them, because they don’t deserve that. It takes at least twenty minutes of back and forth just to talk Bachira out of trying to come over - it’s too dangerous, too dangerous now, and the call ends with Bachira mutinously threatening that he is moving out as soon as he’s better. 

 

Kaiser stays through it all, that strange, uncharacteristic quiet, the lack of sleep lined through his face as Isagi offers him coffee and feigns being well enough to hobble over to the kitchen to fix him some. 

 

They don’t talk about the night before, or about how both of them have commitments they’re shirking today, or the heaviness lingering from the words exchanged before they’d slept. Kaiser’s quiet and absorbed in thought in the aftermath of everything gashed open here hours ago, the vulnerability of it still too fresh, stinging in the morning air. 

 

Isagi lets it be because he doesn’t know what else he can do. Lets it be, hoping that like the bruise already purpling against his side, dabbed clean with a fresh towel, ointment reapplied with the same care as the night before, that it’ll heal. He’ll take their tentative truce for now, the balancing act this city is so good at.

 

Not knowing that exactly two days later, that balancing act will crash and burn. 

 

5.31 am 

 

Isagi does not wake up to a good morning text. 

 

Instead, he wakes to dozens of urgent messages, from his friends, from his parents back in Saitama, asking if he’s okay, if he’s seen the news.

 

What news, he replies, groggy and still collecting himself, not really knowing where to place the unease prickling over his skin until he taps into one of his apps to glance over the headlines.

 

He ends up doing more than glancing. 

 

There is a lot of news.

 

And it’s immediately obvious to Isagi who’s responsible.

 

6.55 am

 

41: What do you think you’re doing?

 

Kaiser isn’t responding to his messages. He’s not picking up his calls. 

 

The radio on the bus is turned up, the driver avidly listening to the stream of headlines pouring through, almost all his passengers just as raptly tuned in. 

 

Members of drug cartels allegedly extending their presence into downtown North Ward - 

 

…several members, from high-ranking leaders to lower level operatives, have had their personal information broadcast on social platforms…

 

…unclear who is responsible, though we can confirm our news agency has received digital folders containing incriminating evidence…

 

- involvement of several business tycoons, including the proprietor of the national industry leader in semi-conductors…

 

… the alleged involvement of former idol using the stage name Rei of Hope, confirmed to have connections with - 

 

- police are investigating the veracity of this information -

 

At the moment, these mass leaks are, according to the Chief of Police, untraceable.

 

Isagi, clutching his bag to himself like it’s a parachute and he’s going to have to fling himself out of a jet not knowing where he is going to land, shoots another text to the chat he’s had open since he left the apartment building, late - he’d spent too long on Kaiser’s doorstep, ringing the bell, hammering against the wood to be let in, every empty second hollowing something terrible out of him. 

 

It is only as he steps off the bus, about ready to run the rest of the way in the direction of the izakaya and climb to every rooftop he can see in the vicinity to find him, that he gets a response.

 

♛: im fixing this 

 

8.35 am

 

“Fuck,” Chigiri is flabbergasted as they scroll through news item after news item, together on his laptop screen, and Isagi thinks that if Kaiser’d called the act of god he’d performed saving an innocent girl who now calls Isagi an angel a 'perfect execution', then this must be a massacre.

 

Hundreds of names, faces, backgrounds, day jobs, home towns, phone numbers, last known locations, flooding the internet until hardly anyone can keep count - in tandem with the mass transmissions of the same evidence, tying these people inexorably to one of many of the gangs thrashing around in death throes and cannibalising themselves to survive. Parcelled up and presented to the media, as though someone with an incredible degree of foresight has anticipated every single question someone might ask to prove the guilt of the names and attached details that even the public can verify.

 

Are already verifying. The same dossiers have gone public on every social media site and internet forum, from the overused to the obscure. 

 

With every possible communication channel glutted with it, the police have no choice but to act. The clock has not yet struck nine in the morning, but orders have come down for national police for an immediate crackdown - reinforcements are arriving in the city from out of town. 

 

“They’re probably expecting clashes,” their professor says, classes cancelled and the headlines projected onto the screen behind him instead. He’d called Isagi, as he usually does, to help him set it up, and Isagi had seen the obscene number of tabs he had open in his browser window, all icons of news portals. The professor wears an expression that looks almost dazed, like in all his years of life, told by the wrinkles on his face and hands or the white of his hair, he’d never seen anything like this. “They have to act quickly to subdue them before it can happen.”

 

The scale of it, existing as an abstract in Isagi’s head, only impresses itself as the brunt of their collective reality when the university sends them home early, and cautions them to travel in groups for their safety.

 

11.42 am

 

“- I’m saying that this is the right opportunity to -”

 

“Get yourself arrested along with all these drug dealers getting dragged out from their hideouts? Sure.”

 

Reo quietens down easier than he normally does. He probably gets it too, that his one semi-functioning robot is not going to be much in the deluge of chaos sweeping through the city right now.

 

It’s like it’s come alive, Isagi thinks, so antsy he can’t stand it, like he could crawl out of his own skin. Alive in a way he’s never felt it before. Like some giant, wounded sea creature thrashing out of the water, the heavy splash of it displacing the ocean below. All its debris and its vermin beaching up on the shores from that sudden tide. 

 

Kaiser isn’t responding anymore, telling him to sit tight, stay where his friends are. Maybe he suspects the same thing that Chigiri and Bachira do, grabbing hold of him and all but forcing him into the back of Reo’s obnoxiously large car as it wound its way back to the Mikage Corp skyscraper.

 

“This is crazy,” Chigiri’s staring near-hypotised at the news playing out on Reo’s massive wall-mounted TV. It’s hard to keep track, the sheer volume of information dumped online and sent directly to the broadcasters and papers clearly overwhelming the media. The snippets of information rolling by in the scroll text hardly have the time to repeat its breaking news before burning updates crawl to the forefront, each as outrageous as the last.

 

- stand-off against police forces and what is suspected to be the primary hideout of a cartel allegedly involved in the hospitality sector in Japan, running several luxury chains -

 

… police hotlines are reportedly overwhelmed with residents calling in to report neighbours, business owners, and others whose names have appeared in the recently exposed cartel lists -

 

… law enforcement are urging citizens not to take justice into their own hands. Mere hours after a group of college students apprehended a local dealer in his home, in an intervention that escalated to violence, the district chief cautioned - 

 

Chigiri flips to another channel, and it’s the local public service announcement they’ve already caught playing a couple of times. 

 

We strongly advise all residents to stay indoors and avoid public areas…

 

… do not panic and caution your loved ones, friends, co-workers, and fellow citizens to stay calm…

 

…situation under control - 

 

- mass social security threat… unverified disclosure of personal information…

 

Do not contact unknown numbers…

 

… personal and identity theft -

 

“Of course, that’s already happening,” Chigiri mutters to himself, taking his eyes off the TV to look over Isagi’s shoulder, where he finds himself glued to the complete trainwreck unfolding on the internet forum boards he’s scanning through on his laptop. “Of course people are fucking calling the drug lords up, good fucking god -”

 

They’re not just calling them up - in just a couple of wild hours, it’s almost turned into a game. The forums Isagi’s scrolling through, unmoderated spaces flooded with anonymous faces behind anonymous names, have even started sharing their tips for raining retribution on the doxxed criminals - sign them up for subscriptions using their phone numbers, spam them with OTP codes for banking and online shopping services, ringing them up from public telephones so they don’t compromise their own personal information in the process. 

 

There’s a near rabid kind of glee Isagi senses from these people, coalescing into some kind of coordinated movement even in the middle of this madness as they figure out the best ways to harass these newly exposed criminals.

 

“I can’t tell if they’ve just found themselves an acceptable punching bag for their inner cyberbully or if this is some kind of vigilante shit,” Bachira is half leaned over on top of Isagi, perched on the arm of the couch he and Chigiri sit on, reading scraps of the comments as they fly by as Isagi scrolls at the speed of light.

 

Isagi can’t say for sure. He’s seen everything from the most horrific cases of cyberbullying to unwarranted harassment that goes unchecked even in the most benign community posts. There’s just something about the impersonality of the internet and the consequence it removes from people’s actions, the degrees of separation between humans and the impact they have on other people they can’t conceptualise as people sitting on the other side of the screen, that seems to breed the most reprehensible of behaviours. 

 

So he’s fairly confident that at least some of these people are practising or budding cyberbullies, this eager to go all out because like Bachira’d said, these are acceptable punching bags - the damning exposé all but welcoming the attacks with targets on their backs. 

 

But that’s not the only thing, Isagi thinks. 

 

There’s something else happening, something else that Isagi starts to pick up on as a throughline in all the news pouring into Reo’s polished, spotless living room, removed from the world it is all happening in. Something that reminds him of this… this concerted push he recalls from the first time Kaiser had gone and done something like this, something like this for him. 

 

Because he is under no illusions that Kaiser is doing it for him - for them. Has no illusions that he has broken his own pact of neutrality to go to this extreme, as though attempting to purge North Ward of its ills in one deadly fell swoop. 

 

But he wonders if Kaiser had anticipated this . 

 

This reciprocal movement that seems to be crawling out of the ground, picking up the rubble from the fallout and in turn hurling them at the people they now know to be responsible, at least in some way, for the ills in their lives.

 

There are group chats and forum boards forming online, dedicated to following the breadcrumbs and pinning down the bigger fish, coordinating movements to urge the police into action, and failing that, taking matters into their own hands - organising as many people as they can to gather in protest outside homes and workplaces. Isagi, wading through all the information, all these trails left by all these people, only finds out about this because someone shares a link in the buddy system group chat, asking if anyone wants to volunteer to come with them. 

 

Let’s make sure these fuckers get what they deserve, reads the message accompanying the caption, gung-ho and geared up, and that sums up the sentiment infecting the city at large. 

 

Make sure they get what they deserve. A rallying cry of an emotion. Isagi gets up from where he’d been sitting frozen inside the plush of Reo’s couch, towards his gigantic floor-to-ceiling windows - stares out into the city beyond. It lays beneath him like his map - a paper simplification of how large this place is, populated to the brim, easy to overlook like a drop in the ocean. But each drop is its own life, each drop takes the colour and the soot and the grime of the city as it rolls through it - learns to live in fear and preach caution and hurry out of the way if they think they sense trouble. 

 

But fear is such an unsustainable emotion, isn’t it? Isagi should know, staring out into the city and grasping at the edge of the cool metal frame to feel like it might not just swallow him. Living in constant anxiety, projected into the future as you imagine all the awful things that can happen to you once you step out of your door, to you and the people that you love. Worry, for little kids playing at parks and for your dearest friends and family and the person that lives across from you, a balcony over. Worry, that sours into anger and resentment. 

 

Anger and resentment that turns into action when you see the faces and names of the people who’ve wronged you. 

 

Maybe not personally, Isagi thinks, mutely listening to the news report playing out behind him about a particular gang running out of an abandoned soda bottle warehouse being swarmed by the workers in surrounding warehouses, until any of them who’d not managed to escape out of the windows and into the back alleys were tied up with zip ties and rope and hand-delivered to the nearest police station. 

 

But the wronging still feels personal, doesn’t it? 

 

The red face of the man being interviewed on screen stares back at him when Isagi turns to look, the veins standing out in his face and the sweat gleaming under the sunlight as he impassionedly insists that he doesn’t care if he goes to prison, he’s sick of these people running the city, sick of worrying if he can scrounge together a living for his family, what might happen if he gets entangled with the wrong crowd, if his kids are safe walking home from school alone, if his wife is safe doing the groceries by herself. 

 

The wronging still feels personal, and any one of these names now easily accessible all over the internet could be implicit in it.

 

Isagi, disoriented by the city plan splayed neatly beneath his feet, unable to grasp the full picture of the change wrecking through it even as he stands here and desperate to be able to zoom in, search , among its buildings and all its people, wobbles a little from the vertigo. 

 

Bachira, who had come over to join him, catches him by his upper arm and cries in alarm, “Woah - are you okay?!”

 

“Yeah, just,” Isagi smacks his lips together, mouth dry, head spinning, “Worried.”

 

“About Kaiser?” Bachira asks, commiserating. 

 

“About Kaiser.”

 

3.16 pm

 

The reinforcements had arrived in North Ward a couple of hours ago, and from what Isagi can tell - from the barely perceptible tempering of the media shitstorm, even the tone of its delivery, newscasters appearing more composed as the fever-blur of headlines start to slow down, down to the stability Isagi finds here, the atmosphere at street level - there’s a sense of calm returning. 

 

The immediate action by national law enforcement was a good call, Isagi muses, as he quickly makes his way towards the izakaya. 

 

His friends know that he’s returning home. And he will be, that much is the truth, but - 

 

Apart from quick, short reassurances from Kaiser that they will talk and he will see him soon, Isagi has had nothing from this man all day. 

 

Or maybe that’s not entirely correct. He walks through the metaphorically smouldering remains of a city that’s had its soul electrocuted, and he has no questions about who is responsible for starting the fire.

 

What was he thinking? Except Isagi thinks he knows. 

 

What is he trying to do? Isagi knows. He knows. 

 

Why didn’t he tell me? Because Isagi would have tried to stop him. 

 

It’s the same reason why they’d all tacitly banded together to keep Reo from doing anything crazy, carried away by the wave of change he’s taking as very, very promising, is visibly itching to be a part of. Bachira’s also heading back to his place, but Chigiri has stayed on with Reo, unwilling to leave before the dust properly settles and they understand the new thing their current home, breaking out of hibernation, is mutating into. 

 

It keeps reminding Isagi of a giant animal - a huge, impossible organism, one that had built up immunity over the years to the things infecting it, and is in the flux of doing the same right now. Releasing its flurry of antibodies, its self-righting agents, nipping down at the disease in the pitch of the fever burning through it right now. 

 

This is the exact kind of power Isagi’d daydreamed about. The power to quell a beast - too large to be fought off with conventional or conservative means. The power to tame it, all at once, all that authority, the ability and the knowledge and the will it takes to even attempt such a thing. 

 

This is the type of power Isagi’s always dreamed of, but you don’t really know what you’re asking for until the fumes of change swirl around you and you’re caught in the hurricane, your perspective snapped down to the immediate than to the eye of the storm visible from up in the sky, the satellite view.

 

Right now, Isagi finds himself craving the satellite view. Where he has the bigger picture, understands it, can find Kaiser in it. Whether he’s busy coordinating his ludicrous, incredible checkmate, or laying low so that in the midst of all this communication warfare he doesn’t get snagged himself, Isagi doesn’t know. 

 

But what he doesn’t know hounds at his steps as he gets to Stop #83, and instead of waiting for the bus, takes a deliberate turn towards a familiar street.

 

He spots what he thinks he’s looking for, and maybe what, right down in his gut, beneath all the overwhelm and the amazement and the anxiety, he’d expected to see. 

 

The sake store. 

 

The sake store that has stood there empty for months. 

 

Or, rather, that everyone has just assumed to stand empty for months. 

 

Isagi gets close enough to see that even with the shutters drawn, the lock isn’t caked with dust as he’d have expected, after this long. 

 

Can’t get any closer, because one of the two familiar faces who had walked into the diner and sent the whole establishment into high alert is standing right outside of it. 

 

Leaned against the wall, a grim scowl carved into his face, thick ropes of cigarette smoke hanging around him like a miasma as he intently scans the street, up and down. 

 

And Isagi has none of the facts, but as he keeps his head down and tries not to walk past as though this is what he’d intended to do all along, he thinks he has the picture. 

 

If he needed to station himself out of this area to keep an eye on its movements… 

 

Hiding in plain sight. 

 

Right here, so close to Stop #83.

 

But he’s been found out, hasn’t he? Isagi turns the corner and nearly breaks into a run to get far enough away that he can try and gather his shaky thoughts, the cold frostbite of panic threatening to paralyse him. Kaiser’s been found out, or someone has the scent, and suddenly his lack of response to Isagi’s increasingly frantic text messages feels far, far more sinister.

 

6.23 pm

 

“Chigiri -,”

 

“Wow, dude, are you okay?!”

 

Isagi’s not sure he’s okay. Can hear the tremors of panic in his own voice, thick and near tearful. He’s alternated between pacing around like a caged animal in his home and all but trying to break into Kaiser’s. There’d been no response. No give, nothing to take, none of the mutual exchange Isagi had gotten so used to in so little time. 

 

Now there is nothing, and Isagi has polluted it all with his own overpowering anxiety, every single one of his worst fears. 

 

“N-no,” Isagi admits. He’s been whittled down to it, his most basic, most primal of instincts. “No, I’m not. Chigiri, I’m worried about Kaiser. I’ve not heard from him.”

 

“Oh, shit,” comes Chigiri’s terse, alarmed voice, “Are you at home?”

 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m -,” Isagi wipes harshly at his eyes. He’d tried to seat himself down by the hydrangeas, but even the sight of them, the life of them drained out but still sitting here on display on his countertop, threatens to derail him completely. “I’m at home. Are you at -”

 

“I’m at Reo’s still. Do you want me to ask him to look into the Mikage Language Program guys? Like through the professional circuits?”

 

He doesn’t even think about it, panic throwing caution out into the winds, “Please. And p-please, if you could ask him to… do it on the down-low.”

 

It’s suspicious, his request. Isagi knows. But he’s far more worried, pushed to the extreme of the impossible choice that’s been swimming towards him under the surface all this time, than he can stand to be careful. Weathers the wariness in Chigiri’s voice as he says, “...okay, sure. You’re not going to work today, are you?”

 

His colleagues at the diner have been in touch. The informal curfew the city had been shoddily shuffled into has lifted, the police presence from the capital stifling out the trouble as much as possible. It’s far from normal yet - he’s been hearing from everyone about the godawful traffic, about the vans full of people being carted out of town because the city’s jails are already crammed full. There’s too much going on to tell for sure but Isagi assumes that it’s not just the criminals awaiting trial getting herded out - it’ll also be anyone else who had spilled out onto the streets in those brief bursts of disorder earlier in the day to act out on their own impulses and anger and greed. Who knows how many of these people will trickle down from holding cells to court to prison - it feels too distant, too unreachable a future to Isagi, so afraid of what might be happening within the present, beyond his knowledge or his ability to help, that he thinks his heart might stop. 

 

He thinks his heart might stop, like the world is coming to an end, but North Ward, as resilient as ever, continues moving forward. 

 

“Boss called and said we’re still open for business today.”

 

“Bullshit,” Chigiri swears, “Look, things are calming down - like I mean we have inside news from Reo’s contacts, people are holding off on being too crazy coz they’re even saying they’ll deploy the military if things get too bad. But there’s still trouble. Especially around there.”

 

“Where?” Isagi asks quickly. His map lays on the coffee table, open and useless, giving him no insight at all into what he wants to see. A blank and silver card beside it, embossed with an ankh, the one he has used to try and get into the hotline, only to hit blank after blank as he tells the automated voice responding to him that his name is Isagi Yoichi and he needs to speak to the Emperor. 

 

“Just that general area. I’m not sure what’s happening, and it’s not in the news but…,” Chigiri hesitates. Like he’s not sure if it’s a good idea, what he’s about to share. “It looks like the Emperor has been sighted again. ”

 

8.34 pm

 

Isagi hangs up the phone, hands shaking, and it nearly slips out of his clammy palm as he struggles to unlock it and dial a familiar number. 

 

Starts to speak as soon as he hears the dial tone cut. 

 

“Bachira?”

 

“Yocchan?” he’s picked up on the anxiety blown open inside Isagi’s voice, all the leftover spasms of rage and distress and worry from the words he’d just finished exchanging with Kaiser, “What’s wrong - what’s happening - ”

 

“Can you come over?” Isagi interrupts, urgently. Asks, begs, demands. “To the diner - please, please come to the diner.”

 

And then he’s calling Chigiri.

 

Now

 

Isagi’s already hurrying towards the corner of the rooftop where he’d sensed movement before he even sees Kaiser appear over the lip of it - is reaching for him, half-seeing, to grab on to his forearms and pull him towards himself. The feel of his existence, solid and real under his touch, also sends Isagi to his knees with relief.

 

“Quick, this way -”

 

“Darling -”

 

“Just hurry ,” Isagi almost has a migraine right now from how hard he’s been straining himself to pick up anything he can, anything he can see or hear or feel around the perimeter of the diner. His phone is overheating in his pocket from how many apps he’s got running at the same time, the stupid website, all the forums he’s been hunting through in search of some sighting, some sign of Kaiser, until one of his calls to the hotline had finally gone through. 

 

There’d been just a smattering of reports, too little than one might think would stick out in the deluge. But North Ward had been looking - searching for it, some reason, some beacon, some symbol or answer that they could look to for direction in all the chaos. 

 

In the void, the re-emergence of the Emperor had blazed anew the conviction that this was their hero - an enactment of justice, his appearance from the shadows after all this time, devoid of the signature cape but surely him, spotted against the skyline too fast to be pinned down to any one location and coinciding too cleanly with the greatest act of retribution the city has ever seen. 

 

Isagi all but manhandles said retribution through the door of the stairway, pulling him down into the darkness before he can risk being seen again. 

 

By the avid public now searching the night sky for him, and by whoever’s down at ground level, the enemies he’s made in a single split second like a trigger-pull no one can reverse, trying to smoke him out and forcing him up above, where he’s harder to get hold of.

 

Where Isagi has gotten hold of him, halfway up and halfway down, dragging him towards the staff room.

 

“Yoichi, are you sure -”

 

“No one’s going to come back here,” he whispers to him over his shoulder, yanking the door open and then pushing Kaiser through it. Just in case, he bolts the thing shut behind them and switches the lights off. “Bachira’s taking care of it.”

 

A pregnant pause. 

 

“You told -”

 

“All I said to him is that I need him to run interference in the kitchen and make sure no one comes back here, and to let me know if anyone does,” Isagi rushes so quick his words run into each other, slamming together in a near-incomprehensible stream, “I… I’m sure he’ll have questions later though.”

 

Later is not a concept that they even have time to think about right now - not when things are still happening at breakneck speed around them. 

 

They’re crowded close enough together that Isagi picks up the crackle from inside Kaiser’s helmet, Kaiser tilting his head as though listening. 

 

Thoughtlessly, he blurts out, “Is that Ness?”

 

Realises what he’d just given away when Kaiser stills - doesn’t try to take it back because it seems so miniscule a truth in the grand scheme of every truth that’s seen the light of day today. So he hurries to add on, “Can I talk to him?”

 

Kaiser doesn’t get a chance to say much more. The ringing of Isagi’s phone interrupts them, Isagi cussing, the noise too loud and too unexpected in the fragile safety of this room, and he sets the thing on silent first before he picks up the call. 

 

The 8888 flashing on the screen tells him who it likely is, but still, he picks the call up and asks, “Ness?”

 

“He’s reached the diner, right?” Ness demands, without preamble.

 

“Yes, he’s here with me now. We’re in the back, the door’s locked and I’ll know if I need to hide him -”

 

“Okay, good,” that’s what relief sounds like. “But that means…”

 

“What is it?”

 

“No just…it could just be alarmists,” Isagi removes the phone from his ear and taps the speakerphone button, reducing the volume so Kaiser and he can both hear without being too loud from the outside. “But I keep getting reports of people who might have seen him in a different part of town -”

 

Isagi can feel Kaiser’s stare boring down into him through the metal of his mask. “Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you know where the nearest place is where there’s a large police presence? Like, one of the squads from the capital?”

 

“Why?” The suspicion is sharp in Ness’ voice, and Isagi understands it, has been dealing with varying doses of misgivings and wariness all day today, so he does what he can to allay it immediately, because they don’t have time.

 

“I have an idea,” he says, blood rushing in his ear, laced with the adrenaline sending each of his nerves singing, “I have an idea to get the guys who’re looking for him out of the way.”

 

---

“So…,” Kaiser says, brushing off Isagi’s efforts to figure out  where he’s hurt, telling him that he has the first-aid kit they keep on the premises hidden inside here and they can do some basic treatment before Ness can come around with a change of clothes and a duffel bag to pack Kaiser’s costume into. If everything goes accordingly to plan, they’ll just be able to walk out of here, Kaiser looking every bit a clueless foreign man out for dinner, unperturbed by whoever he’s pissed off enough that they are scoping out the city for him, the forum posts a smoking gun tightening the noose around this area according to Ness’ input on their movements. “Ness.”

 

Isagi, only just managing to have him sit down at the staff benches where he has his meals nowadays, falters. 

 

“That’s what you want to talk about first?”

 

“Did he tell you his name?”

 

“...no.”

 

“How long have you known?” and then, as though thinking better of his question, the tilt of his head up at Isagi so familiar it near cascades through him in relief and distress, how much it took to just get him here and how uncertain here still feels, “- or rather, how much do you know?”

 

“I -,” Isagi feels his eyes widen when Kaiser starts to take off his mask. “Wait, are you sure you should do that?”

 

He shoots a panicked look at the door - Bachira’s sending him texts at regular-enough intervals, letting him know that he’s still around, working the floor, at some point coaxing someone who was about to head over back for his break to play beer pong instead. He trusts that Bachira will be able to keep anyone from coming back here until he can get Kaiser out safely, but for that to happen, everything else needs to work out right. 

 

The guys who have been prowling around the sake store need to be lured away. 

 

Isagi sweeps his stare down to his phone screen where Chigiri’s sent him screenshots - forum posts, made recently, about sightings of a dark figure propelling itself across the cityscape several blocks away from here. He’s the one who posted them, under different pseudonyms, savvier than Isagi about the tags he needs to use to make sure the people who see them are the ones who’ll boost the posts and their visibility. 

 

It’s one half of the plan working, Isagi thinks, glancing once at the numbers on these false reports of false sightings, before looking up at Kaiser - and nearly dropping his phone in shock.

 

“Oh my God - what happened - ”

 

Kaiser’s mouth is set in a grim line. 

 

A large bruise is swelling up against the side of his forehead, near his temple. Isagi, in the span of a single second, takes in the bruise, then the helmet on the table, the barely discernible dent to its smooth metal surface, visible now only because Isagi’s eyes have finally adjusted to the darkness in here, and before he’s looking for it. 

 

In a flash Isagi’s sprung to his own feet and hurried around the bench to look at the bruise, “ Shit, shit - do you need a -” his harried movements nearly send the first-aid kit topping off the table.

 

“It’s fine -”

 

“It’s not fine, what happened? Did they - did they get to you -”

 

The line of Kaiser’s mouth turns more firmly down. He’s incredibly reluctant as he says, “...missed my footing. Tumbled into a landing.”

 

All the blood in Isagi’s head drops to his feet, all at once, furnished by his overactive imagination with too-vivid visuals of the scene. Of everything else that could have wrong, of all the risk, all the danger - 

 

He could strangle Kaiser right now. 

 

“I told you!” He uses great restraint not to smash the cold compress he’s peeled out of its plastic package on to Kaiser’s forehead, just stands there pressing it firmly to the bruise instead and tries not to break down in tears as he rants, “I fucking kept telling you that this could happen, that this was not safe, that your stupid mask and stupid grapple gun could get you killed, but no -”

 

“ My stupid mask probably prevented what could have been serious head trauma -”

 

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Isagi hisses at him. “Saying you had shit under control, that it’s as easy for you as swinging around the skyline, all that fuckign bullshit - and now everyone’s seen you and your stupid mask and they’re looking for you and –”

 

“It’s okay, right?” Kaiser says and Isagi can only blink down at him, baffled beyond belief because nothing is okay , starting with the horrible bump hard and undoubtedly painful bulging at Kaiser’s temple, “I mean I’d supposed it was time to retire it anyway.”

 

And that’s enough of a declaration that it disarms whatever biting retort Isagi’d been loading up to fire.

 

The mask, with its dent as proof of the fact that it might have saved Kaiser’s life, sits empty and expressionless on the table as Isagi grapples with that statement. 

 

“... did you think this was going to happen?”

 

Kaiser avoids his eye. Like a child caught doing something he knows he wasn’t supposed to. 

 

Isagi’s not having any of it, grabbing his jaw and pulling it back up to him, keeping up the firm pressure of the compress on his head and staring intently into his face. 

 

With no way out, Kaiser mutters, “I knew that I wouldn’t be able to easily resume working as the Emperor after this, so…yeah. It was on my mind.”

 

The swears froth up in Isagi’s mouth, through his teeth. It takes effort to choke them down enough to say, “You didn’t fucking think that if you made an enemy out of thousands of people in one go that some of them might not be out to get you?!”

 

“Considering the odds, I’d say I did pretty well,” and maybe Isagi’s going to choke Kaiser out after all and finally free himself from this headache. How can he be so blasé with everything else going on around them? He’d have assumed the rough landing might have given Kaiser a concussion, if by now he were not only too used to the fact that Kaiser can be this disconnected from the consequences of his own actions.

 

“ Did pretty well? ‘Did pretty well’ like right now we’re not improvising an elaborate fucking mousetrap to get the people who might actually try to kill you out of the way - do you even know who’s after you at this point?”

 

Somewhere out there, right at this moment, shipped in a discreet looking car, there is a robot that will be taken high up to the rooftop of a Mikage-owned building and then sent careening down a pre-determined route that Isagi’s mapped out and sent Reo moments before. 

 

It’s not going to intervene. It’s not going to involve itself at all. 

 

All it needs to do is be seen. That’s all. It just needs to be seen, obscured by the night and glimpsed in the blink of an eye, circling ever closer to the coordinates that Ness had shared with them. 

 

Isagi prays that it will go well. He’s acted, he’s made his move. 

 

Now, all they can do is wait.

 

And in the in-between moments, they fight for the wheel to steer the conversation. 

 

“Does it matter? After I walk out that door, the Emperor will just go back to being an idea they’re chasing.”

 

Isagi can’t help glancing at the helmet again, unable to unsee the unnatural bend of it now, grotesque the longer he keeps looking. Security, like Ness had said - in more ways than one.

 

“And you’re okay with that? That was your whole… your whole thing, your whole -”

 

“It’s just a mask,” Kaiser tells him. In the hazy darkness of the unlit room, only the faint glow of the hallway outside making its way in through the gaps of the locked door, Kaiser’s eyes look near-luminous, lights of their own. “I can always get a new one.”

 

The air clanks around in Isagi as he starts to ask, “So you’re planning -”

 

“No, darling. It’s your turn.” Kaiser catches the wrist Isagi’s kept braced at his jaw, preventing him from avoiding Isagi’s eye. His attention suddenly gaping open like a vortex, sucking Isagi in. “How much do you know, exactly? ”

 

And that’s… that’s a tricky question isn’t it? 

 

“I…,” Isagi starts carefully. Not because of his reservations, because somehow, while Isagi’d been too terrified out of his mind to dwell on it, they’ve both unmasked all the way. Finally, at last, their truths in all their completeness laid open for each other to see. He’s just not sure where he can even begin. “I know…bits. Like I figured… some stuff out, I think.”

 

“How much?” Kaiser pushes again.

 

“Well, I know… a little - about the circus.”

 

Kaiser’s shock is obvious even in the darkness - if not by the sudden flare of glowing eyes, animal-like as they shine brighter than anything else in the room, than by the way Kaiser’s grip at Isagi’s hand almost grows slack.

 

So Isagi explains. Tries to. The unintentional hint that was the Mikage Language Program, Kaiser’s surprise palpable in the sharp laugh he lets out realising the person who’d been populating Isagi’s home with expensive coffee paraphernalia was a Mikage himself. How he’d found out about Ness through Reo’s slides on the project - made the connections between his engineering smarts and Kaiser’s unorthodox gear and the elusive partner-in-crime who called himself the Magician . Made even more connections digging through old German newspapers fed through automatic translators until he’d found the clue that made the picture he’d been trying to pull together click into place.

 

The whole time, Kaiser stares at him near unblinking, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. 

 

Isagi, the one actually having to say it out loud and feel the sheer ridiculousness of his own exploits, steams himself away with every admission. 

 

By the time he finishes, he’s almost exhausted. Like he’s had to wring himself free of his secrets. 

 

He’d flatline, too, if it were not for the awful suspense of waiting for Kaiser’s reaction to all this. 

 

When it doesn’t come, the seconds too long, Isagi blurts, “Say something.”

 

A harsh exhale of air. “I don’t know what to say,” Kaiser confesses, and he does sound as  stunned as it looks. “You… you’re fucking obsessed with me, aren’t you?”

 

It punctures through the tight, ballooning tension that had been growing inside the room, taking up all the air. 

 

Isagi lets himself breathe, a large lungful, even as he splutters out, “Like you get to talk!”

 

Dancing shoulders in the dark. The relief of it almost breaks Isagi’s heart, breaks apart the dreadful fear of finality creeping up on him when he’s distracted by all the strings fraying in his hands. This entire city beyond them, in the throes of a transformation they’re yet to understand.

 

A part of him is still twitchy, jumping at each new ding on his phone, half of them the notifications from the half a dozen news platforms he’s turned on alerts for, the others updates from his friends. The robot has arrived at the building, Nagi surprisingly taking on the responsibility of comms because according to him, Reo’s too excited for the chance to test drive the thing to type sensible sentences. He assures Isagi that he’s keeping an eye on him though - that they’ll retreat at the slightest sign of trouble, at the smallest sign that someone might be spotting them more than they want to be seen. 

 

Isagi trusts him on that. Trusts him completely, knows that Nagi is completely invested in keeping Reo safe and Reo, for all his eagerness to finally take his creation out into the real world, is smart enough to know when to step back. 

 

That’s why this other part of him even gets to stand here, and enjoy the privilege of the reprieve he’s managed to afford himself and Kaiser. The fact that he can trust these people, Reo and Nagi, Chigiri still back at Reo’s place scattering seeds of dead ends on the online forums Kaiser’s pursuers are keeping an eye on using Reo’s sophisticated work laptops and all his VPNs, Bachira right outside, keeping bypassers at bay. He can believe in them, just as much as they believe in him, enough that they’re doing all this on faith alone that eventually, Isagi will tell them why.

 

And that’s why he has to do this. Feels compelled to be completely truthful to Kaiser, to forge something stronger than the flimsy connections that he’d felt so close to tearing today. So he can demand the same commitment back. So he can have it and keep it, and never let it go.

 

By the time Ness arrives, parking his car unobtrusively a couple of blocks down and coming up to the back entrance, by the dumpster where Isagi had found the bag of cash all those nights ago, Kaiser tells him his fair share of truth too. 

 

That he comes from an abusive home and had run away at a young age, stealing all the money he could find in the house as one last act of vengeance. 

 

That he lived off the streets for a while, entangled with the wrong sort of guys, the kind of high school delinquents that have been the last threat on anyone’s mind today, not with the mass arrests of high-profile gangsters who’d been covertly pulling strings through their lives all this time. 

 

That eventually, he’d run off with a circus, dazzled by the free-wheeling life he was sold, the opportunity to make money off of the obscenely rich, whether the trick was to collect the change for a crazy manoeuvre performed midair or to pinch pockets and purses when they weren’t looking. 

 

“Didn’t last long there either, but it taught me a valuable lesson,” Kaiser admits to Isagi. Pulls him in closer like he wants the security of Isagi nearby, anchored to him with his arms around Isagi’s waist, peering up at him as he sits near Isagi’s height standing. As though at this point, anything he could confess to could drive Isagi away. “That if you’re gonna take, you have to take from the people who have so much they don’t worry about losing it.”

 

After all, what kind of clientele would a travelling circus need to have to let it get away with a bunch of underage performers? 

 

He’d posed the question like a riddle and smiled, Sphinx-like, as he watched Isagi reach the conclusion. 

 

“Rich people.”

 

“That’s right,” Kaiser agrees. “You’d know that better than anyone, darling.”

 

Enough wealth, enough privilege… and it gets to people’s heads. They get divorced from reality until even their fellow people don’t seem like people to them anymore. That explained why it wasn’t reported sooner, didn’t make a much bigger splash in the news than a circus exploiting children should have. 

 

“It was a very exclusive affair. You know how it is with these people - the more novel it feels, the more forbidden and rare, the more they’ll salivate. Only a certain circle would be aware of it. And with a model like that, you can imagine what it would take to scrape together enough of a profit to keep the thing running in the first place.”

 

Isagi, aghast, allows himself to be steadied by Kaiser - allows himself to be pulled down until he’s sitting beside him. 

 

“...are you talking about the circus or are you talking about you?” Isagi asks him softly, and gets his answer from the way Kaiser laughs.

 

“I took it from them, the idea,” Kaiser says. “Just like I took everything else.”

 

And Isagi does not understood that statement, not entirely, not until he asks, trying to wrap his mind around the horror of a machine that fed on and chewed out children to make money like this, “… but surely, surely someone would have tried to do something… it got disbanded eventually, so someone must have reported -”  

 

“They did,” And in the jaunty, faux-conspiratorial tone of an actor breaking character to address the audience, “It was me.”

 

Kaiser’d discovered, at some point, that the ringmaster had been pocketing far, far more money than he made a show of distributing equally among the kids. Far, far more, more than Kaiser said he’d ever seen in one place, in his whole life. 

 

And he couldn’t stand for it. The fact that he put his neck on the line, swinging in the sky without so much as a safety net below him, only to get cheated out of his rewards. The gruelling work hours and training he endured, the abuse at the hands of the ringmaster until he’d all but perfected himself into the heart of the show. 

 

He’d sworn, as he’d fed the news of the circus to the right people, the information circuits he’s developed to what it is right now originating from that cobbled together web of his, whispered words and confidential tip-offs to the police and to the papers, that he would never allow himself to be taken advantage of like this, ever again. 

 

Realised that simply packing up his bags and fleeing the country to the first place that would take him isn’t enough. Realised that if he wanted to be untouchable, he needed to amass power. 

 

Kaiser shakes his head, slowly, when Isagi asks him why he didn’t try to galvanise himself better from discovery, then. Why he lived in his barebones apartment in a seamy part of town, when he could fortify himself far better with the money he must be making. 

 

“The money’s good, don’t get me wrong - it lets me keep my options open. But I can make money in other ways too. And there’s always more - there’s always a higher bidder, someone above you on the food chain that can chomp you down like leftovers. No, what I wanted…,” The glow of Kaiser’s eyes remind Isagi of a cat’s in the dark, a predator poised for a kill, “was leverage.”

 

And it’s that leverage that he’d detonated en masse today. The biggest sharks in the city, the most formidable players in the game - all beholden to him not because of the jobs he completed for them, hidden out of sight and out of understanding, but because of what he procured about them in the process. What they could stand to lose simply through involvement with Kaiser, the knowledge, the influence, the secrets he’s amassed along the way - 

 

Pure, concentrated power.

 

Isagi’s glad he’d been sitting down, because the sheer magnitude of what Kaiser is trying to convey to him is so large it’s like trying to take in the view of the city in a single glance. 

 

“But you gave it up,” Isagi tells him in a whisper. “You… you just gave it all up.”

 

“Not all,” Kaiser says to him, thumb coasting along his mouth, expression a strange mix of content and craving, “Not everything. But enough that I could have what I want now.”

 

Isagi suspects he knows what mortifying thing he’s going to say next and preemptively deflects it - he needs to stay sane until this is over. 

 

By over, he means letting Ness in through the back entrance, hurrying him into the staff room where Kaiser changes into plain clothes, shoving the suit he peels off into an unobtrusive backpack. Isagi, in between fending off the absolute shamelessness of the man teasing that he can look if he likes while Kaiser dresses and avoiding staring too much at Ness because he’d abandoned the cap, mask and shades this time, texts Bachira saying he’s going to be leaving soon, and he’ll explain everything, he swears.

 

Finds out, from Reo, that he and Nagi are on their return ride home - they’d been spotted and had to get the robot switched off and picked up off a side street before the building could be stormed by the people thinking they’d been trailing Kaiser.

 

The same people he’d been in the pay of, doing recon. 

 

They have connections to yakuza, Isagi learns, head utterly saturated from the crushing revelations it’s had to make room for in just twenty-four hours. They’d wanted to be in the know of local gangs in the area, in case they overstepped and interfered in any of their invisible, informally-marked territory claims.

 

It’s while they are in Ness’ car, safely exiting the diner even though the three-minute walk it took them to get there were the longest, most heart attack-inducing three minutes of Isagi’s life, that they get confirmation by way of whatever information network Ness is tapped into that a large group of people affiliated with some crime ring or the other had clashed. Several arrests are taking place, though these will only start to show in the news some minutes later.

 

Kaiser, sitting in the backseat unnecessarily close to Isagi, in full view of Ness’ rearview mirror, turns to Isagi with a fire in his eyes. 

 

“You’re insane.” 

 

He almost sounds awestruck, and… wanting , and it nearly flusters Isagi out of the car. 

 

He’s already awkward as anything and reeling from coming out of the staff room and running straight into Bachira. He doesn’t know how to begin unpacking the fact that Bachira’s surprise had dialled down to something almost like realisation in the space of a second, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, before he’d turned to Isagi with a, You have sooo much explaining to do later. 

 

Later, he’ll find out that between Bachira and Chigiri, they’ll have added their twos and twos together, because of course, the person Isagi’d been trying to protect is the Emperor, and the Emperor is Michael Kaiser. 

 

Later, he’ll find himself agonising over what it said about him, that they are more mad that he kept something like this from them than they are surprised by the fact that of course he would find himself involved with the Emperor, and he would somehow be complicit in the mass exorcism of North Ward and some of its worst demons. 

 

There’s a lot in store for later. Kaiser grabbing at Isagi later that night, picking him up before they’ve barely managed to get over the threshold, using the momentum of their turning bodies to slam his apartment door closed. How he’d kiss him against it like he’s trying to quench some horrible thirst he’s been nursing for who knows how long. How he’d look at Isagi like he can hardly accept he’s real, will whisper it against his lips, and Isagi will breathe out, hot and shaky, that he’s right here. 

 

That’s something Kaiser will learn over time. Just as Isagi learns it, the depth of his own devotion, told in the quieter ways that linger than the bombastic flare of an explosion that only leaves fragments behind. In scribbled lines between margins and pages holding the imprints of people who keep thumbing through to revisit their paragraphs. In the breakfast he’ll cook for them the next morning, stoically enduring Kaiser’s teasing about not expecting to have spent the night together before they get to go on their first date when he’ll not be fooling either of them. Feigning being bothered by Kaiser clinging to his back like an overgrown, touch-hungry child, thinking then that he’s just trying to be annoying, but learning over time that this is how Kaiser shows his devotion back. In the ways he will learn to seek out Isagi’s warmth in bed or half-asleep stumbling through the apartment to plaster himself on to Isagi and get in the way of whatever he’s doing as the body heat and Isagi’s complaints slowly wake him up. 

 

Later will involve long and stubborn arguments about moving in together because Isagi doesn’t want to spend Kaiser’s dirty money on a better apartment and Kaiser will complain that he’s not about to donate all that to charity, he earned that himself and it’s his, because they’ll never not be butting heads, rising to the occasion of each other’s stubbornness, each other’s will, each other’s pride and greed. Asking and taking in equal measures like enough is never going to be enough, an obsession that only grows as much as it goes both ways. 

 

It will involve fresh flowers on countertops, blue blooms for every season, and walks in parks with paper bags of rusks to keep an eye on children Kaiser will grudgingly learn the first names of, even though he will insist on calling them Brat #1, Brat #2 and so forth. It’ll take him a while yet to overcome the habit of sulking when someone’s trying to compete with him for Isagi’s attention, even if they’re kids. Some people even learn to weaponise it against him, including Hiori, who Isagi will learn later, to his complete horror, had already heard about the German neighbour who had been glaring holes into Kawasaki while they’d been exchanging numbers. Acting extra sweet and friendly when they meet while Kaiser is around, the menace. 

 

It might be that, or it might be Kaiser’s own greed, that will keep him sticking to Isagi all the more. Like he’s trying to prove something, to the world, to the park kids and the guys from the group chat to the teens who now eye Isagi with some kind of grudging respect and fear, because apparently they think he single handedly kicked the asses of three of their crew and also a fully-grown bonafide thug, and also because Kaiser, perpetually at Isagi’s side glaring coldly at anyone who might dare to look at them, looming height and powerful physique and stark tattoos, will keep the rest of them away. 

 

Later, Isagi will think, letting Kaiser tug him into his side in public even though it embarrasses him to bits, that he’s also just proving it to himself. 

 

That all of this is real, and theirs, just as much as Isagi will prove it to himself every time he will to wake up to a cloud of gold and blue in his face.

 

They’ll get used to it, eventually, wear it down into something comfortable and easy to slip on, because the things people can adapt to are funny - humanity will get used to anything. His friends, for example, adjusting to the fact that Isagi’s boyfriend used to work as a hired hand for North Ward’s rich and powerful, enough that Bachira will have fun actively antagonising Kaiser and instigating fights with Rin and Chigiri will impart relationship advice for long-lasting, healthy couples while Kaiser’s in earshot.

 

Reo’s approach will be a little different - will involve kickstarting his own company after graduation, where Isagi and Nagi will end up working, and where he will poach a certain pair of Germans right out from under his father’s nose to be a part of his team. A genius of an engineer and a genius whose real-life input will help develop the fleet of robots that will someday revolutionise the public safety sector, though that’s still some ways away. At least they’ll outsell the alien earbuds when it comes to the profit margin, to Reo’s vindictive delight. 

 

All of that will come later, though. 

 

Right now, Isagi just responds to Kaiser with, “I’m insane? Have you looked in a mirror recently?”

 

And Kaiser - Michael Kaiser, who’d swept into Isagi’s life and turned upside down everything he thought he understood about himself and the world, who’d decided to break it so they could mend it into something where they could be the reality of themselves without the fear and the worry and the secrets, just grins at him. 

Says, “I guess you have to be a little insane to change the world.”

Notes:

fucking finally.

i have a love-hate relationship with this fic. hate, because im not happy with it. there's a lot i wish i'd done differently, a lot i regret, a lot i wish i'd done better. if kintsukuroi was the closest i've felt i got to my vision for a fic, this the farthest (also i'm so mad rn i had to post the chapter in two parts, i hope this doesn't confuse anyone who just jumps to the last chapter ugh)

but also, love, because, it's received so much love inspite of my personal reservations. i came so close to dismissing this fic as terrible so many times but folks waiting for MONTHS, sending support my way, sometimes in comments of other fics, even saying this is their favourite of my work (which has me going huh? really?? every time) - i really really owe that support and patience and love for bringing me back to this fic with kinder eyes and renewed vigour. a rose wouldn't have been completed without it's wonderful readers. and to the best of my abilities, which this fic forced me to face the limits of, i did my best to, hopefully, make the journey and the wait worth it. it's been almost a year in the making, but at last - it's curtain call.

now i'm gonna take a fat nap and fix the grammar et al after i wake up and respond to all the comments i haven't gotten back to i've been so bad at this i'm sorry

edit: i forgot to say that i strongly feel this fic is going to get an epilogue but like i need a break. i need a long break from it first lol ;-;