Chapter Text
Once upon a time, when he was young and naive and still had time for strolling through artisans’ booths, Art can remember seeing pieces of pottery, smashed and then put back together with lacquer and shimmering gold. Kintsugi, it was called, and supposedly, as the woman selling it had said, there was beauty in the breakage. Broken pieces can be fit together stronger and more beautiful than before, she’d told them. Gasuke had taken his time looking through the pots while Art got more and more anxious about his upcoming meeting with the previous superintendent they were sure to be late for. Finally, Gasuke decided upon a small pot with silver-colored lacquer, just the right size for a plant in his office as he explains to Art while he pays.
Kintsugi. Finding beauty in the breakage. As time passes, Art is realizing just what a lie that was. When something breaks, it breaks, and all you have is smashed pottery and no way to put things back together.
He’s not sure when the first real crack in him appeared. Perhaps it was when Moral left him dead beside his brother’s grave. Maybe it was remembering again what it had felt like to jam that broken glass into Skill’s chest. Or perhaps it was deciding that he would someday have to kill Nice. Maybe it happened when he began at Facultus, and met a child with a huge smile and bandages upon his face and who would represent everything Art never could become.
Lots of places a crack could start. And lots of ways it could start to spiderweb as Art falls further and further into Freemum and Momoka and his own desperate desire to erase Minimums from the world. Falling until he’s more cracks than person and there’s nothing to do but push forward harder and harder and hope he reaches his goal before he breaks entirely. Just keep moving. It doesn’t matter. Stop crying. Keep going. This is for Skill. All of it’s for Skill. Keep going. Keep going.
He kills Nice, and thinks that, yes, this was the last crack, and he still hasn’t fallen apart. The worst thing he could do, with Nice’s blood dripping from his hands as proof, and still he doesn’t fall apart.
But when he wakes up washed up at the side of the river far more alive than he’d expected, he does more than simply break.
He shatters.
He drags himself from the water, coughing and spitting up mud. There’s the clink of shattered glass whenever he moves, and the broken vials that had once held Minimums dig into his skin beneath his sopping coat. Why? Why is he alive? He couldn’t have survived that fall.
His coat drags red behind him. He’s not sure if it’s his own blood or Nice’s, still soaked into the fabric.
Nice.
Oh God. Oh God.
When he throws up, it’s mostly mud. He can’t remember eating much these last few days.
There had been Nice, and then the rooftop, and then Nice again, and he’d...he’d…
The only explanation is Skill; he knows that as he drags himself along and tries to get the bitter taste of stomach acid from his mouth. For some reason, his brother still thought he was worth something alive. After all Art has done, Skill still sees him as worth saving.
He leans to the side and throws up again. He’s shivering violently wrapped in his sodden wet coat. He doesn’t want to be alive. That’s why he’d let himself fall. Why is Skill forcing life back onto him?
He’s too exhausted to think it through. He manages to get himself beneath a bridge, and hides away in the shadows, fists clenched and eyes leaking hot tears into his sleeve. He doesn’t want to be alive anymore. So why? Why?
Slowly, slowly, hidden in the shadows of a bridge as dawn breaks over the bay, he finally crumbles to pieces. Nothing beautiful about it.
It takes six months for Art to build himself back up to the point he feels ready to face the world once more. He spends most of that time in the backroom of Momoka’s flower shop. No one comes to look for him. He’s dead now. There’s nothing to look for. He makes his way to the flower shop in the darkest hours of the next night and collapses on the floorboards the moment he’s jimmied the lock open. There’s nothing but bad memories left behind here, but it’s all he has. He can’t return to his apartment. Not the one he’d owned as superintendent, and not the shabby one he’d rented for the last few months. If anyone thinks he’s alive, they’ll be sure to check there. And if they think he’s dead, someone will come to remove his things at least.
But not even the flower shop is safe. He has to abandon that sanctuary for a few days once Momoka is discovered dead in a ferris wheel—a fact Art is completely numb to—and people Art doesn’t know come to remove the long dead flowers and board the place up until it can be bought and used for business again. As soon as they’re gone, Art breaks in through the back door and makes the empty shop his home once more. Just him and a few fallen petals. No furniture. No extra clothing. No framed pictures.
He hopes Nice finds the picture of himself and Skill he’d left in his last apartment. Skill would want Nice to have those happy memories, he thinks. For three months all Art had felt when he saw that picture was guilt, Skill’s smiling face overlaid with the nightmarish metal mask over his eyes as he begged for Art to kill him. Art doesn’t think he could handle that, not now. Not after how much he let Skill down. But Nice could have the picture, maybe remember the good times they had, all three of them.
Maybe Nice can sometimes remember Art as something other than what he’s turned into. Art hopes so, a guilty little hope he knows he has no right to.
The one sensible thing he’d done was raid the cash register his first day in the flower shop. He leaves late at night and heads to the closest convenience store. He stocks up on enough food to last him a few weeks and makes another stop on the way to buy a blanket and a change of clothes. The ones he has still reek of blood.
And so he hides himself away in the boarded-up shop, and lives with nothing but his own thoughts for company. And they make for very poor companions.
The weeks spent lying on the floor scraping nails uselessly across the floorboards destroy the muscular body he’d cultivated in short time. Within a month he can count each rib on either side and his legs seem so much weaker when he eventually has to force himself to leave in the night to get food once more. His arms ache from holding the bags of non-perishable goods and his knuckles are bloody from where he’s punched the brick walls, over and over and over, trying to make himself hurt, trying to make it hurt enough to make the screaming in his head stop.
He failed. He failed. It was never what Skill wanted. Never.
Days go by just letting the thoughts drain from his head. Lying there hazily and remembering all that’s happened these past few months, that final slow-down and realization of just what a fool he’d been, the whole time. Thinking he was taking revenge in hand by destroying Ego when the whole time he’d been funded and nudged by a Nihilist who was in desperate need of entertainment. He hopes he was an amusing enough dancing bear.
He remembers standing over that city gone silent and realizing he would remain unchanged. Because there’s nothing left in him anymore. He’s all burned out and hollow on the inside. Hollow except for the dark tangle of emotions welled up beneath his throat he doesn’t want to touch. That’s where he remembers Nice’s final gasp of breath and the feel of warm blood on his hands. Where he remembers the way Skill’s body had jerked and spasmed when Art rammed the piece of bottle right into the wrong place beside his heart. How he’d spent so long learning exactly where the human heart lies, so he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
Wasn’t it okay to want to take revenge? Against Moral, against Facultus? Against Ego itself? Wasn’t it okay to want to take revenge on the thing that had stolen his brother away? It had all made so much more sense back then.
On days his thoughts turn to this, Art rolls over onto his side and covers his ears with his hands, like that will help at all. He doesn’t know anymore. Everything is all jumbled up inside his head.
The last instance of clarity in his life had been falling from that rooftop. It had been so simple in that moment. Now he can’t figure out what he’s supposed to think or what he’s supposed to do. Skill saved his life for a reason. Art doesn’t think it was so he could rot away in an abandoned flower shop.
In the months he’d infiltrated Freemum and worked with Momoka, the thought that had driven him on was that it was all for Skill. That everything was okay, because it was for Skill. He would do it right, he would become whatever was needed, so Skill could be at peace. Now, there are two thoughts. One, always, is that he failed. He failed Skill in every way possible. Two, insidious and painful, is that he killed Nice. True, Nice came back to life, but Art looks back over the time he spent with Nice, his smile, his laugh, the way he sticks his hands in his pockets and wears his headphones slung around his neck and the way he bled onto the ground with the knife in his heart and—oh God—if he had anything precious left in this entire world it was Nice. And he burned that bridge to cinders and smiled while he did. Now he clenches his fists and muffles a sob into his elbow. He has nothing left anymore. Why is Skill doing this to him? Penance? How much pain does he have to endure? How many times must he die before it is enough?
And in the worst moments, he remembers Nice’s face as Nice tried to reach out and save Art from falling and Art curls into a ball and feels the tears run hot down his face because how could Nice even consider him worth saving?
So he lives in the dark, trying to untangle the frayed threads of guilt and anger and love and despair and self-loathing all twisted up inside him. For five months he stays, and hopes that the next day will be better. The next one. The next one. The next one. But what’s he done stays in his dreams and in his waking thoughts, and he realizes no matter how long he hides, these are the things he’ll never escape.
Around him, the city picks itself back up and learns how to move past what happened. He sees it in the late night runs for supplies. How the smiles come easier and easier to people’s faces, how the newspapers stop being in all capital letters he never dares actually read and once again become stories about daring firefighters and award-winning scientists. His eye catches on a photo on the front page one night, and he sees the headline about how Facultus Academy has been officially shut down. A hand stretches out to grab the paper so he can take it back with him, but he pulls it back. He’ll take his food and go. He’s scared to see what those lines of text will tell him, and he can’t do any good for Yokohama. It’s a city that lives now, that thrives. He’d tried to destroy it. Turn it into a perfect utopia, drained dry of color but everyone happy in that black and white because he hadn’t given them a choice.
That had always been the end of the story for him. To achieve that perfect, colorless world, prevent the spread of Ego, of Minimums, of sadness and grief and regret and then once he’d done that, he’d—
Well, this story had always ended with him falling.
But now he needs a new ending. And he can’t stay in a flower shop forever, hiding from the world. It would be betraying Skill all over again. And the building is bound to be sold at some point.
He thinks on it for a few weeks. And then he makes his decision.
He has enough money stolen from the cash register to find a seedy hotel on the edges of town. Nobody knows his face. Not with hair grown shaggy and a matted, scratchy beard along his jaw. He tries turning on the television, and is happy to see that Freemum is not the first bulletin on the news. The weather will be hot and humid. And he has three days before his most important anniversary.
Skill hurrying him along, Art thinks.
He goes to a standard clothing store, hair washed but not cut in case people happen to be searching for him. He tries to avoid looking too hard in the mirror as he tries on suits. He’s dropped a few sizes, but he finds one that fits. It doesn’t take long to grab the tie and the shoes. At least his shoe size hasn’t changed, even if everything else has. A strange constant to take comfort in, but a constant.
He buys a razor on the way back to the hotel, and spends the night before he leaves trimming away the beard and getting his hair back to acceptable length. It will pass. He stares at himself in the mirror, now somehow recognizable but in no way the person he was before. Eyes too hooded, cheeks too gaunt, skin too pale even by his standards. In the morning, when he gets the suit on, it looks a little better at least. Time to go.
He slips the razor in his pocket but otherwise leaves everything in a trash can. The clothes he’s worn for six months don’t need to come with him.
He walks out into the morning sunlight, squinting so hard his eyes are practically closed entirely. At least he knows where to go today. And who he’ll find there. But he’s ready to come back to life again. Come back to life, and then hand himself over to the police, where he can pay for what he’s done under due process. Walk with the last of his pride into the station to turn himself in, no more hiding, no more pretending it will go away if he disappears for long enough.
He just needs to visit Skill first.
He uses the last of the money on a bouquet of flowers. White. Never black. Never anything like Black Cosmos.
It’s a nice little bouquet, but it seems so heavy as he walks. He’s truly lost most of his strength if it takes all of it up just to reach the cemetery. He gets through the gates and rests a few minutes on the steps beneath the shadow of a tree. It’s past noon now. It took him hours to get here. The air he heaves in is not clean and clear, since this is the city, but it also doesn’t fill his lungs with dust like the flower shop. The chatter of people around him seems so much louder than he remembers after the silence of his life these past six months. And the sun is still so bright.
Maybe it was a mistake to come back. But he can’t turn around now. Not with who’s waiting. He keeps his steps steady as he continues on, until he can spy the familiar tree and the figures who have beaten him to his brother’s grave.
Nice looks well. At least, less bloody than the last time Art saw him. A tension Art’s been carrying up around his shoulders eases, like seeing Nice has reassured him that yes, Nice is alive. Art didn’t actually manage to do the very worst thing. No matter how many times he tried, his most precious thing is still here, still breathing. He remembers how he’d once told Murasaki he would live for Nice, if he didn’t have to kill him. Seeing Nice here, it’s so easy to remember that feeling, that devotion. But then Nice turns and meets Art’s eyes.
Time stops.
Art wonders if this is how it feels when Nice uses his Minimum. This utter moment of breathlessness, complete stillness as he stares back at Nice, the weight of the bouquet in his hand the only thing holding him down to Earth.
The thud of his own heartbeat, somehow kicked into motion. Funny, how he hadn’t really remembered he had a heart up until now.
Boom.
Boom.
And then Nice is smiling and the stillness is broken because Nice is holding out his hand once more, that hand he’s always held out to Art, and it’s probably Art’s first smile in six months as he tries to get used to the feeling of time once more. It’s slow, and uncertain, but finally he holds out his own hand to match.
Five seconds later, he can’t breathe all over again for the fist to his stomach. “If you die again, I’ll kill you!” Nice proclaims and Art can’t believe he forgot how absolutely maddening this man can be. Laughing as he draws his fist back in, laughing all glorious and alive and Art can’t believe this is how Nice greets him. It’s a gut reaction to raise the bouquet and bash it over Nice’s head, and he thinks Skill would forgive him for the flowers that go scattering. Skill’s forgiven him for a lot more than that.
And so has Nice, as it turns out, once the arguing has stopped and Art is on the ground recovering from Hajime’s kick and staring up at Nice. Nice, who clutches his hand tight between them. Nice holds him like if he holds his hand hard enough now it will somehow change what happened the night Art fell. Like it will prevent him from falling altogether, in every sense of the word.
It doesn’t work, of course, but for a moment, it feels like it should.
Six months. Six months for ‘attempting to disrupt public order’, because that’s the only label they can slap on him, with his urgent insistence. It’s hard to pin him for murder when Nice is still around kicking and refusing to press charges, and apparently the Freemum members who had been taken into custody had cussed and ratted him out in full, so not even the conspiracy charge will stick. Every action he took with Freemum transforms into a higher duty to ultimately save the city in an infuriating manner. Art considers admitting to the attack on Facultus Academy, but he can still feel where Nice had gripped him around his wrists and whispered for Art to please, please, please just let the lawyer do her job so he doesn’t have a long sentence. And he can’t find it in him to disappoint Nice even more than he already has. It’s not like this is punishment, really, he decides. This is for the sake of the pretense of justice, so the part of him that was a policeman can breathe easy. His real punishment happens inside his own head.
Six months.
Nice comes to visit him almost every week, during allotted visiting hours.
“We took down your memorial,” Nice tells him the first day, in his attempt to break the silence that’s hung between them since Art sat down. It achieves its effect. Art chokes and sputters until he can string the word together. He hasn’t talked much the last few months. His mouth isn’t used to it.
“ Memorial ?”
Nice nods, not acknowledging Art’s sudden inability to speak. “Yeah, we had a memorial up for you in the new Nowhere.” He glances up at the ceiling, and then to the wall. Back to Art. And away again. “It was mostly me who took it down, to be honest. Right after we dropped you off. Damn depressing thing.”
Dropped you off. Yeah, that’s a car ride Art will remember, side by side with Nice in the backseat of Murasaki’s car because Hajime has dibs on the front. Nice trying to convince Art to at least come home—he means Nowhere, of course—before turning himself in, Hajime munching on a chocolate bar she’d stored in the middle console, and Murasaki on the phone with a lawyer he knows while studiously not meeting Art’s eyes in the mirror just as hard as Art was avoiding it as well.
“Three’s really happy,” Nice adds now with a wry grin snaking up one side of his face. “He said he wasn’t crying, but I think he was.”
Art shakes his head and presses his fingers to his forehead. “A memorial?”
Nice glances back to him and frowns before planting his elbows on the counter in front of him, leaning forward in his seat. “What, did you think none of would care that you were dead , Art?”
After all he’d done? Art shrugs one shoulder, and Nice narrows his eyes at him. “Well, we did. Even if you didn’t.”
Art shuts his eyes. He doesn’t want to have this conversation now. Or ever.
“How are you alive?” Nice demands after a moment. Always so direct. Art rubs at his temples and shifts in his seat, feeling the coarse fabric of the prison uniform against skin still adjusting to light.
“I don’t know,” he admits at last, not looking at Nice.
“Was it Skill?”
“Probably.”
Nice hums. His chair creaks. He takes his elbows off the counter, and then puts them back on. Art can tell he has another question he wants an answer to, and he’s also fairly certain what that question is. He’s also completely certain he doesn’t have a good enough answer.
“What sort of memorial?” he asks quickly, so Nice never gets a chance. He tries for a smile. “A nice one, I hope.”
“Nicer than mine,” Nice whines. “Those cheapskates.”
His pout punches a laugh out of Art, and Nice’s face is instantly all smiles. “Hey! It’s not funny!”
“It’s a little funny,” Art tells him. “You could have sabotaged mine. Make yours look nicer in comparison.”
Nice gives him a scandalous look. “After all that time I spent on it? No way!” He’s still grinning, and Art keeps the smile on his face by force, but the sudden image of Nice maintaining a memorial for the man who tried to kill him is pushing its way into the forefront of his mind.
Because that’s the thing. That’s why he’s here now, on this side of the plexiglass. Because he’s a terrorist and a murderer, no matter how few of the charges actually stick. He’s felt Nice’s warm blood on his hands while Nice’s hands have lit candles in his memory.
He doesn’t want to talk anymore.
“I think you should leave,” he tells Nice very quietly, folding his hands in his lap and ducking his head.
“Art?”
“Nice, please leave.” Already he can hear the attendant who waits at the back of the room standing to attention, getting ready to escort him back to his cell as soon as Nice leaves.
“Art?” Nice calls again, voice plaintive, and Art darts his eyes up, sees the way Nice’s face is all crumpled with sudden hurt. Because of course all he ends up doing is hurting Nice, again and again and again.
“I’m just tired,” Art lies, and the tension releases a little bit behind Nice’s eyes.
“I’ll come back next week,” he promises, and stands up, chair squeaking on the floor as he does. Art just nods, and stands as well, so the attendant can cuff his hands to escort him out of the visitation room. He catches Nice’s eyes once as they part, and quickly looks away.
Part of him wants to scream at Nice to stay away, to stop dredging all these memories up inside him, to let him serve his time and escape into a new life in a new city where no one knows his name. But a larger part wants to scream for Nice to stay. Stay and do what, Art doesn’t know. Just stay, maybe. But he has no right to ask that of Nice. He has no right to ask for anything.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Art tells him the next week, placing his chin on tented hands. Nice copies the gesture, their faces so close with only the glass separating them. A habit he’s gotten into over the past hour. They’ve mostly talked about how the city has recovered from Freemum’s attack and the removal of Ego. Not a subject Nice likes to spend time on, but one Art wants to hear now, through Nice’s words, not the words of a newspaper. He needs to hear how the city has rebuilt itself. How it has fixed what he broke or simply let break. How Facultus is shut down and the staff all under inspection. And Nice has indulged him, replying to his questions with either answers or promises to know the answers next time. Art knows Nice isn’t telling him the whole truth, but he shakes that thought away. Maybe he doesn’t want to hear the whole truth. Now, Nice catches easily onto the change in topic, face open and content.
“I don’t have to do what?” he asks.
“Come and see me.” Art frowns and shakes his head a little in disbelief. “You certainly don’t owe me anything.”
“I have to keep an eye on you,” Nice says with a grin, trying to make it into a joke. Maybe it’s a coping method. “Every time I don’t, you go off and get yourself almost killed.”
Art thinks back to the day Moral stabbed him, whispered in his ear that he killed his brother. And shot him. Art can’t remember which had hurt more. Only that his phone had been buzzing with Nice right there on the other end and Art wasn’t able to reach it in time. Struggling through the grass and the mud, as if hearing Nice’s voice might save him from the shadow leaning over him with the click of the safety going off. Art leans forward until his forehead hits the plexiglass and, predictably, Nice does the exact same. Art looks up into Nice’s eyes, closer than he’s ever seen. “It was never your fault,” he whispers, the glass between them granting an intimacy that he’s never been afforded before.
Nice sighs and shuts his eyes as he touches one hand to the glass, fingers leaving little smudges. Art resists the instinct to match his motion. “Maybe,” Nice says, voice rough. “But I’m sick and tired of not being able to save you. I’m not going to screw that up again.”
He doesn’t open his eyes, which means he doesn’t see the way Art’s face goes red. In fact, he seems perfectly content to sit there with their foreheads so nearly pressed together until the visitation time is up. Nice stands at the bell and smiles down at Art, trapped in his seat by the weight of that smile. “Next week,” Nice says, and it’s such a simple promise to mean so much.
He doesn’t need saving anymore, Art thinks that night while he lies in his cot. And even if he does, Nice is ridiculous to think Art can be saved by anyone. He is beyond saving. He’s broken and wrong and nothing anyone—including Nice—can do will ever fix that.
But Nice still fulfills his promise and comes the next week, and the next week, and the week after that. He misses the one after that because Hamatora has a job, but he’s back the next week again.
Nice begins to tell him of everyday life in the new Nowhere. About how Birthday is feeling better than ever since Suruga healed him and is causing that much more trouble. How Hamatora is doing, client-wise, which turns out to be very slow, even with the whole ‘saving of the city’ and all. How Hajime and Koneko have started spending so much time together it’s making Nice suspicious.
“Koneko never seemed to put anything on Hajime’s tab,” he mutters conspiratorially, leaning in close to the glass. “I think she likes her.” Art leans away and snorts.
“Or maybe she just dislikes you.”
Nice nods before sighing dejectedly. “Both options are possible.”
There are some topics that never get brought up, certain people who only show up as a fleeting mention in conversations. Art notices, and doesn’t force the issue. He won’t make Nice talk about the things that he doesn’t want to. There are lots of things Nice is avoiding for Art’s sake too, after all.
A week passes. And then another. Before he knows it, he’s been in prison for over two months. He feels better now. He eats better than he had in the flower shop and starts an exercise regimen to get back some muscle tone at least.
And Nice comes to see him almost every week.
On the days visitors aren’t allowed, Art doesn’t do much besides try to gain his strength back. It’s a long process. But over the weeks the shakiness leaves his limbs and eventually he’s able to start doing pushups again, even if he has to start on his knees. He hooks his feet beneath his bed and starts doing sit-ups as well. He stays isolated from the other inmates, which he’s glad for. He doesn’t know how many Freemum members might be housed here, and he doesn’t want his identity to be widespread. Anonymity is his best friend right now, even if he’s sure none of the Freemum members would be in the same low-danger area and allowed freedom from their cells. Still, he’s careful not to watch television when he has a chance. He prefers reality as filtered through Nice’s careful wording. He doesn’t want to find his own face on the screen one day. He avoids the recreation room altogether, preferring to stay in his cell and gradually working up to proper pushup form. There are some things he’ll never be able to forget, but maybe the best thing is to try to pretend he has.
Some days, Nice arrives with extra bandages on his face and his hands, wrappings likely snaking up his arms as well. It doesn’t always hide the blood leaking from his cuts, and the white of the bandages makes the bruises look even worse. Art aches to reach through the plexiglass and retie those bandages, just right and not too tight, like he learned from Gasuke patching him up his first few months in the field. Aches to press ice against the bruise on Nice’s cheek. Aches to be the one not hurting Nice this time.
But he can’t reach through the plexiglass, which is probably best.
“You need to let Murasaki choose your cases,” he chastises instead, and Nice laughs as he scratches at one of the customary bandages on his jaw.
“This one was more important though.”
For the given value of ‘important’, which Art thinks Nice has a terrible judge of. Case in point: how many hours has he wasted here already?
He winces the next week when Nice comes back, and another bruise has taken bloom over his left eye.
“What sort of job is this, exactly?” he asks, and Nice shrugs while keeping his eyes on the ceiling.
“An important one.” No good answer for him then.
“Did you go to the hospital? Get checked for concussion? You have to have been hit pretty hard.”
“I’m fine. Art. Art, shut it, I’m fine.” Nice pokes at the bruise and hisses through his teeth, proving the exact opposite, but it’s not like there’s anything Art can do from here.
“Just…” He lays a hand against the glass, like he really can reach through. “Just be careful.”
Stupid, he thinks later, staring at the ceiling of his cell. What right does he have to tell Nice to be careful? To act like he really cares about him?
Except that’s the thing. It isn’t an act. He prays and prays for Nice to come back to him the next week, safe and alive, and nobody in the world would believe him when he says he would throw himself in front of a bullet for Nice.
Except that perhaps Nice would believe him. Because Nice never seems to remember that Art tried to kill him.
It’s one of those things they don’t really talk about.