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His body isn’t his.
It’s the second lesson he learns, pinned beneath Shimano’s thumb, to the corkboard of the Hole; his wings plucked, on display with the rest of Shimano’s mutilated collection of trophies.
His body is a tool, an object, a decoration built to adorn Shimano’s halls.
Later, it’s a weapon, a blunt-force, trauma wound instrument of brutality and violence, meant to be wielded by someone that’s… not himself.
He fights like an animal, fucks like a machine, and takes a sickened, smug pride in how good he is at both.
After all; the better you are at something, the quicker it ends.
The first lesson Shimano taught him, all without ever having to say a goddamn thing.
He lets his cuts bleed, doesn’t bother with rubbing alcohol, but slumps in the rain, smoking as the filter blackens.
He twists his voice, his personality into something that can’t be recognized as the shaking, shuddering wreck of a man that slumped in defeat under the hands of a monster, who gave himself over, mind and body, to be used and brutalized without a word.
His hair stays cropped short and ragged, and some days he’s lucky enough to not feel the bite of nails against his scalp.
Most of the time, no one dares get too close to his snarling, savage smile, worried the Mad Dog will tear out their throats with his teeth.
It’s not an idea that he dismisses entirely, either.
There’s a wary glint in Shimano’s eyes some days, when he builds the fires of chaos and mania around him, melting himself into the shape of a gun built to misfire.
He hands himself to Shimano, daring him to pull the trigger, a bent bullet lodged in his chambers, and waits for Shimano to resign himself to catastrophic failure.
“Who did you let break you, Majima?” Shimano murmurs at him one night.
Majima grins, vicious, bloodthirsty, terrified. “I’ve never felt better, boss-man. Turns out that number you did on me fixed me up real good. I ain’t ever felt fear since then.”
Shimano’s eyebrows furrow. “Haven’t you?”
Majima bares his teeth.
Unfortunately, his hair is still long enough to be pulled.
He lets the fires of chaos cast and recast him into weapon after weapon. He slams the heel of his shoe into Kiryu’s forehead – a broadsword. He sweeps low, slashing at a man’s knees with his tanto – a poleax.
He shapes himself into a viscera covered armory, sharpening his quicksilver tongue with lies, tempering the heat of his fury-forged body in the blood that drains into the gutters.
His body becomes a grenade, a 9mm, an axe –
Each day is a challenge to build his shattered personality into something crazier, more vicious, more terrible. Something vengeful enough to keep the howling whisper of Shimano’s voice away in the night.
His family shies away from him in the daylight, the men Shimano pays tremble in their shoes at night.
He watches the water run pink down the shower drain, snarls at the hiss of pain, and passes out from exhaustion, arms dangling over the lip of the tub.
shotguns, a dagger, an artillery shell –
The more lost in the façade the Mad Dog of Shimano becomes, the less inclined people are to touch him.
And that suits him just fine.
He sharpens his edges so every glance draws blood and breathes in the haze of battle frenzy, the snakes on his shoulders hissing empty promises in his ears.
hacksaw, rapier, katana –
He shrieks and howls with laughter in battle, cracking his skull against his attackers, licking the blood from his teeth as he slams the bony sharp edges of his elbow into a man’s solar plexus.
He leaves a heap of groaning, whimpering men in his wake, and strolls off, swinging his bat over his shoulder, and whistling cheerily.
spear, tonfa, kali sticks –
The rain drips off the overhead ledge, trickling down his shoes, and he breathes in the nicotine of his cigarette. With no to witness him, he closes his eye, resting his head back against the solid of the building behind him.
The rich rumble of petrichor washes over him, the steady-slick whisper of motor oil and city streets lingering in its afterecho. For a moment, in a heart-beat-flicker respite, the screaming in the back of his mind falls silent.
In the hush of the steady downpour, for just the space between breathes, Majima lets himself breathe.
His body becomes whatever weapon his wielder needs, and he learns to stop caring who’s holding his leash.
Shimano curls the heavy weight of his hand against Majima's cheek, gentle as a promise and just as feather-light.
Majima twists his face into a smile, teeth bared, and fights to keep the furious, panicked work of his jaw quiet.
“So docile. The Mad Dog of Shimano eats so willingly from my hand,” Shimano murmurs, one massive thumb stroking down the exposed line of Majima's throat.
Majima says nothing, but stands still, still, still.
“On your knees,” Shimano says.
Majima resists for a split-second.
Not long enough to count as a struggle, but just enough to register as so with Shimano.
Shimano's hand tightens around his throat. “No longer have fear, do you?”
Majima grins, all reckless abandon and panicked desperation. “You've already pulled every move in the book with me, boss. What, you wanna choke me out around your cock again? Shove me face down and rail me again? That shit ain't scarin’ me these days.”
He tastes blood against his teeth and shapes his words into the truest lie he's ever spoken. At his sides, his hands are steady, steady, steady.
Shimano frowns.
Majima vomits for hours afterwards, tasting copper-rust in his mouth, feeling fingers in his hair and the blackout-burn reminder that his body doesn’t belong to him.
Nishida gets a pay raise three weeks later when he wordlessly takes all Majima's clothes to the dry clean, taking the reek of blood, spit, sweat, and sex with him.
Majima never mentions it, and Nishida never asks.
Getting shot hurts like a bitch, it always does, but it’s the slow slide of air from his lungs as the surface slips from view that’s a new kind of panic in and of itself.
The water and the distant gasp of oxygen wasn’t anything new, but this time it was his own limbs dragging him down,
down,
down
down
down
down
down
down
down
down
down
down.
He feels the crushing steel of suffocation or someone’s arms crushing around his lungs, and then it all goes black.
He wakes, briefly, to Kiryu’s blurred face hovering over his, Kiryu’s lips moving, the stern set of his brow tensed, tightened into something like panic and that-
That just.
That just ain't right.
He slurs out the saltwater taste of something that might be Kiryu’s name, his lips curling into a waterlogged smile as he bares his throat, before unconsciousness takes him again.
Later, he fights Kiryu again, with a viciousness that surprises them both.
The floorboards give out beneath them, and Majima hopes Kiryu understands it’s because he knows just who Kiryu’s destined to go up against.
Shimano dies.
Six feet of ugly, six feet under.
Hellbound in a casket, his fingers finally loosed from Majima's leash.
Freedom is a length of rope, and Majima's skin crawls with the need to hang.
He presses the hilt of his tanto to his forehead, just above his left eyebrow.
And breathes.
And breathes.
And breathes.
His thumb traces the lacquered flowers from memory.
And he breathes.
And breathes.
And breathes.
He pisses on Shimano’s grave.
It only helps a little.
Nishida bustles in on him sitting alone in the dark in Shimano’s old office.
“Nishida,” he says softly, and the man in question yelps, dropping the documents he was carrying in a glorious, horrifying swirl of papers on the floor.
“B-boss!”
Majima slowly uncrosses his legs and swaggers to his feet. Nishida trembles from where he scurries to recover the papers.
“Nishida,” Majima says again, his voice the drop of a pin in the silence of the room.
Nishida trembles as he looks up at him.
“’M thinkin’ about startin’ a construction company. What’d’ya think?”
“I- I.” Nishida swallows loudly, his jaw working. Nishida closes his eyes and breathes out in a heavy gust, before meeting Majima’s gaze, his expression set and determined. “I think you would need to get a hard hat first, sir.”
Time passes.
He claws his way up the yakuza ranks, blood and dirt and grit beneath his nails every step of the way.
When he wakes gasping, he tries to ignore the way his choking, rasping breaths sound like Shimano’s damp breath in his ear.
Kiryu watches him with steady eyes that track the harsh lines of his face, searching, like Majima’s a puzzle he just hasn’t put enough time into solving.
They fight like it’s a dance, and dance like it’s a fight, and there’s something like relief in the hot copper tang of blood in his mouth when their fights end with just defeat, and not with humiliation as well.
Saejima rears back, snarling out something vicious about giving up too soon, or not giving it enough, and all he can think as Saejima bears down on him, all monstrous wrath and unwavering fury, is;
Finally.
Finally, it’s over.
Saejima stops his fist.
Majima keeps breathing.
Well.
There are always less important things to be disappointed about.
The assassins sent to kill him mid-negotiation are just fuckin’ lazy, he thinks, frowning at the blood on his hands.
“Shoulda gone for th’ head,” he slurs out as he’s dragged, bleeding from the room. When he gets no response, he laughs, and laughs, and laughs, until he chokes on his own blood, and all goes dark.
“The Mad Dog of Shimano. You aren’t looking so well these days,” Kurosawa murmurs. There’s a sick, cold glimmer in his eyes.
One that Majima knows intimately.
“Would it kill ya’ dumb bastards to be fuckin’ original for once in your goddamn lives,” he grumbles under his breath as Kurosawa’s men shove him to his knees.
Kurosawa raises an eyebrow. “Was there something you wanted to say?”
Majima bares his teeth, the snarling claws of mania prowling up his spine. Something must shift in his eye, in the air around him, because Kurosawa’s men glance at each other, uneasy.
“Yeah, ya’ unoriginal fuck. Find a better way to mess with a guy than jus’ stickin’ your dick in him, numbnuts.”
Kurosawa frowns.
The chains are just extra, he thinks grouchily as they drag him to the roof of the millennium tower. In the background, the resounding echo of the Japan Dome can be heard, chorusing off Majima's ringing headache.
There is blood against his teeth, the dull wrench of knives from beneath his lungs with every breath, but he is nothing if not good at clinging to the miserable scraps of life he’s given.
Kurosawa starts his monologue as Saejima watches him with something like pain etched in the harsh lines of his face, and all Majima can do is close his eye.
He thinks of Kiryu, and Haruka, and knows his chains are no longer just physical.
“They do more than just beat on ‘ya?” Saejima asks, voice soft in the hospital hall.
Majima tsks. “’m a skinny fuckin’ bastard with a vicious streak a mile wide, and a reputation more dangerous than most’a the folks in the yakuza. The fuck y’think happened?”
Saejima is quiet for a long moment. “Majima,” he says at last.
Majima grunts, not meeting his eyes.
“Majima,” he says again, more force in his voice.
Majima rolls his neck to finally make eye contact, and Saejima steps forward, slow, raising one giant hand to gently fit against Majima’s side, fingers framing the sharp valleys between his ribs, the knife-edge cut of the bones beneath his skin. Saejima’s lips quirk towards something that’s almost a fond, sad smile.
“Least you admit you’re a skinny fuck these days.”
Majima barks a sharp laugh. “Fuck off, you giant bastard.”
“You alright?” Kiryu asks.
The rooftop of the hospital is a quiet place, and here, there are no orderlies to scold Majima for breaking out his cigarettes.
Majima grunts, and says nothing.
On the hazy horizon, the sun steeps red as it sinks below the shadows of the city.
Kiryu lets the silence rest for a long moment before trying again.
“What did he want from you?”
Majima huffs, the nicotine haze cloying the air around them. “Same thing every power-hungry bastard wants when they got the Mad Dog of Shimano on his knees.”
Kiryu goes still.
“I’m not sure I understand,” he says carefully.
Majima snorts. “Don’t be fuckin’ dense, Kiryu. It ain’t like you. Sex is power, that’s all it is. Dumbass yakuza these days ain’t had a goddamn original idea in decades. ‘S been the same ol’ same ol’ song n’ dance for the past couple’a decades. Wish they’d figure somethin’ new out to spice the boring shit up.”
Besides him, Kiryu is so still, Majima wonders if he’s stopped breathing.
“Oi,” he says, digging a sharp elbow into Kiryu’s good side. “Snap outta it.”
“You said,” Kiryu forces out through grit teeth, his words and breathing ragged, snarling. “You said it was the same old song and dance for the past couple decades.”
Majima flicks his cigarette away and stands. “I ain’t talkin’ about this shit.”
“Majima,” Kiryu says, but Majima’s already shoved away from him, and by the time the cloud of rage and fury and awful protectiveness clears from Kiryu’s mind, Majima is long gone.
Majima’s tossed in jail again.
He watches the tendons ripple beneath the fragile skin of his fingers, his knuckles raw and bloody, and stares blankly out the window.
His hands shake.
He hears rumors from inside the walls of his cell.
Some punk-ass comes at him from his left side once.
Once.
“I’m going home, Majima,” Kiryu tells him, voice soft.
“Yeah,” he says.
Kiryu hesitates. “You know, there are spare rooms at Morning Glory.”
Majima glances at him. “Yeah?’
Kiryu chances him with a slight, rare smile. “Yeah.”
Majima sits, sprawled out, his toes sunk into the sand.
The ocean murmurs kind things where the waves break against his feet, and the dying sunset scatters across its vast expanse.
“For someone who’s doesn’t think often, you have the most stoic thinking face.”
He grunts, but makes no attempt to move.
Kiryu lets out his breath in a gust, and settles down besides him.
“Doesn’t seem right,” Majima says eventually.
“Hm?”
“Doesn’t seem right that I get t’just. Leave. Violence is who I am, Kiryu. ‘S all there is to that.”
Kiryu is quiet for a long while.
Instead of saying anything, Kiryu reaches in to his shirt pocket and pulls out a pack of smokes, wordlessly handing over a cigarette and the lighter to Majima.
Majima snags the cigarette with his teeth, his lips brushing against Kiryu’s fingers, pulling back with an amused quirk to his brow as Kiryu flushes beneath his collar.
“Ah, Kiryu. Y'so easy to tease,” he says, grinning cheekily, sloppily. Tilt the head just so, bat the eyelashes, play coy enough, and…
The better you are, the quicker it’s-
Kiryu scowls, breaking Majima from his thoughts, and says nothing, looking back out over the water.
They smoke in silence, watching the honey-slip of the sun sinking below the ocean edge.
“Violence isn’t who you are, Majima,” Kiryu says at last. “It’s what they tried to force you to be. You put on a good act about it. But I know you. I’ve seen the way you treat people when you think no one’s looking. I know you nearly killed yourself to protect Haruka. You’re a very good actor. But violence isn’t who you are.”
His fingers curl in the sand, useless fists of helplessness and anger and fear, grains of sand slipping through his clenched fingers like the steady drain of irrationality.
“Shut your hole, Kiryu,” he manages at last. “Y’don’t know shit.”
Kiryu is quiet for a long time, stubbing out his cigarette in the sand, before glancing over to look Majima in the eye.
“I may not know much,” Kiryu says carefully, his voice the steady promise of thunder in the distance, the warm rumble of a hearth. “But I do know you. The heart of you. And you are not what they made you.”
In the distance, Majima can hear the kids at Morning Glory laughing; free, joyous, and wild. The sea-salt air is warm, sweet against his skin, and the hush of the ocean sings a haunting, beautiful melody.
Majima stubs out his cigarette in the sand, and reaches over, twining the fingers of his bare hand through Kiryu’s.
“Y’think so?” he asks through the choking disbelief in his throat, after the stars have risen in the sky and the kids have fallen asleep.
Kiryu squeezes his hand once. “I know so.”
Majima scoots the smallest bit closer to Kiryu, just enough so their shoulders can press together, a solid line of warmth in the chill of the night.
“Okay,” Majima says, breathing in the salt from the sea. “Yeah, okay.”