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Under normal circumstances, Ichiro wouldn’t have left the television on. It isn’t as if he’s really watching it, anyway. But a bit of free time after a cancelled job had left him with the opportunity for an impromptu spring cleaning, and a bit of background noise is good enough to break up the monotony of dusting the living room. Especially, Ichiro thinks, when the voice coming from it is one he knows.
“Sasara-san?”
And sure enough--when he turns to face the tv, a familiar face smiles back, stage-perfect and bright. Sasara chatters on animatedly about something or other, in his element as the studio audience laughs. High and delicate. This is one of Chuuou’s variety shows, for women, by women. So for their guest to be Nurude Sasara, of all people--
“That’s Osaka Division, yeah?” Jiro balances a laundry basket precarious on the arm of the couch, then plops down beside it to watch. “Or one of ‘em, anyway.”
Ichiro makes a vague noise of affirmation, still more engrossed in sweeping the floor than the old memories that voice stirs up. But Jiro, it seems, isn’t content to let things lie.
“You were in a team with him once, right? How strong is he?”
Ichiro frowns. Two years ago, he would’ve had an easier answer. But when Sasara had gone, he’d left everything behind--his team, his mic, his place in Tokyo. Made as clean a break as he could, when Samatoki’s anger had been determined to follow him back to Osaka.
Ichiro glances back up at the tv. It seems Sasara’s bit is ending; he stands and waves to the crowd to nothing less than raucous applause. If anything, he looks younger than he did two years ago. But it could just be his imagination. After all. He’d always been Samatoki’s friend more so than Ichiro’s. At the time, it had seemed wise not to get between them when they were squabbling. Or playing around. Ichiro had often found it hard to tell which. With those two, he doubted there was a difference.
“Strong enough to stand up to Samatoki one-on-one. He acts like...well, you’ll see. But he’s a serious threat. Don’t take him lightly as he’ll want you to.”
Jiro nods, solemn as he’s ever been. This time, Ichiro’s warnings have weight. He knows to take it seriously. Though it’s not a second later before he brightens up again, chirping at him confident--“But we can take the other two no problem!”
Jiro pulls his phone from his pocket and starts fiddling around. It’s not a moment later before he’s got up a recording of some old Osaka local station, a quick little radio bit dated a few weeks back. When he taps play, it begins halfway though. He’s clearly listened to it before.
Ichiro leans over the back of the sofa to grab the remote; mutes the television so as not to miss anything important. Tsutsujimori stutters his way though his answers; Ichiro can’t help but feel the tiniest scrap of pity. Chuuou’s stage is a trial by fire. While it would certainly be easier for them if he never found his footing, Ichiro can’t wish for that. He’s never been fond of watching others crumble.
It’s not long before the interview switches directions, jumping down the line from two to three. Ichiro doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until he has to exhale, everything in his chest tight with anticipation.
You’re not from Osaka, are you? asks the interviewer, all easy charm and deft experience.
Me? he replies, returning her grace so easily, nah. Tokyo's my home sweet home--
“And this guy,” Jiro says, interrupting the small talk as if it’s nothing--as if Ichiro isn’t hanging on every word, and hating himself for it all the while--“This, uh, Ten… Ten..?”
“Amayado… Rei.”
The name falls with hesitation in a voice that isn’t his. Ichiro and Jiro crane their heads back--towards Saburo, who’d appeared sudden in the doorway. He’s clutching a stack of towels with a strength that’s betrayed only by the tenseness sharp in his shoulders.
“You know him!?” Ichiro can’t keep the surprise from his tone. He curses himself for it--of course Saburo would have researched anything and everything regarding the new divisions. Especially when it was obvious that Chuuou and its schemers had commissioned them. He’s jumping the gun. Getting ahead of himself does no good. He should know this by now.
But.
Saburo blinks, gaze darting away at the last moment. It’s as good as confession to the crime. At the very least, a plea of guilt. “Ah, no, I… Ichi-nii, I…”
And something wells in Ichiro, painfully like dread. Saburo shouldn’t know. He was only just a baby when Rei left their house for the final time. Even if he’s got the best memory out of all of them, it’s not possible. It isn’t.
“C’mon, don’t make excuses,” Jiro chides, but Saburo just shoots him a glare and proceeds to ignore him, which is only a half-step up from escalating things into a fight and losing the point of the conversation entirely. It does make Saburo gather up his words, though they’re nothing close to the ones Ichiro wants to hear.
“Ichi-nii. You know him?”
“Just… in passing,” says Ichiro, because it is the thing that feels least like a lie, “a long time ago.”
Saburo goes quiet. Ichiro can see the cogwheels spinning in his head, jumping to a conclusion that’s the smart one, but not quite correct. There’s a list of things they’ve talked through and don’t usually ask more questions on after the fact. Early childhood isn’t usually included. Delinquency and bad blood and kidnapping usually is.
Ichiro doesn’t let them dwell. “Really, Saburo. This is important. Where’d you meet him?”
Saburo shuffles around for a while, pretending to be engrossed in a dent on the floor that had been there since the day they’d moved in. Jiro looks as if he’s about to rise to his feet and shake the answer out of him with his own two hands. But just as Ichiro lifts a hand to stop him--
“Yumeno Gentaro,” says Saburo, softly. “When I was researching him for you. I found information on his editor. And I thought, if I could meet with him, then..”
Frustration rolls of Saburo in waves. He shuffles uselessly in his slippers, as if trying to scuff out the dent with sheer force of will. Ichiro lets out a tiny breath--so he’d been conned. But Ramuda had been happy enough with the intel, so Ichiro supposed there had to be at least a kernel of truth at the heart of it all. Even if he had gotten caught up as a piece in a much larger game, nothing could change the fact he’d done a good job.
Ichiro beckons him forwards, reaches down to ruffle though Saburo’s hair. It does nothing to ease his frown, but his grip on the towels finally loosens. Pitiful as it might be, it’s the only reassurance Ichiro knows how to give.
Saburo mutters under his breath, certainly having long since found his answer, “...He… wasn’t an editor, was he.”
“No,” says Ichiro, knowing not what Rei had made of himself, but willing to bet on his gut, “He wasn’t.”
Ichiro’s memories of those days are admittedly faint. Everything had burned--and what hadn’t, he’d been too young to understand he should have kept. The photo albums, the fine china, the memory of mother’s voice when she’d said, running fingers though his hair-- ”He’ll come back to us. Don’t you worry.”
He didn’t think she’d ever meant like this.
The eve of the territory battles arrives as it always does--with anticipation so thick it chokes up their lungs and sets fire to their veins, a restlessness that can’t be parched. It overflows into the air, makes a beat of their stuttering heartbeats and dares them on. This time, they are prepared. This time, Ichiro isn’t just ready to defend. He’s ready to lead.
With his brothers at his side, Ichiro marches towards the walls once more.
Squabbling is inevitable; they are not so fortunate as to have solved their problems yet. No matter how Ichiro wishes otherwise. Alone, they are nothing. But Ichiro has head it with his own ears, confirmed it with his own two eyes. Together, they are a force. A wave that could be revolutionary, if the dreamers may dream. And it isn’t as if they can’t put aside their differences, despite it all.
Samatoki and Jakurai stand across the lobby, having sent their teams up on ahead with keys in hand. Their conversation is quiet; nothing that Ichiro could hope to glean from their troubled profiles. But he can guess. He’s followed the trail this far. He knows where it leads.
I want to help you find her, he wants to say, I want to make things right. Even if it’s not enough. Even if you’ll still hate me when we do.
“Ichi-nii,” says Saburo, dragging his attention away gently, “let’s find our rooms.”
“Huh?” It snaps him back to reality. “Oh. Yeah.”
Ichiro hoists his overnight bag up on his shoulder and scans the room for Jiro, if only just to escape the scrutiny in Saburo’s gaze. As always, he’s putting together the pieces. He’s just not sure if he’s ready to face up to the implications of that yet.
It only takes a second to spot Jiro--off a little ways, attention focused on a different corner of the room entirely. He doesn’t notice as Ichiro tries to wave him over, nor as the two of them approach from the side.
“Why’re you picking a fight with us..?” Jiro mutters, a bit of idle speculation meant to be heard by no one save ghosts of days past. He squints over at Osaka Divison, watching Sasara and Rosho bicker incoherently, and with much more physical slapstick than probably necessary. It’s oddly familiar. If tensions were running any less high, then he might have thought himself flung straight back into the past.
But it’s not them that Jiro is watching. His gaze is set firmly on Rei, observing from the sidelines with arms crossed and a half-smile on his lips. An expression almost peaceful in this hall full of broken glass and echoes of gunfire. A square peg in a round hole--and nothing, nothing, but trouble.
Do you remember?
Ichiro doesn’t dare ask the question. Not when he doesn’t know which answer he’s hoping for himself. “C’mon,” he says instead, and leads Jiro away by the shoulder. “Let’s head up, yeah?”
Jiro starts back to reality, flashing him a grin that does nothing to dilute the thoughtfulness in his eyes. Like he’s present with them now, but still mulling mostly over a problem whose answer eludes him. He’s seen it more and more, as of late. He can only wonder what it will become, once he’s found his answer.
They’re growing up, thinks Ichiro, distant as the sky above the clouds. No matter how much they try to live in the moment, that truth remains. There is no such thing as an eternity in the present. Not when the future bears down like a gale, bringing a tidal wave in its wake to swallow the faint of heart.
He pretends not to see the grin Rei shoots them across the lobby as they turn away. But as he herds Jiro and Saburo into the elevator, trying to ease some of the tension in their shoulders with a hand on each before the petty squabbling resumes, he feels that gaze bore into his back. It stays with him, long after the doors shut.
(He can’t remember which one of Rei’s eyes is supposed to be green.)
His room is downright stifling. Ichiro throws open the curtains and paces circles around it, reflecting on their battle plans. Brute force and boundless ambition aren’t enough to get them through this. Experience has taught them that. This time, they’d done their research, come up with plans of attack. There are wild cards, but it wouldn’t be a battle without them. AS long as they keep their heads clear, then they’ll overcome.
Heads clear, Ichiro reminds himself, heads clear.
The fact they’re not immediately facing down Samatoki will help with that. The fact they might end up against Rei absolutely won’t. Because Ichiro won’t be the one taking him on. He’ll have his hands full dealing with Sasara, who’d only grown more clever with his words since the days they’d fought side by side--and more tight-lipped with his secrets. He’ll be leaving Rei to Jiro or Saburo, who’ve had limited to no contact at all.
...It sits badly with him.
...
He goes for a walk.
Chuuou has never sat right with him--not these towering walls, or the streets that always feel too empty no matter the hour. But he doesn’t intend to go far, so he won’t let it get to him. There’s a park in back of the hotel, just a few benches and vending machines beneath the streetlights and some impeccably sheared hedges. A fountain marks the centerpoint of converging brick paths, lit up gently in white and blue like an antithesis to everything about to come. But the distant city noise feels better than the silence, and so Ichiro carries on.
He swerves towards the vending machines, fishing out his wallet as he goes and plucking out a few coins on instinct. Cola doesn’t make everything better, but it does calm the uncharacteristic nerves fluttering through his gut. On the tail end of a sip, he leans back against the vending machine and stares up at the sky. Cloudy as an omen of misfortune. Though then again, thinks Ichiro, last time, it had been clear.
“Well look what the cat dragged in.”
Ichiro snaps back to attention, getting himself out of the corner and eyeing his path of escape. Not that he intends to use it--but old habits die hard, and he’s never been one not to use what he’s got.
“What do you want.” he asks, so flat it might as well be a statement. The answer is obviously something. He wouldn’t have spent over a decade running from them if it wasn’t.
“I have to want something?” asks Rei, smile wolfish and charming. He thinks he’s got the rabbit cornered. Ichiro holds steady, and prepares to show him that he’s always been a bird of prey.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not giving you anything.”
“No sympathy for a stranger, eh?” Rei’s grin is infuriating, all knowing and poised with fake innocence. Ichiro’s hands curl into instinctive fists at his side, catching the bottle in a deathgrip. He forces himself to relax with a thin breath. Not the time or place, he reminds himself. Save it for tomorrow. Tomorrow.
“You’re not a stranger,” he spits instead, though it’s only half-true. The person he remembers—the one who held his hand on the way to kindergarten, who read stories about heroes, who sung him softly to sleep—isn’t the one before him. Not anymore. Clinging to his memories more like dreams, Ichiro can’t help but wonder if he ever was.
“Then you can start this off on a friendlier foot, right? I’m sure someone taught you manners.”
Ichiro glares. He has more than enough reason to be curt, the least of which is the battles tomorrow. “Everything I needed to learn, I learned myself.”
“Slow to trust, hmm?” drawls Rei, with what Ichiro swears is a hint of satisfaction. “Like father, like son...or so the saying goes.”
Ichiro knows this game. Rei is going to drag him around with promises of answers never to commit, dangling out promises of maybe and if. It’s plausible deniability. An evasion of responsibility. It’s the same as every other broken adult that only has eyes for their own gain. Ichiro won’t play. He cuts straight to the heart.
“I’m nothing like you,” Ichiro snarls, a threat and a promise all in one.
Rei only chuckles, dropping a hundred yen into the vending machine with a subtle shake of his head. “Oh? You’re gonna have to be a little more specific than that. Old men like me don’t keep up so well with you kids, these days.”
If Rei expects to come into this with the upper hand, then he’s sorely mistaken. There are more routes in this world than just the ones Rei has his hands in. Jiro knows one. Saburo another. They have more than enough evidence of Rei’s crimes.
“Falsifying your identity. Pyramid schemes that cross the country. Every kind of fraud you could imagine. Holes in the records that no normal man could make disappear. You’re not a good person.”
Rei lifts his eyebrow. Ichiro can’t tell if he’s impressed, or if that simply didn’t go the direction he was expecting. He asks, with what Ichiro thinks might just be genuine curiosity, “You ever really find one?”
The names rush to mind. Jakurai. Ramuda. Even Samatoki, if he’ll only listen to what Ichiro is saying and change course. But the realization hits, and he bites them all down. Samatoki won’t turn back. Ramuda won’t take his hands out of trouble. Even Jakurai must be hiding a past heavier than words can endure. He’s sensed it. And every time, he’s wondered if he wouldn’t relate a little too well if he found out. But they’re still good people. They’re still...
Rei laughs at his hesitation. When he speaks, it is with the edge of victory. “Yeah, thought so.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m like you.”
Ichiro has spent his whole life chasing after good people. When they were nowhere to be found, Ichiro decided to become on himself. Someone that others can take pride in standing with. Who always does their best to make the right choice. Who can not only push on and watch his partner’s backs, but who can lead without shame. Something that the man before him could never dream of. Not anymore.
“Even though we’ve done the same things? My crimes and yours aren’t so different, boy.” Rei drawls out his words, lingering on the last--as if Ichiro hadn’t grown up years before the rest.
Don’t look down on me. Ichiro glares up at him, wielding experience as his weapon. He knows how to pick out the worst of the worst. It’s carved into him like a chisel to stone--because once upon a time, he’d been on the edge of falling. “They’re not even close.”
Rei’s laugh is bitterly amused. “Well. Guess a pawn can’t dream of being as important as a king.”
“There’s nothing important about what you do.”
“Oh? And what exactly is it you think I do?”
It’s a leading question if Ichiro’s ever heard one. But there is no road but forward, and so Ichiro forges on. “Take advantage of the weak. Bend the down-on-their-luck to your schemes. Ruin people’s lives, mostly.”
A moment of silence. The running water from the fountain, the hum of the vending machines, the crackle of the streetlights--it’s all suddenly too loud, unfitting of the standoff they surround. And then Rei laughs. Ugly and true, loud as his ego and just as warped as his intentions. It makes Ichiro’s skin crawl. “And you have the damn gall to call us different.”
“I-”
“Do you have any idea,” Rei interrupts, any semblance of warmth lost, “How many families you destroyed? How many kids went to sleep hungry? Ended up on the streets, worse off than you? Went running to people who needed worse than a guard dog to take out the trash?”
“I did what I could,” Ichiro says, though the words feel hollow on his lips. “To make things right.”
“What,” Rei drawls, a wicked grin across his lips, “You really thought that they all got their happy endings? You know better than that. Every time you robbed one of those suckers penniless, you threw another family into turmoil. Then picked up your cash, turned over a pittance, and went home to sleep, just a little bit happier for having done it… Am I wrong?”
It was never a damn home, Ichiro starts, then chokes the words back down. That isn’t what he wants to say. Not the opening he wants to give. Calm down. Calm down.
“It all ended when we took down Mozuku. His fortune was dismantled. The debts were forgiven.” Ichiro had made sure of that. What influence he had lacked in that sphere, Samatoki had held. They’d seen that things went right. That, if even only in a tiny corner of the world, there was justice.
Rei only smirks, looking down at him with all the concern of a child cutting up worms to see if both ends would still writhe. “Three years is a long time, kid. You don’t really think they all made it that long, do you? That Mom and Dad could keep putting food on the table after you came and took the last of what they had? That those broken homes could keep paying for grandma’s hospital bills? Maybe momma up in Sapporo’s gotta pay for a funeral after getting a call that they found her son hanging by the--”
“Shut up!!”
Ichiro’s shout rends though the softness of Chuuou’s night, filled with an old viciousness—an anger in his blood he’s momentarily forgotten how to control. He knows. He fucking knows. There are people out there who will never believe he’s changed. That look upon him with nothing but resentment for the harm he’d caused. That were nothing but glad when he fell up on that stage, like he’d finally gotten what he deserved for daring to stand as representative of a city he’d once burned. He says, quieter, but with no less strength--
“I got out.”
“And now you’re going to act all high and mighty over all of us who didn’t,” says Rei, drawing out each word like a punchline. A knife between his ribs. Filled with enough intent that for a second, Ichiro is sure they were meant to be spat out atop a beat. He might just be dealing with Rei tomorrow after all.
“I’m not--”
“Don’t lie to my face,” Rei snaps. Ichiro draws back a step and hates himself for it all the while. He’s not running away. He isn’t. But it’s suddenly so hard not to feel like a child again, five years old and behind scolded for drawing over the backs of Rei’s papers with crayon because that’s a li-a-bi-li-ty, Ichiro--
Whatever flashes across his eyes, then, Rei likes. It was probably weakness. Ichiro just hopes to any gods listening that it wasn’t a misplaced fragment of old affection now thirteen years broken. Rei’s wolfish grin returns. Though their height difference isn’t much, it suddenly feels as if Rei towers over him, the phantom of years long gone.
“So that’s why they call you a hypocrite, hmm? Or, I guess it’s only one of them that does. But the others think it. Can’t keep his word, can’t keep his loyalties straight...Can’t keep his crews together.”
“That’s not it,” Ichiro insists, this time certain that Rei is only trying to rile him up. Jakurai has always respected him. Ramuda has always been pushing him on. Kuko has always been his most trusted friend. None of those things are broken. Not so much that they can’t be repaired.
Rei laughs the sort of laugh of a man that knows things--too sharp, and with the certainty that he’s right. “That’s not it? Then what, was it all just a big lover’s quarrel? Because I know all about tho--”
“You don’t know anything!”
There’s not a single person in the world who knows what Ichiro feels. Felt. And strangely, the thought is reassuring. That no matter how much Rei might have looked into everything he’d missed since Ichiro was six, he doesn’t know him. And maybe he never will. (Something in him aches at the thought. He’s not sure if it’s in victory, or in defeat.)
“You weren’t there.”
Ichiro was, and even he hardly understands why. He’d never done anything to Nemu. He hadn’t turned his back on Samatoki. Not until he’d been used up and thrown away, same as every other rotten adult playing war games with lives they didn’t care for.
He still doesn’t understand what made that strange friendship between Ramuda and Jakurai crumble down into resentment. Why he’d let himself fall prey to Mozuku and his schemes when the long road had been right there before him. Just where he’d gone wrong, when all he’d wanted to do was keep the bonds between them all strong as the ones he’d been rebuilding with Jiro and Saburo. The ones he never should have lost. The one he hadn’t understood Samatoki had until it was far, far too late.
Ichiro stares down Rei with all his burdens bared, an accusation that’s defined their lives. “You weren’t there.”
Rei accepts this with a strange sort of silence. Ichiro can’t read its intent. But instead of firing off excuses, Rei turns to the vending machine and finally, finally, picks up his drink. Canned coffee. Black. He doesn’t open it. Instead he reaches into his pocket, strikes a cigarette to light. The hotel grounds are non-smoking, but Ichiro doesn’t bother to tell him that. Nothing will come of it, even if he does.
“Well. No one wants to say they were raised by a swindler, eh?” Rei says, not-quite jokingly. He takes a moment to look Ichiro over, then adds, “Or in your case… Raised by a terrorist’s lapdog.”
Ichiro bristles. He’d never been doing it out of loyalty. He’d never wanted Jiro and Saburo to see that side of him. And when they had--when they’d misunderstood, when Ichiro had lacked the words to defend himself--he hadn’t yet known how to explain why he’d broken their trust. And by the time he had, he’d found it far too late.
(Until he’d been shown otherwise. Until he’d been told, in no uncertain terms--you are worth more--)
Portals don’t open to the past. He’ll never close his eyes at night only to wake up fourteen again, knowing everything of the future to come. What has come to pass can never be undone. All he can do is carry that weight, and keep moving on.
“I’ll make them proud,” he says, “I’m taking them to the top. And nothing is gonna stop us.”
“...I know you will,” says Rei as he steps away, disguising a grin laced faintly with pride. Though it may just be his imagination--it’s hard to tell, when Rei’s eyes are still hidden behind sunglasses in the dead of cloudy night. “Take good care of those brothers of yours, stranger.”
And Rei fades into the distance, taking that heavy gaze with him in a puff of smoke and a lackadaisical wave. He doesn’t know where Rei is going, marching off into the city at this hour. He’s not sure he has it in him to care. But Ichiro stares after him nonetheless, unsure what he’s been left with but an ache too hollow to call anger.
It’s far too late to come and take responsibility off his shoulders. Not when he’s given up everything a dozen times over, sacrificed everything but his soul. He doesn’t care for them more than Ichiro does. He can’t.
And besides. With or without Rei--with or without Ichiro-- they’ll grow up just fine. They’re finding their dreams. Eking out their place in them, bit by bit, word by word. And one day, they’ll stand on their own, stronger than Ichiro could ever be.
Ichiro turns his gaze back to the sky, only to find the clouds have parted. He squints up for stars, but it’s only a vast expanse of black that greets him. A new moon, Chuuou’s lights drowning out all the stars. Ichiro shakes his head, and finally finishes off his cola in a grand swig.
Stories will end. Teams will dissolve. People will leave, no matter how he longs to keep them at his side. Despite the fact he loves them. Father. Mother. Jiro and Saburo. Kuko. Samatoki, and the rest of TDD with him.
This time, it will last. This time, he’ll protect them. Honestly and openly. With everything he couldn’t before. One day baring every truth he was too afraid to speak. And then, perhaps, he’ll finally have his answer.
Because he wonders, sometimes. When the days are cloudy just like this, threatening rain before the sun can shine again... Maybe he’s not a good person, deep at heart. If he’d ever been willing to dirty his hands, been able to justify it with empty promises and useless platitudes about making up for it later, then maybe that’s the true him. Because he can’t help but think. If Rei had showed up, five--even just two--years earlier… Ichiro chucks the empty bottle in the recycling bin and drives the thoughts away. It’s no use speculating on what he would have become if the person who’d offered him their hand had been different.
His past has shown him--the dark might be boundless, but there is no place the light can’t touch. There is so much longer a fall than his before it’s extinguished completely. So long as he chases those sparks, then one day, he’ll find the sun that’s left them behind.
He believes.
Ichiro walks back to the hotel with head held high, sights far beyond whatever awaits them on tomorrow’s stage. He has a future. Beyond this story--of the wall, of the loneliness that ensues--there’s a future left for him, too.
He believes. For tonight, that is enough.