Chapter Text
The first thing he feels is the familiar tug of being cut open. The tell-tale head-swim of anaesthetic blocks the pain, but he remembers the sensation vividly; he’s experienced it enough times over a lifetime of hospital visits and surgeries. Arakawa Masato opens his eyes to blinding light and the shape of a man leaning over him.
“You go on back to sleep, Mr Governor,” the man-shape tells him. “Let it carry you off. There you go, attaboy…”
Fuck you, he wants to say, but he’s already obeying; his tired body has made the choice for him.
It’s not fair. He’d already decided to go ahead and die the moment he saw his own blood on Kume’s knife. It’s ironic; he’d chosen to live only moments before, because Ichi had begged him, because Ichi had wept for him, because Ichi had called him kyodai. That had been enough to keep him alive for just a little bit longer, just long enough to put the gun away and agree to a social and political execution instead. Prison would’ve been a form of death, too, after all, but it was one with further possibilities beyond it, and for a few precious seconds he had believed in those possibilities because he’d seen how deeply Ichi believed in them, too.
And then the knife had gone in and out of him and he’d known hope was a mistake, at least for him, at least for this lifetime. He could always come back, reincarnated into new flesh—start from rock bottom, as he’d told Ichi—but this specific lifetime had been a lost cause for a long time now. God, fate, the universe (whatever you want to call it) has made it abundantly clear that he’s overstayed his welcome. His death was supposed to happen on a New Year’s Eve forty-two years ago, and all he’s been doing his whole life is running from the inevitable. The knife to his gut was just destiny catching up with him.
But now here he is, on the cold flat surface of a surgical table, and he can hear the distant shouting of a familiar voice as the unfamiliar doctor keeps pulling him open. Then he’s falling out of himself, through the floor, into blackness, leaving the light and noise behind.
It’s not fair.
Just let me fucking go.
--
Masato opens his eyes. There’s a ceiling with chips and cracks in the paint above him, and the wallpaper is peeling. The air is heavy with the smell of grease and cooked meat. His skin is warm; feeble winter sunlight is bathing him through a scratched, dirty window.
“Masato.”
His head is a ten-ton weight, but he manages to turn it towards the voice. A silhouette against the sun; a familiar fedora and coat.
“Dad,” he tries to say, but all that comes out is a soft hiss of air between his dry lips.
“The curtains are about to come up,” says his father. “Better get ready. Full house tonight.”
The hell are you talking about, old man? Masato wonders, but he’s too tired to do much of anything but let his eyes slide closed again.
--
The next time Masato comes around, it’s to his whole body being shaken. Well, jostled is probably the better word. He is being jostled, and not gently, either. Then there’s a sharp yank that makes pain shriek through his belly, and his mouth pops open to let out a yelp before he’s even fully conscious.
“Good,” says a rough voice. “You’re finally awake. Took you long enough.”
Masato opens his eyes, closes them against the harsh morning light, then cracks them open again. His mouth is full of cotton balls.
“Water,” he manages to mumble. A plastic cup is shoved into his hand, and he lifts it only to splash half its lukewarm contents over his face. As he splutters and coughs, rough hands close over his and guide the cup to his lips.
“Drink,” says the unsparing voice, and Masato manages to choke most of the rest down, clearing away most of the cottony sensation. When he finally lets his head fall back onto the wet pillow with a gasp, the cup is yanked away again.
“Where am I?” he croaks. His throat hurts.
“Isezaki Ijincho. I’m not telling you more than that. You don’t need to know.”
Yokohama? “How…?”
“Unfortunately, we homeless made a promise a while back to save any poor fucker who makes it to our camp alive, so that’s exactly what we did. Pulled a few strings with some allies for a clean room, and since I’m the only bum in town who happens to also be a nurse, I have the displeasure of looking after your sorry ass.”
Clean is certainly an exaggeration, judging by the stains on the wallpaper and ceiling, but the tone in the stranger’s voice gives Masato the distinct impression that he should be grateful he’s got a roof over his head at all.
After he’s finished drinking, the nurse returns to the activity that had woken Masato in the first place: changing his bandages. Now that his vision is slowly adjusting, Masato can see that his entire stomach is wrapped up. He averts his gaze, not wanting to see what’s beneath them. “What happened?”
“What happened is you got incredibly lucky, and you owe Kasuga Ichiban more than you’ll ever know.”
Ichiban. Of course. He’s never known when to give up, when to just let someone go. Masato lets out a soft, scoffing laugh that swiftly morphs into another yelp of pain when the nurse jabs one thick finger into his tender belly. He’s fairly certain it was on purpose.
“My stomach,” he mumbles.
“Emergency laparotomy and anastomosis. Ichiban got you to an old yakuza-owned clinic in Kamurocho in time to avoid peritonitis, then brought you back to Yokohama with him. Crazy bastard.” The nurse finishes up his work and then leans in close to Masato’s face. Masato has to suppress a gag; his breath reeks. “I’m not normally one to threaten people, Aoki Ryo, but you wouldn’t be here if Ichiban didn’t have friends who love him enough to help a sad, pathetic, cruel scumbag like yourself. Don’t make us regret it.”
Now that he’s close enough, Masato recognizes the nurse as one of the group that had accompanied Ichi in all his recent trouble-making endeavours, though he’d never gotten most of their names (or, in truth, cared to learn). The man’s wide, soft face speaks of a person who might normally exude an earthy, no-bullshit sort of kindness, but none of that reaches his dark eyes now. All Masato sees in the nurse’s gaze is hate. No, not hate. Disdain. This stinking, dirty leech on society disdains him.
It's been a long time since anyone looked at him with that kind of contempt, much less a homeless man. Masato turns his face away, not wanting to remember, not wanting to imagine that he is going to return to his former life of people looking at him with scorn—or worse yet, pity.
If they even look at him at all.
“Where’s Ichiban?” he asks as the nurse finishes up his work.
“At home resting. He was up for three days straight waiting for you to come around. I’ll give him a call tonight. God knows he needs a break.”
Masato stares at the peeling wallpaper as the door opens and then shuts, leaving him alone with the silence and sunshine.
--
He’s thankfully still too exhausted and dazed from his painkillers to feel bored as he lies around waiting for the day to end. He slips in and out of dreamless dozes, waking now and then when the nurse returns to check his vitals, change his IV, and give him medicine and water. Noises rise and fade outside: loud, raucous laughter; distant sirens; a conversation in rapid-fire Mandarin; the clang of metal; someone’s phone blaring tinny music. He can’t see much out of the filthy window in his little room; only the slow crawl of light across a blue sky lets him know time is passing, marred only by the occasional contrail of a distant airplane.
Dusk falls, then night, and the buildings around him come alive with music, voices, the smell of frying meat. Nausea twists his stomach and cramps at his bowels. He would’ve thought he’d be hungry after three days (if not more), but he has no appetite at all, not even when the nurse returns and offers him a child’s sippy cup full of warm broth. There are faded pictures of Doraemon on it.
“You’re healed enough now that you can start with clear liquids. Solid food will have to wait another week or so, though.”
“I’m not hungry,” Masato mumbles. The thought of sucking down fluid from an old cup once used by who-knows-how-many snot-nosed brats makes him want to puke.
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry.”
Masato turns his face away, eliciting a beleaguered sigh from the nurse, who begins muttering to himself about not signing up to take care of an overgrown child. He’s just about to tell the bum to fuck off and go back to whatever tent city he came from and just leave him alone already when the door slams open and Kasuga Ichiban bursts inside in a flurry of wiry brown hair and maroon cloth.
“Waka!” he cries, and as always, his voice is a decibel louder than necessary. It makes Masato wince. “You’re awake!”
“And refusing to have his dinner,” the nurse adds.
Ichi’s eyes land on the cup where it sits on the bedside table and he scoops it up in one big hand, immediately putting it to Masato’s lips without bothering to wait for an invitation. “You need to drink up, Waka,” he half-admonishes, half-cajoles. “Can’t heal without some good, old-fashioned broth, right? God, I’m so glad you’re up!” He’s beaming and close to tears all at once. “I’ve been so worried.”
Masato is so startled that he swallows several gulps before he remembers that he’s supposed to be sulking, and at last he manages to push the cup away. A few drops spill out of his mouth and down his chin, and the indignity of it rankles him. Ichi pulls an old napkin from his pocket to wipe him clean, but Masato feebly shoves that away, too. “I’m not a child, Ichiban!”
Ichi’s expression turns sheepish. “Right. You’re right. Sorry, I got excited.” He hands the napkin over, and as Masato struggles to clean himself off, he turns to the nurse. “Thanks so much for this, Nanba. I really owe you one.”
For once, Nanba’s face fills with the gentleness and concern one might normally expect from a nurse. “Are you sure this is a good idea, Ichi? You’re going to get stuck watching this asshole for the rest of your life.”
“I can hear you, you know,” Masato mutters, but Nanba ignores him and continues.
“I’m not sure how long he’ll be welcome here, either. The place is overcrowded as it is, and Zhao’s losing patience.”
“It’s okay,” Ichi assures them both. “That’s actually what I’ve been working on today. He can go without his IV bags and everything now, right?”
Nanba shrugs. “Yeah, now that he’s awake. He’ll need his medicine and someone to help him change his bandages, though.”
“Well, in that case, I have good news!” Ichiban looks over at Masato with a massive grin. “I got the two of us an apartment of our own!”
Silence. Both Masato and Nanba stare at him.
“A what?” Masato splutters.
“You mean you’re not going to stay at Survive with us anymore?” asks Nanba.
Ichiban looks nearly ready to crow with pride. “Well, thanks to Ichiban Holdings, I’ve got enough money to rent a place of my own now, and Waka can’t exactly go back to Tokyo, can he? So I came up with the perfect solution!”
So that’s it? Masato wonders as he sinks back onto his pillow. Not only is dying off the table, but so is turning myself in? Kasuga Ichiban is making all of my decisions for me from now on?
“Ichi,” Nanba says, “you can’t take on this burden alone. Just the two of you alone in an apartment together? That’s…”
“Waka isn’t a burden.” Ichiban’s voice is firm. “He’s my oldest friend, Nanba. And I promised to stay by his side, so that’s what I’m doing. I’ll still be around! You guys aren’t losing me or anything!”
“That’s not the point,” the nurse tells him, but it’s clear that Ichiban’s mind is made up; he isn’t listening.
Instead, he turns back to Masato, his eyes full of warmth—and, more than that, hope. “I’m helping you start over, Waka, just like I promised. Right?”
Masato has no idea how to reply to that; his mind and body are exhausted enough already. Instead, he just stares up at Ichiban, speechless. How is he supposed to start over when he’s clearly become an unintentional fugitive? Isn’t the entire world still hunting for Aoki Ryo?
Nanba lets out another exhausted sigh. “You know what, I think the two of you have some talking to do. Excuse me, I need about fifty beers.”
Once the door shuts behind him, Ichiban sinks down on a chair next to the bed. The sheen is back in his eyes, and his smile is shaky. “You really scared me, Waka. I thought I was gonna lose you.”
“Yeah, about that.” Masato tries to sit up a bit, but winces as pain contracts across his belly again. “Ichi, why did you save me?”
The question seems to stun the other man. “Why?” He lets out a disbelieving laugh. “What do you mean, why? I’m staying by your side. Helping you start over.”
Masato scoffs and gestures weakly at the room around them. “This isn’t exactly prison though, is it? What happened to coming clean, handing myself over to the police?”
A spasm of guilt passes across Ichi’s honest face. “Well, that’s the thing. The world thinks you’re dead now, Waka. Or that Aoki Ryo is, anyway.”
How many fake deaths am I going to experience before the real one? Masato wonders. “They do?”
Ichiban clears his throat and scratches the back of his head. “Well, after you got stabbed, I just…I freaked out a little bit, I guess. After I got you to an old underground clinic I knew about, it was touch and go for a while. The Doc didn’t know if you’d pull through or not, so I just kept thinking about what would happen if you lived and then went to prison anyway. You’ve made so many enemies and someone could just as easily get rid of you in there, you know? And I wouldn’t be there to protect you. So I talked to my friends here in Yokohama and they…well, they took care of it.”
“Took care of it,” Masato repeats in a dry voice. Meaning that a body was produced that could be passed off as his. Meaning that somewhere, some poor sod had to die in his stead.
More blood on his hands, and this time he isn’t even the one who spilled it.
“There were three conditions,” Ichiban continues, looking as if he doesn’t want to dwell on that thought, either. “I have to keep an eye on you for the rest of your life, you can never leave the apartment without me or go beyond Ijincho city limits, and you have to pay back the damage done to all three gangs over the past couple months. Including what happened at Geomijul.”
Masato swallows. Hard. “That’s…that’s millions.” Possibly more.
“Y-yeah. Yeah, it is. But we’ll figure it out together. I know we can.”
Masato isn’t so sure about that. Prison—even with potential assassination attempts—is starting to sound a great deal more palatable compared to being a lifelong debt-slave to the Ijin Three. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when you were talking about starting over.”
“Me neither,” Ichi admits. “But it’s a lot better than dying, right?”
Masato says nothing.
--
Ichiban somehow managed to get his hands on a wheelchair somewhere, so while he goes to grab it, Nanba removes Masato’s IVs and catheter and helps him dress in the clothes that were brought for him. The nurse is careful, but not gentle, and doesn’t seem especially concerned at his patient’s obvious pain, exhaustion, and humiliation.
“You’re lucky,” Nanba reminds him as he shoves a baseball cap onto Masato’s head and hands him a face mask. “Ichi really is pulling out the stops for you. He’s a better friend than I am.”
Masato has nothing to say to that. He’d never once thought of Ichi as his friend until the very end, when he believed himself to be dying in the man’s arms. Ichi was just one of his father’s men, a pathetic hanger-on looking for attention and sustenance, attending to a cripple only because he was ordered to do so. It had never once occurred to him that any of the kindness Kasuga Ichiban had ever shown him came from a place of sincerity.
In truth, he’s still digesting the idea, and he’s still not sure what to think of it. Sure, Ichi could be doing all this out of the Family bullshit the yakuza tell each other to feel better about their shitty choices, but this is a lot, even for them. Hell, this is a lot even for so-called kyodai, especially after the eighteen years Ichi already did on his behalf. And now he’s chaining himself to Masato for the rest of his natural life.
It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, but Masato isn’t exactly in a position to argue. For now, all he can do is go with the flow.
He allows Ichi to help him into the chair—a creaky old thing that’s certainly seen better days—and wheel him out of the little room. They are, he sees now, in a dingy back alley lined with the telltale signs of a heavy immigrant population, with their little shrines to foreign gods and their red banners plastered to the doors. Nanba mentioned Zhao Tianyou; that means they must be in Liumang territory. Thankfully, nobody seems to take much notice of them in the dark, and the hat and mask help shield the famous face of Governor Aoki Ryo. The immigrants swarming this grimy warren would probably be none too happy to hear about this particular guest.
They turn a corner to find a van waiting for them. Another of Ichi’s cohort—the older fellow with the beard—is waiting in the driver’s seat scrolling through his phone.
And against the van door leans Zhao Tianyou. Masato has only seen him in person the once, but he’s seen plenty of surveillance photographs, and the jewellery and clothing are unmistakable.
“Aw, Kasuga-kun, you’re really wheeling him away without letting me say goodbye?”
Ichi lets out an embarrassed chuckle. “To tell the truth, I didn’t think you wanted to have anything to do with him.”
“After what he’s done to Ijincho? Nah, I don’t. But I thought I ought to have a word with him anyway.” Zhao pushes away from the van and takes a step closer to the wheelchair.
“C’mon, Zhao, can’t this wait? He’s exhausted and up to his eyeballs on painkillers.”
“Not to worry, this’ll only take a second.” Zhao crouches so he can look into Masato’s eyes. There’s a smile on his face, but it’s sharp and poisonous. “Listen, Ao-kun, I was willing to let you crash here until you could get your own pad because I owe my buddy Kasuga a few major favours. That, and I know what it’s like to care about some jackass more than anyone rightfully should, you feel me? But when it comes to you, this is as far as I go. You ever darken the door of my home again, you’re dead meat. Got it?”
“Got it,” Masato says, willing his tired eyes into holding Zhao’s venomous gaze. He’s always hated it when people crouch to talk to him. It makes him feel like a child—even now, when his life is being threatened, he’d prefer at least a little dignity. “Not to worry. Won’t be coming back.” They couldn’t pay me enough.
“Perfect.” Zhao lifts his fist and bumps it against Masato’s before straightening up. “Alright, Kasuga-kun, get your little Waka outta here. I better see you at Survive on Friday, though.”
“Wouldn’t miss it!” If Ichiban is at all bothered by the Liumang’s open mockery and threats, his voice doesn’t indicate it. As Zhao and Nanba head back into the Liumang alleys, Ichi and the bearded man—Adachi, as he introduces himself—move to help Masato into the back of the van and load up the pathetic old wheelchair.
It’s strange, Masato realizes as they pull away, how easily he slid back into being in a chair—even if only temporarily—and into being treated like an invalid. It’s strange how easily Ichi picked it back up again, how unbothered he seems—chatting and joking with Adachi in the front seat—at the prospect of helping a helpless Masato recover from his unanticipated surgery. It’s almost as if nothing has changed at all since they were young.
The thought makes him want to throw himself out of the van and into the filthy river with the rest of the trash.