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Toshinori had been away for nine days. First it was an away mission to Sakurajima, which had been threatening a severe eruption; now it was some other thing, with no time to come home in between.
Not that he hadn’t offered. “I could swing by for a couple hours tonight,” he’d said over the phone after the all-clear in Sakurajima. “We could get dinner, maybe, before I have to head back out.” It had been Mirai who’d said no. “Go on up early so you can get a decent night’s rest. It’s only a few more days.”
Today in the office, as he struggled to focus on a tenuous link between two missing-person files, he felt that his acuity would have been improved by a hasty take-out meal with Toshinori, along with whatever they might have found a few minutes for before or after. He was gone nearly half the time lately, ever since Hypnos and Masquerade had been found together in their shared apartment, one dead and the other quirkless. It had been a bad spring.
In the atrium outside, he could see Miss Ogano looking rather put-upon as she took a phone call. They’d greeted one another that morning with bland politeness, each of them too sluggish to take a witty jab at the other. She was also always in a better mood when All Might was around.
Just then the light on his desk phone flashed orange, accompanied by a muffled tone. He picked up the handset. “Yes?”
“I have a man on from, ah—” Miss Ogano pronounced her next words haltingly—“Héros Supérior Paris? It’s a magazine? It’s French.” This final declaration was confident.
“Yes,” Nighteye said dryly. He looked up to meet Miss Ogano’s gaze through the office window. She quirked her mouth at him and daintily scratched her cheekbone with a well-manicured middle finger, which was like a thin ray of light piercing his cloudy mood. “Why didn’t you tell him All Might has suspended press bookings?”
“I did. He doesn’t want All Might. He wants you.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“I don’t know, monsieur. Maybe for their next men’s fashion icon.”
Now it was Nighteye’s turn to make a sneering face through the glass. Still, the possibility—however unlikely—did not strike him as quite remote enough to suppress the neural tingle of a tiny spark of vanity. “Fine. Put him through.”
“Oui oui.”
He cleared his throat and hoped his pronunciation would impress. “Bonjour, monsieur. Puis-je vous aider?”
“Bon après-midi, Nighteye. Your French is very good.” The accent that greeted him sounded thoroughly Japanese.
“Uh—not at all.” He tried not to sound thrown. “But may I say the same for your Japanese?”
The man’s voice chuckled. “It would be a very small compliment, I fear.”
“You’re not French, then?” He kept his register formal, but embarrassment was making him irritated.
“Ah, no. Just a little whim of mine. You will forgive me my small deception.”
Mirai grimaced. It was not the first time something like this had happened, and he was cross with Miss Ogano—and more so with himself—for taking the bait.
“You media people can try every trick in the book,” he said. “It won’t get you anywhere. I have no comments for you, and All Might’s hero duties leave no time for interviews for the foreseeable future.”
The man made a little hum of regret. “No time even to catch up with an old friend?”
This too was surely a ploy, and a shabby one. “No. All Might is in Tokyo for a government consultation at present. If you know him, you should try his private number.”
“All Might is not in Tokyo.” The smooth voice on the other end of the line sounded amused—tickled, even. “He is in the mountains of Kyomaru, not fifty kilometers from where you sit, looking for people he won’t find, alas. Did you feel the need to invent a story for my benefit? Or is it All Might who makes up stories to tell you?”
Nighteye felt suddenly sick. His face felt hot, the rest of him cold. He swiveled his chair away from the office window, out of Miss Ogano’s view, then clenched his jaw and hardened his voice. “Who is this?”
“Now that, I expect you do know. You’re a reasonably clever man, Mr. Sasaki. Quick to figure things out, yes?”
“What do you want?”
“Just to chat. You’re one of All Might’s closest associates, yet I’ve never had the pleasure of speaking with you. That didn’t seem right.” A smile slid into the voice. “And I imagine, with Toshinori away so much of late, things must be a little dull for you in Might Tower. Is that so? Are you bored, Mirai?”
He made himself sniff irritably. “‘Sasaki’ is acceptable. As is my professional name.” He wanted to tell the man to keep All Might’s personal name out of his mouth as well, but knew that if he did, it would sound petulant and weak.
“Certainly, Nighteye, certainly. As you prefer. I do believe in observing the proper forms of things, you know. Without decorum, where would we be as a society.” The words were still smile-stretched, and the man seemed not to care that his question about Mirai’s state of mind had gone unanswered. Then he asked, “What does Toshinori call you?”
“Sir.” Mirai had said it, defiant, before he could change his mind.
The man laughed. It was a warm, sincere, handsome-sounding laugh. The familiarity of it was abhorrent. “How charming for you both.”
Fuck, enough of this. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m a very busy man myself. If you want heroes to have time for social calls, you might consider abandoning the world domination scheme.”
“Oh, not so soon! What of your investigative abilities? As long as I’m on the line, don’t you want to fish for clues?” He said the word with real, childlike enthusiasm. “Surely you’re in no real hurry to try something so blunt as call your intrepid detective friend and have him run a trace. Or by all means, do so, but you must know by now that it won’t matter. Perhaps I’m in a high rise block in Osaka, or a cabin in Hokkaido, or that nice café across the street with the good strawberry castella. In any case, by the time you know it, I will again be nowhere.”
“Do you always talk like the villain in a children’s cartoon,” Mirai asked, “or is that just for me?” He knew full well that he should stick to his resolution to hang up. “Have you got a fancy chair that looks like a throne and a cat on your lap?”
“Indeed, perhaps I should get a cat. A white Persian, yes? You are funny.” He said it as though someone had told him so, and he had only just decided he agreed. “Do you make Toshinori laugh?” All For One did not wait for an answer. “Perhaps not so much now as you used to. Hard times, hard times. They try the soul.”
He hated this man. He would have hated him even if he had known nothing about him apart from this oil-slick phone call. “He’s going to destroy you. And then we’re going to joke about it over dinner.”
“Ah. You know all about it, naturally. Tell me, young seer: what will be the date of my destruction? Where will it take place? What will my last words to All Might be?”
“Why would I tell you any of that?”
“Because it would please you.” The voice was calm and very sure of itself. “You would very much enjoy telling me the dire details of my demise, if you had them stored away. But you have nothing to tell me, I see. There is nothing that you know.”
Impotent rage clutched at his chest and throat like heartburn. Worse, he did not think it was directed solely at All For One. What a sickening shame it was to know nothing. How easy and valuable it would be to know something. Knowledge was his job, his gift. Being forbidden from it was like knowing how to sail a ship, how to read the stars, while under orders to stay below deck and swab the hold or peel potatoes. Worst of all, he suspected that All For One perceived all this.
“Even so,” the man went on, “no doubt All Might finds you useful in other respects. Keeping the home fires burning, yes? Providing domestic comforts?” He avoided any theatrical pauses or emphases that would burden his words with heavy-handed innuendo. But then he asked evenly, “Does Toshinori still like to talk during sex? Does he say sweet things in your ear while he fucks you? He can be quite filthy too, though, can’t he. A man of contradictions.”
Mirai dug his fingernails into the padded arm of his desk chair, overwhelmed by revulsion. All of this, he knew, he knew, was an elaborate charade calculated to elicit a reaction. All For One wanted him to be shocked and horrified, to feel like an ant writhing under a sadistic boy’s magnifying glass. Wanted him to be jealous, somehow. He would not show any of those emotions. Coldly, he said, “You can say whatever you want. You don’t know him.”
For a moment there was silence. “I don’t know him.” The voice that echoed his words back to him was suddenly soft and terrible, like death caressing his ear. “Such ignorance. Such arrogant presumption.” Mirai was startled—frightened, in truth—to discover that he had suddenly succeeded in making All For One angry. If he had talked like a villain out of a comic book before, now he spoke like the vengeful god of some unwritten epic. “For lifetimes, I have known him. Before your whore mother conceived of your tiny existence, I knew him. Everything you think you know is the scum of foam on sand. I know the ocean of what he is. He is of one being with me. Bone of my bone. Blood of my blood. Do you understand?” All For One did not wait for an answer, not that Mirai had one to give. “Of course you do not. How could you. You are too small for any of it. But on the day he becomes mine again, as he should be—as he is—you may live just long enough to know how stupid you have been.” The silence that followed vibrated with menace. Suddenly All for One softly cleared his throat. “This conversation is finished now. I have measured your limits and taken as much amusement as I can from so cheap a toy. Good day to you, Mr. Sasaki.”
He stayed facing away from the atrium, resting the handset on his knee, until he trusted that his face was composed. Then he replaced the phone in its cradle and returned to his files. A moment later, as he had expected, Miss Ogano opened the door without knocking first. “So?”
“Just another media man trying to slip under the bar.” He didn’t look at her, but he heard real disappointment in her short exhalation. “You should know better than to fall for things like that.”
“What a dick.” He looked up, unsure whether she meant the caller or himself. “It’s not like you weren’t excited too.” When he didn’t answer, she shrugged and put a hand prettily on her hip. “You could always take it as a compliment that I thought it might be legit, you know.”
“I’ll consider that, Miss Ogano.” She smiled and returned to her post, leaving him alone in the silent office for the rest of the afternoon.
***
All evening long, he found himself perversely hoping (against his own fond wishes) that he would not hear from Toshinori that night. He had not made up his mind what he would tell him. He hadn’t made up his mind what he would ask him, either. But the call came anyway, after Mirai had forced himself to eat a protein bar for dinner and before he’d made himself the cup of tea that would fuel another hour or two of work.
“How is Tokyo?” Mirai asked. He wasn’t sure why he believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Toshinori was not where he’d said he’d be, that he really was hunting All For One in the woods of Kyomaru instead. He wished his instincts led him astray more often than they did, which was virtually never. But maybe he had misunderstood, somehow. Maybe Toshinori had had to change his—
“Boring.” Toshinori staged a heavy sigh. “Spent all day at HQ. Only just got done.”
Mirai’s heart felt like a paperweight. “I don’t suppose you could sneak over to Ginza Mitsukoshi tomorrow and bring me home a tie as a present? I like Paul Smith.”
“Oh. I don’t know.” At least Toshinori had the decency to accompany this lie with an uneasy chuckle. “You know what these Commission guys are like. Wall-to-wall meetings, always one thing after—”
“Never mind it. I’m not being serious.”
“Hey, I’ll see what I can do.” Toshinori said, starting before Mirai had finished. He put a smile into his voice. “You can’t fool me, sir. You’re always serious about ties.”
Mirai huffed a laugh. He wished, with all his heart, that the call this afternoon had come from some Parisian wanting to photograph him for a glossy sartorial spread. What a stupid thing that had been to imagine. The world they lived in now was not a world of daring ties and elegant journalism, but of routine lies and violence too grim for public news.
“You okay? You seem kind of down. Hard day?”
“Not really.” Mirai realized that he took some perverse pleasure in telling lies of his own. “I’m just tired.”
“Yeah, don’t run yourself ragged. You should go to bed early.”
“Maybe I will.” There’s another, he thought.
“Good.” On the other hand, maybe Toshinori was only pretending to believe him. “Sweet dreams. See you soon.”
“Good night.” He added, before he hung up, “Be safe.”
***
“I’m home!”
The booming voice reached Mirai in the bathroom, where he’d been showering before bed. He had not expected Toshinori until the next day—if that. He threw on a robe and flung open the door. All Might was putting water into the kettle for tea, still in his hero gear. The sight of him puttering around the kitchen in his gigantic form had always been endearing. Then again, Toshinori could do anything, in any body, and be endearing.
“You’re early.”
“What can I say? I missed you. Hold on—” He reached into a bag on the counter and held out a rectangular box, royal blue, about the length of Mirai’s arm. Stamped on the front in metallic foil: Mitsukoshi. “Open it,” he urged, as Mirai stared at it without touching.
He did. The tie he unwrapped from the interior tissue was cream-colored silk, patterned with boldly colored yet strikingly delicate flowers: poppies, irises, daisies, and more. A tiny green caterpillar crawled up one stem. It was unlike any other tie he had ever owned.
“You like it?”
“It’s beautiful.” He looked up from the floral print, straight into Toshinori’s eyes. They matched the color of one of the blue flowers Mirai couldn’t name. “How did you manage it?”
Toshinori did not waver, offering a lopsided smile. “Hey, I’m not number one for nothing.” He stepped close to Mirai, brushed a thumb against his cheek. Mirai let himself be drawn into All Might’s massive arms and kissed. Soon enough he relaxed into it, subordinating consternation to relief. Wherever Toshinori had been, he was here now.
All Might dipped his head lower, brushed his lips against Mirai’s neck. “You smell good,” he rumbled, and Mirai felt the inevitable course of arousal rising in his veins. “Everything been okay here?”
In that moment, the right answer seemed obvious. All of All Might’s efforts out there depended on Nighteye seeing to it that everything was okay here. To say otherwise would make nothing better, and several things worse. “Yes. You know. Quiet. Busy.”
Toshinori raised one eyebrow at him. It was an expression that made his chiseled hero face look keenly perceptive. “Busy and quiet?”
Mirai smirked. “Quietly busy. Busily quiet. That’s my life.” But at the faintest shift in Toshinori’s expression, he regretted it. He pressed their bodies close again. “Tell me more about how you missed me.” And when Toshinori dropped sweet, filthy details into his ear, he tried to think only of those, and nothing else.