Author's Note: You might be wondering what the hell Fuuma and Seishirou are doing in an upscale hotel room together. Well you'll just have to wait to find out. XD This was originally going to be part of another story I'm working on at the moment, but I felt it detracted a bit from the conversation so I decided to rework it slightly and post it separately. Consider it a teaser if you will. :P
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"Ketel One is fine. Yes, the whole bottle. Thank you."Seishirou hung up the phone and immediately reached for his pocket, to pull out a cigarette, pausing only when he realized he was in shirtsleeves.
"Your jacket's on the other chair." Fuuma commented lazily as he flipped through the room service menu conveniently left on the nightstand.
"Of course."
"Can you seriously order all of this even at three in the morning here?"
"Full menu served 24 hours. Says it on the cover."
Fuuma whistled. "And you have this place on constant reserve?"
"What can I say, there are perks to being a government employee." Seishirou lit up.
"It must be the perfect job for you. I mean, being the sort of person who doesn't care about anyone else, I can't imagine you mind killing people for a living. And it gets you all of this." He gestured around the hotel room.
"Hm." Seishirou took a long drag. "A word of advice, though you aren't likely to need it with the direction the world is going. No matter what job you have, no matter how much you love it, it will always at some points be just that. A job." He smiled as he examined the glasses left by the coffee pot. "But overall, yes, I do enjoy the perks."
"Bit of a hedonist, aren't you?"
"Life is short. Live while you can." Seishirou stretched. "That's what you're doing here isn't it?"
"More or less." Fuuma smiled over his shoulder. "So Ketel One- that's a vodka right?"
"It is."
"That's what you ordered last time too. What is it with you and vodka?"
"Just a preference I suppose you could say."
"Funny. I would have taken you for more of a sake kind of guy."
"I just don't hold so much with tradition. Though sake is nice with the right meal."
Fuuma turned to give him one of his more piercing gazes until he shrugged and grinned. "And I guess I have fond associations with it."
"What's that?"
"Oh it's a boring story."
A knock at the door interrupted them and Seishirou disappeared into the entrance to return momentarily with a bottle and fresh glasses. Fuuma watched him pour thoughtfully.
"To living while you can." He raised his glass and Fuuma followed suit, determined not to choke slightly this time as he drank.
"So what's the story."
"Hm?"
"About why you love vodka so. Come on you, can't just leave me hanging like that."
Seishirou sighed. "It's a bit long."
"We've got time."
"Not much really."
Fuuma laughed. "Enough for this. What else do you have planned for the rest of the night."
"I think we already discussed that earlier didn't we?" Seishirou winked.
"After this." Fuuma indicated the glass.
The older man sighed. "Oh alright. If you must know." He made a show of getting settled and Fuuma plopped himself down on the bed, taking another cautious sip.
"I became the Sakurazukamori when I was fifteen, making me officially the head of the 'clan'. However the government isn't especially keen on using fifteen year old boys as assassins, not for any moral reason mind you, but because lack of experience combined with teenage arrogance can be disastrous. Besides, it's generally unnecessary to use a young Sakurazukamori when there are plenty of other assassins at their disposal. As such, it wasn't until shortly after I had turned seventeen that they came to me with an assignment and even then it was because of unusual circumstances that called for… more unique skills shall we say.
"A Russian diplomat, let's call him Dubrovsky, was visiting Japan and creating a bit of an issue for reasons that shall remain unnamed. Suffice to say, the Japanese government needed him taken care of and needed the Russian government to not know or suspect their involvement so as to avoid international scandal. Now Dubrovsky was a large and constantly well-armed man, having once been an active soldier who never forgot his training so it would have taken a fairly skilled assassin to take him down anyway, but it could have been done. If Dubrovsky had been the only one to worry about.
"He also had a bodyguard whom we'll call Gorbunov. He was a former fellow soldier according to some rumors, and more importantly, he was a known practitioner of Western sorcery. It's not so uncommon to find a certain amount of sorcery use among the other assassins that the government uses, but this was a powerful and different kind of magic that none of them were familiar with. Not wanting to risk the interference of the bodyguard, they came to me with the assumption that if anyone would be powerful and/or knowledgeable enough to counter the unfamiliar magic, it would be the Sakurazukamori himself.
"Little did they know, I didn't actually know much about Western sorcery at the time either. Up until that point, if I had needed to kill someone without anyone else knowing or getting involved, I could always create a mabaroshi and I had the strength and skill to do so without even other practitioners being able to detect the working. When it came to Gorbunov, I had no way of knowing if that would work, if he might have some way to repel the spell or see through it. So I cheated.
"I arranged an 'accidental' encounter with Dubrovsky's secretary that led to my being granted an internship in his office. It was boring, menial work, but I was patient enough to bide my time until he and Gorbunov were accustomed to seeing me. Dubrovsky took a liking to me, most people do when I decide that I want them to, and one evening as we were both leaving the office late, he invited me over for a few drinks. I agreed, thinking it would finally be my opportunity to get him away from Gorbunov.
"No such luck of course as it turned out the bodyguard actually slept in the same apartment. Still I naively hoped that perhaps with some alcohol in their systems, Gorbunov and Dubrovsky might let their guards down enough to reveal some weak spot.
"Recall my earlier comment about teenage arrogance? Yeah, I was no exception.
"I had had alcohol before. You can't really come from as traditional a Japanese family as mine and not have had sake at some point and I had tested the waters with wine and beer on my own by then. When vodka was first brought up, my understanding was that it was like shōchū which I had actually also tried by then so I thought I had a good grasp of what I was getting myself into.
"Let me just say that vodka is not like shōchū. It is in fact stronger.
"I realized this with startling clarity around the time that I found myself lying on the floor beneath the table, uncertain as to how I had gotten there or why I didn't feel any need to be anywhere else. Dubrovsky and Gorbunov were still going through bottles like water while I wrestled with consciousness and the idea of asking for another glass, just so I didn't look like such a lightweight, as though my being curled around a table leg hadn't already established that. I should have probably just eaten something, but the only thing they were munching on was pickles, which I must confess, I have always hated.
"Somewhere in there however, I had learned something. It's considered very bad luck to put an empty bottle back down on a table in Russian culture so the empty vodka bottles were gathering on the floor with me. So when Gorbunov realized that they had run out of pickles and left for the kitchen to replenish their supply, I wove a spell, albeit a very messy one I am sure, into the most recent of the bottles. When Dubrovsky stood up to glance outside the window at the traffic below, I dragged myself up a chair to place the bottle back on the table before collapsing back beneath it. So when Dubrovsky turned back around and caught sight of the empty bottle, he immediately moved to put it back on the floor, not realizing that the moment he touched the glass, his heart would explode.
"I don't know if Gorbunov returned just then because he had heard Dubrovsky collapse or if it was because he had detected the magic. Or maybe he had simply gotten his pickles. In any case, he walked back into the room to find Dubrovsky dead as a doornail and only one person there to suspect. If he didn't already know magic had been involved, as a practitioner of any kind of sorcery, it would be only a matter of minutes at the most before he realized it. In my vodka-induced haze, I had exactly one idea as to how to get out of the scenario alive and it hinged on some complicated magic of a variety one does not take on lightly even when sober.
"I explained to you once that I used to be a veterinarian because I could redirect the backlash of magical workings onto the animals at the clinic. Well the same principle can be done with people too. Throwing all caution into the wind, I used the spell to do just that, to direct the backlash at Gorbunov himself. Maybe it was lucky that my words were slurred because he didn't realize what I was doing until it was too late to stop me. He did try, he did call up a protective spell, but of the wrong sort to block mine, and when that failed, he went the more straightforward route of trying to strangle me. Killing a magician does usually stop their magic in its tracks, so it wasn't actually a bad idea. It was just unfortunate for him that the spell kicked in only a few seconds after he got his hands around my neck. Why he didn't just snap it, I'm still not sure. I think it has something to do with needing to squeeze the air out of a magician in order to cancel out a spoken spell in Russian sorcery but I'm not certain. Either way, I was lucky that he didn't realize that a quick death would have been sufficient to stop my spell. Very, very lucky.
"I woke up sometime the next morning with just enough time and presence of mind to cast just enough of an illusion spell to sneak out of the apartment before the authorities got involved." Seishirou punctuated his story by downing the rest of his glass and pouring another one.
Fuuma watched him with a raised eyebrow. "So what did you do, go home and celebrate that the job was done?"
"If by celebrate you mean puke my guts out, then yes, I did a lot of celebrating that day."
Fuuma laughed. "Then why do you say you like vodka? I would think you would hate it after that."
"Ah, well that's the thing you see. As miserable as I felt for the next couple of days, there was a certain sense of accomplishment. There is a kind of high, an exhilarating sense of invincibility that comes with realizing that even at such an extraordinary disadvantage you're capable of bringing down a giant. Obviously I realize in retrospect that it was merely luck, but at the time arrogance had me convinced that it was my genius that had led to my success. Ever since, I suppose you could say I associate vodka with that sense of invincibility." He held up his glass. "And of course after that I taught myself to have a much higher tolerance of it. Just in case."