notes— on the list of unnecessary ficlets about obscure characters, this ranks pretty high. apparently that's my speciality. idk, i just really wanted to write about the guy who was a downright gentleman one minute and had his foot in your face the next.
also, i miss actual bad guys.
not the end of the line
;;
i won't let this plane go down,
i'll do what it takes to make this fly.
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He isn't that young when he finds Eisenwald. He's seen enough of the world that he doesn't run for cover at the mention of the word 'assassin', at the very least. He knows enough about the way your stomach heaves and clenches when you haven't eat for days. He is all too familiar with the anger that churns your insides, lights them aflame, when strangers' jewellery glints in the sunlight as they pass your slumped body by on the street and don't spare you a glance.
No. Certainly, when Eisenwald finds him, Kageyama is willing to go the lengths the guild wants him to. He's willing — all too eager, if anything — to throw himself into the darker underworld of revenge and taking.
Anything's better than the sewer, after all, and he's spent more years in dark alleyways than he cares to remember.
But once he's there, it's like he's not. Not really, 'cause it's not as dark as he was hoping for. The beer is stronger than it needs to be and the voices are more often hushed than loud, but the guildhall is never empty, and that's— that's everything.
.
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The jobs themselves aren't all that bad. Some are assassinations; some are murders; there's the odd torture request; and most of them are what no other guilds would consent to doing, but they're not bad, per se.
Kageyama learned a long time ago that no matter how shiny and new those who are better off are, there still needs to be someone to clean up the trash, and there will always be dirt on the lowest levels. In a country where you can starve on the street across the street from a palace, that's how it works. That's the kind of society this is. It was long ago that Kageyama resigned himself to living like a rat in the city of stars.
But the thing about the Eisenwald guild, despite its reputation as the filth of the magic world, the lowest of the low, the dirty and degraded, is that it seems to take pride in that stature. It takes the labels the Magic Council throws at it and turns them into a gilded iron nameplate.
Sick enough to take the assassination requests? Nevermind that they have no choice, that no-one will send them any requests that the law would take care of for them — the abused and screaming don't have that luxury, and the masses have never favoured the ugly.
Sick enough to kill for money? Sick enough of living in poverty, just trying to survive with others trampling on their backs.
Not everyone's like Kageyama, of course. Specialising in assassinations attracts its own sort of crowd. But there are those who were around from the beginning, who suffered in these walls like he did on the street. There are those who've told him about how the master struggled with the decision for months before finally accepting that first request to kill.
A master who wouldn't let his guildmates starve to death — is that so wrong? Not everyone, but enough. Surely human life is worth at least that? Surely he deserves to live like everyone else?
(Surely, his victims did, too? But that thought never reaches the finishing line, because the drink is strong, the voices are quiet, and the guildhall is never empty.)
The richest of murderers; the poorest last choice; that's Eisenwald.
.
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When the Magic Council arrest the master, they call for the guild to disband. For eighteen days, the guildhall is deserted, and all of his inquiries about a job are returned to the address he was kicked out of a week ago. He begins to see gold glinting in sunlight again, his shoulders tense and back aching from sitting on the street, eyes watering with dust from the street.
And after eighteen days, when Erigor — one of the new ones, a modern day grim reaper, made for the jobs he excelled in — makes the call to action, Kageyama returns to the guildhall with hollowed cheeks and fingers that are thirsty for blood.
.
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An outlawed guild doesn't have access to normal job requests — not even the ones rejected from every other guild in Fiore. What Kageyama does have access to are the ones that never entered the system in the first place.
And so, Eisenwald begins to kill exclusively. Scratch new words on their iron nameplate with an iron scythe.
It works for them. No-one starves to death in six years.
.
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Six years later, however, the guildhall is not filled with hushed voices and Kageyama drinks in a bar in a village a few miles out where it's safer. Eisenwald is loud, dangerous, a lion's den, and far from the home he'd made for himself when the guild found him digging for hope in the dirt.
Erigor gets better at what he's always done best. Kageyama ends up with a knife in back, a flute in his fingers, and clenched teeth that won't play it no matter how much he thinks he wants to.
When he looks at Makarov, he's reminded of the old master who's rotting in some prison in the capital. In the end, he doesn't go through with the plan, but it's more because of the bandages choking him rather than the blood every meal he eats tastes like it's soaked in.
He's not sorry when he goes to prison himself. He's not sorry, because he was starving and those jobs fed him. Because they didn't have a choice when they took those assassination requests — it was kill or be killed. Because when murder became all he did, no-one else would take him in and give him the chances he wanted. Because Eisenwald was the only choice he ever had, and six years later, he was tired of trying to find something else in a world that had never looked at him twice. But even then, the guild was run by a tyrant and filled with the worst of society, so he gave up the details of the plan when pushed, and gave up on the plan itself when pushed.
He thinks of his guildmaster, and of the thanks from the people he helped in the early days. He remembers all the friends who never came back after those eighteen days.
When Kageyama goes to prison, he's just relieved. The meals are free. His thoughts are his own once again. It's where people go to give up that he finds the one chance nobody could give him.
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He was never handsome. His hair stuck up at odd angles from age thirteen. When his parents could afford to send him school, he didn't excel, achieving grades that were perhaps a little higher than average. But when the income stopped, his father ran, and his mother was trying to raise toddler triplets, Kageyama went on ahead and took all the jobs they'd give to a fifteen year old with no qualifications.
When two of his three sisters died to the common cold, he stole a meal and ended up with a few months in the local jail as a result. That's where he learned his shadow magic, and that's what kept him going when he came out to two more grave markers.
Unemployable before he was sixteen. Society was never kind to him, never looked at him twice. He grew up in the gutters. So what qualms should he hold about taking revenge on the people who took everything he ever wanted in life from him before he even had it? Before he could hold it?
Why should he be sorry for killing them in order to live when they would've let him die for nothing?
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His release coincides with the old master's. Kageyama tries to explain the six years. He can't do them justice, and ends up painting the picture worse than it actually was—
which is saying something.
They go to the Fantasia Parade together, meet up with some old guildmates who left when the master did. The master pays for dinner. For all the bitterness and irony and old scars, Kageyama has a good time. His laughter sounds too much like his father's, but he can ignore that when it's mixed with that of his friends.
When he leaves that night, he exchanges addresses with them, and wonders on the long road home if he might start teaching shadow magic. As a source of income, magic has never let him down.
His fingers curl in the empty air above him when he looks at the stars, walking along the silent road in rare peace. His hand is a fist, the scars on his knuckles shining like coins in the moonlight, more beautiful than golden jewellery on the street could ever hope to be. Under the vast night sky, he feels small, like the world is just waiting for him to find it. The air is crisp in his lungs.
This is the life he made for himself. Kageyama looks up at the city of stars he lives under, and continues to climb.