A/N: Joker Game © Yanagi Koji and I do not gain any profit from writing this fanfiction.
A friend actually told me that in the novels half of the spies ended up dead or something, but since I wrote this before knowing, so... yeah, let's just think about the anime ending ;u; By the way, English is not my first language so if you found any error I would happily (also appreciatively) revise it. (´・ω・`) Hope you enjoy!
lacuna (n.) a blank gap; a missing part.
"How does it feel," Sakuma asks, "being dead?"
The man before him smiles—astute, sardonic and concealing—exactly in the way Miyoshi always used to. "Do you really want to know?"
Sakuma counted things.
He counted the number of heads and hats that night—seven people—all remaining of former D Agency spies plus himself. He counted how many crossroads they had passed and how many bars they had gone into. All the important things, all the most insignificant things; he counted everything—just like the way he counted the cigarette butts he smoked and the glasses he drank dry every time they stumbled upon a new place.
Sakuma counted the things that others did; how many times Amari brought up Emma into the conversation, how many woman's names Kaminaga mentioned, how many random magic tricks Tazaki pulled off effortlessly. Counting helped him stayed sane, like he was having a grip to this insane world despite everything that was happening—the war, the loss, the suffering—he counted his blessings too, and Sakuma knew it made him able to go on.
There were some things, however, that he didn't count. Such as how many times he had declined Miyoshi's invitation to go out to the city, how many times the brittle memories of the spy come to his thought at night, or how many parallel universes in which Miyoshi was still alive he had imagined. Sakuma didn't count the years that had passed, the numbers that had been added to their age and how many times he felt dead inside.
Those were simply things that better left uncounted.
"If you keep doing that," Miyoshi says, "you'll soon know for yourself."
"Know what?"
"Being dead."
Sakuma puts down the bottle he doesn't remember drinking from, light-headed and dejected—no, he can't count when he can't even think. The blurry figure of Miyoshi leans his back to the wall, arms crossed. Sakuma can't see his face, but he knows those eyes are staring at him coldly.
He didn't remember who he heard it from, but they said Miyoshi died smiling.
Was it Hatano who told him? Jitsui, maybe? Or was it Lt. Col. Yuuki himself? It didn't matter anymore.
People said that you'd see your life passing when you're about to die, like a montage of life, slithering from the darkest pits; of the things you wanted to hide and things you didn't want to let go. How would it be for the spy then, did he see something as endearing as childhood memories—long before he became Miyoshi—or only the fragments of his fake identities?
"If it's Miyoshi," Kaminaga once said, "he probably thought about how he had completed the mission." He shrugged, tapping the tip of his cigarette on the ashtray. "When he was dying, somehow I could still picture that smug smile of his."
Sakuma couldn't deny. Silently, he imagined about dying somewhere far from one's mother country, alone in the snow, with real name unbeknownst to anyone.
The last thing he saw was the bleak ceiling of the wrecked train car.
Chest as still as a statue, breath had ceased long before. His eyes are closed, but Sakuma knows he's awake; because Miyoshi had slept forever, and now he won't be sleeping anymore. As the spy lies with arms neatly folded, Sakuma tries to picture him as a corpse. Face white and pristine like a porcelain doll, lips pale and beautifully sealed; Miyoshi must've been a lovely one.
But the Miyoshi who's with him at the present is not a dead body. He touches the hand Sakuma uses to caress his cheek, then looks at him with half-lidded eyes, smirking like a fox. He's still annoying, even in death.
The life they went through in the military wasn't an easy one. He had seen death for more than he could count, and lost all that ever mattered to him. The life of a spy wasn't any better. They might have different methods and disparate principles, but both were staking their lives for the country. They've been hanging on a thin thread, a frail tie that could be severed anytime; death was eventually, inevitable. Sakuma knew they simply didn't have the right to lament, no place to grieve, no time for sorrowful tears. Death was natural, death was their fate.
Don't die, don't kill.
If could, Sakuma wanted to shove Miyoshi all the blame.
"Isn't it ironic," Miyoshi says, "that you actually start hanging out with the other guys now, but not when I so persistently invited you out before."
"It's never too late for anything," Sakuma replies idly, eyes wandering to the autumn foliage by the terrace. His coffee is still warm, releasing thin white steam into the cold air.
"Well, it is," the other man leans his back to his, facing the dimness of the house as he continues, "for me."
The rest is silence. Sakuma wants to keep watching the sun setting between the clouds, smearing red and orange to the darkening sky, but the shifting from the other tells him that he wants the conversation to keep going. He wonders if dead people do get lonely.
"Are you angry?"
"No, for what?" Miyoshi doesn't wait for an answer. "I actually found it funny."
The latest job he'd been assigned to didn't require much going out into the fields or having his life on the line anymore. It was even considerably tranquil, compared to all the ruckus he had been going through before, and considerably boring. Sakuma only needed to come every morning and go home every evening at a fixed hour, sitting on his desk and checking documents, giving approval, ordering around, sending out his subordinates.
Once in a while he would find errors in the papers; false information, wrong gaps between words, a missing part in the sentences—a lacuna.
Sometimes too, the solitude of his office was suffocating. Small, ominous hands crawling from all corners, blocking the lights, swallowing every sound, creeping to the roof and dripping onto the floor. It's strangling, it's smothering. Sakuma couldn't breathe, his lungs flooded, he choked—
He closed his eyes, trying to reach inside, trying to stop dying. In that void he sat, thinking if his world was like those documents, then the tiny missing part in his chest must be the deceased.
You see that, Miyoshi? he said to nobody, almost stifling a laugh, you're a lacuna.
"You're meeting the others again tonight, right?"
Sakuma never tells him anything, not that he needs to; Miyoshi always knows. The spy then leans close—too close that Sakuma can't miss seeing the ever present bloodstain on his right collar—his words tickling his ears in a ghostly whisper, "Tell Fukumoto that Odagiri said hello."
They had only known each other for the briefest moment—not that Sakuma really knew him, he only had known what Miyoshi let him to. They weren't anything close, just a co-worker, those whose circumstances were a bit unique, but nothing intimate nonetheless. Or were they? Were they more than anything Sakuma recalled, or was he just lost count of the subtle efforts Miyoshi had done?
The morning the spy went to Germany, the day and night Sakuma regretted for not saying anything. No goodbyes, not a single see you again; they weren't in a relationship that allowed them to, and he was fully aware that it was how it would be from the start. Lt. Col. Yuuki had told him, didn't he? That all those men of D Agency would spread around the world, alone, silently, working and collecting information. He had seen the look on Miyoshi's face the day he departed, almost cheerful, as if he was finally set free.
Now that when not even the phrase I love you held meaning, Sakuma kept thinking why the impact Miyoshi—someone whose real name and past he had never even known—left on him was ridiculously tremendous.
"I have to let you go," Sakuma says one night, with arms folded under his head like a pillow. Miyoshi is sitting beside him on the bed, playing cards with a non-existent companion. He glances down, brown eyes glinting with amusement.
"You have to let me go," he repeats. That is not a question.
"I must."
"You must." Sarcasm thick in his tone. Sakuma's eyes widen when Miyoshi hovers above his face, bending low and plants a faint kiss on the side of his lips. "That took you long enough."
If the others were hurting, it wasn't showing.
All of the former spies were equally adept at handling their masks—or they might as well just threw feelings aside, like the former profession required them to. Sakuma too was a Japanese military man, and never in his life would he let others see his true emotions. But did he really need to hide it? This is D Agency member he was talking about; people who could peel you like opening layers of cabbage while you couldn't even touch them. Sakuma understood that he wasn't fooling anyone.
Years after the war, Japan was still trying to get back to its feet. The remains of the proud empire had vaporized, along with the smoke and fire that ruined their cities. The agency lost its avail when the war broke out, and its existence ceased. (Not that anyone mind, it wasn't supposed to be there in the first place. Why would people mourn for things that they didn't even acknowledge?) Not even once Sakuma ever met Lt. Col. Yuuki again, and he didn't hear anything or knew the whereabouts of the others until Amari showed up at his door one day, "For old time's sake," he said.
Seasons slipped by like a rapid stream. Before he knew it the Western and Eastern Bloc started a cold war and conflicts emerged in all parts of Asia. Warfares and politics made less and less sense to him, and if people would just all live peacefully like in some kind of utopia, without having a missing part, without having an empty feeling, how wonderful would that be.
Once in a late winter, Sakuma thinks he falls asleep a bit on the kotatsu. When his consciousness returns, he stays still, and instead thinking how it would've gone if he had become a full spy of D Agency at that time. Forgoing his past, his name and everything that was him, he would become one of those monsters; dexterous, ruthless, emotionless.
He wouldn't be attached to anyone like the way he was now. Sakuma would probably be lonely, because neither one would ever be allowed to get to know him, nor that he could get close to anybody. Maybe he would also die in a duty—somewhere in a foreign land, unknown, unnamed—he was someone who would not be remembered.
The other spies would go on with their lives, smiling as ever, as if he was never there. If they did talk about him, it was without a slightest hint of emotion, because it's just the way they were—and the way he was—nothing was missing for them. They've already had too many lacunas, his death wouldn't be much of significance.
Sakuma wonders if the deceased spy thinks of the same, and maybe this time he will deliberately seek for his opinion.
When he opens his eyes, though, Miyoshi is no longer there.