Disclaimer- Minekura Kazuya owns all that is Wild Adapter
Warning- language
Notes: There are a lot of details in here that have not yet been explained in the manga, and so I had to improvise. Once Minekura does explain more about them, like Kubota's childhood for instance, then this story can very quickly be pushed into Alternative-Universe-land. But until she does explain, this is just one possible interpretation. Finally, feedback is always appreciated, and thank you.
All Things Familiar - Then
Keiichiro Kasai was not a family man, even when, for a short time, he had a family to come home to. He was a detective, albeit a little crooked, but you could say that his morality line crooked the same way the entire police force's did. He was a man who liked his alcohol and his cigarettes and always liked them together. He was a man who was not a stranger to women. The one who he was a stranger to was his nephew.
They should have been closer since they both shared a bond with a woman who recognized neither of their existences. Kasai only saw his younger sister in the few grainy photographs from their youth, the ones that stayed pressed between the pages of his old school primer, lost deep in a box in the back of his closet. He didn't need to dig them out though to remember what she looked like, or to remember that look of disdain she laid upon him and on their life back then. That life though was only a memory now, since she had moved on, cutting all ties to what little family was left, and he eventually did the same, since in the end, all that was left of their family were him and her. Or so he had thought.
Years earlier, his sister had the honor of becoming a powerful man's mistress. Although their relationship was strangely absent from the tabloids, this powerful man's family was very much aware of her presence and they scornfully tolerated her for being his "unfortunate necessity". Although he kept her separate from his family, he provided her with more luxury than her and Kasai's parents ever could have offered. And thus she embraced her new life just as she embraced this powerful man, shedding her old skin and forming a new one. So much so, that Kasai could barely recognize the girl he used to race home from school with, her feet skips ahead of his, her pigtails flying in front of his eyes. Now, her face, her body was ripened by luxury, and seemed so cold, it was as if she had frozen herself into a permanent, finely drawn mask. But, as Kasai found out, it was not only a new skin that was born from this embrace.
It didn't need explaining how Makoto came into the world, but why, why something so unwanted was allowed to be was a question that Kasai pondered on many times. The only reason he could pin down was that his sister must have believed that bearing this powerful man a child would raise her status with him and with his family. His line would continue, and it would be through her. But he had other children, and hers, in the end, was not a welcome addition.
So Makoto was born a "nobody", a non-person among the family, and no one in that house acknowledged he existed. Although blessed with the blood of this powerful man, he was seen as an unforgivable result of his father's unfortunate necessity. Unlike his mother's tolerated, separate existence, he was cut completely off from them. Because his mother wished to maintain her new life, and was angry still because her ploy of bearing a child did not raise her status, she dutifully complied with the family's wishes and removed herself from raising her son. She did not even look at him, so he never received that look of disdain that Kasai knew so well. But even though he was separated and ignored, Makoto was not removed from the house. Instead of creating a possible scandal, he was quietly raised by servants and entered into school at the earliest age possible.
Sometimes, Kasai couldn't suppress his curiosity, and he used his connections to learn what his sister was doing, where she was. And it was here that he'd learned of this nobody boy. "What's he like?" he asked, holding the phone with one hand, and lighting his cigarette with his other. "Does he look like her?" He brushed back his graying hair from his forehead, and wondered, does he look like me?
"He's like…" the voice breathed in his ear, quiet and low, probably speaking from some empty corner of the house. "He's like a ghost."
He was treated like a phantom among the living, and when he walked the halls, neither his mother nor his father would acknowledge that his cool presence had passed them by. By the time he had left the house when he was just entering junior high, even his name on the family registry had mysteriously vanished. He was no longer a ghost anymore, since for that to be, he would have had to have died, and now the family that bore him made sure that his very existence would never be known.
Kasai wasn't quite sure why suddenly Makoto decided to stop being a nobody at his father's home and started being an almost nobody at his. They had never met, but one day he showed up at his doorstep, bag over his shoulder, and the end of a cigarette in his mouth. It wasn't a complete surprise though. A half-hour before he'd arrived, Kasai received a phone call telling him that his 12-year old nephew was coming over. It was told to him like everything else from that side of the family, from some whispering staff member that worked for the man that his sister had borne a nobody boy to. So when the door bell rang, he walked to it, knowing what he would meet. What he wasn't quite sure though was what would happen next. He wasn't a family man after all, and kids weren't his thing.
But it seemed that to Makoto, families weren't his thing either. Even though he dropped his bag inside and took off his shoes and sat down to eat the dinner that Kasai suddenly realized he had to make for two, he never seemed to stop giving off his nobody feel. Sometimes he was so quiet, sitting there, that Kasai could turn around and forget he existed, except for the smoke that was twirling slowly up from the cigarette in his mouth, its thin white air wafting up until it disappeared.
Kasai made his own poor attempts at communication.
"So…how was school today?" He pushed the ash tray towards his nephew. At first he frowned at the boy's smoking, but with his own pack and a half-day habit, he realized he had little principle to stand on. He couldn't even use the "It'll stunt your growth" excuse because it was easy to tell how fast Makoto was growing. Already the pants from his school uniform that he had gotten three months earlier were inches above his shoes. He was still wearing his uniform at the dinner table, which prompted Kasai to ask how his day went.
"Dunno." Makoto answered simply and tapped the ashes into the tray. "Didn't go today."
Kasai stopped, a plate of hot curry rice held in his hands. "What? Then what did you do?"
Makoto took the plate and put it on the table in front of him. "Little of this. Little of that."
And that was all he could get out of him. "A little of this, a little of that." Kasai left for work before Makoto went to school and came back hours after classes ended, so he never was sure where the boy went during the day, dressed in his too-small uniform, his leather satchel over his shoulder. Kasai attempted a "study hard today" in the mornings before he left, but there was never a response from the small room that had before been his office. After a month, it was simply an "I'm off" from the entranceway, right as he was about to leave. But with his nobody nephew only silent on the other side of the door, he stopped doing even that, and they both left just as quietly as they came.
His coworkers sometimes said, "I'll finish this paperwork. Don't you have a kid to go home to?" He shook his head to their offer and lit up another cigarette. "He can take care of himself." And Kasai knew he was right because when he did look at Makoto, whether it was across the table, or in the living room during the few times they sat silent and watched television together, he saw that he wasn't looking at a boy at all. It was like his nephew had skipped growing up entirely and gone straight into adulthood, but was still made to wear the clothes and the body of a child, even if they didn't fit him. His eyes showed the distance that only years of experience had given Kasai. Everything that Makoto did, from speaking to walking to holding his cigarette, expressed a knowingness that Kasai normally only saw in the men his own age, over thirty years Makoto's senior.
The only times he saw Makoto act closer to a child than an adult was when something new caught his nephew's eye. His look changed. Not entirely, since his face still held "the half smile" that Kasai considered almost mocking. (Although he was never sure who it was directed at- to everyone else or to Makoto himself.) But at these times, there was a slight lift at the corners of his lips, and his always narrowed eyes would widen a little as his hands reached out to hold whatever it was that caught his fancy. It was over in a moment, but Kasai noticed it. It was these few times that he ever saw Makoto really…alive.
He eventually figured out where his nephew was spending the days when he was supposed to be in school. After finishing a victim's interview in Chinatown, he decided to take the long way back to the station and stopped in at one of the many small mahjong parlors that dotted this section of town. The game was a hobby that he played often enough after a shift and occasionally during. Stepping through the door, it was like walking into another world; one made entirely up of smoke and the clack-clack-clack of tiles being quickly but carefully placed on the boards. He scanned the room for an empty seat when he spotted a familiar head among the crowd of players. Walking closer, he recognized the hands quickly picking and placing tiles down. The sleeves on his uniform were growing shorter by the day.
The table he was playing at was full, so Kasai grabbed a chair near the wall and pulled it up next to him. The others at the table looked up and eyed him warily. A couple he recognized from games that he had played (and won) in the past. He brushed their dark looks off with a wave. "Only here for a moment. I won't ruin the game."
"You can't ruin it," Makoto replied. "I've already won." And to make his point, he showed his tiles to the rest of the table. Kasai was a little taken aback both from the kid's win and also by the unrestrained cursing that the men threw down on his nephew, but Makoto only smiled in response, saluted, and took their money.
"Are you here to arrest someone?" he asked, pooling the coins into his pockets.
"Nah, just stopping in." Kasai looked down at him. "Did you win all that today?"
"Yeah, it's always a little slower on Tuesdays." Makoto shrugged and stood up. "I usually pull in twice as much."
"Damn, Makoto." He couldn't believe this kid sometimes. He looked up to see the table of grown men scowling back at them. He reached out and took his nephew's arm. "C'mon, let's get out of here." Surprisingly, Makoto didn't pull back, but allowed himself to be led out of the parlor.
"What now?" the boy asked as they stood on the sidewalk. Kasai was reaching down, searching his pockets for his lighter. A hand moved out in front of his face, and he looked up to see Makoto holding his own lighter up. He nodded and bent over a little, allowing his nephew to light his cigarette. After a moment, he breathed out the smoke, and with it, his thinking cleared a little.
"Why don't you…use your slow day's winnings and treat your uncle to dinner?" He spoke carefully, as if testing each word. He stayed on "uncle" for a full beat. He looked down at Makoto who only returned his gaze, his head cocked to the side, that half-smile on his lips.
"Okay, Uncle," he said. Kasai couldn't help but smile back. This would be one of the only times that Makoto ever called him that. Without turning around, his nephew started down the street, and Kasai followed him, watching his back as he walked.
After a short distance, they came to an outside ramen stand. Makoto sat up on one of the empty stools and called out to the cook busy behind the bar. "Two of your cheapest noodle bowls, please!" he yelled out.
Kasai laughed as he sat down next to him. "You're really treating me tonight."
They ate in their usual silence. The only noise was the slurping of noodles and the baseball game that played out over the radio behind the bar. When Makoto looked up to wipe the steam from his glasses, Kasai took that moment to pry a little.
"So…who taught you to play such mean mahjong?"
Makoto bent his head back over his noodles and began slurping again. Kasai wondered if he hadn't heard him, or maybe he was ignoring him. He was about to turn back to his own bowl when Makoto spoke up.
"Watching Lee-san," he answered, his voice low.
"Lee-san?" Kasai turned to look at him.
"She worked at the house. They all played in the kitchen when there wasn't work to do. After a while, they let me in. She was the toughest player though, so I watched her a lot. I knew when I beat her, I was doing good."
"How long did that take?"
"Two days." Makoto smiled into his soup and began to dig around until he found the one fish cake that the cheapest bowl of ramen gave you. "I was about…eight. At first they joked that they'd let me win. But it got pretty bitter after awhile. Soon no one who didn't want to risk losing their money came into the kitchen after one-o-clock."
"I'm surprised they didn't start poisoning your meals." Kasai took drag off his cigarette.
"I didn't win all the time." Makoto replied. "Sometimes I lost. It was one of the few places I wanted to be, so sometimes losing was better than winning."
Kasai looked over at him from the corner of his eye. Makoto was bent over his bowl, picking at the soup. He was grabbing nothing with his chopsticks, but instead, just made circles in the surface, breaking his reflection over and over again.
Because for a nobody, a place to stay is worth more than winning, Kasai thought grimly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins. "This is for the soups," he said, passing the money over to the cook. He turned to see his nephew looking up at him with that half-smile.
"What can I say, Makoto," he shrugged. "Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. C'mon."
Makoto followed after him. "Are you going back to your place?" he asked. Kasai noticed that he never called it his.
"Nah. I still got work to do." He stopped by a set of stairs that went down into another mahjong parlor. He chewed on his cigarette, and after a moment, headed down. When he reached the door, he turned back up to see Makoto looking at him with that same half-smile. "C'mon. Play this old man a game."
The corners of Makoto's mouth tweaked up a little. "I'd feel a little bad taking your money, Kasai-san."
"Sure you would." Kasai shook his head and opened the door. "You think you're good, kid, but let me tell you. You don't know good yet." He stood there, holding the door open and waited. After a few moments, Makoto started slowly down the steps.
"You're right." His half-smile widened into a full as he passed Kasai and walked into the shop. "I won't feel bad taking it."
It was here in the dark smoke of the mahjong houses that Kasai and his nephew discovered the one thing outside of their blood that they did have in common, their skills at the game. Few were in the same league with them, and when they shared a board, they became oblivious to anything else, including the crowd of people that often gathered to watch them-- the well-known Officer Kasai and the kid that came out of nowhere to challenge him and the rest of the Yokohama mahjong scene. Here in the smoke, Kasai learned more about his nephew than he ever did at home. His years of ghosting the halls had given the kid skills of perception that Kasai didn't see even in some of the most experienced of detectives that he worked with. He got so lost sometimes just playing his tiles and watching Makoto respond back, that he realized too late that the cigarette he had lit was just a stub burning between his fingers. He started to get up to go buy another pack when a scraping sound caught his attention. Looking down, he saw that Makoto had passed over his own pack of Seven Stars.
"Thanks," he said, sitting back down.
"It's the least I can do." Makoto shrugged and leaned back, showing his tiles to the table. "Since you will be paying."
Kasai swore under his breath as he dug into his pockets for both his lighter and his money. Although he hadn't won a game against Makoto in weeks, he wasn't going to admit out loud that his nephew was a better player. As he dropped the coins on the table, he started to regret walking down those steps months earlier since it had meant a continuing blow to his ego. But in the end, he lit his cigarette and started again, since these times they played were basically the only home they had together. And he realized in the back of his head, behind the smoke and the past, this little bit of home was worth losing a few yen for, even if it was to a punk-ass kid like Kubota Makoto.
And just like back in that kitchen, Makoto did take his turn to lose, but only enough to keep people guessing. You never knew with him how long the game was going to go, or how your hand would do. This allure, a mix of his youth, his skill, and his dry, quiet humor, made him very popular among the parlors, and there was always a crowd around his table. He even managed a little fan club of neighborhood kids who followed him around, replenishing his cigarettes or running out to buy him a drink when he mentioned off-hand that he was thirsty. They listened to him because he seemed just like them, but they followed him because they saw there was something more, something they couldn't figure out, but something that won them over as quickly as he won the games.
Although it seemed Makoto didn't lose enough to keep this perfect balance going. Having been at work, Kasai only heard this after, and the story was never clear, but on one strong day of playing, some of his opponents took it out on the boy. Kasai saw him come home late that night, his face bruised, his pockets torn. When asked what happened, Makoto said nothing, walked into his room, and shut the door. Kasai found out later that his nephew had stumbled into another shop in Chinatown that day, a place that dealt with odds and ends, and "other things", a place owned by a man named Kou. It had probably been him that had put the scattering of band-aids on the boy, but these were details that Makoto never shared. Kasai had to piece them together himself. "I saw some kid, looked like your nephew, hanging around some shop in Chinatown," another officer told him one day.
Kasai kept his face expressionless as he brought his cigarette up. "I know," was all he answered with.
With his new "home", Makoto often came back to the apartment just as late as Kasai, if not later. Their silent dinners were a thing of the past, and Kasai often found himself grabbing a sandwich after work and eating it cold in front of the TV. He was on his second beer when he heard the door to the outside open and shut, the sound of feet in the hall, and the opening and closing of the door to what was once his office.
He knew this wasn't the way things should go. People never acted like this on TV or in the stories his coworkers would tell of their own families. But somehow, he never did get up off that couch, mostly because he knew whatever he said to that door, he would hear nothing back. His nephew, his growing-out-of-his-clothes, mahjong-winning, Chinatown-working, school-skipping, silent nephew wanted more than anything to remain a nobody, at least to him. Kasai scratched his head, and smoked his cigarettes, and opened another beer, but no ideas came to him to help change this. Even though it was his job to solve problems, this thing that shared his flat seemed impossible for him to crack. But maybe that was partly his fault. He wasn't a family man after all, and kids weren't his thing. So he opened up another beer and took out another cigarette, and turned the TV up a little louder, anything to drown out that awkward silence that only a shared space can make.
He wasn't surprised on the day his nephew left. As Makoto saluted, his bag thrown over his shoulder, Kasai suddenly realized that his nephew had grown taller than him.
"Thanks for everything, Kasai-san." Makoto always kept the formality between them, as if they were two strangers who had just happened to live in a small apartment for over two years.
"Take care of yourself," Kasai nodded towards him. He didn't need to know where he was going. He had received a phone call that day saying that an apartment was arranged for Makoto to stay at. He didn't know the terms of this "gift", but assumed it was for Makoto to remain what he has always been, a nobody.
Makoto waved in response and grabbed for the knob. He was halfway out the door when Kasai found himself speaking, but completely unaware about what he was saying.
"Feel free to call, Makoto, if you need anything, I mean." He stumbled over his words like some rookie, but unlike work, he had no rule book to fall back on here. "We're…family, after all."
Makoto remained still, his back to him. Looking at him, at his height, as his shape, Kasai couldn't help but think, he really does look like his father. I wonder…if he hates that.
"Thank you, Kasai-san, but I'll be fine." And with that said, Makoto stepped though the door. All he left in the apartment was a room so clean, it looked like no one had lived there, and these words that seemed to echo with the closing of the door.
"It's not a family that I want."
Kasai stood in the entranceway and listened as his nephew trudged down the hall. He remained there for a while, and as he stood, he listened to the quiet, to the silence that only a person alone could make. After what felt like a long time, he turned away from the door and headed down the hall to the kitchen and to the six-pack of beer that was in the fridge.
"I wonder, kid…I wonder what the hell you want."
He didn't know if he'd ever see Makoto again although a part of him believed he'd stumble upon him somewhere, because no matter how much the boy acted like a nobody, he still had a knack for winding up in noticeable places. He imagined he'd see him lost in the smoke of some game parlor, or maybe somewhere in the back streets of Chinatown. A dark part of his mind, the part he tried to keep locked at work, the part he tried to forget when he went home, believed he might find him in that back street, limp, and gone, the winner of too many games, or taken down by the hand of some random staff member of his father's. No one was more surprised to see that Makoto slipped past all these expectations and became in one day's time, the head of the Izumo gang's youth division.
"I saw some kid, looked like your nephew, working over in Sanada's section of town. You wouldn't believe this, Kasai, but I think he was…collecting," one of his coworkers told him as he was pouring coffee. He said it like it was some secret, but Kasai knew full well that the mob was no secret to the police, nor was the way they worked. He wondered if this was the time he was supposed to mumble some excuse or grow red with the embarrassment that only family can bring upon you. But he didn't do either because families weren't his thing.
"I know," he said, bringing the cup up to his lips, mixing the bitterness of the coffee with the taste of the cigarettes that never fully left his mouth.
And time to time, he did stumble into Makoto, and as the case on that new drug continued, he stumbled into him more. Kasai wasn't going to lecture him about what not to do, or who not to work for. It was like his own crooked-cop, pack-and-a-half day habit stopped him from saying anything that a "normal" uncle might say. Instead he only left the Izumo's Group's Youth Division Head with a wave and a warning under his breath.
"Watch out for that Sanada. He's rotten right through."
He didn't even know if that little bit of advice was worth saying. He thought he was watching his nephew spiral out, cutting all ties not just to the past, like his mother had years before, but to everything around him. Unlike her, it seemed like the kid didn't even care if he lived or died. Yet for some reason he kept plugging away- in the gang, in the mahjong parlors- moving in a direction that Kasai couldn't see, but still going all the same.
"It's like…" He sat back in the seat of his patrol car, his partner, Araki, sitting next to him. "He's looking for something. And that's the only reason why he keeps going."
"Something? Like what?" Araki asked. He was still noticeably confused about the relationship Kasai had with this tall kid who had been sitting in the station just hours before.
"I don't know, but everything else is just there to keep him busy until he finds it." He stared out onto the street. He was tired from that day. The latest corpse just piled on top of the growing mountain of questions linked to this new drug…this WA. And he didn't know if his blood connection to the Izumo gang would help with it, but it was worth a shot.
"But, Kasai-san, was it right to tell him all about the case?" Araki hid none of his suspicions towards Makoto.
"Ah, hell, he knew all the info we gave him anyway." He shrugged. "Who knows, he might even know more than us. I got a hunch though…while he's doing all that looking, for whatever the hell he's looking for, maybe he'll find something that we can use." He tapped his ashes outside the car and watched the grey sky darken into night. "…And maybe, maybe he'll find what he really wants."
He had no idea though on that day, as he sat in the car, letting the smoke drift out through the window, letting the cold winter air come in, how right his hunch was.
tbc-
