notes: Written in one sitting on a stray image of rituals in an alleyway—which isn't nearly as cool or sexy as it sounds, and in fact I'm pretty sure there are no pairings in this at all unless you squint. For that, I apologise. In actuality I have no idea when this fandom took over my life or why I'm subjecting it to my dubious everything.
Come to think of it, I blame one particular person. You know who you are, douchebag.
Anyway. Usual disclaimers apply! K belongs to GoRa, I neither own nor profit from the posting of this story.
possessed by light
"There will be no grave for Suoh Mikoto."
Kusanagi blinks twice. The line of his mouth's still steady. He hasn't shown teeth. "Pardon?"
"The body," Munakata says, "has been burned." His hands fold together; he leans over the bridged fingers and speaks in a resonant voice: smooth and clear, syllables crisped, a precise mainland Japanese accent. The voice, Kusanagi thinks, of a true government official. "In light of the incident with the seventh king, upper management gave the order for the body to be disposed of entirely as a preventative measure. The details of the matter are closed to citizens, however—"
"I understand," Kusanagi says, and he does. Informing him that the files are sealed is a clue as to where Kusanagi might first start asking, if he should want to report. A gift from Munakata.
He's used to taking these from Seri, albeit in much longer exchanges that often result in indignant exits. She has a few things yet to learn from her king, it seems.
A week after the siege on the high school and the island's still a hotbed of investigative activity: Scepter 4 sorting through every student witness account for value, bureaucrats hounding officers and field operatives taking stock of the consequences. Wrecked buildings and bloodied citizens and teenagers in trauma, a forest torn to splinters and ash. It's been a hard week for them—well, it must have been.
Not that there's any tell-tale stubble to shadow Munakata's jaw, or stains dribbled along his sleeves, or wrinkles in the cut of his uniform. Simpler than that: it's in the stiff, collected way he holds himself, harder than usual despite the fact that every advantage has been ceded to him for this meeting. They're standing in the heart of Scepter 4's headquarters at its busiest hour. The screens are lit with reports; boys in blue uniforms come sweeping in and out of the room; even Awashima Seri's standing by, close enough to defend her king without being pulled from her organisational duties. Kusanagi's tended bar since well before he inherited his own; he knows the signs. When a man like Munakata Reisi shows effort, it's because he's already worked himself to the dregs.
So an educated guess would go, anyway; the usual gossip which would have substantiated these observations has fallen off his radar somewhat. A bad move, he reminds himself. What remains of them, the brats and punks and subjects clustering into his bar, need a defense now more than ever. He'll have to drop by to see a couple people this week, chat and remind them of favors owed and secrets shared.
"Still," he says in time, "it seems like something Scepter 4 could have offered. A chance to see the king's cremation. I hope the service wasn't too hasty."
It's the sort of lash that Munakata's used to, playing in government echelons the way he does, and so the mildness of it hits in a way that venom never would have. Behind the glasses, the blue king's eyes fix on him like pins. "Kusanagi Izumo," he says. "Are you aware of how Suoh died?"
"Well, you didn't send us much of any news," Kusanagi answers at once, and he makes his voice easy too—flattens his palms idly against his hips and softens the sling of his shoulders until he's standing like another plaintiff reporting to Scepter 4's office for the defensive their civil rights against supernatural forces. He's never had Mikoto's presence, never wanted the weight of that hanging from his frame for all the world to mark—but he knows manners, and knows how to make ease look insulting.
He adds, "Did you?"
"If I'd thought that the details would have comforted his Clan, I would have passed them along," Munakata says evenly—too even, which is the sort of petty observation Kusanagi's feeling savage enough to savor, if only for a moment. "Are you telling me that you don't know the answer now?"
Does he know? Any response withers on his tongue at once.
It strikes him, almost absurdly as Munakata watches him, that the rich oak framing of Scepter 4's headquarters is quite plain in its own way, too: that their hallways loom a little too heavily to carry their own effect, that the cool taupe of the walls only ages the paneling and the people who stand underneath it and of course he knows, of course he's thought of it, of course he understood as soon as HOMRA's mark sparked and scorched its way from his skin while the island lingered in the distance, silent and unconsumed. Who but Munakata could have done it?
If Kusanagi were another kind of man, someone else—one like Yata, maybe—he might imagine the blade, too, the shine and the steel of it it driving up through the caging bones, a single hard lunge into the heart. (Mikoto, he thinks, wouldn't take a decapitation—and Scepter 4's thin blades could hardly stand to cut the weight of a king's head without their flame behind it.) He might imagine the snow, the red sinking into ash, the puffs of breath; he might think of Mikoto's coat, so casually worn and yet still soft enough to lure Anna to run her fingers down the sleeves before she clasped Mikoto's hand—the coat which had come as Kusanagi's gift the previous winter, and which Mikoto'd almost bothered to care for in his own indulgent way. Mikoto in his dark coat, falling like a shadow through the white.
He might wonder whether Mikoto might have said anything at the last, after all.
"If I could—Kusanagi of HOMRA, did you have something else to say to me?" Munakata says, and abruptly Kusanagi's conscious of himself all over again: his shoes black against the rich carpeting, the air cool around him, standing in the middle of a rival Clan's headquarters and staring at their king.
Idly he scratches at his head, presses his shades up a little more securely. He doesn't bother with the correction, not yet. "You know," he says instead. "I grew up with Mikoto. We were separated maybe for a couple weeks at a time." His hands flatten at his sides, steadying. "But in the end, only one king can really understand another one, right? There's a level of power to you that none of us can reach."
He stops, and Munakata waits for him. It's all the gap he needs.
In a moment, Kusanagi's slammed his hands against the desk. He's distantly aware of the sound as it shocks through the office and every officer turns towards him, and it doesn't matter. Wood bites his palms as he leans forward.
"He still wasn't yours to bury," Kusanagi breathes. The words are smoke and ashes in his teeth, bitterest and most dry. Munakata hasn't flinched—his eyes are clear and steady as he watches Kusanagi right back. "He was our king. To the very end. He was never meant to be—"
"I am well-aware. It was a slight I am grieved to have had to perform." Abruptly Munakata strips off his glasses; his lashes dip, stark and bright as needles as he glances down. "I apologise," he says formally—but Kusanagi only thinks heat, thinks of brightening fingertips, wants to char the words from his throat. He's known concrete things: habits and weights and warmths. His first bottle of sake, shared around a table; Totsuka's skull a hard curve under his fingers as they hid together underneath a windowframe and let their king stand to take the brunt of a half-naked girl's wrath; summer days wandering down a sidewalk with nothing to think of but Mikoto's amicable slouch and the next step. And maybe something of Mikoto had spread a contagion to him after all, because Kusanagi thinks of every impression left and in their wake all he can see are the white, scorchable lines of Munakata's face.
But there's no light under his skin, not now. The brush of cloth against his shoulderblade feels abruptly like a scrape, stung cool and oddly bare. A beat passes. Kusanagi straightens. He reaches back, rolls a shoulder as he works his words over on his tongue.
"Thank you for letting me know," he says at last, and there's nothing left but the words. "Please tell me if any pertinent information gets made public later."
If there had been pity in Munakata's expression then, or sympathy, or gentleness, Kusanagi might have lost it after all. Hurled himself across the desk, maybe, and tried to strangle him, or brain him with a paperweight or set his hair on fire. Because his king is dead, the body lost, and anything to indicate understanding would have been too much. In this, Kusanagi's no better than the rest of the Clan Mikoto gathered: once upon a time, in stranger lands, Suoh Mikoto had been theirs—and there's nothing so private as misery to carry.
But Munakata only bends his head and lets the screens on his laptop alight with five different diagrams. "I'll have a messenger sent to you," he says, and starts to type again.
They hold nothing in the end: no funeral, no wake, not a word. Hard to organise, after all, when their main headquarters comes barred against the idea.
It's the sort of thing Kusanagi would feel guilt for if their circumstances hadn't come prepackaged. Anything that pulls them together now would be too much. There is no Clan without a king, and they're tentative enough, frail enough at the moment to cling to any sort of rallying together as a sign. Kusanagi brought most of them in for Mikoto to test to start with—he knows them all. So he lets them drift in at odd hours, in twos and fours, lets them order their beers and their scotches and their mixed rums, glancing up sharply at any raised voice which might be taken for an order, or a decisive thought—and lets them leave, too, with the same drifting unease. No more, no less.
He cleans their glasses; he asks for their days; he lets the worst of them sleep it off on the sofa as they need. Turning aside all questions of what kind of preparations is his one concession to selfishness. Surely he can have that much.
It isn't as if he doesn't understand.
They pick up their own routine after a fashion. Anna's guided to school by a loving network of well-armed punks with good manners and a wary eye for any little brat who'd dare to cross her; Bandou and Shouhei have taken to competing in pachinko parlors (just for the month, they assure him, and well away from any bankrupcy); Yata's boarding more furiously than ever while the brief clear burst of the season lasts. It makes sense, then, to do his inventory during the daytime, when most of them are busying themselves with outside pursuits.
What he can't anticipate is the brown boot stepping through the door: the coat in a blue furl, the collar starched and white around a thin frame.
"Fushimi?" he says—but the startlement only lasts a moment. This, after all, is the kind of talk he knows: the easy bartender's patter, already steadying on his tongue. "Ah, nice of you to drop in—we haven't seen you here in a long while!"
From the door, Fushimi gives him the sort of look which can only be described as a hairy eyeball: a deeply vexed expression of must you and if only I could tell you to shut the hell up mingling. "So I haven't," he agrees, however, after a moment—and actually steps inside. Kusanagi pauses to watch in wonder. "Don't think about it too much," he adds as he ventures in, muted contempt in tone and step. "I'm sure it's going to continue for a long time."
"Still," Kusanagi says reasonably, pushing the last of his bottles into place, "you must have come in for a reason."
By the time he turns back, Fushimi's already slung a folder down. It skids a little across the counter, and Kusanagi cocks a brow.
"The expected report from Munakata." His disinterested deadpan, as ever, is flawless.
"Is that it...?"
Behind his spectacles, Fushimi's eyes narrow a little. "Along with some reports on the Red Clan's recent activities. He advises you to reign them in before they take on pursuits they won't be able to handle."
His fingers still over the pages. "I'll remind them," Kusanagi agrees. "But you'll have to correct him: there's no Red Clan now."
The noise Fushimi makes is deeply unimpressed. He does, however, cast a glance around the bar. It's an easy catch. Moving aside, Kusanagi passes the cloth over the first faucet. "Yata isn't here," he says.
There's a distinct pause for the moment that Fushimi doesn't speak, and the words he fails to say are as loud as anything. "I wasn't looking for him."
Kusanagi's mouth crooks as he works the shine back into the metal. He doesn't glance up; Fushimi isn't a fool, and in spite of everything, his frame of reference for human reaction is uncanny. "You could talk to him," he says, "you know."
"Aah," Fushimi says, sounding distant. "Is that what you think?"
"Well, you were never really interested in what I thought." He's moved from metal to wood; his hands pass smoothly over the grain. He doesn't need focus for this, but it seems worth trying anyway. Fushimi, after all, is the kind to vanish if looked at for too long—this might actually be one of the longest conversations they've had. "But you're right—I think it's high time one of you did."
"Because he doesn't have anywhere else to run anymore. Isn't that it."
"All right," Kusanagi sighs, and sets his cloth aside. He glances back over the bar—Fushimi's already turned his back, but he hasn't left yet. "I'll say it. Because Yata fights. Just how he lives, right? But he's never really had to fight without you—not before you left. You never really thought he'd tell you that himself—our Yata's too stubborn for things like giving up. But it's been hard on him."
Fushimi's laughter rings thin as knives scraping. "He knows where I've gone, doesn't he? He can find me."
Kusanagi says, "Does he know?"
Silence. Fushimi stands like the most absurd tourist in the middle of the room, stranded in his blue coat and the unlikely saber at his hip. His fists are cocked, his shoulders high—and Kusanagi thinks, for a moment, that it might not have been fair to ask after all.
"Fushimi—" he says, and keeps it gentle. "People don't change all that quickly. You can wait, if you want, or you can go after what you need."
"Shut up," Fushimi says, thin and harsh. The words shock through the air.
Kusanagi stops, and in an instant Fushimi's wheeling towards him, so abrupt that his step rattles the chairs. Light scorches off his glasses, and for a moment Kusanagi could swear that he stands like a king. "You know why you're saying these things, don't you?" he calls, wild and fluting. "Aaaa, but doesn't everybody know by now? HOMRA's king was all you had to live for. What good are you now that he's gone?" He flings out an arm, gesturing into the bar's dimness. "This is the best that you can see yourself doing: holding everyone together! Until they're strong enough to walk away from you. You'll let them all drift away, one by one, because you could never serve another king—and that's all they'll be good for now. Scrambling blindly to fit back into the world until they can find someone to serve again."
The last of his words coils into silence. Kusanagi bows his head.
"Sounds familiar," he says, easily.
Fushimi doesn't miss the sling. He scoffs. "I know what I want—and I want it for myself. Do you think you could say the same?"
It's a fair question, if not one that Fushimi wants an answer to. The point in that kind of remark's always the sting. He remembers the way Fushimi had looked at Mikoto, towards the end. "We'll see, I suppose," he says. All the same, he cocks his head. "Something else for you?"
He sees Fushimi's eyes flick over him, sees the tension unwind from his bones, the saber dangling loose from his belt again. Of course—it was only a momentary insult. In the grand scheme of things, Kusanagi's of no consequence to him at all, his words scarcely more so. And yet—once upon a time, this blue-swathed boy had been one of theirs too.
For a moment, Kusanagi could almost be sorry.
"No," Fushimi says. "I don't need anything here."
He turns on his heel and strides away; the bells rattle the door shut behind him.
If Kusanagi knows anything about himself, it's this: that he's always served. Just as a friend at first—just because Mikoto had needed it, those little pushes, that reminder once in a while to cut his hair and act a person, a glass buffer between the flame and the moth of humankind. These things snowball, Kusanagi understands, and so it's burned itself down to this single truth: he's never not served. And, here and now, it seems the only clear language left.
Which isn't completely true. He isn't so old as that. He could drink; he could go side-eye punks with Kamamoto—he's a little old for that kind of stance, but a baseball bat works wonders as far as advantages go. He's seen Yata fight, after all; he's seen them all fight. He could change, yet, to go with them.
He couldn't.
He works, instead, until the bar's regular closing time: flips the sign, washes out every glass and leaves them to dry, dusts and cleans what needs a little polishing, sets the tables for the next day. The ground can't swallow everything, and personally, Kusanagi's grimly set on keeping his bar well out of any untimely foreclosures. So it goes: all the usual routines, the expected for a precious old place.
Then he gathers supplies and heads out into the alleyway.
The wind rattles brittle around him, rustling up his sleeves and through his collar in a shudder pulled straight from the cold. Kusanagi grimaces, feeling the cold sink into his spine. He pulls his collar a little tighter and tucks himself against the back wall to light his first cigarette.
Ah. This kind's worse than he remembers after all.
He smokes four of them in a row all the same—dragging hard on each until the alley's drowning in grey—before the bitterness catches up with him. He doesn't stop, however; it's too early in the night for that. Instead, Kusanagi lights the fifth with a steady hand and tilts his head up. For a moment, wreathed in a king's old smoke, it isn't the rusted fire escape he's looking at, or the darkened windows, or the faintest trace of stars in the gap between roofs.
For an instant, he breathes.
"You know," he says conversationally, "what you did—afterwards. That was pretty unfair."
Nothing answers.
"Putting us in that kind of position... I meant what I told Munakata, too. Nobody ever had to explain it to you, did they? What a Clan needed—you knew from the start what the duty was. And you took them all in, one by one. All of us. To be our king."
The smoke rolls through his lungs like coals. He exhales. "No," Kusanagi says into the hush. "You were more than that."
A thought startles him, and Kusanagi blinks. Neatly, he taps the ash off of the cigarette's end. "Ah—" he says, and winces slightly as the cigarette smoke twists his throat. "I never asked you for anything, did I? Well—to be fair, I didn't think I had to. You were there, after all. Though I guess you never let me read to you."
He pauses, considering. Between the winter wind and the alley's dimensions, the air ventilates fairly well; the taste's thick on his tongue, but the scent of the cigarette's fading, as if it had emerged on someone else's breath.
"All right," Kusanagi adds, after a moment. "I've got it. Listen just this once, won't you?" He laughs, a little sound; it's torn away by the wind at once. "I won't abuse it."
"They have a tradition in France, did you know? For the royal succession. When the old king died, they would lower his coffin into the royal vault, and have a duke stand over it to watch. As soon as it began to sink, he would say, the king is dead; long live the king! To mark the inheritance, and show that it happened just like that: a king might come and a king might go, but the line would live on. They changed a lot about the burial rites over the centuries—" he pauses, both to exhale smoke and to grimace. "You know I don't really keep up. But that part's always stayed the same."
He leans back against the wall—feels the scrape of brick with some comfort. It's a relatively clean alleyway for a bar. Having so many punks hanging around the bar meant that there was always somebody available to keep the place dusted and the trashcans straight and the drunks chased out after closing time from treating it like their own personal stall. Kusanagi laughs, tucking his hands into his pockets.
"Well," he admits into the silence. "It's not the kind of story you'd like, I know. But I thought it was interesting."
The last of the cigarette's burned to the filter some time during his rambling. He flattens it between thumb and forefinger and lets it drop to stamp it out beneath a heel. The pack's in his palm again almost as an instinct; he notices it only as it smacks against his other palm. The small shock startles him, and he stares. He can still taste the smoke of the previous cigarette curled around his tongue. It's not a flavor he'd have picked for himself—he'd wondered at Mikoto's fondness for it after high school, its cheap, scorched-film taste. There isn't even a hint of spice or flavor to it—it's purely bitter all the way through. No wonder he'd had to go to three stores just to find one.
After a moment, he lets the pack go—watches it tumble to his feet. There he toes it a little, considering, as he pulls the flask from a coat pocket. It's a squat, rounded glass, more jug than bottle, but he breaks the seal with deft fingers and keeps talking.
"This is a Woodford Reserve," he tells the sheaf of cigarettes. "It's good for a bourbon. Popular with Americans especially. You would've liked it—ah, if you hadn't kept sticking to your turkey whiskey. I don't know why they ever drank with you," he adds after a moment. "Your taste was pretty bad, you know? I had a bottle set aside for you one of these days—well, here it is. I couldn't take it, either. You know me." His mouth twists up at the corners. "I've never liked whiskey much."
He pours it out in an easy stream, feeling the ebb in the weight against his wrist. There isn't enough illumination to admire the color; it looks faint, dark as stagnant water, but there's a grace to the arc. A breath rises, catches against the roof of his mouth, and he realises that it's a laugh. With a rough exhale, he stops, leaning a hand against his hip. "Look at me," Kusanagi says, rueful, "standing here, telling you all these things now. I don't want you to think that I'm saying them because they ever mattered to me. If you were here—"
He stops, looking down at the pack. The rich scent stings his nose even through the cold. Kusanagi swallows and tastes warmth. It does look absurd by his foot, a clump of cigarettes damp and glittering with a generous splash of bourbon. In fact, this whole performance really is a wasteful display, he thinks—it's the kind that he'd have banged heads together in any other member of HOMRA.
Hypocrisy's always been a privilege of the old.
"If you were here," he continues all the same, slow but clear, "none of it would."
There seems nothing else to add after that. He caps the bottle before setting it aside, then shuffles a matchbook from one of his pockets. The light he strikes out of the strip smoulders to white, then strangely yellow: a flame too warm to trust, he thinks, and oddly unreal. He pinches the tiny branch for a moment, thoughtfully, turning it over; the flame bobs but doesn't sink.
He drops the match. And maybe it's a miracle after all that the fire catches at once in a hard flare. Light spreads; the coarse smoke wafts up. It startles a breath into his throat, and Kusanagi stumbles back, coughing. But the cigarette pack goes on burning, and he watches as its plastic covering twists away to blacken the cardboard beneath. The taste's an acrid kiss. He stands back, then, to wait. Under night, the weaving of flame under smoke looks like the slow burn of a steadier light, redder than any he's ever known.
"The king is dead," Kusanagi says to the dark, and shuts his eyes.
end