Prologue – An Even Bigger Fool's Journey I
"Good evening! I'm a devoted public servant from the Shinjuku Police Department just down the road – I've notice that you're walking around very late at night without any supervision from an adult, and I'm sure you're aware that this is an incredibly dangerous part of town. Might I ask, how far away from your residences are we right now? Do you need any assistance in getting home? I'd be delighted to help you both make arrangements and I can also recommend you to another officer that will be happy to help drive you if need be. The Shinjuku Police Department is always looking to help all those in need and maintain the peace."
20XX. Shinjuku's shopping district, 23:40. The two teenagers on the sidewalk in front of him stare at him incredulously, as he orates in the street just in front of them. His heart in the right place, but his thin form, clammy hands and his swept back hair clinging to his forehead from sweat steering him off course right from the start.
"Oh, I'm sorry, did I come on too strong just now? Oh, I have to apologize, I'm new to this beat, you see, and I'm not that familiar with what you boys are used to hearing. I know that Mizunashi-san used to be in this position before I got here, so if there's anything he used to say or do to make things a lot clearer for you, please don't hesitate to let me know, and I'll adopt them into our service going forward -"
"Hey, look, you need to chill out."
"Yeah, this whole thing you're doin' right now? It's weird as fuck."
"Hey, is this the guy your brother was talking about? The autismo dude?"
"I think it is. Let's just get going."
The two boys try to move past him, but he shuffles himself onto the sidewalk and right in their way. This time he smiles at them with a toothy, million dollar smile, the value of which rapidly dropping as the bags under his eyes betraying the sheer amount of effort he's putting in to not seem nervous.
"Haha, come on now, we don't need to argue about it like this. It's not safe for kids your age to be out this late at night, and curfew's in just a few minutes-"
"Just get lost, will you?"
"Do you wanna get smacked with a harassment claim? Then get the hell out of our way." One of the boys is holding a soft drink, which he throws at him.
His face caked with the damp, sugary concoction, he just goes on smiling.
A third boy joins them. "The hell is going on here?"
"Sorry, we got stopped by this fuckin' clown."
"Officer Nijima, these boys aren't doing anything wrong I swear. Now can we all just get going?"
"I understand that you're upset, but the Shinjuku Police Department always looks to maintain the best interests of everyone in our beloved ward -"
"You don't talk to your wife like this, do you?"
"I heard he's not even married. Yeah, didn't his girl cheat on him last year or something? This other dude got her pregnant."
The other boys start to snicker. "Holy shit, I didn't know it was that bad. The fuck kind of man are you, anyway?"
"Heehee, come now, let's not indulge ourselves in silly rumors. I'll have you know that I'm engaged, actually -"
"Rumors? I heard the reason why you're stuck here at all is because you got into a fight with the dude and lost like a little bitch."
"Woah, so this sick fuck's gonna raise the other guy's kid for him?!"
"How the hell does a freak like this have a job on the force?"
"Don't you know anything? His mom's got all this pull with the MPD."
"Ahh, so he didn't even get the job in the first fuckin' place." The boy spits on his shoes. "You're everything that's wrong with this city, you know?"
"But really, how the hell are we gonna get rid of this guy? By the time he fucks off on his own it's gonna be too late."
"Hey, you think he'd actually stop you if you tried to take a piss on him or something?"
"It can't hurt to find out. It's not like anyone is gonna come along and help him out."
He wraps his bony hands around the boy's throat and crushes it with ease. The other two start screaming at the top of their lungs. He shoots one of them through the stomach, and grabs hold of the other one as he tries to run away. He bashes his face against the window pane of the closed store just behind them over and over again until the glass shatters and the boy's face is full of glass shards. He drops the boy, whose neck collides with the metallic window trimming and snaps. The boy with a bullet in his stomach tries to crawl way, but marching over to him, he breaks both of his kneecaps with nothing but the sheer force of stomping on him repeatedly. The boy squirms on his back, begging for mercy.
Then he snaps back to reality, in which the smell of ammonia cuts through the air, and he's still standing there, smiling.
"Holy shit, he's really just standing there."
"Hey, make sure you don't miss, alright? Any of that lands on the sidewalk and that's defecating in public, right Officer Nijima?"
The moon is full tonight. He takes solace in the moon.
"God damn, can't imagine a bigger cuck than a policeman."
The moon shines down, like a light hanging from the ceiling.
"Take away all their fancy toys and make 'em play by the actual rules and you see just how little they actually get done."
"Hey, I think he broke down. Let's just get going."
"Fuck that, I need another drink and I don't have any cash on me. Let's see… Holy fuck! There's almost nothing in here!"
"Hey, the fuck are you doing?"
"Alright, yeah, don't worry, I'm not taking any of this dude's money. See how nice we are, Officer Nijima? You're gonna need every yen you can keep your mitts on for your wife's son, right?"
The three of them head off into the night, and he's left there.
He practices on his reflection in the window pane, still whole and undamaged.
The pane of glass – just like the moon. Vibrant, beautiful, but perpetually on the verge of shattering.
Saito Nijima loves the moon, his constant companion.
Many years ago, ruin came for the people of Tokyo, and while that ruin was adverted by the collective will of many, in the end, all things tarnish overtime if left unattended. Social constructs are no different – and perhaps that's the point. Once these people desired freedom from having to choose for themselves – but now the right to decide is all they have, and at the end of the day, what everyone wants most is for someone else to carry the weight of their decisions for them.
Being a police officer is the greatest honor society offers. An officer of the law adheres to his beat with everything he has, and his role takes him all across the prefecture – an officer's beat can cover up to five square miles. An officer is expected each and every day to respond to incident reports relayed to them by the administration, as well as tend to what was defined as basic public service. An officer is expected to tend to damaged infrastructure, report structural failures of public property to the proper channels, and to an extent they are expected to address littering in designated public areas including parks. An officer is not to intervene in any incident outside their beat unless explicitly ordered to by an operator, of which there were dozens stationed all over the country that each and every day pass judgment on incidents purely based on the information relayed to them by the officer or civilian that reports it.
Above all other things, the single critical failure of human beings is the lack of foresight for problems occurring after one's lifetime. And this failure, above all others, is the one that will inevitably lead to extinction.
In 20XX, where even mankind's own mortality is on the brink of having an answer, this fatal flaw has already brought many walks of life to inglorious ends, and those who are left to deal with the mistakes of their predecessors want nothing more than to offload the blame they've been saddled with on to someone else. And when their inadequacies one day bear the same rotten fruit as those before them, their nearsightedness passes on to the next generation.
At the end of this road is nothing. A fruitless path that will yield nothing, with only inescapable failure marking its length.
Such was the fate of this nation, and the counter force tasked with protecting it. Prefecture by prefecture things began to slip away as the years droned on, as the Diet struggled ceaselessly to find a prime minister that could hold the office of their own volition for more than a year, and a governor for Tokyo that could lead by example. Jobs were lost, basic amenities soon became scarce and expensive, social unrest was rampant, snap elections were held as the government disbanded at the prefectural level thrice over.
Under Governor Shirogane of Tokyo, widespread government reform plans began to take shape – plans that would restore the sanctity of the establishment while ensuring that the general population could be provided for. These plans, formulated by complete novices that Shirogane stacked the cabinet with himself, collapsed under their own weight with each sweeping clause gutting the independence of businesses across the country. The Shirogane establishment saw the revenue streams elected officials abused as the root of the problem and looked to desecrate one government contract after the next.
What ensued was the worst economic crash since the eighties – one that ended in prefecture wide massacres, one that after enough time passed law enforcement took into its own hands. Governor Shirogane's death at the hands of an active duty police officer set the stage for society's ever prevalent coping mechanism with problems it failed to solve when it should have – new laws, laws that would surely restore faith in public service.
Waves of legislature aimed at reducing the open-ended capacity law enforcement was allowed to operate in, but without preventing them from making arrests – the best of both worlds, captured in a hundred and fifty pages of bold type.
Saito Nijima is just a product of the world that ensued, built on the reactionary policies of its incompetent leadership – an officer of the law that cannot protect in the same capacity that he can serve, even if just to protect himself.
It's not his fault.
None of it is his fault.
But here he is, the cross on his back.
This is how it should be. Don't be a fool.
"You could've at least told them to stop."
When he gets home the topic of conversation for the night settles in pretty quickly. He'd gotten himself cleaned up at the station, but a notice was sent to his residence that he would be home outside his regular hours due to an incident he was involved in. Since those calls never go out with any context it's now 01:50 in the morning, but Saito returns home to his lovely fiancée wide awake and thoroughly distressed though she was trying not to show it.
"I didn't want to give them the pleasure."
"You know if they locked you up for a little bit because you defended yourself, I really wouldn't mind."
"The landlord probably would, though. And besides, I'm not getting reprimanded over a bunch of kids screwing around."
"Still, you should've at least been allowed to protect yourself."
"You know how this goes by now."
"I do, but that doesn't make it right. The wives of the other officers feel the same way, you know. And those men've been around a lot longer."
"Violence wouldn't have helped solve the problems with any of those boys."
"It might've saved your life if things got any worse, though. What if they decided to rob you? Or worse?"
"Then I would've been able to arrest them for attempted theft. Or worse. But they didn't – in fact, they caught themselves before things got any worse. That means a lot, you know." She's not satisfied with that answer, but all he can do is rub her shoulders and reassure her the best he can. "My job is to protect and serve. If I had struck any one of those boys tonight, they would've lashed out even harder, god forbid at someone else. If becoming the focus of their ire keeps them from doing the same thing to other people, I don't have any problems carrying that weight. That's the only way this country's gonna run right."
No matter what, people need to be able to look to a higher authority, even if not always with admiration or respect. In so few words, that is what Saito Nijima believed.
"Oh, don't give me that model policeman talk..." She groans, but she's smiling.
"But enough about my day – what I want to know is what the best most perfect angelic creature in the whole world was up to today. And I will not accept 'shopping' as an answer."
"Kunikazu's being sworn in or something tomorrow morning. They're going to stand him up in front of the whole board and give him control of the whole company. Almost like he was born to it, or something."
"You should go see him."
"I don't think he wants anything to do with me by now."
"Maybe he doesn't. But at least he'll know that you're not just going to curl up in a corner and die. That's gotta count for something. It might even make him honest."
"What a lovely picture. I think I might draw that up and send it to him." She takes on a pensive look for a few moments. "Hey, Sacchi, do I… Do I dress kind of obnoxiously?" He knows right away that she was trying to ask him something else but refrained. Even so he plays along.
"You dress like a mother hard at work preparing the best childhood possible for her child. The fact you have better clothes than the other mothers is a slight against them, not you."
"And I don't look like I'm some kind of street urchin?"
"Maho Okumura – what could compel anyone on this earth to think that you look anything like that? And who are they so I can endeavor to find the most appropriate death for them imaginable?" He's smiling like an idiot to hide that he's upset. Though with her it wasn't really hiding. He knows that she hates shouting and screaming, not that he really has it in him for either.
"Someone's daughter told me that my hair looks awful today, and the woman looking after her gave me a look like she agreed. Maybe I should style it after mother's."
"Your mother shows way too much skin."
"Dear, virtually anyone in the whole world besides me would've heard what you said just now and taken that in a very different direction from what you intended."
"Not true." He lightly touches at the ever-growing bump in her stomach. "We're both loud enough that Kiana's probably gotten this all figured out by now. Not much longer – soon she'll be correcting me at every turn so you won't have to anymore."
"Of course. Why else would we be having a baby?" He kisses her then, trying his hardest to get her to move on to talking about something else, of course she gets too wrapped up in the moment, and circling him with her arms deepens the kiss even further.
Eventually they have to break off for air, much to her disappointment. This is the kind of woman Maho Okumura is. Not quite all together, but deeply in love.
"Oh no. We're not dropping this yet. It's getting worse and worse out there every day and you know it." He sighs as she moves into the kitchen, returning with what looks like a magazine that she starts flipping through. "I'm not having you come home with another broken leg."
"How many times have I told you that was just bad luck?"
"Bad luck will saddle you with a broken neck one of these days at the rate you're going." He looks at the advertisement she points to as she forces him to take the magazine. "They're giving lessons at that old shrine, the one behind the strip mall in Kichijoji. You should go. You can't just go out there every night armed with nothing."
Off duty officers are not allowed to carry firearms and are in no circumstances allowed to part with their beat without the requisition of their provisioned firearm to one of the many police stations throughout. And, under no circumstance, is an officer allowed to be in possession of a firearm past 22:00 JST. Any officer that doesn't comply with this on a nightly basis is reprimanded, and continued offenses can result in the loss of their post.
Officers are allowed to carry model guns on their persons to create the illusion that they are armed late at night, but as a result of that, many officers like Saito whose beats take them out sometimes into the early hours of the morning undergo more than just basic training. Many take up aikido, which is generally the most acceptable socially, and further is ideal for an officer of the law that is required to act within a certain margin of necessary force at all times when lethal force is not involved – and this was an advert for aikido lessons being offered for free for the next six months.
Saito however was never any good at aikido. And right now he just didn't have the muscle mass for it.
But Maho still pushes him, every day. And really – that aggressiveness is in her blood. The last time Maho met with the Okumura family, there was apparently rather animated speculation over the idea that she was chasing after her mother's will, which to date remains unwritten. His girl was a bit of a loose cannon, and an altercation following those allegations that he had to drive her home from had ensued, but hearing something like that had hurt her deeply, and it was something that kept her from seeking the aid of the Okumura even now. But that didn't stop her from trying to fight her way out of every situation. It was one of her stronger points.
Once Kiana was born, he was going to have no choice – he was going to have to go to his mother, which is the last thing he wanted to do. Continuing to live like this wasn't going to be feasible with a third resident – but for the two of them, there was no hesitation. They would bring her into the world, and no matter what, they would not abandon her.
And that's why, no matter what -
His center must hold. He must be the police officer that the city wants – that his family needs. There's simply no other way.
He comes home from another rancid evening. There's a huge gash in his neck from where a dog had bitten him. He has already stopped most of the bleeding, but the wound hasn't been dressed. The police station at the far end of his beat is light on first aid, but Maho has a kit at home that she uses to patch him up.
"I hope it was a pitbull. Or my aunt."
"Why?"
"Because then I wouldn't feel so bad about you kicking its ass."
"Ah, okay."
"Okay? Is that it? Well? Did you kick it's ass or not?"
"It was a dog. Of course I didn't. And it was a husky that looked like it hadn't eaten in days, not a pitbull. I took it to the animal shelter."
"That's so sad. Any idea who the owner was?"
"Nope, he didn't have a collar. The owner probably didn't want anyone bringing him back."
"Hey, what would happen if you took a dog to trial?"
"I'm not sure. They'd might have to bring in a judge from Nagano to figure that one out."
"I hope he finds a nice family, then."
"I'm sure he will. People love big dogs like that."
"You know, maybe if no one takes him in a few days..."
"We're having a baby, Maho. I don't doubt he'll make a great pet one day, but the kind of healing he has to go through can take years."
"Yeah, I know. Sorry. I wasn't thinking. Like usual."
"Come on, don't be like that. I know you just wanted to make him happy."
Just then the microwave goes off.
"Oh, that's dinner."
"I might've guessed."
She comes back into the room with two plates and what looked like rice patties sitting on top of them, two each. He bites into one of his. It's soft to the bite, but it's definitely sorely lacking in taste, especially since there was supposedly meat on the inside. Maybe they'll put some soy sauce on them next time.
"It's amazing how cheap this stuff is. Wish you didn't have to watch it 'grow' like that, though. Kind of kills your appetite."
"Stuff from Nakajima Station sells through fast. Pretty surprised you managed to pick them up this late on a Friday."
"Oh, is that where these came from?" She frowns a little bit.
"All our dehydrated food does – don't make that face. Using a space station as a production line gets around a lot of the red tape farmers have to go through, and it's been keeping the food shortages from getting out of hand."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously. Didn't your mom make that investment herself? I doubt she would've made a call like that unless she knew what she was doing."
He wasn't making it up, either. Resources that came from Nakajima Station and its sister Shirasagi Station were, above all else, extraordinarily cheap and very fit for their current budget. While sending materials out into space proved to be as expensive as ever, the rate at which Nakajima Station could send produce back helped keep food prices under control.
Japan had been on a long-term upswing in birthrate – Dehydrated foods and drinking water prepared on Nakajima Station are staples of the current market, and without them, the supply chain would break easily. Shirasagi Station was a much smaller unit, but no less critical with its use as a satellite array to oversee Nakajima Station's facilities and monitor activity from other countries – and in its application for the ID tagging of government equipment, including his own. It was by far the Okumura Group's crowning investment, one that her mother had received a Nobel Peace Prize for not just her role as an investor, but for her role in the establishment of the space program's long term application for the stations.
It's something Maho should be happy about.
But she's never smiling. He knows she still loves her mother. He knows that she doesn't blame her for anything. But even then, it's just not enough.
"...Right." She gets up for a moment and heads back towards the microwave to clean out the plate cover. She goes at it with a lump of wet paper towel, struggling for a few moments before she goes digging through the cabinets for the dish soap in frustration. She runs the cover under the sink, a buttery film clinging to her fingers as she washes it out. She runs her own hands under the faucet washing off as much of it as she can. As she does so he watches her for a time before taking his uneaten rice patty and dropping it on her plate, next to the one that she had left.
When she comes back over, she wordlessly picks it up and puts it right back on his plate before she starts eating into her second patty.
"So always remember, when you're changing a light like this, you've always gotta use the electrical tape. The bigwigs went ahead decided to cut the number of substations in half and build out the ones that were left, but the power grid's not really built for that, so we have to worry about storm surges and the like a lot more than we used to. These things spark all the time, and until we can get a proper replacement, we've gotta make sure we don't tape these in with anything flammable."
"Hey, no offense Officer Nijima, but… Can we move on to the next street?" The even younger officer stands just below him, keeping the flimsy stepladder they have to work with steady, while Saito works on the damaged street light above them. "This is that avenue where those yakuza kids hang out, right?"
"And if we see them, we'll arrest them."
"Seriously? They'll tear us apart."
"I wouldn't be so sure. Organized crime isn't what it used to be, that's for sure – guns are really hard to come by, even on the black market."
"We're having just as much trouble there, and that doesn't stop them from sticking a knife in our backs."
"Tell me something – have you been checking the street crime statistics lately?"
"I can't say I have." The young man looks over his shoulder nervously.
"Police fatalities have been down ninety-percent in the last five years. That remaining ten-percent is comprised of accidents. Why do you think that is?"
"I… I hadn't heard of anything like that, sir. I don't know."
"It's because they're afraid."
"Afraid of us?"
"They're afraid of what'll happen if they try. How well do you remember the Red Crossing?"
"I was in high school. Some of my classmates died on the way home from school."
"In the scramble, or at the station?"
"They were just trying to take the same train they always did. I reckon they weren't expecting it to blow up."
"Those massacres set the score. Today's criminal only turned out the way they have because their parents are stuck in jail with no chance for parole. It made them who they are, and these days, everyone's got way too much to lose, even if they're a bum living on the streets. There's a level of helplessness in that, something that no one can ever shake off, no matter where they're from. Even the worst scum on these streets will hesitate before trying to injure an officer. So don't worry!" He smiles at the younger man as he finishes taping up the replacement light.
Miserable Grengar. For a second Saito thinks he hears someone speak. But there's no one around besides the two of them.
About a week later, that younger officer is trapped in a sinkhole on his drive home from the police station. It takes three hours before a properly equipped team of other police officers, of which Saito is included, arrives on the scene to help him. When they extract him from the rubble, he has died from suffocation. The street is closed off for over a month while negotiations are made with an external contractor to conduct repairs. Most of the Shinjuku police officers are asked to dock a portion of their pay in order to contribute to the funds needed to pay for them.
The next time Saito has to go out and replace a streetlight, the stepladder he uses cannot hold his weight. He falls from about seven feet in the air and breaks his right leg.
"Say ahh."
"No."
"I'm telling you, say ahh, dammit."
"I get you want to practice for Kiana, but this is not the way to go about it."
"Oh, alright." She sighs in defeat before setting the bowl of soup on the nightstand and plopping herself down on the bed right next to him, taking care not to disturb his leg in the sling. They'd gotten the hospital to agree to letting them take some of the equipment needed to treat his leg home temporarily, so that he didn't have to spend all his time in the hospital. They needed the hospital space more than they needed the equipment, after all. "It's like you want to suck all the fun out of being stuck in bed. It's ridiculous."
"You know we can't because you're pregnant."
"Yeah, but still."
"Wait, you haven't been watching those pregnancy videos again, have you?"
She grins at him. "If you're going to accuse me of something, just come out and say it. 'Have you been going online and watching pregnant women having sex again? Dearest wife slash fiancée in the whole world?'"
"Just don't think we're trying any of that."
"Of course not. It's probably actually horrifying." She rolls onto her side and pokes at him. "Though while you're like this, it's not like you could stop me, right?"
"I'm putting all my faith in your sense of well-being here."
"Heehee, now that's a mistake."
"I'm putting all my faith and a guaranteed unlimited Odaiba buffet after Kiana is born in your sense of well-being, then."
"Alright, that's a deal. But I want to go to the one in Shibuya instead."
"That one's twice as expensive."
"I don't see how that makes any difference."
"Alright, fine." With that she kisses him quickly before getting out of bed and wandering off into the kitchen, leaving the soup out of his reach by accident. He sighs.
In truth, Saito's injury had done much more than set him back on his payroll. Not only was his beat nearly in shambles by the time he returned to it, but it left him in a place where the insurance he had wasn't enough to cover even just the time he'd spent in the hospital before being sent home. Hospitals always charged an arm and a leg, but with how difficult it was to get a hold of prescription-only drugs, the amount of money a hospital visit costs was only on the rise.
He didn't have much of a choice in the matter, so he had to make his visit earlier than planned.
That evening, after his beat, he calls Maho from the precinct and lets her know that he'll be very late. With that, he drags himself over to Shinjuku Station and takes the train bound for Shibuya. Saito's old beat actually took him through Shibuya, in order to make up for how one of the officers that usually patrolled the area at the time was injured through a pitfall in an arrangement that lasted almost six months.
But even outside of that, he knows the area very well. One way or another this city has been his home all his life. He knows nothing else. He can't even dream of anything else.
No. He can't think about that, not tonight. Tonight isn't really about him, so much as it's about his fiancee and, of course, his mother.
His mother's apartment complex was actually not very far from Shibuya's station square. He could walk the distance without issue, though most people would probably take a taxi to get there. The night is as vibrant as always – people are always up until dawn the next day. In the past you could stumble upon the Shibuya scramble without so much as a soul around – but that time has long since passed, and there are simply too many people around to warrant even thinking of such a thing. But of course the moon is right there too. All one had to do was look up – and it's like nothing had changed. The moon is the same. The moon is constant. A lot of people could appreciate that. But mostly it was just him.
The roads around his destination however are quiet. It wasn't all too likely for there to be any kind of commotion this close to a major thoroughfare, making the area ideal for someone trying to keep to themselves.
She lives on the twentieth floor, five from the top of the building. It's always a bit of a hike since the elevator from the bottom only makes it to the fifteenth. Naturally, he finds the door unlocked.
"How's your leg? I heard about what happened."
"It still hurts, but it'll do. It's bad enough no one was able to fill in on the beat for as long as I was out."
"Must've been even worse for Maho."
"How does this end up being a trend with you women? She's pregnant, for god's sake."
"Is that supposed to stop you?"
"Of course it is!"
"Hmm… You definitely didn't learn that from me. That's gotta be Sojiro talking. Sorry it was up to him to give you the talk. I bet he never even showed you any girl-on-girl."
"I don't know who's teasing is worse – hers or yours. And don't drag Master into it either."
His mother had just stepped out of the shower and was wearing nothing but a towel. She'd sat herself down on the couch next to him, but he'd inched himself towards the far end away from her. From the moment he'd done that, he'd brought this upon himself.
"I'm glad you stopped by, though." She drinks from a tea can she'd pulled out of the refrigerator stuffed in the corner of the apartment and opened, before setting it down on the otherwise barren snack table just in front of them. "I haven't gotten to sit down and talk to anyone like this in awhile."
"The district attorney still giving you problems?"
"We put him away last month. No – the acting governor's cutting a deal for infrastructure. That sinkhole you pulled that young man out of – it was only fully closed up about a month ago."
"I'd heard something like that, yeah."
"The plan's popular with the voters, and with the cabinet for what that's worth, but he doesn't have even half the money he's agreeing to fork over. One of his cutouts walked into my office the other day demanding we cut Gifu Prefecture out of the redevelopment stipend for next year. I've just been trying to make sure that doesn't actually happen."
"Doesn't budgeting for next year have to be done in two weeks?"
"And it's gonna have to be two weeks that I'll be keeping him at bay."
"Maybe it's for the best. The prefectural police in Gifu spend a decade fleecing money from the union, right?"
"That's exactly why they need the money now, so we can send our own detectives in to clean things up over there. Back when I was still a student there were all kinds of horror stories coming out of Gifu. Child killings during the elections, the governor getting iced by his ward, the crime wave that happened after – they never really recovered from any of that, and other places are much the same way. We've got it pretty good in Tokyo, believe it or not."
"I'm not sure if I trust the detectives here any more that I would out west."
"You trust me though, right?"
"Well, sure."
"What, is that all I get from my own son?" She smiles at him taking another sip of her drink. "You've got to work with what you've got, and I've got to work with what I've got. If I stacked our offices here with any more of my own people, they'd be more like a stack of cards at that point. One scandal away from all falling down."
"Okumura can help."
She takes another sip of her drink. "Well, if you were interested in other men, and about to marry the new head of the family, they might." He doesn't respond very well to that one. "Oh come on. Don't look at me like that. You know Haru won't talk to me about it. Not after what happened."
"But the Red Crossing wasn't her fault."
"You know what her daughter's like, don't you? Her mom's the same way. I'm lucky she still talks to me at all."
"It wasn't your fault, either."
"That's sweet of you, but someone's got to take responsibility for these things, one way or another."
"And it wasn't your fault. Okumura-san didn't plant the bombs on the train, you didn't start cutting up everyone in the 107 building with a hatchet."
"We had big plans for this city, you know. Haru, my sister, me, your father too. I just hope by the time I hit fifty it won't all have been for nothing."
"You just said it yourself, right? We have it better here than many others do. One way or another, I can go outside dressed in my uniform and not have to fear of my life. I can watch Maho walk out the front door in the morning and not have to think about her not coming home that night. That can't have been for nothing."
"Hmm…" She has a pensive look on her face as she stares at her tea can, like she doesn't really agree. But a moment later she looks back up at him, a scheming smile on her face. "Alright, now you've gotta give me a hug."
"Not while you're dressed like that."
She frowns, still inching closer to him. "You never used to complain like this before. In fact, I remember when you used to want me to give you hugs all the time. Remember when you were six years old, you came running into one of my meetings in tears, and I had to pick you up in front of the district attorney, his boss, my boss -"
"I don't remember you being half-naked in that board room -"
It's too late. She's too close. She throws her arms around him before he can escape, tucking his head under her neck. She's pressing up right against him – it wouldn't be so damn weird if she didn't still look so young.
She holds him like that for awhile. "Thank you. I'm glad I've got you on my side."
"Yeah, yeah, alright." He pats her on the back, right where her towel meets her bare skin. Also not helping.
After a few moments of silence, she speaks again, very softly. "I can get you five hundred grand. That should be enough to get you through to the new year. But every yen's gotta count – and don't forget about the hospital bills. Yours and the baby's. A quarter of that money's going to have to go there, no exceptions."
"How the hell are you gonna pay for this apartment, then?"
"I'll worry about that. But you've gotta stay here with me tonight, okay?"
He nods. "But you really have to change into some clothes. You're going to get sick if you just lounge around like this all night."
"Ahh, such a good boy." She squeezes him tighter. "Almost thirty, and you're still so worried about your mother."
"I'm not even twenty-five yet."
"Really? Maybe I'm thinking of my other son then."
"That's an even worse joke."
She finally lets him go, letting him crack his neck before leaning against his shoulder and closing her eyes. He's not sure what she's thinking of in that moment, maybe she's recalling some far off memory, maybe she's trying to pretend that she's with his father right now instead of him.
"Saito." She speaks his name with a soft sigh.
"What?"
"You really don't have anything in common with your dad." Well that certainly answered that question.
"That's nice to know."
"The two of you would've gotten into fights all the time. I would've always had to be the mediator. It would've been terrible."
"That's also nice to know."
"I would've loved that, though."
"I know, mom." He rests his hand on her shoulder.
The two of them stay there, just like that.
Even if Kiana was born and she hated him – even if she hated what he was, even if she hated what the Nijima family stood for, that would be okay. He would still love her no matter what. All that matters is that she gets to live the life that she wants. And the world they lived in, ever on the brink of something great and terrible happening – it was his responsibility, as an officer and as a father, to make it work.
This world would continue. This country would last.
It must.
Because his child would be born into it.
I may vomit.