Chapter 3 – The Tiger and the Monkey

Suoh Mikoto was sleeping on his floor. To be precise he was sleeping on a spare futon on his floor. Twenty-four hours ago Reisi would not have been able to stand such unguarded proximity. Now he was just glad that Suoh was alive. Nothing more. Oh, he remembered being consumed with desire for the man and eviscerated by his loss. But all that remained of that turmoil was the knowledge of having passed through it and into the placid harbor of ambivalence. It was a beautiful, crisp morning, the weather forecast promised a warm and partly cloudy day, and Reisi thought he might declare a holiday and spend it basking in everyone's befuddlement at Suoh's resurrection. He would also need to register Mikoto back among the living, reinstate his IDs and finances, and get him a change of clothes.

The object of his scrutiny squinted up at him with one amber eye and scoffed at his cheer resentfully. "Too early," he growled.

"It's six in the morning," Reisi informed him.

"Drop dead," was the response. Clearly, Suoh wasn't keen on sunrises.

"Get up, minion," said Reisi, pushing his luck, and was rewarded for his effrontery with a very creditable lightning bolt to the face.

"Eat fire," grumbled Suoh and burrowed into the blanket.

"An interesting proposition. I have a counter-offer."

Two amber eyes glared up at him from under the pillow and he showed them a cigarette pack, waving it just out of reach.

"Bastard," said Suoh, sitting up in his makeshift bed. "You couldn't have wished me back to life without a nicotine addiction?"

"Ah, but I love you just the way you are."

Suoh peered at him as if he were trying to read fine print on his face. "No," he said. "You don't."

What did he know and how did he know it? Reisi hadn't explained the particulars of how he had revived Mikoto, so how could the man know what he'd traded for the privilege of seeing his morning face?

"I heard you bargaining," Suoh said. "Suoh to live for Suoh to love. Don't panic, I am not going to throw you off a roof."

That was unexpected but gratifying. Suoh was proving to be much more reasonable in his second life. "But what are you going to tell people?" he then added, ruining the moment.

"That you were such an asshole that hell spat you back?"

"Thank you, Reisi," said Suoh. "You say the sweetest things."

"Hold your applause till after breakfast."

He made Suoh breakfast in bed. Not out of any consideration for the man's inability to get out of it before noon, but because he could see Mikoto's growing apprehension at facing a life he hadn't been meant to have. And seeing as he was to blame for Suoh's predicament, he felt that he owed the man some waffles. Not to mention peace of mind, his conscience grumbled at him; if he weren't here you'd still be trying to convince yourself that opening your eyes was worth the effort. But look at you now, prancing about without a care in the world, while the poor idiot you've cobbled back together is fortifying himself with waffle courage to walk out the door.

But Suoh was a brave creature after all and death hadn't deprived him of spirit. He rallied by the time he saw the bottom of his plate and demanded pants. Reisi took particular delight in offering him a whole closet worth of uniforms just to see more of those brilliant lightning bolts go up Suoh's hair, but stopped the man before he set the closet on fire.

By nine o'clock he'd bullied the willful ogre into taking a shower, because being returned from the dead was no good reason to come back smelling like blood and ash, gifted him with a brand new unopened pack of luxury cotton underpants and a pair of socks, stuffed him into jeans and one of his tees, and threw the filthy rags that Suoh had been wearing down the incinerator chute while he wasn't looking. He let the man keep the boots, which he didn't have a replacement for in Suoh's size, and all the jewelry, which probably held sentimental value.

Shockingly, the former Red King didn't make a fuss. He had emerged from the shower naked and smelling of vetiver, dripped all over Reisi's bedroom until provided with a bath towel, dressed himself in the new clothes, and put away the futon, just in time to clash with Fushimi, who had come to the residential wing and knocked persistently on the door to Reisi's apartments, because, unless you were sick or dying, sleeping in until nine was degeneracy, so obviously something had to be wrong with his King.

"Please tell me I am seeing things," said Fushimi when Reisi opened the door. "Because all the alternatives I can think of are deeply disturbing."

"Munakata has bought me off a deranged Strain with godlike powers," said Suoh. "If that is what you were thinking, then you're totally correct."

Reisi heaved an exasperated sigh. He knew it was going to be an uphill battle, but did the lunkhead really have to make it more difficult?

"This really is Suoh Mikoto–" he began, only to be interrupted with:

"No, I am not. Suoh Mikoto is dead and burnt to ashes."

"Go on," said Fushimi, folding his arms.

"Fine," said Reisi. "This is an exact copy of Suoh Mikoto, as full of bullshit as the day he died, recorded by the Dresden Slate and reproduced by a new Strain I was investigating."

"The Slate keeps records?" said Fushimi, zeroing in instantly on the shocking news.

"Apparently," said Suoh.

"Prove it," Fushimi demanded. "Prove that you are what he says you are."

"Be careful what you ask for, Saruhiko," said Suoh, wicked little fires dancing first in his eyes then in his hand as he placed his palm just below Fushimi's collarbone, making both of them glow red.

"Fuck you, Suoh," said Fushimi, knocking his hand away. "So, what was death like?"

"Boring. I got to shuffle around and watch all of you trip over your feet."

"What, all of us here?" said Fushimi. "You creep on Seri in the shower or something? I'd have thought you'd be haunting Izumo's bar. Making bottles float and rearranging peanuts into heartfelt messages for Anna, who is King now by the way."

"Couldn't. Couldn't touch anything, feel anything, couldn't even go where I wanted to go, see whom I wanted to see. And doesn't that sound like a fun afterlife to look forward to?"

Why hadn't he bothered to ask Suoh the same question, wondered Reisi. He had assumed that the Slate had simply stored the Red King as data, like some sort of eldritch hard disk, but evidently it had left him wandering the world like a hungry ghost without so much as a scrap of autonomy, torn away from both the living and the dead. No wonder he was so unusually talkative. A year of isolation was a year of words Suoh had been unable to say to the person he had died for.

Reisi knew of course that the last loop of Mikoto's death spiral had been the end result of losing a clansman he had loved, but as wrapped up as he'd been in his own obsession, he had avoided the thought. Now that his emotions were no longer obscuring the other man's pain, he could appreciate it as having been nearly equal to his own.

"Sounds pretty crap," retorted Fushimi. "So what then, Boss-Glasses here made a wish to some genie that gifted you back to us like a Christmas fruitcake?"

"Not gifted. I was very expensive."

"Oh?"

"You're lucky Munakata hadn't bartered away your whole mansion with all of you in it, but... the Strain wanted a piece of him instead." Suoh smirked as Fushimi began to inventory Reisi for missing appendages. "Not any of the bits that you can see," he added, probably hoping to steer Fushimi towards an embarrassing assumption.

"Shut up," said Reisi. "Both of you. Let's just get through the day."

As both pits of sarcasm shuttered in unison with an audible click of teeth and Suoh's hair began to sizzle blue again, Fushimi's eyes lit up with a sudden understanding.

"You're Reisi's little bitch now," he gloated. "Suoh Mikoto, the Great and Terrible. He's done and bridled you with the rest of us chumps."

"Try not to look so envious, Saru," Suoh told him, sliding an arm across Reisi's shoulders and flicking red and blue sparks in Fushimi's face. "Or should I call you senpai? After all, you were serving two masters before it was cool. You'll need to up your game now."

"Fushimi," said Reisi, because he was a King and it was his job to keep these things from escalating, "I want you to go notify the rest of Scepter 4 about Suoh as tactfully as I know you can manage. Then, send Anna a message. She will want to see him."

"All of godsdamned HOMRA will want to see him," protested Fushimi.

"Then," continued Reisi without breaking stride, "I want you to update Suoh's records to not deceased, unfreeze whatever assets he may still possess, and put him on the payroll."

"While you what?" muttered Fushimi, low enough for plausible deniability but not so low that Reisi would miss it. "Bang him in the broom closet?"

Suoh's habitual intransigence was clearly an infectious disease, and if Reisi wasn't careful it was going to spread to the entirety of Scepter 4.

"While I," he said, "shall turn all my considerable intellect towards seizing control of the Strain responsible for the second coming of this," he shrugged off Suoh's arm, "dumpster fire." The latter flared red at the insult but did not explode.

"Yes sir," said Fushimi in a tone that was just this side of impertinent and stalked off.

"Payroll?" said Suoh, losing all his swagger and stepping away from Reisi the instant that Fushimi was out of sight. "I never agreed to work for you."

"And until you do, I won't actually pay you."

How much of Suoh's former attitude, wondered Reisi, had been the invisible crown? The man at his side now was still trying to regain his footing in the land of the living, so he swung from terse to tempestuous, uneasy in the new skin Reisi had provided, but in time he would definitely become an asset.

Reisi stopped walking. Sometime in the middle of that pointless altercation with Fushimi, they'd left the residential wing and were drifting leisurely towards the business end of the mansion. And just as imperceptibly he had gone from thinking of Suoh as a person to thinking of him as a project.

"Now what?" Mikoto's stance became defensive, reacting unthinkingly to Reisi's change of mood.

"Mikoto," said Reisi. "I need you to do me a favor. It's not going to be easy, because I am your King now, but it's for the greater good of keeping me objective after who knows what that Strain has done to me. Sacrifices must be made. So, whenever you start feeling like you do right now, I want you to slug me."

"With pleasure," said Suoh and sent him skidding down the hallway on his face.