Chapter 4 – A Letter to You
Gods help him but Mikoto was beginning to find Munakata's purple eyes oddly enticing, and he hadn't ever had occasion to use that word. Or maybe he was confused and meant entrancing. Whichever. Both. Anytime his own eyes crept up as high as the lower rim of Munakata's glasses, he felt like someone slapped him, but he kept doing it anyway. And fuck him with a rusted tricycle if he was the only one. Maybe it was the mutual draw of the gangster shades, but Izumo was definitely flirting with the Blue King in full view of his queen, who looked on approvingly as if it were a two-for-one sale.
They were at Izumo's bar, where they'd been cordially invited by Yata, who had invented several new expletives for the occasion and was the reason they had left Fushimi behind to guard the castle, so they consisted of himself, Munakata, and Awashima, whom he had tried referring to as Seri, but it had ended with her fist in his gut, so he wasn't going to try it again anytime soon. Other than that, she had taken to his return with enviable aplomb. Evidently, Munakata had her blanket approval whether he hit on her boyfriend or chose to practice necromancy on the weekends.
The Red King was sitting atop the bar and playing with Mikoto's hair with all the delight of a child who finds her favorite toy restored to her after she'd thought it lost for good in a freak ketchup incident. And it was undeniably good to be in Anna's immediate proximity, as well as Munakata's on his other side. So much so that Mikoto was itching to punch the Blue King again. He knew it was just the servile part of his brain in thrall to Munakata's imperious aura competing with Anna's possessive pull on it, but one of these forces was telling him to touch Reisi, while the other one brimmed with resentment for the man. As a result he wanted to touch the Blue King with violence, which meant either fighting or fucking, and neither of those two choices was an acceptable way to behave in the middle of what was essentially a family reunion.
The other thing that pissed him off or made him sad – whichever, both – was that these wretched alien feelings he was being made to feel by two Kings playing tug-o-Suoh were crowding out Totsuka. Even here, in the middle of the one place where the ghost of his quiet love for his kind friend should have torn at his heart strongest. Mikoto didn't want to sit and deliberate on what potential threat the new Strain portended – Munakata's word – and what ought to be done about it. The creature that had brought him back to life was no doubt too dangerous to leave running amok in his old neighborhood, but he didn't think that catching it could lead to anything good either. And since he didn't have a solution in mind other than kill it, kill it with fire, he sat and thought of Tatara instead. Tatara who did many things and was many things and could never settle on any one thing, except for Mikoto. Tatara had picked him up the way that others picked up a smoking habit and never even tried to quit.
"I am going to be a writer," he had told Mikoto after quitting the guitar, but before taking up the camera. "I got this notebook and I'm going to write letters in it, confessing all my deepest thoughts. The first letter I am going to write is to you."
Mikoto had never seen any of the letters inside Tatara's notebook. Before, it had been too personal; after, it had been irrelevant. Now, he imagined a notebook of his own inside his head and began to write a letter in it.
"Dear Tatara," it said; then he scratched it out and wrote "Beloved" instead, but that was "enticing" or "entrancing" all over again, not really a word he had experience with, so he scratched that out too and stared mentally at the naked page, willing his mind to open up and pour out his feelings in the shapes of words. They didn't have to be perfect – because no one was going to read them – but they had to be true. "You," he decided. It made the letter personal, but at the same time it could be addressed to anyone.
You made living bearable. Because I knew I was making you happy, and it was like walking towards the sun. A fire that warms no one is always destroying something. With you stretching your hands towards me, I had to be a steady flame. The hunters would have never found you in the dark. It was by my light that you were seen. Whom shall I burn for now?
He paused, then signed it "Me" and added "Burn this," because that seemed appropriate. Then, he sat there for a few moments in morose silence. At least until he noticed that his former clansmen were staring at him. Actually, everyone was staring at him. Because he was glowing. Incandescent. Blue. And Munakata Reisi – the asshole that did this to him – had stopped spouting hypocritical courtesy from his mouth and began pouring smugness out his eye holes, until Mikoto gave in to his competing urges and punched off his stupid glasses. It was all downhill from there.
When they finally got back to the mansion, having resolved abso-fucking-lutely nothing, Mikoto realized another problem.
"Shit! Where am I supposed to sleep tonight? And don't say 'the floor'; I'm not your dog."
Munakata tried grinning at him lopsidedly with the side of his face that was not currently matching his uniform, but it turned into a wince.
"I had Fushimi assign you a room."
"Right. So I am sleeping in my old cell then?"
"He did try to bury you in a triple suite amid the new recruits, but I've grown wise to his wicked ways and had a spare room in the executive end aired out and refitted to suit you. Next door to Seri."
"You hate me that much?"
"It's also next door to me."
"Is it too late to choose the jail cell?"
"Yes," put in Awashima. "Is it?" She looked as immaculate now as she had at the start of the evening, due in part to Izumo's gallant defense once the glassware started flying.
This was almost normal, thought Mikoto. Just three drinking buddies limping back from a pub crawl turned a pub brawl. Except, of course, they weren't friends. And one of them was an abomination.
He slunk to his assigned room, which really was next door to Awashima and across the hall from Munakata, and threw himself atop the covers of a gray oak platform bed. Now that the novelty of being able to touch stuff and talk to people again had worn off, he was once more staring down the long tunnel of meaningless existence. What was he meant to do with this second chance? Try everything he came across like Tatara had done? Follow Reisi's orders? Move to New Zealand? He was too drunk to make plans, and there were no more cigarettes left in the pack Munakata had bribed him with this morning. It was a shit end to a shit day, or possibly a shit beginning to a new shit day. Mikoto kicked off his shoes, covered his head with a pillow, and went to sleep.
He meant to stay in bed until somebody higher up the food chain stormed into his lair and set his blankets on fire, but Munakata chose a much more effective method. At five in the morning Mikoto woke up to find the Blue King snuggling up to him under the covers.
His first impulse as a clansman was to press closer, but he listened to his natural reflexes instead, which suggested that he kick Munakata out of bed. Which worked like a charm. The startled man woke up on impact with the floor and glared up at him with his stupid purple eyes. Or rather he glared up somewhere past Mikoto's shoulder on account that he didn't have his glasses on and was apparently myopic as a rhino without them. How he had ever managed to stab Mikoto where it counted was anyone's guess. Looking at him now – blinking angrily at nothing and tugging on his sleep shorts – almost made Mikoto reach for his phone to preserve the moment for posterity, before he remembered that he no longer had a phone and might never again have a phone if he was stupid enough to piss off the man who was reclaiming his postmortem identity for him.
"What are you doing here?!" demanded Munakata, as if it was Mikoto's fault that he was sprawled on the floor in his skivvies.
"You dragged me out of hell, remember?"
"Shit!" said Munakata, looking around. "This isn't my room."
"How blind are you asshole?"
"Not that blind."
Munakata looked appropriately disturbed by his blunder, so Mikoto gave him the benefit of a doubt.
"Sleepwalking?" he suggested.
"Dreaming," said Munakata slowly. "I don't remember it, but it wasn't good."
"Well, crawl into your mama's bed next time."
But Munakata did not respond to his jibe. One of his hands was at his temple, while the other rubbed absentmindedly at a spot on his chest. The same spot, thought Mikoto, that the Strain had touched when she had gutted Munakata's heart. Maybe this was some sort of residual effect from that ordeal.
"Hey," he said, "Munakata, look at me. You awake now?"
Munakata collected himself from the floor, going from kicked dog to arrogant wolf in no seconds flat, and gave Mikoto a curt bow.
"I apologize for violating your privacy, Suoh," he said. "It was... It won't happen again."
"Yeah, yeah," said Mikoto, watching Munakata try to navigate towards the door without bumping into furniture. "I been drunk before. Just don't fall into Seri's bed by accident. I won't come rescue you."
When the Blue King had gone, Mikoto tried going back to sleep, but the moment he had drifted off there was a loud knock on his door. He ignored it, but it came again, this time accompanied by Fushimi's snide voice.
"Rise and shine, Suoh!" he cajoled. "Christmas has come early!"
Mikoto got up, congratulating himself for the second time that morning for going to bed fully dressed, and opened the door. Fushimi stood on the other side, surrounded by boxes that he immediately started kicking across the threshold.
"Clothes," he said, pointing to the boxes one after the other. "Gadgets. Random crap that Munakata thinks we all need. I emailed paperwork to your account. If you can't figure out the network password, then you don't deserve to be a Blue."
"I didn't fucking ask to be one," said Mikoto.
"Then fuck off back to HOMRA," said Fushimi, turning on his heel and stomping out the door. "Breakfast is in the refectory at eight." He left before Mikoto had a chance to ask what a refectory was and where might one be found.
Whatever. It was only six-thirty. He had almost two hours to figure it out. Mikoto began opening boxes. Fushimi, he discovered, had gone to great lengths to outfit him in the worst fashions he could contrive. The "clothes" box contained a number of button-down shirts in patterns ranging from tiny red flowers to swirling blue paisley, two pairs of cargo pants, and a red tee with a psychedelic squirrel across the chest. The "gadgets" box held a tablet, a dock with a small keyboard, a charging station, and a phone. The box marked "miscellaneous" revealed toiletries, a bunch of stationery and writing supplies, a tea set, and a tin of melon candies.
Mikoto dumped the clothes onto the floor for mobile trash bins or junior clansmen, or whatever slave labor the Blues used to keep their glorified jailhouse clean, to collect later and busied himself setting up the gadgets. He left the tablet docked and charging on the desk by the window and booted up the phone. It chirped, took him through a quick setup sequence, and asked for the network password. Saruhiko sucks big donkey balls, typed in Mikoto. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't it. Nor was it Saruhiko is an ass dongle or any other true fact about Fushimi that he could think of. It was probably something really lame, like Sword in Hand, because the Blues were wankers.
"Just say your name," said Munakata's voice from the doorway. "The phone will scan you to confirm, then grant you access to set up two-step authentication. Once that is done, you should have privileges on par with Seri, second only to mine and Saruhiko's. That ought to mollify him a bit. He's angry because you don't need a sword to use my power."
That's right, Mikoto realized, the Blues needed permission to draw their sabers. And that was the only way they could channel their aura. It hadn't occurred to him because he simply did what he had always done and reached straight for the source. Power, whether red or blue, came to him easily and without restraint.
"Are you just gonna barge in here all the time?" he demanded to cover up his confusion.
"You left the door wide open," pointed out Munakata.
"Fushimi left the door open. Cause he's a spiteful little shit. Why can I do this," Mikoto levitated the candy tin, "and he can't?"
"I didn't have a spare sword to hand you in the parking lot."
That didn't really answer the question, but it could wait. It was almost eight o'clock and he was hungry. "What the fuck is a refectory?" he asked. "And how do I get there?"