Chapter Thirteen: Saved for a Night
A black, starless night fell over downtown Tokyo. In a flurry of flapping white, a figure ran and vaulted over its rooftops. Below him, clean swept streets and walkways gave way to blankets of dirty slush, and the pristine LED brilliance that illuminated the city turned into gaudy neon lights and sulfur streetlamps. It was only in the uniformity of the rooftops where both places felt the same. Where he could see that the appearance of power and safety was simply a veneer. A skin that only mattered where it was exposed and not where no one saw it. But he saw it.
And he saw the old wealth from decades past in the neglected parts of the city. In the faded paint and outdated architecture. In the neighborhoods curated by the decay of time. Even though their rises and declines happened far after his sealing, he felt a kinship with these forgotten spaces. A shared experience of being left behind.
Catching a familiar scent, Sesshoumaru stopped nimbly on the cornice of an apartment building. The scent was human male and it mingled with a heady mixture of cheap deodorant, aftershave, and motorcycle oil. He launched off toward the scent, still keeping to the rooftops. As he neared, his pace slowed, and his quiet footfalls turned silent. Soon, he came upon an alley behind a nightclub, and he peered down from above.
A halogen lamp lit the alley in an eerie yellow glow that reflected in the slush and icy puddles. Wrapped in thick jackets, two men stood by a metal door. At first glance, they appeared to be careless about their surroundings, numbed by the cold as they smoked cigarettes and chatted. But their sidelong glances toward the mouth of the alley belied their relaxed demeanor. And when a new shadow ambled into the alley, their conversation stopped.
There was an awkwardness to the young man as he approached, a nervousness poorly concealed by false confidence. Neither of the men were fooled.
"Hey guys," the young man began and held out his fist in greeting.
Both men looked at him coolly, their hands still in their pockets.
"Yeah, I know I owe money, but-," he started weakly, his fragile facade already breaking.
"But, yeah, you do," one of the men interrupted. He took a drag from his cigarette. "You shouldn't gamble, Kisuke. You got no luck. Go steal some shit from your mama and pawn it. Then come see us. We're not going anywhere."
"I can't…"
"Sure you can," the other man assured. "Your mama loves you. She'll forgive you. Just like last time. But you know who she might not forgive?" He nodded toward the man beside him.
Kisuke's eyes widened.
"Yeah, if we don't see what you owe, we might need to make a visit. If you can't fix the problem, we're gonna have to ask her to do it, know what we're saying? But if you get the money and pay up, then there's no problem."
"Just remember there's interest," the first man added. "Compounded daily."
"Getting fancy there."
"I've been reading."
"No," Kisuke said quietly.
"No?"
"No." Kisuke produced a folded knife from his coat pocket and flipped it open.
Both men stumbled back in mock fear before erupting in laughter.
"I'm serious!" Kisuke asserted, punctuating his threat with a wave of the blade. "I'll kill you. Stay away from my mother."
The men looked at each other and sighed, cigarettes dangling from their lips. One reached for a metal baseball bat concealed behind him while the other pulled his own knife from a holster on his belt.
"I think your interest rate just went up, kid" the man with the bat said, and he started to stride towards Kisuke with the other man on his heels.
Then they froze.
Kisuke laughed under his breath, suddenly feeling sure of himself.
"Who're you?"
He sobered. They weren't looking at him, but behind him. Turning to the side, Kisuke looked over his shoulder. At the edge of the lamplight, a man stood. He wore a two-toned, leather jacket and a dark skull cap. Pulled up over the bridge of his nose was a mask with the snarling maw of a tiger stenciled on it in white. The black silhouette of a staff was in his hand, the tip resting on the ground.
Before he could be asked again, the masked man was in motion. He flew past Kisuke. Caught off guard by the charge, the first man came at him with his bat. But the swing was wild and easily dodged. The arc of it pulled him forward, and the masked man brought his staff down hard on his back and then jabbed the end into the softness of his side. The man collapsed, pain twisting his face as he writhed.
The other man lunged for him. The masked man leapt back, avoiding the blade. Then with a quick swat, he struck the man on the hand, knocking the knife away. Next came a hard thrust, and he jabbed him in the stomach before he swept the staff across his jaw, knocking him out.
When the masked man glanced back at Kisuke, he found only an empty alley.
In the darkness beyond the lamplight, a desperate scream erupted. A furious stream of shoes slapping puddles followed and Kisuke sprinted into the light. Terror blanched his skin and steam from his ragged breathing billowed around his mouth.
Materializing out of the shadows, a demon in white appeared.
Blocked in by monsters on both sides of the alley, Kisuke started to whimper, his eyes wild and tears streaming down his face.
"Go home," the masked man ordered.
The young man balked, as though there was a trick to what he said.
"Go home!"
Kisuke bolted past him toward the mouth of the alley and out to the safety of the street beyond the shadows, hoping his feet were fast enough to outrun the devil.
The still conscious man on the ground growled, "You %$# ing bastard…"
"Eh, go %$# yourself," the masked man said to him and kicked him in the jaw, knocking him out. His eyes rose to meet the demon, and their bodies squared off. "Well, look at you." There was a smile in his voice.
Then the masked man approached, a playful hitch in his step as he walked around him. "You look great, man!" he exclaimed. "Look at these clothes! The others were pretty much trashed, but damn, this is an upgrade! Almost worth getting shot twice, am I right?" He laughed. "Well, maybe not. Where did all this hair come from. You look so %$# ing scary now. I love it!"
Sesshoumaru waited silently, wondering when Tora would breathe again.
"Oh yeah!" he remembered and thumbed towards the mouth of the alley. "I've got something for you. I figured that if you lived, I'd run into you again, so I held onto it. It's on my bike." He collapsed his staff, slipped it into a pouch on his thigh, and started to walk away.
Sesshoumaru eyed the unconscious men on the ground.
"Don't worry about them! Cracked ribs and loose teeth come with the job. Stop being mysterious, or whatever, and come with me." Tora could feel the sigh of resignation even if he couldn't hear it and a grin spread under his mask. The daiyoukai appeared beside him in a flow of white. "Damn, you're so %$# ing cool. But you gotta be cold. Are you going to get another long coat?"
"It's in shipping," he replied.
"He speaks!" he announced with a laugh to the empty streets. "Well, you don't have to talk if you don't want to. Believe me I can do more than enough for the two of us."
"Why did you protect that man?"
"What?"
"Why did you protect that man?" he repeated. "He was the one at fault."
Tora blinked, trying to process the question. "What do you mean? They were going to hurt him. Probably worse."
"He owed them compensation and he produced a weapon. He should not wield a knife if he's not ready to be cut."
He looked up at him as they walked, considering the shadow of an eye that he could see through the hole in the mask. The slit of its pupil. This person could throw cars at pesky yakuza and withstand the force of a truck crushing down on him. That he could bleed made him real, but how he had recovered from those bullet wounds made him something more than mortal. It would be a mistake to pretend that he was anything human.
"All right, let me ask you this," Tora posed as he gestured at their surroundings, "What do you see around us?"
Sesshoumaru gave him a flat look that he could scarcely miss. "Buildings. Street lanterns. Automobiles. The night…"
"Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. Bad question. Let's think about it more abstractly. What's the condition of everything around us?"
He paused, his free-flowing thoughts from earlier that evening bubbling up. Old buildings scabbed with graffiti. Burnt out street lanterns. Rusted out vehicles with tape and plastic covering their shattered windows. The frustrated arguing of a couple somewhere in the darkness of the night. These were the forgotten spaces left behind.
"Decay," he replied.
Tora nodded. "This is a desperate place. The absence of power and influence is what makes poverty. And that poverty eats hope. Not all of it, but it eats enough of it that the people who live here will do anything to hold onto it. To escape that desperation. And sometimes people choose to escape it by climbing onto the backs of others, pushing them into the mud so that they can get a little more air. So that they can wield a little more power and feel safe."
"You're speaking of those men."
"Yeah. Those men peddle hope. They lend money and run gambling dens. Kisuke got suckered in like so many other dumb kids around here. Hell, it's not only kids. Someone gets sick or they lose their job, and they'll do anything. And these guys are waiting."
"You know him."
"What?"
"The man who pulled the knife."
Tora instinctively reached to stroke the crown of hair buried under his cap and sighed. "He's one of my kids."
Sesshoumaru peered down at him critically.
"No, no, no… Not like that," he stuttered. "My real job is that I'm a social worker. For at-risk teens and young adults. Kisuke is one of my cases. He's a good kid. Just desperate. His mom can't support them anymore, and the idea of winning big and having all your problems solved in a crazy moment of luck was just irresistible for him. Even if he knows deep down that the house always wins."
"Hm."
"Still, it's going be bad for him. I shouldn't have stepped in, but when the one guy pulled the knife, I knew it was going to be more than some bruises and a black eye. He's going to have to disappear for a while."
"Will he escape?"
Tora scoffed. "The odds of that are about the same as his odds of winning in a yakuza gambling den. These neighborhoods are like those fishing traps where the fish can swim in, but they can't figure out how to get back out again. And so, they just sit and wait for the inevitable."
"If it's futile, then why have you chosen to be this social worker? Why were you watching over him this evening?"
He blew out a breath. "Do you only ask hard %$# ing questions or something?"
Silence.
"Maybe it's because I won that jackpot and got out? Not the easy way though. My mother rode me throughout school. Like hard. And because of that I got into college." He chuckled. "She told me I wouldn't make anything of myself with a humanities degree, but I fooled her."
Sesshoumaru gave him a blank look.
"Let me rephrase. By the grace of my hardass mother, I gained access to opportunities that many like me never had the chance to seize. And I see it as my responsibility to make those opportunities available to others who were like me. To be that support for them. To pay it forward."
"And the mask?"
"Because words and gestures never feel like they're enough for me. Sometimes I just want to do something with my own hands. To save a life even if it's only for a night." He laughed ruefully. "I think when you're born in the mud, you never really escape it. Like it's in your bones."
"Is saving a life if only for one night being a hero?"
Tora blinked. "I don't know. I think it's just easy. It's hope in a gambling den. Real heroism takes more than that. I beat up some thugs, but that doesn't necessarily make anyone's life better in the long run. Maybe they're safer for a day, a week, or a month. But the facts of this place remain the same. You said decay, right? Heroism isn't just smacking down the guys standing on others to escape the mud. It's finding ways to raise people up so that they don't have to wade in it anymore. No matter what I do here tonight, the real difference I make is what I do during the day."
A silence persisted, and then Sesshoumaru nodded. "You have given me much to consider this evening."
"My pleasure," he replied, waving his hand with a flourish. "And we're here."
Tora turned down an alley, and in the shadows on the far side of a dumpster was his cherry red motorcycle. On the bike, secured in place in a pair of clasps, was an old, iron crowbar. He pulled the tool free.
"For you, my friend," he said, holding it out for the daiyoukai to take. "I went back to the spot where you were injured and grabbed it. Figured you might want it back. It's not something you find laying around in an alleyway."
Sesshoumaru took it from him. He regarded it for a moment, and then slipped it into his sash at his back. "Thank you."
"When I rescued you from that alley," Tora began, his voice earnest, "When I got you home, and those ladies pulled the bullets from your body, I believed that I was being heroic. But I hope it's not like what happened tonight with Kisuke. I hope I didn't save your life for a night. Or a week. Or a month." His hand came up to grasp the him by the shoulder. "Be careful. However, you choose to be a hero. And if you need help, let me know. I left my number with Higurashi-san." He laughed. "I can't throw cars at people, but I can help out in other ways."
He looked at him, processing everything said, and then gave him a nod.
"Good. Because I want to be there when you kick a %$# ing truck into outer space. It's going to be the most badass thing I will ever see."