Picking up his cell phone, Kenji crossed the ten meters from his apartment's workroom to his bathroom, by way of his bedroom, and flipped it open. He didn't have anybody on speed-dial, but he had an extensive address-book, which he began to scroll through, browsing past his multitude of work-related contacts until he found one in particular—his editor, a good man by the name of Yoshida. As he stepped in front of the mirror, he clicked, send, and held the phone up to his ear, at the same time studying his reflection a bit.

As a rule, Kenji didn't pay much attention to the way he looked; if he was clean and well-groomed, that was usually good enough for him. The one thing that hadn't really changed since his high-school days was his mode of dress—a button-up shirt and slacks was really about as formal as it went for him. He was currently in a bit of disarray—he hadn't slept the previous evening, as was occasionally the case, and his hair was disheveled enough, his eyes red enough to prove it.

In spite of all this, the years he'd had thus far, none easy ones by anybody's standards, had been relatively kind to Kenji Harima's face and body—not only a little indebted to his constant practice of the martial art he had affectionately dubbed harijutsu. The gut he'd acquired—on his tall, lanky form, it gave him the appearance of being pregnant—from the booze had faded, and his skin had tightened again; there were no laugh-lines about his face, but nor were there wrinkles from the many, many nights of stress and no sleep.

And really, there were no two ways about it: Kenji Harima was a handsome man. Clean-shaven as he was now, or with the beard from whence sprang Princess's (no thinking about that trigger) nickname for him, he was good-looking: his jawline was pronounced, his eyes almond-shaped and cool, his stature tall and his body lean and well-toned. Were he less standoffish, he would have probably been extremely well-liked, but he could never quite overcome that feeling of I-don't-belong-here at all the publication's parties. It came from his childhood, he supposed. He also supposed—

"'lo." His editor's voice filled half of his head, and Kenji's face instantly creased with concern—the man, usually quiet but never this tough to hear, sounded awful. His voice was ragged, barely above a whisper, as though he'd been screaming all night, and there was something off about the way he'd uttered even that one syllable, as though he'd suddenly acquired some vague accent.

"Yoshida?" Kenji said, his voice thick with concern. "Are you…are you okay?"

"That's a really good question," Yoshida said, his voice even thicker with…with Kenji didn't know what. "I'm not really sure."

"What's going on, man?" Kenji had never quite lost that part of his speech, that informality to it. That and his scars were his only reminders that he had, once, nearly flunked out of high school as a delinquent. Do I need to be calling the police? I'm not very…

"I'm not sure myself," Yoshida said. Something shrilled in the background at that point, and Yoshida took a moment to shout something back, something incoherent that had something to do with some kind of fucking noise. "What I do know is that my wife thinks I've had…" there was a pause, and a dull smacking sound—maybe somebody wetting his lips, or just smacking the phone, "too much to drink."

Kenji froze. "Yoshida, you should lay off." How did they say it to me? "That stuff is no good in the end, you know, it's just—"

"Don't you fucking spout that AA," his words slurred and it came out something like eh heh, a twisted, drunken laugh,"BULLSHIT at me, Harima," Yoshida snapped. "You pathetic sod, you have no. Idea. What it is to live badly, nor what it is like to have such a—"

Another shriek. Yoshida shrieked back this time, and Harima understood every word: "WOULD YOU, FOR ONCE IN YOUR PATHETIC, CONNIVING LIFE, JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME HAVE A DECENT CONVERSATION WITH MY FRIEND?" he screamed. "Thank you."

A moment of tense silence, Harima not quite sure what to say, verily stunned. "Yoshida, man, I think you should really…I think you should lay down or something."

"I am laying down, Harima, my friend. And you know? I think I'll stay that way."

Kenji had never been a clever boy, nor a sharp boy, and sharp and clever men did not grow out of slow or dense boys. However, alarm bells started lighting up all over the place at this last. Trouble was trouble, no matter what you did for a living, and this was trouble.

As though sensing danger to his plan, however, before Kenji could say anything, the line went dead. No goodbye, or good luck on your work, or enjoy yourself, I'll be here cleaning up this wreck you call Japanese.

Just silence.

Kenji didn't call back. He called the police.

They didn't arrive in time to save Yoshida's television, which had been cranked up to its highest volume so that it could scream at him properly, and then promptly muted when he screamed back. Nor did they arrive in time to prevent his wife from throwing him out of the house; when they showed up, he was sitting on the front step of his apartment complex, his head in his hands, snoring gently. He spent three hours in detox, and his wife bought a new TV. She wouldn't let him back in the apartment for another three days, but when she did, they would make tender, gentle love and he would remember what it was that he loved about her for the first time in years.

Kenji didn't go out that night. He slept, but only out of sheer exhaustion, and he woke feeling about as bad as he ever had—in a moment of what could only be described as sheer, bone-freezing panic, he wondered if he had dropped off of the wagon the night before. It took several minutes of steady breathing and recalling the events of the night before to convince him otherwise—it had been Yoshida who had fallen off of the wagon, if he had ever had a wagon to begin with.

His cell phone rang about twenty minutes into his workout, which was about ten minutes after his workout ended; he didn't feel anywhere near well enough to attempt something stupid like exercise that day. He answered it, and, while he thought he put on a pretty decent show of being coherent, the first words out of his agent's mouth were, "Harima, are you all right? You sound like horseshit after a week in the sun." His agent, an unobtrusively tall, pudgy man named named Mamoru, had a certain flair for hyperbolae.

"Fine," Kenji said, refusing to elaborate.

"Are you sure?" The man's tone was concerned, but it was the sort of concern that Kenji knew damn well from his—half for the man, maybe, but half for his pocketbook as well—Kenji wasn't his only client, but he was certainly his most successful, and therefore he was the largest part of his paycheck. "Should I be—"

"Fine," Kenji repeated. "Completely fine."

Silence, breathy and tense for a moment. Mamoru was considering whether or not to take him at face value—of course he was. If Kenji was lying and he had dropped off of the wagon (Mamoru's biggest fear from Kenji) then the longer he waited to check him back into rehab, the worse it could be, and the longer it might be until that paycheck. He didn't know about the stacks of pages hiding under Kenji's desk any more than Yoshida had—if Kenji had kept an assistant, he might have, but Kenji refused any assistants; as a professional mangaka, he claimed, the only thing he really had to do was draw, so he might as well do it all himself. If he needed poses done, which he still did, on occasion…well, that was what Yoshida was for, and when he worked in the office, the man was only a stone's throw away. He really had liked the quiet, sharp man; he felt a sharp pang of fear at the thought.

(That's what you tell yourself it is; in reality, you've just never found an assistant like)

"Alright," Mamoru said at last. "If that's how it is, then I don't feel bad about talking to you about this. You might want to sit down, though."

Harima did, his breath catching in his throat, and Mamoru told him about Yoshida.

"I already knew that," you shit, "do you know if he's alright?"

"The police picked him up after he butchered his television with what his wife called a fucking battleaxe, officers, a fucking battleaxe," Mamoru said, raising his voice into an irritating whine in a pale attempt at imitating Yoshida's wife, a pretty, opinionated woman who Kenji had actually liked quite a bit. Mamoru gave a chuckle, and Kenji sat in stony silence until he had quenched himself on thoughts of beating the fat bastard to a pulp and Mamoru resumed his tale with all of the awkwardness that a crash-and-burn joke brought. "He went to detox for a while, and he's more or less done puking now, but…"

Kenji's heart didn't really have time to unclench; okay and but were too close in that sentence. "But what?" he asked hurriedly.

"But he quit."

Somebody dropped a thirty-ton weight down Kenji's throat, and it forced all of his insides down, and out through his bare feet.

"Told me to tell you that he was sorry for what he said to you last night, and that he was done editing. Said something about writing a novel, teaching a class, something like that."

To Kenji, something like that seemed like a curse. Deliberate disrespect; he hadn't paid attention to probably the last words Yoshida would ever say to Kenji. You bastard.

"So the department is assigning you a new editor, as well as an assistant."

"I don't need an assistant," Harima said. It felt like the billionth time he'd said it, and maybe it was, but he hadn't needed to repeat it for at least two years.

"They're the same person, Harima," Mamoru said. "The department's been pretty impressed with your sales thus far. Heaven's seven is probably their best-selling series right now, although the fans say they'd like to see a little bit more of Sei and—"

"The department's assigning me a personal editor?" In spite of his pain over Yoshida's departure, Harima couldn't help but groan a little: People who got personal editors were expected to crank out more pages.

Yoshida nodded. "If you want an assistant, you've got one, and I'd recommend making use of the opportunity. The department wants—"

"More pages. Right."

"More pages." Harima silently counted just about how many pages he had stashed, and wondered how quickly those reserves would deplete. "So if you could just come in today and—"

"The department already hired a new editor?" Kenji silently wondered if Mamoru was going to start getting pissed about being cut off all the time. Of course, if he'd cared about what Mamoru thought, he probably wouldn't cut him off so often.

"Theyhave a pretty long list of applicants. It wasn't hard to find somebody new."

"Someone with experience?" Not that Kenji could really complain if they didn't have much experience. Kenji didn't have much himself. Somebody who had been writing for seven years may as well have been in diapers.

"No clue. I have no idea who they wound up hiring. They basically just went back through their list of candidates they'd interviewed, pulled up the one with the highest score, and called him or her back and asked if they still wanted the job. That's the thing about this business, Harima, is you can't go for even a day without—"

"Activity, I know, I know. So," an idea piqued into his head, one he hadn't had in a long time. "What you're telling me," he said, trying to sound as positively threatening as he could, "is that I have to get up off of this wonderful, comfortable chair, where I am in what the Buddhists might call Nirvana, primarily composed of light, comfortable pillows, haul my ass down through Tokyo rush hour traffic and over to our Dark Tower of a corporate office, just so I can meet some editor that I might ask to be let go within a week? Are you really inconveniencing me like that? Are you really telling me that I have to put myself through that kind of hell, today of all days, after I've just lost a dear friend and all I think I'll be capable of is sitting around or maybe kicking the hell out of somebody?"

"Yes." Mamoru said it as though he hadn't heard Kenji's tone at all. Maybe he hadn't, or maybe Kenji had just lost his touch. Or maybe Mamoru just wasn't frightened of anything the man could do to him—they were, after all, separated by a phone cord and about twenty miles. Or maybe two hundred miles. Kenji had no idea where his agent was right now, nor did he care. "Why? Is that a problem?"

Kenji grimaced in defeat. "No. I'll be in."

He could almost hear it in Mamoru's voice: There's a good boy. "Wonderful. I'll call and let them know you're coming in." Mostly, Kenji worked from home on his rough sketches, so he wasn't always in.

"Fine," Kenji said again.

They hung up shortly thereafter, and a half hour later, Harima had grudgingly dressed and cleaned himself, and had some coffee and rice. It made him feel a bit more awake, and by the time he was out his door, he wasn't moving quite so sluggishly.

The motorcycle ride over even made him feel pretty good. It usually did.

Thanks for reading, as always! Look for the next chapter sometime later this week, I hope. And hey, if you liked it, or even if you didn't, think about dropping me a review! Mmm, reviews. Food for writers.

You DO want me to eat, don't you?