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He had been amazingly stoic for a man held at swordpoint.
Impressive, really. Except for the fact that Gregson had probably seen it coming for the past decade. Not those exact circumstances, perhaps; after all, Kazuma’s little bout of amnesia had left them all scrambling to improvise last-minute, and he doubted that Gregson would ever have anticipated death sailing in from Japan anyway.
But he’d admitted it freely to Kazuma: the British judiciary had committed a grave perversion of justice a decade ago, and ever since, the Reaper had been using it as leverage. Gregson had been living on borrowed time for a long time, and he had to have known it.
Which didn’t really change the fact that Kazuma had almost been the one to steal that time from him.
Kazuma swallowed thickly and drank a mouthful of water to try to clear the bitter catch from his throat.
The boarding house’s dining room was nearly empty, the hour approaching midnight as it was. Still sick with adrenaline, Kazuma had wandered into the first place he’d seen. It was dim, smoky, cheap. Perfect for his purposes; a Japanese man in France was altogether a little too prone to drawing attention, and that was the last thing he needed right now. He’d bartered his way through a room rental and dinner purchase using some pidgin of English and hand gestures and then wedged himself into the darkest corner of the dining room he could find.
The stew was mediocre, as best as he could tell, but it tasted like very little to him anyway.
In a way, the shabbiness of the room was a comfort. For long months, he’d been familiar with very little except this particular strain of décor: that peeling off-white paint, those warped floorboards, the distant hum of steam engines. Now that he had his memories back and had been stuffed into the outfit Stronghart had foisted on him and made to play lords and ladies with the British judiciary, he felt an odd sense of nostalgia for those long months spent on cargo ships.
But nostalgia was irrelevant, in any case. A luxury. He lifted his spoon, poked at a lump of something unidentifiable in the stew, and smiled wryly to himself. Yes, luxury.
A voice speaking French knocked him out of his thoughts, and he looked up into the face of the barman.
“Oh,” he said.
The man rolled his eyes and said something that Kazuma could not understand.
“Yes, I’m done,” Kazuma said, hazarding a guess at the topic. He shoved the half-full dish away from himself, and the Frenchman scooped it up and left without another word.
An obvious signal if he’d ever seen one. He got to his feet and cast his eye around the room, hand unconsciously resting on Karuma as he sized up the other occupants. They were paying him no mind and he realized, a touch chagrined, that he was perhaps too on edge. Though, in his defense, it had been an unusual evening.
Either way, he saw no sense in remaining in the dining room any longer. His gorge rose at the thought of lying alone in bed with his thoughts, so when he reached the base of the stairs, he zigged where he should have zagged and instead exited into the night.
The air was quiet and cool and he allowed himself to take a shaky breath. It tasted like salt and mud and algae in the back of his throat, and his feet began to carry him towards the shore.
Pitch-black as the night was, he could make out only the distant, hulking silhouettes of the steamships in the harbour, but he figured that the Grouse was long gone. It had been scheduled to depart Dunkirk around ten; that was why he had been so eager to deboard as soon as possible after his confrontation with Gregson.
Where was Gregson now, anyway? He’d made no move to follow Kazuma out of Jigoku’s cabin, though Kazuma couldn’t believe that he was going to attempt an assassination himself. The whole thing was a set-up, of course, though Gregson had no way of knowing that; in the end, he supposed, it all came down to whether Gregson wanted to take his chances with Jigoku or with the Reaper.
And, even more saliently, it was no longer Kazuma’s problem, or so he wanted to believe.
It was in poor taste and poor humour that he acknowledged that had he swung a little left, or had Karuma glanced off of that metal trunk at just the right angle, his mission might actually have ended in success. Whose success exactly, he wasn’t sure. Not his own, certainly. And not Gregson’s. Jigoku’s, yes, but Kazuma knew it had to extend beyond that. And if he could just get himself a bit more time—
His feet had carried him fully out to the harbour, and now his toes bumped up against the barrier at the end of one of the docks. He laid a hand on the railing, swishing it from side to side, smiling as the perfect white silk of his gloves picked up that miraculous, modern, twentieth-century coal grime. Just to his right, there was a gap in the railing where a ladder led down to the water, and he lowered himself to sit at the edge, pulling his cloak tighter around him and dangling his legs over the edge. Beyond his toes, the water was dark and calm, and he was silent, listening to the waves; and then, struck by some small impulse, he swung his legs to and fro for a moment. It was a pointless little frippery. It reminded him of lazy childhood afternoons.
“I almost killed someone today,” he murmured.
He had almost killed someone today.
He pulled Karuma from his belt and laid it on the dock next to him, then rested his hand on it.
“Father… I almost killed someone today.”
And to whose ends? His own? He’d told himself for years that he was willing to do whatever it took to get answers, but equally he had told himself that he would not kill for them. And what to do when two promises were incompatible? What about the other promises he had made to Mikotoba-houmujoshi, and to Ryuunosuke? Lies begat lies, after all. He even had a memory of telling Ryuunosuke as much at some point. A cute little line, probably delivered while drunk on easy, uncritical adoration.
Was that before or after he’d agreed to kill someone, he wondered.
He made a disgusted noise and pulled his feet back up onto the pier, crossing his legs and tucking them beneath him.
It was instinct that had told him to draw Karuma, rather than that unfamiliar saber, when he was speaking with Gregson. Partly from muscle memory, yes; it was at his left hip, and his hand went there automatically. But partly also because it was his sword, and he was accustomed to its weight in his palm, and to the intuitive physicality of sliding it from its sheath. And maybe, if he allowed himself to acknowledge his melodramatic side, it felt poetic to use the Asougi clan’s sword to exact… not revenge, perhaps, but some semblance of real justice.
But using it on a sham assassination mission which was itself based in corruption… He was reassessing that impulse now. It was silly to get sentimental over a weapon, a tool of death, but he couldn’t help but think that Karuma deserved better.
He sighed and tugged it onto his lap, sliding one finger up along the scabbard and wrapping his hand around the hilt. Even through his gloves, it was soothing in its familiarity, and he thumbed his way around the butt of the hilt, gripping it underhand, watching the tendons in his wrist flex.
He had almost killed someone today.
He pulled Karuma from its sheath, listening to the soft hiss of steel against worn wood, hefting it this way and that. But though he’d done it to calm himself, there was something not quite right, not quite familiar, about the way it glinted in the off-yellow lamplight, and he frowned, passed a hand over the blade, and looked closer.
And—
For a moment he thought he was seeing ghosts, and then for several moments more he desperately wished that he was. He squeezed his eyes shut and grit his teeth together, the razor edge on Karuma biting into his palm as he instinctively tightened his hand around it.
It was just a small fragment, but it was undeniable: the tip of the sword was missing. The great sword Karuma, soul of the Asougi clan—it was hundreds of years old, and as sole living member of the Asougi family it had been his responsibility—his privilege—to carry it.
This irreplaceable symbol and heirloom was broken, and he didn’t even know how it had happened.
Except...
It was with an exhausted frustration that he acknowledged that he knew the answer after all, but his conscience shied away from the knowledge every time, because—
—had he swung a little left, or had Karuma glanced off of that metal trunk at just the right angle—
The trunk. Gregson’s trunk.
—at just the right angle—
He’d broken his family’s soul during a failed murder.
“I almost killed someone today, Father,” he murmured, and laughed.
Or perhaps it wasn’t only an almost-murder after all.
His face was numb, and he raised his hands to his cheeks, trying to press some warmth back into them. The silk felt cool and alien and it smeared harbour grime across his skin.
He’d broken his family’s soul. Your own soul, he thought to himself, irritated: how many times had he told Ryuunosuke that? Wordsmithing didn’t change the truth; verbal distance didn’t equate to emotional. So, he’d broken his own soul. The soul of Naruhodou Ryuunosuke’s best friend—the look on Ryuunosuke’s face when he’d lifted the sword from his own belt, back in the courtroom in the Old Bailey—he’d treated it like something so precious, so sacred, and—
Kazuma had broken it.
What a fucking joke.
The thought of Mikotoba-houmujoshi and Ryuunosuke learning of what had happened to Karuma was so viscerally repulsive that Kazuma pressed his fingertips to his lips, swallowing again past a sick lump that rose in his throat.
Even a year ago, breaking Karuma would have been disastrous news, a mistake that would have cost him dearly to admit to. But now—they had changed, and not in a way that would do Kazuma any favours. Susato-san was sharper, more critical, and—more to the point—less dependent on him than she used to be. And Ryuunosuke… He’d become exactly who Kazuma always knew he could. Or, maybe, who Kazuma knew he would: tenacious, self-possessed, and far too smart to fall for Kazuma’s superficial bullshit.
They had changed. He had not. It was a simple equation with a simple solution, and he felt a useless, undeserved grief for the people they had been before Kazuma had dragged them into all this.
And tomorrow, he would return to the land where his father had been murdered and play politics with men who hated him. Tomorrow, he would return to his newly-fledged friends and face them with the knowledge that behind his fragile eggshell skin was a very deep betrayal.
A simple equation with a simple solution: there was no longer space for him, and he had knowingly, deliberately done it to himself.
He stood, dusted himself off, and hid his broken soul back in its sheath, where he could pretend it was still whole.