Archive of Our Own

Mori had explained it all to her on the train ride up the mountain why he had chosen this remote mountain resort. It was quite simple, he told her. He wanted something beautiful and traditional to honor this rare visit of their wealthy foreign visitors. He clarified further: he wanted it to be impressive and unfamiliar in a way that put his visitors at a psychological disadvantage, but not so unfamiliar a setting that he was having to constantly smooth over cultural faux pas. He would have the visitors fly in from abroad and then be immediately driven up to the resort to meet with him the same day; the long flight, jetlag, lack of rest, and sudden altitude adjustment would make them feel exhausted and unwell. But the Port Mafia team, he assured her, would arrive a few days early so as to acclimatize themselves. 

Despite being a torturer, Kouyou had not previously considered the idea of weaponizing business discomfort. She really did work for a professional jerk.

The inn was a beautiful resort built into the mountainside itself so that the lowest floor was at ground level but the actual entranceway was two levels above, and the five floors were nestled discreetly into the mountainside and forest. The rooms, private and public, had massive glass windows to show the beautiful surroundings, and on the top floor, where she and Mori were staying, they could see down into a deep valley from their balcony. 

They kept mostly to their own schedules for these first few days, interacting entirely on their own whims; they dined together, and she would run into him in their room, or lounging in the library-styled boardroom with his laptop, but she found herself mostly resting. Mori had told her this, as they were standing in their shared room among their luggage after arrival:

“I wouldn’t advise smoking or exercising. I recommend that you rest instead.” 

The air was thin and felt insubstantial, and the sun was brighter, and walking too quickly made her surprisingly out of breath, so she was not unhappy to be ordered by the chief medical officer of the Port Mafia to lie in a lounge-chair in a robe and eat the elaborate multi-course meals brought to their rooms. There was so much natural light that one didn’t always need the indoor lights; the polished wood floors and tables reflected back the daylight like pools of water in the quiet, dim rooms.

Mori seemed to love the private outdoor bath on the balcony of their room. It was a deep tub with hot water continuously flowing into it from a cleverly-constructed wooden spout, and continuously draining as well; the balcony was made to easily drain overflowing water. There was a reed screen along the lower balcony for privacy; Kouyou had inspected the views and decided that you would have to be an unnaturally talented sniper to hit either of them out there, so she allowed Ougai-dono his fun. He happily spent most of the first day soaking in his outdoor tub until he was red-faced as a monkey, and indulged twice daily on the following days. (She herself reserved the private indoor hot springs for an hour every evening for the novelty of splashing through completely empty full-sized luxury baths.) Ougai-dono was peculiar about his preference for private baths, although sometimes she brought a drink and a chair out to the balcony to sit with him and chat while he steamed in his bath. 

It would be embarrassing for the Port Mafia if their leader fell asleep in the bath again and actually drowned this time, after all.

On the fifth day, their visitors’ plane touched down in Narita and they would be arriving in four to five hours with their mafia escorts. Kouyou was almost annoyed that she had to work again, but accepted that she was not actually here to relax, although Ougai-dono had turned it into a sort of vacation all the same. She laid out her clothing options on the racks and stared at them, trying to decide.

She had brought some tasteful subdued suits of her own in the event she was told to blend in with the rest of security, but she received no such guidance from her Boss that morning. Traditional, impressive, and unfamiliar, hm? She decided upon a beautiful golden kimono patterned with spots and rectangles that clung together as they proceeded down the body of her kimono and became a rippling sea of patterned geometrical black and gold, as if sunlight itself had revealed its mathematical form. Her obi was pitch black with a crimson lining, patterned with faint leaves.

She examined herself in the mirror, checked her makeup, and admired her nailpolish. She was ready for this meeting. 

Ougai-dono emerged from the side room wearing an expensive black suit with onyx cufflinks and a topaz tie pin. His hair was also in two high messy pigtails. “Ready to go?”

She frowned at him, and he beamed at her. She increased the intensity of her frown and he groaned, returning to the dressing area with a whine of disappointment. When he slouched out of the room a minute later pouting like a teenager, his hair was tied back properly. Now she would accept the arm he was offering her.

Their visitors were called “the Germans” for their parent company was German, but just as in the Port Mafia, the representatives came from a variety of backgrounds and countries. English was the mutually-agreed-upon language of business, to Kouyou’s relief. She found German difficult to follow at her level, and they couldn’t speak Japanese, and both sides tended to speak English formally and precisely, making it easier to keep up.

The Moricorp group greeted their visitors in the lobby, and then directed them to leave their luggage and return within half an hour. Kouyou thought that there would be some kind of justifiable rebellion at this order, but they started straggling back into the conference room fifteen to twenty minutes later, immediately locating the coffee and serving themselves.

The half-dozen German visitors drank black coffee, a mild roast, without any elaborate preparation or stylistic flourishes; it was a drink to focus the mind, not a dining experience, she had read. This was quite different from some of their other visitors, where an elaborate service production was required; Mori had simply ordered that coffee be put out and they would take care of themselves from there. He himself drank tea the color of blood - when asked, he smilingly explained it was a tisane of rose hips. Kouyou had tried it herself on a prior day, and to her disappointment it essentially reminded her of an expensive detox tea. 

Finally their leader arrived from his freshening-up at close to the thirty minute mark, looking both tired and bewildered. He was a friendly-looking man with curly reddish-blond hair and a curly blond mustache. He was neither particularly handsome nor ugly; he had the sort of pleasantly forgettable face one might pass on any street in his hometown. He wore a clean and well-pressed camelhair suit but his signet ring, cufflinks, and tie pin were all glittering diamonds, so large they looked artificial.

“Mori! Must you really hold your meetings all the way out here? Your country is beautiful, but that was a hell of a drive!” he said somewhat breathlessly in English, mopping his forehead with his linen handkerchief. He leaned against the wall, took a few deep breaths to compose himself, and fanned himself again with his free hand. He looked wobbly and Mori hurried to his side solicitously.

“I am sorry, Hans! But this was the best location and, as you say, isn’t it beautiful? How did you like your rooms? Have you been in a room with tatami before?”

“Is that what they’re called?” their guest said wearily. 

“Yes, come up here - are your shoes off? Good, do you feel that under your feet?” This boardroom had a mixed Western-Eastern interior design; a long table and chairs set upon a slightly raised platform above the level of the hallways, so one had to step up into the room.

“Oh,” the German said, his face lighting up. Kouyou could not see from where she was sitting, but he must be wiggling his toes. “That’s quite nice, actually. Supportive!” He looked around. “Forgive me, but thank god there are regular chairs. My back is about to give way and I am terrible at sitting on the ground.”

“Yes, come, sit down and have a drink. But first, let’s finish the introductions so you can start forgetting names.” They both laughed. She rarely got to see Mori play the jovial host outside of the Mafia holiday parties, so it was interesting to see him be friendly, or pretending to be friendly, or pretending to pretend to be friendly, or whatever level of nonsense he had reached inside his head. They exchanged business cards with all the formalities, and Kouyou felt inside her bag to locate her own card case. She slipped her card out by feel alone.

The two leaders inquired after each other’s families in low voices. Then Mori was cooing over photographs of someone else’s children without pulling out his own phone, which must be truly heroic self-restraint on his part…given that she knew all too well that he had wrestled Elise-chan into a panda costume just last week and was very proud of himself. Or was it a tiger? She often tuned out the details when he was on a roll.

She entertained herself with similar foolish thoughts for a while, and refocused in time to find herself being introduced to “Hans,” who kissed her hand with old-fashioned courtesy before remembering himself and stiffly attempting to bow with both arms at his sides. She responded with a curtsy and a welcoming smile, and accepted his business card.

Kouyou thought on their background reports as she read his card, which had thoughtfully been translated into Japanese on the reverse side. This smiling man Hans was the CEO himself, here all the way from Munich. Six months ago, the Mann Konzern had been caught laundering large sums of money in Yokohama for an unknown entity; Boss believed it was money intended for the Guild, the Clock Tower, or the mysterious Rats, since his government contacts did not seem to believe it was being funneled directly to foreign governments. So the intrusion of the Konzern into Yokohama remained a partial mystery, and enough of a concern to address.

The Port Mafia took action in that case as it was within their purview; their bank insiders had alerted them to the concerning large deposit trends from specific foreign investors and a significant fluctuation in their casino incomes. That had been unexpectedly clumsy of their adversary. The mafia took over the front businesses and seized the money, then fired and tortured the involved dealers and cashiers in the subsidiary casinos. This should have been sufficient, but they were forced to repeat the action a few months ago when the Konzern had the audacity to try a second and even third time. It had become apparent that the Port Mafia casinos were being used to launder someone else’s money without their permission, and their people were being offered bribes large enough to overcome their good sense. eBoss had talked about excessive market liquidity and inflation, and had started smiling creepily when talking about Moricorp acting as a liquidity trap - 

“ Madame, have you worked for this old double-crosser for long? ”

Hans was now addressing her with twinkling eyes, his curly little mustache with its two careful points bristling with what seemed like genuine interest. He was very much like a Shiba Inu, she thought, but was he a good dog? She automatically offered her own business card to stall for time. If Mori wanted this man’s head for the insult, he’d let her know.

“ He’s asking if you have worked for Moricorp for very long, ” Mori translated sweetly.

“Oh come now, she surely speaks English for herself. You wouldn’t have brought her if she didn’t. Don’t play your games with me, you rascal! Did you know,” he addressed Kouyou directly again as he took her card and peered at it, “during the war, he used to come to all the drinking parties, drink water and keep quiet until everyone else was drunk, and then get a Bierskat game going and clean up with free drinks? I kept buying his beer because I felt sorry for him not getting to participate in conversation and being new to our country and not knowing our card games - until I realized he had taken me for a ride every single time. Nobody could prove it, though!”

Kouyou snorted, and then glanced desperately over at Mori, who was grinning both at the story and at her lapse of decorum. She sighed in defeat. “ I speak a little English,” she said carefully, smiling at their guest. “If you speak slowly, I will understand.” Hans brightened.

“Splendid! Let me know if I have to repeat myself. It’s a pity that my Japanese is terrible, but I don’t have the brains for languages like this fellow. Forgive my rudeness.”

“Thank you,” she said, relaxing. It was easy to forget that not everyone you were obliged to deal with in this world was irritating and foolish; even Mori was acting casual now. “Won’t you sit next to me? Tell me about your trip.” She smoothed down the seat of the chair next to her, and helped Hans settle himself comfortably. Mori nodded in approval and crossed over to the head of the table.

“Your dress is so beautiful,” Hans said, taking his platinum cigarette case from his jacket pocket. He pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache. “ Reminds me of a painting. Mori always said this was a beautiful country. But oh, a good night’s sleep will really help me appreciate it more. Oh - thank you kindly,” he said, as Kouyou politely brought out her own lighter for his use. “ This resort is so far away from the Tokyo. I was expecting neon signs and tiny hotel rooms. This is quite lovely.”

As their guest chattered away pleasantly about his flight and impressions of the country, Kouyou glanced around the room, taking note of which of his employees were behaving like security and which were more likely actual businessmen. Two of them looked like they were trained for some kind of physical exertion, but they weren’t staying close to their leader. That seemed oddly amateurish.

Hans took a deep drag of his cigarette, grimaced, pulled harder, and smoked with effort for another thirty seconds before he took his cigarette out of his mouth and made a face at it. “This tastes…this is so strange. It tastes terrible. Weak. Maybe my mouth is dry.” He tried again before giving up and stubbing out his cigarette in the proffered crystal ashtray. “How was your name pronounced again, Madame? Again, pardon my rudeness. It is easier to remember familiar names, so I will try to make your name more familiar to my ear.”

Pretty good line, Kouyou conceded, and she generally liked his face. So she explained, “ My name is Kouyou Ozaki; in English, it means Autumn Leaves. In German - “ She thought a little with a frown. Surely she’d learned something this basic. She should have thought about it before starting the sentence.

“Herbstlaub, ” Mori interjected eagerly and impolitely from his spot at the head of the table, and she inclined her head towards him to include him again.

“Herpst - “

“Herbst-laub,” Hans said slowly and clearly. “My words are unfamiliar to you as yours are to me, but I understand. Like when the leaves turn the color of your hair and fall from the trees? Lovely! I wish my name had a lovely meaning, but it’s a boring family name.”

“Hans is Johannes, my friend. One of the companions of Christ.”

“The Baptist? Or the Apostle?” Kouyou had a basic knowledge of maybe two of these Christian figures but thankfully her audience was reacting like she had guessed correctly. 

“Perhaps? I suppose so,” Hans said, startled. He turned more fully towards the head of the table. “I had no idea. Perhaps my boring name isn’t so boring after all. What about you, then, Mr. Mori?”

“I - “ Mori thought about it with tilted head, and then laughed. “ Wald, ” he said. Hans smiled even more broadly in pleasure. Kouyou could clearly imagine how these two had been as young student-soldiers during the early days of the War, as bizarre as such an idle fantasy about her Boss would have been for her even a few hours ago. She could clearly imagine the bars filled with rowdy students and cigar smoke, and Mori-sensei quietly watching the events so he could reach into the chaos and get what he wanted, even if it was just a free drink and information about his surroundings. The surprise he must have felt to be approached by this curious and overly-friendly foreigner with his glass of beer.

Hans stared out of the windows of the boardroom at the surrounding forests, which were a delicate green at this time of the year. The polished tabletop reflected his face among the leaves. “How refreshing. Are all Japanese names so poetic?”

Kouyou glanced doubtfully at Mori, who seemed perfectly willing to let her field the silly question about their pseudonyms. Since Hans had not reacted with confusion, she presumed he had only translated ‘Mori’ for the man. Come to think of it, Ougai-dono’s family name and given name meant essentially the same thing - ‘forest’. What unimaginative parents he must have had. “Like all parents, our parents try to give us names that will give us a good life, or a good character; you are named after a saint, are you not?”

“I am indeed, it seems! I am not a very good Christian, though, so I don’t know many details of the lives of the saints.”

“I am not Christian at all! So I will not judge you,” she laughed. 

They didn’t immediately jump into work. There were introductions, and drinks, and more introductions, and more drinks. Kouyou observed the flow of the room for a while, relaxing into her chair. At some parties she was expected to keep things running smoothly, keeping glasses full and people smiling, but the inn staff were attentive and she could relax and be waited upon, which was a blessing. They had been up at the resort for a few days to acclimatize, but she still felt tired ; the sun was too strong, the drinks too powerful, and her head swam when she tried to exert herself. All she could do at this point in the evening was relax and watch what happened.

To her surprise and displeasure, Mori reassembled the visibly tired and intoxicated group of visitors to the conference table after dinner, insisting that it was traditional to begin the meeting on the day of arrival. He has been completely serious about exhausting their visitors, it seemed. The two groups formally greeted each other and the rest of the group exchanged the typical cards and greetings. This was all out of order, like a strange game; traditions were being shuffled and their guests did not seem prepared for what would happen next. 

At his signal, Kouyou brought out the boxed daruma that she had bought before leaving Yokohama, and presented it formally to their guest. Hans took out the black daruma, turning the simple round papier-mâché doll around with curiosity in his gold-ringed hands. “What do I do with this?”

“It’s a good luck charm for a project. You fill in one eye when you start and make a wish for your project to succeed, and fill in the other eye when you finish your project. It encourages you to work hard and not give up until you reach your goal,” Kouyou explained softly into his ear, letting her hand rest on his shoulder. Mori, who was learning over Hans’s other shoulder, nodded and reached down over Hans’ shoulder to put a felt-tipped pen in his slack hand. Hans shivered, looked at both of them in turn, nodded, and drew a wobbly black pupil in one of the doll’s eyes. 

Mori snatched the doll away from him and put it in the place of honor in the center of the table, where its single winking eye could observe the proceedings.

“Did you tamper with his cigarettes?” she asked later while tuning her shamisen. This resort was so remote and satellite reception was already poor; the Mafia was doing strict electromagnetic signal blocking (courtesy of both technology and one of their Ability users) to keep their guests isolated, but heightened security came at the expense of their more modern entertainment options. After Mori had whined about his crippling boredom, she had promised to entertain him and he had seized upon the opportunity.

“Whose cigarettes?” 

“Mr. Hans. How did you do it? What did you do?” 

Ougai-dono kept staring at her with that particularly foolish, empty-headed expression. 

“He commented on the taste of his cigarettes. You told me not to smoke, so I haven’t. What - do we have a cigarette-poisoning Ability user on staff? What kind of Ability is that?”

His face cleared with understanding. “Kouyou-kun, I’m not a magician! And we don’t have an Ability-user like that, although come to think of it they might come in useful.” He frowned, clearly thinking of his own mostly-discarded smoking habit. “Or a security risk. No, none of that, then. You brought your own cigarettes, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I didn’t smoke them. You said not to.”

Mori nodded, clearly pleased with her. “That was a recommendation, not an order, but I’ll show you why. Give me your cigarettes.”

Kouyou put down her shamisen, went to the side room with their luggage, and unlocked her suitcase to retrieve her cigarettes, carefully stored in her toiletry bag separately from her finer clothing. She brought them back and placed them in front of him. He lifted the pack up, showed her the intact plastic packaging, and then broke it open and tapped out a cigarette. He put it to his lips and lit it, and Kouyou watched as he took two deep drags to get the cigarette going. He made a face and then handed her the cigarette. “Try it.” 

She took a deep burning breath of air, feeling the normal spreading of the smoke into her lungs - but it was accompanied by an additional fire in her lungs from the effort and a flat wet-ashes taste underneath the usual flavor that made her cough. She had to concede faster than she expected; she wanted a drink of water to clear her mouth of the taste after only a few drags. She stubbed it out and flapped her hand to clear the smoke from the air. “Disgusting!”

“The altitude affects your sense of taste and how the tobacco burns; personally, I prefer not to smoke something that tastes of pencil shavings. The human body itself is quite different up here. For example - ” He laughed as Kouyou stuck out her tongue in disgust. “Hold on, I think I have some chocolates!” He rummaged in his pockets, and then in the courtesy basket on the front table, returning with a container of mints from which they both gratefully partook. “A cigarette-poisoning Ability-user? Are you drunk?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Kouyou said with great dignity, returning to her instrument. When she was ready, she took a deep breath, picked up her plectrum, and began to play.

Thankfully, Mori-sensei did not sit and stare at her while she played; in fact he treated it like she was music on the radio; putting his head down on the low table and closing his eyes, one hand cupped around a mostly-empty glass of beer. She walked her way through some basic pieces - she practiced when she could, but this was no longer her day job, and not even her night job, so she was aware she was making mistakes. She consoled herself that her current client did not actually keep her around for her entertainment skills.

“ Yakko-san, dochira yuki? Haa~ koryakorya~ danna omukae ni…”

“Why do you use a plectrum? Why don’t you pluck with your fingers?” her busybody companion immediately asked at the end of the song, perking up and lifting his head. How much did he have to drink to switch off?

“Wrong type of song. Besides, even if I wanted to, the strings hurt if your calluses are gone,” she explained, pausing to hold out her hand and extending the fingers not actively holding the plectrum so he could see the fingertips. 

“Catgut strings?” he suggested.

“Leave those poor cats alone. Silk is what these strings used to be made of. This is just nylon.”

He looked at her shamisen again. “I heard they used catskin back in the day for the body as well. I had no idea you could turn a cat into a musical instrument. Who knew cats could be so useful?”

She stopped strumming. “ Danna , this is synthetic. This,” she indicated the tortoiseshell plectrum, “is plastic. You are in the wrong place to be hunting for authenticity. Go to a museum.”

He did not seem to be listening. “I should tell Fukuzawa-dono about the cats.”

“You leave him alone,” Kouyou scolded to no avail. Mori looked unrepentantly gleeful, so she reached out and slapped his arm. “So, this man Fukuzawa - is he another of your war comrades…?” she asked out of genuine curiosity as he whined and rubbed his arm. She knew the regular recruits told each other to never question the Boss’s orders, but she was no common footsoldier. 

He scratched his head with a laugh; laughing was always his way of stalling. “No, no, after the war. Bodyguard when I had my clinic.” 

This gave additional interesting context as to why this two-bit detective agency leader thought he could ask her to hand-deliver an invitation to the boss of the Port Mafia and that he might accept. Interesting.

“I see. We talked before they released me.” Kouyou fanned herself slowly with her hand, surprised that the alcohol was making her flush so quickly. She was quick to show the effects of drinking, which she had always used as a convenient excuse to stop drinking long before her companions, but she wasn’t trying to stay sober tonight. “Tough customer. I know the type. Not a single laugh for my best jokes! No sense of humor!” 

“He doesn’t like Elise,” Mori sighed gloomily into his beer, ruffling the froth. Kouyou frowned at the idea of her little Kyouka being in the care of someone who didn’t like children and who rarely smiled, but Mori seemed to read her mind and shook his head with a chuckle. “Oh, don’t worry. He can be trusted to be tediously proper nowadays and he likes strays and children. He’s like Hirotsu…without the sense of humor. Although he’s had his moments.”

With that framework, her anxiety was able to recede slightly, and she bowed her head in acceptance. 

“Maybe this will sound strange to you,” he said almost hesitantly. 

Occasionally their Boss got broody and distant, and she’d learned that humor instead of solicitousness seemed to be most effective to help this particular chicken lay his mental eggs. “Compared to everything else you say?”

He laughed reflexively, and then continued, “Do you recognize yourself when you think about the past?”

Certainly a strange thing to say, but not so outlandish that she couldn’t guess at his meaning. “Do you mean childhood memories?”

“That is part of it, but when you think about being a child, or a teenager, or even five years ago, do you remember what it was like to be that person?” He shrugged. “Perhaps this is only a concern of someone my age and not yours.”

If he was talking about what Mr. Hans had brought up, that was probably stories from twenty years ago. She thought back, trying to clearly remember what she had cared about as a six year old, who her friends and enemies were, what she had cared about. It was a vague, frankly unimportant blur of disconnected sensory impressions and fragments of stories. But that was childhood, not the beginning of adulthood. 

“I looked at those old photos, and it’s a rum thing. I knew they were pictures of me - I even had my own memories jogged looking at those photos, so I know they are real - but I also feel, so strongly, that I am not the same person in those photos anymore. I didn’t realize how much I’ve changed until I saw those photos. I don’t know how I could have ever been that person, and yet I know that I was at one point.” He looked away, a crease between his brows.

She thought about herself from ten years ago. She had been in the Port Mafia (obviously). She had been sixteen (obviously). Time and place, well-established. Back then…back then, she had mostly wanted to die, she reasoned out cautiously. It was shortly after her failed elopement. Her memories of that time were a tarpit, black and shining and alive, steaming with remembered hatred and despair. 

The more she thought about it, the more unpleasant and strange it felt; she found herself trying to re-imagine the black places of her mind only using the weapons of her teenaged self, and her mind balked. Her current self did not fit within those confines. But it was still her. She stopped herself before the differences could become disturbing, but she didn’t realize it would be so distressing to realize how she had changed, even if she felt it was for the better. 

“Is that normal? Or is that some kind of,” she grimaced in disdain, “coping mechanism?”

Ougai-dono shrugged. “I’m not sure, to be honest. I personally don’t know too many normal, sane people who have had uneventful lives, do you?”

She tilted her head. “What were you thinking about that made you ask that, Ougai-dono?”

He seemed surprised at her question. “I was thinking about those mountains of Germany that Hans was whining about. We went up there for training exercises at one point. I had to go because it was my job to. 

“One morning I woke up early. I couldn’t sleep for some reason, and went outside for some reason. It was so dark, and so cold, and so far away from everything. But then the sky began to change colors, and everything started to regain its daytime appearance as the light touched it. It was really an extraordinary sunrise, especially from that altitude. Have you seen the sun rise from Fuji?” When she shook her head, he eagerly recommended the experience; she was not particularly into hiking but she’d keep it in mind; hopefully this was not a sign of strenuous upcoming Executive retreats. “Anyways, I couldn’t imagine that there was someone who wouldn’t want to look at this marvelous sight. So I went back into the barracks, and as you can imagine nobody wanted to be up at 5 am looking at something that happens every day. It was foolish of me to disturb everyone for that. But,” he concluded with a shrug, “Hans is an early riser.” 

Normally they weren’t both foolish and depressed at the same time when they were drinking. What a dreadful combination they made in this mood. She slapped her hand on the tabletop to get his attention and raised her voice. “What would you like me to play, Danna?” He looked confused and then speculative. Good. “Or perhaps you’d like me to tell you an old story? Nothing too obscure, mind you; I’m good but this is no longer my day job. But I know plays and folktales reasonably well.”

He seemed to finally pounce on the tidbit she was offering him. “How about…have you heard of the play Scarface Otomi ?”

Kouyou strummed to buy herself time. “I don’t know that one very well…” she lied. 

“Or maybe The Love Suicides at Sonezaki?” he asked, even more unsubtly.

“What do you want to know about Scarface Otomi , then?” she groaned, giving in.

The prospect of gossip or blackmail seemed to revive her companion’s mood as intended. Why was he always so indirect? If he wanted to know about her past, he should just ask! But no, he had to be weird about it! “I want to know what the beautiful Otomi’s lover, the handsome Yosaburou, was like.”

“What he was like?”

“Yes, what he was like.”

“A little older than Otomi, but not old or smart enough to know better,” she said with an even deeper sigh. “Just another teenager. Handsome and kind, always with little gifts in his pockets and a kind word for her.”

“Was he a civilian?”

“Oh, no, a low-level thug. Those gifts were probably stolen from people he beat to a pulp on collection raids. Once he came to her with his own nose broken and she had to help him straighten it again. Another time he had to ask for one of his gifts back because they’d noticed he’d taken it.” She smiled. “It was a ring, or a watch, something like that. It wasn’t important to keep it, just that he had tried to give it to her. But in the end,” she concluded briskly, “she got pregnant, and they planned to try going clean and to start a family. So they ran away.”

“How old was Otomi then?”

She thought hard to remember the story within the tar-pit of memory. “Fifteen?”

“Hm,” he said, quite unsurprised. “And that adventure went poorly.”

“And that went poorly,” she agreed. “So she adjusted her plans for the future to reflect reality.” She heard the unspoken question. “No, I don’t have children.”

“Ah, well, I myself only have the one,” Ougai murmured with a half-smile. He put his cheek in his hand and stared into space.

Kouyou did not argue with him if one’s imaginary friends counted as children, or even as friends. Her job was to redirect and find another way to please the client, and luckily this one was easily amused by novelty. “Come! Enough depressing stories. Let’s play Tora, Tora, Tora.” She went over to the windows, picked up the decorative standing paper screen, and shuffled it over to the middle of the room. Mori finished his glass of beer and got to his feet, obediently taking his place on the other side of the screen. 

This game was simple, like rock, paper, scissors but with a spear-bearing warrior, his elderly mother hunched over with a cane, and the fierce tiger chasing the old woman. Kouyou checked that Mori knew the three options (he did), whether he remembered the song (he did not), and if they had enough alcohol for a real game (hopefully the one large bottle would be enough for now). Once Mori was ready to go, Kouyou began to clap and sing, doing the poses and gestures as Mori began to clap along:

“From a thousand ri away, deep within a grove,

Everyone come and see:

Sleeves and forehead tied with cords of gold,

Lord Watounai so mightily strove,

And caught a beast so bold!

Tiger - tiger - tiger - “

Kouyou peeked out past the edge of the screen holding her imaginary spear, and met Mori hunched over his imaginary cane. She accepted the penalty shot of beer (carefully portioned out to last). 

The second pass was a tie, but she was now the only one clapping to the song, to her surprise; normally the rest of the attendees would be clapping for them at a party but surely he could get into the spirit of the game, or was he bored at such old-fashioned entertainment? This became understandable when the third round ended with Mori on all fours play-growling at her old woman. He winked up at her, and declared he was the deadly white tiger of Yokohama. Kouyou commented sourly that she was definitely going to stab him with her spear next time if that were the case, and accepted her penalty drink with a practiced toss of her wrist.

“If you’re not going to clap, you have to sing,” she ordered, and the game proceeded with increasingly ridiculous physical interpretations of the three choices and a more even distribution of penalties as both of them started to make mistakes.

Shortly after taking his position as Boss of the Port Mafia under suspicious circumstances, Mori had invited her for a private dinner all the way over in Ginza. She had dreaded a tedious mandatory social event with another narrow-shouldered black suit, and even worse, it was Mori-sensei. She dreaded meeting him in these particular circumstances, in a way. He had been quite tolerable as an occasional encounter in headquarters or at parties, but now he was her would-be employer and she had never met someone who didn’t change for the worse in some way when given authority. 

She had made her position clear to him, she’d thought as she walked down the tree-lined streets and expensive storefronts, ignoring the curious looks she attracted with her clothing: she was nominally on his side because the Port Mafia and Yokohama would descend back into violent chaos without a firm hand on the wheel. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t have decided otherwise. 

Mori always seemed shady as hell, particularly when dressed in his suit instead of his usual crumpled white coat. Even now she couldn’t describe him any other way. She had known a great many evil-faced people who turned out to be kind, and vice-versa. But Mori had a face that was…insincere, somehow, even when he was clearly being quite honest by his definition of the term. Something about his eyes, perhaps. 

The conflict between his smiling face and cold eyes was psychically unpleasant if you were paying attention, but it also gave her a memory of looking at her own smiling face in the mirror after a long day in a full face of makeup. She only really began to understand this interesting effect later when she saw the same falseness on another person, a young man who was less experienced with his mask.

They were meeting outside of Yokohama, presumably to stay in neutral territory for both of them. She had expected a fancy meal in a fancy restaurant if she was meeting the boss, but instead the address was for a basement bar; she clopped carefully down the narrow stairs into the dense stuffy air of a mafia-owned establishment and Mori-sensei waved an arm to greet her when he saw her at the door. There was soon beer and fried chicken and peanuts in their small booth, and he broke protocol and poured for her before she could put on her business face and pour for him.

She had sat across from him and toasted his promotion, one hand tensed into a fist under the table, watching his arms for a sudden move. She was always armed, and she presumed he was as well, but the lack of guards was a sign of suicidal bravado. She had mentally sneered at his confidence; she had been dragged back to the Port Mafia in disgrace once, but that did not mean there had not been a bodycount. If she wanted him dead, it was unclear that he would be able to stop her.

“I’d like some advice on something that has been bothering me a little,” he said after a certain amount of the usual pleasantries. Kouyou nodded cautiously, and he inclined his head respectfully to her. “How do I avoid ending up dead? Your information so far has been keeping me alive, so you clearly have good insights into what is going on outside of my own spheres of information. Tell me what I need to know.”

Advice? This ghoul was asking her for survival advice? She overcame her surprise and started talking about her experience of the Port Mafia in very general terms, giving him the requested pointers. When she would look at him to assess his expression, she saw nothing more than a deceptively polite dead-fish stare over the edge of his glass. Everyone always had their assumptions about her, but as shady as Mori was, he simply absorbed what she was saying in silence, offering neither sympathy nor blame. So she told him more.

Mori listened, and poured, and even helped her hold her beer glass to her mouth when she was too drunk to pour and hadn’t finished saying what she needed to tell him. All of her stories and confessions dropped into the black hole of the man’s personality and blessedly disappeared without a trace. Nothing seemed to surprise him; nihil admirari .

Mori had spoken too eventually, but reluctantly and only in response to direct questions. She hadn’t known him very well at the time so she’d foolishly used the rare opportunity to simply grill him about his family, friends, anything that would make this human-shaped creature into something more like a person - at which he’d smiled and explained that he had a family like anyone else but they lived far away from Yokohama in the countryside, and he had not seen them after coming to the capital before the War. He said it simply, like he’d moved to the big city to get a job like anyone else, and then poured half the beer from his glass into hers and offered it to her. He said nothing about his friends.

At 2 am he paid the bill and rode with her in the taxi back to Yokohama; outside the Port Mafia headquarters he’d simply said, “Can you get home by yourself?” When she shook her head, he walked her into the fledgling medical wing, hooked her up to IV fluids, and left her to sleep it off.

She’d woken up the following morning on that uncomfortable cot with a dull headache and the feeling as if she had emotionally pulled out a rotten tooth last night. It was surprisingly liberating to feel emptiness and quietness for a few minutes.

She carefully searched her impressions of the night before. She mostly found a surprising lack of anger, even at having been so efficiently pacified by a token show of humility from the older man. He truly only wanted the names of his enemies and didn’t seem to count her as one of them, which made her more inclined to be cooperative. 

She sat up, pulled the IV out of her hand with a tiny bite of pain, and began to explore the room for her purse where she knew she kept painkillers. Overall, she supposed, the whole episode last night had inclined her favorably towards their new leader…not that it was hard to be better than the last.

Unlike the kabuki heroine Scarface Otomi, when the former Boss had punished Kouyou for her affair and elopement, he had ordered her face to be spared, and there had been nobody to smuggle her out to freedom after he was done with her. 

On the other hand, she thought with satisfaction as she located her pill bottle and swallowed the aspirin dry, Scarface Otomi had ultimately survived the chaotic seas of her life through her wits, business sense, and willingness to resort to ultraviolence.

Being in the mafia and becoming a torturer, leaving and returning, drifting onwards. The cycle of days, chaotic and cruel, pitilessly reinforced a suspicion she’d had about the world. Everything broke, one way or another. By now, when she tortured someone and they died without telling her anything at all, she only felt a vague, poorly-formed disappointment, and then anger. She just hadn’t figured out the breaking point for that particular person in time, and therefore it had been a waste of her time. 

When someone broke, on the other hand, she felt a rush of calm and relief of having done her job, and then quickly a wave of benevolence towards them; it wasn’t their fault. She was doing her job, and she was very good at her job. It’s not that she was unaware that they were suffering human beings with families and rich inner lives just like her own - she too was a person, and they probably weren’t thinking about her rich inner life in that moment either. Torture was not a time for torturer and subject to ponder each other’s humanity. She broke people one after another, and simply felt a deep sense of relief at having figured out exactly how people, even herself, could be broken with enough effort. 

Mori invited her to join him for food at another bar all the way over in Shinjuku some weeks after their first official dinner meeting in Ginza. She did like bar food and had discovered that she didn’t entirely want to kill him right away, but she didn’t know what the still-new Boss wanted to talk about this time. The customers of the particular bar he had selected were definitely used to certain kinds of business being discussed; she saw people keeping their leather gloves on to eat their chicken skewers, indicating that they probably had something to hide about their hands. The dishes were tasty, and the menu had all the classics, although they had to agree to disagree on the merits of goya. 

When Mori had admitted indistinctly through a hot mouthful of goya tempura that he had been tortured before, she was mildly curious, but when he simply said that he had not confessed anything useful and didn’t think too much about it, she was blindsided by a surge of rage coming from the dark place beyond rational thought. She had been stunned into immobility by the intensity of her reaction - in retrospect she was glad for the Port Mafia that she had instinctively frozen. A couple of deep breaths and the urge for violence had receded to controllable levels. Where had that come from?

“Are you all right?” Mori asked with a nonchalant expression, putting down his chopsticks.

She didn’t understand what she could have possibly revealed. She hadn’t moved a muscle. But his eyes were dangerously alert now.

“You’ve gone grey,” he said, still smiling in that irritatingly unbothered way as he watched her for sudden moves. “But suit yourself. Do you want to keep talking about this?” 

She actually did, even if she wasn’t sure how she might react. Well, if she killed him, she killed him.

He studied her for a minute, sighed, and then his demeanor changed. “They couldn’t figure out how to scare me,” he said more soberly, “so it was just pain. I’m good at waiting, and I enjoy not giving people what they want, so that suited me just fine. But torture of the mind, that might work on me. I see that’s more your style.” The person in the booth with her grinned a little sadly. “I have to make sure not to fall into your clutches. Some people are just simple sadists, but you’re competitive and you don’t like losing, do you? That’s bad news for your subjects, but good news for you.”

She frowned. “What if I’m a sadist after all?”

He frowned back, but playfully, and snagged a piece of the tamagoyaki plate that had just arrived at their table. “I don’t think so, but I’m hardly going to judge you if you are; you’re mafia, not a schoolteacher, and even schoolteachers are entitled to a good time. But hopefully you’re not another Sada Abe.” She made a face at him and he popped the sweet egg omelet into his mouth to cover a smile.

“Are you a simple masochist, then? Is that why you held out?”

He shook his head. “I have no issue with lying and there is no real circumstance where I must tell the truth like a robot whose button has been pressed. So far, at least, I have only told the truth when I wanted to…see, this is the problem, now I’m challenging you!” He laughed in apparent good humor, holding up his hands which were occupied with beer and chopsticks respectively. “Please let go of your weapon. I really haven’t done anything to deserve it yet.”

“I suppose your daughter would miss you if you were gone,” she muttered, shoving the inch of blade back into its sheath.

Mori swirled his beer in his glass and sighed dramatically. “She’s obliged to.” He downed the last inch of beer and leaned forward. “Ozaki, listen: I only mean to say that we do not need to be enemies. Before now we have gotten along, and I think we can continue to do so, but I don’t want you reading malice into my actions when I intend none. We’re here because you have something to say and I wanted to hear it, and then I have something to ask you.”

Kouyou finished the last of the karaage and decided to relent. But not much; just enough to keep the evening going. “So what would you do if you got caught by someone with an Ability that forces you to tell the truth?” She turned around, located their waiter, and signaled them to come for another round. She was hungry today.

“Oh, that’s a good one. Spite motivates me in times like these. I suppose I’d just be painfully literal in my answers. Waste a lot of time making them be precise about what answer they want. Give it to them in a language they don’t understand so they have to waste time there. You can be quite weak like me and still make them work hard for it.”

“You can remember a foreign language in extreme duress?”

“Kouyou-kun, I was in the war. I know I can.” He wrung his hands slightly, looked down at them, and then plastered a smile on his face. 

She had to give him that one. For her, the War was an unpleasant memory of childhood, not a ghost living in her house. “What if the Ability caused extreme pain?”

He actually relaxed at this question. “Oh, then one just screams, do they not?”

Kouyou swirled her drink for a minute, thinking. “Mori-sensei, what do you want from me?”

“Oh, I’d like you to protect me, if you would,” he said, as guilessly as a child. He indicated the last piece of goya tempura and nudged the plate closer to her. “Try it! Trust me!”

She grudgingly picked up the last piece of deep-fried bitter melon and bit into it. It…wasn’t terrible, actually.

“I am so tired,” Hans confessed the following morning, nursing his coffee cup between his large pale hands. “I woke up at 4 am and it was bright outside already. So I took a stroll outside and nearly had a stroke walking half a kilometer. This is worse than being in the mountains at home!” 

“I suppose we could have had this meeting via teleconferencing,” Mori said. Kouyou knew that he had been monitoring the Konzern’s activity for well over a year and had certain plans for this meeting. Or was he planning to do a surgical strike remotely after all?

Hans shook his head, leaning forward. “No, no, I wanted to come when you invited me. It had been so long since we’d talked! I wanted to see you and what you’ve done since the War. You were always such an odd fellow, but now that I see you in your element, I understand you a little better. You cannot judge how useful a tiger’s stripes are in the snow; you have to see them in a forest, right?”

Mori looked at Kouyou. “Am I a tiger?” he murmured.

“Better a tiger than an ass,” she whispered back behind her hand, and he choked. Hans watched them with interest, sipping his coffee. 

Mori turned back to their guest and tapped the table sternly, still smiling. “When you are ready, we need to start our discussions, Hans. This is a business meeting.”

“Yes, yes,” he said in good humor, signaling his secretary to gather the rest of the team back to the table. 

Today’s discussion was not as genial as yesterday’s. Their guests were exhausted, their patience was short, and Mori seemed unworried by their irritation.

“Mori, let’s stop pretending. You’re a businessman, and I can guess you’re in a number of interesting businesses yourself. I lend money to the people who come to me. If they pay it back on time with interest, I’ll lend to them again. If I am given a gift of money and asked to re-invest it in a specific company, I am happy to do that for a very reasonable fee.” Hans waved his free hand dismissively. “You’d do the same.” 

“Of course,” Mori said evenly. “But these financial practices are destabilizing to our economy. Think of the local businesses,” he continued, as if they were dealing with opening a train-station food court and not the illicit movement of several billion yen.

Hans took his dying cigar out of his mouth and gave Mori a frankly bewildered once-over. “Forgive me, but I have heard more than a few stories about your company. You do ‘money lending’ yourself. Where are you drawing the lines here?”

“You don’t put any thought into who you deal with on the larger scale, Hans.”

“If I were fussy about that, would I really be dealing with you? You were desperate for money once, and I knew more or less what you needed it for, and yet I gave it to you anyway.”

“True,” Mori conceded. “Asking for money for a private army is hard to justify on a conventional morality scale. I’ve done worse.”

“I don’t doubt it. I don’t even involve myself in that kind of moral calculus; I just lend and collect. Money moves, and good things happen or bad things happen, but it’s all the same in the end.”

“If you give someone a weapon, it’s none of your business what they do with it,” Mori rephrased with a wry shrug. He seemed to be thinking.

“When does personal responsibility enter into it? I can’t take responsibility for everything that happens adjacent to me. You are a busybody, old fellow, and you know that’s how you get into trouble.” Hans leaned back with a deep sigh. “I am quite proud to see what you managed to do with that loan I gave you. I knew you could do it.”

“You charged fifty percent interest,” Mori snorted, returning from his thoughts and slapping the table. “It’s usury! You could have cut me a break!”

“Never,” Hans laughed heartily. “You’re too clever to need a handicap! And I don’t discriminate between clients. If I decide to lend to you, you get the same rate as anyone else.” He folded his hands. “Now, to get to business: why won’t you let me do business in Yokohama, really?”

“I’m allowed to make business decisions in my home city,” Mori said. “You’re competition, my friend.”

“Fine, but even when I go to other cities in your beautiful country so as not to compete, nobody is willing to deal. I cannot make contracts. I cannot even get the money through the banks - it’s always tied up in paperwork. If I get a contract signed, it is broken - even at high expense! - within days, and then nobody wants to even sign a contract because they heard what happened. Even the casinos won’t work with me, and those men would sell their mothers for cold hard cash. If this is about competition, surely we can come to an agreement, Mori. Be reasonable.”

She knew Ougai-dono had exerted some effort into blocking this ridiculous white-collar business and would not have bothered to arrange an in-person meeting if he had any doubts left in his mind. His eccentricities aside, his time was too valuable to waste on arguments. But he sat and smiled back at Mr. Hans, and she could see Mr. Hans’s life being weighed and measured behind his smiling eyes. She wondered if Mr. Hans realized how close he might be to death up here.

“Madame Ozaki,” Hans said wearily. He did not seem as annoyed as earlier, and was back to his genial jetlagged self. “Do you have children?”

Kouyou smiled a practiced but not unfriendly smile. “None, I’m afraid; do you?”

“Yes, two,” he said, but to her surprise and relief he did not pull out the pictures. Maybe he got out all of that parental energy with Mori, thank god. “I didn’t bring them with me this time, but I had been considering it. Maybe next time I should bring my wife too so I can introduce her. Pfui! Even my cigars are terrible today.” He stubbed out his sputtering cigar in disappointment; Kouyou wondered how much those five centimeters of cigar had cost. “Did Mori bring his wife with him?”

“His wife?” she said, confused, wondering if she had misunderstood the word. His tone was neither insinuating one thing nor another, but she realized the opportunity she had been handed and drew away in shock. “He has a wife?” she exclaimed in distress, and then covered her mouth with her fan and laughed lightly, dropping her gaze. “I don’t know much about his personal life. I’m just a subordinate.”

“I just can’t imagine,” Hans said with a smile, looking over at Mori and watching him for a minute. “I heard he had a daughter, but I suppose that’s pretty hush-hush. You don’t need a wife for that, but Mori isn’t someone who would adopt, and he doesn’t mention his family, so I thought it might be a delicate situation.”

“I have never met his wife,” Kouyou said with perfect honesty. “He doesn’t talk about having one, at least. He never told me he had one…” She let that hang in the air and fretted for several minutes, keeping his attention on her, but he stayed polite and solicitous in a somewhat old-fashioned way. She began to feel irritation that he was not giving her the crack she needed to dislike him. 

Did this man think someone that naive and gossippy would be in her position? Her Boss’s actual family situation was significantly more bizarre than some garden-variety wife and child. 

She would have to throw in more bait after all. She leaned in conspiratorially, touching his sleeve and hiding her mouth with her fan again. They both looked around and found Mori at the far end of the room; he glanced at them and returned to his conversation. Reassured, the two moved closer to whisper. “I didn’t even know he had a daughter!” she hissed behind her fan. “What have you heard? How old is she?”

“Well, Danna, you’ll be glad to know that Elise-chan is famous even in Germany.”

“Is she,” Mori said with a mean grin. Elise peeked out from behind his shoulders. “Are they aware of how cute she is? What were you two gossiping about over there?”

“They don’t know where you got her, but they know she exists, and put quite a bit of effort into finding out about her, as far as I can tell. Hans thinks you must be a very strange sort of parent but he thinks that’s amusing. He wants to respect your privacy so he didn’t ask you directly about her, he says.”

“Oh, Hans,” Mori sighed. He seemed unsurprised. “What a liar. He wouldn’t know about her if he really had been respecting my privacy.”

Kouyou nodded grimly. It was basic sense that had been drilled into the top brass of the Port Mafia: you never spoke about Elise before Boss brought her up himself in front of third parties, and you never referred to her true nature at all in any circumstance. She essentially had the same security measures as a flesh-and-blood daughter, without the need to stake out a physical location. “He also asked if you had a secret wife or a mistress or a concubine - “

“A wife? What on earth for?”

“Mori-sensei,” Kouyou said patiently, “where do babies come from?”

“But why would I need a wife if I have Elise-chan?”

“RINTAROU,” Elise scolded, yanking on his hair until he yelped, “you need to get a life! A nice normal life, not whatever this is.”

“Elise-chan, please, that hurts! And a concubine? What am I, a warlord?”

The former boss certainly had had a number of female companions, Kouyou reflected, but that was neither here nor there. “That’s what I thought. I said I had no idea about any of that and was absolutely not involved.”

Mori chuckled. “Not interested in being Elise-chan’s mother?”

There was a pause, and Mori cackled in genuine amusement at whatever he saw on her face. 

“I’M not the problem here,” Elise insisted, deeply offended. “I’m a delight!”

“Of course you are, my darling Elise-chan, I wasn’t saying - ”

Kouyou raised her voice to interrupt their idiotic squabbling. “Does she actually need a mother for public appearances?” she asked, resigning herself to whatever nonsense he would come up with. She rarely accompanied Elise-chan in public (that task being delegated to the youngsters), so there was likely limited evidence of their connection. They would have to start building that up…Elise was staring at her, giggling behind her hands. She could be rather cute when she was having a genuine reaction.

“No, actually, I was just teasing you. I rather prefer to leave that part a mystery; they focus more on who the mysterious mother was than who Elise is.” He frowned, twirling a coil of Elise’s hair around his finger. “Which would be more convincing to Hans, do you think? Tragic widower, divorcé, or full-on Bluebeard? I believe I could sell him widower. I’m very tragic.” He thought for a while longer while Elise made her opinions known on that subject. “What does he think is going on between us?” he asked after a minute of contemplation.

Kouyou fanned herself dramatically. She had even allowed herself to shed a tear of rage over this shocking betrayal, and Mr. Hans had been so kind about it. “You’ve been toying with my heart and lying about your secret family, Ougai.”

“I am a monster, ” Mori said, delighted. “Imagine Hans thinking I could juggle two women.”

Dinner was shabu-shabu for two and good local beer. Kouyou was grateful for the break and was completely famished; she needed to eat more if she wanted to drink more. Their guests were treated to a large and expensive group dinner in the dining hall downstairs, but both Mr. Hans and Mori had retired early to their rooms pleading headaches. She suspected Mori just wanted some quiet to think, and was thankful for the excuse to also skip the raucous party if she had to tend to her ailing employer.

“What do you think, Kouyou? This isn’t my area of expertise. Is it unwise of me to block this man from bringing his money to Yokohama and lending freely?”

“Depends on what your concerns are. If he could be relied upon as an ally, we can surely negotiate good terms for future loans. But fifty percent interest every ten days , Danna? Really? ”

“I was desperate and it was years ago! I could hardly go to a bank for a loan! And you see he doesn’t cut people any slack!” Mori whined. 

“For shame, the Port Mafia boss getting ripped off by a moneylender. How did you pay that back?” 

“Bought some mercenaries, bought some weapons, knocked over a bank,” he said as if this were obvious. “It took about eighteen days to organize, so it was painful but I could do it. Got into counterfeiting for a while, but not too much. And after that, ‘sound financial investments’ and ‘clever banking’ have been all we need. But that’s not the problem with Hans, is it.”

She sighed, gently scratching her nails over the tatami. “No. I like Mr. Hans well enough as a person, but he will just as soon lend large sums to your enemies. He is not an ally. He is a businessman.”

“I can’t control everything that happens everywhere, but Hans would not be satisfied with an exclusive contract for Mafia business. He wants it all, so he’ll try to get it all. He’s always been like this.” He groaned and yanked on his hair. “I shouldn’t have taken that loan back then, but I was young and didn’t have many options. I panicked.”

“Have you accepted other loans from his group?”

“Not at all. I promise! That kind of unsecured debt is dangerous and not worth it. I know your opinion of my financial skills is currently low but I at least understand how to keep my kneecaps. Besides, now that we have our Business Permit and the laws have changed, Hans would have to charge me the legal limit for interest...or I could just go to a bank for a business loan like any other businessman, right? And I can consult an expert for managing my black market loans,” he said, nodding at her.

She briefly panicked. Running some collection businesses was not the same as running a company of this size. “Danna, I hope you ran this plan by our actual accountants.”

“Of course, of course - but unless you’re saying we should let Verlaine train our business accountants to be killing machines so they can help us with our collection work - although that would be interesting…” Kouyou snapped her fingers to bring him back from his tangent. “I don’t need an accountant for managing some business. I appreciate having intelligent muscle with me,” he finished ingratiatingly, offering her a drink.

Kouyou had been called many things at work in her time, but that was a new one. She laughed, somehow enjoying the new description. “You could have brought Chuuya too if that’s all you wanted, Ougai-dono.”

Mori laughed so hard he nearly lost his balance. “Never, not with Hans around! Although - “ He physically waved away the idea with another snort of laughter and she lunged forward to catch the bottle before he knocked it over. “No, no, that would be incredibly unkind to Chuuya. I think I wasted my lifetime ask when he acted as Elise-chan’s decoy, don’t you think?” 

They both howled with laughter at that remarkable memory before Mori finally regained some degree of control over himself. “No, no, Kouyou, I needed you specifically. There’s no substitute for you for this kind of work. Thank you as always for assisting me.” 

Clearly this useless man did require assistance from someone who still had some basic hand-eye coordination. “You are at least a tolerable drinking companion, so I suppose I’ll help you.” She smiled in memory. “You like loosening people up with booze before you pick their brains, don’t you?”

“It’s effective,” he said shamelessly. “It even works with me.” 

“Do you actually get drunk? Are you drunk now?”

“Madame,” he said with wounded dignity, “Of course I get drunk sometimes! Do you really think I’m sober?”

“I don’t know; you’re often just as foolish sober as you are drunk so you could be lying all the time.” 

“But Kouyou! You get mean with liars, so I have to give you a little honesty or you’ll get angry at me!” The terrible Boss of the Port Mafia was reduced to whining like a teenager. “Yes, I am drunk right now and if you wanted my head, I think it’d be a real effort to keep it. Is that good enough for you?”

“That’s better,” Kouyou said graciously.

“Believe it or not, I used to be quite optimistic about the future, in my own way. But the War…” he trailed off, tapping the side of his glass moodily.

“The War?” Kouyou asked quietly, trying not to alert him to the fact that he was being a talkative drunk.

“Humans beings are mortal and they die. This is a universal truth and it does not bother me. I’ve seen many people die. I suppose I’ve helped a number of those people on their way themselves,” he chuckled. “I think…it was seeing what happens after a person dies that changed me. Because it’s true; nobody is irreplaceable and the graveyards are full of indispensable men. Nobody’s individual life makes a large diversion in the course of history, or even in the lives of those around them. I try to be a rock in the river of time, parting the flow of history around me by my presence, but eventually I too will be worn down and disappear…and everything I have ever done may leave no mark at all on the world, forgotten in ten or twenty or fifty years. It is all futility, on some level.”

“If that’s true, then why bother?” Brutal logic applied to this kind of worldview would just lead straight into the tunnel of nihilism; she had seen it so many times before. He was staring out into the forest at night, the drink in his hand apparently forgotten for the moment. But he did not act like all he could see was a dark destructive planet hanging over the world, close enough to touch. To her surprise, there was a sort of lightness to his expression.

“Would you believe me if I said it was sentimentality? I’m still human, and I’m still alive. I love being alive even if there is no point to it. Even if it is all futile in the end, I will live in accordance with what I think is necessary and logical. Even if we all die in the end, we need a society with rules and structure. The bright side of the world that faces the sun always has to have a side that touches the wet, rotting reality of nature. And for anything that is on the underside of that world of law, there is the Port Mafia holding the world steady. Or it could go the other way again. The Port Mafia just as well can become the rot consuming the city, as it was in the past.”

“I know you believe in this vision of yours, and I don’t disagree.” His behavior was whimsical, but his decision-making was not. “But why is the move so easy in one direction and not the other? It’s so easy to crawl under the rock, but if you crawl on top of the rock, someone will try to step on you like an insect until you can find another dark place to hide.”

“I don’t know; human beings are cruel.” He seemed to notice her renewed anxiety at the thought of Kyouka struggling out there in the light and patted her hand. “But it’s not impossible, with the right planning and right connections. I suppose even I could have tried to get a government posting after the War - although my unit was disgraced and the records are under lock and key, I am sure that in return for my silence I could have gotten a nice low-level office job in the bureau of something-or-other far away from Yokohama, filling out paperwork I don’t want to fill and making small talk over tea in the cafeteria with my colleagues.” He paused, frowned in recognition, and Kouyou covered her smile with her fan. “But, in the end, I’m an insect, and insects like the dark. What would you have done?”

Kouyou thought about it. She looked at the inlaid decorations on the small fan she was holding. “If I must be practical…I could give lessons of some sort. Handicrafts? My family made small goods, and I could learn again, I think.”

“You’re an Executive; you wouldn’t want to go into government work? Or consulting?” She could see him asking again and again from different angles: don’t you want to leave?

Well, she didn’t. “Pretending that they would ignore my history and hire me for sensitive work, do you think I have a burning desire to be told to make tea for everyone at meetings? Or be crudely propositioned without the right to stab them?”

“But don’t you think it would be funny making poor Sakaguchi erase our criminal records?” Mori mimed a stack of paper taller than he was, and Kouyou laughed, copying him.

“Leave that boy alone. He would never.”

“Oh, but I think he would ,” Mori said. “I cannot harm him per our agreement, but that does not mean we cannot ‘interact’. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime request.”

“Wasn’t that Dazai?”

“Oh no, his guilt towards Dazai allowed us to arrange that one. That was his apology, brokered through me.”

“And Chuuya’s papers?”

Ougai-dono laughed, clearly in a much better mood when talking about his successes. “A secret military project can easily get papers and a family registry in return for me keeping my mouth shut about the whole business. Suribachi is much more politically convenient as a gas leak to the public and destruction caused by neutralized foreign agents to the rest of the government. Especially after the Clock Tower sent its agents, and after the Dragon’s Head Conflict…they had too many messes to cover up. Not all sectors of the government talk freely to each other, after all, and everyone lies to their supervisors. The military needs to be close-lipped most of all.”

“Didn’t the government want you to turn Chuuya over to them?”

“They did,” Mori said with a gentle smile, and left it like that.

“So you think that you have one big ask left from that Department?”

“If I play my cards carefully, yes. As you can see, Sakaguchi see-saws between sentimentality and practicality, so I need to have both arguments ready whenever I need him to do something for me. Taneda himself has no sentimentality to appeal to, other than the safety of his subordinates, and in the end he too is a leader. There are always considerable risks with the kind of favors that the government tends to ask of us, because you know their priorities are different than our own. But it is always good to remind them of their debts.”

“Can you…why don’t you bring out Gold Demon?” Ougai asked at the end of dinner after the dishes had been cleared by the inn maids.

“May I ask why?”

“I want to try something, but I need her here. Would you please?”

Kouyou shrugged, recognizing the command, and Gold Demon settled into the air behind her, its sleeves drifting over Kouyou’s shoulders and blending in with her own golden sleeves. Ougai-dono looked all the way up at Gold Demon, leaning back on both hands with a little smile. He glanced over at the low table which had an old-fashioned round hand mirror on a stand, and held out his hand; Gold Demon took the mirror and offered it politely. He looked at himself and then angled the mirror at Kouyou, and his eyebrows jumped. “So she doesn’t show up at all!” He took out his phone, pointed the camera at Gold Demon, took a picture, and seemed fascinated by the result.

“Most don’t, Danna.” 

“ I do,” Elise interrupted pertly.

“She does!” Mori gushed, searching through his photos for a good example before Elise knocked the phone out of his hand with a scowl. Kouyou picked up the phone and looked more closely at the photograph of herself sitting alone, without Gold Demon in the frame with her. Ugh, she looked tired. She politely handed back the phone to her equally tired-eyed companion. 

She turned to pour another drink for the both of them, and when she turned around, Elise was now leaning over Boss’s shoulders in a cascade of golden curls, admiring her face next to Mori’s in the hand mirror in a rare moment of peace. Elise was often better-behaved in private without an audience of outsiders; Mori was too, come to think of it. They were both making exaggerated expressions and laughing together, and when Kouyou held out the refilled beer glass to the elder, Elise pushed off of Mori’s shoulders and walked up to Gold Demon, her hands behind her back. Unsure what she was supposed to do, Gold Demon rose a few inches into the air, hovered, and then settled back to the ground.

“No feet,” Elise said curiously.

Kouyou looked at the hazy place where Demon’s kimono faded into golden obscurity near the floor. Elise, as cute as she was, completely lacked the supernatural majesty of Gold Demon. “That’s right, Elise-chan.”

Elise leaned back to look up at Demon and seemed even more delighted. “No face either! Well - it’s just a mask, isn’t it?” She stroked Demon’s long sleeve, and then pressed the spectral cloth to her face with an almost drunken giggle.

Demon fidgeted; Kouyou wasn’t sure what to say. Gold Demon carefully put a hand on Elise’s head and the girl squirmed closer for more pets. She thought about Kyouka and the hollow within her itched. 

“ I have feet and a face,” Elise said proudly, peeking over the cloth in her hands. Ougai-dono looked sleepy. Even if he was drunk, Elise-chan seemed generally unaffected; Kouyou wondered yet again if he was pretending to be drunk. But that seemed unlikely; Kouyou had personally poured a lot of alcohol into him tonight. “And I can see myself in a mirror!” She loudly sniffed and exhaled. “Oh but I can smell it too, what is this? Incense? It’s really pretty!”

Kouyou picked up Demon’s other sleeve and took a deep whiff of it, but she could only smell the faintest fragrance, which she might have been imagining because he’d brought it up. Mori sipped his drink, and Elise said dreamily, “It smells like…aloeswood. That’s very nice.” She crumpled the imaginary silk over her face again, and Mori hiccuped. Demon hovered uncertainly, caught by her sleeve.

“Let me braid your hair,” Elise said from the depths of the silk over her face. “I can, right, RINTAROU?”

“If she says yes,” Mori mumbled, using the opportunity to lie down and convert his jacket to a pillow; he curled on his side so he could keep watching them. “What do you think, Kouyou?”

Kouyou was not quite drunk enough to have lost her sense of propriety yet, but - what could the harm be? Demon always appeared fully dressed and coiffed. Kouyou never played dress-up with her, even as a child; some dolls were not toys. She nodded acquiescence and Gold Demon knelt - hovered? - so Elise could reach and remove the pins from her hair. Elise tugged at Demon’s cape and succeeded in pulling it off her shoulders. 

Demon’s coral-red hair fell down around her face and shoulders for the first time she could remember, and Kouyou was shocked at how weirdly…different it made her feel. She kept her face calm and let Elise run her hands through Demon’s hair, exclaiming at its prettiness. 

“I didn’t know I could do this with Demon,” she said suddenly, forgetting to remain nonchalant as she watched Elise play with her new doll. She couldn’t explain her sadness. “I just thought that was how she looked. I’ve never tried - I just summon and dismiss her.” 

“I wasn’t sure, but I thought it might be possible,” he said from the floor. “They're just us, after all. If they have a form, you can change it. And, as it turns out, Abilities can work together and affect each other.” Elise noticed Kouyou’s melancholy expression and waggled a hairpin saucily at her. Just like a human daughter, her smile betrayed her close relationship to Mori. “Can’t people change? Don’t you want to try?”

Elise hummed tunelessly as she divided Demon’s hair into several segments, moving with unexpected ease with the basic mechanics of braiding but fumbling when the volume of hair was too much for her small hands. She took her larger form in response to keep braiding. 

It was an unusual and charming sight to see the two kneeling together, and Mori sat up and turned off the table lamp so the moonlight over the mountains could reflect off of all the polished surfaces of the room. Light passed strangely over and around and through Abilities; the two had a faint inner glow, like lanterns - no, Elise clearly had more solidity to her, like a sculpture. Her eyes were very pale blue ringed with darker blue, in sharp contrast to Demon’s gold-on-gold or even her father’s.

Mori did not seem to have much need for his nurse outside of the operating room, and the small and harmless form paired well with her user when he too was hiding his true nature. Kouyou herself still wasn’t sure what an ‘accurate’ or ‘honest’ form for Elise-chan might be; the spoiled child felt right, but the blood-soaked war medic with the thousand-yard stare wasn’t wrong either. The better she got to knew her employer, the stranger he got, but this was preferable to digging deeper and finding a garden-variety egotist or lecher or woman-beater.

She studied him, and he did her the courtesy of not opening his eyes while she did so. Like suspicious but well-trained dogs, they instinctively avoided glaring at each other while sizing each other up. He really was not a difficult employer, she decided. Though she didn’t know his precise thoughts, she knew what he valued and therefore she found it easy to anticipate what he wanted. She knew when his anger was real and dangerous, and when he was simply play-acting or throwing a childish tantrum. These two points alone made him infinitely better than the former Boss, although she understood that the rank-and-file might not agree how easy he was to understand and predict. 

After a minute of feeling the phantom sensation of a comb through her hair, the temptation had been too much and she had undone her own hair to brush it. Mori mumbled something and Elise’s braiding hands gradually slowed down and stopped. She leaned her forehead against Gold Demon’s back and seemed to drift off, her long straight golden eyelashes shining against her cheeks. Had she been a real girl subject to gravity she might have fallen to the ground, but Kouyou smiled and Gold Demon leaned forward slightly so Elise-chan could have a more comfortable drunken catnap nestled in her hair.

She generally enjoyed spending time with this fool, and was glad that of all possible fates for the Port Mafia, this specific man had decided he wanted this job. These times were quite nice, in fact. What was so morally wrong with this kind of life?

“She could have stayed ,” Kouyou grumbled to herself after several peaceful minutes of combing her hair in the silent room. 

“She could have, but didn’t,” Mori countered immediately in his unforgiving way, opening his eyes from his comfortable doze. 

The wooden comb snagged in her hair and hung there before she adjusted her grip to pull it through the tangle. She was lucky that he had not disciplined her for wasting the resources he had granted her to retrieve Kyouka, but she had been careful with the permission he had given her; it was her own strength and own time, and young Akutagawa as an assistant and collaborator. Akutagawa was a mad dog at times, but he was a mad dog with a younger sister and so he was an unexpected ally. These resources were all perfectly within her rights to use as long as they did not interfere with the bottom line. 

Mori, of course, didn’t care personally. He had rarely met Kyouka and probably cared exactly as far as she was valuable to Kouyou herself. Her knowledge of front businesses and secret passages was a simple security risk but that is why he had bodyguards. To him, Kyouka was an employee to be weighed on the same scales as everyone else, and Kouyou understood this. It was hard to ask him to have a personal investment in other people’s desires when he barely allowed a personal investment in his own, but she recognized when he made an attempt.

Elise’s eyes had snapped open the instant her father’s had, but she had not resumed braiding yet. She was watching them alertly with her cheek against Gold Demon’s back, and Kouyou wondered what he was worried about for Elise to be on that level of alert. She put down her comb and reached for her drink. “Did I fail her somehow?”

“Why do you think that?”

“She ran away! She’s….she’s not safe. ”

“Nobody’s safe,” Mori said, not unkindly. “Neither of us are safe, either. She will probably live longer if she is allowed to learn how to survive without so much protection.”

She badly wanted to say something about Mori’s ideas of letting people sink or swim, but held her tongue. She respected him, and obeyed him, and generally agreed with him, but she didn’t spoil Kyouka. She didn’t smother or infantilize her. She didn’t! Why, Kyouka had gone through the same training that anyone in wetworks did! Kouyou hadn’t stopped that. She didn’t even disagree with having Kyouka trained by Verlaine, or having her mentored by Akutagawa, or teaching her to kill at all. 

She’d seen Kyouka cry the first time she’d carried out a mission, but such initial squeamishness did not mean Kyouka was ill-suited for the work; even Kouyou herself had shrieked the first time a man was stabbed in front of her. If she must be honest, she had breathed a sigh of relief when Kyouka’s tears stopped and were replaced by quiet indifference; such waterworks were useless in the end and the sooner she could handle the cruelty of the world and accept her role in it, the better she would feel. She knew this for a fact. Kyouka had come to the Port Mafia with a death wish, after all, and all of Kyouka’s mentors were people who had managed to survive their own desire for death when given a task, so - 

She looked suspiciously over at Mori, who was becoming visibly softened up by the evening. Good thing he was a genial drunk. 

Mori was being rational about letting people make their own mistakes, of course. She knew that. She understood his thinking and knew he was just as harsh about his own mistakes. But her own greedy and possessive instincts couldn’t be controlled by cold logic and a master plan. She always wanted to devour her loved ones to keep them safe inside her, even though her attempts to protect people had always failed her so far. If she could keep just one important person from being hurt - 

Elise patted Gold Demon’s head comfortingly and Kouyou sucked in her anxiety again. She was being terribly obvious if even Elise-chan was reacting.

Mori pushed himself up to a sitting position with a groan. “It will be all right. You know she will be fine with the Armed Detective Agency.”

“ Do I? Do you?”

“Don’t you?” he said, seeming genuinely surprised. “Dazai is there.”

Kouyou snorted, rising on her knees to refill his half-empty drink. She caught herself with one hand against the mats, laughed at the near-fall, and poured with both hands supporting the bottle. “Respectfully, that’s not a recommendation.”

“He’s still alive,” Mori said simply, taking a sip.

Kouyou chewed on that response as she carefully set the bottle back on the table. Ah, of course it made sense now. Mori had hidden his own protege with the man who he had apparently once trusted with his own safety; she wondered if the lad realized he had an anxious father looking out for him. Then she laughed ruefully and continued braiding her hair. “Do you know what that cheeky lad said to me?”

“No, what?” Mori said, always willing to be distracted with gossip about Dazai. Kouyou told him about the specific threats he had made for the benefit of their non-mafia audience and he actually laughed. She laughed too, the whole situation hilarious now that it was well behind her and she had some alcohol to make her recall her sense of humor. She hadn’t seen the lad in several years, and she wondered if Ougai-dono had broken his own rules to check on his protege’s larval development. The Dazai she remembered from four years ago was a capricious and cruel little boy who had no care for himself and cared even less for others unless they interested or entertained him. 

When she saw Dazai enter the hospital room and dismiss the tiger boy for privacy, she had felt a pang of concern that she would never admit to Mori and had prepared herself for the worst. If Dazai wanted to make her scream, their shared history meant nothing, because she knew she meant nothing to him and she was unlikely to interest him enough to spare her. If this was the one who had possession of Kyouka, it would be worse than when Akutagawa and Verlaine had tried to teach her…and she wouldn’t allow it. She didn’t trust Dazai, no matter what grand plans Ougai had for him.

But once he began to speak with her in private, she was shocked into listening and then compliance. The Dazai she met in the Agency still had the shadow of brutality in his eyes - she knew he would have greatly enjoyed her pain had he been forced to hurt her - but he sat down next to her bed and in a quiet voice laid out the logical reasons she should trust his as-yet-unexplained plan to help Kyouka. She almost laughed out loud when she understood her own response to the way he sat, the logical arguments he made, even the oddly detached and polite manner of speaking he’d adopted. But instead it had made her smile at him, which she knew Dazai had not quite understood. That was all right; it was good for him to not understand things once in a while.

“That whelp Dazai. He scared off all the agency employees claiming he was going to cut off my fingers, and then he did no such thing. The games you both play! It’s a wonder anyone tolerates either of you!” She chuckled. Mori was smiling, but it was surprisingly harder to read his actual reaction when he was this drunk. How contrary of him. “He sounds just like you,” she added deliberately.

“Does he?” Mori looked genuinely surprised at her comment. He then looked grave. “Then I do hope Fukuzawa is enjoying my gift.”

She leaned forward across the table and hit him lightly on the arm. “You must make that poor man so angry.”

Mori and Elise burst into peals of laughter again, the same scale in two different octaves. “Oh, trust me - “ He put a hand over his glass in response to her offer. “Later, thank you. If I drink more now, Gold Demon’s going to have a very interesting hairstyle indeed.”

“This is the last of it, so that’s fine.” 

“Are we already out?” Kouyou scanned their lodgings, but did not see any other kind of alcohol. She would have accepted pretty much anything at this stage of the night, but they had even gone through the complimentary bottles in the fridge. Mori groaned and heaved himself to his feet, Elise’s fingers still working their way down two spectral braids of long red hair. “I’ll go to the lobby and get some more to drink. I want to stretch my legs a bit.” He put his feet into the hotel slippers and felt along the side table for his keycard.

“Wait. Don’t go alone.”

“Oh? Why?”

“The Mann Konzern is impatient and smells like the type to try to solve impasses with brute force.”

Mori wobbled, looking surprised. “In broad daylight?”

“Danna…it’s late at night and we are at an isolated location that we already know takes bribes to keep illegal business quiet.”

“You are correct, and there are only the two of us on this floor! We are alone and defenseless. Sitting targets.” Mori did not take off his slippers, merely waited at the door, smiling at her. Kouyou sighed, and Gold Demon brushed aside Elise’s attempts to finish the ribbons she was braiding into her hair.

“Go ahead, then. Please bring back some water too.”

Mori plodded down the hallways, followed at a slight distance by Kouyou. Once he reached the elevator, he turned and faced Kouyou solemnly.

“Do you have your keycard?” Kouyou asked. Mori patted his pocket. “Do you remember our room number?” Mori nodded. “Get something expensive.”

“I don’t think anything is cheap in this place,” Mori said, pressing the down button. 

Their room was on the top floor, and the lobby was on the third floor. They waited in silence for the elevator, and Mori entered the elevator alone when it arrived. It had mirrored walls, a brass handrail in the back, and a square of plush carpeting on the floor. Mori skimmed the buttons, found the lobby, and pressed the correct button. The doors closed.

In the lobby there was a roped off area for suitcases left by guests who were arriving later or would collect their luggage after checkout; a few late-arrival tourists from the last train were still milling about, checking their belongings before they would be wheeled away. Mori glanced over at them and made it to the counter where he was frantically attended to by the desk staff, who apologized for their valued guest having to come down himself for room service. Mori waved this off graciously and leaned against the counter to keep his balance as they rushed to bring him warmed sake. 

As Mori boarded the elevator with his precious cargo, he was joined by two of the wealthy tourists, men who looked like they had spent all day shopping for souvenirs and regretted the waste of money. Mori glanced up at the security camera, and then stumbled as a third man crammed his way inside and the other men in the elevator pressed closer to him in response, forcing him to adjust his hold on his tray. 

“Sorry,” the latest occupant said.

“Quite all right,” Mori said graciously. “I just want most of this sake to end up inside me and not on the floor!” Figuring Kouyou would forgive him (and technically was not allowed to stop him), he drank directly from the warmed bottle, enjoying the sting of alcohol at the back of his nose. 

“Looks expensive,” the man on his left said enviously. Mori chuckled and touched the warm ceramic side of the bottle to his cheek to enjoy the temperature, and found that the man on his right was holding his elbow to immobilize his arm.

“Ex…cuse me?” Mori asked, and looked down to see the short tatami knife headed for his belly, the gesture half-hidden by the tray he was carrying.

The elevator doors opened on their floor; Mori was quite drenched in blood, but Gold Demon’s precise swordwork had carved three people into ribbons around him without even touching a hair on his head, as neatly as peeling an apple with a paring knife. Blood spray decorated the mirrored walls, the ceiling lights, the elevator buttons. Demon retrieved one of her blades from the security camera and one from a torso from where it had gotten lodged in a vertebra. Bone could dull a real blade, but thankfully spectral blades were tougher than steel.

He laughed in mad delight as he saw Kouyou and spread his arms; his glee was infectious.

“Amazing! Splendid!”

He nudged a severed head aside with the side of his foot, and frowned as the blood soaked into his hotel socks. His entire outfit was a complete loss, and the drinks he had been carrying lay shattered on the floor of the elevator. 

“Are you all right, Ougai-dono?” Kouyou reached forward to help him out of the chaos of severed body parts but he nimbly hopped over a torso, followed by the pristine Demon. He beamed at Kouyou with his hair sticking to his blood-spattered cheeks.

“Never better! That was just marvelous! What control!” His eyes were shining. “I ought to take some lessons from you! Eliselein likes to show people the pointy end of her needle at high speed, but she lacks technique like this.”

Kouyou wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, mentally quite taxed from the effort of precision dissection while stinking drunk. “Now let’s get dressed for bed and go to sleep. Your first meeting tomorrow is before breakfast.”

“Nope!”

“You know you have to.”

“Can’t make me,” he said, and took off in a drunken lope down the short hallway, laughing. Kouyou groaned, picked up the hem of her kimono with one hand, and jogged after Mori, who had rounded the corner and picked up speed on the straightaway. His bloody socks and slippers left smears on the wood.

“Danna! Please! Ougai-dono, you’re making a mess!” 

“We - will - pay - for - cleanup - “ He bumped into a wall, winced, and corrected his course. The error allowed Kouyou to gain some ground, but suddenly Elise jumped in front of her with a shriek and Kouyou nearly went down facefirst. Elise caught her in her arms with a giggle - she had an extremely strong grip that Kouyou could feel through all her layers of clothing - set her securely upright again, and vanished, but by this point Mori was loudly turning another corner at an unsteady but fast walk. Kouyou jogged after him, bending to pick up one lost slipper, and found him breathlessly leaning against their room door. His hand against the door frame left a bloody print and he’d been wiping his face with his sleeve, creating a smeared mess on his face. He looked guiltily at her as she walked up.

“Bathtime, Ougai-dono,” she said, slapping the slipper against her palm threateningly and trying not to smile.

“Nooooo…oh, all right ,” he whined. Kouyou swiped the keycard without answering him, allowed him to enter, steered him away from walking across the still-clean futons, and marched him to the indoor bath. She could hear his grumbling behind the closed door as she returned to the main room. Her phone was still tucked in her obi for safekeeping, and she retrieved it to call their security and cleaning services - and their office manager to bring a polite but not extravagant bribe. Businesses shouldn’t get the idea that the Port Mafia needed to pay them anything at all for the privilege of their patronage. She washed her hands neatly and touched her hair; the braids were holding up remarkably well.

Then she collapsed into a seat and tried to catch her breath. The combination of the altitude and the alcohol made her feel out of control of her own body; it was almost frightening until her heartbeat slowly returned to normal. She hoped Mori-sensei wouldn’t slip and crack his skull in the bath because she could not promise that she had the energy to get up.

“Are you sure this isn’t going to be a problem?” she asked when he emerged from the bath, clean and toweling his hair sulkily. He had even obediently changed into the inn pajamas. He was not a large man, and seeing him in casual clothing was like seeing a freshly hatched cicada freed of its armor.

“Oh, it’s fine. They started it, and we simply finished it. Though our current policy prioritizes peaceful solutions, preferring to avoid the violence of the past should not be mistaken for an inability to revert to form if needed.”

Kouyou tilted her head. “Are you still drunk?”

“Very. Pretty good for a drunk old man, right?” He collapsed to a seated position by the table with a groan, still drying his hair. “Water in my ears,” he grumbled, knuckling at them. Kouyou went to the bathroom, retrieved the complimentary set of ear cleaning tools, and knelt on the floor chair at his side. He looked at her in confusion. She patted her lap.

“Just this once, and don’t get any ideas that I’ll do it again.”

Mori beamed and fell over sideways to lay his head in her lap. She hesitated for a second, remembered who she was dealing with, and brushed his wet hair away from the side of his face before going to work. She examined the results.

“How did you get blood in your ears?”

“How did you get blood in my ears,” Mori retorted sleepily. He yawned hugely, caught himself, and then yawned again. “Oh, I left my clothes in the bathroom. I should go get that.”

“We’ll put them out for drycleaning.”

“Probably should put them in combustible garbage,” Mori mumbled.

She slapped his shoulder and ordered him to turn over so she could get the other ear. Once done, she tossed them in the nearby trashbasket and leaned back on her hands. Mori seemed three-quarters asleep and she couldn’t bring herself to wake him up quite yet. She grabbed the towel he had dropped on the mats next to him, put it over his head so she couldn’t see his face, and rubbed his hair slowly. She could tell from his breathing that he was almost asleep, and kept her movements soothing. She extracted her phone from her obi, searched for some music, and placed her phone, volume turned very low, next to his towel-shrouded head.  

Around 1 am her legs finally gave up and she was forced to stretch them; the movement alerted Mori-sensei who was instantly, completely awake again as if someone had flipped a switch; he had no transitional stage whatsoever. He sat up while pulling the towel off his head, looking around alertly. He saw Kouyou next to him on the floor chair with her legs outstretched, and seemed very confused this time. It was an uncommon expression on her useless Boss’s face, and she smiled and shoved his shoulder. 

“The futons are laid out. Go to bed.”

“Did all of that just happen today?” he asked. She nodded, and he seemed pleased. “ As Descartes said, there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished,” he explained earnestly, if that made sense. He looked at the futons, nodded to himself, and slowly crawled on all floors over to his futon and into bed, rolling himself up like a comfortable little grub. 

“You have dreams like this?”

“No,” Ougai-dono said from the depths of his futon. “No, not like this. I dream…” He sighed. “One day, I will be done with everything I have to do. And perhaps then I will go and have a cottage by the sea. Not too quiet; I will have the roar of the sea and the wind instead of the sound of traffic, and the scolding of the seabirds instead of humans. And I will live until one day I cannot escape death anymore, and then I will die.” 

Kouyou listened to his breathing, but he had nothing more to say. She got to her feet somewhat unsteadily, shook out her numb and tingling feet one at a time, and moved around the room turning down the lights. She went into the bathroom, saw the low wicker clothes basket filled with the remains of his nice suit, and wondered if he had remembered to bring an extra set of work clothing. Well, he’d probably find it amusing to go to a business meeting in his nightclothes, so that was his own problem. She changed out of her heavy day clothing and into her own dove-grey inn robe. She hung the pieces of her outfit up to air, wiped off her makeup, and then looked at her braids, turning her head side to side. She wondered if she should undo her hair for sleep. Instead, she wet her hands under the faucet and patted down her hair thoroughly until it was damp.

At 5:30 am there was a discreet tapping at the door, and Kouyou sat up, noticing that Mori’s eyes were also open but he had not unwrapped himself from the safety of bed. She picked up a blade and walked to the door. Outside there was a pile of boxes with a new suit and even new shoes. What extravagance. She picked up the leather shoe and turned it around, wondering if such pointy toes were comfortable. 

“I texted for new clothes last night,” Mori said sleepily. “I figured you wouldn’t lend me a kimono. You are stingy, and mean.”

“….which one did you want to borrow?!” she laughed in disbelief. Well, they were similar heights, she supposed - 

“MY HEAD HURTS,” Elise yelled, and both Mori and Elise winced. She was in her default outfit, all braids gone. Must be too much effort this morning. “Stupid RINTAROU,” she whispered loudly and pathetically.

“René Descartes died of pneumonia from forced early morning appointments,” Mori whined. He sat up and scratched his head, squeezing his scalp with both hands. “Or, rumor has it, he may have been assassinated. I suppose that’s life. Someone tries to shank you in the elevator at night, and you still have to go to work in the morning.”

Kouyou held out a hand to help him to his feet, and her sleeve slid to expose the long scar on her inner arm. Mori’s eyes fixed on it as he grasped her hand and let himself be pulled up.

“Wow, Scarface Otomi! Better watch out, RINTAROU,” Elise said, openly staring too. 

“I deeply apologize for her rudeness,” Mori said meekly. Elise shoved him out of her way.

“You know I would have pulled stupid RINTAROU out of trouble last night, right?” Elise said imperiously, now blocking Kouyou’s way to have her full attention. She wanted this point to be very clear. “It would have been easy! POW!”

“Of course, Elise-chan, but it seemed a job beneath your notice. I could handle such a menial task.”

“Do you think I should pretend I’m not coming next time? He’ll get scared. Maybe he’ll cry!”

She knelt to be closer to eye level. “Let Big Sister give you some advice.” Elise nodded, allowing her hair to be petted. “Don’t be too mean all at once, Elise-chan. If you spread it out over time, he’ll suffer more.”

“I don’t think I like this,” Mori attempted to interject, and was silenced by their stereo looks of derision. 

Today’s black kimono was specially chosen for their guests; the Great Wave crashed along her legs and strange deep sea fish swam along her obi. She undid her wet-braided hair to reveal long waves quite like Elise-chan’s, and tied them back with a ribbon. Mori had taken one look at her, gone back to his suitcase, and switched to a Prussian blue tie.

The elevator was pristine, as was the hallway. One of their cleaners had the ability to literally make messes like this vanish, and the other could do exquisite reconstruction of destroyed objects. They could not handle a battlefield quickly, but this kind of work could be accomplished in minutes. Kouyou saw them eating breakfast earlier in the dining room; they had jumped and scurried out of sight as soon as they had noticed her.

“Weren’t there more of you yesterday?” Mori said politely, scanning the opposing conglomerate’s assembled team members in the boardroom. “I am unfortunately bad with names, but I am good at recalling faces. Was our hospitality poor?”

Hans looked genuinely embarrassed, and Kouyou entertained the possibility that he was uninvolved. Then she looked at her companion, and was reminded that sheepish hungover fools could be extremely dangerous. Hans seemed extremely tense behind his joviality. “It’s embarrassing, but some of the youngsters over-indulged and had to rest. My head too! This altitude is no joke. And I must be in a dead zone for WiFi; I tried to send videos to my children and they all bounced back.” 

“I’m sorry, that is the downside of this extremely remote and private location. That’s all right.” Mori put his arm around Hans’ stiff shoulders and steered him to the table. “Come, sit between me and Kouyou and have some coffee. This is a Japanese-style breakfast; do you want to try it? Some of this food will help with a hangover.”

“Certainly,” Hans said with good humor, and worked his way through the miso soup. The fish had to be tackled with a fork, and he was puzzled by the vegetables and rice porridge, but with gentle guidance from his dining companions he seemed to enjoy the process. They finished it off with green tea and all three sighed in relief, feeling the worst dregs of the hangover drain away.

“It has been a little while since we worked together in this fashion, hasn’t it?” Mori murmured in deep satisfaction with the world at large, looking across Hans at Kouyou.

“It has,” Kouyou replied with a smile. He finally seemed in the mood to get to the point today. At her sign, the mafia enforcers drew their guns and before the Germans could retaliate properly, they’d been urged out of their seats and their backs put to the wall. Hans tried to rise from his seat and sat down hard as if chained in place; his hands were plastered flat against the tabletop. There was no sign of Elise-chan, but Kouyou thought she recognized that cute little girl’s brutal grip turning Hans’ wrists red and white.

“Hands on the table,” Mori said out loud; Hans looked up at him, unable to disobey although the muscles of his forearms quivered with the strain of pulling. “Everyone will remain calm. Don’t move.”

”You,” Mori singled out a young man near the elevators. “Go to the kitchens, and ask them to give me all of the knives they used to prepare the fish for breakfast.” The runner scrambled to obey, actually running for the staircase when the elevator was not immediately available. Mori gently pulled all of Hans’s breakfast dishes away from the area in front of him, stacking them neatly and gently to not damage the place settings too much.

“I’ve been thinking about what you’ve said, Hans, and I’ve decided to take your advice. Money is money, and business is business. We can’t differentiate how we act based upon the situation and consequences.”

As Mori carefully pulled back the tablecloth to reveal the bare table, the young mafia member returned with a catering tray rattling with knives. Kouyou always had a blade on her, but this too was part of the breakfast show so she did not offer it.

“You’ve gotten to know my executive Ozaki who has been my bodyguard for this meeting; she also is responsible for our interrogation teams.” He smiled briefly. “ She is our most talented torturer.” 

Hans looked at her in surprise, and then a gratifying amount of fear entered his expression.

“You are doing what is best for yourself and your company. Naturally I understand that. I do the same. If life is as simple as just looking out for your own interests, then you are doing nothing wrong. But that’s a beetle’s understanding of their place in the world, just scuttling around for food and safety. Add the pursuit of pleasure, and maybe you can be upgraded to an animal, but no more. 

“Torture is a curious intellectual exercise,” Mori continued, looking through his hastily assembled torture options on the tray. He picked up a corkscrew and put it back down. “It really makes you think, does it not? If the information may not be accurate, what is the ultimate goal? What if you decide,” he selected a simple chef’s knife, “or it is decided for you, that inflicting pain upon someone is the way to cause the greatest good for the greatest number of people? What if human nature is such that we simply enjoy watching others suffer as a form of pleasure? Can that be productively redirected, do you think? Is torture or murder acceptable to enjoy if the victim is wicked? How do you decide who is wicked, if that is the logic you follow? Isn’t that what we call justice, when the law is involved?” He looked down at his victim. “The violence never ends if you make the definitions of ‘benefit’ so open-ended; the holes are so obvious that anyone can see them. That’s why I fundamentally disagree with that particular approach, although I understand it and do apply its lessons, from time to time. So what do you think?” 

Mori smiled. Mr. Hans was not smiling.

“ Am I about to hurt you because it is for the greater good, or is it because I’ll have fun doing it?”

“I - I don’t understand - I - “

“ If I may interrupt ,” Kouyou said, to the visible relief of their victim. “Let me translate for you, Boss, if I may.” She leaned down to look at Hans and pulled out her best business English. “I regret to inform you that we run a business. Competition is allowed, so long as it is not hostile. And just so you know, Mr. Hans - torture is my job, but it’s Mr. Mori’s hobby. So the answer to his question is ‘both.’” Mori’s face crinkled in humor.

“ Wh - what’s non-hostile competition? Isn’t all competition - “

“If you fund our business rivals and ruin our markets and devalue our currency,” she spoke louder to overrule his meaningless sputtering, “we will know and respond. I know that you felt obligated to lend money to your close personal friends - “

“I don’t know them at all! It was strictly business! We are not friends!”

“Aha,” Mori said, pleased at this statement. “You’re unrelated to them after all. That’s excellent news! So they will not care if something happens to you.”

“No! Mori, come now, be reasonable!” and he lapsed into German which Kouyou did not understand and Mori seemed unmoved by. He angled the blade gently against the back of Hans’s hand and with a single movement shaved the hair off the back of the man’s wrist before lifting it away, satisfied by the sharpness of his tools. Hans’s breath caught in his throat before resuming, faster than before. “ Mori, this is against the law. I have immunity! ”

“ Mr. Hans ,” Kouyou said, stroking his hair pityingly, letting her claws prick his scalp. “ Have you mistaken us for the police? ”

“Kouyou,” the Boss of the Port Mafia said, looking down at Hans’s hand outstretched in front of him. She came over to his other side. The bright overhead lighting, the blond hair on the back of his knuckles, the trembling of his fingers, his shirt cuff against the table - the man’s hand was simply a strange insect pinned to the table. 

“Boss.”

“ If you had to lose a finger, which one would you give up? ” he asked in English for the benefit of their guest.

Kouyou smiled. “Don’t you have any better pick-up lines?” she replied in English for the benefit of their guest.

“I’ll teach you something good,” Boss promised. She could see the whites of his eyes despite his otherwise placid expression. He sounded like a little boy about to pull the wings off a fly. “You can even use this yourself later if you’d like.”

“Very well: I could live without my little finger.” She stuck out her lacquered little finger for dramatic emphasis.

“ Very traditional; it will weaken grip strength to a degree.” He put the tip of the blade in the space between Hans’s last two fingers and lifted it away again. “The best finger to lose, in fact, would be the index finger. You lose very little function that way. The worst choice would be the thumb, naturally - the hand loses half its functionality instantly. Every other finger is somewhere in between.” 

Kouyou looked at her fingers, flexed each one individually, feeling the correctness of what he was saying with her own body. She nodded. “I never thought about the function of which finger I’d cut off before; I pick at random if unpredictability seemed more frightening, or I went left to right if the anticipation was worse than the pain. But if there’s a purpose - you’re right. I’ll keep this in mind.” 

She looked up from her fisted hand and Boss was nodding appreciatively; their visitor clearly did not enjoy the look on his face. Mr. Hans was then quite fortunate that he had not seen Ougai-dono’s expression in the elevator last night. The hand on the table tremored a little more visibly, the diamond signet twinkling like a small star.

Suddenly one of the Konzern men burst forward, and before their own enforcers could react, Boss pulled his own gun with his free hand, shot him inelegantly in the face, and returned his gun to its holster. Hans yelped in shock as the sound reverberated shatteringly in the enclosed space and Kouyou winced, wondering if last night’s cleaners had scurried out of the area yet. None of the hotel staff responded to the loud noise; they had been instructed to mind their own business.

Boss picked up the knife again and flipped the handle over and back in his hand, considering the heft and weight of the blade. This was common heavy-duty stainless steel; what it lacked in embellishment it made up for in brutal functionality. He turned, put the tip of the blade in the space between two fingers, and parted Hans from his right thumb as neatly as jointing a chicken leg into thigh and drumstick.

The man’s mouth opened soundlessly, and the guttural howl of an animal caught in a trap emerged from deep within him. This lasted for exactly one long moaning breath, and then the Port Mafia Boss looked sternly at him as he inhaled in preparation for another shriek - 

“Do me the favor not to behave like that,” he said.

Blood spurted unevenly, and then sputtered as the blood began to pool under Hans’s hand in the silent room. The pressure on Hans’s wrists vanished and he did nothing; he just sat and stared at his captor almost uncomprehendingly. The Boss was watching the severed thumb and the spreading blood with neither fear nor disgust. 

“Give me your hand,” he told him after a moment of satisfied silence.

“Which one?” Hans said shakily.

Boss smiled approvingly. “The left,” and he picked up the severed thumb and put it in the palm of Hans’s left hand, not moving any closer than strictly necessary. Hans had to lean forward to receive the gift and stared at it once he did. “Now put it in your mouth.”

As if hypnotized, Hans did so. His eyes darted around, aware that something bad was happening but past the ability to stop it. The shock of being affected by an Ability, especially one they couldn’t see, sometimes put people in a particularly useful state of mind, as it took them a while to overcome their primitive fear of the supernatural.

“Swallow it.”

Hans obeyed, and he choked terribly as Kouyou stroked his hair. They watched as he struggled, drooling and terrified to chew but unable to avoid it; when he seemed like he wanted to give up and spit out his own flesh and bone, Kouyou put her hand under his jaw and held his mouth shut. Finally he accomplished the deed and she let go of him, wiping her fingers on his shoulder. Boss stood up from the table, looking around the silent room for anything he had missed. He saw nothing out of place.

“I will consider the insult forgiven and our relationship set back to neutral, but it should not have come to this. This is your final warning. Because I respect you, I gave it to you in person instead of via a nameless visitor. Next time…?” He looked down at the gory mess before him and the body on the floor, and blinked. “You will need some medical attention for that, my friend. Shall I, or would you prefer…?” 

Hans was very pale with bright red spots on his cheeks. He fumbled for a napkin and pressed it desperately to the stump of his thumb, sweating profusely. The crumpled linen bloomed with red and became wet; his forearm against the table was wet to the elbow with blood where it had touched the tabletop. Kouyou wondered if there was a hint of blood on his quivering mustache. “No! Thank you! Thank you for sparing my life. I will attend to my own injury.”

“ Wie du willst,” Mori smiled. “But you’re going to want to raise your hand above your head and keep applying pressure, Hans.” He saw the daruma doll tilted over in the middle of the table, picked it up, and pressed his own bloody thumbprint into the unfilled right eye.

Back on the train, Kouyou dutifully turned on the government burner phone and sent a message to Sakaguchi to update him on the situation when they were stopped at a mid-sized station far enough from their inn. This station had enough transfers that their location did not give away their specific line. Once the adrenaline of the morning’s entertainment had faded, she felt disgusting and she wanted to be back in Yokohama, in her own city and ideally in her own bed for a long rest.

The Mann Konzern was not an Ability-using business; the lack of an Ability business permit did not delay them like the Guild, and the Special Abilities Bureau wasn’t able to deploy their agents. The government was similarly unable to legally stop the Mann Konzern’s business practices if they had the correct permits and clever lawyers, which they did. So Sakaguchi (poor lad; he was stuck with them until death as the favorite go-between) had conveyed the government’s request to Boss, who had thought for a minute and then agreed. She wondered what the terms had been this time; she knew they would be favorable.

“You don’t believe we should finish this business cleanly? He tried to kill you, even if incompetently,” she asked as Mori settled back into his train seat after washing his hands in the bathroom. He had only gotten his fingertips bloody, but his hand towel alone couldn’t get the blood from under his nails.

“Hans is a coward,” Mori said with enough real venom to surprise her. He noticed her response and although he seemed to have quite a bit more to say, he stopped and visibly recalibrated the intensity of his response. “A cowardly egotist in peacetime, even though I hear he fought bravely as a soldier,” he continued calmly in a dismissive voice, “insulating himself from reality through simply denying responsibility for his actions. This visit should be enough of a wake-up call. If not, then he is welcome to invite more consequences.”

“Do you actually respect him, or is this just a more effective lesson in-person? You could have sent me as your emissary. Based on how he reacted to you, I can clearly tell how he would have reacted to my methods.”

Mori smiled grimly, rebuttoning his cuffs over his damp wrists. “Even I believe in giving an animal a nice day before I plan to put it down. I was trying to handle this as above-board as possible so I was hoping not to need your services at all.”

She was quite all right with being backup. “Why did you make him swallow it? That was quite inspired.”

He settled his head comfortably against the headrest and looked mischievous. “Truthfully?” he said untruthfully, “severed fingers can be reattached, and I don’t know whether a thumb should go into burnable or non-burnable garbage. So I panicked.”

Kouyou laughed despite herself, and winced as her temples stabbed with renewed pain. She hoped they could enter a tunnel soon; pulling the shades down made her vaguely motion-sick, but the bright daylight made her head hurt. She felt like shit. She wanted to die. It had been a good week.

“But you asked me why not just get rid of him. If we murder him, it will destabilize his company during the transition phase, but then we might end up with a new fool to deal with who needs the same lesson taught to them, and so on, and so on. I do hope, for the sake of efficiency, that Hans pays attention this time.” 

“I think he will,” she agreed, remembering his expression. Mori inclined his head at her in attention. “I find myself confused by him, though. He seemed shocked. Why? I’m not surprised that he thinks that you mostly talk people to death - “ he scowled, “But you have never been tolerant of this kind of foolishness. Why did he not flee overnight? Who exactly did he think you were ?”

“Perhaps having his thugs vanish without a trace was merely confusing and frightening, but not a signal to flee - and he is not a coward about battle, as I said. Surely he has to know that he might fail and that I would retaliate. Surely if he had been investigating me enough to know about Elise-chan, he could have prepared better for my potential response. He should have researched you the minute he saw you were my backup.” Mori seemed equally baffled by this foolishness. “What did he expect? A spa vacation in Japan?” 

“A spa vacation in Japan with an old friend and his secretary-mistress, where you would agree to stay out of each other’s hair and how much to bribe each other regularly,” Kouyou agreed bluntly. 

Mori groaned. “There is nothing he could give me that I would not rather have as a favor from the government. He can only give me money, and while I did work strictly in cash as a clinic doctor, I don’t particularly enjoy working with money - it doesn’t interest me outside of what it can buy, and it’s an exceptionally useless thing to live and die for, but that is the level of hell we all live on in this cycle. So I am obliged to care about it.”

“Easy for you to say, Boss,” Kouyou said dryly, handing him a bottle of water before taking one for herself. She suspected that the oh-so mysterious Boss was not from completely humble origins, as hard as she knew he had worked to get here. 

“I don’t deny that. Perhaps it’s just a curse to also worry about more fanciful things than food, shelter, and safety. The next step up on the staircase of worries. I should like to be born as a beetle next time.” He yawned widely to pop his ears as the train’s descent became steeper and they entered a tunnel, the sudden replacement of clear hazy daylight with the drab indoor lighting like a magic trick. They could see all the empty seats stretching around them in the reflections. “Do you think I’m happier now than I was when I was a back alley surgeon?” 

She wanted to joke back that this particular back alley surgeon had probably enjoyed cutting off that terrified businessman’s finger, and that was the fun of being in the mafia, but instead she looked directly at his face. The jaundiced overhead lighting made him look hungover and profoundly exhausted. His head swayed slightly with the motion of the train. These trips to the most beautiful places in the country were wasted on someone like him if he added to his misanthropy in the process. If the mind is poisoned, the body follows.

“If you are occasionally happier now, Boss,” Kouyou said with sudden cunning, knowing what this fool needed to hear, “it’s not because of the money, or the power, or the job.” She leaned across the space between them and put the daruma in his lap. She had taken it with her for various reasons; it was evidence, it had the boss’s fingerprint on it, and - it was a good souvenir of the trip. It should be kept for the year.

Ougai-dono was silent and looked out at the blackness outside the train as the noises of the train howled around them. He finally looked back at her, and then down at the daruma. He loosely cradled the doll in his hands. “Oh? I thought you said you weren’t paid enough to be my therapist?”

“Luckily for you, a rich man’s thumb is probably worth something, and your entertainment value counts for something too. We’ll call it even with that.” 

He smiled and settled his head back against the window. “I do hope we part on good terms one day, Kouyou.”

She inhaled loudly, both deeply flattered and deeply annoyed that she was flattered. “It will most likely be sudden and violent,” she told him, not wanting to disrespect his compliment with a platitude. She kicked his shoe with her boot. “The life of an Executive is dangerous. So if you are the one to survive me, kindly do me the favor of not getting yourself immediately killed and wasting my time in that manner. Scuttle away like a beetle, just like you want.” 

He didn’t argue with her. His reflection showed he had closed his eyes, his cheek cushioned by his coat collar. He had locked his fingers together to continue supporting the daruma in his sleep or feigned-sleep.

Kouyou took out her tablet and drearily considered working; someone had to keep abreast of what was going on if Mori-sensei was sleeping. She now deeply regretted having spent an entire week drunk, and wanted to kill him for going through the trouble of acclimatizing their side to altitude first to create an advantage, and then crippling everyone equally at the conference with alcohol. 

Maybe the element of controlled chaos made the game stay interesting.