Chapter Text
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Little Gidding)
“You never trust a man who hides so much of himself away,” Marude roars. At least, it could be Marude. All that’s visible is a pair of pinstriped trousers, legs dangling precariously off the edge of a rough wooden bench. At that tipping angle, it’s about to fall over. The speaker’s head is hidden behind the ramen stand’s old banner. There’s the sound of clinking cups, of swallows of sake, of people slurping noodles and trying not to spill the hot broth.
“Keep your voice down -”
“So what! Not like he can hear! Workaholic son of a -”
“- the best we’ve got, so don’t -”
If Kishou reaches out now, he would touch coarse cotton, and the strands would rub and catch against the calluses lining his palms. Hard knots of skin where he gripped his quinque tight, where the skin knew it had to protect itself. He would pull the curtain aside, and Marude would look up with caterpillar eyebrows rising high into his hair, mouth pursed in a tight line of shame, hot fear of being caught crawling up his face. His eyes would fill with defiance – and why are you out tonight, Investigator? Pale, silent thing you are.
Kishou holds his hand tight to his chest, as though he is cradling some delicate cocoon. Keeps it to himself. In his other he grips his black-lined briefcase, and it bumps against his knee, the cold weight inside an agony.
-
“I want it,” whispers Hairu. “I really, really…”
Kishou sees her out the corner of his good eye. “Hm?”
Her hands blur, fluttering back and forth in denial. “No! I didn’t say anything!” But she stares at the case with desire brimming in her eyes, sneaking loving glances at it when he pretends to look away. It’s a handsome case, he’ll allow that. The surface liquid and black, embossed with gold at rigid edges that catch the light streaming in through the windows.
He really ought to have curtains installed, Kishou thinks, it’s been on his to-do list for a while. It’s not good for sight, having his desk backlit all the time.
Hairu looks at him through her eyelashes, playing coy. She walks a wide circle around his office and stretches, the Squad Zero coat hugging sinuous lines, tight like a lover’s hands. It’s a slinking movement that can turn heads and break hearts, and send the boys down in the Rank Three cubicles scrabbling for their handkerchiefs, trying to hide the lines of drool on their chins.
Kishou’s seen it all. He wonders where he should have dinner – Chinese might be good, maybe.
“The laboratory department won’t respond when I ask them how it’s going,” Hairu complains, practically bouncing to a stop in front of his desk. “I just want some news!”
Kishou closes his eyes. “They’ll tell you when they’ve made progress. They’re responsible for manufacturing quinques for all investigators, not just the upper ranks. Give them time.”
“Hmph.” Hairu doesn’t sound placated, but she’s never argued with him. “How long did it take them to make Narukami?”
She says the name so casually that she must be forcing it. Kishou’s seen the green in her gaze, when she looks at Narukami’s case – and moreover, he’s seen the monthly reports from the Research Department. He knows that Hairu is waiting for an ukaku quinque with changeable blades and dense energy output; an Academy trainee could figure out what she wants out of it, where she found her divine inspiration. But Hairu has always found joy in the art of mimicry, a twisted craft of loyalty and devotion with diminishing returns; and who is he to deny her that catharsis?
“Not long,” he answers, shuffling the papers on his desk. They’re tedious things. He wants to hold anything but a pen. “They knew my specifications already. Narukami -” he almost says she – “was my third.”
He leaves so much unsaid, but Hairu has never been able to leave any stone unturned. Kishou has known this, from the moment that he met the girl in the Garden. She ran with her arms flapping, bird-bones uncoordinated with the swell of her love and affection. The white uniform-blouse was two sizes too large on her, billowing with wind, and in the center of it Hairu was a small pink-haired sail that hugged him fiercely around the legs. She looks good in white, always has.
“Your third?”
Kishou nods. Surely she’s heard this story before, but he’ll humor her – it’s Hairu, after all. “IXA, and – ah, right, you never saw me with Yukimura.” He remembers her, very pink and small, in the Garden. “It was several years ago.”
Several. Several, indeed. In a handful of years the clocks have spun and the sands have fallen, and at the end of it all here he sits, straitjacketed in tailored gray wool and white-winged awards, while Hairu parades and prances before him. With age, Hairu is all woman, child’s fat melted from her features, and with age Kishou’s hair has gone parched and dry. Between their feet gleams a checkerboard grid, the stark lines so unlike trampled flowers.
What was it that Yukimura had said?
“Yukimura is First Class Hirako’s quinque, right?” Hairu asks.
“No, he’s using a different one now. Nagomi, I think. I don’t know who has Yukimura, actually.”
Yukimura. Yukimura is a quinque. For so long, he’s been able to dissociate the name from the –
Not a man, don’t ever let yourself think that, Kishou.
Searching for words is drowning. Lower oneself into the memories, feet-first, but don’t hesitate to let go, sink to anchor and dredge up the hidden things at the bottom. They are stacked one atop the other, and Kishou scavenges the corpses without meaning to.
“You never forget your first.”
Ah, that was it.