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In his first life, Riko Moriyama was a king. He was number one.
But that meant nothing as the bullet went through his skull at 3:17am on a Tuesday.
And it means nothing as he lurches back to life in a body that is smaller than it should be, weaker. There is a scream behind his teeth, acid hot in his throat. It takes moment to realise that this is the darkness of his own bed - that he’s not held down but tangled in the sheets around his legs, that the clamminess of his skin isn’t from blood but sweat.
Trembling, he presses his fingers to his own skull. Feels the bone, solid and uninterrupted. Feels the place where the bullet should be and isn't.
Then he breathes.
A dream. Of course. A nightmare, vivid and stupid. But he's not a child. He doesn't lie awake shaking over bad dreams.
Then - because he is Riko Moriyama and he is twenty years old and he has never learnt anything that didn't come with blood attached to the lesson - he gets angry.
The anger is a hot, wild thing. It crowds out the fear. It crowds out visions of his brother’s dark, disdainful eyes, of that soft-handed touch on his cheek of the realisation when Riko finally understood what it felt like to be Kevin Day - to be a thing that used to matter and then didn't.
He lies in the dark and he stokes the anger like a fire.
He knows, if he turns, Kevin will be right there. He can hear his snoring, breathing deep and oblivious. Kevin is here. Kevin, who ran. Kevin, who betrayed him. Left him and mocked him. Left him and let him die. It might have been a dream but he knows these things often contain kernels of truth.
By morning, Riko has made a decision. If the dream was a premonition, this is his second chance. And Kevin is not going anyway.
And so he shatters Kevin's hand.
He tells himself it's containment. He tells himself it's strategy.
He doesn't dwell on how clean and familiar the movement felt. He doesn't react when he hears Kevin's sobs a moment before they begin. He doesn't let himself look too long at Kevin's face, at the way Kevin looks at him afterwards - like a dog that still hasn't worked out why it was kicked. Deja vu is a scientific phenomena. It means nothing to him.
He has Kevin treated at the Nest. He keeps him close. There’s no running to daddy in this reality.
What he doesn't account for is what it feels like to have Kevin there, right there, every day - to have everything and nothing at the same time. Kevin's hand doesn't heal right. The Ravens training is too intense.
It doesn’t matter what rehab the Master forces on him. It doesn’t matter that Riko knows Kevin should be capable of pulling himself together. He did it for the Foxes. He should do it for the Ravens.
But he fails. Over and over.
His eyes drift during practice. Kevin is present and Kevin is also already gone, and Riko watches it happen from three feet away and can't stop it and can't admit why he wants to.
The anger has nowhere left to go except outwards.
He's always been better at outwards.
Jean takes the worst of it.
Riko doesn't mean for it to happen that way. Not exactly. He just has a talent for destruction that runs ahead of his intentions - always has - and Jean has the specific misfortune of being both present and stubborn.
Jean is tougher than he looks. Jean is tougher than Riko has ever admitted to himself. But there are limits to what anything living can take, and Riko, makes a point of finding them. He breaks Jean over again and again.
If he can’t beat Kevin into shape, Jean will have to do. He will have his perfect court.
A few months later, his uncle plucks Nathaniel Wesninski out of Millport. The scrawny thing that’s dropped on Riko’s court isn’t the boy he remembers. Nathaniel looks at Riko with fake brown eyes that scurry corner to corner in a desperate attempt to find an exit. He already knows what this boy should look like. And the feeling is more than uncanny this time. More than he can put down to a dream. How had he known about the Butcher's runaway son?
He tries to shake it off.
Either way, he decides that this fear on Nathaniel's face is a much better look than the one he’d worn in the East Tower on the night Riko died.
In the dream, he adds. The night I died in the dream.
He has the dye scrubbed from Nathaniel's hair, the contacts confiscated. When they reach practice and Nathaniel is decked in Raven black, he smirks to himself and thinks: he's mine now.
He is wrong about this.
He is wrong about most things this time around, though he won't know that yet for a while.
By the end of the year:
Jean is dead.
Nathaniel has opened his mouth to every press outlet he can reach, which it turns out is a significant number when you're the son of the Butcher of Baltimore and you have a gift for making yourself interesting to journalists. Oh, and zero survival instinct.
Kevin will not say a word in Riko's defence. He won't say a word against him either. He just sits with his crumpled hand in his lap and lets his eyes do what his mouth won't, spitting accusations that Riko isn’t ready to hear.
Riko doesn't see Ichirou this time. He doesn't even get as far as the finals.
He meets Lola Malcolm in a room with no windows and a drain in the floor. He learns - in pure and excruciating detail - exactly what happens to Moriyama assets that stop performing as expected.
He is awake for all of it. Nothing about this is a dream.
------
He wakes up screaming.
------
He lurches upright. His heart pounds. His breathing catches against every one of his ribs, snarling at the tightness in his throat. He can’t breath.
He can’t stop checking to see if his fingers and toes are there, that his feet are there, his tendons and ligaments below his skin.
Fingers: ten.
Toes: ten.
The tendon in his right wrist that Lola spent forty minutes on: intact.
The knuckle on his left hand that she bent backwards until something gave: fine.
His feet. His Achilles. His ears. The duct of his left eye - his last vivid memory of the ice pick she’d used to push into his skull.
He goes back to his hands. Flexes them. Presses his fingertips together and feels the pressure, the warmth, the blood running through them.
He checks all of it. He checks it twice. He sits in the dark and trembles and gasps until morning light drifts in through the windows.
"Riko?" Kevin’s voice is sleepy and slurred. "You’re awake?"
This is his third life and as he turns to his roommate, he realises they’re younger this time.
Not by much - a year, maybe a little more - but they’re not in the dorms and Kevin’s hair is longer than it was their first year on the Court. They’re not full-fledged Ravens yet and the realisation is enough to make his eyes burn. He has to do it all again.
He doesn’t know that he can.
So what has he learnt by this point?
That he never wants to meet Lola Malcolm again.
That Kevin's hand is a boundary he cannot cross - not for a third time.
That Jean Moreau has limits to his durability.
That Nathaniel Wesninski is a fucking problem and better off left in Millport.
These are not the lessons he should have taken from any of this. He knows that, in the way a child knows that refusing to look at directly at thing means that cannot be truly real. But they're the lessons he has, so they're the ones he goes to work with.
The problem is his head.
His head is full of another life. Two other lives. He’s twitchy - head always full of nightmares, thoughts full of burnt and broken skin, of a ruby-lipped smile that belonged to a demon.
He sleeps restlessly, wakes with his pulse in his throat. He can't touch a knife, can't look too long at an open flame without something animal in his chest trying to climb out through his sternum.
Of course, Kevin is first to notice that something is up.
Kevin has always been able to read Riko the way Riko can't read himself - it's one of the things Riko has always hated about him, the way Kevin's eyes track him across a room and find the splinters.
He doesn’t complain when Riko takes his hand at odd moments. Turning it over. Running a thumb across the knuckles, the back of the wrist, the tendons below the skin.
"What are you doing?" Kevin says.
"Nothing," Riko says, tracing his fingertips over invisible, unmade scars.
Kevin gives him a long look and then looks away. He doesn’t take his hand back. In this life, they're still - something. Not broken yet. It makes Riko's chest ache in a way he can't name and doesn't try to.
He clings on and is glad when Kevin doesn’t push him away.
Later, he’ll hate himself for that weakness.
The Master is second to notice something is wrong with his most precious investment.
And he arrives at a different conclusion.
Riko is distracted. Riko is fixated on Kevin in a way that has tipped from possession into something else, something softer and therefore something the Master can use.
He decides Kevin is the lever. Where Riko fails, Kevin will carry the punishment.
And Riko does fail.
He fails again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
He tries to focus. He runs drills until he’s throwing up, blows his arms out, his legs, trains until his vision swims. He takes hits from older Ravens that never would have touched him in a past life. He sits through Kevin’s punishments with his jaw locked and his back straight and tries to convince himself that this version of himself is in control, that the thing he's carrying in his chest - all those hours, all those rooms, all that damage done and received - hasn't made him worse at being Riko Moriyama.
He is worse at being Riko Moriyama.
The Master has always known how to make him worse.
And it feels now like there’s nothing that will make him better. He jumps at the rattle of plexiglass. He sobs apologies in his sleep. Wakes to Kevin’s green eyes watching him in the dark.
He should have guessed what would happen next. But what’s one more bad practice, one more failure, in the face of everything else? He hangs his head low, fighting to stop his body from shaking as the ball rolls to a standstill, the silence of the goal hoops louder than the whispers from the Ravens who should have - one day - called him captain, called him King.
The Master shatters something in Kevin that night - he’s never gone this far with Riko and Kevin before. Not in this life or those past. But he brings his racket down on Kevin’s back, his legs, his arms. Again. Again. Again.
The next morning, Kevin can’t stand.
Riko is sent out to practice alone. He runs drills, tries not to think. Tries to be good. But somewhere along the way, he’s lost the wings that made him the first son of exy.
And when he comes back to their room, Kevin is burning with fever, blurring in and out of himself, his eyes open but not finding Riko's face when Riko says his name.
Kevin is sick for three days.
On the fourth day, he seems a little better. Riko sits on the edge of his bed and watches him sleep and feels something collapse in his chest. He picks up Kevin’s hand, traces the invisible scars. He thinks about all the ways he's broken this. All the ways this keeps going wrong.
On the fifth day, Kevin’s hand is cold to the touch. He is gone.
All the paperwork blames the fever. But there is no cover for this.
Tetsuji tries - Riko watches him try, watches him make calls and have conversations and arrange silences - but Kevin Day is too visible, too important, too much of a story, and the story ends up in the wrong hands and the wrong hands end up asking questions and the wrong questions end up pointed at the Nest.
The ERC investigates.
Tetsuji resigns.
Riko goes to sleep the night Tetsuji's resignation is made official and wakes up on a court floor, shaking and shivering on the court where the Master has left him after a disciplinary. He can just about hear the tap of his boots fading in the distance.
------
He lies on that court in his fourth life and counts the five things he now knows to be true.
- He can't watch Kevin break. He thought it was about control - keeping Kevin close, keeping Kevin his - but it's not. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.
- He is utterly, entirely alone without Kevin. He already knew this in an abstract sense, the way he knew that there was a world outside of Evermore or that happy families existed. He knows it differently now.
- What he did to Jean was wrong. Is wrong. Has been wrong in both of the lives he's lived and will be wrong in every life he lives. He knows this the way he knows the curve Kevin’s thumbs. The wrongness of it lives in his body, and he is sick with himself, and he doesn't know what to do with that yet.
- The Master is not family. Was never family. Will never be family. He is a man who found use for two small boys and called it love because love was a convenient storyto tell the rest of the world.
- The Moriyamas will never be family either.
He lies on the court floor and looks at the ceiling and thinks: I want to die.
Then he realises: that's not new.
Then he lets out a keen. Because Kevin is still alive.
And he begins to crawl. For once, he’s not being dramatic - his legs don't work right and he remembers the first time this happened several lifetimes ago. He’s fifteen years old, just by a few days. And just like the first time, he drags himself to his room by his fingernails. And just like the first time, Kevin is there when he gets to the room, sitting on the edge of his bed with concern in his eyes and a needle and thread ready, the way he always is after these nights.
He has done this before. He will do it again.
Riko looks at him and shakes his head.
"Riko-"
"I'm fine."
He's not fine. Kevin can see he's not fine. Perhaps he sees something else - the hollowness beneath his ribs, the aching river coursing through his blood, the guilt and grief.
Neither of them says anything as Kevin shuffles to sit on the floor beside him, his shoulder against Riko's shoulder - the warmth of him sure and solid and so painfully alive. It's the most okay Riko has felt in two lifetimes.
That doesn’t stop him from taking a knife in the morning. He kills himself in the bathroom, sorry that Kevin will be the one to find him this time.
Maybe - he prays - maybe if I end myself, I end the cycle.
Maybe he can spare Kevin any more pain.
------
When Riko wakes this time, he is thirteen years old.
He knows he is thirteen because Jean Moreau arrived yesterday, and Jean Moreau arrived at the Nest two months after Riko's thirteenth birthday, which is a fact Riko knows with the same certainty he knows his own name.
Riko has known Jean before, in versions. He knows what Jean becomes. But Jean at thirteen, newly arrived, barely speaks French let alone English, is not the Jean he remembers.
He is a fierce and furious thing - a cat determined to escape its cage, all flailing claws and hissing rage. There’s so much anger inside that too-thin chest, sparking within his huge dark eyes that haven't learnt to give up yet.
It’s a fire that Riko wishes was his own.
But you’re the one who stamped it out of him the last time, a sneering voice says in his head. You’ve grown weak.
It’s a voice Riko can’t unhear. And so, whilst Jean is Riko’s responsibility, he can barely look him in the eye. He turns away. Tries not to see all the ways that the Master is already trying to beat the boy into submission.
Kevin tries to take over - but for all Kevin’s talent, he’s a brutal perfectionist and Jean does not suffer the same obsession. It doesn’t matter that Kevin shows Jean drills or footage, or that he explains in absolute seriousness, that Exy is the truest thing human beings have invented and that Jean should feel grateful to be learning it from the best. Jean isn’t going to learn the game just because Kevin would give it all for the game. Jean doesn’t have a dead mother to live up to like Kevin.
But whilst Jean doesn’t learn the game and Kevin doesn’t learn to teach, Riko learns that he can’t wait on the sidelines. The Master is watching the three of them and there’s no protection from his wrath except through performance.
He puts on a mask for his uncle, excusing his absence from the efforts to teach their newest and youngest recruit. "I wanted to see his weaknesses," he lies (and perhaps it’s because his voice is still unbroken that Tetsuji doesn’t see through him).
"Now I will show him how it’s done."
—
He's never done this before.
He can’t say he has a strategy.
Can’t say he has much of a plan at all.
All he can cling to is the haunted landscape of his memories, the five lessons he’s learnt across four deaths, and the growing, grinding determination to see if something, anything, good can be made of this latest chance at life.
On the court, Jean is messy. Where Kevin and Riko had grown up with rackets in their hands - exy taking up their morning, noon and night - Jean is unpolished and brutal. He also is instinctive in a way neither of them ever had the chance to be. He’s slower to be sure, but moves in ways they can’t predict because Jean hasn’t learnt his plays from Tetsuji’s drill book.
That's what I crushed, Riko notes as Jean blocks Kevin yet again and the two of them start to bicker. I destroyed what made him good.
"Again," Riko calls. The two of them turn and blink at him, faces still pulled into the lines of an argument. He repeats the order and Jean’s expression turns suspicious.
Later, as the three of them eat yet another nutrient-dense dinner at the end of a table filled with Evermore’s twenty-something recruits, Kevin demands to know what Riko’s playing at. "He’s not following the drills and you’re not calling him out for it. You know it’s not good enough."
"Perhaps," Riko admits. "But he’s fast when he stops thinking about being fast."
"I don't speak English well enough for that sentence," Jean says. His accent is very thick. He's going to lose most of it within the year and Riko’s stomach pinches strangely at the thought.
"You understood it," he says.
Jean scowls. "Say it again."
In a past life, Riko would have mocked Jean, told him to listen harder. Now, he looks at the future defender and says. "You are fast when you stop thinking about being fast. It’s the difference between technique and instinct."
Kevin is looking at him now too, brows furrowed. Riko wonders if Kevin suspects something is different in him or if he just puts it down to growing up.
"When I tell you to check Kevin, you hesitate. You overthink before you do. But when I tell you to guard the goal, you block him out. Without thinking," Riko says. "That instinct is an asset."
"Tetsuji will correct him, if you won’t," Kevin warns.
"We need a defender that can read anyone on the court, not just run drills. If Jean can do that naturally, we need to hone that." Riko picked up his fork and speared a tomato, offering a rueful smile to his teammates. "It still means learning the drills. But it also means working with what makes him good to start with."
—
Kevin is right, of course, the Master isn’t impressed.
Jean is disobedient and wily by nature and his failings are Riko’s too. Still, Riko doesn’t complain as he takes his punishments. Sometimes it’s laps, most times it’s lashes. Kevin puts him back together each time and Jean watches in silence until it clearly becomes too much.
"Why?" he asks, his spark spitting and fizzing behind his eyes.
Riko is lying on his stomach, back covered in arnica that does nothing to really stop the throbbing. He knows that Jean still doesn’t understand this place, not even months after his arrival. And he cannot understand that Riko would pay so much more in restitution.
He thinks about all the things he could say. He thinks about Kevin's broken hand. He thinks about Jean’s obituary in his second life. He thinks about Lola Malcolm.
"You're going to be the best defender on court in a few years," he says.
Jean stares at him.
"I promise you," Riko adds. "You will be the best and you will be free."
—
Jean doesn't believe him at first. And that's fine - Riko doesn't need him to believe it, he needs him to keep playing, to keep sharpening the edge that will make Jean as immoveable as Kevin is unstoppable.
Yet somewhere in the months that follow, things start to click into place. It’s subtle at first. Little things like Jean moving into place then holding position until the check opened up, like blocking Kevin’s pass instead of Kevin himself.
It’s not until nearly a year has passed though, that he knows Jean has turned a corner. It’s mid-practice, mid-drill, Kevin tries to duck past Jean's defence and can’t, tries again and is blocked again.
Kevin looks at Riko across the court but Riko is looking at Tetsuji. The Master watches Jean as he resets, waiting for Kevin’s next charge, and then his eyes move to Riko.
There’s no reading the look in his uncle’s eyes, but at the end of practice, none of them are summoned to his side.
—
That first year, they become a unit.
Within two, they're something Riko doesn't have the language for - not family, the Nest has poisoned that word for all of them, but something that lives in the same territory. It feels heavy and it feels safe.
As their fifteenth birthdays come and go, Riko feels his old lives and their ghosts growing distant, at least during the day.
At night, he still wakes gasping, still sweats his way through nightmares, shrinks when he sees the flash of too blond hair, still hears the voice in his head saying he doesn’t deserve any of this.
Monsters like you don’t change, the voice hisses in his ear at night. Would either of them like you if they knew what you’ve done with those knives hidden away in your cupboard?
He tells himself he’s trying to be different. That he is different now.
He never quite believes it though.
Not when he can still dream of cutting along Jean’s spine with such clarity, still see the bones shattered and bursting through the skin of Kevin’s hand. Persuading The Master to reject Grayson’s application this time means little when he can still recall the satisfied smirk the young man had worn the morning after he visited Jean for the first time.
You don’t deserve this, he reminds himself. You ruin things and you’ll ruin them.
It’s only a matter of time.
—
The year they turn seventeen, two things happen.
Kevin learns about his father. And Andrew Minyard plays his first game in goal.
It’s two things that he should have thought about earlier. Two things with the potential to ruin the fragile non-family that they’d cobbled together. and two things that drag his worst instincts up from wherever he'd been keeping them.
Kevin tells him about Wymack in the hush of night, quiet and careful words that seem to be sounding out the truth as much as sharing it. Riko feels panic rise up his throat before he can stop it - a fizz cocktail of grief, fear, anger - old and reflexive and already reaching for something to grip.
You don't have to lose him, the unhelpful little voice whispers. Kevin'll never say a word unless you tell him to. You know that. Tell him to forget about it and he’ll stay. You've done harder things than this.
The worst part isn't that it's tempting. The worst part is that it's true.
He bites his tongue so hard blood fills his mouth. He swallows. Tries to speak. Fails. He can’t say anything. Long after Kevin says a soft, disappointed goodnight, Riko lies awake. He doesn’t want to lose him. He can’t. But he also knows what happens when he holds on too tight.
He says nothing the next day. Kevin’s fragile confession hangs heavy but Riko can’t find the words to make it right. Instead, he turns to practice, runs drills, sits in silence at dinner as his gut churns.
He still hasn’t said anything when the Andrew Minyard footage comes a week later.
They watch it together, the three of them, in the film room after everyone else has gone to bed. Kevin's little inhale. Jean's slow exhale. Riko sits very still and watches a boy in a juvie goal move like he's been doing it since before he could walk.
He should be a Raven. The thought is followed by a familiar, hideous feeling: possessive and hungry and terrified.
He pushes it all down. He pushes it down hard. But it's already there, churning through him.
He knows Andrew Minyard will never join the Ravens. It doesn’t matter that Kevin will fight to recruit him. Minyard will say no and sign with Wymack’s team. And then Kevin will leave because Wymack is his father. He knows this with such surety.
He can feel it now, a countdown like a bomb in his chest, ticking behind his heartbeat.
His hands curl and uncurl, yearning for a racket that isn’t there.
There's a racket in his bag though. There's a racket in his bag and Kevin is inches away and Riko knows - with a clarity that turns his stomach - exactly how it would go. He's done it before. He knows the precise angle and the precise force and the precise sound it makes and he knows what Kevin's face does and he could do it in his sleep, he has done it in his sleep.
You want to hurt them. You're angry and you want to hurt them, and you've done it so many times before, does it even matter?
"Riko?" Jean says. "Mon pote, what is wrong?"
He lurches for the bathroom, his body trying to expel every hideous thought. But there’s no getting away from who he is. His nature is and always will be to ruin.
He just needs to make sure that when he does, it's not Kevin or Jean who go down with him.
—
He starts counting, scouring his muddle of memory to create a timeline.
He knows the shape of what's coming - the ERC's assessment of Kevin's growth versus his, the Master's escalating pressure. He knows that if they stay, one of them gets broken. He knows this with the same certainty as he knows sunrise is a certainty or that Neil Josten is a mouthy little bastard or that death isn’t never the thing that hurts most.
They don’t have much time, but he’ll have to make it work.
—
"We need to talk about Wymack," he says to Kevin.
Kevin goes still. "You want to talk about him now?"
Riko says it plainly, the way he's rehearsed it. "I needed to process things but… I think you should reach out. He's building something at Palmetto. You could play there instead."
Kevin looks at him for a long time. "The Foxes are the worst team in Class I exy."
"Yes, they are." There’s no point pretending otherwise.
"And we're Ravens."
"Yes. We are." He hides his hands in his pockets, knowing the knuckles would be white where they clenched. "You know you could turn the Foxes around if you joined them. And he’s your dad. A living parent. That counts for something.”
Technically, Riko has one of those too. Not that he expects Kengo to recognise this fact in any lifetime. No, being shot in the head by his brother and then tortured to death at his family’s request had been quite enough to dispel any hope for acceptance from his blood relatives.
"We’re a pair. I’m not… I won’t leave you and Jean.”
“Things are getting worse here. The beatings. The hazing. It’s going to be worse when we’re on the team properly.” Riko says. “I know it. And I know you know it too because you’re pulling that face when you’re trying to hide what you’re feeling. I promise this isn’t a trick. I’m not going to turn around to the Master and tell him about this.”
“I know. You’re not like that,” Kevin says, looking genuinely confused. “Okay fine, maybe when we were kids but not now. And anyway that’s not the point–”
Riko ignores the swoop of relief and ploughs on. “Do you think you’re getting better here? Becoming a better player?”
“I– yes? This is the best team in the country. And playing with you and Jean makes me better too. Are you okay?”
“I’m not. I’m not okay. I don’t think either of us are okay. Because I think we’re going to peak here and it’s going to be the ruin of everything that we could be. Have you heard about the Ravens that flunk out? You know as well as I do that there’s a couple every year - they go home broken. That guy - the freckled one last year - I heard Thea talking about how he tried to kill himself.”
“We’re the best players here and we’re not even on the team yet. We’re not going to flunk out.”
“No, but we’re not going to thrive either.” Riko didn’t realise how much he believed this until he was saying it. “You said it. We’re already the best here. But if we keep going we’re going to break ourselves striving for perfection. We’re going to break each other.”
“Hey, hey, stop that.” Kevin pulls Riko’s hands away from where they’ve tangled in his hair. “You’ll hurt yourself pulling like that.”
“I... I didn’t realise…” Riko takes a shuddering breath, another. He must look mad, but Kevin’s hands stay entwined with his. “Sorry, this was meant to be about you getting to know your dad.”
“I think it was about more than that,” Kevin says. “I didn’t know you wanted to leave the Nest.”
“I don’t.” The response is automatic, trained. Riko hadn’t thought about leaving with Kevin. That wasn’t how this happened in lives gone by. But maybe Kevin was right. “I don’t know that orange would suit me.”
“Those are different things. Leaving here and being a Fox, I mean.” Kevin’s thumb runs over one of Riko’s knuckles. There’s a small, white scar there from where he was clipped on the court a few months back. “I do want to know him. Wymack.” The word father is louder even though it’s unspoken. “But I’m not going without you and we’re not leaving Jean here. He can’t be a fresher here on his own. We all go or we all stay.”
“Okay,” Riko says. “We all go.”
“We all go,” Kevin repeats.
Riko doesn’t know how this will work, but he remembers how Kevin’s eyes gleamed - cedar green and so defiant and more beautiful than anything else in the world - that day a lifetime ago when the Foxes defeated the Ravens.
The expression he wears now is so close… Riko’s heart ticks a little louder.
—
It's not simple. Nothing is ever simple when the Moriyamas are involved.
Kevin can go to Palmetto. Wymack is his father; there's a logic to it, a story that can be told and accepted. But Riko and Jean are a different problem. Their blood ties them to the Nest in ways that Kevin's doesn't - Jean as an acquired asset, Riko as family, which in the Moriyama vocabulary means property in very fine handwriting.
Tetsuji will not let them go.
Tetsuji will not let them go unless he has no choice.
And Riko only knows of one occasion where Tetsuji had no choice but to let one of his little birds leave their cage.
He brings it up with Kevin and Jean and knows immediately that they’re not buying it.
"You want to break my hand.” Jean’s mouth is pulled to one side, his brow furrowed.
"So the Moriyamas let you go."
"You want to break my hand."
"It wouldn't be permanent. It's not - that's not something I'd wish on anyone." Riko thinks of Kevin's hand. His voice is very flat when he says this. "It's a strategy."
"Your strategy is my hand, Riko."
"You'd seem broken. Unusable. They'd cut you loose."
Jean looks at him and then to Kevin. It’s becoming familiar, this searching scowl, the accompanying concern. "And you? What's your strategy for you?"
Riko says nothing. He was going to work on that next.
Kevin reminds him. "We all go or we all stay.”
"But this would work."
“Doesn’t matter. We are the musketeers. We all go or we all stay.” Jean says. “You will come up with a new plan. Preferably one where I have no broken bones.”
Riko looks at Jean. His spark is there, behind his eyes - older now, harder now, but still there, still spitting and fizzing, still unextinguished. Kevin too - he isn’t cowed. He isn’t obedient. But he reaches for Riko’s hand and holds it so gently.
Riko thinks: we're going to get out.
There are so many more things that he knows - about Nathaniel and the Butcher, about the ERC and the power of their scrutiny when turned in the right direction, about his family even.
He’ll make another plan.
A strange feeling curls around him - dangerous and disquieting as it settles into his bones. But he has been holding onto worse things for longer.
I don't know how, yet. I don't know the cost, yet. But we're going to get out.
For now, in this lifetime, that was enough.