Archive of Our Own ^beta

Naruhodou Ryuunosuke is standing outside the door of a stranger’s London flat. Someone he’s never met and doesn’t know. At least, he’d been spending the last week trying to convince himself that’s the truth of it, but he knows in the tender traitor heart of him that it will have been futile the moment the door opens.

He’d had to humble himself to ask for the address. Barok van Zieks had seen them in the antechamber that evening after everything, after all. He had seen their amicable interaction. And although he had seen their spit and teeth in court as well, he’d still looked at Ryuunosuke with a chilly scrutiny when he’d asked him, a little shamefully, for the address. He’s surprised I don’t already know. He thinks we’re on good enough terms that I’ve been there already, Ryuunosuke had thought to himself. But van Zieks had given it to him without challenge, so he was here, standing in front of the door to a supposed stranger’s flat, telling himself over and over what he had been telling himself the entire week since they last spoke, in the courtroom antechamber. I’m doing the right thing. I’m doing this because we need it to be done before I leave.

He looks up at the building again before knocking. It’s ugly, he thinks, bitterly. Flat faced and average. Ruddy brown bricks stained with grey dirt and grey filth spattered on it from London’s grimy citizens and their grimy lives. He exhales heavily and knocks.

There’s nothing, at first, and Ryuunosuke finds himself immediately thinking he’s not home, I can leave, I’ll have to come back tomorrow, until an excruciating moment later, he hears footsteps from inside, and the door opens.

Ryuunosuke thinks, shit. Standing in the doorway, he’s wearing a fine white cotton shirt, tucked into belted grey trousers. No severe white jacket. No red ascot, or cravat, or whatever it is. It makes him look softer than Ryuunosuke had gotten newly familiar with, in court. It makes him almost look the way he used to. Ryuunosuke thinks again, shit. He watches Asougi Kazuma school his expression into impassivity impressively quickly, and hopes desperately that his own face does the same.

“I- Ryuunosuke. Please come in.”

Ryuunosuke heaves his resolve up and says, “There’s some things we need to talk about, Asougi.” He sees Asougi flinch slightly, at the use of his family name, and allows himself to feel self satisfied about it. Ryuunosuke is not here to pretend they’re back at Yuumei, flirting carelessly with the limits of propriety. He wants to skip the pleasantries, and Asougi lets him. He can tell that his sudden arrival and the mood he’s brought with him has immediately made Asougi nervous. Still, they have not yet had a private conversation since his memory returned to him. Ryuunosuke bitterly wonders if Asougi imagined how this moment would go; if he’s imagining how this conversation will go right now, before it happens. Probably not like he wants it to.

Silently, they go to sit down at a table on one side of the room. Of the two chairs set, only one of them is pulled out. Ryuunosuke thinks briefly of the disarray of chairs around the dinner table at 221B, putting shame to decorum at any time of day. He feels almost certain that in the two and a half weeks that Asougi has been Asougi again—to whatever degree that may be—he hasn’t entertained many guests. That fact of that makes something in Ryuunosuke itch. He doesn’t want to address it, so he instead takes a short moment to examine the room where Asougi lives.

He doesn’t have a fire going in the measly little fireplace provided in the tiny flat, despite, what Ryuunosuke thinks, is called for given the grey evening weather. There is a single gas lamp lit at a desk across the room, lighting the desk well and lighting the rest of the room less well. Asougi must have been doing paperwork for some prosecutor (who just assisted in dismantling the highly corrupt judicial system and was surprisingly not fired about it) business.

They look at each other. Sitting across from Asougi like this, Ryuunosuke is keenly brought to mind the memory of the two of them at that silly steak restaurant in Tokyo, speaking about London. ‘Then come with me!’ Asougi had said to him. Ryuunosuke almost laughs, in front of him now. They’ve come all this way, to this.

Asougi is watching him, waiting for him to speak. It’s bizarre to have him quiet for so long.

“Going to the British Empire to reform our legal system, huh, Asougi,” Ryuunosuke says. Waits for the haughty response, ‘It seems that we’ve reformed theirs instead, haven’t we, Ryuunosuke?’ or something.

Asougi says nothing. It’s—uncomfortable. An almost power-trip, having Asougi so silent, when Ryuunosuke had known him to never shut up, about anything, in that first year of friendship. It makes him uneasy.

“Say something,” He prompts, annoyed.

“What do you want me to say?” Asougi shakes his head minutely, a little aggravated. His bangs shiver against his forehead, falling over his eyebrows. “‘Looks as if we’ve reformed theirs instead, Naruhodou?’” Ah, Naruhodou. “You want to talk, tell me what you want to talk about. Don’t walk around it like that.”

There’s something coarse crackling in the air around them now. It makes Ryuunosuke’s hands itch. He wrings them together under the table, in a helpless endeavour to cool the tension in him. It doesn’t work.

“Fine. I want you to tell me why you lied to me about.. everything. You come back miraculously from your ‘fake death’ only for Susato-san and I to find out that everything we thought we knew about you was just—what, a front? Some cover up for all your—” He gestures wildly, fully agitated now at the need to explain his frustration. A flint's struck inside him. “—your secrets. I’m here to talk about that.”

Annoyance sparks across Asougi’s face, as if he hadn’t been the one to ask Ryuunosuke for an explanation of something obvious. “We.. can talk about that. But really, the dying thing wasn’t my fault. You know that Naruhodou. You can’t blame me for that.” He looks at Ryuunosuke coolly and tilts his head forward slightly, as if they were conspiring. “We can forget that part, huh?”

Ryuunosuke laughs humourlessly, rattled by his arrogance. “You think that I can just forget that?”

Asougi has the decency to look a little chastised. He’s hesitant when he opens his mouth this time, and Ryuunosuke sees it curl a little. In irk at himself or at Ryuunosuke, he does not know. “Okay then, fine, I’m not asking you to forget. It’s just that.. it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it? I’m here now.”

Ryuunosuke looks at him fully, incredulous. He feels nauseated, to have his mourning dismissed so carelessly like that. Manic indignation makes his skin start to flush, his hands shake. “I’m sorry? It ‘doesn’t really matter’?” He searches Asougi’s face, almost urgently. He can’t be serious. Finding blankness in Asougi’s expression incites him like a whip crack. How dare he—

“You died! Kazuma!” Ryuunosuke’s voice rises to a shout, he hears it loud in this tiny flat, but he can’t stop. He’d been holding this filthy grief in him for so many months, staining his insides hot and ashy. “You died and I had to sleep in your bed! My fucking dead best friend’s bed!” It seeps out of him, putrid. It burns his throat. “You died and left me alone on that stupid ship and I had to pretend that it didn’t make me feel like someone had lit a match to my insides and left me to rot! I had nothing left! The only fucking reason I was on that goddamn ship was because of you! And you died!”

Asougi stares at him, still as a prey animal caught in the downwind of someone hungry and clawed. The expression on his face is one Ryuunosuke can’t care to interpret. His ears are roaring, adrenaline making waves crash in his head. He’s almost grateful to have his thoughts drowned out like this; grateful to instead focus on getting air back into his lungs, despite how they’re burning. He closes his eyes, forcing deep breaths in and out through his teeth, and feels the drum of his heart abate, a little. He opens his eyes and looks Asougi in the face.

Ryuunosuke’s heart is a stone dropped in his rib cage.

It’s as if Asougi had never considered what it meant to have been presumed dead for a year. As if this was the first time he had realized that Ryuunosuke had grieved him.

“I didn’t—” Asougi stops, seemingly unmoored by his shameful sudden realization. He’s speaking so quietly. “I hadn’t considered what that would’ve been like.”

I know. Ryuunosuke swallows thick. He says nothing.

The chair Asougi is sitting in creaks, guilty, as he shifts. “I didn’t—know… that I had died. To you. I mean… to me, I didn’t die. I lost part of myself for all those months. All of myself, really. It wasn’t even—when I saw you again, I didn’t think about that. I didn’t know you lost me like I had lost myself. Different than that, I guess. I just thought about how you weren’t there in my life, because something felt off, so I knew I was missing people, even when I didn't. But then you were there again, and part of it felt normal, in a way. Not like I’d died.”

He keeps saying it. Died. Died. Died. The room feels airless. Ryuunosuke presses his eyes closed and thinks of the dry, stagnant room of the ship cabin, after Kazuma died all those months ago. The way the soft rocking of the ship had made him feel tossed, heaved, the wake of Kazuma’s death turning the swells of the ocean cruel. It stretched on so endlessly, cold and grey and lifeless. His world had been torn raw and reset, shrunk to that tiny room, with one bed, a wardrobe, and nothing else.

Asougi is still speaking.

Ryuunosuke clenches his shaking hands together, feeling fragile and useless. “I can’t do this right now, actually.”

At that, Asougi stops. Stricken, he looks up at Ryuunosuke. Opens and closes his mouth stupidly. Ryuunosuke feels sick.

“I have to go.” That acrid knot of grief is lodged back in his throat; his breath and his words come shallow, scraped up from the pit of him.

Asougi looks—Ryuunosuke closes his eyes again. He fights the unwelcome tang of regret in his mouth, swallows it down into the pit of him where he needs it to stay. Asougi still has the gall to act as if his feelings are hurt, after this. Ryuunosuke goes to stand, silently praying his legs grace him with the unshaking dignity of a man with resolve.

“Wait.” Asougi pleads. He’s pleading. Ryuunosuke can’t look him in the eyes. “Naruhodou, I know I can’t understand—”

“You can’t. You can’t and I don’t know how to explain it to you.” He wants to say more, but he can feel the despair from everything pooling in his jaw, up his nose, making it sting with the threat of tears. He shouldn’t be here, in this grey empty room.

There’s a long, leaden silence between them. Ryuunosuke waits for Asougi to say something, doesn’t let himself think about why he’s giving him the chance. When Asougi finally looks at him, it’s devastating.

“I don’t know what to say.” His voice is barely above a whisper. He looks pathetic.

“Then figure it out.”

-

Ryuunosuke closes the door behind him and lets his back hit it, uncaring if Asougi hears the thump of him. Let him, let him know how this exchange exhausted him. Ryuunosuke exhales hard and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. He feels heavy, soaked through with something ugly and sour. Why did he have to say that? How am I supposed to do anything when he can’t even—why did I even want to fix this at all?

He goes back home, to Baker Street. Ryuunosuke hadn’t registered the weather, caught in a hopeless tired replay of the conversation, but when he gets inside, he’s damp. It’s late, far after dinner. He’d mentioned late afternoon to Susato that he was planning to go for a walk after they’d eaten, trying to feign normalcy. She greets him at the door now. It’s an ordinary occurrence for them, except her expression is curious in a way that conveys that she did not believe his bluff. Ah, he thinks. Fondly, despite his mood, I can’t keep a thing from her.

“Naruhodou-san, you’re wet! I told you it was going to rain and you still didn’t take an umbrella!” Susato fusses over Ryuunosuke with kind concern, brushing droplets off the shoulders of his jacket. She’s too generous to him, giving him space to be honest. Knowing that asking directly would close him off, perhaps. He doesn’t say anything.

Rightfully, Susato takes his weird silence as his response. Her intuition, as is typical, is spectacular. “You spoke to Kazuma-sama? Privately?” The hopeful look in her eyes crushes him, makes him feel like a hunter setting a trap. He watches her register his bleak expression.

“I yelled at him.” Snap.

Her face crumples. “Oh, Naruhodou-san…”

Ryuunosuke lets out a groan of frustration at himself. He’s so wrung-out. He can’t let himself see anymore wrongs done tonight. “I can’t talk about it right now Susato-san, I’m sorry.”

Susato looks at him, her eyes serious. “He…” She pauses, thinks over her words carefully. She’s trying to be kind about Asougi. Ryuunosuke feels a part of himself yearn for the same generosity, and he quashes it down. “He hurt me too. I believe it was not with intention, but he did. Naruhodou-san, your feelings are not alone in this. You can speak to me, if you would like to, when you’re ready. Okay?”

“Thank you, Susato-san,” he says sincerely. And he goes up to his room.

For months he’d dreamt of wooden floors with chalked shapes of bodies scratched on them and dark streams of fabric dripping red into the grooves. They’d slowed in frequency, until van Zieks 'disciple’ had shown up, fluctuating in the vividity of the imagery in the short weeks that followed. Kazuma came to him in last night's dream, his death a ferocity set on drowning Ryuunosuke in his own bed. He wakes in the morning with hair plastered to his forehead and shaking hands.

Ryuunosuke doesn’t want to see Asougi today. Or tomorrow. Or for another week again, maybe. He’ll be back on a ship bound for home by then, a wait that long ruining the chances of ever reconciling whatever their weird fractured relationship has become. Although part of him thinks, ah, that would be easiest, and, that might be for the best anyway, the part of him where a tiny wise vision of Susato lives and tells him when he’s being foolish is looking at him disapprovingly. He knows she’s right.

-

Ryuunosuke finds a quiet time of the day when Susato’s father, Holmes and Iris are out to speak with her privately. It’s mid-afternoon, and the wan grey light filters in through the windows and makes the room feel—old, somehow. Older. She’s curled up on the sofa with a book and a blanket over her lap.

Ryuunosuke sits down on the sofa beside Susato and heaves a huge sigh. She glances up from her book briefly and then looks back down. Must be a really good part. Tucking his feet up underneath him and leaning his arm on the armrest, Ryuunosuke wonders if maybe he’ll get Susato’s attention if he swoons like a sickly maiden, or something. It feels too shameful to acknowledge that it’s pride that keeps him from speaking first. Shameful to admit that he and Asougi both had done harm, when Ryuunosuke had come home from that interaction so bruised. He sighs again, a tad more pathetically.

Not looking in Susato’s direction, Ryuunosuke waits. After a moment, he hears her repress her own sigh in her throat and close her book, placing it on the trunk in front of them.

“Yes, Naruhodou-san?” A-ha.

He turns to look at her expectantly, relief momentarily subduing his nerves. She raises her eyebrows and nods her head slightly, encouraging him to speak with a “mhm?”

Ryuunosuke purses his lips. He inhales deep through his nose and then out again. Susato is so patient. There is truly no one like her. “I’m ready.”

“To talk about yesterday? With Kazuma-sama?”

“...Yeah.”

She waits again. When Ryuunosuke says nothing, she quietly reaches down to the blanket bundling her legs and flips the ends out. Stretching forward, she politely spreads half of it over Ryuunosuke’s lap. He almost tears up. She speaks then, after that.

“Tell me what frustrated you, Naruhodou-san,” she offers. Typically, such kindness in her voice would be a balm, but he feels his breath come up short at the question. Memories of the previous evening cloud his thoughts, almost overwhelming him.

Ryuunosuke scrubs at his face with both hands. “Uhh… I told him I wanted to talk. It was already bad, the moment I’d arrived, Susato-san. It seemed like he was.. nervous? to have me show up so suddenly. Which makes sense I guess.” He takes a breath. Looks at his knees and realizes his fingers have been fidgeting with the blanket, tugging at the knit. To save Holmes’ possessions from his maiming, Ryuunosuke brings his knees up to his chest under the blanket, and tucks his hands under his feet.

“I just told him. He asked. So I told him what I wanted to talk about, Susato-san, and all I had to do was mention that he ‘died’ and he went ‘let’s forget about that, it doesn’t matter.’” The memory aggravates him right away, a spark to the cinder of his grief. He hears Susato hum, acknowledging his frustration.

“How could he say that? How could it not matter? And he didn’t get it! He said ‘Oh I didn’t realize it was like that for you’!” Frustration churns in his gut. He can barely quell the flare of it. “Susato-san, he died.”

She’s quiet. Ryuunosuke looks at her, waiting for her to share his indignation. Instead, he finds a troubled look on her face.

“He went through a lot,” she says pensively.

“So did we!” It feels like he’s pleading with her. He forces his breathing to come out even, willing his heart to remain well-behaved for her. “How can you still be so kind to him?”

Susato looks at him sharply. He’s stirred something stormy in her. “Because I love him! Naruhodou-san! Don’t act as if you don’t suddenly! I know you do. We both miss him. He may deserve our vitriol for his deceit but he does not deserve it for not understanding our private feelings.” She’s breathing harshly through her nose as she looks him in the eyes, with a sternness Ryuunosuke knows he shouldn’t shy from, “I know you know this.”

Ryuunosuke drops his forehead against his knee. It makes a dull thunk in his head.

“Yeah.” He sighs again.

“Naruhodou-san, Kazuma-sama’s death…” Ryuunosuke lifts his head to look over at her, and this time he finds her gaze withdrawn. She’s looking at her hands, folded tight on her lap. “It was difficult for both of us. It was scary, and awful and not something I would wish on any other. And Kazuma-sama himself can not know what it is like to lose a best friend, or a brother, but he does know loss. He knows it quite well, really.” Ah. “So I think…” Susato’s expression is determined when she looks back up at him. “I think it would be best to discuss Kazuma-sama’s death only after you speak about everything else with him first. And when you do,” she pauses, breathes in and out once. “Take care to think of both his feelings and yours. I think you both deserve that.”

She’s right. He knows she is—knew she would be, but, still, it all just makes him feel—tired. He rests his forehead on his knees, both grateful and disheartened for her honesty. He wants to lay by the fire laden with blankets and not have to think about all the hurt that he’d wrung out in the open between Asougi and him. With little under a week until the ship back to home leaves port, Ryuunosuke decides he probably maybe has enough time to give them a break for a day. They’ll figure something out, even if that something is some sort of finality. An ache blooms in his chest at that thought. He swallows it and he gets up to get another blanket.

Morning light filters through the clouds, sooty, but nearly warm, when Ryuunosuke closes 221B’s door behind him. It would feel nice, better than the heavy overcast of the last few days, but he decides that light overcast is still overcast.

He sits down on the front steps and rests his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands together under his chin. Everything is normal—sort of. He’s normal. He can have a normal conversation with Asougi Kazuma, the man whom he loved and lost and un-lost and un-loved. They’re both adults, surely they can speak to each other without raising their voices each time either of them respond to the other. If Ryuunosuke chooses to ignore everything they previously spoke about—and didn’t speak about, then, being optimistic, his hopes are low for the both of them.

He’s looking attentively at the mud between the cobblestones when he hears footsteps approach him and then stop. Ugh. Ryuunosuke is ready to feel immediately annoyed at not being able to go speak to him own terms when he looks up at Asougi, he knows it’s him, and—

“Naruhodou.”

He looks… Ryuunosuke blinks once and looks away. He has no idea what expression he just made. Asougi looks good. Again he looks familiar, distressingly so. He’s wearing a fine long wool coat, dark in colour, almost black. It’s tailored loosely and hangs on him full and comfortable. With a short collar, turned down and unbuttoned, Ryuunosuke can see the same soft white shirt he had on the other day, tucked into dark trousers. At least he’s not wearing suspenders, probably. Ryuunosuke sends a silent prayer to the November wind, begging for it not to reveal any extant accoutrement with a coat-blowing gust.

He does notice, with interest, that Asougi had no swords strapped to his waist. There was no knowing how attached he was to the saber he’d somehow gotten his hands on as van Zieks’ disciple, but seeing him bereft of Karuma was unusual. Had Ryuunosuke had the time to, he may have considered why Asougi would come to speak to him weaponless—after their torrential previous interaction—but as is, he needs to concentrate on… being normal.

Ryuunosuke collects himself and looks back up. He can see Asougi’s mouth open and close abruptly, knows he had a quip, swallowed it. Ryuunosuke sighs and pushes himself up onto his feet.

“Let’s go somewhere.”

Asougi hesitates, clearly unsure of Ryuunosuke's mood. He thinks I’m capricious now. He realizes this annoys him more than the unexpected hostility in the courtroom, to have Asougi be careful around him like this.

“Are we—” Blessedly, Asougi has the foresight to stop before saying anything foolish. Ryuunosuke doesn’t look him in the eyes.

“It’s fine.” He looks at the stone sidewalk again. The stones are grey today.

“Okay.”

Ryuunosuke can see Asougi looking at him, searching his face, trying to find— normalcy, he guesses. Asougi wants to know how sharp Ryuunosuke’s claws are today, and if he’s enthusiastic to use them. The stones are a mix of warm grey, almost brown, not quite, and cold grey. Steely, almost. The dirt between them is also grey, but in a—

Asougi clears his throat. Christ.

“Should we go back to my flat..?”

This is truly awful. Little else before this moment has Naruhodou Ryuunosuke suffered pettily to this extent. He inhales deeply, and lets out a long, noisy sigh. It doesn’t really help to expel his discomfort, but perhaps Asougi will read it as such.

“No, I need to look at a tree, or something. Your flat is too weird and stuffy.”

There’s an awkward pause before Asougi responds. “...Right.”

“And grey,” Ryuunosuke adds. “Grey makes me feel—” He gestures vaguely with his hand, in an attempt to indicate melancholy with a casualness he does not feel. Come on, Asougi, I’m giving you something.

“It’s overcast today, Naruhodou. If you’ve not noticed, everything is grey.” Bait and hook.

“I had, thank you. Maybe if you’d worn your cravat thing I could look at that and feel something else, like annoyance.” Against his better judgement, he falls easily into this, with Asougi.

“It’s a jabot, Naruhodou." Jackass. "And you'll be pleased to know I brought it with me, actually.” Ryuunosuke looks at Asougi in dismay as he genuinely pulls the stupid piece of red fabric out of his coat pocket with a hand. He watches Asougi reach up with the other to push the wool collar of his coat back so he can tug the collar of his shirt up against his neck. As he flicks his head to whisk the hair off eyes, he raises his chin, and brings the “jabot” up to clasp around the back of his shirt collar. Ryuunosuke is distraught.

There’s something in Ryuunosuke’s head about how the jabot will bring to mind the difficult image of Asougi in court, hostile and deceiving. There’s another thing that says that putting that familiar red colour on his person will make him look too much like his Kazuma, from before. There’s a third, worse thing that says you look good enough already, have mercy. Ryuunosuke voices none of these things. Instead, he says, “please don’t.”

“What? You don’t want it? You seemed so desperate to feel annoyed just a second ago, Ry-Naruhodou.” Asougi blinks away at his stumble. God, Ryuunosuke thinks, this is foolish.

“You’re already annoying enough without it, I’ve decided.”

Asougi laughs once, with his mouth closed.

“Where to, then?” Partner. Ryuunosuke’s traitorous brain finishes Asougi’s statement for him, betraying him to it’s last. He aches with how he longs to hear Asougi say it himself, and aches worse with the recognition of his longing. Uncomfortable, he swallows it down.

“There’s uh, a park up the street. It’s a weekday morning so I imagine it won’t be busy.”

“Alright.”

It’s immediately awkward again. Why are we doing this to each other?

Asougi hums quietly beside him as they start walking up Baker Street. Ryuunosuke braces himself. “You know, Naruhodou,” Oh god. Asougi doesn’t say anything else, and Ryuunosuke realizes that he’s waiting for an acknowledgment. He can feel his heart beating mouse-quick in his chest. They can’t do this here, in the middle of Baker Street. They’re not even sitting down. One wrong word and they could be at each other's throats, surely causing not only a commotion but also likely an unmendable gash in their already gnarled friendship.

Asougi’s eyes slide over to him—

“Look, Asougi, I uh. Can we wait. Until we get to the park, I mean.”

Asougi turns his head to look at Ryuunosuke fully, his features scrunching up in bafflement. “To speak? At all?”

“Oh.” Oh. He wasn’t—

Asougi barks out a laugh. “How cold, Naruhodou!” There’s a satisfaction in his expression, some sort of pleased surety that Ryuunosuke doesn’t know how to react to after his personal imagining of their worst-case-scenario. He watches dumbly as Asougi raises his eyebrows conspiratorily. “You’re vowing me to silence until you see a tree, then?"

The park entrance is just across from them now, across the road at the end of Upper Baker. The greenery looks a little worse for wear, given the time of year; the yellows and oranges mostly having donned their browns, but it’s there. Asougi looks over at him, eyebrows raised still, expression a single scoff-from-Ryuunosuke away from victorious.

Ryuunosuke huffs a breath through his nose. He will not give Asougi this. Wheeling around, he begins a valiant trudge in reverse, eyes glowering down Baker street as he marches backwards away from it. There are certainly trees on this street, huh, brandishing their twisty little arms at him.

Asougi laughs fully. “Are your eyes closed as well, then?” He knows the trees are there, damn him.

Ryuunosuke throws a hand over his eyes. “I actually forget what trees look like suddenly. Wow, maybe I can finally get some peace and quiet this way.”

“Yeah, well you’re definitely going to get peace and quiet when you—” Ryuunosuke hears Asougi walk up close to him. Putting his rotten cheater hands gently on Ryuunosuke’s shoulders, he turns him back around to face forward, “—walk into something and fall over.” Ryuunosuke still has a hand over his eyes, and he barely takes two steps before the toe of his shoe catches on the edge of a cobblestone. He squawks and stumbles forward, and Asougi’s hand is on his arm yanking him upright before he does himself in and puts truth into Asougi’s words after all. Those nefarious cobblestone layers had set that stone just so, the angle decreed perfect for Naruhodou Ryuunosuke to trip on in this exact moment.

“You steered me into that stone, didn’t you! Bastard.”

Asougi starts laughing again, pleased to have Ryuunosuke so characteristically inelegant in front of him, Ryuunosuke supposes. Part of him feels foolish, another part, the one he’d swallowed and tried to keep down, is quietly relieved. Silently and despite himself, he sends a thought of thanks to the cobblestone layers who had set that misaligned stone and granted them a brief moment of familiarity before they inevitably throw themselves into each other’s thorns. As much as Ryuunosuke wants to feel put off by it, it eases the weird ache in him.

Crossing Upper Baker, they come up to one of the entrances of the park, Regent’s Park, as it’s known, on the side where a shallow lake scoops around the edge of it. A bridge cuts through the leg of it that bends towards Upper Baker Street. Beyond the trees that cluster the far sides of the lake, Ryuunosuke can see the wide public grounds that make up a decent majority of the park.

“Have you been here?” he asks Asougi.

“I haven’t. You’ll have to play the guide today, Naruhodou.”

-

They make their way through the wide pathways, Ryuunosuke leading them towards a knot of the park he knows is more heavily forested than the others. He doesn’t realize it until the trees begin to huddle around them more heavily, leaves curtaining the sky closed and softening London’s regular city din and the wan overcast light, that, with Asougi beside him like this, it reminds him of home. Again, that stupid ache. He wants to look over at Kazuma and see the petals of red show through his hair while they walk, the long tendrils of his headband a pair of bright plumes against his back. The want of it washes his body hot; a foolish yearning. How embarrassing. Ryuunosuke clenches his jaw and forces it all back down, again. He can’t keep doing this to himself.

Asougi seems to have the same thought, about home, albeit probably without the pathetic yearning portion of it. He hums a little and says, “if the leaves here were yellow…” The ginkgo trees in Tokyo at this time of year are a performance of golden yellow, a drapery of them laid over the streets and paths. He’s thinking of them, surely.

And Ryuunosuke misses them, too.

He’s about to voice this, as aloof as he can manage so as to not let on his foolish desires, when, to the left of them, a small tortoiseshell cat slips out from the brush, rustling Ryuunosuke from his endeavour. “Oh!” He stops in his path to admire her silky black fur, and how the irregular bites of orange in it call to mind the embers of a night's dying fire. When she pauses to look up at him in her journey across the path, he’s delighted to see that there's a perfect split down her nose of the two colours. Ryuunosuke crouches down on his heels to marvel at the symmetry of it. “Wow, look at that! Asougi, look.” Asougi hums from behind him, surely charmed by her, as Ryuunosuke is.

The cat blinks twice at Ryuunosuke before she resumes her business, trotting off into the forested area on their right. Her paws are so cute. He sighs, a little wistfully. “I wish I had something to give her..”

He hears Asougi exhale a quiet laugh. “You’re so soft, Ryuunosuke.”

Ryuunosuke stands back up to face him, anticipating a petty conflict, despite the fondness he hears and ignores in Asougi’s voice.“I am not.”

“So you say, but you want to feed every stray cat you see, don’t you?”

“Wha- and you don’t?”

The look in Asougi’s eyes is so achingly familiar, that sly, endeared surety. “Sadly, I don’t have the time to see enough stray cats on an errant stroll to consider it.”

Ryuunosuke can feel his cheeks heat, which is humiliating. He tries to hide it with a scoff as he turns around and continues walking. Asougi is not supposed to be looking at him like that, as if this were easy, as if they are the same as they were. He feels frustrated at the ease with which he gets wrapped up in Asougi’s charm, his cocky demeanor. Belatedly, Ryuunosuke realizes that Asougi had used his given name. He probably hadn’t noticed he’d done it. Trying to muster the same ire that he would’ve felt a few days ago, if Asougi had slipped up then, he finds he can’t quite.

-

Further up along the path, Ryuunosuke spies the little single person pathway off through the trees that leads to a small clearing. Iris had told him about it, how she used to sneak Holmes in and make him assistant to her crafting of potions of rainwater, mud and berries—a typical excursion for them, he’d heard. Ryuunosuke had come to be fond of the clearing, coming often in the spring during his suspension to relieve his mind from the law, and the systems of the law, and the failings of the law, etc. He’d liked to watch the sparrows hop around on the roots of the trees, hunting for nesting material. He imagined it was a good place to have a private conversation in London; an unknown hideaway within the city, if you didn’t want to be walled-in in a dingy grey room.

They pick their way through the side path and enter into the clearing. The grassy area itself is only a few square meters, although this time of year most of the grass is concealed with fallen leaves. A small iron-wrought bench that had been drug out to the clearing years ago is nestled beneath the trees on one side of it. It’s uncomfortable. Ryuunosuke pauses, and then goes to sit on the dry leaves a few paces away, under one of the trees. Asougi hesitates. He wants to sit on that damn bench so badly, Ryuunosuke thinks, a little spitefully.

“Your coat’s dark, it won’t stain.” Ryuunosuke calls from his spot on the ground. He stretches his leg out and thunks the heel of his shoe against the grass across from him a few times, indicating Asougi to sit down under the opposite tree. “Come on.”

Asougi comes over and Ryuunosuke watches him consider sitting seiza for a brief second, before tucking the length of his coat underneath him to sit with his legs crossed. Something about it makes his heart clench, pleading endearment, and he ignores it.

It makes Ryuunosuke feel weird, a little. To be so in control of how the situation is going to go. He’d thought it would be better for him, to be in charge, but commanding Asougi to do as Ryuunosuke wants feels… unfair, almost. He doesn’t feel self satisfied about it. He just feels kind of mean.

They look at each other from across the carpet of leaves. Asougi says nothing. In the silence, the intended conversation topic looms heavy over them.

Ryuunosuke is suddenly deeply grateful he hadn’t let Asougi put the jabot around his neck. There’s something severe in his expression that already recalls the image of him at the prosecutor’s bench enough as is. Perhaps the familiarity of his appearance could have eased the tense knot in Ryuunosuke’s gut, but the flintly look in his eye sears clean through the facade. His coat is draped open around his knees, showing the expanse of his white shirt. He’s not wearing suspenders.

He’d been lying to himself, this whole morning, Ryuunosuke has. Looking at Asougi now, he can’t be him. His Kazuma. Ah, even his hair’s too long. The sweep of dark hair that covers his forehead now cannot conceal the nakedness of it, bare without its red. Ryuunosuke feels almost uncomfortable to look at it, feeling like he’s seeing something private when he can barely see it at all. He has no idea where the headband is. Asougi had removed it from the hilt of Karuma before the first trial he’d served as primary prosecutor, Ryuunosuke had noticed immediately that it was nowhere on his person the moment he stood across from him in court. That itself had somehow felt like a betrayal, before any dreadful undisclosed truths were revealed at all.

And looking at him now—it’s easy to plan to consider Asougi Kazuma’s feelings when Asougi Kazuma is not sitting in front of him, looking at him, holding his hands too tightly together in his lap.

Ryuunosuke looks down at his own hands, listening to the wind agitate what leaves are left on the trees. They clatter together noisily, heightening the disquiet in him. When he looks back up at Asougi, he sees that he’s shared his discomfort a little too clearly on his face—something Asougi Kazuma himself had warned him he does plainly, and often. But there’s something bristling in Asougi’s eyes now, a tell of his brewing irritation, as if he’s anticipating what new resentment Ryuunosuke’s going to share with him now. Might as well not keep him waiting.

“I just feel like… Asougi, I don’t even know if I know you anymore.”

A breeze picks Asougi’s hair up off his forehead and lets Ryuunosuke fully see the flash of displeasure cross his face, eyebrows drawn sharp and low, eyes intense. He scoffs. “What? why would you say that?” He doesn’t give Ryuunosuke a chance to reply. “Because I have a complicated family history that I didn’t want to talk about? That’s a crime now?”

Ryuunosuke balks at the self-delusion that all that’s occurred between them could be explained by a bit of casual personal choice. It seems he was right, to be pessimistic about their abilities to behave politely to each other.

“Do you think it’s like that?” Frustration coils in his gut, he feels venomous. “Do you really think that’s what it was like for me? ‘Oh my best friend won’t mind if I just conceal the entirety of my private life from him.’” He feels his lip curl into a snarl, spitting sarcasm into his next words. “Be honest, Asougi.”

“It wasn’t like that, Narudodou.”

“What, for me? It wasn’t like that for me? Tell me what it was like then.”

“Stop it.” Asougi's voice is sharp, hard.

Ryuunosuke stops. He blinks hard, jerking his gaze from Asougi’s face. The patch of grass his eyes stop on is crusty, withering for the season. In the spring it will regrow green, he supposes. It’s dying now. Ryuunosuke wonders if that’s an apt metaphor for the present situation.

He hears Asougi exhale, harsh. “You don’t—” Get it? Ryuunosuke draws his eyes back to Asougi’s face, anticipating it. He narrows his eyes and watches Asougi cut his words off. They watch each other for a moment, two creatures, fanged, circling each other. Planning strikes. Asougi leans forward slightly.

“You don’t get to tell me you don’t know me anymore. It was always like this for me. Nothing changed,” he says, eyes steely.

Ryuunosuke bites out a cold laugh. “Maybe if I had known what it was ‘always like’ for you then I could pretend I feel the same way, Asougi—but I didn't. You never told me. I got on that ship with you totally oblivious to your secret revenge plot.” He knows he’s being cruel. He knows and he ignores that part of him that would be ashamed for it.

“My—” Asougi scoffs, his expression turning vicious. The air between them is potent, a single cinder pop away from lighting the forest ablaze around them. “As if I could just—” He cuts himself off, teeth bared, animal.

Ryuunosuke snarls back. “Asougi, I agreed to stuff myself inside a suitcase to come to London with you! I slept in the wardrobe!!” Distantly, he knows that they’re about to start fully yelling at each other in a public park. He doesn’t care. “Why wouldn’t you tell me the actual reason we were even going??”

Asougi groans in frustration. “Why do you—” He scrapes the palm of his hand against his forehead, breathing harshly before speaking again, looking up at Ryuunosuke with a sharp intensity.

“Why do you think I could just tell you that my father died when I was fourteen because he got wrongly convicted in britain for serial murder? That my mother died because she was too fucking sad to take care of me and I was the only person left in the Asougi clan and if I didn’t do everything I could to find the truth I would be left—” He gasps in a lungful of sharp air, when he speaks next it comes out rasped, wrenched from his throat, “with nothing!”

Ryuunosuke is a match strike away from crawling over to Asougi and grabbing his insuffrable grey coat—why is everything so fucking grey—to rattle him into sense. He feels molten, fit to splinter. “Because being someone's best friend means that you don’t keep them in the dark about everything important to you.”

“I wasn’t trying to leave you in the dark, Ryuunosuke!” Asougi looks as if he’s about to cry, eyes wide and wet, as he shakes his head roughly. Fists bunched in his lap, he’s leaning forward so far he’ll lose his balance if he presses himself any further. Ryuunosuke registers this, dully, as his lungs heave. In his pause, Asougi continues.

“I wasn’t trying to trick you. I swear it. I swear it,” pleads Asougi. He’s crying now, fat, sad tears spilling down his cheeks. He’s crying, Ryuunosuke realizes with a start, I’ve made him cry.

“I just—” Asougi is hastily scrubbing at his tears with the heels of hands. Ryuunosuke watches them fall still, as he does, his mind awash with them. “—Didn’t want to scare you off. I didn’t want you to say no.” I’ve never seen him cry before.

Something in Ryuunosuke starts to tear, he hears it, the wild, gnarly edges of his anger starting to pull apart.

“You… what?”

The way Asougi looks up sharply at him abruptly reminds Ryuunosuke of the stormy look Susato had given him the other evening, before she’d reproached him for his callousness. ‘Because I love him,’ she’d said, when he’d asked her how she could be so kind, still. Asougi is looking at him with all of his insides bared, the whole of him, unclouded and vulnerable.

“Do you think that you could still say yes?” He looks wild. Manic. Desperate. He looks exhausted. “If I’d told you all of my stupid, insane baggage? That I could ever expect you to just go with it?”

Ryuunosuke looks at him, really looks at him; the vicious, familiar sweep of his hair—unchangingly choppy, despite its length—his dark, handsome eyebrows, pulled taut in emotion, the shine in his eyes—bright and intense, those same eyes he knew that would shine with the vigor of a man with a monologue incoming.

And Ryuunosuke finds he knows exactly what he would say, if he’d been told all of Asougi’s stupid, insane baggage.

“...Yes.” He barely breathes. “Kazuma, I would’ve said yes.”

Asougi makes a high, tiny animal sound, like a warbler asking a question. His throat catches on it. “I— wait.” He looks away from Ryuunosuke, his expression bewildered. He then takes a big snotty inhale through his nose, as Ryuunosuke, likewise astounded by his own realization, watches fresh tears well up in his eyes.

“Uhh. you—” He lets out an astonished little exhale, swiping at new tears. “Really?” Ryuunosuke is rooted still. He thinks, again, I've never seen him cry before. His voice is a gust when he answers. “Yeah.”

Asougi folds over himself, a tree felled, and Ryuunosuke hears him exhale like all the leaves hitting the ground at once. Then he hears him inhale, and it sounds like a sob. Curled over, Ryuunosuke can see the soft arc of the back of Asougi’s neck, dark hair parting irregularly to expose it in slight slices. Ryuunosuke watches the first knot of Asougi’s spine shake with his weeping, and he feels—torrential. He wants to run away. He wants to reach out. He wants to apologize, even though he isn’t sure this is his fault. He wants to hold Asougi in the cupped palms of his hands, like he would a kitten, or a cupped hand of spring water. He wants to kiss his forehead. He wants to tackle him to the ground and punch him in the gut.

He closes his eyes.

He listens to Asougi’s shuddering breaths slow, come even again, and he tries to temper his own heart.

“Kazuma…” he whispers, voice scarcely louder than the hush of the leaves on the trees. He isn’t even sure if Asougi can hear him. A stream of November wind slips through the trees around them, brushing the hair on the back of Asougi’s neck. He shakes his head back and forth for a moment, the soft hairs rustling with his movement, before lifting it up to meet Ryuunosuke’s eyes. Asougi’s eyes are red; his eyelashes are wet with tears. He seems to have come to a conclusion while weeping, his sober expression a juxtaposition to the mess of him. Ryuunosuke can barely stand to look at him, heart thudding dumbly in his chest.

“I was wrong. When I didn’t trust you. I was wrong,” Asougi says.

Ryuunosuke aches. He lets himself feel it, lets it clot in his chest. A big knot of bitter want. “You didn’t trust me, but you should’ve. You could have, and nothing would have changed between us.”

Asougi puts his elbows on his knees, and presses his face into his hands. Ryuunosuke watches him. He looks distraught. He sniffles again, a little pathetically. When he speaks, it’s hoarse. “This is so..”

Ryuunosuke pulls his knees up to his chest, to do something with his hands, to stop himself from reaching out. He can’t. They can’t, yet. He rests his cheek on a knee. “Yeah.” Asougi lets out a groan, dragging his hands up his face and shoving his fingers through his hair. He lets his hands drop, and laughs once, maybe at his own foolishness, maybe just because this whole thing is so stupid. Asougi looks up at Ryuunosuke, and he looks so tired. When he speaks, it’s a whisper. “What did I do to us, Ryuunosuke?”

“You fucked it up.”

-

They sit there on the ground and look at each other for a long moment. The air is still again. In the quiet, Ryuunosuke can hear people conversing on the wide pathways of Regent’s Park, ignorant to the maelstrom had in the clearing between them. Asougi looks up at the tree branches above where Ryuunosuke is sitting. He watches a leaf float off it’s branch and meander to the ground, twirling. He watches it settle onto the carpet of all of it’s leaf-siblings. He looks at it for a long time.

They breathe quietly. The silence of the moment is occasionally broken by Asougi, as he sniffles up the remains of his cry. Slowly, he looks up. His expression is piercing.

“Can you forgive me?” he asks seriously.

Ryuunosuke realizes that he’s not surprised to hear Asougi ask this of him. Maybe he wanted him to. He knows, can see, that Asougi isn’t asking with a hopeful glint in his eye. There’s no plea in it. He’s not asking because he wants Ryuunosuke to say yes, a petition to bring them back to normalcy. He’s asking because he wants to know. There’s a sincerity in his face that makes Ryuunosuke feel unwound to see. He closes his eyes and breathes in slowly, holds the ache in him in his throat. So badly, does he want to draw it out; lay it out on the ground in front of them, give them witness to his thorned yearning. He won’t. He can’t.

“...I don’t know,” Ryuunosuke responds honestly. They both deserve that, at least. “Can you trust me?”

Asougi regards him earnestly, his expression steeled, reckless almost. There’s something defiant in his eyes, making Ryuunosuke lift his chin from his knee to watch him speak.

“I do.” Ryuunosuke’s breath catches. Asougi continues, “I already have. I put my trust in you the moment I asked you to stand before me as the defense in Barok van Zieks’ trial. I trusted you with every last breath I had, because I knew—after you defended yourself back home, before all this— I knew that you would pursue the truth like a man possessed.” Ryuunosuke feels his mouth fall open slightly, as Asougi speaks. He barely blinks. “I trusted you to be relentless. I trusted you to steer me back, to put the truth of the case first, to not allow me to get muddled inside my own pursuits. I put all of my trust, everything, every part of me, in your hands, Naruhodou Ryuunosuke.

And I was right to.”

They look at each other. Ryuunosuke feels hot and cold and hot all over. The knots he’d re-tied in his brain, watching Asougi think a moment ago, unspool, all at once. He’s a loose thread; a leaf of fabric, loosened from its stitches. He almost doesn’t see Asougi open his mouth again.

“So yes, I trust you.”

Ryuunosuke closes his mouth, licks his lips and he whispers, “okay.”

-

When they get up to leave the clearing, they do so in silent agreement. What’s left to say needs to be done outside of the moment that occurred there, in that little space in the forest. Ryuunosuke’s body feels weightless, almost, as he stands. He stumbles from it, throwing his hand on the tree behind him for balance. He turns to the trail leading back, shaking his legs out, and feels the light press of a hand on his back, a reassurance for him were his legs to falter again. He pauses. The press of it is barely there, a breath of a gesture. Asougi does not remove his hand when Ryuunosuke continues walking. When they step back out onto the wide pathway, Ryuunosuke notices the hand is gone, shoved into coat pockets. He tells the ache in him that he does not miss it.

The temperature had dropped a good few degrees while they were in amongst the trees, yelling at each other. Ryuunosuke hadn’t noticed, the adrenaline of it making him run hot until now. He finds his hands are shaking slightly, and too opts to put them in his pockets, a little bitterly. He turns to walk along the path towards the lake. Asougi follows beside him. Asougi. Asougi Asougi Asougi. Too scared to find out if he’d earned Ryuunosuke’s trust, until he found himself with no one else.

“Huh.”

Asougi looks sideways at him as they walk.

“It’s just—” Everything I’ve been telling myself since you’ve returned has been wrong. Ryuunosuke’s mind is a weight in his skull. He doesn’t know what’s anchoring him, he feels as if he’ll either float away or sink into the earth if he thinks too hard about everything. He looks down toward his shoes, and is startled to notice, to his embarrassment, that Asougi’s hands are now out of his pockets. When did he take them out? Ryuunosuke decides for himself recklessly that if he’s to focus on something, anything, to keep his feet on the ground, it might as well be this. So he does.

He thinks about coming home late from some izakaya with Asougi—with Kazuma, tispy and weightless, high off the others' woozy contentedness. The summer heat of the night making them both feel melted, insides like syrup. Ryuunosuke grabbing Kazuma’s sweaty hand and squeezing it. Feeling him squeeze back. That anchor. The way Kazuma would tug Ryuunosuke closer, oblivious to the way Ryuunosuke’s eyes would be glued to his flushed, handsome face and goofy, inebriated smile. Maybe not oblivious. Their arms would crush against each other and their heads would bonk together and they would yelp in shock and then laugh, and laugh.

He thinks about how he misses him, the way Kazuma would look at him in those moments, eyes curved like petals, filling Ryuunosuke with a warmth that could’ve spilled out, were he not careful. He barely was. He misses the Kazuma that used to look at him like he was a kindness from the world. Like seeing him was a relief, a balm for his weariness. How could they have had that so easy, after only a year of each other's company. Then come with me, to London! How badly Ryuunosuke wishes to open the wardrobe door into another dim salty morning and see Kazuma, sitting on the edge of the bed, quietly buckling his boot gaiters. He wants to hear him say “good morning” with the softness in his voice that Ryuunosuke knew he’d used because he pitied his poor best friend, sleeping in that tiny dark wardrobe, for whose sake, neither of them would say.

It isn’t that Ryuunosuke wants to grab Asougi’s hand now, but he sees it, and—

“Naruhodou.”

They’re at the bridge now. He looks at Asougi, and he can see in his eyes that he wants to ask him what he was thinking about. He would have, back then. Now he only searches Ryuunosuke’s face, seeking permission to even ask. Ryuunosuke can’t tell him. How humiliating, to be thinking of how starved you are of the very man beside you. How crushing, then, to tell yourself no, when you know he wants to ask for it. Ryuunosuke swallows, and he says, “shall we?” nodding towards the bridge.

They cross the lake in silence.

-

When they reach 221B, Ryuunosuke’s exhausted himself from the fervency of his thoughts, running the conversation over and over in his head. He hasn’t been able to get his hands to stop their shaking.

“It’s just that,” he picks up the thread he’d unwound earlier, suspecting Asougi will follow the line of it. He pauses. Swallows the knot, torrid in his throat. “What changed your mind? About trusting me, I mean.”

“Oh.” Asougi laughs once, and looks off to the side. “When I saw you at the defence bench, with Karuma at your waist—even when I didn't have my memories back—when I saw you put everything you had into that case with the scientist, even when things kept getting thrown in your way, and it seemed so hopeless for you, you still fought. You still fought!” Ryuunosuke watches Asougi’s expression alight, brighten in the way that it always had when he was speaking passionately . “Something itched at me, from the moment I saw you, truthfully, but watching that, it… made my heart race. When my memories returned—and I realized it was you, Ryuunosuke, my Ryuunosuke—who had so relentlessly and so courageously fought for the truth like that, I knew. There was no one else. I had you, to trust, and that was it. So I did.”

Ryuunosuke is almost breathless when Asougi finishes speaking. He has to stop doing this. He thanks the cool November wind for it’s foresight, his cheeks already flushed from the cold, saving him the childish shame of being flushed pink with embarrassment. ‘My Ryuunosuke.’ He’s unbelievable. He may have been right after all, perhaps he hasn’t changed. Ryuunosuke shakes the thought from his head. The fondness he feels at the familiarity of Asougi Kazuma also makes him reckless. He wants so badly to reach out. It tugs on him, makes him ache again. But.

“I see,” Ryuunosuke says, shoving it all down.

Asougi looks at him for a long moment, digesting his sober response, and says, “there’s something else, also.” He’s looking at Ryuunosuke with an expression that Ryuunosuke knows precisely how to read, and chooses not to. He needs to get inside and eat a meal with his family. He needs a good night's rest before they do this again. He lets Asougi look at him, lets him wait for Ryuunosuke to speak.

There’s something in the air that makes it feel as if it’s going to snow. Ryuunosuke looks up at the heavy grey clouds and breathes out, watching his breath cloud white into the sky and dissipate.

“Tomorrow.”

Asougi looks at him, long. Ryuunosuke looks back up to the sky, so he can’t see Asougi’s expression when he speaks.

“Okay. Take care, Naruhodou.”

“You too.”

Arriving through the door of 221B is a goddamn solace. Being home feels so good. Ryuunosuke toes his shoes off and shucks his jacket, blearily locating Holmes’ fat leather sofa and letting himself collapse into it. He registers that Holmes, Mikotoba-sensei and Iris must be out again. Susato had looked up at him when he came in, from the armchair where she sat, curled up with the knit blanket wrapped around her legs. She’d quietly watched him melt into the sofa opposite her, and went, “hm!” Ryuunosuke has his eyes closed and is positively drifting off when he feels the knit blanket placed over him, a gesture of sympathy, maybe. Or just Susato being herself.

He wonders if it’s started snowing yet.

As it went, overnight, London had been—not dusted—but draped, a heavy woolen layer of snow arranged over it’s gables and chimneys. Roads were cloaked full with it, tree branches laden.

Holmes had said he hadn’t seen snow come this early, and so heavily, in many years. “It must be an auspicious day, indeed!” he’d mused, with a wink in Ryuunosuke’s direction that Ryuunosuke had pointedly ignored. More often than not, Holmes had been very good about pretending he never hears any of Susato and Ryuunosuke’s private conversations in the consultancy office, directly above his workspace. He tended to make exceptions to the upholding of this lie when it concerned favourable news, Ryuunosuke had noticed.

And indeed, as the snow had started to fall last evening, shy almost, in it’s delicacy, Ryuunosuke and Susato had spoken quietly of the tides of his and Asougi’s tumultuous conversation. About how they spoke to each other in truths, finally. How fierce misjudgements had slashed a rift, and how by acknowledging them, Ryuunosuke felt the rift was mendable, almost. Finally.

He didn’t tell her that he had made Asougi cry. Something about it felt too intimate, too cruel to share. A coil of Asougi that Ryuunosuke had wrenched from him with both hands, twisted tight enough to draw tears. Thinking about it made him feel cold with shame, knowing he’d watched him weep. It felt callous to think of it as necessary, something that had to happen, for them to approach reconciliation.

Susato had said to him that she and her father had gone to speak with Asougi the previous day, that day after she and Ryuunosuke had spoken in the morning, after he’d yelled at Asougi the first time. He did not ask for details of their conversation, and she did not reveal any. Only that they had spoken. Ryuunosuke presumed it had gone reasonably well, given her amiable mood when he revealed to her that they had had to yell at each other to reach the point of speaking truths. Probably pleased to hear Asougi had gotten some yelling in as well this round. Tit for tat.

More somberly, both Ryuunosuke and Susato were well aware that it was all on a time limit. Their ship back home to Japan was to depart in 3 days, now.

So again, Ryuunosuke stands outside the door to Asougi Kazuma’s flat. The snowfall had left a heavy hood on the roof and had frosted the edges of the brick facing, making it look— starched, Ryuunosuke thinks, and it reminds him of daifuku. Of home. Funny, how you can both miss something and dread it with equal fierceness.

When he knocks and Asougi opens the door, they gaze at each other for a long moment. The city is so quiet, snow muffling the usual morning clamour of London. The calm silence around them immediately makes Ryuunosuke feel heavy; the weight of the moment, of Asougi’s solemn gaze on him, pulls all of his loose thread thoughts inwards. The stark knowledge that this may be their last conversation is his own heavy hood of snow.

They sit on Asougi’s tiny grey sofa. It’s hard, like it hasn’t been used for its intended purpose very often. Dreary light comes in from the window, white skies reflecting cautiously off the snow in the city. Asougi is looking at his hands. Ryuunosuke thinks, I’m right here, look at me.

“Asougi.” Asougi exhales through his nose. He doesn’t look up.

Ryuunosuke draws his eyes down the length of Asougi’s nose; traces the profile of his face. Tiredness makes the pits of his eyes look a little hollow, like he slept badly. Ryuunosuke misses him.

“...Kazuma,” he ventures, quiet like he’s waking someone sleeping. Asougi looks up at him, roused from whatever reverie he was in.

“Sorry.” He looks back down again. “...Should we start with that, actually?”

Ryuunosuke’s throat tightens. “With apologies?”

“Yeah. Uh. For the first time—when I..” He’s out of place, like this. Being remorseful. Ryuunosuke can’t even admit to himself that it looks good on him. His cocky, always sure Kazuma. He misses him, he misses him.

Asougi looks up to the ceiling. He blinks hard. They both are breathing quietly, lightly. Trying not to agitate the muted occasion they’ve found themselves. For a long moment, neither speak. Ryuunosuke watches Asougi’s eyes fall closed; his mouth open softly. Watches him exhale. Asougi’s eyebrows pull together slightly and his mouth twists so subtly, but Ryuunosuke can read the expression on his face clearly even in profile. Heartache.

“I died.”

It feels like a burn. It sears him, to hear Asougi say it outloud like that—like it’s a confession. An admittance of some secret truth that Ryuunosuke had torn out of him.

“Yeah. You did.” Ryuunosuke’s heart is a cinder in his throat. “You told me it didn’t matter.”

Asougi clenches his hands together between his knees. Still, he hasn’t looked Ryuunosuke in the eyes since they sat. The silence between them is thick with—something. Mourning, maybe. Ryuunosuke can barely hear Asougi breathe before he speaks next.

“What was it like?” he asks softly, the grief in his voice palpable.

Ryuunosuke swallows. He does not look away from Asougi’s face, burning the sight of him into his head, his heart. His insides are alight.

“It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

At this, Asougi exhales a shaky breath. He lowers his head, eyes still closed, and his shoulders bow with it. Affirmation of the truth heavy; a yoke around his neck.

Finally, he looks over at Ryuunosuke, and when their eyes meet, Ryuunosuke sees in him one thousand apologies; a man making his last plea before the final judgement. Not to plea his innocence, but to plea his truth, his heart. Honesty being the last thing he has left.

“I’m sorry.”

Ryuunosuke is dizzy with the weight of it. Like someone tugged on his fingertips and the whole of him started to unravel in twirling little spirals. “I yelled at you.” His mind is a flood of episodes, a torrent of wrongs and cruelties, of mistakes, and of ferocious loss.

Asougi searches his face. “Your best friend died and then told you it didn’t matter.” There’s something in his eyes—in his expression, but Ryuunosuke’s heart is churning too much to look for anything in it. He tastes salt in his mouth.

“Yeah. You did.” His heart is breaking right there in his chest all over again. “You did.”

“I—” Asougi falters. “Ryuunosuke.”

Asougi reaches over and puts his hand on one of Ryuunosuke's wrists, careful and deliberate when he wraps his fingers around it. Ryuunosuke makes a small, pathetic sound. He’s coming unwound, tiny mechanisms coming loose, making the gears of him spin backwards. He’s in the ship cabin. His hand is being drawn up from his lap. It’s steady, the pull of it, until it reaches Kazuma’s chest. There’s hesitation—and then there’s not. He’s pressing Ryuunosuke’s palm against the fabric of his white shirt. It’s warm. The hand Kazuma has splayed over the back of Ryuunosuke’s hand, holding it to him—it’s warm. Ryuunosuke looks at it. Kazuma’s hand. Kazuma’s white shirt, snagged up against Ryuunosuke’s fingers. He’s going to crease it like this. It’s warm. Heat bleeds through Kazuma, a furnace against Ryuunosuke’s palm. The ship rocks.

Ryuunosuke is sitting on the edge of the bed. Kazuma’s bed. The one he slept in. His hand is searing hot. Something inside him burns. The sea lurches, making his insides slosh all up against the hollow of his body.

He’s looking at the floor, the white shirt, the body encased in it, his best friend. Kazuma. Kazuma.

Ryuunosuke’s lungs heave, “Kazuma.” He presses forward, hands grasping for something—anything, an anchor. Fingers clutch fabric, and he pulls Asougi towards him, the weight of him dragging Ryuunosuke’s head above the torrents.

“You died. You died on the floor in front of me while I was sleeping and then they dragged your body away and made me live in that tiny room. The same room where your body lay dead, as if you’d never been there at all, Kazuma.” He inhales a shaky, wet breath, fists bunched in Asougi’s soft white shirt, surely wrinkling it now. His head feels heavy, so he lets it fall forward. It thumps against Asougi’s shoulder and Ryuunosuke hears him make a quiet sound when it does. A squeak, almost, as he inhaled. Ryuunosuke wasn’t thinking about how Kazuma was right in front of him, really, until he heard that, and then he was. “But you’re not dead.”

The hand on Ryuunosuke’s back is so, so hesitant. A man meeting a deer in the wild for the first time; moving with such deliberate stillness as not to frighten it off. When Asougi whispers, it’s a breath, an exhalation. Delicate relief that they were agreeing on something. “I’m not dead.”

Ryuunosuke exhales hard, pressing his face into the space below Asougi’s shoulder. “God.” He inhales what feels like a sob. He thinks maybe he deserves this, to do this. “You’re not.” He heaves another breath and lets himself cry, just a little, into Asougi, who isn’t dead. Lets the truth of it overwhelm him finally, now that it doesn’t make his insides churn. The grief he’d nurtured into a hot coal can start to dissolve. He feels it begin, the lightness he’d shunned, asking permission to be let back in. He lets it.

His Asougi. His Kazuma. His best friend whom he would drink foolishly with after finishing asinine school assignments; lamenting together the woes of their separate degrees. Whose shoulder he would fall asleep against while pretending to pay attention to whatever topic had impassioned him into monologue at that moment. Whose face would flush pink when teased—overwhelmed whenever he found his tongue in knots—a surprise to all who’d known Asougi before Ryuunosuke had him and drew it out of him more than enough times for it to become a common occurance. Whose hand Ryuunosuke had gripped too tight before he’d closed the lid of his outrageous suitcase. Whose laugh echoed loud in a tiny cabin made for one, filling the space with something sweet and familiar, arm wrapped around Ryuunosuke’s shoulders as they sat on the bed and conspired whatever escapades they would get up to in the city of London when their ship reached port.

His best friend, who had died on that ship to the British Empire—except, he didn’t. He never died. He was here, with his arms wrapped around Ryuunosuke, letting him weep his grief into his shirt.

He hears Asougi make a quiet sound, almost like a laugh. It’s self-pitying, he thinks. He draws a hand across Ryuunosuke’s back, soothing him. “You went through all this because of me,” he says quietly. Ryuunosuke shakes his head slightly, forehead pressing into Asougi’s shoulder. He swallows wetly, and makes a sound of acknowledgment. When he opens his mouth to speak, it’s muffled against the fabric of Asougi’s now damp shirt.

“Really made you feel like for it shit, huh.”

He hears him make the same almost-laugh again. There’s a pause, not an uneasy one, and when Asougi exhales, it’s long and it sounds shaky. Now I’ve brought him to tears again. Ryuunosuke wants to keep him here like this, with his arms wrapped around Ryuunosuke’s back. Asougi’s voice is quiet when he speaks, but it’s steady. “I deserved it, a little.”

Now Ryuunosuke huffs a laugh against him. “A moderate amount, at least.” Asougi hums, maybe in agreement.

It feels strange somehow. This moment they’re letting themselves have. It’s strange, Ryuunosuke thinks, but it feels fair. Honest. This was what they had deserved, he understands now. At some point during his cry, Ryuunosuke had loosened the fists he’d bunched in Asougi’s innocent and now quite wrinkled shirt. He takes a moment to breathe, content, and then bring his hands out from between them without moving the angle of his head on Asougi’s shoulder, and wraps his arms around Asougi's back. He is the deer now, with Ryuunosuke placing his hands quietly so as to not spook him. But Ryuunosuke finds that he hadn’t needed to be so thoughtful, because once his hands touch Asougi’s back he feels Asougi surge against him, sure and solid, enfolding his own arms tighter around Ryuunosuke. Given permission to drink after a drought, Ryuunosuke supposes. How he’d missed this.

Ryuunosuke feels Asougi bury his face in his hair, pressing his lips to Ryuunosuke’s head in a chaste kiss. He smiles indulgently against Asougi’s shoulder, feeling as if he’d won something back. Hard fought, really.

“You’ve really missed me, huh?” He doesn’t wash the smug tone from his voice, relishing in his right to it.

Asougi grumbles, but there’s fond exasperation in it. “Shut up. You were so mean to me that first day. You said—” He pulls back a little so he can look Ryuunosuke in the eyes. Making a stern, intense face, “‘Figure it out.’ as your last word.” He mock shivers, and then pulls Ryuunosuke back against him, hand on the back of his head as if to protect him. “You were so scary. Ryuunosuke, you truly are unparalleled with words. Never before had I longed to instead hear one of your wicked tongue twisters than at that moment.”

“Oh yeah?”

“No! No, no, don’t. At that moment. Not at this one. Please, I’m already vulnerable as is,” he whines.

Aren’t I the one who just cried? Ah, well.

“You want me to hold you until you feel all better, then?”

“Ugh, fuck off.”

A pause. Ryuunosuke is content to wait until he hears Asougi groan quietly.

“Yeah whatever. Please hold me, I’m pathetic and I need to be consoled, even though I got what I deserved, moderately.”

“At least.”

“Moderately, at least.”

-

“We should go for a walk.”

Asougi snorts. “Haven’t we had enough of those? Isn’t this nice?” Their arms are still wound around each other, having leaned further into each other in their newfound—re-found, deservedly—ease. Asougi’s back is pressed into the back of the sofa now, Ryuunosuke nestled against him like a purring cat.

“Yeah, but I’m getting stiff, I wanna move around!” Was like a purring cat.

“Alright, but I don’t know if you’ll want to do it outside. The sun’s out—you’ll get blinded by the snow.”

“The—” Ryuunosuke’s head shoots up from Asougi’s shoulder, bonking him in the jaw. He makes an oof sound upon impact. “Oh no,” Ryuunosuke touches Asougi’s jaw with the tips of his fingers for a moment, before whipping his head around to get a look out the window across the room from them. He looks back at Asougi, “sorry, Kazuma—” Looks to the window again. His fingers fall back to Asougi’s jawline, resting on it while he’s looking away. He looks back at Asougi. “Oh my god. I need to—are you okay?” Asougi laughs. “I’m fine. Go on.” He releases his arms from around Ryuunosuke and gestures to the window with a soft jerk of his head.

Ryuunosuke bursts up from the sofa and goes straight to the window. The sun really is out. He feels his eyes well up, and not from the blinding flare of the snow, incandescent. A little bit from that, actually. The window isn’t enough. Ryuunosuke moves to the front door and throws it open. Asougi makes a noise of protest from the sofa, “Ryuunosuke, the cold air!” Ryuunosuke can feel it! It whisks past his cheeks and makes his nose tingle when he breathes in. Smells good. Crisp and new. “Kazuma, the sun!” He hears Asougi sigh from behind him and push himself up from the creaking, hard sofa. He comes to stand behind Ryuunosuke, who looks back at him for a moment, face sunny, before turning his gaze back out to the brilliance of the snowy streets.

“It’s been overcast for the whole damn week, Kazuma. Is this a metaphor, do you think?”

Asougi huffs a laugh through his nose. “I’m no estranged-english major. You tell me.”

And Ryuunosuke turns around again to look at Asougi, and sees the sunlight thawing the room a velvet glow behind him, sees his cheeks flushed pink from the cold, sees warm brown, fond in his eyes, and he thinks, huh.

THE END