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“Not that I don’t respect the artistry, Raidou, but isn’t the hanamaru supposed to come after a job well done?”
With a flourish, Raidou scratched one last big chalk flower onto the wall, making an even dozen eye-level targets. The whole dusty training hall had an oppressive air of gloom about it that made the drawings look all the more out of place—whether that meant demons afoot or was just the place’s natural state, Narumi couldn’t tell, but he hoped that whatever was lurking here didn’t mind the decoration.
“Consider it encouragement, then,” Raidou said, and returned to Narumi’s side, giving him a clear shot at his handiwork. “Are you ready?”
Narumi shifted his grip on his pistol, the weight of it awkward in his left hand. In his right hand, the Luger used to feel like nothing—like it was a part of him, like it had always been meant to be there, like he could trust it every bit as much as he could trust his own body—
—but that was the rub, wasn’t it? He couldn’t trust his own body, not the way he used to. Now, no one could tell at a glance anymore—his handwriting had never been pretty anyway, he could find his way around a fork or a cigarette just fine, he could even carry the occasional sack of groceries with his right arm if he didn’t mind barely being able to lift the darned thing the next morning—but his grip wasn’t anywhere near what it used to be and his shoulder certainly wouldn’t thank him for the recoil.
He’d had a grim sort of understanding since Raidou had first managed to stitch him back together that night that, no matter how much he recovered now, he was going to get worse in a few years when his age really started to catch up with him—and putting his bum arm through the wringer now would only speed up the clock.
He hadn’t had to fight again since that demon had done him in, but if he did—and if there were civilians around, or Tae, or Raidou—a mis-aimed shot had a good chance of being a sight worse than not shooting at all. It was plenty bad enough to be helpless—he wasn’t about to let himself be an active liability.
And he’d learned to use chopsticks with his left hand plenty fast, he told himself. How much worse could it be, really? All he had to do was do the same thing backward.
“Ready,” Narumi said, and, hooking his right thumb into the pocket of his trousers, set his sights on the first hanamaru on the left. Just the same as he always did, but backward. All he had to do was aim, breathe in—
“Narumi-san,” Raidou cut in, just as he’d set his finger on the trigger.
Narumi let out his breath in a sigh instead of a shot, pointing the gun at the ground. Raidou was frowning when he turned to look at him, brows all furrowed under the brim of his hat. His eyes were a queer shade of gray out in the sun, but in the dim lamplight, they looked black; the look in his eyes gave Narumi the feeling that he really wouldn’t like to be a demon right about now.
But he wasn’t a demon, and he wasn’t keen on being interrupted at the last second, either.
“What?”
Raidou’s scowl softened a little, like he’d realized it was sterner than he meant it to be.
Just a little, though. Apparently, Narumi had signed himself on for the full Raidou Kuzunoha the Fourteenth experience here, not what little deference he got around the Agency.
“Your grip is too low,” Raidou said, crossing his arms.
Narumi frowned right back. “I’ve been shooting like this since before you knew which end of the gun was the business end.”
Raidou’s frown got a little deeper, but he didn’t say anything else. Narumi turned his eyes back to the target, raising the gun to line up the flower in his sights again. Aim, breathe in—
Bang.
Narumi could tell he was way off before he even surveyed the carnage; his once ever-so-trusty Luger kicked like an unruly horse, slamming into the joint of his thumb hard enough he felt it all the way up his arm, and when he squinted at the opposite wall, he spotted the chip in the paneling a good two hands’ breadths left of the the hanamaru.
“I just need to get a feel for it,” he snapped, and ignored Raidou’s slightly more insistent “Narumi-san” as he lined up another shot, adjusting his grip a little more. A little higher, though Raidou withheld any I-told-you-sos.
Bang. Bang.
Still wide, and his wrist was already starting to ache in protest. Narumi gritted his teeth and tried to shift his grip until it felt right; there were five shots left in the magazine, and there was no way he couldn’t hit one target with one of them. Six months ago, he could have nailed every last one of them with his eyes closed and his off hand tied behind his back. Now he just had to hit the damn flower once—
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Narumi-san.”
Raidou didn’t shout, barely even raised his voice, but it still snapped Narumi back to reality like he’d slapped him. Narumi let his finger slip off the trigger and looked at the far wall; not a single shot had even grazed the chalk markings.
“Look,” he started, but then Raidou decided to unceremoniously grab both his arms from behind, and whatever he’d been about to say to defend himself disappeared from his mind like a candle going out. Something about just having to hit center mass, maybe, but thinking about center mass made him all the more conscious of the fact that Raidou was all but pressed up against his back, grip on his arms firm and unyielding.
Narumi would never say he underestimated Raidou, but he couldn’t pretend he didn’t forget, sometimes, that for all Raidou looked delicate, he didn’t need his demons or his weapons—or hell, even his clothes, from the stories Narumi had heard on the grapevine from the Kantou Haguro-gumi’s goons—to put down men a lot bigger and tougher than he was.
That certainly didn’t slip his mind now.
“Raidou—”
“If you’d allow me,” Raidou murmured as he nudged Narumi’s ankle with his foot, guiding him—maybe a little more easily than Narumi’s pride should have allowed, or would have allowed from anyone else—into a stance that wasn’t at all suited to shooting one-handed. And, sure enough— “Bend your right arm—brace your wrist like that. Using both hands is better for accuracy.”
That was rich, coming from a guy Narumi had seen capping a zombie with one hand while he ran another through with his sword with the other. Maybe doing a back flip for good measure, the show-off.
Narumi swallowed, and did what he did best when he was nervous—he tried to be funny. “Of course, Raidou-senpai.”
Raidou didn’t laugh—he’d never actually heard Raidou laugh, now that he thought about it—but he let out an amused little exhale that was closer to a laugh than a half-baked impression of Nagi really deserved.
Narumi could still feel his breath on the back of his neck long after he’d already stepped away to let him take his last shot.
Both hands. He was really getting back to basics here. It made him feel like he was nineteen again—and not in the fun way, either. He still remembered the first time he shot a Type 38 from five hundred meters like it was yesterday—fumbling with frostbitten fingers while his commanding officer towered over his shoulder, an ox of a man who’d probably still dwarf Narumi now, let alone when he was a greenie still growing into lanky limbs.
Every shot you miss, the CO liked to tell the would-be snipers in Vladivostok, is someone dead before you get to take another.
Narumi sucked in a breath through his teeth and pulled the trigger.
Bang.
“Oh, for crying out loud—!”
Narumi released the magazine and let it clatter to the floor, at least keeping the decorum not to throw the whole damned gun along with it. He was shooting like he was nineteen again, too, and he knew better—he knew it was balls-up before the bullet even left the chamber. All amateur mistakes. Holding his breath instead of pulling on the exhale. Eyes on the wrong sight. Of course he didn’t hit the mark; if anything, he’d actually managed to get worse.
Raidou drifted back into his peripheral vision, his cloak making him little more than an amorphous black shape in the lamplight. Narumi didn’t bother to look; he didn’t need to see the disappointment on Raidou’s face to know it must be there, making those eyes of his look even darker.
“Just give it to me straight,” he said, but Raidou was silent. He knelt down, picked up the magazine, and—slowly, carefully—pried the pistol out of Narumi’s clenched hand. He pulled out an ammo box from some inside pocket hidden in his cloak, and Narumi found his eyes glued to Raidou’s fingers as he elegantly loaded a single bullet into the magazine.
“Try again,” Raidou said, and held both the gun and magazine out for Narumi to take. Narumi sighed, finally chancing a look at his face, but it was blank. Whatever Raidou was thinking, he was keeping it close to his chest.
“I’m wasting your time.” Narumi waved a hand. “We may as well pack the game in here.”
Raidou shook his head, gesturing more insistently with the unloaded Luger in his hand. No, his face wasn’t quite blank after all—there was something in those eyes, there, something that wasn’t disappointment, but Narumi couldn’t for the life of him tell what it was.
“Just one more time, please,” Raidou said, and it wasn’t as if Narumi could argue when he said it like that. Heaving another sigh, he took the gun, slotting the magazine back in and clicking the safety back on—
—and when he looked up again, Raidou, quick and silent as a cat, had parked himself right between two of his chalk targets, where a couple of stray bullets had already hit the wall.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Helping you focus,” Raidou said, as if this was a perfectly sane, sensible, not at all suicidal thing to do. “Clearly you need some external motivation.”
“Come on, Raidou.” Narumi laughed, a little frantically, not sure how else he could possibly respond to this other than to assume Raidou was pulling his leg and hope for the best. “I’m used to you being a pretty neck-or-nothing kind of guy, but even for you—”
“Do you trust me?”
“What?”
“Narumi-san.” Even meters away, Raidou’s stare was electric, and stone cold serious. Narumi felt a bead of sweat drip down the back of his neck. “Answer the question, please.”
“Of course I trust you,” he said, trying to fight the sudden urge to avert his eyes. “With my life—for whatever that’s worth. You know that.”
“And I trust you with mine.” For an instant—just a single, fleeting instant—Raidou’s mouth curved up in a smirk, like he knew what he’d just said hit Narumi like a swift kick to the gut and he was proud of it. “You aren’t going to hurt me.”
There were probably about a hundred things that Narumi ought to say to that—that a better man, a more reliable man would say to that. There were about a hundred things he should do, too, and all of them involved dragging Raidou’s skinny keister away from that darn wall and out of this whole dusty building, and giving him a stern talking to about the value of his own life.
Exactly none of them involved swallowing past the lump in his throat and saying, a little hoarsely—
“The Herald will kill me if she ever hears a word about this, you know that, right?”
—but Narumi wasn’t a better man, and if Yatagarasu wanted a better man, they should have thought of that sooner. It would’ve saved him and Raidou both a heck of a lot of trouble, too—but where would Narumi be now if they had?
“Trust me,” Raidou said, and closed his eyes, still as a statue against the wall, a bit of the chalk from the two hanamaru at his shoulders smudged on his cape.
“You’re off your block,” Narumi muttered, far more to himself than to Raidou, and gripped the pistol exactly as Raidou had demonstrated. “Completely out of your mind. Forget the Herald, don’t get me started on what Tae would do to me if she caught a whiff of this…”
He’d done this hundreds of times. This had been exactly where he’d started, in basic training a lifetime ago, and he’d been good. Until the very second that sword had pierced his shoulder, he’d have taken a shot like this—twenty, thirty centimeters clearance, easy—without any real concern for Raidou’s safety. He had. They’d both pulled some pretty risky business back in the army base, once Raidou had turned up and getting out alive was on the table again; Narumi could still remember the thrill of it all, picking off the Red Guards while Raidou slashed at demons he couldn’t see, fighting in tandem, firing right past each other’s ears without a single close call like they’d been watching each other’s backs for years, effortless despite his injuries because none of them were anything he couldn’t walk off.
If he couldn’t hit this mark, now, with Raidou perfectly still and in no danger from anything other than Narumi’s own nerves and traitorous muscle memory, that would mean accepting, dead to rights, that Raidou could never put his life in his hands again, not really. And it may as well be him with his back to the wall, then, hanamaru like a halo—every good soldier knew what the punishment was for dereliction of duty, as much as Raidou would lay him out in lavender for thinking of it like an obligation. Sure, Narumi was no Kuzunoha, but that didn’t mean there weren’t expectations from on high about exactly whose life was more important if it came down to the wire—and it wasn’t that he wasn’t willing to throw himself in front of bullets as much as he was willing to fire them, but that usually wasn’t a trick you could use to save someone’s skin more than once.
Even if Yatagarasu could forgive him for letting one of theirs get killed, he’d sure as hell never forgive himself.
“If you’re having any second thoughts, Raidou, now’s the time,” Narumi said, but Raidou didn’t budge, or even open his eyes.
“Do it,” he said, quiet enough that it wouldn’t have carried in any building but this creepy old hall, completely authoritative until he amended—as if he suddenly remembered he was technically still talking to his superior— “please.”
Neither an order or a plea left any room for argument, not when it came from Raidou. Narumi took the magazine out to line up his shot, again and again, maybe a dozen times, and a dozen more before he even thought about touching the safety.
Aim. Inhale.
He thought of everything he could imagine on the other end of the barrel that might motivate him. He thought of Seimei Abe’s striped beast of a demon, of the smug smirk on Abe’s pretty face as he’d lied about Raidou through his teeth. He thought of the undead soldiers throwing little Kaya around like nothing, he thought of he hideous creature writhing in Munakata’s mouth, of giant machines and massive, screeching insects—and despite himself, he thought of writing a letter he thought Raidou would never read, of Akane looking ghostly white in her wedding attire, of Tae’s rattling breathing and the little princess’s horrifying dignity as Abe took her away and Narumi clawed after her in a pool of his own blood, useless, useless—
—and Raidou standing in front of him now, still having so much damn faith in him despite all of that that he was willing to put it to the ultimate test, every last chip he had on the table, counting on Narumi not to do exactly what he was doing right now.
Please, Raidou said, like Narumi was doing this for him. Like—he needed to know that his faith wasn’t for nothing.
And Narumi was going to prove bugger-all to him if he stood around feeling sorry for himself for a past neither of them could change.
“You really know how to get under a guy’s skin, you know that?” Narumi muttered. Raidou’s face was right in his blind spot, but he had the sneaking feeling that he was smirking again.
Aim. Inhale. He held that breath and thumbed down the safety, and pushed everything out of his mind but the sight picture right in front of him.
Bang.
He pulled on the exhale, and he still felt the kick of recoil, but he held steady. It wasn’t the kind of shot that would make the Kempei trust a nineteen year old drunk with state secrets, but he knew in the split second before it hit the wall that—even with his heart rattling like a drum in his throat—he’d shot true enough to feel half-decent about.
He still couldn’t bring himself to actually look at where the bullet had struck until—
“Narumi-san?”
—Raidou broke the silence, and when Narumi looked up he was staring at the marked up wall like fine art.
He hadn’t hit a bullseye, not even close, but he’d hit the target respectably enough—well away from where Raidou’s head had been, and close enough to the center of the target that anything he’d really have to aim at would have felt it. Right, center mass—he remembered what he’d meant to say about that, now that he’d actually done well enough that it was a legitimate observation, but Raidou already looked plenty proud enough without him fussing the details.
Narumi tried to puff himself up a little in return, and when Raidou swooped back over to him, about as close to beaming as he ever got—or, in Raidou Kuzunoha terms, smiling just enough that it actually got to his eyes—that made it a lot easier. “Looks like I’m not all out after all.”
“It will only get easier with more practice,” Raidou said, like he was the one with all the years of experience—but then again, considering how young the Kuzunohas seemed to start their own, maybe they were more equal on that front than they ought to be. Narumi shrugged, emptying out the Luger’s magazine and chamber and willing his fingers to stop trembling. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this spent—not from anything that didn’t involve running for his life from demons, at least—but it was a satisfied kind of tired he hadn’t felt in even longer. Like he’d finally managed to wrestle his way out from under a weight on his shoulders he hadn’t realized he was carrying.
“Sure it will,” he said. “But I’m tapping out for today. I’m dying for a smoke, and I think if I lit up in this tinderbox I might burn the whole place down.”
He tucked the empty pistol into the back of his trousers. Raidou nodded, and touched the brim of his hat—the way he always did it, that made Narumi think of how a bird might fiddle with her hair if she was feeling shy. It always made him want to get in there and ruffle Raidou’s hair himself, but he could count the times he’d seen him take his cap off on one hand—even if he included the times when he’d only had the privilege because he had to treat a head injury, and he tried to think about those times as little as humanly possible. He settled for slinging an arm around Raidou’s shoulders instead; Raidou tensed for an instant, a little color on his cheeks, but he allowed it with a kind of reluctant dignity that reminded Narumi, to an uncanny degree, of Gouto deigning to accept a scratch under the chin.
“Gouto must be getting concerned by now, as well.” Speak of the devil. Raidou’s eyes trailed back to the wall as he spoke, and Narumi couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to be up the creek for the property damage, or if he’d even thought about that before now. Raidou didn’t seem keen to dwell on it, though, and Narumi could make sure everything was square with him later. It was hardly the most pressing question now.
“Maybe he should be,” Narumi said. “I’ve gotta ask you straight before we go, Raidou—what were you thinking with that stunt?”
Raidou fiddled with his hat again. “It worked.”
“Don’t play dumb. I’m not saying it didn’t pan out, but really—what would you have done if I’d hit you? You could have gotten seriously hurt, or worse.”
“Narumi-san.” Raidou ducked out from under Narumi’s arm to face him properly, eyes fixed on him in one of those piercing stares. “If you hadn’t known, deep down, that you were capable of hitting the target—and not hitting me—would you have pulled the trigger at all?”
“That’s—” Not the point, Narumi started, but of course Raidou was right on the money. He could be reckless, but he wasn’t an idiot; if he hadn’t seen something in all those missed shots that convinced him the block was mental rather than physical, he never would have taken that kind of risk. On some level, Narumi had known that from the jump. Trusted that.
And trusting that, trusting Raidou, let him trust himself—which had been the problem all along.
Damn it, Raidou.
“—What can I say? You’ve got me pegged.”
Raidou practically preened; Narumi never thought he’d see the day. “What sort of detective would I be otherwise?”
Normally Narumi would contradict him, if only just to rib him a little—apprentice detective, he’d say, don’t forget who’s the boss here—but given the circumstances, he didn’t think he had much of a leg to stand on there.
“Still a damn fine one,” he settled on, chucking Raidou under the chin and enjoying the quiet war between gratitude and embarrassed indignation that broke out in his subdued expressions.
He could give Raidou this one; getting another glimpse at one of those rare, proper smiles once gratitude came out the victor was more than worth letting the praise go to his head a little.
“Come on, Raidou.” He gave Raidou’s shoulder a squeeze, jerking his chin toward the door. “Let’s get out of here, huh?”
Raidou nodded, and—after a surprisingly long moment of hesitation that had Narumi halfway to wondering if something was wrong—reached over to squeeze his shoulder, the good one, in return.
“Let’s go home.”