Chapter Text
Now
“Rin-chan’s not going to say it outright, but he needs a place to crash for one night before he takes the train to the next city over, for his try-outs,” Bachira has both his elbows propped over the counter Isagi has just wiped down and Isagi would chew out anyone else, but he’s also brought him an assortment of leftover pastries from his barista gig, so Isagi holds his tongue. “Think you can let him borrow your couch for a night?”
Isagi tries to imagine Rin in all his tallness trying to fit himself into his tiny little barely two-seater couch and snorts. “He can have a futon, it should be fine.” His senpai-instinct kicks in. “Or the bed.”
Bachira’s eyes glitter as he bounces back on to the balls of his feet. “You’re such a softie for him. It’s almost like he doesn’t threaten to kill you every time he sees you.”
Isagi wipes down another glass and places it in its neat row with the rest on the tray he’ll take round back eventually. “It’s how he says I can tolerate you enough to hear you breathing near me . Or at least, I like to think it is, or else you’re inviting over a walking stabbing incident into my apartment.”
“As though you don’t enjoy the danger,” Bachira is already fixing him with that unamused look of his whenever they get to this topic - which they do, a lot, because Bachira can be surprisingly naggy when he cares about you enough to worry near-constantly about your well-being.
“You make it sound like I’m an out-of-control thrill-seeker,” Isagi complains, carefully hefting up the tray of glasses and retreating to the kitchen with them. Bachira just follows. Technically, this place is completely off-limits to non-staff - but Bachira has a way of wiggling into anyone’s good graces, including Isagi’s prickly manager’s. Isagi suspects it's because the first time Bachira had rocked up to his workplace, he’d brought an entire party-sized box of pastries and a cup carrier of those outrageously priced coffee drinks that are more whipped cream and caramel drizzle than coffee for the staff. He greets the servers and cooks working the kitchen today by their first names, asking about how the kids are doing, or how college is treating them, before picking their conversation back up.
“You’re worse, ” is Bachira’s eventual retort, now that he’s done being an incurable social butterfly. Social bumblebee? “No one in their right mind would decide to live in the most crime-prone neighbourhood in a stigmatized property, no less.”
“It’s cheap! I get the whole apartment to myself!” Isagi defends for possibly the hundredth time. “And you’re acting like the place is haunted or someone got murdered there or something. It was a natural death.”
“Doesn’t that weird you out?! To live somewhere someone died?!”
“Bachira, we live in the country’s most crime-ridden city. Someone is dying somewhere every single day, at least the grandpa who lived there before me had the chance to live a long life and pass away in his sleep.”
“It’s still a bad neighbourbood,” Bachira is pouting, and Isagi can hear it in his voice even as he takes inventory of the late night supply drop they received not too long ago, to crack into for the next day. “During the day, okay, fine, but you’re working late night shifts here and going back by yourself, it’s… just not safe.”
“You have so many issues with where I stay and you’re sending Rin to me anyway,” Isagi grumbles. He knows he’s side-stepping the issue, but what else can he do? His part-time job at the library pays a pittance, and while he makes more at the family diner, the compromise is the late hours. If the internship were a paid one, it would make life a whole lot easier, but until Isagi gets a leg into the full-time workforce, he doesn’t see how he’ll make ends meet without clenching his teeth and dealing with his lot.
Bachira is pouting even harder when Isagi finally turns to look at him. “You’re the only one with the space. My flatmates have that stupid rule about not having guests stay the night, and you know how Rin-chan is, he’s not that close with Reo or else I’d have just had him shack up at that guy’s stupid penthouse or something. The fact that he’s even entertaining the idea of sleeping over at yours for a night is something , for him.”
Isagi has to agree. If there’s anyone pricklier than Isagi’s manager, it’s Itoshi Rin. Bachira and Isagi like to joke among themselves that he’s simply forgotten to outgrow his angsty teen era with his hyper-focus on becoming an athlete. But over the years, he’s mellowed out some - to put it very, very generously. He’s still lone-wolfing ninety-percent of the time, even more so now that he’s moved one town over, but he does occasionally let Bachira and Isagi step into the older brother role his own older brother had left vacant for a couple of years during his time studying abroad in Spain. The adjustment had been harder on Rin than anyone’d expected - harder still when Sae came back with issues of his own and unable to just pick up that relationship where they’d left it off.
They’re sorting things out now, so that’s good. And Isagi’s genuinely so proud of all of Rin’s growth. In his heart of hearts, he’s even a little pleased to have Rin rely on him a bit. Even then, he asks, “Did he actually agree or are you prospecting for him?”
He gets his answer in the coy little look Bachira gives him before he twirls away. Of course. Rin would bite off his own tongue before he ever approached anyone asking for a favour. “I’m just gonna text him and tell him about the very generous offer you have made to let him stay over at yours for the night,” Bachira hums as he makes to exit the kitchen. “And that you’re insisting, you won’t hear no for an answer. ”
Isagi watches Bachira go with a shake of his head, doing his full round of goodbyes with the kitchen staff on his way out, and calls out, “Text me when you get home!”
“Aye, aye! ~”
“Isagi, if you’re done slacking off can you take the trash out, please?”
At this point, Isagi doesn’t even bristle - he’d gotten used to the manager’s selective oversight during Bachira’s visits, forget the fact that he’d been working the entire time he had been here chattering away at him. He - and his colleagues, if he’s being fair - are all used to Bachira gliding in and out of his workplaces without consequence. He’s just got that sort of aura, Isagi can’t fault him for that. And at the end of the day, he collects his paycheck in full, and the occasional bonuses for holidays and leftovers to carry home, so Isagi lets it slide and grabs the trash bags, heading to the back entrance.
The night air is cool, a welcome relief against his skin. He’s acclimated enough to the inherent warmth of the diner, with the muggy heat that comes as a consequence of continuously burning stoves and hosting crowds of people at a time, that whenever he steps outside, the temperature difference always surprises him a little. The steady background noise of pots and pains and chinks of chopsticks and spoons against cutlery layered over the buzz and drone of conversation fades almost as soon as the back entrance’s door clicks silently shut, and in the stillness outside, Isagi has a moment to breathe.
Or he thinks he does, because the second he flips open the lid of the giant dumpster hulking against the grey brick wall, he spots A Problem.
The Problem is a bag. Largish, a plain dull red with a brand name and the tag still attached to a zipper. It’s an innocuous thing, completely unsuspecting in every other scenario than it would be just sitting atop a heap of black plastic bags, gleaming slightly in the sparse lighting of the back alley.
There’s a lot of things Isagi can do about this. And one of them, probably the smartest one, is nothing at all. He can just heave the garbage bags he’s brought out back into the dumpster and go back to the kitchen, wash his hands, clean up some of the tables as the diner’s late night patrons filter out. And then he can go home, like his sore body and tired brain have been aching to since the last of his classes for the day, and pretend he didn’t see a perfectly good, high quality gym bag just sitting on top of a pile of trash. If it’s still here by morning, this becomes the garbage collectors’ problem.
Isagi doesn’t think it will still be there by morning.
Even an hour later, after his shift is through, Isagi thinks that he still has time to just. Leave. He can just go home and wash the problem away in the comforting warmth of the bath, a relief his entire body craves all the more as he huddles down on the rooftop of the diner’s building, situated just so to be able to have a clear view of the alleyway and that godforsaken dumpster.
And because of course, thinking things can’t get worse is an invitation in Isagi’s life for worse things, The Worst Thing of all arrives not long after he does.
Isagi doesn’t even turn around - he has had the grim displeasure of becoming quite well acquainted with that very specific combination of metal chinking and the muted tug of cable being pulled taut before zipping back into its holder. The tap of leather boot making contact against hard ground, the barely there swish of fabric in motion. “Not you again.”
“Sharp as always, darling,” comments the newcomer, “It’s like you’re some kind of dog or something.”
Isagi throws a glare over his shoulder at the newest arrival. He cuts an impressive silhouette against the muggy night sky, stars shrouded by the miasma of smoke and dust and lord knows what other unsavoury byproduct of human enterprise. Isagi can’t quite remember the last time he’s seen stars.
“Are you here for what I think you’re here for or did you just spot me while ziplining around, you fucking stalker?”
“Always so rude,” with an elegant swish, the figure swoops in until it’s blocking Isagi’s view, swallowing up the night sky to fill his vision with nothing but a depthless, impenetrable black. A black so deep it seems to eat the light, the newcomer is completely cloaked from sight - from his visored head down to the form-fitting suit that seems to cling to a… very well-proportioned body, that leaves little to the imagination. Isagi would appreciate it more, if it didn’t belong to the current bane of his existence, breaching into his air and hooking his chin in a leather-gloved hold. “It’s hardly my fault that you seem to be everywhere trouble is.”
His voice crackles out, fed through whatever voice modulator he has outfitted in his helmet and churned out in its robotic rasp.
“Tsk,” Isagi pushes the hand off, eyes scanning the alleyway again. “So this is trouble.”
“You clearly suspected as much, otherwise you wouldn’t be on a dank rooftop at 3 am staring at a dumpster. But then again, you seem to gravitate towards trash…”
“That’s probably why I keep running into you, then.”
“So drôle you are, sweetheart. You’d be so perfect for the role of the Fool for me.”
“Please keep your cringe tarot themed posturing to yourself.”
Isagi fully means this to be as insulting as possible, but the figure claps his hands together once in a gesture that seems entirely too cheerful for the aesthetic he otherwise gives off. “Oh!” he leans toward Isagi, and this close he can hear the thin filter of his breathing through the speakers too.” “You’ve been looking into me.”
It should be impossible, what with the fact that the only part of this man Isagi can see properly are his contact-lensed eyes, black and silver and as eerie as the mechanical grind of his voice, but he almost sounds pleased about this.
Isagi does not dignify that with an answer. He feels like he shouldn’t be humouring anyone running around with a cloak and a grapple gun all over town and calling themselves The Emperor with an answer at all.
It’s not long after Isagi’s first encounter with this absolute nuisance of a person that he’d started looking into him. Which, all things considered, is probably the reasonable thing to have done. This city has produced many oddities - necessity and desperation force people to get creative with their enterprising, and that can run the gamut of elaborate money-making schemes to stomach-churning crime. But even against the backdrop of the kinds of surprises that skitter and crawl out of the cracks of the North Wards’s back alleys, The Emperor stands out.
Then
Chigiri had been as fascinated as he’d been disturbed by it.
“So, I’ve been looking through the online forums, especially the true crime places and, would you fucking believe it, the creepypasta sites,” Chigiri has his iPad propped up on the library’s front desk, taking advantage of the relatively slow work day and the senior librarian on her rounds on a different floor to catch him up. “And it turns out, this guy has been getting kind of internet famous, lately.”
Isagi swipes through the tabs Chigiri has kept open for him to look through. It’s Twitter accounts and forum threads and obscure blog posts about a masked stranger who has been spotted flitting through the streets of the city - the information is vague and inconclusive at best, can hardly be called information in most cases. As with most things that dwell on internet forums and urban legend websites, every morsel of truth has pages and pages of embellishment and conjecture to dig through.
But there is truth in here, that much Isagi knows. He’s confirmed it with his own eyes.
“This,” Isagi points to a thread someone had started, in a forum that seems local to their city, ‘I swear I am not going insane, but I saw a man glide up the side of a building and leap on to the roof - does anyone know what’s going on in North Ward?’ “The guy has a grapple gun. This has to be about him.”
Chigiri has an impressive frown on his face - impressive, because Chigiri has a resting unimpressed face ninety per cent of the time that he’s a little insecure about. His frown right now would give even the older Wanima brother from their shared Global Business and Economics elective a run for his money.
“Isagi, I don’t feel good about this.”
“No, I know,” Isagi hastens to reassure. He’d hesitated to even bring it up to his friends, because he knows their first and strongest response would be extremely powerful disapproval, if not the insistence to escort him everywhere because none of them seem to trust him on his own. “It’s not like I’m going to go chasing after him. I really am not, I promise,” he doubles down as Chigiri raises the most sceptical eyebrow he’s ever seen. “It’s just - I mean won’t you be curious if you run into something like this?”
Chigiri plays with the end of one of the curls that’s worked its way loose from the bun his hair is in today. He’s thoughtful as he scrolls through the post Isagi had pointed out, the replies to which are either people colourfully dunking on the claim with the unrestrained unkindness internet anonymity seems to afford people and the conspiracy theorists adding on other sightings and incidents.
Opinions seem to be split between this cloaked, hooded, masked figure being some kind of vigilante, or an entirely new breed of criminal.
What they don’t know is that he is possibly neither of those things. Not entirely.
“You’re saying he just gave this to you?”
Chigiri taps at the piece of black card on the counter between them. It’s matte, a deep, dark inky black on a thick piece of card. Embossed on it in silver is a single symbol, a cross with a loop at the top. Chigiri is more tech-savvy than Isagi is, and he’d had the idea to take a picture and reverse image search it.
They’d learned what it was right away - an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life.
They’d also learned something they had not been banking on, not from a piece of card as simple as this.
A near identical picture of the card had cropped up in the search. And with it, a corresponding website link.
“I don’t want to open that,” Chigiri had said flatly. They’d been on campus then, staying back in an empty lecture hall after class. “I especially don’t want to open that on any of my devices or like, anywhere that makes obvious where the search is coming from.”
That’d been a very, very good point. Anyone who invests in grapple guns and cryptic embossed calling cards probably has the means to trace where clicks into their website are coming from, Isagi thinks, and there’s no reason for them to give that away. Even if they use one of the campus computers, or one at the library - it would just narrow down the physical radius of where to look for people who might be holding one of these stupid cards.
Isagi can only assume it was meant to bait an action like that, when the masked figure had curled a hand around his wrist, using the other to spread his palm open before placing the card in it. “In case you need my…services.” And then he’d twinkled down at him, and said in the mechanical approximation of a sneer, “Though I doubt you’d be able to afford it.”
“He did.” Isagi rubs at his temples. He should have just thrown it away, honestly. He wants to think that the odds of running into him again are slim and he can probably live the rest of his life without it happening again - but he also seems to be turning corners and walking right into him these days.
“Tell me what happened again.”
So Isagi does. He’d been on his way home from the izakaya after another late shift when he’d run into the masked man the first time - he omits the fact that this had only happened because he’d heard the sound of a scuffle and gone running towards it instead of away even with Bachira’s voice in his head screaming at him to stop being stupid.
He also omits that fact that when he’d skidded to a halt at the mouth of the alley the sounds were coming from, he’d stumbled upon quite the scene - cash, hundreds of thousands of yen, carpeting the damp alley floor, and what was unmistakably a gun lying by the foot of a person currently getting choke-slammed into the wall.
The person doing the choke-slamming had turned towards him - Isagi had known the second he’d seen the faint gleam of the smooth metallic cover hiding the guy’s face that he had seen something he absolutely should not have.
Isagi had legged it. He may be incorrigible when it came to interfering if he stumbled on a pickpocketing or a stabbing, to the point that Bachira has dragged the both of them to sign up for self-defence classes “for fear of your life, since you don’t want to fear for it yourself” , but even he did not want to be involved with someone who looked like he’d jumped out of the pages of a seinen manga and had enough strength to suspend a fully grown man with one hand pinning him a foot above the ground by the neck.
And he’d hoped, against hope, that that would be the end of it. It was dark, they would not have had a good look at his face, and he’d zigzagged all the way back to his apartment, darting in and out of the shortcuts he’d learned by heart in a frantic attempt to throw off pursuit, if there was pursuit. Unless that guy had an accomplice, he would probably not have been able to leave all that cash, which must have been the motive of the capture, nor the person in possession of it, to come chasing after him.
By the time he’d gotten home, a stitch sharp and stabbing at his side, lungs rattling as they tried to take in air and skin clammy and cold as the adrenaline trickled out of his system and left him shivering instead, he hoped, hoped , that he would not see either of them again.
His hopes had only half come true.
Chigiri doesn’t find out about any of this. Not the choke-slamming or the money or the gun. Not the fact that some two weeks later, Isagi had happened upon a mugging, a middle-aged man he recognised living a block away from him getting shoved around, bloodied up as a gaggle of delinquents pushed him about, their jeers and taunts bouncing grotesquely off the cramped walls of the side-street.
A number of things had run through Isagi’s head in the fraction of a second. Not enough time to call the police. Too late at night to ask passers-by for help. Too many of them. Too many of them.
That man had a little daughter at home and Isagi had seen him walking her to school before. Holding her little hand in his, carrying her cute bag in his other hand.
He’d pulled out his phone. Yanked his hoodie over his head for at least a little bit of cover to not be instantly recognisable. Started recording. Pushed air out of his lungs even though terror had wired itself into tension throughout his bones and shouted, “HEY!”
They’d turned, they’d seen him, they’d seen the phone, and Isagi had bolted.
Geography had been on his side - he knows the lay of the land better than anyone, can map it out in his mind as clearly as though he had a bird’s eye view of it. If he’s got anything going for him, it’s his fine-tuned sense of direction and the kind of heightened awareness that would creep his friends out a bit when they were younger, because he could tell they were approaching before they appeared at the door or in the room or behind him.
What worked against him, then, though, was speed.
He’d bought himself a little time, ducking into alleys and side streets as he put distance between them and inched agonisingly closer to the nearest police box. But he could hear their voices carrying in the distance as they called out to each other, could hear, with a sinking nauseating lurch in his stomach, the motorbikes revving, the sounds tearing through the night. There were at least six or seven of them, and one of him, and he should have been going to the gym with Chigiri on leg day, and before even that, should have been listening to Chigiri telling him to save his own hide first before taking on thugs that outnumber him. Fuck. Fuck.
It had been with all his senses stretched to their limits, heart pounding in his skull with the awareness that they were rapidly gaining on him, that Isagi had noticed someone entering his space a beat too late to react.
And then he was airborne.
He’d wanted to scream. His mouth had opened too, but the sound got swallowed back, as he blindly clutched at the figure that had snatched him up around the waist. Air whistled and sang past Isagi’s ears as he squeezed his eyes shut, as though his body had been fish-hooked up and left his sense of place back down on the ground.
And then there’d been ground again, back beneath his feet, although his knees had been shaking too much to keep him up. Eyes wide, heart clattering around in his ribcage, Isagi had gotten his first, proper look at the face of the person who had just plucked him off a backroad and onto… a rooftop?
His knees had buckled even more when he’d realised they were perched on the slant of some shingles.
The only thing that had been keeping him upright was the arm secured around his waist. Isagi had still been gawking as a thick cord of cable retracted over the angle of the roof and snapped back into the cylinder of what was, unmistakably, a grapple gun.
The air had still been leaving him in heaves and whistles when the guy spoke to him, in the crackly rasp of a voice changer. “So. We meet again.”
Isagi mentions none of this to Chigiri. He doesn’t think Chigiri fully buys that he’s telling him the full story as it were. There’s that downward slant of his mouth and the furrow of his brow and the critical look he’s levelling at him without even blinking and Isagi is internally sweating bullets but he avoids outright lying. He saw the guy once in an alleyway and thought he looked shady and ran away. Then he ran into him again while trying to avoid a mugging. And then ran into him again after.
Specifically, at the 7-eleven Isagi dragged his feet into after a shift at work to buy himself a bento box to reheat, only to find that he’d walked right into a robbery.
The cheerful electronic chime of the door and the recorded female voice chirping Welcome! had been almost comically morbid as Isagi made eye contact with the man in the balaclava covering his whole face, in the middle of waving a serrated knife in the face of the elderly lady behind the counter.
Isagi had an exact split second to think. In that split second, he could see the slow arc of the knife’s blade moving towards the elderly lady, shorter than him, her smile-wrinkled face twisted in the kind of horror that made Isagi taste bile in the back of his throat.
“If you move, she gets -”
“That’s your bike outside, right?”
The robber had blinked at him. “What?”
“I said,” Isagi repeated louder. His pulse hammered against his ears, thoughts racing but everything else moving slow, slow, even the confused blinks of the man in front of him.
“That’s your bike outside. You’ve left the key in, so you can get away faster.”
There’d been exactly one beat of silence before Isagi had thrown himself back out of the automatic doors, squeezing through sideways as soon as there’d been a wide enough opening and thanking how stupidly slow they moved because they ran interference for the robber, who very quickly realised what Isagi was trying to do.
Isagi’d been on the bike and kicking it into life before the thief could make it to the sidewalk, and it had taken off in a lurching jerk even as the guy screamed obscenities at him.
“You fucker, I’ll KILL you!”
Not unless Isagi got himself killed first, because he didn’t even know how to ride a motorbike and it was bucking like a wild animal under his grasp and he was absolutely going to -
CRASH
The machine had gone spinning out from under him, and Isagi had thought for a second the force of impact was what had sent him flying and, in the odd sort of calm that descends on a person when everything is spiralling out of control, had guessed that this should have bought the grandma enough time to call the cops, or someone in her family that she ran the convenience store with.
And then his feet were back on level ground, and he’d been leaning against something solid and firm and decidedly human.
“You fucking clown,” a hissing voice, broken and reconstructed and sieved out of a speaker reaches him and Isagi’s blood had been pumping so hard he’d felt in all his entirety like a thumping pulse. “Are you actually trying to get yourself killed ?”
The motorbike was lying in a heap in front of the building it had collided into. Isagi only had enough time to register the broken headlamp and think with morbid clarity that he doesn’t think he’d have broken any bones in that crash when he’d bitten down a yell and felt the world tilt dizzyingly, awareness catching up a second later as his vision refocused to the ground below him - this guy had thrown him over his shoulder.
Moments later, they were closeted away in another dark side street. Isagi had sunk to his knees as soon as he’d been put down, the vertigo making everything sway as he sucked in lungfuls of air.
In front of him, the masked figure stood with his arms crossed. Just from body language, Isagi could tell he was not very amused.
“The guy -”
“Ran away because of the commotion.”
“And the grandma -”
“Would have had plenty of time to call the police, or one of the neighbours that woke up thanks to that racket would have instead.” There’d been a tight silence before the masked man had asked, “What the fuck were you thinking ?”
Isagi had blinked up at him. Wobbled back to his feet, because he did not like how he felt even smaller in his near foetal position compared to this masked man’s intimidating height, made more intimidating from how solid and dark he appeared, almost at one with the night.
“The store was about to get robbed, he -”
“Do you enjoy playing the hero? Is that it?”
His tone - stripped as it was of anything that made it sound human - had pissed Isagi off.
“Am I supposed to just stand there and watch people get hurt then?!”
“Wow. You really are trying to play the hero.”
Rage had begun to cloud Isagi’s vision. He had not even really thought about it as he took one shaky step closer and stared right up into the masked man’s face - held the contact-lensed eyes, the only part of him that he would reveal to the world.
“And what about you? Running around fucking ziplining over the city but somehow, you’re just hiding in the shadows while there are crimes happening?”
The noise that’d crackled out of the mask was definitely a snort.
“Sorry, but these “crimes” are below my pay grade.
Isagi hadn’t even been able to process that right away. “Excuse me? Your paygrade ?”
The guy had just cocked his head at Isagi, tilting it closer - a hand had come up to hold his chin.
“Do you think I’m spending my nights in these godforsaken dumps for free? Out of the goodness of my heart?”
A sick feeling had pooled in Isagi’s gut. He’d shoved the man’s hand away, backed away from him until his shoulder blades hit the wall behind him.
“So what are you exactly?” Isagi’d spit out. “A paid… what. Hitman?”
“You’re funny. Do you think you’d be alive if I was in the business of killing?”
“Then if you’re not in the business of saving either, why did you help me just now?” Isagi had shot back.
On the rooftop of that house all those nights ago, when Isagi had been at the mercy of this guy’s hold keeping him from tumbling down the slope of the tiles and landing in a crumpled heap where the delinquents giving chase could easily find him, he’d simply told him - “There. Now we’re even.”
Even, because Isagi had not gotten in the way of the job. Even, because when Isagi had called the police, an anonymous call from a phone box the next day when he’d felt braver and safer under daylight, he’d only mentioned a fight in the general location of that alley, and no other details.
Even, because, suspended above the lip of the roof and the certainty of pain and worse waiting if this guy had let go of him, Isagi knew what this was. A bargaining chip. Isagi’s safety just then, in exchange for his silence.
And Isagi had bought that - in the give-and-take ruthless barter of life that happened every day in this part of the country, these sorts of deals were being signed in far worse ways. He’d taken it and gone home once he’d been silently set down on the street after a police patrol had sounded in the distance, the sirens chasing away those obnoxiously loud motorbikes.
The masked man moved towards Isagi - loomed over him, actually, arms coming up to cage him against the wall as he bent just enough to be eye level with him.
“Let’s say I’m in the business of debt collecting,” he had whispered to him, lightly, and Isagi had thought with how hard his heart was pounding he shouldn’t be able to hear anything at all, “And now, you owe me.”
The senior librarian making her way back downstairs saves Isagi from having to try to outmanoeuvre Chigiri and his obvious hunch that Isagi wasn’t telling him everything. But this didn’t stop his friend from pulling him aside after politely requesting a word with him, and tightly holding both his shoulders.
“Look,” he tells him seriously. “I don’t know what you might be getting yourself into, but you better be careful , Isagi. Whatever this guy is, he’s bad news, and you need to stay away from him, right?”
“Right,” Isagi agrees readily, because what else is he supposed to say?
Chigiri frowns deeply at him. “I know you said not to tell Bachira but -”
“Chigiri, I promise I’ll leave it alone,” Isagi hurries to say immediately. “Really, I will. I don’t take the roads I used to get home anymore, and I’m looking at daytime shifts at the diner. And if anything happens I’ll call. Don’t tell Bachira, he’s been freaking out since I moved anyway.”
Chigiri considers him for a while longer, and finally sighs. “You better mean that, you punk.” he mutters, and smacks Isagi on the forehead for good measure before he goes.
Neither of them find any more leads about the card for a couple of days, until it comes up purely by accident.
“The Emperor,” Isagi repeats, around a mouthful of onigiri . He ignores a “Chew your food properly!” barked from the neighbouring table from Barou, and tilts his head in question at Reo, “No, I don’t think I’ve heard about that…”
Reo is picking at his convenience store lunch, deftly removing a mushroom and then offering it to Nagi, who just eats it off his chopsticks without looking up from his game. Isagi does not understand how a person who can eat wagyu every day of his life if he so pleases could be so fascinated with convenience store bento boxes, but maybe when you get to eat Michelin five star meals around the clock the mundane turns fascinating. Whatever it is, Isagi likes how happy Reo looks whenever he’s eating one, so he’d picked one up earlier when he’d been grabbing his own lunch. “There’s been talk of this masked mystery man that’s been running around the city, recently.”
Isagi twitches. Across from him and to Reo’s other side, Chigiri makes eye contact with him.
“Masked mystery man?” Chigiri asks lightly.
“Supposedly,” Reo says. “No one’s got any pictures of this guy, but there are stories floating around on the internet of a man in a mask who climbs up the sides of buildings and goes flying from rooftop to rooftop.”
“Eh?” Nagi tunes into the conversation just long enough to blink around at the table - the brief one hour lunch break where they don’t have classes overlapping is usually the only time during the weekdays they’re able to hang out together. Or mostly together - Bachira’s off helping one of the dozen clubs he’s part of with something. “Like a superhero?”
Reo makes a “not exactly” motion with his chopsticks. “Won’t say that. I think he probably only goes after select types of crime. For specific clientele. Specifically, people pay him for certain jobs.”
“How do you know?” Isagi asks, at the same time as Chigiri blurts, “What kind of jobs?”
“Well…I think some friend of my dad’s on the non-exec board of directors must have hired him recently. I heard them talking during one of their dinners over at the house.” Reo explains. “Something about recovering extortion money, and a clean hassle-free way of doing it without involving the law.”
Chigiri has that frown on his face again. Seriously, Isagi has to tell him about the wrinkles, but he has a feeling Chigiri would whack him. Isagi focuses on sipping the green tea he’d grabbed at the convenience store just slowly enough to not be suspicious.
“Doesn’t sound legal.”
Reo grins. “You’d be surprised how little of what goes on among guys like that is.”
“So…what about this Emperor ?” Isagi asks.
“That’s the name the guy was calling him by.”
“Corny as fuck,” Nagi contributes, even while immersed in his game.
Isagi’s phone buzzes. Across the table, Chigiri is staring him down, his own phone in his hands.
He unlocks his screen to the message Chigiri has just sent him. It’s a screenshot of a page where the search term Chigiri had typed in catches his eye first.
“emperor ankh”
And the search results below -
About 652,000 results (0.29 seconds)
“The Emperor (Tarot Card)”
“Ankh Symbol Meaning in Tarot”
“The Emperor Tarot Card Meanings”
“So it doesn’t sound like he’s a bad guy,” Chigiri is saying thoughtfully, when it’s just the two of them heading back to class. Bachira complains constantly that they didn’t get any overlapping classes - it makes him extra clingy whenever they all hang out. “I mean… it just sounds like he’s a fancy loophole for people who don’t want to go through the legal system for whatever reason. Like, to avoid the bad press or bury scandals or whatever.” There’s a considering pause and then Chigiri adds, dryly, “Okay, fine, not not a bad guy.”
That’s…putting it mildly. As they wind their way to their habitual seats in the lecture hall and Isagi pulls out his laptop, his thoughts are a blurring timelapse, recontextualising his previous encounters with the masked man, all the things he’s read about him online, true or untrue, against what he knows now.
A hired hand for the rich. Someone who cleans up the messes the affluent get into in their brushes with the dirty underbelly of their empires. What was all that cash that he’d seen pooled out on the alley floor that day, that first day he’d stumbled upon the Emperor in action? Extortion money, probably. Ransom, maybe. Someone with dirt on a person with power and influence, leveraging it to…
To what? To label it as a crime is so simplistic. Isagi may live in the country’s most crime-riddled ward, but crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. When neighbourhoods bleed dry while skyscrapers loom in the horizon, twinkling like stars making a mockery out of the ones that don’t appear against the horizon anymore, and the rich continue to get richer while jobs disappear and so income disappears. And then doors start closing one by one, to schools, to healthcare, to basic human respect and the right to live with dignity, and the whirl of the vicious cycle is so strong that none of the straws you clutch at can hold as you try to pull yourself up and above the surface.
There are emperors and kings in this city, sitting on the lion’s share of its wealth with their thrones built on the desperate, clawing hands of those trampled down to build their towers so high. Isagi does not know what kind of man that was in that alleyway, what kind of life he lives, why he was in possession of a weapon he could not possibly have the legal permit to openly carry, let alone the wads and wads of cash spilling out like an open wound in a grimy, unlit back street. But who was the worse villain there - the guy trying to make money off a man who could afford to stuff a bag full of more cash than Isagi’s ever seen in one place before and hire a glorified vigilante to nip the problem in the bud…
Or said glorified vigilante? Who somehow had the ability to tap calls going into the police and verify that Isagi had never mentioned him when reporting the incident, who had the power, ability, and resources to do something - in ways Isagi felt so helpless, sometimes, to do?
“Oh, I really hate that look on your face right now,” Chigiri’s voice reels him back to the immediate - the lecture hall is mostly full now, the professor setting up at his podium and struggling as he does every week to hook up his laptop to the projector screen. “That’s your I’m thinking intensely about the unfairness that plagues modern society face.”
Isagi huffs, though he colours at being seen through so completely. “I was just thinking about…you know, the hired hand thing. It just seems…I mean the rich folks are the ones who can hire the best lawyers, they’re the ones with the connections and sway to have law enforcement and politicians move to their will. Isn’t it… I mean if you’re going to be someone who operates above the law and below the law at the same fucking time shouldn’t it be for the people that actually need the help?”
Chirigi just considers him for a second and then sighs. “Listen to me, Isagi,” he says, leaning closer to him and putting a hand on his knee, squeezing at it. “You’re right. Your ideal is right. But getting involved with that guy is not going to change anything. This -” he waves a hand at the class they’re in - Education and Social Justice, a combined module by the university’s social sciences faculty - “- can. It’ll take longer, sure. It’ll take a lot to get there, sure. But none of that is going to happen if you end up getting yourself involved with all these shady, dangerous people.”
Isagi doesn’t say anything. He wonders, sometimes, in between nights spent up cramming for exams and the discrepancies he sees between the theoretical ideals of his textbooks and lectures and the reality that plays out on the streets and in courtrooms all the time… doubts, whether this can be of consequence. Because if it could, why hasn’t it, yet?
After another second of scanning his face, Chigiri gives his knee an extra squeeze. “If you get yourself hurt, I’m going to kill you, you know that right?”
Isagi lets out a snort at that. “I love you too, man,” he mutters back, at the same time as the professor calls out, “Isagi-kun, could I trouble you to help me with the projector again, please?”
“Of course, Sir.”
(“There’s one thing I don’t get, though, and it’s bothering me,” Chigiri had said, begrudgingly, frowning. “Why did he give you that card?”
Why, indeed.)
Isagi does not know, as he walks home after his shift at the library, for once enjoying getting to see the twilight on his way back, if he would be able to just look the other way if something happened in front of him right now.
A mugging, a burglary. A pickpocketing, an attempted purse-snatching.
It’s not like he ever plans to intervene. It’s just that a lot of the time, he’s moving before he can think about it.
But even then, even with whatever incorrigible strand in his DNA makes it physically impossible for him to stay out of trouble, he genuinely does not think he’s going to run into The Emperor again, especially when he’s actually not running around like a homing device for it.
So, when a caped figure lands deftly in front of him as he turns into one of his dozen shortcuts in this area, Isagi takes one look at him and immediately goes, “Oh, hell no.”
He’s cursing even as he’s turning around and briskly speed-walking back out into the street, “Fuck that. No. Piss off.”
He hears the chink of metal on metal, a cable snapping tight behind him, and looks over just in time to see a dark silhouette swoop over the edge of a rooftop and disappear.
The day grows gradually darker, the last of the sun fading out as Isagi hurries into the pathways he knows will have the most people. Students coming back from cram school, office workers heading home. There are more motorbikes and bicycles in this part of town than cars - a reflection of its collective income as well as a precautionary measure because owning a car in these parts is sometimes an invitation for someone to pillage it for parts to resell or just vandalise.
Even as Isagi mingles with the foot traffic, though, he’s aware of the shadow gliding from rooftop to rooftop close behind him.
Seriously, he’s getting farther from home with the meandering at this point - because no way is he going to walk right to where he lives with this asshole clearly following him - and he takes one turn already expecting the masked man to be perched at the corner of a rooftop like a stupid unnaturally large bird and glares so hard he hopes it feels radioactive.
He swears he thinks he sees that guy’s shoulders shake. Like he’s laughing at him.
Oh fuck this. Maybe he’s come to collect whatever debt he said Isagi now owes him, right? Fine, then. He’s going to fucking give him a piece of his mind to pay him back.
Against all good sense, and even with Chigiri’s death threats hanging over his head and Bachira’s continuous warnings of stop doing stupid shit, for the love of god ringing in his ears , Isagi cuts across the street, down three blocks, and he’s left behind the slowly thinning throngs out and about shopping or going for dinner or on the way back home from a day of school and work.
Before long, he’s in an isolated side street, the kind he seems to be finding himself in a lot, especially with this guy - smoothly sliding down the height of an apartment building’s backhouse and clicking the grappling hook back into place as he touches down gracefully.
“What the fuck do you want?” Isagi is gritting out through his teeth even as he stomps furiously towards him.
“Oh? What’s got you so pissy today?”
“Listen, you stupid ass flying monkey man,” Isagi spits, and for all the camouflaging and cloaking he takes a grim delight in the way he can see this asshole’s eyes widen behind his mask, “Either you tell me why you’re following me around like a fucking creep or I start yelling until the police arrive.”
Isagi jabs his finger behind in the direction leading out of the alleyway, and delights some more as he watches the realisation dawn upon the masked man of exactly where Isagi’s brought them - across the square from the nearest police box.
The guy shakes it off annoyingly quickly. “Well, well,” he murmurs, taking a step towards Isagi. “Aren’t you always full of surprises?”
“What. Do. You. Want? ”
They’re in deadlock, just staring at each other. Isagi refuses to back down or even blink. It’s stupid, he thinks, the part of his mind frantic and panicking about all the ways this could go wrong compartmentalised and separate from the rest of him that’s been raring to have a go at this guy and how he’s come to stand for the very kind of callous apathy Isagi hates and blames so much of the state of the world on. Just because this guy said he’s not in the business of killing did not mean he was telling the truth. He shouldn’t be here, but even as he retraces the steps he took to arrive at this moment, he can’t think of what he would do differently if they hit rewind and did it all over again.
“You know this place well,” is what the masked man says, eventually.
Isagi says nothing.
“In fact, your sense of direction is almost disturbingly good. You compute your routes to where you want to go on the fly, don’t you? That time too, when you were being chased by the biker gang - you had them lost and disoriented even though you were on foot.”
This… is not where Isagi had thought the conversation was going to go.
“Your senses are also very sharp,” the masked man continues, shifting closer to Isagi tipping his head to the side, something about the gesture questioning, pondering. “The entire time you were trying to get me off your tracks today, it’s like you knew exactly where I was going to be coming from, even though you can’t move as fast as I do. You even lured me here, this close to a police box, without me realising” He almost sounds…pleased, about this.
“Just spit out what you want,” Isagi growls. He doesn’t want to show it, but how keenly this man has been observing him sends every single one of his nerves on edge.
A gloved finger tilts Isagi’s chin up. What is with him and touching his jaw?
“It’s a shame that you’re completely mannerless, but at least you’re cute.”
“ Excuse me -!”
The man cuts off Isagi’s spluttering with a finger to his lips. Isagi feels his eyes blow wide open.
“How would you like to work for me?”
Now
“Is it…ransom? Theft?” Isagi asks, peering out into the alleyway and then back down at his watch. It’s closing in on 3 am - he’s not going to be getting much sleep tonight before the grind starts again, he thinks, miserably.
“Silly little idiot,” Isagi feels the figure behind him crowd closer, looming over him in height. “Why won’t you learn? You could be putting that nose of yours to use by working for me. Could actually be useful instead of running around playing detective.”
“I already told you that I don’t care for making rich people stay rich or whatever it is that you do.”
“You could find out,” The rasp of the robotic voice has a lilt to it, like it’s meant to be tantalising. The masked man is almost draped over Isagi’s back as the shorter one stands his vigil watching over that stupid dumpster he should have just left alone. “I could make it so worth your while.”
Isagi bites down on his tongue because there’s a real risk he’ll just scream if he speaks otherwise. This is another unexpected development he’s not had any idea how to navigate, let alone broach with someone that will end in any other way than him being put in solitary confinement by his friends for his own safety. He doesn’t even know what to call it. Ever since he’d flat-out refused that inane invitation, it’s like he can’t go a couple of days without running into this stupid, shitty, self-proclaimed Emperor. It freaked him out enough to check his clothes and bags for hidden trackers and download VPNs on all his devices to mask his location - this man has to have some kind of hidden surveillance network at his disposal, if he’s able to find him so easily and at will.
And he seems to have a knack for finding him when he’s about to get himself mired in another of his incidents .
The loud crashing and jeering noises he’d followed to a store getting vandalised a couple days ago, and police sirens blaring out of nowhere before Isagi could think of a way to bait them away only for this smug bastard to emerge from the darkness, no speakers upon his person but clearly responsible for making the thugs flee.
The time he’d heard panicked screams for help and gone running in the direction they were coming from, only to be grabbed up and into the air and deposited into the balcony of an empty apartment, moments before he could run directly into a violent stabbing incident that had left three people injured. The culprit had been found knocked out hours later, zip-tied and dumped on the pavement he’d started attacking pedestrians at.
And then most recently, when Isagi’d been stumbling his way home, exhausted even more now that he was alternating between his internship and part-time jobs, this dense cloud of black that seems to perpetually exist in the corner of his eye had swooped in and told him to go spend the night at the nearby manga cafe instead. Isagi had found out the next morning that there had been a bloody, dangerous gang fight along the route he’d usually take to head home.
Each and every time, it ends with the same song and dance. “There’s so much you could do if you’d just stop being stubborn. Put those animal instincts of yours to use, darling. You could be so useful to me.”
“Which part of no do you not understand?” Isagi mutters, finally, keeping his eye trained downward at his mark. He’s not going to say what’s really been going on in his head - not going to talk about how, when he’s at his most tired, brain feeling like sludge trying to understand whether the sirens in the distance are the police or the ambulances, he’s almost tempted. Almost tempted to dip his toes into what this man could be offering. The power. The connections. The ability to do something more consequential than put a mark on his back to try and lure threats and danger away from civilians in harm’s way.
But the flipside that must come with the offer - making himself another tool in the arsenal of the very people with the spending power to solve the city’s problems ten times over - keeps that temptation under its heel.
The Emperor - Isagi cringes internally every time he thinks of him by that name - sighs. “You’re hopeless. Such a clown. One of these days you’re going to walk right into a problem bigger than you are. What are you going to do then?”
I’ve survived you so far, haven’t I? Isagi wants to bite back, but that feels like it’d open the gateway to something neither of them have touched on, yet. The last person he will stand being reprimanded by about his safety is this obnoxious prick. Especially when, lately, it seems like said obnoxious prick is making it his business to appear wherever Isagi and his problems are.
Completely ignoring him, Isagi asks, “So you’re here to catch whoever comes to take the bag away - not just to retrieve the bag itself. Is that it?”
The figure sighs again. “Okay, then,” he hums eventually, and then Isagi startles as he feels two arms come up on either side of him, fingers hooking into the wire mesh fringing the roof and effectively caging Isagi there. “Let’s make a deal.”
Isagi, frozen, is wary as he asks, “...what deal?”
“Since you want to play Sherlock so badly, why don’t you tell me what you think is happening? If you do well, I’ll answer exactly one question for you. Any question at all, besides, of course, who I am.”
The offer is… Isagi hates to admit it, but it’s tempting. He has plenty of burning questions he could ask him, and one that’s been screaming for his attention every time they’ve crossed paths in recent days. His tentative goal coming up here had been finding out who came to retrieve the bag, getting a picture or video, and deciding whether or not to send it to the police. Ever since this guy had shown up, though, Isagi’s chances of doing this unimpeded had dropped to less than thirty per cent. If he’s intervening on behalf of a client, it’s not like Isagi could win against him in a physical fight. Nonetheless, he does shove his elbow into the guy's middle, annoyed at how solid he is, until he relents and shifts a little to Isagi's side instead of half-draping himself over his back.
“The…bag is unmarked but brand new, the tag was still attached. So it’s like someone bought it just to hold the cash inside,” Isagi begins, begrudgingly. He’d verified that it was cash, wearing kitchen gloves as a precaution against leaving fingerprints, just to make sure he had actual reason to be freezing himself outside on a rooftop in the dead of night. “But the fact that it was in the dumpster - not underneath any of the other trash bags, not hidden - I think it means that whoever threw that in there, probably did in a hurry because he was trying to hide in a moment’s notice, or was being pursued. So, likely, they’re going to come back when there’s fewer people around.”
“So why didn’t you call the police the second you found it?”
Isagi shoots him a dirty look. “As if police lines are secure.”
It gets him a chuckle. “Fair enough.”
“And besides, even on a secure line, the city’s resources are stretched thin - there’s no telling if they’d arrive on time. There was a statistic, recently, that crime prevention by the police fails nine out of ten times here because by the time they arrive, not only is the deed done but the evidence has been messed with too.”
And when they would finally arrive, likely when either the culprit or someone else who’d caught wind of it had taken the bag away, it would be everyone in the surrounding buildings that would be grilled - including the person who reported the bag being there in the first place. That’s what would get in the newspapers, and Isagi doesn’t particularly want a potential criminal to know who he is and where he works.
“And how did you come to discover that bag?”
Isagi blinks. And then groans.
Fuck. He’d been so caught up with the situation that he’d completely forgotten that the last person he’d want to know where he works four out of seven days a week is currently standing on the building’s roof.
“Uh, I was throwing away a candy wrapper and I saw it there.” It sounds stupidly unconvincing to his own ears. Isagi can’t see his face, but the Emperor’s posture communicates how unamused he is by that answer.
Isagi deflates. “I work around here and was throwing the trash out,” he hedges instead, trying to minimise the damage.
“Better,” a hand comes up to ruffle his hair that he bats away. “Not bad with the deduction work though. Now if only you would put your smarts towards -”
“Can you stop with the recruitment pitch already?”
“It would pay a lot better than whatever you’re earning here,” the hint of disdain in his tone makes Isagi wish he had the physical strength to toss him off of this building. He’d probably just grapple hook himself to safety though, like a spider that keeps coming back out no matter how many times you wash it down your sink.
“Don’t care.”
“How noble of you. Did you know that money can solve practically every problem you could possibly have? Even the ones you’re so fond of jumping into.”
“Then how come you haven’t solved world hunger or poverty, if you’re rolling in so much dough?”
“Because those are not my priorities.”
Isagi’s getting pissed off all over again. Butting heads with this guy always leaves him feeling more rage than he knows what to do with. He bites down on his lip to keep from retorting, because this would just devolve into a one-sided screaming match.
“Not going to yell at me today?” The Emperor asks, indulgently. “But I do so enjoy the feral look in your eye when you fight for your moral high ground, darling.”
If no one shows up in the next fifteen minutes, Isagi makes up his mind, he’s just going to leave.
“Nothing? Not even one of your adorably uncouth insults?”
Okay, ten minutes.
“Boo. That’s no fun.”
Five. The next five minutes and then -
“Shh,” he’s holding up a hand, cutting off whatever gibberish the tin-head man was spouting. He’s ninety percent sure he heard something and…
A figure appears at the lip of the alleyway, dressed all in dark. Isagi instantly crouches, keeping just his eyes above the bricked edge of the roof where the wire mesh begins. There’s barely any light down there to tell who the figure is, but he’s darting directly towards the dumpster, furtively looks left and right, and lifting up the lid with a creak that carries in the quiet of the night, in a way that makes Isagi, four floors up, flinch.
He’s wondering if this had been a hopeless fool’s errand in the first place, because it’s so fucking dark he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to see who it is and even modern day smartphones don’t have night vision that good, when a pool of light flicks to life in the hand of the man by the dumpster. It’s the guy’s own phone, the point of light swinging around to focus at the dumpster and -
Isagi’s mouth dries up in an instant. He knows that man.
He’s known that man for the entire time he’s worked at this izakaya. The man who owns the liquor store close by. The friendly, cheerful man who always snuck free bottles of saké into Bachira’s bag whenever he tagged along with Isagi for emergency drink runs because the diner had been running low.
The man whose son had recently gambled away all their property and possessions, after, according to Isagi’s manager, getting into debt with the wrong sort of people.
That son, his only child, now behind bars and awaiting bail.
“Hey,” Isagi whispers, his eyes wide and panicked as they try to find the shape of the person crouched next to him, melting into the darkness. “Hey, what are you… what are you going to do to that man?”
He can hear the panic high in his own voice - it’s obvious that the Emperor can too.
“...you know him.”
Isagi doesn’t know if he can confirm or deny that. Doesn’t know if it would make a difference, if someone had paid enough money to have The Emperor here today, to recover that cash - wherever it had come from, whoever it belonged to.
“Don’t…,” his voice is hoarse, and his tongue is heavy in his mouth as he tries to force the words out in a hurry. “Don’t hurt him. Please don’t hurt him.”
He’d beg. If that’s the only thing he can do. He thinks about being choked by large leather-covered hands, eyes bugging and rolling around in their sockets and spittle collecting at the corner of the mouth as the air was slowly wrung out of the body, and feels his own lungs struggle to remember how to work. This smiling grandpa who’d run that shop for almost his entire lifetime, whom everyone on the strip knows by name, and everyone on the strip felt for as his livelihood and family descended into the undertow continuously rocking these neighbourhoods.
The Emperor makes a move and Isagi grabs on to his hand with both of his. “Please. You can recover the money but don’t hurt him.”
“Hey.” The hand Isagi isn’t holding comes up to the side of his face and Isagi, in his complete panic, almost winces - but it only settles against the side of his face. A gentle and careful touch. “Relax. Breathe. Look - he’s already leaving.”
Isagi snaps his head back around in time to see a figure disappearing out of the alley mouth.
“Don’t -”
“I’m not going to follow him,” The Emperor assures him, and through the fog of his alarm, Isagi realises with a jolt that the tone trickling out through the voice changer is almost cajoling.
“You’re…not?”
“No, I’m not.”
“But isn’t that -” Isagi blinks, confused, willing the adrenaline down so he could think over his fevered heartbeat, “Isn’t that your job?”
The Emperor cocks his head at him, a move so familiar Isagi has lost count of how many times he’s seen him do it. “This wasn’t a job.”
Isagi’s brain goes quiet. Dumbfounded, he repeats, “...wasn’t?”
“Nope.”
“Then why…”
“Because you were on a rooftop at two in the morning,” the Emperor tells him, and Isagi doesn’t know if he’s spent so much time around this faceless nuisance that he’s starting to imagine expressions on him because he sounds like he’s smiling, “and that’s basically a guarantee that there was trouble nearby.”
The implication that this guy has eyes on Isagi when he doesn’t even know, that maybe he already knew he worked here, flits through Isagi’s head like lightning, but somehow isn’t the most pressing issue at hand.
“But…,” Isagi whispers, “you… you’re not supposed to care. You’re not supposed to involve yourself with people unless you’re being paid for it. Then why?”
“Is that your question in exchange for our deal?”
Isagi takes a deep breath, seeks out his eyes and holds them. “Just tell me.”
The Emperor regards him for a long time - or at least, it feels like a long time.
“I suppose it’s because you’re an exception to that rule.”
It’s almost 5 am by the time Isagi makes it home - too late to try and sleep and hope that he would be able to wake up in time to get to class. He gets some food in him - the pastries Bachira had brought him the evening before cheer him up somewhat, as he inspects how the plants on his balcony are doing. There’s one that’s started attracting little bugs under the leaves, and Isagi makes a mental note to call Nagi and ask him what to do about that.
Thinking Netflix would probably not make his night of sleeplessness any better, and desperately needing to empty his mind of all thought, Isagi decides to get his laundry done. He’s showered already, and after adding the clothes he’d been wearing to his hamper, makes his way down to the building’s laundry room.
Because of his wonky work schedule, Isagi has done his laundry at odd hours of the day before, enjoying the quiet of being down there without having to compete for one of the only two machines or the single tumble dryer with the other tenants. So he’s surprised when he throws the door open in the middle of humming a jingle from an old TV advert to find that someone’s already there.
“Oh! Sorry,” Isagi apologises, embarrassed about the singing, eyeing the person’s hair - blond dip-dyed in blue - when they turn around.
The first thing Isagi registers are the eyes. Bright, startling blue - so blue they’re almost unnerving to look at.
And the second thing, the tattoos - blue peeking around the neckline of a plain white shirt that sits a little insultingly perfectly on this man’s frame, inked black coiling down his arm to end in what Isagi thinks looks like a crown.
“No worries.” He speaks perfect Japanese, without an accent.
Isagi awkwardly shuffles into the room, heading towards the free washing machine and loading up his clothes. The German. The one the landlady is always gushing about, with the supermodel looks and the charisma to make an adult elephant keel over. He lives opposite Isagi, in the wing of the apartment adjacent to his balcony - Isagi’s seen him before, out there in his own balcony in nothing but a fluffy robe and glasses, on his laptop or tablet.
This is his first time seeing him up close, though, let alone speaking to him. Everything about him stands out in this place. His build, the hair, the tattoos, sure. But also the simple but tasteful cut of his casual clothes… and that face . It makes sense that he’s heard about this guy long before he’d seen him. Isagi doesn’t understand how a combination like this even makes sense in the dank, slightly sweet smelling laundry room of an apartment complex in a less than stellar part of town.
“You live opposite me, right? You have the plants all over your balcony.”
Isagi’s had a long day that’s spilled on to another day without any break in between, so he’d like to forgive himself for the surprised squeak he lets out at being addressed. Let alone, noticed. “Uhm, the one with the hanging plants, yeah… that’s me.”
“I’ve seen you out there watering them,” the German comments conversationally. He’s sat himself down on one of the chairs someone had brought down here and then left for general use. As he speaks, he stretches his legs out, and they go on for days - Isagi wills his sleep-deprived brain not to hone in on those thighs. “It looks like so much work, but it’s nice to see some green when I look out the window.”
“Oh, um, thank you? It’s a lot of work but it’s relaxing.” Lies. Isagi almost cried when the plant Nagi had gifted him after he’d jumped into plant parenting started turning yellow.
But his German neighbour, in his nice clothes and stylish red eyeliner - seriously who is this put together before the sun’s even risen? - only smiles at him. It’s a really pretty smile.
“Maybe I’ll get you to share your tips with me, uh -” the blond tips his head to the side questioningly. Something very faint and nebulous bubbles at the back of Isagi’s brain and fades away.
“Oh,” Isagi puts his hand out, “um, I’m Isagi. Isagi Yoichi.”
A large, warm hand takes his. Isagi’s eyes are drawn to the black inked crown, and the twining vines that curl up his arm to disappear into his shirt-sleeve. “Isagi Yoichi,” the German repeats, as though testing the syllables out. “ The world’s purest, huh . ” There’s a glimmer to his eye as he says it.
Isagi’s surprise must show on his face, because he laughs a little. “I study etymology - I’m in the field of languages and translation and such.” He explains. “Though, I’d say it suits you - the landlady is always talking about how the boy who lives across from me is helping her carry the groceries up the stairs and keeping the neighbourhood kids in check. That’s you, isn’t it?”
Isagi, a little thrown off by the fact that the landlady is going around saying these things about him - and to her personal celebrity tenant no less - says, “I…think so?”
Their hands are still clasped in each other’s, he thinks distantly. “And, um… your name…?”
“Michael,” the blond man smiles up at Isagi from where he sits, his eyes a stunning ocean blue. “Michael Kaiser.”