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Il le faut bien, reprit la Bête ; je me rends justice. Je sais que je suis bien horrible ; mais je vous aime beaucoup ; cependant je suis trop heureux de ce que vous voulez bien rester ici ; promettez-moi que vous ne me quitterez jamais.
“I must,” said the Beast, “for, alas! I know too well my own misfortune, but then I love you with the tenderest affection. However, I ought to think myself happy, that you will stay here; promise me never to leave me.”
— La Belle et la Bête (The Beauty and the Beast)
o.
What follows are—fragments of my still-broken memories.
Fragments of a fairy tale.
Almost illusory, if not for the fact that I can still clearly recall the touch of his lips on mine—
---
“Were I to cry ever so much,
that would not make things better.
I must try to make myself happy without a fortune.”—
---
i.
Sometimes, I still dream of the hart that someone else shot, that fateful day, many months ago.
What are you thinking of, Barok van Zieks?
He hadn’t answered then, of course—I was too scared to voice it out, to actually ask him what he was thinking of whenever he gazed at me with eyes the color of the sky, scared that I may not like the answer. But of course, the feeling remained, even when we were finally out of that place, even when, days and days and weeks and weeks afterward, we found ourselves at an odd stalemate where we both wanted to talk to each other, and yet refused to at the same time.
What are you thinking of, Barok van Zieks?
I think—I think… something may have changed.
“Asougi?”
Barok van Zieks was again walking before me, and he was dressed all in white, and the hothouse was right before us, and the grass was moist and if I had been a little more clairvoyant, I would have known that I would be kissing him for the first time in the middle of those brilliant tropical flowers—bright blue, red, yellow, purple—that he had been keeping in there, but because I wasn’t, I kept my mouth shut, and followed him. Followed him. What an easy thing to do. Go, Asougi. Put your left foot forward. Put your right foot forward. Put your left foot forward. Put your right foot forward. Put your left foot forward. Put your right foot forward.
What an easy bloody thing to do.
That is, to follow Barok van Zieks forever.
Once upon a time, I did exactly just that.
---
“Do but see our youngest sister.—
What a poor, stupid, mean-spirited creature she is,
to be content with such an unhappy, dismal situation.”
---
ii.
—After the first kiss, the days passed uneventfully, like they have always done. Like today.
A week had passed after his angry flight from the hothouse when I realized that we had not spoken to each other about the incident since.
I did my final duties of the day patiently, almost tiredly; I swept up the papers on the desk and cleared up the books that he had inadvertently left strewn on the armchair and the floor, and finally, put them back in their proper places. The master of the house had departed on some urgent business this morning; he was not expected to be back by nightfall, and therefore I found it imperative that I slip the key of the wine cellar from its well-concealed hook (we both liked to pretend that I hadn’t found it yet, though he may bristle a little whenever I found his more expensive stores) and take a celebratory weekend bottle and a glass back to my quarters.
The Lord’s Bottle in my hand was heavy, but my spirits were light. I silently slipped inside my room and set my loot aside, before stripping off boots and stockings and jacket and rolling my trousers up. The saber that was set against the wall was watching me quietly; I had to pat the handguard, not unaffectionately, before bringing both wine bottle and glass to the only window in my room.
There was only one window, but it was of a generous width and height, like all other windows in this endless manor, and when I pushed it open to perch myself on the sill to finally drink, I was greeted with the cold, crisp air of the suburbs and an excellent view of the gravel driveway leading from the gate. If Naruhodou Ryuunosuke could have seen what I was seeing right now, no doubt my bosom friend would have thought that he was dreaming; though, I remembered with a slightly acidic taste in the back of his throat, the ancestral home of the Asougi family was perhaps even vaster than this estate.
Even if I do return to the Japanese Empire… I am, perhaps, not going back there to the place of the Asougis, I realized—
Suddenly incensed, I blew the top off the wine bottle with a well-practiced swing of the hunting knife that my mentor had gifted me once, an odd present that I was quickly finding to be rather useful for doing even odder tasks—much like opening this bottle. I sniffed at the cracked neck, feeling a little heady on the delicate scent of the wine, and poured a generous amount of crimson liquid into my glass.
After a hard day’s work, the first sip of a wine whose grapes Barok van Zieks had curated himself was fit for the gods. I drank, steadily, slowly becoming drunk on the wine and even drunker on the starlight, slowly indulging in the luxury of forgetfulness once more, because forgetfulness brings numbness, and only in numbness can all pain be eradic—
“I was wondering where you were.” A quiet voice by my shoulder.
—At that, I nearly dropped the bottle.
But my mentor was quick as lightning, as always, his gloved hand firmly covering my grip over the offending object and making sure that I spilled not a drop, and I could only blink at his impassive face—wait, was that a flicker of amusement?—before finally wresting the bottle and the glass from my slackening grip.
“A certain someone decided to deplete my stores again tonight, it seems.”
“—Mmm.”
I tried to say something else other than that dumb sound, anything cleverer, but my tongue somehow won’t cooperate, and he snorted before seating himself on the sill beside me. Once done, he surprised me once more by inelegantly tipping the dregs of the wine into his own mouth.
“—This one is just over two years old,” he mused, and again I wanted nothing else than to produce a coherent statement, but the room seemed foggy and everything in slow motion. Everything, except this goddamn prosecutor—was he now smirking at me? “Ah, and you’re quite drunk. I’m quite sure that you’re going to have to stay in later tomorrow and curse your head in the morning if you sleep now.”
“Will shake ’t off,” I finally managed to mumble, and he looked away, toward the door, before seemingly coming to a decision.
I wasn’t surprised when he suddenly grabbed me by the elbow, but I was startled when he managed to hoist me into a very shaky, somehow-upright position. I wobbled dangerously, but his grip on me was true, and he easily steered me across the floor to the one door on the wall that connected my bedroom to his own.
The master bedroom was spacious and surprisingly spare for someone of Barok van Zieks’s standing, and the prosecutor hauled me onto a nearby couch before pouring a glass of water from the carafe and handing it to me. I sipped at my water slowly, watching the flickering candles on the small table beside him spin rather unpleasantly, and waited for the floaty feeling to fade away. As it ebbed, the more I felt that this was a somehow strange situation to find myself in.
My mentor, meanwhile, had walked over to one of the high windows and was apparently browsing a thin book, bound in gold and blue leather.
“What are you reading?” I asked bluntly, prudence forgotten, and he looked up, his blue eyes almost black in the ash-soft darkness of the room.
“A story someone read me a long time ago,” he said, shortly, and when no other answer was forthcoming, I lowered his gaze into the depths of the glass, wondering why his mentor’s face suddenly bore an incredible sadness.
“Read it to me,” I said, boldly, and I half-expected him to scoff and place the book back down and drive me away after his small minute of kindness, but he again did something that I was not expecting. He came over, his tall figure looming ominously over my reclining form, before he said, bitterly—
“Why did you do that , on that day?”
—the book in his hand glittered blue and gold—
You are a brash guy, Asougi, Naruhodou Ryuunosuke’s voice resounded inside my skull, and angrily, I retorted back, both to the shadow of my friend, who likes stating the obvious, and to this impassive Englishman now before me, who likes stating nothing at all—
“—I do whatever I like. Sir. ”
Barok van Zieks bent down, almost to my level. His eyes are—
“You… are…”
Too close. Too close. Ah. His gentle breath is fanning across my cheek—
“You… are simply an impudent brat.”
—Saying thus, he breached the distance between us for the second time in seven days.
His lips against mine were cool, and sweet, and cruel.
Cruel, because this is what I wanted—
And cruel, because I know I will remember nothing when the moon finally fades into the dawn.
---
“Since you have the goodness to think of me,—
be so kind to bring me a rose,
for as none grows hereabouts,
they are a kind of rarity.”
---
iii.
I think I have fallen in love exactly once in my life.
I may still be in love with that person. I don’t know. I have not fallen out of love before to know what it looks like. I did not have anyone who may have shown me what falling out of love looks like.
Sometimes, I think Professor Mikotoba may have, once. A long, long time ago. But of course, I hesitated to ask.
I do not know if I have fallen out of love with that other person, it is true. But I knew enough to know that I have fallen in something like love with this inflexible, domineering, meticulous mentor of mine. Is this love? A cunning facsimile of it, perhaps? I think so. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe this is real. I’m afraid to think that it is. If this is real, then it is difficult to rub out of existence forever.
“Love changes people, Kazuma,” my father once told me.
—And it certainly did. His words were a terrible prophecy of my mother’s fate.
Even as he sat in his desk and filled in paperwork, his pen making neat scratching sounds that I found to be rather pleasant, I knew that Barok van Zieks was one such other unfortunate like myself who had suffered mightily, because of this thing called love.
Absently, I stroked my lip, and winced slightly. The wound—the wound was still there where he bit me, as if he had anticipated that I wanted to engrave that memory of him kissing me, taking his revenge upon me, into my heart. Or, no, rather, he wanted me to remember. To feel a crushing despair everytime the wound on my lip throbbed, because he did it to put me in my place, to burn the bridges that I had tried crossing, to gaze upon me from the other end of the chasm and smile and tell me wordless, bold-faced lies like You will never be able to get to me. Never.
“—so absentminded during work.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said automatically, cursing him, cursing myself, and as he glanced up from his papers with that familiar crease between his eyebrows, I boldly asked, “I… what may I fetch for you, sir?”
“You—” He already had one arm up to point, and I was already half-rising from my chair to get whatever it was, when, suddenly, his pointer finger wavered and there was a split-second of a sudden, incredible pain on his face that made me pause and stare at him, but it was gone in the next moment, replaced by an irritated scowl—not particularly directed at me, I was quick to observe—and a clipped, “The notes on the Landers trial from last month. Quickly .”
---
“I have saved your life by receiving you into my castle,
and, in return, you steal my roses,
which I value beyond any thing in the universe,
but you shall die for it—”
---
iv.
My second favorite place in this too-huge house was perhaps the library, both beautifully built and situated.
It could be entered through a set of double doors on the ground floor of the east wing of the house, but the room itself spanned the height of two stories. The second level of books, which mostly contained recreational literature, was accessible through a handsome spiral staircase beside a gigantic hand-carved globe, and on the ground floor itself, there was a gorgeous tiger-skin rug right in the middle of the marble floor, and a comfortable sofa where a tired student may recline and do as he wishes. Since my mentor had little occasion to use the library himself during the weekends, I could virtually spend all morning and evening just browsing my way through the fat, leather-bound law tomes that filled the shelves from Saturday morning up to Sunday evening.
I was just picking out my first five books one Saturday when I heard the morning bell ring and the steward's voice filter through the speaking tube in his room, telling me that I should change into more comfortable clothes and head to the back of the manor, leading to the not-so-modest garden. Quickly refastening my sword belt about the waist, I steeled myself for whatever it was that my mentor was up to now, and stepped out, immediately blending in the shadows of the hallway with my black garments.
Perhaps one of the things that surprised my mentor (and my other London acquaintances, their glances at me fleeting and a little awed) was the fact that I had chosen to shed the clinical white of the revived prosecutor in favor of donning once more the muted black uniform of the Imperial Yuumei University. As one of his final gifts, Naruhodou Ryuunosuke had left the sets of Yuumei uniform that was originally mine in the first place, lovingly altered by Mikotoba-houmujoshi back to their original measurements (and perhaps a little more, to compensate for the growth spurts that I had undergone since then), and I must confess that the first time I shrugged the achingly familiar shirt and jacket and trousers on, every inch inscribed with Naruhodou's recognizable, comfortable scent and Mikotoba-houmujoshi’s painstakingly-small stitches, I felt as though I was constantly being embraced by my clumsy bosom friend and the young woman I have had the honor of calling my little sister.
—We had parted ways, and then thereafter the three of us existed, not side by side perhaps, but with a bond far greater than what mere distance can sever. And to some, they may see Naruhodou Ryuunosuke and Mikotoba Susato’s decision to part with me as the beginning of the end—a curse of distance, of betrayal, of loneliness. Which is, I think, not without reason.
But to myself, rightfully clad now in my magnificent black, this is just the end of the beginning—a blessing to finally shrug off the many, many expectations of me, and to finally live my life according to his own rules… and not under others' machinations.
The sweetness of this new freedom is almost— intoxicating .
“—Have I perhaps troubled you from something, Asougi?” The sound of my mentor’s voice pulled me out of my reverie.
“No, sir,” I lied, smoothly.
Out here in the garden, I found my mentor standing by a patch of empty earth with a hoe in his hand, my eyes resting on him not a little appraisingly—Barok van Zieks was clad in rather plain and drab clothes, an abrupt departure from his usual rich garb, though to my eyes, this was also something that happens quite regularly when we weren’t working on something urgent and he just needed to unwind a little. Perhaps befitting a man of his private nature, he preferred activities where, essentially, he could be alone with his thoughts.
And dressed like he was right now, less like the remaining son of the van Zieks family and more like an ordinary squire from the country, I knew immediately what we would be doing today.
I took off my black school jacket and unbuttoned my cuffs and collar, and followed him to the current plot of earth that he had been working on. Recently, my mentor’s petunias had grown considerably well in their seedbeds to allow transplanting already, and he surveyed, with not a little pride in his eyes, the resilient little green sprouts in my wheelbarrow as I pushed it from the shed to where he stood, marking where we were to start.
We started with work, and even though earlier I had been a little miffed, to be quite honest, that I had been torn away from what I was intending to do, I have to admit that working outdoors, with the scent of damp soil strong in the nostrils and the air heavy with the promise of a light rain, promised unique pleasures of its own. For his part, Barok van Zieks, with his rough gardening gloves, his sleeves rolled up to the forearm, and up to his elbows with soil, made for an oddly charming picture.
If Naruhodou Ryuunosuke—or anyone else for that matter—would have seen him as I am seeing him right now, the first thing that they would have done is to rub at their eyes furiously before wondering if they are dreaming.
Again and again, I was left with a strong impression of my mentor’s otherworldly, single-minded focus as he continued this menial task, patiently digging up dirt and transferring the seedlings in their proper places, and so regular and rhythmic his movements were, and so unhesitating, that when he paused digging into a particular patch of earth with his spade and instead dug into it with his gloved hands, I had to wonder whether there was something wrong.
He sat back on his heels in the dirt, and opened his palm.
It was a piece of metal—I was unable to quickly determine what it was, as it was so tiny, but Barok van Zieks’s voice was quite clear, and to my surprise, sounded more than a little shocked.
“A lock…”
Before I could even react, he had already started digging into the same spot, desperately this time, his hands carelessly shoving away piles of earth in great flying clumps, and I would have counted this as a random act of madness if not for the almost hopeful fear in his oft-guarded blue eyes—
“It’s… here… you… ”
I watched his expression change as he started uncovering a small, dirty box from under the soil, and when Barok van Zieks pulled it out with trembling fingers and a childlike, wide-eyed look, as if he had just remembered something so important that he couldn’t quite believe that he had forgotten it in the first place, I felt like I had just seen a glimpse of the boy that he had been, lurking in the depths of those eyes—
“So this is where you have been, all this time,” he finally murmured, and it may have been my imagination, but I could almost swear that his lip trembled a little.
“Sir? I can hold that for you—”
And I was about to take the box from his outstretched fingers, when—
It— happened again—
“A-s—oug—i— gghk! ”
A look of… incredible… pain… on… his— face—
“Sir!”
And to my utter horror, with a rattling gasp, Barok van Zieks pitched sideways, onto the soft soil, his hand tight against his chest, and lost all consciousness—
---
“Let me have no words, but go about your business,
and swear that if your daughter refuses to die in your stead,
you will return within three months.”
---
v.
“There’s nothing wrong with him. At least, physically.”
“—That can’t be.”
I thought about the expression of pure shock and agony on his face. The hand fisting his shirt, over his chest. That can’t be. He was in pain— asking for my help—
“Well, young man. Lord van Zieks’s apprentice, is it?” I meekly nodded, and the doctor shot me a glance of something close to sympathy as he started packing up his valise. “I’m just reporting what I found. And I found nothing concerning. Overwork, perhaps. Stresses of daily life. That sort of thing.” He was writing something on a small piece of paper, and when he ripped it out and held it to me, I took it with numb fingers. “He should be kept confined to bed for now. A strict diet, too, perhaps. I have given the list of prescribed foods to the steward to pass on to the kitchen. Make sure he follows my instructions to the letter.”
“Okay.” I nodded, my face carefully blank, and the doctor finally lifted his bag and was escorted out by a manservant. As the bedroom door closed behind them with an awful finality, I glanced back at my mentor, noting his even more stark pallor against the white sheets of his bed.
Nestled in a bed as big as this, even someone like Barok van Zieks can be made to look smaller than he actually was. His hair was starting to come out of its slicked-back coiffure, pale curls fanning on his pillow, and his eyebrows were twitching slightly in restless sleep. His left arm was stretched out beside him, while the right was—his right hand was again clutching over his chest, a gesture of helplessness.
—I didn’t know what to do.
Or, more precisely, I did know what to do next—I have the doctor’s prescription tightly clasped in my hand—but I didn’t know where to go . To position myself. Should I… should I stay here and wait till he wakes up, perhaps? Or is that too familiar, and I should wait in my room instead? I stood there, an unusual, irritating indecision permeating my person, something that I wasn’t familiar with at all, until the butler relieved me of my burden by entering the room and bidding me to rest after the exciting events of the morning. I vaguely remembered pushing the folded piece of paper in his hands and wheeling on my heel, mechanically, to return to my room via the adjoining door—
“—Mr. Asougi?”
I glanced back over my shoulder in surprise just as the butler ran up and handed me a small, strangely familiar, earth-crusted box.
“You left this behind.”
I was about to correct him that this wasn’t mine, when a sudden idea struck me, and with only a murmur of thanks, I continued back to my room and shut the door discreetly behind me. Kneeling on the floor beside my bed, I placed the box on the covers and gazed at it—the lid, with its deceptively simple but elegant carvings; the small engraving at the side, the word schatje in elegant letters; the broken latch, twisted and rusted all the way through.
I put my right hand on the lid, and as if coming to a decision, I gingerly lift it to reveal the contents within—
---
“Here, Beauty,—
take these roses, but little do you think
how dear they are like
to cost your unhappy father.”
---
vi.
—
——
———
“How are you feeling, sir?”
The evening had already fallen over the manor when Barok van Zieks finally stirred from his deathlike sleep.
“Asougi…? You’re here.”
“Of course.”
I averted my eyes when he gave me a searching look, and pretended not to see the oddly absent expression on his face.
I had been perched on the edge of the bed, the empty space between us disturbed only by the opened box that we had found in the garden earlier, and his gaze searched me quizzically as he slowly reached at the box and let his fingers rest on the collection of small trinkets nestled within. A small pearl in the shape of a teardrop. A half-torn picture of a young man with a strangely familiar boy sleeping in his lap. A bundle of folded documents, tied with a threadbare, yellowing ribbon. His face was unreadable, except for the slight twinge of pain still on his features, and when I made as if to reach out and assist him, he held his hand up, and reluctantly, I stayed in place.
“Where is the journal that was in the box?” he said, tiredly, and sheepishly, I held up the leather-bound notebook that was in my lap. However, instead of anger, only a weary sadness seemed to emanate from his pale features. “Have you read all of it?” were his only words, and when I shook my head, something like a slight amusement lit up his worn face. “I haven’t read any of it, yet,” I retorted, and he smiled sardonically.
“‘Yet’? I appreciate the honesty.” My mentor adjusted himself and sat up with an audible groan; again I half-rose from my seat, but he only shook his head. “Would you be so good as to turn on the lamp on the nightstand, please, and open to the first page.”
Hardly believing what is happening, I quickly did as he asked, and by the yellow light of the lamp, viewed the rather charming, childish cursive on the weathered page that I had been so itching to read. “1877,” I read the date scrawled on the bottom, and did the math—this was, without a doubt, a journal written by a ten-year-old Barok van Zieks.
“This is…” I was just about to say, but he only smiled wryly and bade me to turn to the next page. Upon a quick skim, I determined that the next pages were filled with a large, gently-flowing script, the same childish penmanship that graced the first page, and when the prosecutor said, softly, “Can you read it out loud?” I only glanced at him from the corner of my eye, not a little apprehensive, and when he nodded, as if to tell me that he was certain about this, I started—
Sometimes, when I wake up at night and I cannot fall asleep again,
I wonder if I can be like you when I grow up, my esteemed elder brother.
Outside, a soft evening rain has started to fall, making the curtains framing the tall, opened windows flutter slightly. I glanced at my audience with an attentive eye; he had closed his eyes, as if he had fallen asleep, but the weight of his breathing told me that that wasn’t exactly the case. On the nightstand, a vase of freshly-cut white roses stood, left by the butler; its scent mingled with the scent of the damp earth, and it smelled like what irredeemable loss would smell like.
I read and read out loud, for hours on end, sometimes helping myself to the tea that the maid had eventually brought in whenever I felt parched, and Barok van Zieks occasionally opened his eyes to look at the ceiling, but mostly he kept them closed, as if trying his best to create a careful mental image of the descriptions herein, traced with fading black, and occasionally blue, ink. Most of the entries were addressed innocently to Klimt van Zieks, and the language was as formal as if these were letters addressed to his person—even though, in one entry, the child explicitly mentioned that this journal was naught but a project that one of his tutors had bidden him to keep up for a year.
I found it odd that, perhaps, aside from the briefest mentions of him in my father’s occasional letters to me throughout his stay in London, I have never perhaps heard much of this friend of his. Therefore, the perspective of his younger brother was invaluable, perhaps almost irreplaceable, in establishing what I had already guessed to be the case about the late Chief Prosecutor van Zieks.
Klimt, even in the young Barok van Zieks’s rose-colored lenses of him, was—a hopeless idealist. Well, there was no other way around it. “You shine brilliantly, Klimt, like the northern star, and I guided by it,” was how it was put in a rather overly poetic tone by the author of the book, and despite myself, I had to smile a little, bitterly, at the all-too-obvious childlike affection that spilled so uncontrollably from these pages. Especially… given what I already know.
“Does it pain you, to read such a naive thing like so?”
My mentor had opened his eyes, just a little bit, and was staring directly at me.
What kind of a question is that, I wanted to ask. Isn’t it obvious?
“What kind of a question is that?” I decided to say. “Isn’t it obvious?”
If, perhaps, we were closer, and I could see myself reflected in those clear blue eyes, will I see there immense suffering? Confusion?
“I’ve asked you this before,” Barok van Zieks said. “But don’t you loathe me?”
“Of course I loathe you. With all of my heart.”
“Then that’s clear.” He heaved a sigh, and I was incensed by this show of relief.
“What’s clear? Why—! ”
In an instant, I was already on the bed and at his throat; his eyes had locked onto mine, and my hands, fisted in the neck of his evening dress, were trembling imperceptibly. He looked more resigned than surprised—
“Tell me,” I said, through my teeth, “why did you take me in? Did you think that this is some form of punishment, of repentance, for what you have done?”
He opened his mouth slightly, though the words that I wanted to come didn’t, and I noticed a drop of water fall down from my face and roll off his cheek, and I realized I was crying.
“Tell me,” I murmured, “why I, too, must be punished by falling in love with you like this?”
---
“—Since the monster will accept one of his daughters,
I will deliver myself up to all his fury,
and I am very happy in thinking that my death will save my father's life,
and be a proof of my tender love for him.”
---
vii.
The doctor’s order of bedrest technically only lasted for a week, though even when he was finally allowed back at work, the prosecutor seemed to be more prone to spells of tiredness and would sometimes twitch his eyebrows and absently rub the spot over his chest where the old pain had been, as if it was still twinging.
Normally, I would have pointed it out, but something had shifted ever since I confronted him that evening when we read his childhood journal, as if some sort of veil had lifted between us, and it made me rather uncomfortable to be as snippy and familiar with him as I had been before his sickness.
The journal I would have left with him, and I was pretty sure I did, but the morning following that incident, I found it on my bedside table in my room, and while I felt that I should return it to the rightful owner, the mere fact that it had returned to my possession made me think that, perhaps, Barok van Zieks wanted me to have it after all.
It became a strange habit for me, then, every evening after work, to just sit at the window and read the pages of that book, some of them already starting to fall out from their old binding, some of them badly damaged by water that had seeped through the gaps of its box and the lid, and while the contents bring me a strange mix of sorrow and bitterness, the persistent joy of the writer that so leaped at me from every entry left me wondering if, somehow, this more idealistic younger self was somehow still deeply lodged somewhere in a recess inside the stormy soul of my mentor.
I was doing the same one evening, innocently, frowning over random French words scattered here and there in the entry (clearly, the author trying to show off his brand-new French knowledge at the time), when I hear the faint, glasslike crashing of something against the tiles from the room beside mine, my mentor’s bedroom—and—
I heard what was, unmistakably, a faint cry in the night—
“—!”
I quickly leapt up, saber in hand and journal forgotten on the floor, and pushed the door between our rooms just very slightly open, my eye trained on the scene before me—
—The strange man was clad all in black.
He made a clear contrast against my mentor’s white bed as he struggled with its original occupant, and I was about to move in and accost the stranger, of course, when the glint of steel in the intruder’s hand made my blood freeze cold— a dagger—
“Asougi!”
Barok van Zieks called out yet again, and all thoughts of danger flew out of my brain— except, maybe, for the surprising rush of emotion I felt at the thought that he was calling out my n—
“Argh!”
The first crash of my entire body against the assassin felt bloody fucking satisfying , if I had to say so myself.
We tumbled off the covers and onto the carpet, and both my mentor and the assassin seemed a little too dazed to realize what just happened, before I quickly collared the latter, stared into his eyes, and demanded, in a strange voice that I have little memory of using before, “ Who sent you, you bastard? ”
With a snarl, the guy broke off from my grip, his dagger flashing yet again, and I was acutely aware of the flashing of his dagger yet again and a dull, burning sensation on the back of my hand before I bounded after him as he flashed across the room, leapt through the open window, and was lost into the evening—
“ Asougi ,” I heard my mentor say in a weak, but forbidding voice, and I had to suppress the stupid thought of also leaping from the second-story veranda beyond the window to turn back and inspect him. He looked extremely shaken and exhausted, though otherwise unharmed, and I heard the frantic bounding outside the door, which alerted me to the fact that the household has just wisened up to the presence of our unwelcome guest.
“He rode off toward the city. I should—”
“No. I forbid you from doing anything of the sort.” His tone had an awful finality in it, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, then—“You’re… bleeding.”
“Huh?” I glanced at the ripped sleeve of my arm, and the gash underneath, and mildly said, “Oh, yeah, I guess I am.”
“You’re being awfully blasé about this, Asougi,” he said, and I was about to reply back scathingly when the butler finally burst in with a harried look on his face that melted into a relieved expression when he saw me standing over the bed, and the evidence of the assassin’s flight scattered all over the floor in the form of broken glass. “Sweep this up,” he told the maid that trailed after him with a half-terrified expression, and she nodded quickly and rushed to find the nearest broom closet.
“I have sent the groom and some of the boys after the man, my lord,” he was saying. “I promise this won’t happen again—”
“Just get some bandages and antiseptic for my apprentice, Geoffrey,” the prosecutor said grimly, though it was not until we both assured him that we were both perfectly fine that the good man finally turned on his heel and marched off. I just stood awkwardly there by the bed, finally feeling the odd sensation of my blood flowing from the nasty cut that the intruder had left on my hand, and we lapsed into a strained silence.
“—Thank you.”
The expression of gratitude was so sudden and delivered in such a soft tone of voice that I had to take a second before I realized that he had spoken.
“I’m… I’m sorry, sir?”
“Thank you,” he repeated, this time firmly, and when he turned his head and stared right into my eyes, I felt a warm flush creep up my neck. We fell into another awkward silence, and I had just shifted my weight to the other foot for want of anything to distract me from this situation when the butler thankfully came back with the requested bandages. He handed them to me with an expression of gratitude, and ushered me quickly to the master’s private bathroom so that I could finally stop dripping red all over the tiger rug.—
I glimpsed Barok van Zieks’s face one more time before I closed the door behind me, and I can see him gazing back at me with an expression that I dare not name, for fear that I might be correct.
---
Welcome Beauty, banish fear,
You are queen and mistress here.
Speak your wishes, speak your will,
Swift obedience meets them still.
---
viii.
My last memory of my father had become quite vague, almost dreamlike.
It has not always been like this; perhaps it was because of that incident with the ballerina from the S.S. Alaclaire , or perhaps I simply did not realize just how much of my memories of him had eroded over time. Whatever the reason was, the sound of his voice had started to fade pleasantly from my mind, and I was left with nothing but the memory of his face, lips mouthing something important to me before he boarded the ship, and left me behind forever.
“You’re the man of the house, now.”
I still wonder what he spoke to me about. To the thirteen-year-old me. I…
“You’ll be in my heart. Always.”
Sometimes, I think, or I’d like to think, that Asougi Genshin’s last words to me were… words of love.
“Ugh.” I gingerly dabbed the medicine over my stinging cut, and had to wince as it started working its magic. I didn’t fear medicine as much as, say, Naruhodou does, for example, but… well… dressing wounds, which was a delicate practice, has never been a particular specialty of mine.
Only when I was able to cover the wound with some respectable-looking bandaging, white covering the red, around and around, over and over again, was when I finally almost felt back to normal.
“—Sir?”
I left the bathroom and reentered the semi-darkness of his bedroom, and found no one in the room when I peeked through the half-opened doorway.
I tentatively stepped inside, noting the half-wilted vase of roses on a nearby table, and a familiar book that lay beside it. It was bound in blue and gold, and I had a fleeting memory of a drunken evening and seeing that same book in his hand that I just had to look at it, and I glimpsed upon its first page a very handsomely embellished calligraphy, wholly in French, that I of course did not at all understand.
In the corner of my eye, a pale curtain fluttered, and I immediately turned my eye on it. Through the gaps of the curtains, the moonlight shone, clearly, creating a lovely silver stripe across the floor and the bed, and a pure white rose petal fluttered inside. Just then, I also noticed that the vase on the bedside table, earlier full of flowers, was forebodingly empty.
“Sir?” I repeated, and for some reason, I dared not raise my voice above a whisper this time.
I left the roll of bandages and the medicine on the bed, and gazed through the fluttering curtain. The huge ceiling-to-floor windows had remained wide open from the flight of the ruffian from earlier, letting the cold evening breeze in, and as I debated whether to approach and perhaps shut it again to prevent the draft (despite the fact that, I guess, its cracked pane would not help it a whit anyway), a movement at the corner of my vision made me pause yet again, and I walked softly, my boots making nary a sound on the marble floor—
As I stepped through the window and onto the broad veranda, the evening sky opened up before my eyes, and once more I realize how, out here, away from the foggy darkness of London, the stars seem so much like the ones back at home—
A lone rose petal glided through the breeze and caressed my cheek for just a moment, and I had no choice but to gaze at the apparition in the corner of my eye.
Barok van Zieks was in white, all in white, as he walked barefoot along the ornate balcony and looked down at the stretch of green below and before him, a bouquet of wilting white roses in his arms, and I mused just how much of a specter he looked like this; how ethereal, as if one puff of the gentle evening breeze would, perhaps, take him away from my sight, forever. Suddenly, I felt afraid—felt a strong urge to call his name, lest he suddenly decide that this mortal realm does not deserve to behold such unearthly beauty—
“Barok,” I murmured thus, the first time I spoke his first name by itself, and it broke the spell binding him to his thoughts and he glanced at me, a surprised look in his eyes, though his surprise had an odd quality to it; it was as if he had been waiting for me, actually, and half-expecting me not to come, and what had surprised him more was me eventually arriving in so sudden a fashion.
“What a nostalgic accent,” he said, a bitter smile quirking his lip, and suddenly, I was coming up to him and putting my good arm up around his neck and kissing him again, again, again, the third time we made such contact in the past forty days, and I could feel the flutter of his eyelashes against my face as he kissed me back, and when I broke away, I whispered at his jaw, roughly, urgently—
“You’ll be in my heart. Always.”
I remembered my father, mouthing his last words to me.
“I have decided. —This is your sentence, Barok van Zieks.”
“My… sentence?”
“If you are insistent on bearing me as your burden, then take responsibility for my feelings.”
“Forever and ever?”
“Without end.—”
“Then,” he said, gravely, gracefully, his eyes dark, “let it be so, Kazuma Asougi.”
—What an irresponsible promise, begotten from those trembling lips.
“You’ll be in my heart.”
What an irresponsible man, this mentor of mine. Just like his perished friend, and his… perceived enemy.
“Always.”
---
“Eat then, Beauty,
and endeavor to amuse yourself in your palace,
for everything here is yours,
and I should be very uneasy
if you were not happy.”
---
ix.
We kissed again, a kiss that was rolling and slow and leisurely, lacking the manic energy that we usually had, the pair of us, when on the trail of a case, and the moment he gasped a little and naively let my tongue enter his mouth, I can almost hear Barok van Zieks thinking how unfair it was that he was the one being devoured, dominated, in this kiss—
“You’ve kissed many people before, perhaps,” he murmured when we broke apart once more for air, both chasing our breaths, and I smiled against his cheek.
“No. Not many. Just… lots of experience. With a certain someone.” I said this as easily, as devilishly, as possible, and perhaps he was trying to confirm that he was not, indeed, dreaming this kiss up by grasping my wrist tightly and feeling the warmth of my skin against his own. We had slowly, slowly, navigated ourselves back into the lovely semi-darkness of the prosecutor’s bedroom, the only source of light being the full moon beyond the high, elegant windows.
“Again?” I asked him, as if we were again in that one room where my mentor kept the long-forgotten grand piano, as if I had just coaxed him to play another piece, and my esteemed mentor only smiled, very, very slightly, a facsimile of a smile, and I took that as answer enough, and leaned back in.
“Ah,”—a sigh from his lips.
—It rained while we were kissing once more.
It was a light, gentle rain, and its soft music accompanied us as I accosted Barok van Zieks and we finally tumbled into his bed, rose petals and leaves flying everywhere as we still hungrily kissed each other. Someone had told me I was entirely too vocal in bed and perhaps that may be so, because he seemed determined to silence my sounds by aggressively taking a mile whenever I let down my guard and give him an inch—
I can’t really say that we… made love, that evening.
Perhaps this is how the fire feels when it meets ice, this incessant, pure excitement of seeing what happens when it melts it down until it becomes nothing but puddle.
—I seared all of these into my imperfect memories.
Barok van Zieks’s pupils were blown wide in his blue eyes as he took me in, literally and figuratively, but never forgetting even in the very moment when our souls touched that I was injured, and was therefore quick to reprimand me when I moved my bad hand too quickly or harshly. It was a carefully-studied passion, if such a thing exists, almost scientific in our scrutiny of each other’s bodies, marveling perhaps in the imperfections of each other, the white outlines of scars on his body a complement to mine.
“Unsightly, are they not?”
He said this as we slowly climbed down from the heights of our passion, when I was tenderly lavishing attention to the rest of his body by kissing my way down his thighs, his legs, to the ankles of his feet, and I beheld the scars that are also even on them, which I realized was made by many, many years of ballet as a boy, then as a young man—seeing the ugliness marring that pale skin was, perhaps, when I finally snapped out of my awed stupor and told him, in a ragged voice,—
“What do you mean?—You’re beautiful.”
---
“Among mankind,
there are many that deserve that name more than you,
and I prefer you, just as you are,
to those, who, under a human form,
hide a treacherous, corrupt, and ungrateful heart.”
---
x.
“ Il y avait une f-fois un marchand qui était extrêmement r-riche. Il avait six enfans— ”
“No, no.” A deep, rich chuckle in my ear. “Repeat after me. Enfans .”
“That’s what I said earlier.”
“No. You said, enfans .”
“I don’t hear a difference.”
“Ah.” Instead of returning my jab, he rested his head back against his pillows and gestured at the blue and gold book I held in my hands. Earlier, he had finally told me what the title means. La Belle et la Bête. The French tale, The Beauty and the Beast . Then, in the same breath, he ordered me to read it out loud to him. Dumb fool that I was, I had to take him up on his challenge. “Well, from the start. S’il te plaît. ”
I glared at him, and turned back to the book to read from the first line once more.
Even as I pretended to grumble, I think… I may prefer Barok van Zieks like this.
Later that evening, after everything that has happened between us (it made me strangely embarrassed to recount specifics), he seemed softer and more likely to succumb to fits of humor, more likely to just curl up in his bed, still quite naked from our earlier exertions and covered in nothing but the blanket, and gaze at me with eyes that almost made me burn with the self-consciousness of being so adored.
What a heavy responsibility, this, I realized. To be the object of Barok van Zieks’s unbridled affection. I have read enough of his childhood journal to know how much of himself he poured into others, as if thinking that something like that, such a single-minded act of giving himself up until he was emptied of everything, was what love was—and perhaps the shocking thing was just how unchanged that mentality of his was, as I had quickly discovered during the first two hours of taking him as a lover.
“ Il y avait une fois un marchand qui était extrêmement riche. I-Il avait six enfans, trois g-garçons et trois filles; et, comme ce marchand était un homme d’esprit, il... ” I became tongue-tied at the next word, and promptly fell silent. He had been listening with a sort of half-amused expression on his face during the entirety of the two sentences I struggled with, but when I stopped, he glanced at me with a quizzical look, and I disguised my weakness with a small cough and the action of pushing the book into his arms. “Y-You read this yourself. French is… too hard.”
“I didn’t know I took in a quitter for an apprentice,” he mused, calmly opening the book to the first page even as I glowered at him. But that glower soon melted away from my face as he obligingly read everything to me, in his beautiful cadence, often pausing to translate the lines for me in English, and I wondered what he may have had been if… if… perhaps, if he had not had such an ill-fated man as his elder brother—
“The Beast isn’t particularly bright, isn’t he?”
I said thus when he had finished reading and transliterating, absently picking up my undershirt from the floor, and he looked up from the book with a curious glint in his eyes at my comment.
“What a curious statement. Why do you say so?”
“Well, why fall in love with Beauty when it’s clear that they'll never be able to truly understand each other?”
Barok van Zieks was still staring at me. “Asougi, stop speaking in riddles.”
Ah, so he truly has not grasped what I had meant. “I’m not.” I shrugged the shirt on, and started buttoning it. “What I’m trying to say is, only another beast can understand the Beast's suffering.”
“Ah, of course.” He smiled. Not the smile of content that he had been doing for the past hour; one of his usual, sad ones. The one that screamed Help me; I am lost. “However, as much as they want to do so, the moon and the sun can never meet, can never see eye to eye.”
Barok van Zieks… you…
You should
stop speaking in riddles,
hypocrite.
---
“I know too well my own misfortune,
but then I love you with the tenderest affection.
However, I ought to think myself happy, that you will stay here;
promise me never to leave me.”
---
xi.
“My first kiss was with our neighbor’s daughter.”
I remembered Naruhodou Ryuunosuke confessing that to me one lifetime ago, when we were both nothing but mere students, nothing but classmates who shared the same club. I think we had been sweeping up leaves behind the archery dojo back then, something that our archery club seniors had ordered us to do, an unwanted obligation that I took with a tired resignation and he with a troubled sigh.
Heh. Unwanted obligation. That seemed like such a redundancy, I realized now, a few years later. An obligation can only be an obligation precisely because it is unwanted.
Even with my fragmented memory, I can still remember the strong scent of the slightly-damp soil, the gentle brown of the leaves that were partially crushed under my broom, the gentle rustling of the branches of the quiet trees that surrounded us. The red headband was not yet on my forehead; that would come later—much, much later—
Naruhodou Ryuunosuke had the knack of saying simple things that could unsettle me. Even this simple statement, of him having already kissed a girl when he was just sixteen, should not have been as big a shock as it had been to me back then. Kissing a girl was… was a natural thing to do at that age, right? Natural—
“Archery is all about losing your sense of self once the arrow is drawn,” Naruhodou once told me, too. I also remembered being unsettled by this. “I don’t think I can do that as well as you could, Asougi.”
I wonder. If Naruhodou thinks so…
Am I that good at lying to myself, then?
I was consumed by such thoughts while I kissed Barok van Zieks’s shoulder from behind, and was rewarded by a deep, longing sigh. I trailed my fingers down the map of thin scars on his bare back, evidently long healed—and wondered what could have caused all of this, because they do not look like anything that could have been caused by bladed weapons—
He seemed to have cottoned on to what I was thinking, because he was looking over his shoulder with a certain look that I had only seen him wear when he did not want me asking unnecessary questions, and I quickly placated him by kissing his nape, that one sensitive spot that seems to quell his anger more effectively than anything else—
“Have you ever been with a woman, sir?”
I impertinently asked this question afterwards, when I was sitting on the side of his bed and lighting up the cigarette that he had handed me. I thought that Barok van Zieks was the type of person who’d loathe such a vice, but it turns out that he does smoke recreationally, at very select times. The cigarette that he had provided was evidently expensive and of a higher grade than the cheap stuff I usually bought in London town, almost sweet and fragrant, and I puffed at it happily as he stretched lazily in bed, almost like a contented cat.
During the early morning like this, before he even does his usual way of taming his hair, Barok van Zieks’s curly hair feels soft to the touch as I impulsively put a hand out and stroked it, and he closed his eyes and murmured, sleepily, “You’re dropping ash on my bed, Asougi,” so that was the end of that loving gesture of mine.
“—Answer my question.”
“I tried, once. A very long time ago. I had been young, and foolish, and it was the fashion.” He opened his eyes a crack, and the blue of his eyes looked almost gray in the soft morning light. “But in the end it was for naught. I paid her a guinea to say that I had lain with her, instead.”
“A rich price for silence.”
“Nothing is as valuable as silence, Asougi. Which is a lesson that I’ve learned at a great cost.” He lowered his eyes, pale lashes glittering like silver, and I was once again transfixed by their beauty. “Perhaps Klimt had been the only one who had known that I ran away, but perhaps his best friend had also been privy to his thoughts, as he had always been. I would never know.”
His best friend… I was asking my question before I could stop myself.
“Did he ever talk about his son? Asougi Genshin, I mean.”
Barok van Zieks was gazing at me curiously; suddenly embarrassed by my question, I turned away, half-consumed cigarette dangling from my lips, and I was slightly relieved when he did not move to touch me, as I was sure I would have immediately retreated to my room if he had made any half-hearted gesture of gentleness. So absorbed I was in these thoughts, that I almost did not catch his answer.
“Yes,” he said, softly, “and I only realized back then, during that trial, that it is not more apparent how much he truly loved you than when he left you that will.”
I stood up, suddenly cold in my bareness, and unceremoniously threw the remains of the cigarette into a nearby vase of flowers. It sizzled a little as it made contact with the water, and for a moment I wondered if my mentor would reprimand me for such an unrefined act, but there was only silence.
I glanced over my shoulder to look back at him; and for some reason, Barok van Zieks had put up his arm to obscure most of his face from view.
---
“I find I have the highest gratitude, esteem, and friendship;
I will not make him miserable,
And were I to be so ungrateful
I should never forgive myself.”
---
xii.
The old garden roses of the van Zieks manor bloom throughout the year, but they blossom into their best during the fall.
This was one of my very last memories in this place before I left—the white roses that bloomed so sweetly under the red foliage of the trees—
They were normally such somber things during winters, that when they blossomed into white, it was as if the entire place had changed. It really was quite a charming place to stroll in; there was a particular bench, half-hidden behind some of those rose hedges, that I liked visiting so that I can think or study in peace. In summer, other flowers have had their share of the spotlight, but once the winds turn a little colder and the lawn starts to get cluttered by piles of red and gold leaves from the old oak trees, the garden turns into a veritable bower of white iceberg roses.
“You look deep in thought.”
He said this while we were poring over our maps and diagrams in the gazebo in the center of the garden. The breeze was sweet and cool, and the scent of the roses were still quite delicate, even though they were at least a thousand-strong. I had to admit, studying in this kind of place isn’t… half-bad. “Of course I am,” I replied, and he deliberately dipped the nib of his pen in the inkwell that we had been sharing, as if to buy himself more time to answer, before finally asking, almost gently, “What are you thinking of?”
He used to ask me that all the time, and I admit, even now, as sort of his bedwarmer every, ahem, evening—that much has not changed, him trying to puzzle me out, and me doing the exact same thing. I’ve always suspected that, in these little games of ours where he just affixes me with cool blue eyes and I stare back defiantly at him, he was slowly discovering what I was made of and I was gaining none at all from him, and that was perhaps what frustrated me the most.
“I am thinking,” I said, slowly, “of what will happen to you, come… November.”
“To me ?” He seemed genuinely surprised, as if the thought had not occurred to him at all, and I had to suppress the sudden rising mixture of anger and sorrow rising in my throat. I lift my teacup to my lips to cover my trembling lip, though it did not cover the tremor of my hand as I set it back down rather clumsily on its saucer, causing it to clink hastily. Of course, my mentor, ever the product of rigid table manners, did not miss the gesture, and he placed his hand over mine to steady it before I sent the cup flying out on the grass—
Without his glove, his skin felt like a brightly burning fire against mine, and he gazed at our linked hands, as if almost surprised at how cold mine was, and then he curled his fingers against the back of my hand, and held me steady.
My lungs called for air, and I suddenly realized that I had been rather… breathless.
“…Sir?”
“What will happen to me, huh? —What a curious question.”
He was still holding my hand. I could barely glance up to look at his eyes.
“It is time for a break. Will you walk with me? Asougi.”
He took his hand away, and rose from his chair. Nonplussed, I followed him with only my eyes until he was already a good distance away, and he turned and called over his shoulder—
“Come. It is a beautiful day to stop and smell the roses.”
I gazed after him, and reluctantly stood up, and then that one question again flashed through my mind—
What are you thinking of, Barok van Zieks?
And why that sad smile—
“—I still think of that first time when you kissed me back in the hothouse.”
He said this as he led me through the rose hedges, which stood a little higher than his waist, and I followed him without a word.
“Why did you do that?”
“—I do whatever I like, sir.”
The exact same words I had told him that evening when he first confronted me about my behavior, but somehow it came out… different this time.
The white blooms swayed as one against the breeze, as we walked amongst them, and I found myself staring at the rose petal that had become stuck under the lapel at the back of his gray coat. It fluttered feebly against the wind, and I was just about to reach out and tug it free when…
The sweet, high wind arrived, and the petal was dislodged from its place, and fluttered into the pale blue of the sky.
We walked like this around the garden, for minutes and minutes, nothing connecting us together but the silence that had settled between the two of us, and I was finally convinced that nothing else was going to come out of his mouth when—
“I am… sorry. Asougi.”
He did not turn around, and I think I wouldn’t want him to.
The way he said those words made me think that he was both addressing it to me… and not to me. Somebody else.
Of course.
“There is a part of me that thinks,” he said, slowly, “that, maybe… it would be… selfish of me, to keep you here. With me.”
“It is. Incredibly so. But…”
He finally turned to look at me, and the child hiding in those eyes—I can see him, clearly—
“Well, Barok van Zieks,” I said, and tossed my head proudly, “be selfish for once, and tell me to stay, and let me break your heart when I tell you I’m still going back.”
He was smiling. But this time, it was happier, and I think he knew what I was getting at. And so, he said, quite seriously, “Stay here, with me. Kazuma.”
Ah. Why is it that my name sounds so sweet when it is from his lips—
This accursed name—
In the corner of my eye, amid the hundreds of white roses, I thought I saw one valiantly-blooming red rose.
“I love you,” I said, and he flushed lightly, and his slight, almost-mischievous smile just grew when I said, “but for now, I am… still going back. Wait for me, okay?”
He’ll be okay.
I look at that smile, and I determine this.
He’ll be fine.
---
“There was only you in the world,
generous enough to be won by the goodness of my temper,
and in offering you my crown
I can’t discharge the obligations I have to you.”
---
to be continued.—