Chapter Text
i. [osaka, august 2006]
Crickets were chirping and you still couldn’t nerve yourself to move. You couldn’t look anywhere else but above, clouds grey and dense and not a single star in sight. Soothing darkness—the sky here unfolded wide enough to bury a body under. All it took was a glance down for the dirt around your nails to turn your stomach and squeeze your heart into your throat. Smell of mud and rain, and blood, dried out, crawled into your nostrils way too quickly for you to dismiss the gravity of the moment. It stayed with you like the remnants of a blue tattoo, the kill imprinted on your trembling fingertips and under your skin.
You still weren’t convinced that burying him would be the best option. For the story would foul up soon if the disappearance got to the public eye: news and cameras, police sirens howling about, an unfortunate hiker stumbling across a pile of dirt. Cold interrogation rooms, cold stares, no way out. But you wouldn’t question his judgement either. “No, not the port”, he’d told you, scratching the edge of his eyebrow before he’d rest his hand over the pliers. Pulled a tooth out and you looked away. “The port has its way to turn against one.”
With your conscious already threatening to shatter under the heaviness of the act, it was difficult to believe you could artfully come up with a good cover-up for any disclosure that was to lead them to you. In truth—you had neither the duplicity nor the brutality to pass through it with an unstained image, and the only one who carried both would only let them unearth for the right price. Knees cold in ripped jeans and caught in feverish tension, about to flinch at the slightest touch of lance-tall sedge coiling around you with the wind that came, you tugged them tightly at your chest. You forced your gaze back at the sky, lest you vomited your guts away.
Toji’s voice burst through the dark like a butcher’s knife, thick and rough and gravelly.
“Oi, don’t tell me you’d just sit there like a useless fucking flower.” When he propped himself against the shovel by his feet, he unceremoniously shoved a cigarette into his mouth. Matchstick dashed against cardboard and lit, snuffed out with a flick of a hand. “Be a good sport and fetch the bastard for me, will ya?”
Behind him, the pit was primed with six feet depth and the perfect human span. Gold glinted off a Rolex rolling down the wrist, of which discrepancy with the rest of the get-up was so vivid there was no doubt it wasn’t his own, although he wore it with pride like splatters of blood on a hitman’s knuckles.
Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?
All that stood for a reminder of how messed up the last three days were, and the nights to come, an image that unlocked something even more distressing, more unsteady, leaving you in a silent tremble. But after giving the sky a last dazzling look—pure dimness that wouldn’t compare itself with the city, where the gray is more amber and the stars are replaced with headlights—you eventually swayed on your feet and the way to the car’s trunk felt like floating inside of a dream.
The most lucid and twisted dream you’ve ever had; and neither the dreadful smell of death around your shoulder, the salty air brought by the sea, nor the yellowish-brown sting on your left thigh, could slap you awake into the real world. From that night on, it became harder and harder to tell whether you could ever be able to dream of anything else.
ii. [tokyo, october 2011]
White neon hummed overhead, holding up the faultless rhythm of keyboard tapping.
You’d often been told you looked angry when concentrating. Eyebrows dragged down, wrinkled, disfigured. But you found peace in the isolation of work. A quiet sense of existence, a space edged between the past and the future where you didn’t need to worry about what turn awaited in your life. So you tapped and faxed and drew papers into files, answered to calls when needed and your mind was content just to have something to keep busy on. Knowing there was always something to do was enough. Working was enough.
When you didn’t work, you read. Anything and everything that fell into your hands. Really. From big chunky novels to pocket volumes to random pieces of poetry you’d saved into your phone, so that there always lingered something by your computer—besides conspicuous piles of paper, besides files and stapler and post-it notes.
You didn’t have many friends, not in the regular sense. Talked only when you had to and ate lunch with whomever seemed self-preoccupied enough not to ask much about your day. It goes without saying that the last wasn’t that difficult, for which you supposed you felt grateful enough. You didn’t hate people. Especially not in the way it looked you did; and like most of us out there, you surely didn’t like to eat alone.
No less than two years had passed since you joined this company and you couldn’t say you didn’t partake in the guiltless escapes of working life, hurled over the terrace railing in the long overtime dusk to burrow a social smoke. Only for a quick environmental change before you slipped back to your cubicle, like a cockroach craving for cramped dark spaces, only peeking out for a bite of food and a breath of fresh air.
Gregor Samsa was right when he came to consider himself, along with the rest of his kind, to be nothing if not compliant—a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone. While you reckoned that true, you still accepted overtime tasks for the simple reason you didn’t feel comfortable with going home. When there wasn’t anything left to do, registry signed and briefcase in hand, you’d wander round the subway and take off at least by the third ride.
Drag and send. You closed tabs on your computer, clicked a reflexive refresh on desktop, shut it down with a distressed yawn. There wasn’t a breathing soul inside the building besides maybe the night clerk and an unfocused-looking guy (Takemura) whose bride-to-be had fucked off with a broker-dealer just a few days earlier.
Drawing your wrap coat on, you flashed him a close-to-empathetic look and headed out. Then you pressed your eyes shut for a moment, taking it to doze out from the sheer immaculateness that had settled as jarringly as a weird form of tinnitus, only to be stricken by the heavy mass of colour and movement that carried themselves under the same name: Tokyo.
Tokyo. With its overly packed crosswalks, flickering banners, blinding neon. With its lukewarm bent for pollution; sugar smell; gush of amalgamated perfumes. A cyber-heaven of hurry and kawaii, electricity cables and side-street lanterns. Although it felt nauseating at times, serenity read upon your face as you drifted aimlessly across crowded sidewalks and by high-end stores and dango stalls. Losing yourself in thoughts about everything, and nothing all the same; blank staring at traffic lights before they turned green; facing your own reflection until you were completely deaf to the passing of time.
Night-time veiled the city with specific picturesque, the dazzling type to be added new terrible decades in music videos and cinema, “a new life awaits for you in the off-world colonies”, a coarse man reading the newspaper in front of an electronics shop, “the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure”. You took it all in like a vulgar shot of whiskey, fists thrust deep in pockets, slowing the step when close to a heap of metro station stairs.
Neon flicker turning to all-white. Echo of computerised voices, rustle of jackets and convenience store bags, you dug in your pockets for your pass. The minutes spent waiting for the upcoming ride were particularly heavy—but here you were, in the end, watching a pair of lights enlarge inside the tunnel and you edged through the murmuring press of bodies to step aboard.
To break free of yourself is cathartic, but temporary, to drop back into your consciousness is more brutal than the soul could handle.
Once in front of your apartment door in Koenji, you unlocked it warily and peered in for a glimpse of TV glow; theatric yelling and commercial glitz and sofa creak as your brother adjusted his head on the armrest.
“You smell like a tobacco shop,” he said when you approached. There was a monotone buried in his throat, something dense and unsmiling.
You paused. You’d chewed a pack of gum on the way home, sprayed a mist of perfume right before you gathered your things and left.
He didn’t turn his head to face you, carried on with a sneer you knew was there. “You know what I think of this stuff.”
The briefcase fell onto parquet with a thump; you crossed your legs as you took a seat on the armrest, your voice levelled without effort. “Must’ve stuck on me from the others.”
“Bullshit.” But when you shifted your eyes to face him, no one was there. A car passed your block and its lights unfurled through shades in pale rusty streaks, specks of dust whirling within. You unconsciously adjusted yourself on the armrest, parquet cruel and cold and unforgiving as you felt about with the tip of your foot. Your stare was blank, your breathing slow.
There was no one to talk to, but a bottle on your shelf and a secret waiting for you just hundreds of kilometres away. The low rattle of the TV and the muffled buzz of your cell phone inside your coat.
iii. [osaka, february 2006]
Fate has a funny way to trial the flawed; it brought Toji into your life when your humanity felt the feeblest, tumbled at the edge of a shit bar with your hand clasped around a glass. Alcohol washed over your guts warmly, bittersweet. But your thoughts were a steady brick wall that no wave was to break through; and with each sip that you took, each gulp, you were if not irritated at the stack of anxiety that stayed untouched in the back of your mind. Your voice was a tender model of exhaustion when you asked the barkeep for another drink. They looked you over, nodded, decided not to say anything and you were thankful for their lack of concern.
A gust of wind whispered through the lanterns that tapped and pattered against the windows at your back; if imagination didn’t play any tricks on you, you’d say they were laughing at you from outside, a caustic sound addressed exclusively to your ears. They knew. They didn’t pity you, didn’t grieve. Only gossiped.
Here you avoided other people’s stares; wouldn’t risk chancing upon any familiar faces, wouldn’t gather the strength to answer their questions if you did, and if there was anything they wanted to know you kept it between yourself and the amber in your glass. The amber blinking off the lights overhead, the dimness lurking from outside. Although part of you knew your thoughts were safe here, in this place, all cluttered and narrow and overworked with clientele that pushed their eyes into their drinks to pass the time. Failed sons, mistreated wives, tired corporates. Something selfish in you found comfort in their misery. The air was thick with sweat and booze and fried chicken. You sat with both of your elbows on the bar.
Someone was peeling an orange at your left while a blue flash of light reflected across the right side of your glass. By the corner of your eye you seized the tiny television set hung over the bar. You didn’t realise at first; yet an unnamed urgency kept you from looking away and you broke into a cold sweat as bits from the news header eventually took shape inside your head—Final Local Missing Reports.
You froze. The sound was off; picture was slightly faded and unfolded at poor quality. A phone number accompanied a row of text by the sight of a woman reporter solemnly holding the mic for a contrived man with coat and badge. Local, Missing. A couple of beats later you found yourself sloshing around your drink, and it felt like a sea of daggers against your throat. Missing.
You tried to read his name on their lips; the name of your brother, your thoughts, your curse. At this moment he might be sunk into his couch, Fortune Wheel flashing in the background, eyes bloodshot and blank before an empty document into his laptop. Ceramic shattered under his feet, the ghost of a fight crunching and clattering when touched—the same that pulsed upon your wrists, once gripped on a little too tightly. You remembered that part of him still lingered in one pocket of your coat.
Could it be that someone would sense his absence? Possibility clutched your stomach whilst the objects whirled around the TV at a nauseating pace.
But whichever name starred on their list you’d never know. When they died, and how soon they were found. You held back the impulse to lean over the remote and turn the volume on. A couple of sequences with a few of Tokyo’s kōban buildings, then focus turned back to the detective who talked with a smirk pressed upon his face. He flashed a look into the camera and, for one uneasy second, you thought the blue in his eyes winked directly at you—do it, I dare you. With restless fingers you tapped your nails against your glass. You felt sick. Sweat bead down off a temple, slowly, hesitant.
Elbow thumped against wood, violent and threatening, and you flinched as it vibrated across your side of the bar. Shivers traced riddles down your spine, a gut feeling, fear for all things ballistic and callous and deadly. You paid attention to your wingspan and suddenly realised how incredulously small you were in the face of the world.
There was a man lingering only two stools farther from the TV set—steady in his seat, loose in oversized sweater, gracefully hovering a flask between thumb and forefinger. He rushed it to his lips and swallowed, mouth carved with a scar at the corner. The world trembled once more as he set it back on the bar. Pushed restless buttons on his phone, sighed, flapped it close with little or no respect for it. It was reflexive. Something told you it wouldn’t take him long to reach for it again and repeat.
The news were off while the programme soon cut into commercial break. Someone leaned forward to reach the remote, switched channels into oblivion—from movie to reality show to fishing programme—until there he was again, the man from the news, this time in suit and tie and slouched in a guest chair by the host. Your shoulders jolted despite your better judgement; instinctively, shamelessly, you prayed for the volume to start itself up.
In a brief moment of caution your eyes swam back to the man in the sweater. When his oden was ready he split his chopsticks with a cracking sound—danger and delicacy, brutality and stealth—twirled between fingers as words spilled out in the room like concrete.
“You’d better not switch from here, small guy,” he said, nonchalantly, in a dry Kanto dialect. “Some of us may be in mood for politics at this hour.”
And it was too late to draw back your stare, for he already caught it like a sparrow by its tail. You fluttered your wings hopelessly. When he looked, he looked right into your soul, happened upon something he found entertaining enough and his lips curled into a smirk as he did. The lanterns rattled, giggled, the lights blinked. They knew. He knows.
You turned your head, your chest heaved in a silent staccato. Breathe. Despite the numbness that pooled your limbs at a dazzling velocity and the sinking feeling that threatened to hurl your guts out, you didn’t move, talk or shifted in your seat, only rattled the ice in your glass and asked for another. Low, clinical. Conversation carried on across from your right shoulder.
“What?” the remote holder said. “You want to watch that?”
The other only chuckled, took a bite from his food and talked with his mouth full. “It be a problem, if I did?” His aura was different from the rest of them; he was viciousness, prowl. If there was any sign of the misery that had led him here, amongst you all, he didn’t show it.
A shrug, a long breath. “Have a ball,” and the remote slid in his direction, clinked when hit ceramic. It was a disinterested movement. The man in the sweater didn’t bother to take it, nor to look up at the TV. Steam hovered up from the dumpling between his chopsticks.
“Fushiguro Toji,” the barkeep set down your refilled drink with a tap, towel flipped over shoulder. They were a middle-aged man with dark circles under eyes and a burnout look you recognised better than you’d admit. You took a long sip while they added on. “He’s not from around ‘ere, this fellow, but I can tell by the look in his eyes no good comes from the likes of him.” A warning, was all, no trace of cordiality in their tone.
Slightly brushing the edge of your left elbow, peels of orange were picked together and wrapped in a napkin. You didn’t shift your focus, not this time. Looking meant extra worry that could’ve easily ended with a confession and a pair of handcuffs clasped around your wrists. You wanted to respond the barkeep, half-tempted to ask some more about this Fushiguro who’d eyed your soul like darts—aim, throw and slash. Maybe you shouldn’t. Voices were muffled with laughter and drunkenness and clink of china, on the TV the cop seemed eager to answer a set of questions addressed by phone.
You drank, cooled off, the last bits of scotch slid down as dry as you were when alcohol occupied your mind and you eventually asked for the bill. Paid with some weather-bitten cash that you were more than relieved to find in your pockets, next to where metal touched your fingertips so slightly. The room spun with you when you swayed from your seat, and your head pulsed—hadn’t expected that to hit you as fast as it did.
Curtains spitted you out with clutched stomach and a splitting headache.
…
You weren’t surprised to see him the next evening, although it was the way he simply appeared next to your seat you couldn’t quite believe. He greeted you impassively, as you knew he would, primed in the same napped sweater and with a bitter commodity that stunned you without trying. You watched him raise a glass to his mouth, wipe the remnants with a thumb.
He looked larger in proximity, stronger, hair dark and dishevelled and overgrown into eyes. They were off-putting, these types of men. You didn’t need any barkeep to tell you Fushiguro Toji was someone to settle into a routine for his own good. Less habit and more convenience, an ugly stage play of usuals and fixed schedules. You related to that, somehow. Most of all you wanted him to know that you did.
Plainspoken and no judgemental; you could say it was the way he talked which had you stick around, when he waved off your attempt to call him by his second name, and was right to tell you Toji’s fine, you’re too uptight for this shithole. It fell convenient, how he told you as little of his past as he asked of yours, how you drank your liquor in silence without thinking too hard about your choice of words. You felt safe with him, he kept your own demons at bay.
Oden and whiskey and a special eye for horse races, Toji himself seemed content when you continued to see him without suggesting a change of context or scenery. The unspoken agreement between you felt comfortable as it was. You never wished for more than what you already had; didn’t keep his contacts; never wondered where he was going when his seat stayed empty for what might have seemed an eternity. For days, maybe weeks, wind bleeding hollow through his absence and into your clothes. You never asked for a lover, weren’t sure you’d find it in him to begin with, but you truly liked to watch how his mouth curved when he drank.
Knowing as little was the pattern—it was better that way, simpler—so you made it a habit to concentrate on his cologne to keep yourself from asking gauche things like what was with the muddy scent he sometimes carried that no booze or cigarette smoke could’ve covered.
…
One time while the summer heat rendered the air thicker than you were used to, he bit on the letters TMPD and your first slip-up was when you asked if he was a cop; “there, in Tokyo.”
You didn’t dare to look above the rim of your glass or the cigarette burning in his ashtray, but you could tell from the low laugh vibrating through his throat that the thought entertained him. “That’d be pretty unfortunate for you, yeah?”
His voice sent an unnerving chill down your spine. You could only shrug.
Toji downed his drink, gestured for another round with a lazy swing of a finger. “Only that I’m not—” way far from that, you’d almost hear him continue, but he didn’t.
Speak through your vocal chords, your choice of words. “Luck of the draw, I’d say.”
iv. [tokyo, october 2011]
Sometimes your stroll led inside convenience stores or quiet, concrete-laden, neighbourhood supermarkets. They were stark places, clinical places, a ghost of the usual turmoil that spoke homemade dinner and routine. You wandered absent-mindedly across aisles, by glossy packings and pastel hues, not sure there was anything you needed at home. In most cases you did. Other times, you grabbed handfuls of them, products you liked and products you might try, regretting the minute you’d chosen not to take a basket at the chance.
It almost reminded you of your working place, save a livelier blotch of colour with sodas lined up on shelves and the shuffle of a kid’s feet while he was dragged along by his mother’s hand. Somewhere else an old lady studied the impurities on a ginger root. Two teenagers giggled behind the candy aisle. Neon hummed and flickered, frozen as it wrapped them all together under the same tile-white glare. A low continuous beep emerged from checkout.
You stopped at the fruit and vegetable department, your attention grabbed by a rich arrangement of berries. They stared back in anticipation, all plumpness and freshness and tints of pink which would look better on a kitchen counter. Showered under sink water to top over plush pastry, whipped cream, be exhibited in glass bowls by other eatables. You rearranged the goods in your arms before you bent downwards and added a box of raspberries to your pile.
“You need a bag, miss?” the cashier said when you hurled your buyings on the checkout counter—flour and noodles, fruits and yoghurt. She was a young woman, seemingly in her twenties. She swiped products across the scanner with the delicacy of someone who hoped they wouldn’t work there for long.
“That would be great,” you were rummaging for cash, a smile in your voice. “Thank you.”
She handed the plastic bag along with the change, you bowed again and the doors slid open as you stepped out. Like a portal to another dimension, they pushed forth the air and the noise, the wind that announced the onset of rain and the cars that gathered around an apartment building not far from your own. Heels clicking on concrete, plastic rustling in hand, you passed a couple of uniforms who were marking the scene with tape. A woman crying, another comforting her. The sky slowly became a magnetic blend of cobalt and ruby.
You pushed a raspberry into your mouth.
v. [osaka, july 2006]
“They’re gonna eat you alive, you know?” it was caustic, disinterested, while your drink was being poured into your glass. Toji hardly talked on a personal level; all part of his choleric game of efficiency that almost felt like negligence as it settled on him. He wore the thing well, like a second skin. A new bruise blossomed however on your left arm when you met him that night, a darker shade below distracted eyes, and one thing he could reckon was that all these came with a decision.
The certainty in his voice unsettled you. “That’s how capitalism works,” you said, taking the chance to turn your surprise into something else. “That’s why there’s places like this to unwind for a second.”
Toji eyed you incredulously, smirked into his glass. “You know what I meant, sweetheart.”
“Know what?” swirled your drink, set it back down, reluctant to let it blur your judgement. It didn’t take long for him to copy the gesture.
“Really want to make a gig out of it, don’t you?” Toji threw an ankle over one knee, took a cigarette out of his pockets that he later brought between his lips. The flicker of matchstick was swift, like a fracture, the exhale slow and through showed teeth. “Bad move.”
The word ‘gig’ drew a frown on your face, though it left just as quickly as it arrived. You dragged your stool a fraction farther from the cloud of tobacco. “Sorry, I really don’t get what you’re talking about,” you said without missing a beat.
“Funny how that works,” Toji didn’t take you as challenging enough to be looked at. Elbow on the bar, cheek propped in a fist, while smoke trailed and hovered from the corner of his mouth: “Just thought you’d like a second opinion on this. Before you blow a shot in the dark, take yourself in the leg.”
“You don’t strike me as the type to think twice,” words came out more honeyed than they sounded in your mind. Like silk, your gaze brushed the path from jaw to shoulder, rested a bit longer where his T-shirt lined the skin.
There was pride in his voice, in how his cheekbone reached eyelashes and his lip hiked to match. “I don’t hit twice.”
“It’s good I don’t have a gun, then.”
Another drag, another chuckle. “Maybe,” Toji flickered the ashes in a glass ashtray by his elbow, veins weaving and mapping forearm, all the way up to wrists. “But you do have someone in mind.”
It took some to register. You opened your mouth to respond, the pretence of innocence still trying to escape the knot that had settled so tightly in your throat, then closed it. You froze. You stammered. Meanwhile Toji’s temper grew weary of your antics.
“Easy, kid,” he waved you off. “Won’t report you, whatever you decide to do. Honestly don’t give a damn about what y’all be up to out there,” he curled his fingers around the glass, and that was when you caught his knuckles, battered, the dirt beneath his nails.
You feared Fushiguro Toji; his violence, his hostility, the way he took all sound in the room and turned it into something your senses couldn’t define but feel, relentlessly, hopelessly, tensing up in your chest. Hallucinating like the radiant hues of blue and ochre which danced with the smoke and crawled in the reflection of his eyes. You feared him the same way you feared death, while there was always something about the unknown that navigated your actions.
Discretion meant nothing when faced with a presence like him; while all your life was about riding out the storm, he was a tempest at its peak.
“You think everyone is worth breathing?” with this out, you felt surprisingly light-headed.
“Sounds like you ask for permission.”
You shrugged. “An answer, more like. A motive.”
“Hard to imagine. You bite your nails at crime reportages as you got all of them,” simplicity adhered to Toji’s tone, to his movements as he flickered the ashes and blew out nicotine.
There was a pause.
You shamelessly indulged the need for an extra swallow. Kissed the rim for longer than intended, pleasant warmth numbing flesh. “That was different,” you hardly heard it through the tremendous beating of your heart.
“Different,” hung in the air, loosely and gracefully, expended with the exhale.
“Mhm.”
“If that’s what you call it.”
Your eyes slipped to the TV set lingering in the right corner, now turned off, greenish tube screen on wooden shelf. It stood there like the eye of a storm you weren’t keen to participate in. “It was a sensitive topic. My mom vanished when I was little, you know.”
“Poor you,” he sneered, the details on his face gradually fading behind layers of smoke, his contour a washed-out amber in dim luminescence. Rust blossomed on wretched metal, trinkets that were forgotten and unloved and left to age in someone’s drawer.
“Don’t need your sympathy,” an out-loud thought.
“No, you don’t.” Shadow lanced and sliced his face in half, a cold eye sniping out like a bullet. “Stay out of lockup, is what you’ll need.”
You hesitated, but you couldn’t recognise your voice when you gathered the nerve to say it: “He’s a no-one. They’ll hardly notice.”
Indifferent, wry. “Tell this to the bluecoat who gets wet every time they shove a camera into his face. Young ones are the most determined, as they say.”
The barkeep returned with a fresh round, holding you by the corner of their eye as Toji pushed a new glass under your nose, took a full swallow from his. He didn’t thank them, didn’t bother to look up. You dragged yourself out of your thoughts and nodded them a sign of reassurance. Wind creeped through curtains, quiet, carrying with it a wintry cold that seeped into your skin. And maybe it was the resolve in the way you held your glass which made the barkeep occupy themselves with other clientele. The steadiness.
“And if you helped?” you said, studying the acid twitch of Toji’s scar. “Would that change anything?”
“Maybe you misheard me,” his voice was the perfect cocktail of cruelty and adrenaline, forearm touching glass as he leaned forward. Close, uncomfortably. You barely heard it when the flask drew closer towards you, a faint creak against the rugged surface. “I’m not the guy to get involved in other people’s shit. Especially for charity.”
You talked slowly, choking on your own words. “Don’t have much money on me.”
“That’s alright,” he said, smile cocked into a side, forefinger reaching the edge of your collar. It was hardly a touch, just enough to guide your eyes to his. You could read into his scent before he took the moment to thrive on your desperation, all booze and smoke and chaos. “Sweet things like you should surely know how to work this out.”
But there was something else which might tickle Fushiguro Toji’s relish, you knew. Something heavy and valuable and continuing to occupy too much space in your pockets since the day of the incident.
Without warning you plucked the cigarette from Toji’s mouth, surprised he let you when you gave it a long rattlesnake pull. Until the end died out and it pressed your lungs with something not less bitter than your heart; an excruciating sting you could get used to. The hitch on Toji’s smile did not waver. If anything, it only deepened when your exhale hovered past his shoulder.
The watch was still warm when you pulled it out of your coat, diamonds lined on immaculate gold and around dark dial, sparkling like ice cubes in cognac. You ran a touch across the straps, a weird nauseating feeling taking over as you thanked the flaws that had plotted in your favour. For Toji was greed, and you had been once envy.
You subtly pushed the watch in his direction. Toji blinked.
“There’s more, in my brother’s racks,” you said, sourly, uncontrollably flat. “He’s a no-one, like I said. Still all the family fortune came to him.”
“Family feud, huh,” he pondered as his hands wasted no time to get hold of the watch. Turning it on all sides, he chuckled, with an undertone of something bitter like self-irony. “My personal favourites.”
“That means we’re settled?” you raised a brow, impatience clutching your guts.
In a blink of decisiveness, Toji retrieved the cigarette from between your lips and stubbed it out in the ashtray. With the other hand he reached for a small piece of paper from his pockets. A business card, a phone number—he was greed.
Momentum filled you with an incredible amount of hope and you chose to ignore the bad man eyes that were seizing you when he admitted: “Let’s just say it’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”