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prelude
A knock sounds at the door, the hour late and his limbs heavy with the exhaustion of a hard day’s work. His scars ache too, with the equally simple promise of a cold, rainy day to come tomorrow. It hasn’t started yet and Hiromi still finds himself reluctant to move and hoping this is a mere delivery, or a guest knocking at the wrong apartment.
Even before, days like that always made him less inclined to work, and more inclined to melancholia. Now, they make work actively uncomfortable, and the melancholia is worse since it's winter.
The forecast had promised twelve hours of a chilly misty drizzle; he’d stopped for bath salts on the way back from Shizuoka. Ijichi doesn't mind small favors, even on the back of a four hour round trip drive, and Higuruma has learned to ask them.
Shibuya Station reopened three months ago. Nobody from Jujutsu High goes there unless it's for work; better he have a detour for bath salts and groceries than ask Ijichi to pick him up or drop him off at that place. Shinjuku is worse for him and Ieiri, which has done nothing but make Hiromi grateful that he doesn't travel outside of work, and even more grateful that work is happy to sponsor flights or cars as needed.
The world of sorcery is slow, recovering still from the grinding, screeching halt. Recovering into something better, and Hiromi always keeps jokes about working in and for flawed systems tucked behind his teeth.
Another knock, urgent. A shade off desperate. Hiromi extends senses that are still rusty, picks up a hint of unfamiliar cursed energy.
He’s curious rather than wary; he opens the door, and sees –
Shimizu.
Looking not quite the same as she did the last time he saw her, not one but two lifetimes ago, before the court case that snapped what had been left of his sanity in a way that he’d rebuilt, slowly and painfully, over the years. But looking similar. New strain in her eyes, new-old tears to her clothes, a tremor to the mouth that had given him a winning smile and wished him luck that day, seared indelibly into his mind, before it’d ended in, well. Blood. Gore. Not his client’s, at least, but Hiromi knows they hadn’t survived what came after.
“Higuruma-san,” she says, only she doesn’t sound relieved, or like something out of a hallucination. She sounds wary, rather than curious, and it seems practiced though unsuitable.
“Shimizu?” he asks. He can barely believe it. A curse – but no, it doesn’t feel like one. A curse user – but no, this is not a face that someone else could wear, even if a cursed technique like that existed. Hiromi’s never breathed a word about her to anyone in these years.
They’re still on the threshold. He’s still disheveled from a long day, jacket discarded, shirt rumpled with the top two buttons undone.
“Do you want to come in? You should – you should come in. How are you here? I thought,” he pauses. Lets silence make it clear.
Her eyes drag over him, then she frowns. A little, then a lot.
“I – no. No, I don’t think I should. I’m just, um. I’m just stopping by?” she tries, ending in a laugh that’s too brittle to be genuine. “I didn’t – I overshot it, maybe, I just wanted to get away , and to find you.”
“Here I am,” he says, helpless.
Then her words register. Then her appearance again.
“Shimizu. You haven’t aged.”
Her eyes are wide as she looks back at him.
“You have.” She tiptoes up, her fingers brushing at his temples where grey has started to creep in. “Here, and here, even if – well. It might not be the job. You wouldn’t be home so early, when there were lives on the line.”
A mirror held up to his past, and it cracks right down the middle. Lives were on the line. Lives have been saved.
“It’s – I have a different job now, that’s true. It suits me better. How did you get here?” he repeats. It feels more urgent now. A ghost, and a memory, all wrapped up in one; a curse, maybe, to everyone who’s lived in this world longer than him.
“It’s too late.” Shimizu is shaking her head now, stepping away. She’s never said that to him before, never been anything but unflinchingly optimistic, even towards the end when they’d both known the unspoken outcome, every single time, and he was crumbling and there was nothing either of them could do about it. Maybe she’d been crumbling too.
“That’s what you always think when you start to lose it in your thirties,” Hiromi tries. A joke. A bid for a laugh, an explanation, for her to come inside so he can coax any of those from her. “But then you hit forty and it turns out to all be smooth sailing. Mostly smooth. Sometimes with more mortal danger and more monsters than you’d guessed.”
“I’m not thirty yet,” she says, which can’t be right except for how it is. “I – I’m sorry, Higuruma-san, it really is too late – for you, for, for me. For me to change anything. I think – I need to go? Try again? I can figure out how, if I try enough times.” Another brittle laugh, her eyes shining over with tears. “I’ve got nothing but time! Funny how that works, too.”
“Shimizu,” he says again, reaching to try and catch her hand. Reaching for his Domain all at once, that instinctive urge for truth. “You’re not making sense. I need a little more to go off than just that, you know. Even the worst depositions we did had more substance than that .”
“Not now. But then – maybe then.” She’s not talking to him, more to herself though her eyes are fixed on his. “Earlier. Before, if I do before , then none of it happens.”
“None of what?” he presses. Concern, threatening before, rears its head full-blown. “I think you should come inside. Really. There’s – I work with people now who probably see this kind of thing every other Tuesday, they can help. They probably can’t explain, nobody has a good track record with actually teaching anymore, but they can help.”
Let me help you, he wants to say, and manages to fall just short of begging. He’s too old for that; he’d been too old for it when he’d whine jokingly at Shimizu over another late night at the office, both of them haggard and worn then. But she’d found it endearing, and it was – acceptable. As a form of complaint.
Now, she just smiles, sad.
“I don’t need an explanation. I can figure it out for myself! You did, didn’t you? So I can, too.” Shimizu’s determination is a familiar thing, one he hasn’t seen directly in years. It feels like he’s taken a blow to the head that’s left him staggering and reeling, ears ringing faintly. Her fingers burn against his skin, and he commits that to memory too, files it away in the dusty cabinet with all the other times they’ve touched.
She’s still talking, though. And now moving, her hand dropping, contact gone.
“I’ll figure it out, and then I’ll fix this. All of it, I promise.” She shakes her head and steps away, distance between her and the threshold, until she’s silhouetted in light, and Hiromi remembers.
.
.
.
Something familiar about the footsteps, about the silhouette darkening his doorstep, a thousand miles away and a hundred miles above him. Deja vu tugs at a thread, unravels a tapestry. He’s been here before. Buoyant in the water, a woman at the door, words in her mouth that he can’t understand.
Hiromi wonders at this, but only for a moment. He doesn’t indulge in reminiscing these days, finds it a largely useless exercise despite the detail of his memory and the precision with which he can recall facts, slights, laws now rendered obsolete. It’s better not to think about the muddied waters of the past when he can see clear into the future.
“You could,” he says to the theater at large and to the woman standing at the entrance, someone he never thought he'd see again, “get in the tub with me.”
He knows her. He doesn’t know her. He’s seen her recently – but he hasn’t, he doesn’t think, not since before the Games. That’s the order of things.
The water is still warm – not body-warm and stale, but properly warm, from the water Hiromi had poured painstakingly into it not an hour ago. It’s comfortable, soothing. He’s contemplating stealing some salts, or one of those bath bombs Shimizu had told him about before everything, during her self-care campaign. He hadn’t listened then; his apartment didn't have a bathtub, just a cramped cube of a shower with water pressure that ranged from urination to a fire hose, at its own whim.
Then again, obtaining a bath bomb now would hardly count as stealing if the stores have been abandoned – looting is, perhaps, a milder crime. If there was a law at all against it.
There's not. Hiromi has read the scant rules over and over, let his mind run over them like water over a stone, seeking erosion, but they aren't deceptively simple – only simple. Brutal, but simple. So much has been stripped away.
He hadn’t floundered like he once might have. It’s been clarifying.
“Higuruma-san,” she answers, her voice cracking like the bang of a gavel, or a psyche beneath years of weight.
Disappointment. This time she recognizes him, though.
He doesn’t know where that thought has come from. Something – strange. Something different, the flicker of a dream where he’s fulfilled, lonely but fulfilled, and Shimizu is at his doorstep staring at him like he’s a stranger and like she’s a ghost.
A dream, he decides. Psyche beneath years of weight, and all that.
“Ah, Shimizu. It’s not so bad,” he promises, without really knowing why. Something about the interaction tugs at his memory – it’s not often that things do, from before . It’s easier not to think about the past, easier to center himself in the now, the cut-flower weightlessness of the Games. Dreams are easier; he’d never been a vivid dreamer before , but now he sees them play out behind his eyelids even when he’s awake, it feels like. “Really. You’ve done –,” Hiromi pauses, reviews her points, and revises his statement. “You’ve done well to survive this long.”
“This long,” she echoes. Her footsteps are quiet as she pads down the rows of the theater, approaching the stage. It feels wrong. She should be wearing heels – she always did, as tall as was practical for a job that required less deskwork than it should and more running around all day, doing the work of ten others. It only ever added a handful of centimeters to her height, barely enough to make her reach Hiromi’s own shoulder, and he was hardly tall himself.
“This long,” he agrees without knowing why. “I didn’t – I would have looked for you. If I’d known you would be here.”
He says it, and that makes the words true. It hadn’t ever occurred to him that she’d have ended up in the Games too. The thought was one he’d never let break through his period of not-mourning, because not-mourning meant that she’d managed to get away, slipped out of Tokyo, was on vacation somehow, never mind that she’d worked as hard as he had, which meant no vacations beyond those compulsory, beyond sick days.
“I was looking for you,” she tells him. Shimizu ascends the steps of the stage, caught bright in the lights Hiromi can’t figure out how to turn off.
“Here I am.” A single gesture with his hand, an arc of droplets splayed. “Taking a bath. Pretty relaxing, I think. Hey, weren’t you always telling me I needed to take it easy? I should’ve taken that advice a while back, but now that I’ve got time to kill, you were right. It’s not so bad.”
Her face crumples for a second, a cataclysm in miniature before she sets her jaw and crosses her arms and Hiromi doesn’t remember this, from before – the posture familiar, the specifics of bravery different.
It’s the expression she had only worn when upset, the one that he’d glimpse from between the slats of his office window blinds and know that it was bad news, or another hopeless case. Shimizu would be smiling by the time she presented it to him, eyes clear and dimples lurking in the wings, ready in case she smiled wider. Hiromi can’t remember it being directed at him.
“I didn’t mean this, Higuruma-san.” She sounds sad. She sounds too sad, though his jokes rarely held weight with her, his humor by turns too sharp or too rusty.
He knows. He doesn’t know, he can’t un know.
“It’s not so bad,” he repeats. “I’m up at the top of the rankings, which means that nobody bothers me except for the interesting people. And after the first few days, it got quieter.”
Less panic. More power – not just him, but the first period of bloody, brutal confusion, the type that gives these games their name, had weeded out the helpless, the terrified, the ones entrenched in the type of denial that was dangerous, here. Hiromi hadn’t.
He hadn’t, then. He hadn’t unless he was attacked first, and the rules of the game were simple. They dictated worth in a way that was easy to understand and easier to assign guilt to, once the points began to stack.
“It did,” Shimizu says. Her voice is toneless. She doesn’t want to talk about it; Hiromi understands that well enough. Some of the ones like him, who awakened and remained themselves, don’t. The ones who from before, old souls in new bodies with terrifying powers, they talk about everything. It’s been informative, though Hiromi doesn’t tell her that.
“Are you – I’m glad,” he tells her, sincerity he can offer, changing tack halfway through because asking if she’s alright is opening yet another door, only there’s a yawning abyss behind it. She hated it when he asked if she was alright, when neither of them were, or had been for a long time. “That you made it through.”
“Are you? Glad?” She folds herself down to sit by the tub, one elbow at its lip for support, clear of the water. Her movements are more graceful than before. Hiromi supposes his must be as well; two people, learning what brutality their bodies are capable of.
He hopes that she hasn’t. He hasn’t looked at her points yet, though Kogane’s name is at the tip of his tongue.
Hiromi is allowed to cling to some idea of innocence, he thinks. He’s allowed to, if it’s her, if he knows that he’s doing nothing but maintaining an illusion. She deserves his faith if nothing else, a favor repaid for their years together.
He blinks. “Yes. I hoped that you had gotten out of Tokyo somehow. This is better.”
“Better, Higuruma-san? How is this better?” she bursts out. Shimizu had never been the more emotional of the two of them, only the one more prone to showing it. They ran deep, but passed quickly, unlike Hiromi’s, which would fester and rot and grow in the core of him, turning to poison.
He drags his fingertips along the surface of the water, watching the ripples. “Not all of it is better, I admit. Whoever set this up, they wanted people to die.”
“Innocent people,” she corrects him. Steel in her voice, another new thing.
“Innocent people,” he agrees easily enough. Lies easily enough. The outcome of a trial is one thing, but Judgeman has always, always found evidence of a crime, and Hiromi has never failed to win a case since the barriers came. “But some of it is better. The fact that I get to see you again is better, right? I thought that I wouldn’t.”
Blood drying on his skin, slow and unbearably tacky. A courtroom full of bodies, a gavel in his hand, a scream building in his throat. He wants to start and never stop. And then – Shimizu, there.
Only that’s not how it happened.
Another dream.
He’d thought of her, though. She’d been the first thing he’d thought of when he came to himself – he wouldn’t see her again, would be condemned by the same system that had damned others, only he would deserve it. This could be justice too, or rather, the system protecting itself. There would be handcuffs on his wrists and he would give the office a bad name, become a stain on all their pasts, but especially hers.
Hiromi drags himself to the present.
“And I get to relax, like I said,” he adds, faux-cheerful. “It only took a mental breakdown for me to get there! Or – I suppose you might not know about that part. Sometimes I think that this is the mental breakdown. You, being here, isn’t helping that. The rest of it, I could accept, you know? I don’t know nearly enough history for my imagination to fuel half of this, let alone the details some of these guys talk about. They’re chatty, when they think they’re playing with their food.”
That was when he got challengers regularly, streaming through his door and then, when the strange etiquette of the older ones bled down into the new, waiting for him in the street when he’d go out for supplies. Now, people let themselves indulge in creature comforts, except for the bloodthirsty ones.
It occurs to him that Shimizu might be a bloodthirsty one. Or that it might be someone wearing her face, her body, and that his carelessness might be the end of him.
And then he looks at her, strange and familiar all at once, and dismisses the thought. She’s overlaid in dream and memory alike, strained at the edges like this sometimes, bright like the sun in others.
“Have you met any of them?” he asks, when she doesn’t answer.
He’s relieved when she shakes her head, saying, “No. I, um. I’ve been keeping a low profile, really. People were willing to help and stuff when this started, but now, I think it’s better to hide out? For me.”
“You could stay here,” Hiromi says. His mouth moves before his brain does, latching on to a piece of his past that may be worth keeping. “It would be safe. Not many people bother me anymore, and there’s plenty of space. Lots of popcorn too, and that butter, if you don’t mind that it’s stale. The dressing rooms are pretty ritzy too, whoever was in the one I sleep in must have had a rider a mile long. There’s still champagne, I haven’t touched it, and more chocolate than I know what to do with. There were oranges, too, but I ate those first so I didn’t fall off the charts because of scurvy. Kogane can’t help with that.”
He’s talking too much.
“You sound like you like it here,” she says slowly. “Why do you sound like you like it here?”
Shimizu sounds accusatory in turn. It sinks into his belly like an arrow through the slit window of a tower, a weakness he hadn’t known about until now.
“Ah. I said that it wasn’t that bad. I’m trying some positive thinking. You were always telling me how useful that was when you’re in a bad situation. Seeing the bright side here is just easier than I thought it would be.” Now he sounds defensive, the thread of it ringing in his voice. He’s not lost his skills so soon; but then, what good did they ever do him?
“Or are you just saying that because you’re winning for once, Higuruma-san?” she cries out. His hand stills. The ripples spread, then slow. “Because you were so tired of not helping people, only it wasn’t about helping by the end, was it? You only wanted to win, and now you’re here, and you’re killing like the rest of them! You were meant to be different! You were meant to be better – you were meant to be fairer ! What happened to all that?”
“Fairer.” He savors that word. Mocks it a little, rolling it around in his mouth like a marble. “Well. I’m fairer now. I get to see the evidence now, I get to have every single bit of it. And the sentences are fair too. And the rules, here – Shimizu, they’re pretty simple, don’t you think? They put everyone on the same playing field. There’s nothing unspoken about them, and the only thing that matters is strength. It’s not such a bad thing here to be strong, I’ve found out.”
“Strong. Is that what you call this? I liked the last time I saw you better, and I thought you’d just given up then,” she says, bitter. “Nope! I was wrong. I should be used to being wrong when it comes to you, Higuruma-san, but somehow I just – I’m not. You were so different, and I couldn’t take it, and you’re always so different! And now I come here and you’re worse than ever. You just don’t care anymore! You even, you act like you like this! You used to care, you would’ve hated this before!”
Her voice cracks on that word. But they’re not before , and Hiromi isn’t the man he used to be – and most days, he thinks that’s good riddance. Most days he dances on that grave, metaphorically speaking.
But now Shimizu is here and he’s excavating the past with bloody hands and broken nails, dirt by handful of dirt. And it hurts.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t regret it. He can’t regret it. There’s nothing to regret, that grave not yet moldering, that corpse clawing at the lid of its coffin.
Silence is damnation; Shimizu drops her head, her shoulders shaking for a moment.
“I need to try again,” she says, forehead resting against the lip of the tub. Hiromi can’t see her face – abruptly, and with a sting, it occurs that she’s hiding from him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answers.
Shimizu takes a breath and straightens up, her eyes red-rimmed.
“You never do,” she tells him. “I thought this was it. I thought – no. It needs to be earlier, doesn’t it?”
The world dissolves.
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coda
“Shimizu,” he says slowly, the last vestiges of his world collapsing around him. The blood is drying on his skin. Slow. Tacky, unbearably sticky. “What are you doing here? You weren’t meant to be here, you’re supposed to be at the office.”
Her presence is wrong, incongruous. She’s too clean for this. She shouldn’t see him like this.
He can see belief crack in her face. Another thread cut, another door slammed shut. There’s no going back for her; there’s no coming back from this for him.
“I think this is it,” she says to herself. “I can’t – I can’t ever go back further than this. Why? Higuruma-san, why is it always this ?”
“I don’t understand,” he says. Because he doesn’t. He can’t make himself, the entire world silent, his head blissfully, blessedly quiet for once. Guilt has stopped gnawing at him, a rabid dog on his heels that’s finally been put down. “Go back?”
“Don’t you want to go back?” she asks. She looks exhausted, more so than when he saw her last only hours ago. Then, there’d just been dark circles under her eyes, her makeup creasing there. Then, her skirt had been clean, if a little rumpled, and she’d been wearing heels rather than a pair of chunky brown boots at least a size too big. Then, her hair had been short and neatly combed, rather than pulled back into a hasty bun, greasy and slicked to her skull in places.
Hiromi looks at her. Then looks around. Dredges deep in himself and comes up with nothing other than that same emptiness, the knowledge that what he’s just done is futile, and that she shouldn’t be here, in case she gets caught up in it.
But it’s over at least. For him.
“No.”
Shimizu doesn’t pale, but she looks pained. “No?”
“No. I don’t want to go back. You don’t go back from something like this, and – you shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. They found him guilty, you know,” he says. “I’d still hoped that they wouldn’t. He’d hoped that they wouldn’t, even if we knew the odds are bad on a second trial. It was a solid case, before the appeal, he was innocent. You worked so hard on it, getting the facts, talking to witnesses. They didn’t have anything concrete in the end, but the numbers have to look good, and it turns out that evidence doesn’t matter so long as everyone has decided you’re guilty. So.”
He gestures around. A fleck of blood lands on her cheek, and he reaches to wipe it off before realizing his hands are in a much worse state.
“So,” she echoes, numb. “You did this.”
“I did this.” And then: “I did it. I did this. All of this.”
The words come faster, with something not glee, but an absence of misery. “I think it was a matter of time before I did this . Everything was going to end this way, from the second I decided to be a lawyer. I had – so many chances, to be a judge, to work for a company, to get rich on retainer for some rich guy. And every single time I said no. Can you believe that? It’s like a fixed point. An inevitability.”
Understanding dawns on her face; sadness follows. Hiromi knows he must be scaring her, or the Shimizu that he’d left in the office this morning would be afraid, but this one just looks at him, hurt and too knowing and he can’t stop talking. He’s always talked too much around her. He’s always poured too much honesty into her.
“Why should they get to decide who’s guilty or not? Do you know how much blood they have on their hands? Do you? I thought it was good to take difficult cases. I thought that it was good to help people that others would give up on. I just chose the least efficient way of doing it.”
He grips the gavel tighter, unwilling to let it go, unwilling to relinquish the first whisper of power that he’s felt in years.
“You killed all of them.”
“I wish you hadn’t seen me like this.”
A fact for a fact; that seems fair.
Shimizu stares at him for a moment, and then laughs. It’s not a happy laugh, instead something verging on hysteria, and after a moment Hiromi joins in. Two maniacs, laughing in a courtroom of corpses. He hopes, desperately, that nobody comes in and sees this.
“I wish a lot of things hadn’t happened,” she admits. “I wish it hadn’t come to this, or those stupid games, or – or any of what came after. I don’t know, I only got glimpses, and I don’t think I care.”
“Games?”
“They’ll be starting soon. You’ll, um. You’ll see. And I guess so will I.” She heaves out a sigh, the full body kind that always comes at the end of a case, only there’s no ‘we’ll get them next time’ or ‘really, Higuruma-san? You’re taking another so soon? Well, I’m going home,’ to follow it.
“I’d say you’re not making any sense, but you know what? It’ll be the least crazy thing to happen today. So alright. Let’s just go along with it. Play the game. Whatever that is.” He laughs again. “It doesn’t sound very fun, to be honest. But maybe that’s just because I’ve never been one for games.”
There’s a commotion outside – and then silence. Something tickles at the edges of his perception, and then hits like a wave washing over him, the gavel in his hand warm, Shimizu radiant in front of him.
“What was that?” he asks her, because she seems to know more of this than him, because she didn’t react at all.
“Alright,” Shimizu says. Defeated, grim. “The long way around, then. Maybe – I don’t know. At least you’ll be there. At least I know you.”
A voice from above, the soft, atonal sound of something programmed: Game, start.
Shimizu sits right there on the blood-soaked bench with him, where the jury used to be, and leans her head against his shoulder.
“It’ll be nice to have the company,” he offers. “I’m glad you’re here.”
A noise like a muffled sob. She presses closer anyway.
“Well. Where else would I be?”