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Vivia rounds the corner, floating three inches above the floor because walking’s such a pain, when he sees the chief emerge from a doorway, braced against the wall, hunched and barely standing. Even from down the corridor, Vivia can see the pallor on his cheeks, an icy sweat on his brow. Lurid pink blood stains his hands, but Vivia can’t tell where it’s coming from. It’s not his blood, the detective part of his mind supplies but his stomach still sinks hard. He freezes for just a second, torn between fleeing back to his body asleep in a storage closet but too many thoughts are happening all at once as he continues to glide towards Yakou. He and Halara had made the decision to split up and keep an eye on the Peacekeepers. Vivia figured he’d be better use as a spectre; he never did thirst for combat quite like they did.
“Chief?” he says, only half-remembering Yakou can’t possibly hear him. Yakou slumps against the wall, trembling legs barely keeping him upright. Vivia’s thoughts slow as he looks over at the door Yakou had just appeared from. The critical lab? Vivia drags the thought from deep inside somewhere. He’d seen the plans for this lab before, some ultra high-security research vault, guarded by high-voltage electric floor plates. And toxic gas. The panic rises again like vomit in his throat and Vivia is about to race back to his body faster than he’d ever moved before in his life when Yakou reaches inside his jacket pocket. A curved hunting knife with an F engraved into the handle gleams in his hand. Vivia glances around, wondering if Yomi or a Peacekeeper was about to round the corner, but he hadn’t seen any on the way over or heard the heavy thunk of their boots. The silence of anticipation hangs heavy in the corridor like the last step before plunging over a precipice.
Torn between racing back to his body, and watching to see what was about to unfold, all Vivia can do is stare at the knife in Yakou’s hand and the photograph in the other. The photo is familiar, Yakou as a young man, a beautiful woman at his side. Vivia remembers the overwhelming shame he’d felt when he first saw Yakou crying over it, the way he always wanted to ask but knew he was never owed the truth. Yakou’s holding the blade out and Vivia fights through his fatigue to put the pieces together. Where is the threat, Chief? he thinks, unconsciously reaching for his own box-cutter, even though anything that could actually do damage sits with his body in the real world.
Almost in response, Yakou turns the blade inwards.
The photograph, the poison, the blade pointed at his gut. The smear of pink blood on his hands, but it’s not his. Not yet. Vivia wishes he could figure it out faster, but he can’t tear his eyes away from the glint of the knife.
Yakou closes his eyes. Vivia lunges to snatch it away but his hands pass through.
He can’t look, can’t think, flies back to the storage closet as fast as the air will take him. He clips some of the lost spirits on the way, their unyielding bodies smashing up against him like stormy waves on a pebbled beach, their otherworldly screams ringing in his ears as they tear at the edges of his vision every time he touches them. He feels battered and bruised, stretched impossibly thin between the veil of life and death. All he can think of is Yakou. The chief, their chief, his chief. The one who’d taken him in, taken them all in, given them a home and a purpose in an unforgivable city.
Vivia wrenches upright in the cramped supply closet choking for air as if he’d just awoken from a terrible dream. He tries not to think of the blade, the way Yakou had screwed up his eyes, taken one last gasp and—
He stumbles out of the closet, tripping over his gangly limbs on the way. He’d never been the graceful athletic type, but with burning eyes and lungs he races down the corridor, loathing his physical form and all its useless limitations.
Please let this be a terrible mistake, he thinks desperately as he rounds the corner again, but there outstretched on the floor, in a pool of blood is Yakou Furio. The blade has been pushed away from him, the photograph hidden. It’s a staging, Vivia’s inner voice unhelpfully supplies.
“Chief?” Vivia asks quietly, kneeling next to him, careful to avoid the slowly growing pool of blood. The poison has no cure, the memory of the lab maps remind him. He pushes it out of his mind.
“Oh, it’s you,” Yakou gasps, looking up at him balefully. There’s a relief in his eyes, an expression that makes Vivia feel ill. It’s the same look Yakou would give him every time Vivia pulled a squashed Kamasaki District meat bun from his pocket, when the two of them were alone late at the agency and Yakou’s brain was unspooling a mile a minute with no chance of ever slowing down. It’s kindness, gratitude, a look that Vivia held close in his heart. He sometimes wondered if Yakou ever looked at any of the other detectives like that.
“I’m glad… it’s you.” Something breaks inside Vivia.
Yakou’s lying prone, and there’s no way to stop the bleeding. There’s a thin white lab coat crumpled up in Vivia's pocket, a costume piece from Desuhiko he could use as a disguise. He doesn’t want to stop it, remember, he did this.
“Please let me help you,” Vivia forces out, reaching for Yakou, dragging any memory of first aid training from the dark corners of his memories. But Yakou flinches away before Vivia’s hand can touch the fabric of his jacket.
“Don’t,” he hisses, curling in on himself, now in the foetal position in a pool of his own blood. The relief in his eyes is enveloped by a terrible shame, and Vivia rocks back on his haunches, pulls away his hands in retreat. He’s seen that shame too, on the nights when Vivia haunts the dripping passageways of their submarine base, when the chief forgets Vivia is asleep in the fireplace and pulls out a letter, a map and a photo.
If you were a better detective, you would have figured out their significance before ever it got to this. Something spiteful that he’d fought hard to keep sedated rises up inside him.
“I suppose,” Yakou chokes out, sweat pouring from his brow, “I can’t tell you— that it was Fink the Slaughter Artist.” He gives a small pained smile. Vivia shakes his head sadly, tries not to betray his guilt. For someone so avoidant of the truth, it always had an awful way of appearing before his eyes unbidden.
“I never could lie—” Yakou breaks off with a terrible wracking cough, and Vivia winces despite himself. “To you.”
Words never came easily to Vivia, and not for the first time he cursed himself and the way he buried his thoughts under thick layers of metaphor and deflection. They were running out of time. They were always running out of time. From the first step Vivia had taken in this cursed city, the red string of fate that brought him to his now-closest friend and confidant was wrapped tightly round both their necks and choking ever tighter.
“I—”
“You always did know me best, Vivia,” Yakou says, looking up at Vivia. “Better than I knew— myself.”
Vivia flinches. I didn’t know you at all, Yakou. This isn’t how the story’s supposed to end. You’re the hero, and heroes don’t die halfway through like this. But maybe that’s his fault for turning everything into one of his favourite novels. The world doesn’t have heroes and villians, detectives and criminals, the good guys swooping in saving the day with a nice clean bow, the bad guys leaving in handcuffs. Kanai Ward should have taught him that by now.
No, the world is just endless violence and unexplainable motives and endless disappointment. I… wanna die some day. Despite himself, tears spring to his eyes.
Vivia reaches out, takes Yakou’s hand. It’s clammy, tacky with blood. Vivia thinks of the first time Yakou had put a hand on his knee as they sat together on that awful checkerboard couch in the submarine, how a pink flush had spread across Yakou’s cheeks as Vivia looked across at him with a curious eyebrow quirked.
“I will honor your wishes to the end,” Vivia murmurs, his voice gravelly. “If I should tell them it was the hitman… then I will.”
Yakou gives him a small smile, squeezes his hand.
“I wish,” Vivia adds, trying to drag his eyes away from all that blood. “We could have had a happy ending… Like in those stories.”
Without thinking, he leans forward, kisses Yakou on the temple, banishing all thoughts of lingering poison on his skin. If this is the way Kanai Ward wishes to take me, then so be it. Yakou looks up at him with an overwhelming fondness in his eyes. Vivia knows that expression too. Every time Vivia entered the room, his eyes would light up so brightly that Vivia would have to look away.
And you’ve always turned away from the truth, haven’t you?
Yakou looks like he wants to say something, but he can’t quite put it into words.
“I have to... alert the others,” He eventually chokes out. He sounds weak now. The love in his eyes has melted into pain again. Vivia squeezes his hand one last time and releases it, and the sudden absence of touch makes his heart lurch. Have we run out of time already? Yakou’s gone to great lengths to set this scene up, it’s only right that the spectacle plays out as planned. Vivia nods understandingly, wonders if he’ll get to see Yakou in the afterlife, wonders if anything there’s anything he could do right now that would even matter. You call yourself a detective?
Vivia looks down at the blood drying on his hands, and remembers how Yakou never factored him into the scene that’s about to play out. He tries not to think of Yakou as a lost spirit, wandering the corridors, trapped forever in an agonizing purgatory.
Yakou lets out a terrifying scream, and Vivia’s world crashes down around him. He knows this is his cue to leave, but sick terror and overwhelming love crashes together in his chest in a way that’s too much to bear. If this is the truth, he’ll willingly go to the grave a lie. The sound pierces through him, and it shreds him apart to hear the agony of someone he cares for so much. Yakou’s crying too now, tears lost in the pool of magenta blood all around them.
“Go,” he murmurs, looking up at Vivia pleadingly. Footsteps ring out through the chambers of the critical lab. Yakou’s eyes burn into Vivia, and he’s sure he’ll see that desperate, terrible look every time he closes his eyes for the rest of his life.
“Yakou—”
“Go.”
Yuma staggers through the heavy metal door of the critical lab into the corridor to see his chief lying face-down in a deep pool of his own blood.
A tall figure in a long dark coat rounds the corner, wrapping a white lab coat around him as a disguise, and doesn’t look back.