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Tommy sees Snake Eyes again in Times Square. It’s a strategic move that he shows himself in public, surrounded by witnesses. All his choices to now have been mined for contingencies, and Tommy knows. He’s had to learn the hard way.
But knowing doesn’t stop the tremulous feeling stirring deep within him. He stops in the middle of the crowded plaza, neon billboards flashing in the late evening dark.
People part around him like water around a stone plunged into a river, and Tommy looks up the long way at Snake Eyes, tucked away on a shadowed ledge above the distorted band of light pollution. He doesn’t move for a few long, tense seconds, and then he raises his hand to the visor on his helmet. It collapses like a paper fan in an arc up to his forehead.
He looks the same. Better, even.
Gone is the tamped down wonder he’d worn on his face when they drove through Tokyo for the first time. He has settled into himself, plucked out of his former life of running and lying and cheating and stealing. Tommy hates that he can see it. He hates that he knows that’s what the lax openness on that face means. No more a pretender than Tommy is a prince of Arashikage.
These are things they were, once, and not anymore. But for everything they have left behind, the sorest loss for him is that which never was to begin with.
A brother he might have had. A warrior, to walk hand in hand with him into a new era.
Tommy resists the urge to feel at his ribs where he keeps his dagger sheathed. New York City is too conspicuous a place to walk around even at nighttime with a longsword. He appreciates the city’s anonymity, but the limits can only be pushed so far. Even if he isn’t likely to be accosted, he can’t afford to be noticed or remembered at this stage. His work with the Cobras will be too easily jeopardized by trouble of that sort.
It isn’t quite what he was promised or what he expected, but he can’t go home. Not yet.
He starts walking, eyes up until the moment he passes the ledge Snake Eyes has chosen as a vantage point. Once their sightline breaks, he brings his eyes forward and sees a second familiar face.
Akiko looks as solemn as ever. He can hear her voice as it had been that night in Tokyo six months ago, raised to speak above the wind and the roar of their motorcycles.
The memory of her belief in Snake Eyes — in his honor — rings clearly in his mind.
He feels so foolish to have ever trusted either of them. To have been wrong every time it mattered, and to pay the ultimate price for those mistakes.
Akiko holds her ground and allows him to pass her by without a word to slow him down. He navigates away from the flux and bustle of foot traffic, away from the erratic advertisements and playbills. He keeps an ear trained on the rooftops and darkened alleyways but he detects no one. Perhaps that is foolishness, too, to think he would, when they didn’t see Snake Eyes coming the first time he betrayed them.
“You are wasting your time,” Tommy says, and his words are for Akiko but not only.
“I’m the one wasting my time.” Akiko makes a noise in the back of her throat — one he associates with her frustration at his stubbornness. The look on her face when he turns to meet her eyes is only disappointed. “You give your hands to an ignoble cause. You turn your back on your people because you can’t admit that you lost your way.”
“I was deceived. I believed in something outside of myself,” he says, pitching his voice higher and tipping his chin to speak to the rooftops if their third will take it upon himself to listen. If he can be bothered. “I shared my way, and it was reduced to ash in front of me. Now I will tell you again, you are wasting your time. I do not mean to go with you, and if you will not have that answer, there is only one thing I am prepared to give to you in its place.”
He thumbs the dagger out of its hilt, just the barest slide of steel breathing in the night air.
Akiko shakes her head. She is still only disappointed. “It will not be a victory if I must compel you by way of violence,” she tells him.
“There is no other way left for me.”
She doesn’t roll her eyes at him. She has too much self-control to give him that break in her resolve. If he is honest with himself, he has always envied her that.
“Arashikage will always be your home. We will not forget you, no matter how long it takes you to remember yourself.”
She leaves him feeling cold all over.
Maybe this is not a victory for her, but it doesn’t feel at all like a victory for him either.
Tommy keeps his thumb on the dagger long after she has walked away and left him alone in the alley. He has both ears trained on the rooftops and his hand down at his side when he hears footsteps behind him.
He turns with his hands at the ready to divert a blow or a strike from a sword, but the only person around is a man in a stained apron taking out the trash. He doesn’t even look up from his task before trundling back inside and pulling the metal door tightly shut behind him. The noise of tourists and buskers filters in like a thousand conversations heard in a bus terminal. Distant, muddled, meaningless. He feels the extent of his solitude.
“So you’re still mad, huh?”
Tommy is still mad enough that he jerks the dagger free of its sheath and throws it with all his might. He’s maybe an inch wide of his target, but he’s fine with that.
He throws himself at that hated face, his fists and his body and his rage that hasn’t gone anywhere since he gave himself to the Cobras, in spite of their best efforts to appease him. Snake Eyes fends him off, but that’s about all he does.
“Oh, yeah, you’re still mad.”
They take turns slamming each other into brick and concrete, overturning garbage bins, soggy cardboard boxes, and one rusted over signpost. Snake Eyes has no weapon on him, and Tommy feels the slight in that, the confirmation of what he’s been left to sit with these long months alone. That he isn’t enough to warrant caution on his own, that the most dangerous thing about him has always been his poor judgement.
“You know, we can talk this out like people,” Snake Eyes says, still in that offhanded, matter-of-fact tone, like he’s bewildered they’d settle this any other way.
Like fighting Tommy in this alley is an exercise in running his energy down to palliate his anger.
Tommy shoves him into a dumpster hard enough that his body armor dents the metal. Let him learn the hard way that there is fire in him to rival that powering the Jewel of the Sun.
Snake Eyes wheezes. “Okay, maybe we can’t talk it out.”
“You want to talk,” Tommy whispers, becalmed in that way that always frightened Akiko so much, less the shadow ahead of the storm and more the eye dead in its center. He feels — numb. Frenetic. Apart from his body. There must be something of this indefinable way he feels in his face because he sees its companion in his enemy’s eyes.
“Tommy…”
He tightens his hands into fists, into killing things, teeth gnashing and skin buzzing. He grips Snake Eyes by his collar and slams him into the ground, dazing him.
“I know I lied to you,” Snake Eyes mumbles, his words running together in a slurry. “I know how much you wanted to believe it.”
“You can’t,” Tommy spits. “You have only ever served yourself.”
“Says the guy who ditched his family to run with terrorists,” he says, blinking up at him, muzzy about the eyes, probably concussed. “You disowned yourself. You think we’re different? You think I don’t know about loyalty just because I fed you a line of bullshit you were only too happy to accept? Why don’t we face facts? You only ever liked me at all because I put my ass on the line for you. Because I saved your life at the docks, right? It was all a transaction with you from the first, but you really went and twisted it up into a big fucking breakup, didn’t you?”
Tommy thinks about the children with the soccer ball outside the warehouse in L.A. and about the white flash of teeth caught in a laugh that didn’t seem to know a thing about restraint. He thinks about the tightness in his chest at a simple declaration to do with honor and the inherent intimacy in being seen. In feeling known, by one person and no other.
He feels his fingers loosen from the claws they’d hardened into, and that’s all Snake Eyes needs to buck him off and regain the upper hand. Tommy isn’t braced for the blow, and the loud crack of his skull hitting concrete is like a melon bursting open.
True to his nature, perhaps, he’s still far too preoccupied with the ache behind his sternum to register the icy sparking in his fingertips.
Snake Eyes blinks down at him. His eyes are wide. “Oh, shit. Tommy? Say something.”
Tommy opens his mouth. He feels heat in his eyes, in his throat where the words dry up, and in his scalp, radiating outward. He feels it, horrifyingly, running down one side of his face. Tears a long time unshed, spilling over.
“I called you a brother,” he says, and then all is darkness.
It is its own kind of mercy.
He comes to on a plane. There’s blaring pain in the back of his head and tape sticking to his temples like electrodes, holding the gauze around his head in place. He’s not wearing his shoes or the suit he’d had on in New York.
The door to the upper cabin slides open. Tommy feels himself tensing up before he realizes who it is stepping through into his cabin.
“Hard Master,” he says, with a mouth that feels full of cotton.
“Thomas-san.” He sits across the way with his hands folded up in his lap, composed as ever. “Good to see you.”
“Is it?”
“Last time I saw you, we defended Arashikage together, shoulder to shoulder.”
Tommy fights the impulse to let fondness wash over him. He keeps his face hard like a stone, for all that it does nothing to deter Hard Master.
“How do you feel, hmm? Are you cold? Thirsty?”
Tommy stares at him, not sure what he’s doing here or how to get away. His odds of surviving if he jumps from a plane with a head injury aren’t great.
“Here.” Hard Master presses a miniature water bottle onto the seat next to Tommy. He shakes out the blanket under his arm so it drapes over Tommy’s socked feet, within easy reach of his hands if he decides he’s cold after all. “You should sleep, Thomas-san.”
Hard Master touches his shoulder as he starts to walk toward the door into the next cabin. His eyes are serene, his expression relaxed. Seeing him look that way causes a vicious jolt of pain to riot in Tommy’s chest. He wants to leave it, wants to remain stoic, but he can’t. He never could, when the alternative was to bleed directly from his heart instead.
“I have no place in Arashikage,” he whispers, switching to Japanese.
Squeezing his shoulder, Hard Master matches him and says, “I know the shape of your mind, Thomas-san, and I know you are not this stupid that you believe such a thing.”
Tommy’s eyes sting. He does feel that stupid. He feels stupider.
Tension flickers in Hard Master’s face. He crouches next to where Tommy lays, eyes serious and taking no prisoners. “All of Arashikage is still yours. It is where you belong. I know you cannot sincerely believe otherwise,” he says again, raising his eyebrows to punctuate his point.
“My birthright…” he begins, too ashamed to continue.
“You are more to us without it,” Hard Master tells him, in the same tone he would use to comment on the color of the sky. “A true leader understands that even the strong may be weak, and if it falls on the people to be their own leaders, then it must fall to them also to be their own strength. Selflessness, Thomas-san. Honor. Death to the ego.”
He thinks of Akiko’s claim that he lost his way and how he had been so sure that she was wrong. Tommy averts his gaze from Hard Master’s, distracting himself by opening the water bottle, but his fingers are clumsy on the cap and he can’t quite get it.
Hard Master holds his hand out to take it and twists the cap off in one swift motion.
“Thank you, Hard Master,” he mumbles, in English again, trying to use it to wall off the crashing tide of everything he feels. He props himself up on his elbows, though the effort makes him feel sick, and begins to drink, finishing the bottle in a few swallows.
He’s still getting his breath back when Hard Master surprises him.
“You know, you were right about him in the end.”
“What do you mean?”
“His final test. He passed, the second go-round.”
Staring, Tommy can only blink as the empty water bottle’s plucked out of his hands.
Rising to full height, Hard Master gestures with the bottle, saying, “I’ll bring you another, and some crackers. Sleep if you’re tired, Thomas-san. We have a long flight ahead of us yet.”
Tommy stays perched on his elbows and watches Hard Master pass through the door into the next cabin. His gaze catches on Akiko’s worried face. She notices him looking a moment later and holds his gaze until the door snicks shut.
He flattens himself down to lay flat, liking that better for how it lessens the pounding in his head. The constant hum of the plane’s engine soothes him and lulls him back under.
Hard Master must come back after he’s already nodded off because the next time he wakes, he’s alone with a fresh water bottle pressed against his hip and the blanket tucked under his chin. The light coming in through the window is tinged pink with the setting sun. He goes back to sleep, and the last time he blinks awake on the plane, he can tell they’ve landed.
Akiko looks up from the book in her lap.
“I thought this would not be a victory for you,” he mumbles.
“You said there was no other way,” she quips back, impassive in both her demeanor and in her tone.
“There wasn’t,” he says, passing a hand over his face.
The seat next to him dips where she sits on the very edge of it. She takes his hand away to look at him, stern but mostly just for the sake of appearances, he can tell. That touch of worry has come back into her expression, and something else, quivering across the surface like ripples in a pond. She still has his hand in both of hers and gives it a squeeze.
“Tommy. Please, come home.”
He understands then. He could still run. Could still fight, could still decide to walk away. To be filled with hatred and scorn. Or he could acquiesce to their forgiveness. He could go home.
Couldn’t he go home?
Akiko takes one hand away to feel in her pocket for something she then presses into his palm. “Come home,” she says again, folding his fingers closed around his ring.
He lets himself hold it and says, “I haven’t earned this.”
“You never had to do anything to earn it, Tommy.”
Opening his hand exposes the bars carved across the signet. The gold catches in the muted cabin lighting. He had worn this seal so easily once. It had felt a part of him, an extension of his hand just as his sword is an extension of his arm. “Will you hold it for me until I feel worthy of it again?” he asks her, still studying the warm gold, remembering the weight of it on his finger.
“You won’t take it,” she says, voice thick with something he doesn’t want to understand.
“Akiko…” He looks down at himself and then back up at her. “I haven’t got any pockets.”
She blinks at him, then, unbidden, a smile twitches over her mouth. She laughs, a soft, small sound that appears to surprise her. “Does that mean you’ll stay?” she asks, tentative, watching him with a look so full of hope he can’t conceive of telling her no.
“You have brought me this far. It would be a shame not to let you have your victory.”
“Yes, some victory.” She allows him to tuck the ring back into her hand and tucks it away into her pocket once more for safekeeping. “Getting it through your thick skull that we have not given up on you. Truly an incredible feat.”
“That’s unkind,” he chides, but he is almost joking with her. Almost smiling for the first time in what feels like far too long. “Can’t you see I’m injured?”
“Poor baby.”
He rolls his eyes, and her smile, while more watery now, stretches wider on her face.
She holds her hand out to him to help him stand. “Let’s go home.”
They take a car through the city, and not for the first time, he thinks back on that day coming home with Snake Eyes from L.A. The sky is dark now, given over to nightfall, and that change feels significant to him. Like all promise has gone out of the sky for him, sunken out of favor and into shadow.
He had felt something in him that first day returning home that he had never known before. Something like yearning entwined with joy and anticipation. He thought he had found a partner to help him usher in the next thousand years of Arashikage. He thought he had given a purpose in the same moment he had found it for himself.
He thought it had been true, but he had been childish to believe. Blinded by his heart.
“What are you thinking about?” Akiko asks him, streetlights passing intermittently over her face.
“It doesn’t matter,” he tells her, wanting desperately to mean it.
“It matters to me. You know our ways, Tommy. You cannot be unburdened if you keep what torments you under lock and key. You don’t have to tell me, but you should feel free to tell someone.” She tilts her head, considering him. “Perhaps the one who wronged you?”
He turns to look out the window, ignoring the suggestion. It doesn’t merit a response.
“He has changed for the better,” she says quietly.
“And I have changed for the worse,” he tells her flatly.
“You haven’t changed, Tommy. Your trust was broken, first by Kenta and then by Snake. It is right for you to be angry, but you let yourself be ruled by your emotions. You always have.”
“Are you going to unburden my load for me, Akiko?”
“I know better than to try,” she says, keeping her tone steady, lined only faintly with disapproval. She crosses her arms over her chest, turning to look out the window on her side. “But if you wanted to unburden yourself to him—”
“What have I done, except trust him?”
Akiko looks at him, saying nothing. Knowing it for the invitation to say more that it is, knowing it at its face to be a trap, doesn’t stop him from walking into it. He has envied her this, too. Her ability to coax the truth out of its dark and hidden places.
“I put the entire world as I knew it into his hands. I let him fool me because I wanted our paths to be the same, but they weren’t. They will never be. And I should unburden myself to him?”
“It isn’t about what you owe him, Tommy. It’s about what you owe yourself.”
He turns away from her, done with the conversation. Done with the idea that he has anything left to give to the traitor that broke his heart. Done with the realization that that is what he feels, what he has been feeling, what he’s tried to ignore but can’t any longer. His broken heart, that he all but gift wrapped for the slaughter.
Akiko lets him sit with his thoughts and his shame. They ride in silence the remainder of the trip until they are behind the walls of Arashikage. She escorts him to the main hall to see Grandmother, but she doesn’t walk inside with him.
“She would see you alone first. It was her wish.”
Akiko quickly embraces him before he can retreat. It is not something they did much before, but he feels almost grateful for it now. She is there and gone before he can move.
Left alone once more, Tommy walks inside by himself.
He sinks into the appropriate position on his knees. It gets the blood pounding in his head to bend forward all the way so his brow touches the hardwood, but it is what the occasion calls for. Even if he can no longer appreciate the clan hierarchy, she is still his grandmother. His blood. She is still the one who raised and loved him, still the one who begged him not to go.
He waits with his pulse thundering in his ears a full minute before he feels a hand on his head. Her approach had been perfectly silent, but he can feel her presence now. She has always been like a great fire keeping out the cold darkness of the world. A bolt of pain twists his throat.
“Grandmother,” he says, buckling under the featherlight touch of fingers in his hair. “I’m sorry. I failed you. I disgraced you.”
“Tommy, look at me.” She hooks her knuckles under his chin to help him along, and her eyes are wet when he can bring himself to meet her gaze. “You have not failed because your journey has yet to begin, and you have not disgraced me because you have come home.”
He feels his face crumple and lets himself wilt in her arms where she catches him. Ever since he was small, she is the one who never fails to catch him.
“I have been weak.” His voice trembles, betraying him further. “I have been selfish.”
“You are young. In the course of discovering yourself, you will make mistakes. Home must be where you are safe to make them.”
“I do not deserve your forgiveness.”
“But you have it. Forgive yourself, Tommy, or you will make a prison for yourself out of your anger.”
He knows she is right. As much as he would like to resist what she is telling him, he cannot. He has been taught in the ways of Arashikage his whole life. Even for the heaviness in his heart, he cannot refute her. She pulls back to hold his cheek in her hand.
“You look tired, Tommy. Rest. Get your strength back.”
“Yes, Grandmother.”
She helps him stand and holds his wrists a moment longer, smiling at him. “My heart is full looking at you,” she says.
He can’t answer that. He merely lets her keep hold of him until she is ready to let go. As she takes her leave of him, he bows his head in deference and in apology, listening for her footsteps, audible now, to fade into silence. His head aches fiercely enough to make him nauseous. For a few long seconds, all he can do is breathe and try to get himself under control.
“Really rung your bell back in New York, didn’t I?”
Tommy’s eyes snap open. He grits his teeth, hands tightening instinctively into fists. He hears footsteps behind him. Booted feet on hardwood, light but deliberate.
“Walk you to your room?”
It’s unavoidable. Tommy can’t pass without having to look at him, so he makes himself do it.
Snake Eyes does look better. He looks right. Like this place has been waiting for him to come and claim it. Like maybe Tommy hadn’t been wrong about him, so much as he’d misjudged the timing.
Tommy crosses to him. He wants a fight, even knowing he’s in no condition and that it never goes his way when his heart is too much in his fists. “Has it grown legs and walked away since I left?” he asks snidely.
Snake Eyes raises one eyebrow at him, not budging an inch even as Tommy brushes past him.
“Then I don’t need you to find it, do I?”
“Well, what about some company?” he asks, falling into step at Tommy’s side and handily ignoring the way it sets Tommy’s teeth on edge. “I know how lonely you get.”
“Not for your company,” Tommy spits, stepping toward him.
Snake Eyes backs away, his fluid motion perfectly synchronized with Tommy’s. He has the audacity to laugh, so near in quality to how he’d sounded that day on the docks. There is something in the way he tracks Tommy’s advance, as if something in the automatic language of his body has given him an answer Tommy can’t yet see.
“Did you really see honor in my eyes, Tommy? Back then?”
Tommy checks himself. He can barely think straight, but he can’t leave it. He’s never been the type. Baring his teeth, he says, “There was nothing in you to see that I didn’t invent to fit a narrative, and you were only too happy to let me. I understand that now.”
For the first time, Snake Eyes looks uncertain. Tommy leaves him standing there, for the first time feeling in control of the situation.
He walks alone to his room and dresses down for bed.
Maybe it’s that he slept so much on the flight to Japan, but it’s still dark out when he finds himself laying wide awake again. His time with the Cobras, brief though it has been, has taught him to get the most out of whatever sleep he does get, and while he feels off-kilter still, he feels energized enough to get up and moving.
A favored pastime of his boyhood had been patrolling the grounds after dark, listening to the night birds and the bugs and the leaves rustling in the breeze. He unwinds the bandages from around his head before he goes, but he doesn’t bother with shoes.
It’s good to feel the grass between his toes and the cool earth beneath his feet. It feels more like home than the sterility of his bedroom had.
He’s not convinced his exhaustion before wasn’t just brought on by a tension headache.
Without knowing it’s where he’s headed, he finds himself at the python pit. The moonlight shines straight down to illuminate the tile at the bottom. He sits at the edge of the hole and stares down at it, remembering the first time he’d gone down to face their judgement.
To think he had been pure of heart, and convinced of it, at one time. To think that had been his reality. To think that hadn’t been enough for him.
Were he to go down there now…
He has been lost. He doesn’t know when it happened.
“I wondered when I would see you again.” Blind Master steps out of the trees. “Welcome home.”
“Thank you, Blind Master.”
“May I sit with you?”
Tommy motions with his hand for him to go ahead. Blind Master tips his head, a small smile visible on his face in the moonlight. He takes the place next to Tommy, sitting with his legs crossed where Tommy lets his feet dangle over the edge.
“Your heart is heavy tonight,” Blind Master says, and he doesn’t bother to put it to him as a question. “Is that why you are not asleep in your bed at this late hour?”
Careful to weigh his words, he says, “I feel restless.”
“Always so careful with your half-truths, Thomas-san,” he laughs, just a murmur in the back of his throat. “It is good to have you back.”
“Is that a half-truth?”
Blind Master gives him a wry look. Tommy has never known anyone half as sarcastic or half as kind. He feels younger than he is under that sly, teasing glance.
“It feels strange to be here and see it with new eyes.” He peers down the hole opening up under his feet. “To feel the differences in myself.”
“For whatever it matters to you to hear it, I feel no such difference in you.”
“Don’t you?” Tommy glances sideways at him.
“Thomas-san,” he says, still smiling faintly, a little sadly, it seems. “You have always been governed by your heart. That has not changed in all the time I have known you. Whether it has led you astray in the past, it has not driven you to ruin. Not yet.”
“Perhaps that day is inevitable.”
“All men must choose for themselves. Would you do it over again? Would you still leave?”
Tommy catches himself rubbing at the spot on his finger where his ring would sit, had he taken it back from Akiko. Since they are talking about his heart anyway, and there is no deceiving Blind Master in matters of the heart, he answers honestly, saying, “To make that choice was the only way out for me.”
“Out of what?”
“A scorpion’s grasp.”
“You feel he’s stung you.”
“I would have given him anything, Blind Master. I did. I gave him exactly what he needed to destroy me and all of Arashikage.”
“Yet here you sit and the city stands. What must we conclude about our friend, the scorpion?”
“How would he put it,” Tommy thinks aloud, turning his head just so, to favor a certain tree he has been paying special attention since before Blind Master sat down. “Ah, yes. I know just what he would say. He would say this scorpion is a little bitch.”
There’s a rustling in that tree, followed by a deliberate silence, and then, when Tommy turns to look right at it, a great commotion. He supposes he has fallen out of trees with less grace.
His satisfaction at rousting the snake in his midst, albeit belatedly, is a sumptuous delight in his belly. The pythons below would surely devour him for it, but he cannot regret how he savors the victory. What’s more, Blind Master doesn’t scold him, nor does he seem especially surprised at their uninvited guest, but he wouldn’t be. If Tommy clocked him when he climbed up onto that branch, Blind Master knew the direction of his feet before he spotted the tree.
“A scorpion can change his nature, Thomas-san,” he says, and there is still no admonishment in his voice. Only that distant amusement.
“So can a frog.”
“Then you agree,” Blind Master says, catching him neatly and handily. “That one can learn to grow against their instincts, if it is in their best interest.”
Tommy sighs. “You win as always, Blind Master. You are too wise for me.”
“You are my favorite challenger, Thomas-san.”
“Akiko is your favorite challenger,” he says, raising his eyebrows at the same time that he gets to his feet to circle the pit and head back in the direction of his rooms.
“There is no challenge when I speak with her. She actually listens to me.”
“Are you suggesting I don’t listen?” Tommy asks, beginning to smirk.
“I would never be so bold,” Blind Master says, with such a bland look of innocence on his face that Tommy can’t help feeling glad for his company.
He throws his head back and laughs. “I did miss you these months away, Blind Master.”
“I listened for you in every crack of thunder and in every whisper preceding the lightning,” he says, not quite serious, but meaning his words for all that he smiles through them. “I knew we had not seen the last of you, and I am pleased that you have not proven me wrong.”
“I may disappoint you yet.”
“You may surprise me,” Blind Master counters. He stands, the pit yawning between them, and bows his head. “You often do, Thomas-san. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Blind Master.”
“Goodnight, Blind Master,” Snake Eyes parrots, stepping onto the path and plucking a leaf from under his collar. He cocks his head in Tommy’s direction. Falling out of the tree seems to have muted his confidence some, though not entirely. “Walk you to your room?”
Tommy is tired, and his head hurts. He doesn’t want to argue with this man, but he also doesn’t want to send him away. “Fine,” he mutters, turning away so he won’t have to see what his admittance does to the eyes observing him.
He is not far enough away to miss Blind Master’s quiet, “Oh, Tommy.”
Snake Eyes jogs to catch up to him. They make it only a handful of paces off the trail before he says, “I didn’t know I could have that much fun being called a little bitch.”
Tommy bites his cheek to keep from smiling. It hardly works, and he’s caught anyway.
“You can say you had fun trash talking me,” Snake Eyes muses, chuckling readily enough for both of them. “My feelings won’t be hurt.”
“Then it follows that there would be no merit to be had in the venture.”
The laugh that earns him is fuller, throatier, but that’s the last that Snake Eyes has to say about it. Tommy doesn’t speak to him further, and he doesn’t give any indication that that’s what he wants. He can hardly admit to himself that he feels at ease even now, but it is — if not nice — peaceful. At one time he thought this was his future, the two of them walking in the same direction with the same goal in mind, through darkness as well as light.
Inside, he tracks smudges of dirt on the floor from his bare feet, but next to him, Snake Eyes leaves no trail. His boots don’t make a sound against the hardwood. Snake Eyes pauses to take them off, but Tommy keeps walking until he reaches his rooms.
He leaves the door cracked.
Snake Eyes slips in while he’s wiping dirt off his feet in the adjoining washroom. Tommy doesn’t look, but he can hear the silence of the room become more complete with the lock sliding home in the door latch. He can hear the slight whisper of bedding shifting, and then the louder sigh of a jacket being removed and tossed across the room. Through it all, they don’t speak.
Tommy wrings the towel out in the sink and drapes it over the edge of the basin to dry. When he cannot avoid it anymore, he steps out into his bedroom. Snake Eyes looks up at him, divested of his shoes and jacket, but otherwise presentable.
Vulnerable in his bare feet, Tommy lingers in the doorway. He knows how he will defend himself if it is to come to that, but he also knows, in a distant, dormant way, that they are not going to fight. Snake Eyes would not have followed him here and locked the door for a fight. Not the kind they would need the use of their fists to settle, but rather the kind, he supposes, one might exile himself to avoid.
“You really made it too easy, Tommy.”
Irreverence he can deal with. He pushes off the doorframe. “Do you imagine this will be easy?”
Snake Eyes flashes an indulgent smile. “Well, I know what you want. Do you?”
Tommy narrows his eyes. He knows he is in striking or even grappling range, but it isn’t their bodies that are the source of danger in this situation. Snake Eyes widens his eyes almost imperceptibly, catching the moonlight like bottled mercury.
“Tommy,” he says, voice low. “I hurt you. I’m sorry.”
Before he even understands what it is that hearing this makes him feel, Snake Eyes’s expression changes. Just the subtlest twitch from melancholy to amusement.
The twisting, spitting thing inside Tommy could power a nuclear warhead.
He fists his hands in Snake Eyes’s shirt and heaves him off the bed and into the wall. Totally relaxed, Snake Eyes merely tips his head at him.
“Kinda making my point for me here,” he says.
Tommy shoves him and turns to sit on the edge of the bed. His headache is creeping back up on him. “And you have made mine, a dozen times over.”
“But I am sorry,” Snake Eyes tells him, reclaiming his spot on the bed next to Tommy.
“For what? For using me and manipulating me? For making a joke of it?”
“Okay… it sounds bad when you put it like that.”
“It felt worse.”
The answering silence is not the admission of guilt he wants. The gobsmacked look on Snake Eyes’s face is better.
“Do you even know what you’ve done? Was it all a game for you?”
“It wasn’t a game,” he insists, and though his uncertainty is evident, leaning on his reasoning brings him to moor. “There was something I needed to do.”
Tommy doesn’t bother replying. Rather, he takes a page out of Akiko’s book and simply waits for him to unravel himself.
Sure enough, the silence gets to him.
“I didn’t know you would take it like that, Tommy. My dad was my whole life for so long. He was all I had. The only person I ever cared about. What you did for me, it was easier to believe you would’ve done it for anyone, and not just for me. I hate that I had to lose it to realize what it meant.
“It never felt real to me. How so many of your plans included me without any doubt that I’d fit. Because you’d make room for me.”
He looks up suddenly at Tommy, and that open, unguarded set to his eyes is back.
Tommy doesn’t want to hear him speak when he looks like that, so he offers a truth of his own, hard-won, painful, and as heavy a burden as he’s ever let himself be saddled with. He says, “It was not a transaction for me.”
“Yeah, no, I…” Snake Eyes nods and looks away. “I got that. Tommy—”
“You should go.”
“Please don’t kick me out yet,” he says in a rush.
“Yet?” Tommy gives him a sardonic look. “Don’t kick you out yet?”
“Figure it’s inevitable.”
“But I shouldn’t? Why? What could you possibly have left to say to me?”
Tommy makes to stand, not to go anywhere, but simply to feed his agitation. Snake Eyes blocks him by slipping off the bed to kneel before him on the floor. The perfect image of a supplicant, right down to the desperate look on his face.
“When you brought me here, you told me to make your home mine. I didn’t know until you’d gone that this place would never be home for me without you. It’s why I knew I was going to bring you back before you’d even made it out of Arashikage. It’s why I’ve been pestering you since we got back. I thought I could give you a hard time and you’d come around and things’d go back to normal, but I didn’t know I broke your heart.” He frowns to himself and then up Tommy. “Seems obvious, now.”
“You did say I made it easy.”
“I don’t know how to ask you to forgive me.”
Tommy presses his mouth into a thin line, mind working, heart stirring. He can guess at how much of Snake Eyes’s words of honor and family were a fabrication, but he had meant his own. And maybe, as with Snake Eyes himself, Tommy hadn’t been wrong, so much as he had misjudged the timing. He closes his eyes and steadies himself with a deep breath.
“Kiku wa ittoki no haji, kikanu wa isshou no haji.”
Snake Eyes blinks. “I didn’t get that far in my lessons.”
Clicking his tongue, Tommy translates for him: “To ask is a moment’s shame; not to ask is a lifetime of shame.”
“Smart. Okay, here goes.” He reaches for Tommy’s hand, aligning their long healed blood oaths as easily as shaking hands would be. “Tommy, I was a bastard.” At Tommy’s snort, he flashes a rueful smile and amends, “I am a bastard. I was cruel, and I brought out the worst in you. Because I was selfish and weak. Because I thought I was alone and that I had to be. You showed me I was wrong, and it cost you everything.”
“Using the Jewel of the Sun cost me everything,” Tommy says, “but I take your meaning.”
“Can I get to the part where I ask you to forgive me here, or did you have more to add?”
Tommy doesn’t bother repressing the smile burning up on his face this time around. He waves his free hand for Snake Eyes to get on with it.
“Tommy,” he says, drawing out his name in a way that makes Tommy feel warm beneath the jaw. “Could you ever forgive me?”
In the end, and perhaps going back to the very beginning, there isn’t any question at all. It should irritate him, but what he feels instead is peace. He says, “I forgive you.”
Snake Eyes opens his mouth. “Wait, really? Just like that?”
Tommy heaves a sigh and takes his hand back. “Don’t think this means I trust you.”
“Why not?” he asks, perking up and, in all likelihood, sensing that the line between them has been lifted and that Tommy hasn’t yet made up his mind where to redraw it.
“I don’t know you.”
“Did you ever?”
“I thought so.”
“Well, who did you think I was?”
Tommy sighs again. He supposes his first night back home always was going to be this way, full of revelations and unveiled secrets, and he had been advised, after all, to unburden himself. He had been advised, as a matter of fact, to unburden himself to this man. So why shouldn’t he?
“I thought you were unafraid of anything,” he begins, feeling his way through only those things he believes could not have been orchestrated. “Too bold by half,” he adds, “and…”
“And what?”
Too young to know darkness but too hardened to be truly innocent, and yet, for all that—
“Gracious.” He rolls his eyes, mostly at himself, for what his next thought yields, and for the fact that he cannot stop himself from saying it. “Sweet.”
“Batting a thousand so far,” Snake Eyes says offhandedly, resting his arms on Tommy’s knees.
“You are not sweet,” Tommy tells him.
But that is clearly a mistake because Snake Eyes hears it as a challenge. He leans into Tommy’s knees so his weight can be felt and tips his head back just enough to raise his chin. A smile simmers across his mouth, twin silver moon drops sparking in his dark eyes. His tongue darts out to wet his lips, and he says, “Aren’t I?”
Tommy pushes that face away, taking care to be gentle now not merely because his hands are trembling but because he doesn’t want to hurt him anymore. His own face feels like it’s on fire.
Snake Eyes lets himself be nudged back, but he catches Tommy’s hand and gives him a considering look.
“What was that phrase you said earlier? Kiku wa ittoki…”
“Kiku wa ittoki no haji, kikanu wa isshou no haji.”
He nods, repeats fragments of it back, and bites his lip. “Tommy, could I test a theory?”
“What theory?”
Humming, Snake Eyes leans up on his knees, and without understanding the test, Tommy shifts his legs apart to make room for him. Snake Eyes looks steadily from his hands on Tommy’s thighs, up to his face. A short, decisive breath falls from his lips, carrying just the barest hint of his voice, and that sound, how it almost has its own texture against the air between them, ignites something bright and urgent in Tommy’s gut.
Snake Eyes uncurls his shoulders, and then he is right there, looking at Tommy like the burning match head struck within him, too. His hand fits along the curve of Tommy’s cheek. “Tommy,” he whispers.
They are close enough that Tommy only has to angle his chin, and even that brush of sensation overwhelms him. He recoils to breathe, to remember where he is, but that one breath is all he’s given. Snake Eyes kisses him soundly, like he knows Tommy had been trying to escape.
He kisses him like that two more times before licking Tommy’s mouth open and pulling back to murmur, “Still think I’m not sweet?”
Tommy groans and reels him back for more. Hands run up the length of his thighs, up his ribs, around his back, trailing fire everywhere he touches, razing his composure to the ground. Snake Eyes uncoils himself to stand, hauls Tommy up, and steps a knee onto the bed. They bounce, and Tommy winces, jostling the tender spot on the back of his head. Snake Eyes gives a sympathetic hiss and drops down to leave soft kisses up the length of Tommy’s neck.
When he reaches the hinge of his jaw, he entwines both arms around Tommy’s waist to flip them around. With his hands planted on either side of Snake Eyes’s head, looking down at him, Tommy has no other thought but kissing him again and again, so he does.
He kisses the reddened well of his mouth, slowly, languidly, until Snake Eyes is squirming beneath him and Tommy is jubilant, buzzing with satisfaction. When Snake Eyes darts a hand down between them, he isn’t expecting to be the target of that questing touch. He isn’t expecting for his pleasure to come first. Frankly, he hadn’t expected for this loop they’ve been caught in to end at all. He thought, having known it, he would burn and burn forever, until the end of time.
Snake Eyes bites him on the mouth and puts a stop to his daydreaming. “Oh, my God,” he says, finally touching himself while Tommy sucks a mark over his heart, where, he tells himself, his clothes will hide it. “Oh, fuck, Tommy, fuck— Tommy—”
Tommy closes his own hand around him, feeling hot all over, as if they’ve only just started, and perhaps they have. “I want you again,” he whispers, almost afraid of it, how deeply true it is.
Pulling his shirt up over his head, he says, “Sweetheart, you haven’t had me yet.”
“Definitely too bold,” Tommy sighs, helping him out of his shirt.
Snake Eyes hums, rolling his shoulders against the bedding. A grin splits his handsome face. “Turns out you do know me pretty well.”
Humming right back at him, Tommy bends down to put his mouth on that golden skin.
“Did you always wanna do this?” Snake Eyes asks on a sigh, dropping his head back on the bed. “Like back in L.A.?”
“When you were Fish Boy, you mean?”
Scoffing, Snake Eyes flicks Tommy’s ear. He rolls away to avoid him, tucking his chin to mind his bruised head, and Snake Eyes pounces after him. Tommy’s not thinking about it when he grabs hold of his arm to propel his momentum over the foot of the bed. Snake Eyes crashes to the floor, and Tommy opens his mouth to apologize, but he’s laughing too hard to get the words out.
“You did that on purpose!”
Tommy pulls at the collar on his shirt until the whole of it slips off over his head. He flings it at Snake Eyes’s sputtering face. “Come and do something about it,” he muses, before adding, sweetly, “unless you’re too much of a little bitch.”
Delight, unfettered and unabashed, flashes across Snake Eyes’s face. He tosses Tommy’s shirt over his shoulder. “Oh, you’re gonna get it.”
“Promises, promises,” Tommy murmurs.
Snake Eyes climbs up onto the bed, hair a wild mess, his kissed mouth burning red. He keeps Tommy up all night.
It does wonders for his headache.
In the morning, Tommy wakes with his face mashed into a warm shoulder and his arm slung around a slim waist. He hasn’t quite made up his mind whether to pull away when the body beneath his shifts and shudders with a powerful yawn. It immediately transfers to Tommy, and he yawns, too, tightening his arm and tucking his chin without entirely meaning to.
“Good morning,” Snake Eyes says, still yawning and picking at the inside corner of his eye.
Tommy groans. “Morning.”
Snake Eyes yawns again, and Tommy swats his ribs. “Hey!”
“You’re making me—” He buries his yawn in the back of Snake Eyes’s head. “Quit it already.”
“Come and do something about it,” he teases, “unless you’re—” He breaks off into a startled moan at Tommy’s hand slipping down and tightening around him. “Yeah, that’ll work. Keep doing that.”
“Now who’s easy, hmm?” Tommy bites him and soothes that mark with a kiss.
Laughing, Snake Eyes says, “You never answered my question, last night.”
“Did I always want to do this?” Tommy asks readily. He has wondered as much. Has caught himself wondering long before he was summarily captured and smuggled home. He smears a kiss into the racing pulse beneath his lips. “Not always. Not for a time, and even then, not such that I knew I wanted.”
“Wanna know when I knew?”
Idly, like the answer doesn’t matter to him, Tommy says, “Last night?”
Snake Eyes shudders, his body drawing itself into a bow and spending over Tommy’s knuckles. He laughs breathlessly, all of him going boneless. “Gimme some credit here.”
Tommy hums. “Times Square.”
“On the hauler truck,” he says, turning in Tommy’s arms to take him in hand. “When you didn’t know yet if you were gonna kill me or let me fix what I did.”
“Why?” Tommy asks, letting his eyes slip closed.
“Because I realized I didn’t want to be your enemy, and because convincing you of that mattered to me. More than I thought it could.”
“What did you want to be if not my enemy?”
“Am I not good at this? Because you’re way too coherent for my liking right now.”
“It’s called multitasking,” Tommy says, gasping when the kisses at his jaw trail down the length of his body.
“Multitask this.”
After, when Tommy’s sated and trying to catch his breath, he says, “It isn’t a commentary on your abilities,” and pauses to take a fortifying breath. “—to want to listen when you speak.”
“Now who’s sweet?”
“Answer my question first.”
“What did I want to be if not your enemy,” he recites back obediently, resting his cheek in his hand and his opposite arm across Tommy’s chest. “Partners, I guess. That about covers it.”
“Is that what we are? Partners?”
“Or boyfriends, I guess, but you’re taking me on a date if I’m your boyfriend. Somewhere nice.”
“As if I didn’t spoil you enough when I first brought you here,” Tommy mutters.
“You can wear one of your white suits,” he continues, as if Tommy hadn’t spoken. “You look good in white. Black for me, though. Suits me better, don’t you think?”
Enamored, but not as bothered by it as he expected, Tommy sighs. “Boyfriends,” he repeats.
Snake Eyes grins at him. “You’re blushing!”
“I never had a boyfriend before.”
“Only girlfriends?”
Tommy shrugs. “No.”
“No?”
“I have had liaisons, trysts, you could call them. Assignations.”
“Oh. I mean, I figured you had to have done some of this before. Kinda gave me a run for my money last night.”
“Did you think I suffered a deficit of passion?”
“You? No,” Snake Eyes laughs. “Does explain why you’re so clingy, though.”
“Says the man covering me like a blanket.”
“Yeah, well, I never had a boyfriend before either. Dated a few women, sort of, but none of them knew me. No one’s ever really known me.”
Tommy pushes his hand into Snake Eyes’s hair. “I would like to know you.”
“Guess you’re in luck,” he muses, leaning in close to nip at Tommy’s ear and then just behind it where he’s sensitive. “I want that, too.”
Tommy pulls him in for a kiss, and outside, the birds begin to sing with the morning.
—
Six Months Later
—
“What about Bruce?”
Tommy looks at him, a pinched but restrained look on his clean-shaven face.
It’s been on his mind to tell him to grow the beard back, but he knows Tommy’s particular about keeping himself neat and firmly inside the lines. His appearance is the easiest thing for him to control, when taken with the short fuse of his temper. It’s tricky asking him to change it, though he’s pretty sure Tommy’ll go for it, if properly motivated.
“Okay, not Bruce. Jeez. Donnie?”
“Donnie and Tommy,” he says, mulling it over. “You almost look like a Donnie.”
“But it might get confusing, I hear you on that.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Tommy muses, looking too warm and too pleased to require an explanation, but it’s impossible not to give him one.
“You have very specific tells.”
“I have asked you not to read my expressions so closely,” he says, but that cat-canary look on his face doesn’t go anywhere. It really doesn’t help that he’s wearing the white.
He always wears his fussiest, most pristine suits when they go out, ever since it was presented to him as a stipulation of their being boyfriends. It’s another point in favor of telling him to grow the beard back.
“If you’d give me your opinion, I wouldn’t have to get it from your eyes.”
“It’s your name,” Tommy says, a little exasperated, a lot fond. “My opinion shouldn’t matter.”
“Well, it does.”
They clear their napkins and their glasses to make room for the plates of sushi and nigiri as they’re brought out. He breaks his chopsticks over the side of table, and Tommy spares him an arch sideways glance before going in with his hands.
“Oh, okay.” He sets them aside and picks up a piece with his fingers. Before he eats, he says, “What about Keanu?”
Tommy halts in his chewing, clears his throat, and shakes his head before continuing.
“Worth a shot.”
They’ve got a few courses left after this one before they get to dessert, and they make quick work of what they’ve got. Everything’s really good. This place earned its Michelin stars for sure.
He waits for their plates to be taken away and their servers to leave to say, “Chuck?”
Tommy actually dribbles a little water over his hand and glares at him for that one. “Please, no.”
“I thought you said it was mine to choose!” he says, laughing and holding his hands up when Tommy whips him with his napkin.
“Please,” Tommy says again, audibly desperate. He dabs at his face with his napkin-cum-cat-o’-nine-tails. “Do not ask me to call you Chuck.”
“What about Sylvester? You can call me Sly for short.”
“You would not do this to me if we were enemies still,” Tommy complains.
“It was your idea for me to have a real name!”
“Snake Eyes is a name,” Tommy says in an undertone, “if you want it to be. What I said to you, is that perhaps you might choose something less hated, now that its purpose has been met. There is the rest of your life to consider.”
He hums, not wanting to show the pieces in him coming unraveled, to hear Tommy talk about the rest of his life. “I have noticed you don’t like to call me Snake Eyes in bed.”
Tommy’s braced for that one and doesn’t react. He’s so careful, his face doesn’t even twitch. The only sign he’s still on board with this conversation at all is that glimmer of amusement in his eyes. He can never hide what he’s feeling, there, but he should know by now that’s just an invitation to take it further.
“Why don’t you wrap your lips around some of these options I’m giving you, Tommy? See which ones feel right on the tip of your tongue.”
But Tommy’s gotten used to his tricks by now, so he just leans in close and says, “You feel right, on the tip of my tongue.”
“Oh, shit,” he whispers, always immediately floored when Tommy gets one over on him.
Tommy leans back in his seat, composed and obviously satisfied, just in time for their next course to be brought out. They wait for the staff to come and go, wait out the warm inquiries into how their night is going, and then they’re left alone again with another delicious set of plates in front of them.
“I like this place. How come we’ve never been before?”
“I wanted to save it for a special occasion.”
“And what’s the— oh. How did you know?”
“I asked Scarlett. Did you know we are both rabbits?”
“You and Scarlett?” he asks blandly.
“Me and you. I didn’t think to ask Scarlett about her birthday.” He leans in slightly, suspicion written all over his face. “You’re blushing. Do you wish for me not to say it?”
He hunches his shoulders. “Say what?”
Tommy smiles softly. “Happy Birthday.”
Flustered, he takes a too-big bite of a toasted piece of bread. “Thanks,” he mumbles, muffled, and spitting out crumbs. He warms at the hand rubbing a slow circle into his back, swallows, and says, “I should’ve known you didn’t fly us out to London just for really good sushi.”
“We have really good sushi at home,” Tommy says, shrugging. “Most everywhere does these days, if you know where to look. Here, it is an experience. I wanted to share it with you.”
“Thank you, Tommy, and…” He leans back into the hand between his shoulders. “Thanks.”
“Of course.” They get through two more courses before he says, “What about Danny?”
Without thinking, he says, “I don’t know any big martial arts stars named Danny,” and then snaps his mouth shut.
Tommy blinks at him, going back over the list in his head. A smirk twitches over his mouth, and he murmurs, “So American.”
“I can’t believe you didn't noticed the running theme.” He snaps his fingers. “Daniel Bernhardt!”
“Every day you surprise me.”
Grinning, he says, “I know. But Danny? You like Danny?”
“Better than Chuck. What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t be opposed to a trial run.”
Their plates are cleared for the last time to make room for dessert. Tommy loads up his fork with a first bite and holds it out like a toast.
“I am glad to have you in my life, whether you are Danny or Bruce or Toshirô.”
“Toshirô? Who’s that?”
Tommy sighs, a common enough reaction when they get talking long enough about anything. He says, “When we get back to Tokyo, I am taking you to the cinema.”
The chef cleaning up his station nearby perks up. He tips his head, alerting Tommy of his attention before he even speaks. First, he asks a polite, carefully worded question in Japanese, basic enough that they both understand. Tommy answers modestly, stating where they’re from and the gist of their business in London.
He catches, more or less, that the chef is deeply honored for their patronage. When he and Tommy continue conversing in fluent, easy Japanese, he’s content to sit back and listen.
His own handle on Japanese is passable after living with it for just about a year now, but it isn’t music in his mouth how it is for Tommy. And while he never has anything less than encouraging to say about his progress, it can still be intimidating speaking it with him.
“I wish you both a very pleasant evening,” the chef says in English. “And Happy Birthday.”
“Thank you,” he says, tipping his chin at the chef’s courteous bow.
Tommy smirks at him when they’re left on their own again. “You shouldn’t be so shy. You speak it better than you think you do.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Why don’t you believe it then?” Tommy asks, switching back to Japanese. “What are you afraid of? Whose criticism matters to you out here?”
“Not criticism,” he says, rolling his eyes when Tommy stares at him blankly. He switches to Japanese, too. “Your opinion matters to me. I want to impress you, not to make you smile how you’re smiling now.”
“You don’t want me to smile?”
“You’re making fun of me,” he insists, but he’s probably losing points for how he can’t stop smiling either.
“I’m not.” The humor recedes from Tommy’s expression. He says, “I like it when you speak Japanese.”
“Flattery’ll get you everywhere,” he says in English, complete with a smirk.
“One of these days,” Tommy tuts at him, twisting his ring on his finger without seeming to know he’s doing it, “I’m taking you to Asakusa, and we are going to speak only Japanese the entire time. You won’t be embarrassed then.”
“What’s in Asakusa?” he asks, catching Tommy’s hand in his since he’s not using it to eat anyway.
Tommy’s halfway to telling him all about the historic neighborhood and a very old Buddhist temple before he ducks away from the fork headed straight for his mouth. “What are you doing?”
“Multi-tasking.”
The look that wins him, heated and pleased but annoyed, too, makes him smile.
“This is domestic, even for you,” Tommy says, pausing with his mouth just ahead of the fork to add, “Danny?”
It turns something warm in his belly. He doesn’t know yet if it’s the one, or if he’ll wind up liking Toshirô Whoever from Tommy’s camp of martial arts films better, but he likes it for now. He likes knowing that it’s safe for him to change his mind until he gets it right. Snake Eyes will always be the path that brought him here, will always be the reason he met Tommy at all, but it doesn’t have to be his future. Not just.
“Danny,” Tommy says again, not a question this time, and takes the offered bite. “Mmm. Good. Oh, that reminds me.” He slips his hand free and reaches into his pocket. “Hold out your hand.”
“What is it?”
“Hold out your hand,” he says again, waiting.
“Should I close my eyes?”
“No, just hold out your hand.”
He does. A little gold ring drops into his palm.
“Pretty sure you were supposed to get down on one knee first,” he says, to mask the bolt of giddy wonder tearing through him.
“Relax. That’s my plan for Kusatsu Onsen.”
“What?”
“I’m kidding.” Tommy gives him a look. “Mostly.”
Inspecting the ring in his hand and the familiar seal, he says, “I guess this isn’t the first time you’ve asked me to be a part of your family.” He thinks about putting the ring on his finger but hesitates. “Does your grandmother know?”
“She knew quite a while before I did,” Tommy murmurs. “I had an obligation once to lead my people, and the burden of that responsibility corrupted me before it was truly mine. She knew that about me, too.”
“She’s a smart lady, your grandma.”
Tommy nods, back to twisting the ring on his own finger. “She says you brought me back, in ways I have not yet begun to appreciate. This was her idea.”
“Oh, so when you propose at Katsu, uh.”
“Kusatsu Onsen.”
When you propose at Kusatsu Onsen, I can expect a second ring, from you?”
“Brat,” Tommy says, taking the ring back and sliding it on his finger.
The striations in the gold catch the soft restaurant lighting, and all around them people are clapping. He realizes what it looks like, but he doesn’t have time to correct anybody before Tommy’s leaning in to kiss him.
Nothing crazy. Closed-mouth, enough pressure to make him wish they had some privacy. Tommy always knows just how to drive him crazy, for better or worse. It goes both ways with them.
“This is a big step at six months,” he teases, though that isn’t enough to cover what he feels.
“It has been a year for me, wishing I had given you more than a sword and my blood.”
“And now you’ve given me a ring and a name.”
“I think you will have other names,” Tommy says softly, eyes intent, “and other swords.”
“Not to mention, at least one more ring.” He thumbs that grooves on his very own signet ring. “What’s in Kusatsu Onsen anyway?”
“Hot springs and snow.”
He sits up straighter. “Snow?”
“Yes. I remember you saying you wanted to see some. We’ve missed the season this year, but perhaps, come November…”
“You mean for your birthday.”
“For my birthday.”
“Sounds like a cold winter. Think you might consider growing out your beard?”
Tommy gives him that shrewd, mildly scandalized look he gets whenever he hears a question that hasn’t been vocalized. “You’ve been waiting to ask that.”
Caught out but not willing to concede yet, he makes his eyes big and imploring how he know Tommy can’t resist. With his voice pitched down, he says, “It was a good look on you, Tommy.”
Tommy scoffs, but his face turns that special shade of red it gets when he’s embarrassed but enjoying the attention. “Fine.”
“Not even gonna make me work for it?”
“I like to give you things,” he says, accepting the bill from a server and dropping probably too much money on the table. He tosses his napkin onto his cleared plate and gets to his feet. “Don’t you know that about me yet?”
They leave the restaurant together and walk out onto the street, him in black and Tommy in white.
“I bet you know where all the underground fight clubs are in every major city,” he says, bumping his shoulder against Tommy’s while they make their way to their motorcycles. “We should hit one up before we fly back home. You can bet on me and make back all that money you just spent.”
“You know that isn’t necessary.”
“I know it’s not, but I like to show off for you,” he says, bouncing a little on his heels. “Don’t you know that about me yet?”
“If you want to show off for me, you don’t need an illegal fighting ring to do it.” Tommy puts his helmet on and throws one leg over his bike. “And in any case, if there’s a fight, we are best served walking into it together.”
“So we tag team. Twice the payout.”
Tommy rolls his eyes and starts his motorcycle, flipping his visor down. They ride out onto the street side by side, engines revving and blaring under the glow of lucky green lights.
The night comes alive around them, awaiting their next destination.