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The apartment smells, simply, like death.
It hits Nishida as the door peeks open. His heart stutters and bile rises in his throat. He nearly cries out, grief and panic, until he realizes that what he thought at first was that telltale scent of rot is instead something weaker; old takeout, booze, the must of a house unclean. Trembling, he twists the plastic bag in his left hand and grips the spare key in his right.
It’s dark. The massive window across the room shows a view of Kamurocho’s nightlife, gleaming in shades of yellow and pink and purple many stories below. Still, it offers poor lighting – a blanket of extremely dim blue swathes most of the room, and even that is cut through with pitch black in the shadows. Furniture, knickknacks, trash, general disorder. It’s all reduced to half defined silhouettes.
“Boss,” he calls out. There’s no answer, so he takes a step past the threshold of the entry, and softly clicks the door closed behind himself. He hesitates, but turns the lock, and drops the key into his pocket.
A few more experimental steps, and he jolts forward as his leg catches on a half full garbage bag in the middle of the walkway. He reaches blindly into the darkness but finds no purchase, the world tilting sideways, and instead curls his arms around his head and shelters the plastic bag on his stomach to brace for impact. The crash is a loud one, the contents of the bag scattering over the already filthy hardwood, his elbow and shoulder slam into the ground, a throbbing pain alighting in the spot.
His heart beats wildly in his ears, and the hazy vision of a smooth ceiling, visible by moonlight, spins overhead. He shuts his eyes tightly and tries to quiet the petrification of broken silence.
He hoists himself to his knees and gently sets the plastic bag on the ground. Checks to make sure that the food hasn’t spilled, and sighs in relief when the bento is secure. He silently thanks his hindsight in buying new containers.
Slowly, turning his sore shoulder all the while, he presses his hand to the ground to push himself up.
A shadow passes soundlessly by the window. He freezes, waiting, and holds his breath.
Something sharp skims his chin and presses against the soft underside of his jaw. Out of the dark, like a demon, Majima’s face gains shape: the night-black of his hair outlined only through the reflection of its grease, his uncovered left eye shut perpetually and detailed with the fine lines of a scar where his open eyelid had been sliced through collaterally. A snarl of twisting teeth, gnarly and grotesque, and one wide, bloodshot eye.
“Boss,” Nishida whispers breathlessly. Majima blinks, and his distinct air of murderous intent falls away. “It’s only me.”
The blade lets up. A slight burn remains where it was; he’d nicked him. No deeper than a particularly bad shaving accident, but the thin trickle of warmth inches down his neck all the same. He swallows, and the droplet trembles over his bouncing adam’s apple.
It doesn’t leave entirely, though. “You better have a good reason for being here,” Majima warns, but he sounds… listless. Tired. His breath smells. His tanto hovers threateningly for only a moment, but he lets it drop.
“I’m…” Nishida purses his lips thinly. He doesn’t bother mentioning that he’s sent several emails, texts, and unanswered phone calls prior to deciding to come, and doesn’t mention that he warned of his arrival, either. Doesn’t verbalize his bone-deep worry or the uncertain tautness of the clan without him, his panic when a message goes unseen and his relief when they’re marked as read, even when they go ignored. He says, instead, “You’ve been gone for a while, sir.”
Majima straightens. “Hm.” He turns, handle dangling from his loose fingers, and wanders to the massive L-couch in the living room. It’s a rather open flooring. To the right of Nishida, just near the entrance, is a wide, sleek kitchen, with an island populated by barstools. Separating it and the living area is a decorative screen added by Majima. On the far side of the room, in the corner by the floor-to ceiling one wall window, is a fully-stocked bar.
Nishida knows that to the right there’s a hallway with a bathroom, laundry room and guest bedroom, because he’s stayed there before. To the left there’s a shorter hallway leading to Majima’s bedroom, with a massive closet populated with a runway worth of strange ensembles and Goromi’s dresses.
Majima makes no effort to turn to the bedroom, though, and Nishida realizes that he never heard a door open or close. It’s well within Majima’s abilities to go through doorways silently, but as Majima bumps his knees into the armrest of the couch and falls on his face into the cushions, Nishida’s convinced he just… never made it there.
He tosses the tanto onto the coffee table, and it clatters unpleasantly, doubtlessly scratching the protective finish. He pulls his shins from where they’re hovering over the side of the couch and turns around, facing the back. Nishida moves carefully, rising up and gripping the bag’s thin straps. The room is at a point of wading.
So many clothes, trash, collected junk and important sentimental items, all of them in piles half-sorted and falling apart. He sees the shadow of motivation to clean, efforts Majima couldn’t finish, beneath mess and filth that expands outward from points almost defined. There, in the corner, that’s where the takeout boxes go, when he bothers to eat. Don’t worry about the stragglers, the rotting noodles and meat and vegetables uneaten on the kitchen counter, bartop, floor beneath the coffee table. Dishes go in the sink, but only vaguely. It piles up and up and it’s so much, and he doesn’t even know where they come from, because he doesn’t even eat that often, cooks even less. They’re mostly glasses, though; when he runs out of those, well, drinks come in a bottle of their own. Used needles on the floor, but it’s no issue. There’s nobody to see.
Except for Nishida. He sees, and even when he doesn’t he can tell when things get bad like this. He holds out as long as he can because Majima resents support he doesn’t ask for, but he’s so stubborn and desperate to keep it up that he would never, even in threat of death, ask for it. Nishida can’t help it, though. It’s in his nature – he wants to take care of those he loves. And if Majima would scoff at that, well, devotion is as good as any love. It certainly takes more of Nishida than he had ever thought to give.
He turns back silently and, now that he knows Majima is awake, turns on the sensitive warm lamps in the far corners of the room. They provide lighting without any particular change in the hidden nature of the room, but Majima curls tighter on himself all the same. He’s wearing nothing but boxers and a crocheted blanket thrown haphazardly over his thin waist, tugged down from the back of the couch. His upper back and shoulders, beneath the shadow of his tattoo, is breaking out in acne.
Next he makes the trek through, stepping carefully, and clears a space from the coffee table. After the initial look-over he needs to turn back to grab a fresh garbage bag. To do so requires shuffling aside piles of used ones in front of the kitchen cabinet. His skin crawls, but he turns back to try and clear the table. Abandoned takeout boxes, beer bottles, expensive whiskey, wrappers and notebook scribbles and what looks suspiciously like important secretive documents that he very pointedly does not linger over. He wrinkles his nose and fights not to gag when one of them reveals mold on the inside.
He desperately wants gloves, but it’s not time to try and tackle all of this, he knows. Majima has been ignoring him, and that, in and of itself, is uncharacteristically subdued. He’s not angry. He’s ashamed.
Once the table is at least usable again, and he’s tied and set aside the garbage bag, Nishida retrieves his plastic bag from a chair. The mountain of clothes that had been shoved to one side slowly reclaims the surface area of the cushion, crumbling down like a rockslide.
“Sir,” Nishida prompts. Majima moves his head in a motion that suggests he’s listening. There’s no way for him to look over his shoulder from this angle, and he’s evidently not given up his effort of pretending to sleep. Or pretending he doesn’t care that Nishida is here. “I brought food.”
Majima folds back into the couch. “I’m not hungry.”
Nishida frowns. “When did you last eat?”
Majima finally turns to look at Nishida, face fixed in a sneering glare. What seemed in the protection of darkness to be something terrifying, a twisted reflection of the Hannya on his back, now makes him look as if he’s blustering, fighting to keep a braggadocio he can’t maintain. It makes him look scared. Like a stray.
Immediately Nishida feels bad for the image. The thought was like dirt under his nails and in his ears, like him in one corner and Majima crouched to strike in another. He never wants it to be like that.
“Okay,” he says softly. He sits down in front of the clothing populated armchair, legs criss crossed beneath the coffee table, and waits.
Majima doesn’t move for a minute or two, glare turned to the cushion again. The apartment stews in its filth, and the bento box with its chopsticks set neatly overtop stares at its intended recipient’s back. Nishida closes his eyes and lets his head fall back hesitantly against the chair. It’s always busy, being Majima’s captain, but the constant anxiety has been worse since Majima’s fallen away from him. How long has it been? Months?
He presses his lips thin. How could things have gotten like this? There has to have been something he could’ve done, before Majima took off and stopped answering calls completely, before the apartment fell to shambles.
But, then, Majima never likes the fuss. Or he can’t handle it. Nishida is pretty sure it's the latter – he’s gotten yelled at, hit, punished, for calling him out. It happens on a coin flip, but still he needs to try. He can’t tell if he’s glad Majima isn’t resisting more, or if he’s afraid of that.
“What are you doing?” Majima asks, and Nishida peels his eyes open to look at him. His head feels a bit heavy, but he shrugs the weariness easily. Second nature by now.
“Nothing, sir,” he replies. Pauses. “Would you like me to leave?”
Majima studies him, one brown eye, nearly black in the lighting. It flicks over his face, searching. Nishida sits very still and schools his expression into something distant and unbothered, even though he wants, a little, to beg. He doesn’t know if he could forgive himself if he left Majima like this. He thinks no.
Majima lifts himself heavily into a sitting position. The blanket goes over his shoulders, spilling across his arms and into his lap like a shawl. Finally he mutters, “Do whatever the hell you want,” and turns his attention to eyeing the bento suspiciously.
Relief is heady and sweet like expensive wine, and it blooms warmly in his chest. He wants to thank Majima, but feels it would go over oddly. “Yes, sir,” he says instead.
“But don’t touch me,” Majima adds abruptly, aiming a glare at Nishida.
Nishida thinks it strange, distantly – never in his life has he touched the boss without requirement or Majima’s initiation – but instead of lingering on the details, he agrees, “Of course, sir.” Unconsciously his face has twisted into a small smile, eyes squinched subtly into half moons. Majima looks at him for a moment longer, glare falling away, and he looks back at the bento with a carefully blank face.
He eats systematically. The chopsticks tremble in his grip, and he chews slowly. Nishida closes his eyes and leans back again, in an attempt to give him privacy. In turn he feels an eye on himself , but doesn’t acknowledge them.
“You make this yourself?” Majima asks gruffly after a while. Nishida opens his eyes to find Majima halfway through, attention trained on him, inscrutable.
Nishida’s cheeks warm a little. “Yes, sir.”
“Hm.”
He doesn’t ask anything else.
The food steadily disappears. Once the box is all but cleaned out, he presses the chopsticks together and balances them over the open cavern of the empty bento. It’s silent.
“A few days,” Majima says faintly, as if he doesn’t believe it himself. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe breaking the fast, the sudden intervention of food – a friend – maybe that distances him enough to scare him.
“Sir?”
“Eaten. I haven’t – I don’t think –” He presses his lips thin. Nishida’s stomach twists.
The conflicting warmth of the lamp bulbs and the watercolor night plays across Majima’s hollowed cheeks. His hair is too long, and that must be bothering him. His eyelashes splay over his cheekbones in webs of wispy shadows. Nishida wants to reach out and hold him; his fingers twitch. It doesn’t surprise him, but he clenches his fists tighter where they rest on his knees. It’s not his place.
“Sir,” Nishida starts frailly, and his voice tapers off with emotion. He swallows, throat clicking dryly. “We’re all worried. I’ve been –” Majima is looking at him. “Sir,” he says again. He’s not sure why.
Majima is quiet. He looks at the space around himself with a resignation long past disgust. “Man,” he sighs, “this place really needs some work, eh? Not at the point I should be entertaining guests. Heh.” He tries for a smile. His lips stretch at odd angles, too wide and unreal, and then it falls away just as soon, like a puppet with its strings cut. An echo of the Mad Dog. Still it very nearly sends Nishida to tears. He longs for the Mad Dog, the boss, the order and strength, but even more he hurts for Majima. What little of him he knows he wants to shelter; a joke, a smile, a story, a secret. Scraps of a person and a friend and Nishida loves them both, the legend, the man.
The implication of a job to be done sets him in motion and subsequently away from his thoughts, blessedly. It’s late, nearly eleven PM now, but they’re both wide awake. “If you’re up to doing anything,” Nishida suggests cautiously, “I can help.”
“Yeah?” Majima drawls. Raises an eyebrow, letting his expression revert to a practiced mockery, sickly sweet and demeaning. It’s comfortable. It’s easy. It hurts Nishida, distantly, though he would never say so.
“Of course,” is the answer, deadly sincere.
Majima’s face falls again. The complete rejection of his deflection offers no reason for bravado, and he instead pulls the blanket tightly around himself. “Fucking idiot,” he says lifelessly. The air conditioning hums in the background and then clicks off automatically as soon as Nishida has been quiet long enough to notice it.
“Alright,” Majima says eventually. He stands, using the couch cushion as a help, and Nishida watches his tall body stretch out above. The cut of his muscled stomach and sharp hips looks more skeletal than anything.
He throws off the blanket and Nishida respectfully turns his attention to standing up himself, since ogling at his near naked body would be bad form. Majima is frozen, fingers twitching at his sides, looking lost.
“Al riiiiight ,” he says again, like a mantra or a spell, as if it’ll give him direction. It does not, and he slaps his hands to his hips testily. Nishida watches him, waiting for a sign of where Majima is headed — if he will order Nishida about, or if…
Majima sends him a helpless glance, brows furrowed, lips tense. The enormity of the project leaves him fumbling, and Nishida softens more, if such a thing is possible.
“If I may,” Nishida interjects, a quiet voice, subordinate even as he takes the reins because Majima needs help , not to be patronized, “I could get started while you get washed up? I’ll get a fresh pair of clothes out for you.”
Majima nods, immediately getting into motion. “Ah, yeah, yeah. But make it something comfortable, alright? No leather today.”
Nishida glances at the piles of clothes and hopes there’s something clean in Majima’s bedroom; he doesn’t think he’ll be able to finish a load in the time it takes for Majima to shower. “Alright.”
He makes a beeline into his bedroom, to the bathroom and advanced fancy shower therein. Nishida waits a few minutes, until he hears the water turn on, splattering against the tiles through the wall. Then he gets to work.
The first order of business is to get those clothes out. He goes into Majima’s bedroom and is surprised at how distinctly untouched it looks. He wonders when the last time Majima slept in it was; there are collections of items and papers, but the mess is a lived in one. A thick layer of dust coats his fingertips when he touches the top of his dresser. Interestingly, his favorite snakeskin jacket is thrown over the bed, abandoned. Upon inspection Nishida finds blood on the cuffs and frowns. He thinks he may be able to get it out, but wishes he’d been able to try sooner.
He goes back to the dresser. He pulls out what he thinks is a clean pair of boxers, and sweatpants crumpled into the corner in the bottom drawer. He brings out a tank top, too, but doesn’t hold his breath — he wonders vaguely why Majima even owns one. They all smell slightly musty, but they’re at least free of sweat and spills. He folds them and leaves them on the bed.
Leaving Majima’s room and the muffled shower behind, Nishida goes to clear the kitchen floor of garbage bags. He doesn’t bother ordering or sorting garbage; upstanding citizenship will have to wait. Instead he searches under the kitchen sink for gloves and comes up with thin plastic ones, then grabs each half filled bag in the kitchen and ties the top double knotted. The trip out of the apartment and to the trash chute is one of blind faith that there are no tears in the bags; luckily the only casualty is a dripping mystery juice down his jeans from a thin leak. He cringes and treks on, and every bag, one after another, goes tumbling down the chute.
The easy physicality of the job puts him in a trance. He clears and sorts; ask the boss, toss out, laundry pile. The plastic trash bag fills up and the floor slowly reveals itself as clinking beer bottles and greasy containers are tossed away.
He’s interrupted when Majima calls out for him.
Nishida quickly slips off the gloves and tosses them in his bag. “Sir?” He asks against Majima’s bedroom door. “Did you call me?”
“Yeah!” He replies. “Get me a towel, would you?”
Nishida smiles a bit and turns away. There’s a cabinet built into the wall across from the other bathroom where the towels are kept. They’re stored neatly, folded in thirds, and Nishida grabs one from the middle of the stack. The thought of Majima cleaning and folding towels, simple chores and housekeeping, makes him happy in a way he can’t explain.
He knocks, and the door swings open to reveal Majima dripping a slippery puddle onto the hardwood. Behind him, on the orange rug that spreads outward from the centerpiece of the bed, is a trail of darkened spots from the open bathroom door. Steam spills into his bedroom like smoke from a hotbox.
Majima plucks the towel from Nishida’s hands, grinning his thanks. He turns away and, as Majima kicks the door closed again, Nishida gets an eyeful of his tattooed ass while Majima furiously towels his hair.
Nishida returns to his job with a fresh pair of gloves. Soon after, Majima emerges from his bedroom, smelling an odd mix of mothballs and fruity soap. His hair curls and frays at the ends, frizzy and tangled from the towel. He’s forgone an eyepatch, still (Nishida notices, with a rushing fondness, a faint tan line where the patch usually is), but oddly enough has chosen to wear the shirt. It’s thin enough that the dark, bold lines and coloring of his tattoo is visible blurrily through the fabric.
Nishida’s lips twitch hesitantly, tugging upward at the corners, and he straightens up where he was at first crouched low, bag edge gripped in one hand. Majima stares. A complicated string of emotions wars for jurisdiction over his expression; Nishida waits.
He settles, finally, on something blank and distantly interested. Already, a dent has been made in the suffocating atmosphere of the apartment, and the smell that had scared Nishida upon his first entrance has been reduced to an echo that’ll clear up well after a good scrub and a day of airing out. It’s no doubt that the kitchen’s collection of old trash was the guilty cause.
“Well, what can I do?” Majima says. He presses his lips tightly, looking annoyed, and uncomfortable. Nishida averts his eyes to motion at the pile of “ask the boss” stacked on and near the coffee table. Knickknacks and collectable cards, papers that seemed important and papers that didn’t but Nishida didn’t get this job by making assumptions.
“Look through that, please, sir, and decide what you’d like to keep.” He leans back down to continue collecting crushed paper wrappers Majima seems to have made a sport of tossing into this corner. “I’m almost done with this.”
Majima doesn’t answer, but in a moment or two he hears the huff of him collapsing onto the couch and the rustle of papers. Nishida gets to it.
True to his word, it doesn’t take long for him to fill, tie, and toss the garbage down the chute. It had come out to a bag and a half, the second of which he leaves in the apartment because he doubtless missed something along the way.
The next hour, give or take some, is the two of them sorting in silent companionship. Nishida gets started on the looming threat of laundry, separating clothes first by what can be done at home and what needs to be dry cleaned, and then by lights, darks and whites for what can be done in Majima’s laundry room. Majima works through the pile of things and stands occasionally to drop papers or some small item in the open trash bag, but eventually decides to just drag the bag over and cut out the effort of constantly walking back and forth.
When Majima’s finished with that at some point, he stashes what he deems important in his bedroom and comes back out. He watches Nishida, a silent question, and they switch places, Majima getting to work on sorting the clothes based on Nishida’s direction while Nishida starts a load of laundry. It’ll take quite a few to get through them all – Nishida is pretty sure he’s emptied out the entirety of his closet and dressers, if the barren nature of the dresser he looked in was any clue.
They fall into an easy pattern. While clothes are washing, the load before it is being dried, and Nishida and Majima turn their attention to cleaning counters and dishes and tiles. Nishida cleans out the nearly empty fridge and scrubs the freezer drawers from who knows how long of muck while Majima disappears to scrub the shower in his bedroom. Once clothes have finished being dried, the next cycle is switched out, and Nishida helps Majima lay the clothes out and fold those that belong in his dressers, and hang those that belong in the closet. Nishida is honestly surprised at just how many clothes Majima owns, and Majima grumbles more and more as the actions are repeated, but never stops or snaps at Nishida. Nishida does his best to keep the momentum going. They need to ride this wave of Majima’s motivation as far as possible.
They work well into the early AM hours. The refrigerator is gleaming by the time Nishida is done with it, including the freezer, and the buildup of dishes in the sink has been washed, dried and put away after a thorough cleanup of the contents in Majima’s cabinets. Finally the clothing dwindles and all that’s left is a pile of to-be-dry-cleaned laid neatly over one another on the couch. Majima’s bedroom bathroom is near sparkling, and Nishida polishes the tile floor in the guest bathroom. The bucket and rag need to be washed out multiple times with new water; a layer, it seems, of dirt and dried blood has caked the white tile floor into a dim brown. Its real color is revealed over time, but the sight of brownish-red running down the drain unsettles Nishida.
At some point Majima wanders past the open bathroom door with sheets curled massively in his arms, some spilling out and trailing behind him. Nishida watches him, bubbly joy in his throat. The washing machine comes to life with a lovely little melody, and when Majima comes back around they make eye contact. Nishida is squatting low to the floor, rag soaking in the water before he uses it for a final wipe over the now white floor.
“You ain’t gotta do this,” Majima tells him. “I mean, a bit late now , but still, you-” he stops and sighs. “Hell, Nishida.”
Nishida wrings out the rag, and in the silence the musical splatter of droplets plopping into the water bucket is very loud. “It’s no problem, boss,” he replies truthfully. Majima’s brow is furrowed low, and Nishida makes a point to catch his eye. Majima blinks, and the tension softens at the earnestness in Nishida’s expression. “I mean it.”
Majima is quiet for a moment. Nishida waits, again. It seems he’s always waiting for something. Waiting for Majima to smile, to yell, to see. Waiting for Majima. He doesn’t mind.
The threshold from the bathroom to the hall, the invisible separation, is broken as Majima steps through. While his sheets spin and dampen in the bumping washing machine a room over, and Nishida scrubs the final flakes of Majima’s blood from the floor, Majima opens the cabinet below the sink and begins sorting through old products.
By the time they’ve gotten through nearly everything, and the apartment smells of cleaning products and the vacuum has gone over every rug around and the bathroom mirrors have been wiped down to reflect clearer than they have since the day Majima got them, the sun is rising. It might have risen a half hour ago, in fact.
Nishida is sitting in the armchair, now free of clothes, his head thrown back and eyes closed. He’s hovering on the edge of sleep, slipping in and out, because the warmth of stillness is welcoming even though the sun is bright through the closed curtains. The lamps are off now and the sun blares onto the city below. It’s in the tail end of its few hazy hours of rest, when it’s too late for nightlife and too early for office workers.
Majima is making circles around the apartment, flipping the tanto in the air. Every now and then he passes by the back of the armchair, and he’s close enough that Nishida can hear the slice of the blade as it rises and falls firmly into Majima’s palm. It’s accompanied, too, by a quiet whispering; he may be singing, or speaking to himself, or some other verbal stim, but all Nishida can make out is a soft psst , like wind through tree leaves.
The constant movement and presence is not always reassuring, but here and now – exhausted and sore and intoxicated with relief – it is. Nishida dozes without realizing.
He’s woken up slowly. “Yo,” he hears, through the dim film of sleep. A whistle. A little sing-song call, “ Yoo-hoo! Nishidaaa~ ”
Majima is startlingly close to his face. Nishida blinks and scrunches away in surprise, confused. It all feels very hazy and dreamlike. Majima grins and it cuts through his face violently, teeth revealed like bone though blood. He’s wearing his eyepatch and a simple gray-purple shirt with most of the buttons undone, sleeves rolled up his forearm.
“Boss,” greets Nishida, dragging himself away from sleep. He realizes, with a blush, that all down his cheek and neck is sticky and dry with drool. He quickly tugs the cuff of his shirt over his hand and tries to wipe it clean; Majima is watching him with an odd sort of amusement, and Nishida relaxes again, realizing that it doesn’t matter all that much. He waits for Majima to do something.
Majima, still close to his face, raises a water bottle from nowhere. It populates the few inches of space between their faces until Nishida raises his hand and accepts it. Majima holds on a beat too long, their fingers overlapping, and then, seemingly satisfied with whatever he found in his investigation of Nishida’s face, retreats from his personal space. It leaves him feeling slightly cold, as if a blanket was ripped away.
“Drink up,” Majima orders. In one fluid motion he collapses dramatically on the couch, removes and tosses his eyepatch onto the coffee table (where it slides and comes dangerously close to falling to the floor, but does not), and reaches into a hereto unnoticed plastic bag on the floor. Nishida stretches his legs out, and his lower back realigns with a satisfying series of cracks, followed by his arms and neck as he twists. Majima pulls out an orange which he tosses and catches with a flourish, and says conversationally, “You were sleepin’ like the dead.”
Nishida opens the water and, suddenly parched, downs half of it in a few massive gulps. He wipes his face with the back of his hand. Majima has made a cut in the orange peel with his blade, and from the opening he’s started peeling away the skin in sections. He stacks them onto a paper towel on the table, to be thrown away later. It’s slow work. Majima is unhurried.
Nishida confides, “I haven’t been sleeping well recently.” His eyes still droop with the weight of sleep sand on his eyelids, and he digs the knuckle of his pinkie finger into the hollows near his nose bridge in an attempt to clear it up.
Majima hums. A small piece of orange is removed and discarded; the air begins to smell sweet with citrus. “Me neither,” he replies simply. The easy empathy and camaraderie, even under the circumstances, makes Nishida smile.
Cupping the water bottle between his palms, Nishida leans back into the crevasse he’d created in the back cushion. “Did you go out?”
“Mm.” Peel, discard, sweet flesh into open air. “Yep. Picked up some stuff from the Poppo and dropped those clothes by the dry cleaners’.” Halfway through speaking he finishes his job, and, to Nishida’s surprise, holds the peeled orange out to him.
Nishida blinks. Stares. Majima’s fingernails are decorated in chipping red paint, and over the few seconds Nishida watches, unmoving, his fingers grip the fruit harder; the final protection of the fruit’s thin membrane is punctured by an agitated thumb, and the juice spurts and runs down his wrist. Majima shakes it. “ Here ,” he insists, scowling. “Don’t get slow on me, Nishida.”
Nishida accepts it like it’s something precious. Heat grows in his cheeks and his eyes and Majima’s theatric, fabricated contempt falls away just as quick as it had appeared. He looks startled. Nishida is startled, too.
“The hell?” Majima says, and Nishida furiously wipes his nose and eyes in the crook of his elbow, orange cradled in his trembling palm.
“Sorry, sir,” he hurries to say, frantic and hating the tears he doesn’t understand and couldn’t predict, voice failing in a terrible whisper, “sorry. I’m sorry.” He shoves his face hard into his arm, until his eyes burn and his nose bridge complains under the pressure, but the tears dwindle to nothing. His nose runs, a little, and he swipes it over his sleeve to clear it away. When he raises his head, less than a minute after the orange switched hands, the only hint of the episode is a faint blotchy redness ringing his eyes.
Majima is gazing at him with one big, questioning eye. He opens and closes his mouth, looking very much like he wants to say something, but instead busies himself with retrieving and peeling another orange. Nishida feels a little lost, emotions twisting confusingly in his chest and stomach, and he doesn’t think he’s ever fallen apart like that – even briefly – with anybody but his own mother. Even then, it’s been years.
Majima, seemingly having regained his footing with familiar ground (Nishida not crying) and with his attention trained solely on his own fruit, asserts confidently, “Yer only hungry, and it’s puttin’ you in a mood.” Nishida looks back at the naked orange in his palm and starts picking a slice away from the rest. Majima keeps going, “Yeah. Happens to the best of us. You come around here with homemade bento, talking about taking care of myself and all that shit… tch. Gotta practice what you preach, Nishida. Yeah.”
Nishida pops the slice into his mouth. His salivary glands come alive almost painfully with the sudden flavor, rushing to catch up, and the orange is sweeter than he’s ever tasted. Majima goes quiet.
“I’ll cut your hair before I leave,” Nishida says softly, when they’re both an orange down, and the apartment is quiet and still.
Majima twitches, blinking rapidly. “Before you – right. Right.” Making a split decision, he lurches jarringly to his feet and pivots for a moment, directionless, in place. “I’ll get – scissors,” he declares, and takes off to his bedroom bathroom.
Nishida watches him, perplexed, but follows dutifully after. He grabs a stool from the kitchen for Majima to sit on and a towel from the cabinet to go over his shoulders.
When he walks into the bathroom, mirror and tiles freshly cleaned, Majima is standing motionless with his eyes glazed over. The scissors are on the counter, and his eyes are directed somewhere to the bottom left of himself.
Nishida signals his entrance with a gentle, “Boss,” and Majima snaps back to attention. They move around one another without having to speak much. With how often Majima calls on Nishida to clean up his haircut, it’s a song and dance long memorized, even though it’s been overdue for a while now.
He wets and combs Majima’s hair. The scissors cut through the strands easily, and they fall away onto the floor, painting it like ink over a blank page. Nishida is careful to keep it even and a healthy distance above his ears. Majima lets his eye fall closed, even as he takes care to keep his head up and forward. Uneven cuts don’t look nice on him; Nishida has, embarrassingly, been the one to help him learn as such.
Once it’s cut short the way Majima prefers it, Nishida grabs the towel away from Majima’s shoulders and shakes it free of clippings. Majima opens his eye to watch Nishida in the mirror, who bundles both ends of the towel in either hand and grabs his head with the makeshift mitts to scrub the moisture from his hair. Majima ragdolls his neck and lets Nishida turn his head either which way. It should bother him, but the contact is practiced, now. Normal, routine. Reliable. In secret, he thinks it feels kind of nice.
It’s only when the hair is sufficiently dry that Nishida braves the razor. He’s most well versed with this, given that he keeps his own head shaved neatly just under half an inch. Majima’s overgrown undercut disappears with the electrical buzzing, Nishida’s practiced touch gently guiding his head.
Finally he clicks off the razor and sets it on the counter. He brushes Majima’s neck clean and carefully combs small, benign knots away until his hair is smooth and silky, smelling faintly of shampoo from the night before.
Majima inspects his work in the mirror while Nishida sweeps the floor clean of hair clippings. A layer of dark, frayed strands coats the bottom of the fresh garbage bin lining.
Majima runs a hand down the curve of his head, feeling the soft bristles flatten and rise through his fingers. He follows the fade down the nape of his neck, the very bottom sharp and sensitive from the fresh shave. Nishida’s learned to soften the transition from cut to skin. It looks clean. “Yer getting pretty good at this,” Majima comments. He’s cranking his eye into the corner of the socket to gaze appreciatively at the clean, even cut in front of the mirror.
Nishida hovers behind him, watching their reflections. “Only took a few years,” he jokes, and Majima huffs a laugh that leans distinctly on the side of genuine. Nishida is afraid to move, because he knows that he will have to leave, now that there is no excuse to stay, and this quiet closeness will become obscured by complications of the world beyond Majima’s walls until some unseeable point in the future.
Seemingly sensing his self-contained unease, Majima raises his gaze and catches Nishida’s through the mirror. “I should give you a raise,” says Majima unexpectedly, and Nishida laughs outright. It sprouts from his chest with such brutal haste that it shocks him, immediately, into silence, and they stare at one another through the mirror in bemused silence.
Then Majima cracks a close-lipped smile, little breaths of laughter shaking his chest, and Nishida finds the humor in it, again. He chuckles to himself while Majima turns to face him head-on, leaning casually against the counter in his black slacks and rumpled purple shirt.
“I’m sorry,” Nishida apologizes lightly.
Majima shakes his head and switches topics, prospective raise on the back burner. “Ya busy today?”
“Well,” Nishida approaches delicately, “you should rest, sir. And you know I tend to look over things when you’re occupied.”
Majima studies him intently, for a moment, but finds nothing of particular interest or suspicion. Nishida is true to his word, after all – he keeps the family in line and alive while Majima is otherwise busy, but has no further interest in running things himself. He prefers things as they are.
“ Resting ain’t exactly what I want to be doing right now,” Majima replies. He glances to the side, and follows his attention through the bathroom door into his bedroom. Nishida trails behind him. He casts his gaze over the room, and ends his inspection once again on Nishida. “Seems that’s all I’ve been doing. Resting. Just makes me tired.”
Oxymoron or not, Nishida understands. He lets Majima arrange his thoughts and follows him out into the living room and watches, something almost protective clogging his throat, as Majima looks out over a city that fears and reveres him.
“I’ll get us a cab,” Majima decides.
“I drove here,” Nishida interjects. “I could drive us both to the office if that’s what you’d like, and save you the cost. Of course, I’d like to stop and get myself a change of clothes, if that’s alright with you.”
Majima nods absently. He shifts and his freshly cut hair sways smoothly. “It’s not –” he stops. Says, finally, after deliberation, “I ain’t – all this, it doesn’t just…”
“It’s alright.”
Majima looks at him. Nishida collects what bravery he has, and takes advantage of the subdued vulnerable lucidity Majima’s bared to him these past hours, because he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to say it again, if ever.
“I’ll support you, sir.” Stares directly at Majima and his uncovered face, one lid perpetually closed and the other perpetually open, hypervigilant. “I’d do anything for you.” He grins, a small, crooked thing, and attempts some levity, “A bit of housework is no problem.”
A ghostly smile passes across Majima’s face, and he stares at Nishida in such a way that makes Nishida feel as though he’s being stripped away. He realizes all at once that Majima is not high, or drunk, or manic, and that this might be the realest, sharpest iteration of Majima that he’s interacted with in a long while. He knows that it won’t last. That Majima will not always be this open or willing, not always this temporarily sober, not always this nonviolent. He knows, also, that it doesn’t matter what version of Majima he’s faced with, because he will stay even if it kills him. (Knows that it probably will, someday.)
“You’re a fucking sap,” Majima tells him. Nishida lays his lips thin and tugs one corner in some imitation of a smile, eyes soft and acknowledging. Majima’s brow falls, conflicted, and he turns away with a scowl.
“Well, whatever,” he sighs loudly after a moment. The day inches onward. “Go bring the car ‘round. Best get to work, long as none of those shitheads have burned the building down yet.”
“Of course, sir,” Nishida agrees, and bows low at Majima’s back.
Majima watches him leave. The sunlight burns the sensitive skin over his bad eye; he rubs it and, in Nishida’s absence, goes to don his eyepatch.