Chapter Text
It’s New Year’s Eve. The ship that Kazuma’s friends had left on all those weeks ago is due in port this afternoon. Was due, he reminds himself. They’re already there. Given the way the world turns, he’s living in the past now.
Kazuma keeps two watches, one on Tokyo time.
He’s envious of them now, home in time for the dawn of Meiji 34. Ryunosuke will go back to his family home before returning to open a law office, but not immediately. He’ll stay with the Mikotobas for a day or two. Probably in the room that Kazuma had left, if his things hadn’t been cleared out while he was dead. He expects they’re all still there. Professor Mikotoba hadn’t known, but he had suspected enough that Kazuma expects he’d left him a place to return to. He hopes it’s still there by the time he does.
Ryunosuke will enjoy the Mikotobas’ New Year’s cooking, he’s sure of that. They’ll all visit the shrine together. Ryunosuke will draw him a fortune, and it will be terrible, and Susato will pledge to do it herself next year. Neither of them will make any mention of this in their first letter from home. Kazuma has already counted the days until he’ll receive it—he’d counted them the day they left. Fifty there, fifty back, and enough in between to have something to write about. He gives them about a week.
He has to stop daydreaming about them this way. All it does it make him sad. After a while he won’t be able to guess with any accuracy, and that will make him sadder. But—after so long without a memory, Kazuma can’t help himself clinging onto the happy ones. Even when he knows the very fact that they’re memories carries with it a sorrow… He relives the past whenever he has the time to.
Today he’s been thinking of last New Year’s. They’d been at sea for the turn of the century. There’d been a party for the passengers that Kazuma and Susato had looked in on, mostly for the spectacle. He’d wrapped up all the food he could and brought it back, sat beside Ryunosuke on the floor of the wardrobe and talked into the early hours of the new year. Easily, so easily, even under the weight of all his secrets.
He’s not sure he and Ryunosuke will ever be able to talk so easily again.
Perhaps not. But Kazuma forces himself to hope that perhaps they can create something more open. More honest. His friendship with Ryunosuke had always been clouded, something he’d taken part in half-obscured. He hopes that his best friend still likes him in the sunlight.
He thinks something similar of Van Zieks, in his more wistful moments.
Likening his relationship with Barok van Zieks to the easy schoolboys’ companionship he’d once enjoyed with Ryunosuke feels preposterous, but the fact remains that they had once been much more cordial. Early in his apprenticeship they’d worked together with a comparable ease. They'd almost been friends themselves.
He had been in Ryunosuke’s place. It stuns him to realize. But he’d known nothing then but his mentor’s kindness…and Van Zieks had to have known. The fact of the matter pushed aside in his mind, perhaps, buried, determinedly ignored—but Van Zieks could not have taken one look at him without understanding that his masked apprentice was Kazuma Asogi.
And yet Van Zieks had openly cared for him. And yet Kazuma can’t help missing it.
That stilted strangeness that’s marred Kazuma’s friendships has marred his apprenticeship too. He still works in the man’s office, sleeps in the man’s house, and they speak only when necessary. They spend their time separately whenever able. Perhaps they can remake their relationship as well. Build something more open, more honest. Kazuma has his doubts. But he also knows that it’s impossible unless he’s the one who tries first, and he knows that if he tries he can succeed. Van Zieks is lucky that at least one of them has the nerve.
He'd expected to do little more than mull it over at half past eleven in the evening. Van Zieks keeps extremely reasonable hours. But as he returns to his own bedroom Kazuma passes by the prosecutor’s study, where he’s sat alone reading by the dim fireplace.
“You’re not usually up this late,” says Kazuma from the doorway.
Van Zieks starts. Kazuma suppresses a smile—it’s always a novelty to see him off his guard, if only just for a moment.
“Is it on account of the New Year?” he asks. “You’re staying up until midnight?”
“I suppose I feel something of an obligation,” Van Zieks admits.
“Would you like me to light a lamp, then, sir?” Kazuma asks. It seems likely Van Zieks had opened his book when it was light outside. He carries his single-minded courtroom focus into all his after-hours mundanities.
“…Thank you, Mr. Asogi.”
“Of course.”
Kazuma steps into the study to strike a match, and carries the handheld lamp over to him from the desk. He looks down at Van Zieks in the glow of it. He’s dressed down, taken off his gloves to turn the thin pages. His half-empty glass reflects glimmers of shine onto his shadowed face. Kazuma forces himself to look elsewhere.
“You have no plans, then?” he asks. “For the holiday?”
Van Zieks turns up to him in indignant amazement, stunned by the impertinence of his question.
“I very rarely have plans, as of late,” he says. “A fact of which you’re quite aware.”
“I didn’t mean to rub it in,” says Kazuma. “I’d only gotten the impression that New Year’s Eve was a popular night for parties.” He’d read of several, in his father’s old letters. He imagines Van Zieks knows that he would have.
Van Zieks flinches, and he turns to look toward the dark window. “My family used to hold them yearly,” he says. “But, obviously, no longer.”
“Do you miss it?”
“The parties?” replies Van Zieks. “…Not as much.” Not as much as his family. As his youth, as his happiness. Kazuma slowly sits in the other armchair, deep in thought. These are the happy memories, it seems, that Van Zieks clings to in spite of their sorrow.
They truly are a miserable pair. A master and apprentice trapped in the past.
“Would you like a glass of wine, Mr. Asogi?” Van Zieks asks him after a moment. This time it’s Kazuma who starts.
“What?”
The prosecutor gestures languidly at him with one hand. “As it appears you plan to stay?”
“…I suppose so. Thank you.”
Van Zieks rises to collect a second glass, and he pours.
Kazuma has to admit he’s a novice with drink. No more than a few sips of sake at celebrations here and there. He had had no interest in softening his focus, in losing his inhibitions, in forgetting. The thought of drunkenness set his nerves on edge.
Even as a sailor the habit had stuck—his fellows had thought him deeply strange.
“You’re under no obligation to enjoy it,” says Van Zieks quietly, as Kazuma sets his glass down after a sip. “Certainly not as passionately as I do."
Kazuma shakes his head. “I expect I’ll grow more accustomed to the taste,” he says. “The more often I linger here.”
“You see yourself lingering often?”
“A resolution, perhaps,” he says. To begin the long, slow process of renewing their trust. To build a bridge, brick by brick.
Kazuma expects a single sip from Van Zieks as well. His passion for alcohol aside, he’s never considered the prosecutor a drinker. If he is, it isn’t in a way that he allows his apprentice to see. He treasures his wines with such a light touch—obsessively, protectively, as a collector might treasure precious porcelain. It’s strange to imagine him gracelessly draining a bottle like any of the drunks Kazuma has ever known.
But tonight, he watches Van Zieks tip his glass back and drink until it’s empty.
They sit in silence until the distant clock chimes midnight. They look back at each other when it does, but they can’t bring themselves to speak again.