Chapter Text
When stone chips off, Ogata thinks, it doesn’t break — not really.
Tree bark can break. Swing an axe, sink your pocket knife, and beads of gold start swelling in the slit. A rifle can break. Neglect to clean it long enough, let the seams come apart with wear, and one day, when you try to yank the bolt, all you’ll get will be the clink of jammed metal.
But hold an opal to a diamond saw, and now there’s bits of the same spotless opal on your table. A crack runs through marble; look inside. No meat to protect, no mechanism to ruin — just more marble underneath.
That’s how Tsurumi should work, all firm and whole and beautiful.
That’s why Ogata can’t blink when he sees blood.
Tsurumi didn’t so much as hiss, didn’t click his tongue, or maybe he did, or maybe Ogata’s hearing things again — he knows he tends to fill the gaps with wishful thinking.
Right now, Tsurumi’s no lieutenant. He’s a Japanese immigrant barber in the Russian middle of nowhere, and Ogata’s his young apprentice with an unsettling stare and barely any language skills, and his job is to go fetch him a napkin. And rinse the ruby droplets off the razorblade, if he would.
“Oh, and get the rubbing alcohol,” Tsurumi adds before Ogata vanishes to the back, to the creaky door, where the barbershop ends and their living rooms begin. There’s Tsurumi’s awfully polite Russian murmur just within earshot, and you don’t have to speak the language to know he’s talking leaps around the client, shaping this slip of the hand into an endearing mishap.
Ogata doesn’t get rubbing alcohol. He grabs the vial from the cabinet, unscrews the lid with icy fingers, pours so much on the napkin it’s like he’s trying to make a mine fuse, and brings it back fully at the ready.
He can’t tell what Tsurumi thinks of the little trick, what with that resting bulletproof smile of his. Nor does Ogata care, because when Tsurumi passes him the razor, then puts the near-dripping alcohol to his own hand, the corners of his eyes twitch. There’s a hiss, a real one, unmistakably — because his painting-perfect moustache falters as he bites his lip.
For a second, there is a much more believable Tsurumi. Cracked, not like marble. Human, though completely on accident. He’s hurt, Ogata thinks, and he stares, and he doesn’t leave, and the beads of blood threaten to roll off the blade he’s forgotten he’s holding. Tsurumi’s pianist fingers go white at the edges from how hard he's just squeezed. There’s the sneaky red unfurling on the cloth between them, like watercolor.
Tsurumi composes himself. His hands relax. His skin is diamond-smooth.
The second is gone.
When Ogata’s already at the sink, the water mutters idly down the drainpipe. The tap is running in vain, the blade hovers beside it, and Ogata can’t tell how the blood on the shiny surface makes him feel. It does make him feel, which is most incredible of all. And everything that makes Ogata feel, he grips, and he laps, and uncurls, and smothers, and tears into bits, like a stray that still toys with its food, like a ravenous mouth that’s forgetting to swallow.
The blade hovers. There’s his own charcoal eye in the metal. He thinks, and he thinks, and he gets out a paper from his pocket. It’s from his surveillance notebook, a discarded page he never handed to Tsurumi, covered in meaningless but satisfying numbers and boredom doodles. Staking out bigwig officers gets really old really fast.
Ogata rips off a clean corner.
He puts the paper to the blade, and it merrily soaks up the blood, blooming, like Tsurumi’s own napkin. That’s not something he should do. So he does it quickly. Shoves the corner back in his pocket, finally puts the razor to the water, and much like its owner, it is instantly lethal and crystal-clean.