Post by Downfall on Aug 20, 2023 17:02:28 GMT -5
"I know you can't get behind the supernatural. It isn't how your brains, collectively, are wired. I get that," says the hulking figure with the greasy smile.
On this cafe patio, overlooking a busy market square, he's flipping over tarot cards; And the empty-skull eyes of the Death (XIII) card stare back up at him, echoing his spooky grin. "And I know I've been in the background for a while. Lurking. In dreams. But always here."
Impatiently, his opposite sighs, leaning forward to put his meaty elbows on the latticed table. Would that he'd never consented to this. But some morbid curiousity -
"But is it that hard to accept that some things that happen are by a design so astronomically absurd that it can only be said that they were directed to happen?"
Wanting to reach across the table and throttle the theatrically monologuing hulk, his opposite passes a hand over his bristly chin, stifling himself from screaming jesus tapdancing chRIST Jason, get to the point - and he blinks, politely, and forces a grin. "So explain it me simply, 'cause I've always been a simple metaphors are the best type'a guy."
As keen as a defensive line coach at his whiteboard pointing to zeroes and X'es, the hulk expounds a finger into the latticed table, and moves it from line-segment to line-segment to illustrate as he talks. "The ring is the sacrificial bridge-price. Okay? It was cast away, off of that bridge -" helpfully pointing in the air, to one end of the San Francisco Bay - "Just before Christmas, by our boy, in a small gesture of casting aside things that he'd been holding onto - okay?"
Still not seeing or caring why this was the subject of a meet out here, in broad daylight, the man who's seen better days picks up his oat milk latte. Not too much sugar, or syrup, because he's trying to soothe his reflux, feeling the twinges in his many aching, sore spots as he moves, the man who some called the Freight Train of Destruction now sits across from a gibbering madman, in broad daylight, at a coffee shop in the Trocadero Square.
At least, as he looks around him, he feels the security in his skin of having backup. Jimin, the rebellious punk eighteen year old cadged from the street of Japantown and Daniel's own pocket, stood behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, chewing a toothpick at Adam's shoulder. He stayed silent.
The once Freight Train of whatever put his coffee cup back down on the lattice, looking up at Jimin, who stayed stoic. All of this in less time than to tell.
The former Warpath, impatiently, waved to the hulk, yes, fine, say on.
"So, first," the stabbing finger poked into the lattice, here, "The ring sinks into the waters of the Bay; Lost forever. Single, dramatic tear rollin' down the cheek, 'Goodbye, Michelle, goodbye, my heart,' and so forth. But -" The finger traces, over here, currents take it, and it tumbles, flowing down Bay, into a school of 900 pound albacore. Fish brains see the shiny, and it is gobbled up like a snack. Gulp. Still lost, correct?"
Not seeing where this is going, Warpath-turned-Adam-with-the-reflux nods, eyes narrowed but still showing dull uncomprehension and slight annoyance. Savoring, with relish, the hulking maniac's grin widens impossibly as he continues his recap. "But then, the tuna are dragged up on a commercial fishing boat, weeks later and farther out to sea... and when the nets are parted, and a fishie's mouth is opened by one dumb, down on his luck trawler who's about to be downsized..."
"Oh, come on, Jason..." Warpath-turned-Adam-with-the-crippling-debt-and-mortage-overdue complains, rolling his eyes, "It would've been digested by then - "
Grinning still, the theatrical man moves a finger further, illustrating, "And, as we know from some of your deals with the local color... desperate men deeply in hock will do anything to get a little money, won't they..." Warpath-turned-Adam-who'd-turned-to-selling-his-services-as-hired-muscle-to-unscrupulous-men starts, annoyed "Hey!" but the greasy, disquieting grin widens, "And the man tries to get some money out of this antique ring... but before he can so much as cash it in for barely enough to get a 7-Eleven hot dog... he is stabbed by gutter trash, and it rolls down into a sewer grate. Falls into stacks and heaps of sewage and waste."
Adam-who's-nearly-three-decades-into-shoulda-retired, simply heaves, exhausted. He shifts uncomfortably, too, because ever since the confrontation where he'd murdered Bradley Jutensai, he's been watching his back for a vengeful, wrathful attack that hasn't come.
Out here, exposed, in the open air, he's trying to keep a look out over his shoulder, from every angle, because narcissists with crowbars can sometimes pop up when you least expect it.
But then, that's probably why Jason is having so much fun telling him this story, and taking his time.
Adam-who's-mild-case-of-angina-is-tightening-his-chest-painfully-due-to-his-anxiety-at-being-out-in-the-open, well... not so much fun.
The finger traces an arc, "From there, it's picked up in San Diego, by a maintenance worker for City Water and Sewer District, a man named Arthur Taijimori. Got that? Old-country name, second generation Nisei, who sees the craftsmanship and intricate carvings on this ring, something that came from a stall in market square twenty-three years ago and was kept like an oath for the longest time. He thinks it's something beautiful, to be treasured. So HE takes it - "
"This is a complete load. Magic rings? Is that what you're -" Adam-who-just-wants-to-be-done-with-this-and-would-rather-be-harassing-shopkeepers-on-Pine-Street-instead-of-humoring-this-pretentious-popinjay vents. "Jason... what the hell are you talking about. What is any of this? Stop giving me a runaround, this is the most unlikely bullshit I've ever heard."
"Is it?"
"YES!" Adam-with-the-fleshy-jowls glowers at the grinning mask. His eyes search his hands, which are curling into angered fists.
The hulk raises his dark eyebrows skyward, "A meteorologist looks at the storm raging, downpour pelting the grass below, lightning splitting the sky, and explains it in terms of air currents colliding, causing friction... the patterns of wind coming together generating power, the cycle of condensation and heat that brought the storm system to a specific area."
"The shaman looks at the storm raging, and the lightning splitting the sky, and says that it happened because he called to the heavens to bring it down."
"I see no contradiction."
"Do you?"
"I- ...You -... "
Adam-who-has-in-the-decade-since-his-Warpath-days-were-behind-him-turned-to-binge-vices-to-fill-a-void-of-emptiness stares across the cafe table at the fervent, maddened grin of his opposite. If he had the capacity to murder this man, he would.
"I always hated you, Jason. Hated your damn guts."
Jason's hands unfold, beautifully, "Multiple choices. S'what it's all about, friends and neighbors."
"Just... shut up and get to the point." But Adam-regretting-this-regretting-everything-suddenly allows that he can't murder Jason, there's been so much rumor and innuendo and obfuscation all of these years, he isn't even sure if "Jason" exists at all.
"You said this was about Michelle."
"It is. It's not. But it is."
"Enough of your damn 'multiple choice' games!! I FOUND Michelle, wandering around the streets of god damn San Francisco, months ago, BEFORE Christmas. She was nearly catatonic, as if she was in shock... some trauma had wiped her mind."
"Mhm." Now Jason turns over another card, The Lovers (VI), usually symbolizing soulmates, complimentary energies, a cohesiveness and balance of forces. But then, he inverts it.
"Are you saying you had anything to do with that? With what happened to Michelle?" Adam-who's-getting-too-old-for-this shit demands, "And if so, why?"
The grinning, empty smile springs back to life, his eyebrows raising satisifactorily, smugly saying 'why indeed?'
Adam-who's-done-terrible-things-just-in-the-last-ten-months-that-make-him-lay-awake-at-night-and-dream-of-sucking-his-.45 searches his hands, and his fingernails, thinking hard about the Michelle problem.
Hinata had seen the value in sending Michelle on to Daniel, unharmed, yet tabula rasa. Not the woman he'd loved. His boss had wanted Daniel to see it for the bait it was and to act rashly.
But Hinata had never cared to ask why Michelle was there, or cared if she had gotten hurt in the crossfire.
Suddenly all of that late-night self-loathing came to the fore, as he looked into this devil's smile, and he realized all along that he had just been playing the role of a carrier in byzantine, unimaginably complex schemes.
It shook the once-and-never-again-Warpath, that would-be tyrant and usurper of the Inner Circle, to his core; His miniscule place in the entire web of things, smaller than he could ever imagine.
Jason sees this on his face, this dawning realization and deeper-hitting self-loathing, that Adam-sinking-into-self-hatred has fallen so far and never had control. It's the shit that the hulk lives for, feeds on, loves.
Moving brusquely, with a manner that says so sad, buddy... anyway moving on, the bigger man straightens, pointing his finger into the table. "So! Taijimori carries the ring in his pocket, until Memorial Day, when he goes to his ninety year old, first-generation umma's house in Los Angeles, and - "
"PLEASE. No more riddles, no more stories, what does this... any of this. Have to do. With Michelle, or Daniel, like you asked me here. To discuss."
He stares at Adam through half-lidded eyes, "Be patient, I'm getting there."
She'd felt lost in a fog for so many months. That was, in total, the sum of her entire existence these days, that fog. Her past, her future, her entire identity shrouded. Who was she?
When she looked in the mirror, her eyes told her two separate stories. "Multiple choice," drifted a voice out of the fog, that made her skin crawl. In this light, she was a fully-grown woman, beginning to show signs of age in the wattle of her neck, her thighs, everything not as firm as it was once and she couldn't remember, and yet in some lights; in some cases, when she looked into the mirror, she saw a little girl. She saw that little girl, now... staring up at her, her eyes beautiful blue.
And that's how she navigated the entire world, feeling like she was just that lost, little girl wading through in interminable fog, occasionally looking back as something swam out at her... some fragmentary, core memory; Only for it to dissipate through her fingers, eternal and ephemeral.
She wandered through Missus Keiko's hallway, wanting to sniffle, but telling herself not to cry. "H-hello?" she called out to the apartment, getting no answer... and she frowned, pushing back the uneasy, squicky feeling in her tummy, that childish fear of the dark. The Hasegawas were at work... right...
She liked staying here... even if it was in want of anywhere else to go. As awkward as it felt sometimes (back of the mind ackowledgement that the elderly matron was nearly a head shorter than her, and only ten years advanced of age) it felt as if Keiko took to her protectively fiercely; As if she wanted to keep a little girl safe from the world. It wanted to occur to Michelle why that was - the recent memory swimming out of the fog of truckbackfire-gunshots - of a small, round-faced girl laying on the floor bleeding... Tom- Tomie?... but that memory, too... dissipated, and was gone... and Michelle just wandered alone and lonely.
That gunshot.
Another memory swimming up.
"The rabbit is caught in the jaws, it's in pain. We gotta put it out of its misery..." He had steadied the little kit bolt-action in Michelle's hands again so that it was pointing right to the temple of the shivering animal. Warner's mustached lip had crinkled in a disdainful sneer, silently judging the weakness of his daughter.
"There... there'sn't any way for it to get out?" Michelle's lip pooched out, sniffling.
"Unless it chews through its own leg...," Warner said, and impatiently steadied the gun again.
And she pulls the bolt-action's trigger.
This is me.
It's gone now... the memory-flash was so quickly coming up and then... so frustrating. And why did she feel like there were connections there to someone in her past... someone else. She saw him clearly in her mind, and tried to hold him there; As-he-was, seventeen, blue eyes flashing, devil may care smile as they lay on the grass next to him, open text of a book about flowers on her crossed, bare legs... He had smiled, as she had plucked a dandelion out of the grass, and slid it into the crease behind his ear...
Another memory, glimpsed fleetingly... another one, dissolving... as he leaned down to kiss her...
The woman-and-child-wandering-in-the-fog blinked it back, as she always had done, these last few months. More important was making herself a snack, since Missus Keiko was at work, she was going to go in their kitchen herself, hoping for another sleeve of cookies to go with milk...
And that was when she saw the small, white, unmarked envelope, at one side of the apartment, as if slid, somehow, under a locked door. The queer little package waited, a tiny bulge in the middle, and something about it called her to it.
She padded on bare feet, trailing a long bedsheet behind her (part cape, part security) as her lithe legs pushed her inexorably towards the envelope, her mind wrapped in fog.
Adam-now-wants-to-kill-himself-and-make-this-audience-end groans, writhing, but Jason-loving-his-discomfort-anxiety-and-deep-seated-ego-bruising, continues, "So from there, Niishima's sister-in-law, the elderly widow Lee-Yin, saw the ring winking up at her from a candy dish in the nursing home rec center."
"A single, intricately-carved golden band, sitting there on top of those ever-present Werther's Originals that seem to spawn in spaces where old codgers congregate."
"And let me tell you, the reason that the candy always seems to spawn in those dishes is something I've - "
A sigh. Jason favors him with an indulgent smile, but concedes the points with a raised hand, as if to say fine, I'll move it along.
"Lee-Jin takes the ring here - " and brings his pointer finger to yet another spot on his 'map' in between the diamonds of the shitty, syrup-covered table, "And gifts it to her nephew, who is thinking of asking his sweetie, Rebecca Jee-Un, to escape the confines of Japantown and run away with him... This way, the ring comes, full circle... storywise, and thematic wise, as well as crossing oceans of distance, to make it's way into the hands of... well, someone close to you, actually..."
Adam looks up, surprised and shocked and finally gathering the implication. The Korean tough aching to leave Japantown and start a new life - He shifts his gaze behind him, to the silent, unsmiling Jimin. Jimin looks down at him, inscrutable through dark shades.
Adam-head-buzzing-with-useless-trivia-and-concepts-too-big-for-him, shakes his head, "So all of that way..."
"Yes. The ring found it's way into the hands of someone who is undergoing the exact same arc as Daniel did, when he was eighteen... charged with power. Charged with destiny. Charged with... magic."
Adam drains the last of his soft, safe oat-milk, wiping his mouth with his hand, wishing that it were a stiff drink instead; Or that this were the old days, and he was cutting a promo against Lion of the Beastly Squad, and the only manual labor ever asked of him was how to think up a metaphor to insult a man wearing a cat mask.
Sourly, he leans back in his wrought-iron. "I'm calling bullshit."
"Well, that's your right, I suppose," Jason says, lamenting the unimaginative. He crosses his arms, looking down, slightly sulky but also still brimming with quiet amusement.
Adam-now-finding-that-old-fire-within jabs a harsh finger in the hulk's face, "More than that, I'm calling this who fucking cares."
"I'd rather buy that Michelle just got raped and got amnesia, rather than that you've been playing some Rube Goldberg-esque long game involving sending a mind-wiped Michelle out of the world at the same time as some ring of destiny is being pooped out of a fishes' butt."
"Fuck off, Jason. You're the worst."
"You'd rather believe in something safe, convenient, and akin to some boring drama that everyone has seen before, I take it."
"I want something REAL," Adam-raging-against-every-pathetic-thing-his-life-has-become explodes, and the little spoon clinks against his plate as he slams down on the wire table. Jimin looks at Jason, who arches a brow, and shakes his head. "I'd rather have something going on that means that Daniel Fehl is trying to be. Like he's moving up in the world. It would make... fucking... SENSE."
"So you want to see Daniel playing mobster, fighting henchmen, and working his way up criminal rankings."
"That would at least make SENSE to me! Not any of this crap!" Adam-complaining-now-because-his-life-has-devolved-into-the-role-of-henchman fairly shrieks. And Jason listens, cocking a sympathetic ear, snaking a hand over to clap him on the arm. Adam rips his arm away, sullen.
Shrugging Adam-the-recalcitrant off, Jason pulls the Tower (XVI) card, considering it for just a moment, holding it up to his face with a scholarly, puckered moue. Destruction. Renovation. Unexpected changes... But he lays the card back on the pile, and begins to shuffle again, paying any watcher no mind. Jimin, now revealed as never Adam's man, or even Hinata's, so much as another, corrupted agent, watches Adam as well, and now, Adam's nervous about those eyes beating into him from behind while Jason languidly shuffles cards. Those eyes he can't see behind the mirrored shades.
Adam huffs, then, finally, vents, "I at least expected something to have happened with him. It's been. Since June. All summer, we've been waiting for the reprisal. For the rage. For the legendary wrath of Daniel Fehl to come at us... and nothing. Hinata is restless. Even though we've regrouped and recruited every kid from Daniel's classes under our fold. Even though the streets belong to Hinata again. And he hasn't come knocking on our door."
"Mmm, no, because that's not what this is to him, anymore," Jason says distantly, disinterestedly in him, examining cards. "If it was ever about usurping the crime kingpin of Japantown and taking his place, or settling an old debt with the one person who knew him when they were both trainees, then it's not anymore. The story has... changed. He, has changed, now... and it's more about what he's changed into... and where he wants to go."
Adam wants to let a fit of pique out, to rage at Jason that this is NOT a damned story, it's real god damned life. But he's exhausted, now, worn fully to the bone and willing to just submit.
"And... what does that have to do with a ring. What does that have to do with Michelle."
"Mmh. Have you considered that the ring is emblematic of his love for her, and what he was giving up by throwing it in the river? Have you considered... how much of his life and his decisions he colored by thinking of her, all of the trials he put himself through so that it would impress her? The life he built, because he was doing it for her?"
Adam waved a hand as if to say, I guess, man. "...Sure, yeh."
"Then?"
Irritably snapping, "I don't know what you want me to say to that. I don't know what the endgame is here."
Jason looks askance, into a distance, eeriely. "No, and that's the point, isn't it. It opens up for - "
"If you say, multiple choices, one more fucking time, Jason, I swear to god, I will end you. I will procure the services of a warlock who can enchant orbs and cast binding rituals and burn the flesh from your bones and I will feed you to dogs and I'll shoot you right in the head just to make sure. I am tired of your multiple choice crap. It is exhausting."
"I truly am sorry that you feel like that. Life ain't so binary black n' white, my friend."
"Just - " a growl low in his throat, Adam-going-back-to-his-squalid-little-hole-and-hating-what-his-life-has-become-after-this says "Just - tell me, as succinctly as you can... that this is your way of hurting Daniel Fehl. Of taking him off the board."
"Oh, I'll expect this is a way for him to be taken off the board... in his own time," Jason muses, still distantly. "Will it hurt him? Ohhh, yes. It'll hurt him."
And he places one, last, meaningful tarot card down on the suite. The Wheel of Fortune (X). The four elements of minor arcana. Opportunity, luck, change, destiny.
Adam... Adam-finally-at-his-end, sighs, then looks into Jason's soulless, pitiless eyes, "Jason..... what the fuck are you?"
"You could, but probably never will, accept, that I'm the devil that's been whispering to Daniel for decades. The negative aspect. The shadow on the other side of him, his terrible opposite, his Mummudrai. That I exist, because he exists. That I fuel his negative impulses, appeal to his baser nature, that I go wherever he goes and always push him to be his worst self. Or... perhaps he does that for himself, and I'm nothing."
"Perhaps it's some alchemical composition of the two."
He picks up the Wheel tarot card between two fingers, and sends it slicing through the air, heaved with just a flick, yet with enough force that it slaps into erstwhile-Warpath's chest. "I leave it entirely up to you."
"Well, thank you for nothing, crackpot," murmurs Adam-skeeved-and-needing-a-cold-shower-to-wash-the-black-out-of-his-soul, "I'll be sure to take the news back to Hinata Fugikawa that a god damned gold ring is back in town."
"Tell your handler whatever you want... tell him, even..." And Jason looks up into the sky, searching, and divining, "that an end will come for him, too... just perhaps not the one he wants. All things end. That's Daniel's point. All things die."
"I need to take a shower," says Adam glumly, as he pushes up to his chair, deadlifting the bulky spare tire that's grown up on him in the eleven years since he was last his fit, recognizable self in the ring with a grunt. He feels shame radiate off of himself, and not just for his appearance; It's the self awareness of everything they'd talked about today. "Jimin, you coming?"
Jimin crossed his arms, and said, with a tsk, "Gotta pass on this one, man, say wassup to Big H tho."
"What's Jason giving you that Hinata's organization isn't, Jimin," Adam said, gauging him, wondering if he was enough like Daniel at his age that all he was thinking of was running away and touring the world with his sweetheart on his arm. Jimin didn't give him the answer to that, gave him nothing but stubborn silence and chewing a toothpick.
Adam moves off, leaving just the large body of the master of multiple choices to sit, staring at his cards, and wonder at possibilities. Adam had wanted a black and white answer; In his infinitely boring, black and white world, it was always coming down to the circle of blood, the cycle of violence and change. Daniel hurt Hinata, so Hinata hurt him back. Daniel hurt their organization, the organization hurt them back. In his hunger... the former Warpath's need to have a new war to throw himself into, a grunt thinking he should always have been the general... Warpath had come to Jason, hoping for some insight at how to continue that cycle. Predictably. To hurt Daniel in ways he understood. Smash him bodily, leave him destroyed, possibly near death.
Jason had tried that before. Wasn't satisfying.
And, as he examined the cards, and the possibilities arrayed before him, he realized that breaking out of that cycle was where the unexpected options for real devastations lay. Real revelations. Real changes.
"You can only take a turn of the wheel so long before it breaks," whispers the enigma. "So if we do break the wheel... what then? Will it hurt? Oh, certainly, it will."
He snatches up the Wheel (X) between two forefingers, never having thrown it away at all, like a prestidigitator. In his grasp, it shimmers, and it turns into a scrip of ragged yellow leathery parchment, daubed, with a glowing, red rune.
"Show me how it ends."
As he lays the scrip of parchment down on the table, over the suite of tarot cards, it brightens emberlike; A red, inscribed ring.
As she digs her fingers into the envelope, her fingertips brush and make contact with the band of gold, and then static shock! A charge of energy passes from it, through her, and her eyes widen.
Suddenly, the world rushes in, as the fog which persisted throughout her day, eating away a perception and memory and keeping her feeling trapped and lost, evaporated, and everything began to rush in. It was akin to a dam opening, and decades entered her mind. More sensory than she could even bear, thousands, millions of tastes, smells, tiny memories entering and she felt buffeted like a leaf on a stormy sea. Birthdays, car rides, dad's funeral, the rabbit (THE RABBIT), the gun, the snowglobes, the doorway, Danny walking away from her... Danny leaning down to put his lips on hers, as she threaded a dandelion in the crease behind his ear... DANNY!
She remembered it all so fervently that she thought she going insane, until the rush began to quiet. She found she had screwed her eyes closed, and, testing, she opened them, bit by bit.
She looked around the Hasegawa's apartment, and, finally, the last six months had begun to trickle back in.
She had no idea how it had happened, or how she had found her way here, but she knew what city she was in, and she knew that just blocks away, Danny was probably training at his dojo. He would be so worried about her.
And if the last time she remembered him reaching for her face, she had flinched back, that was alright... she just couldn't see who was reaching for her. Not through the fog.
Her trembling hands reached for a cordless phone, to punch in a number that, now that she had memory and life back, she knew by heart. Would always know. Always.
The two of them are sitting, side-by-side, on a little pullout couch. They haven't spoken for... well, a while. Daniel had asked "Are you sure", once, he thought, but man... he still felt numb. And he wished there was literally anyone else in the room with them right now. Someone who could comfort Ru. Someone who would know what words a person would say. Someone human.
All she had right now was him.
Rumiko sat next to him, tears still coming down her face.
He reached a rigid, stiff hand out, unsurely, and it wavered for a moment before making tentative contact, "reassuringly" patting her lightly on her knee. Then, he withdrew it, sorry he had tried.
His phone, on the couch cushion between them, rang, unexpectedly. They were both distracted, and feeling a lengthy gulf between them due to the gasped revelation and the hard conversation that followed (the first of many, oh joy), and so neither one paid it mind at first. To shut it up, and thinking it was hers, Rumiko picked the phone up off the couch, and answered, flatly, wearily, "Hello?"
He peaked up at her, willing her to tell the caller this wasn't a good time.
Instead, Rumiko's eyebrows knit in confusion. She looked at Daniel, so slowly, that tendons on her neck creaked.
Her face was ashen. "I'm sorry... who is this?"
On this cafe patio, overlooking a busy market square, he's flipping over tarot cards; And the empty-skull eyes of the Death (XIII) card stare back up at him, echoing his spooky grin. "And I know I've been in the background for a while. Lurking. In dreams. But always here."
Impatiently, his opposite sighs, leaning forward to put his meaty elbows on the latticed table. Would that he'd never consented to this. But some morbid curiousity -
"But is it that hard to accept that some things that happen are by a design so astronomically absurd that it can only be said that they were directed to happen?"
Wanting to reach across the table and throttle the theatrically monologuing hulk, his opposite passes a hand over his bristly chin, stifling himself from screaming jesus tapdancing chRIST Jason, get to the point - and he blinks, politely, and forces a grin. "So explain it me simply, 'cause I've always been a simple metaphors are the best type'a guy."
As keen as a defensive line coach at his whiteboard pointing to zeroes and X'es, the hulk expounds a finger into the latticed table, and moves it from line-segment to line-segment to illustrate as he talks. "The ring is the sacrificial bridge-price. Okay? It was cast away, off of that bridge -" helpfully pointing in the air, to one end of the San Francisco Bay - "Just before Christmas, by our boy, in a small gesture of casting aside things that he'd been holding onto - okay?"
Still not seeing or caring why this was the subject of a meet out here, in broad daylight, the man who's seen better days picks up his oat milk latte. Not too much sugar, or syrup, because he's trying to soothe his reflux, feeling the twinges in his many aching, sore spots as he moves, the man who some called the Freight Train of Destruction now sits across from a gibbering madman, in broad daylight, at a coffee shop in the Trocadero Square.
At least, as he looks around him, he feels the security in his skin of having backup. Jimin, the rebellious punk eighteen year old cadged from the street of Japantown and Daniel's own pocket, stood behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, chewing a toothpick at Adam's shoulder. He stayed silent.
The once Freight Train of whatever put his coffee cup back down on the lattice, looking up at Jimin, who stayed stoic. All of this in less time than to tell.
The former Warpath, impatiently, waved to the hulk, yes, fine, say on.
"So, first," the stabbing finger poked into the lattice, here, "The ring sinks into the waters of the Bay; Lost forever. Single, dramatic tear rollin' down the cheek, 'Goodbye, Michelle, goodbye, my heart,' and so forth. But -" The finger traces, over here, currents take it, and it tumbles, flowing down Bay, into a school of 900 pound albacore. Fish brains see the shiny, and it is gobbled up like a snack. Gulp. Still lost, correct?"
Not seeing where this is going, Warpath-turned-Adam-with-the-reflux nods, eyes narrowed but still showing dull uncomprehension and slight annoyance. Savoring, with relish, the hulking maniac's grin widens impossibly as he continues his recap. "But then, the tuna are dragged up on a commercial fishing boat, weeks later and farther out to sea... and when the nets are parted, and a fishie's mouth is opened by one dumb, down on his luck trawler who's about to be downsized..."
"Oh, come on, Jason..." Warpath-turned-Adam-with-the-crippling-debt-and-mortage-overdue complains, rolling his eyes, "It would've been digested by then - "
Grinning still, the theatrical man moves a finger further, illustrating, "And, as we know from some of your deals with the local color... desperate men deeply in hock will do anything to get a little money, won't they..." Warpath-turned-Adam-who'd-turned-to-selling-his-services-as-hired-muscle-to-unscrupulous-men starts, annoyed "Hey!" but the greasy, disquieting grin widens, "And the man tries to get some money out of this antique ring... but before he can so much as cash it in for barely enough to get a 7-Eleven hot dog... he is stabbed by gutter trash, and it rolls down into a sewer grate. Falls into stacks and heaps of sewage and waste."
Adam-who's-nearly-three-decades-into-shoulda-retired, simply heaves, exhausted. He shifts uncomfortably, too, because ever since the confrontation where he'd murdered Bradley Jutensai, he's been watching his back for a vengeful, wrathful attack that hasn't come.
Out here, exposed, in the open air, he's trying to keep a look out over his shoulder, from every angle, because narcissists with crowbars can sometimes pop up when you least expect it.
But then, that's probably why Jason is having so much fun telling him this story, and taking his time.
Adam-who's-mild-case-of-angina-is-tightening-his-chest-painfully-due-to-his-anxiety-at-being-out-in-the-open, well... not so much fun.
The finger traces an arc, "From there, it's picked up in San Diego, by a maintenance worker for City Water and Sewer District, a man named Arthur Taijimori. Got that? Old-country name, second generation Nisei, who sees the craftsmanship and intricate carvings on this ring, something that came from a stall in market square twenty-three years ago and was kept like an oath for the longest time. He thinks it's something beautiful, to be treasured. So HE takes it - "
"This is a complete load. Magic rings? Is that what you're -" Adam-who-just-wants-to-be-done-with-this-and-would-rather-be-harassing-shopkeepers-on-Pine-Street-instead-of-humoring-this-pretentious-popinjay vents. "Jason... what the hell are you talking about. What is any of this? Stop giving me a runaround, this is the most unlikely bullshit I've ever heard."
"Is it?"
"YES!" Adam-with-the-fleshy-jowls glowers at the grinning mask. His eyes search his hands, which are curling into angered fists.
The hulk raises his dark eyebrows skyward, "A meteorologist looks at the storm raging, downpour pelting the grass below, lightning splitting the sky, and explains it in terms of air currents colliding, causing friction... the patterns of wind coming together generating power, the cycle of condensation and heat that brought the storm system to a specific area."
"The shaman looks at the storm raging, and the lightning splitting the sky, and says that it happened because he called to the heavens to bring it down."
"I see no contradiction."
"Do you?"
"I- ...You -... "
Adam-who-has-in-the-decade-since-his-Warpath-days-were-behind-him-turned-to-binge-vices-to-fill-a-void-of-emptiness stares across the cafe table at the fervent, maddened grin of his opposite. If he had the capacity to murder this man, he would.
"I always hated you, Jason. Hated your damn guts."
Jason's hands unfold, beautifully, "Multiple choices. S'what it's all about, friends and neighbors."
"Just... shut up and get to the point." But Adam-regretting-this-regretting-everything-suddenly allows that he can't murder Jason, there's been so much rumor and innuendo and obfuscation all of these years, he isn't even sure if "Jason" exists at all.
"You said this was about Michelle."
"It is. It's not. But it is."
"Enough of your damn 'multiple choice' games!! I FOUND Michelle, wandering around the streets of god damn San Francisco, months ago, BEFORE Christmas. She was nearly catatonic, as if she was in shock... some trauma had wiped her mind."
"Mhm." Now Jason turns over another card, The Lovers (VI), usually symbolizing soulmates, complimentary energies, a cohesiveness and balance of forces. But then, he inverts it.
"Are you saying you had anything to do with that? With what happened to Michelle?" Adam-who's-getting-too-old-for-this shit demands, "And if so, why?"
The grinning, empty smile springs back to life, his eyebrows raising satisifactorily, smugly saying 'why indeed?'
Adam-who's-done-terrible-things-just-in-the-last-ten-months-that-make-him-lay-awake-at-night-and-dream-of-sucking-his-.45 searches his hands, and his fingernails, thinking hard about the Michelle problem.
Hinata had seen the value in sending Michelle on to Daniel, unharmed, yet tabula rasa. Not the woman he'd loved. His boss had wanted Daniel to see it for the bait it was and to act rashly.
But Hinata had never cared to ask why Michelle was there, or cared if she had gotten hurt in the crossfire.
Suddenly all of that late-night self-loathing came to the fore, as he looked into this devil's smile, and he realized all along that he had just been playing the role of a carrier in byzantine, unimaginably complex schemes.
It shook the once-and-never-again-Warpath, that would-be tyrant and usurper of the Inner Circle, to his core; His miniscule place in the entire web of things, smaller than he could ever imagine.
Jason sees this on his face, this dawning realization and deeper-hitting self-loathing, that Adam-sinking-into-self-hatred has fallen so far and never had control. It's the shit that the hulk lives for, feeds on, loves.
Moving brusquely, with a manner that says so sad, buddy... anyway moving on, the bigger man straightens, pointing his finger into the table. "So! Taijimori carries the ring in his pocket, until Memorial Day, when he goes to his ninety year old, first-generation umma's house in Los Angeles, and - "
"PLEASE. No more riddles, no more stories, what does this... any of this. Have to do. With Michelle, or Daniel, like you asked me here. To discuss."
He stares at Adam through half-lidded eyes, "Be patient, I'm getting there."
She'd felt lost in a fog for so many months. That was, in total, the sum of her entire existence these days, that fog. Her past, her future, her entire identity shrouded. Who was she?
When she looked in the mirror, her eyes told her two separate stories. "Multiple choice," drifted a voice out of the fog, that made her skin crawl. In this light, she was a fully-grown woman, beginning to show signs of age in the wattle of her neck, her thighs, everything not as firm as it was once and she couldn't remember, and yet in some lights; in some cases, when she looked into the mirror, she saw a little girl. She saw that little girl, now... staring up at her, her eyes beautiful blue.
And that's how she navigated the entire world, feeling like she was just that lost, little girl wading through in interminable fog, occasionally looking back as something swam out at her... some fragmentary, core memory; Only for it to dissipate through her fingers, eternal and ephemeral.
She wandered through Missus Keiko's hallway, wanting to sniffle, but telling herself not to cry. "H-hello?" she called out to the apartment, getting no answer... and she frowned, pushing back the uneasy, squicky feeling in her tummy, that childish fear of the dark. The Hasegawas were at work... right...
She liked staying here... even if it was in want of anywhere else to go. As awkward as it felt sometimes (back of the mind ackowledgement that the elderly matron was nearly a head shorter than her, and only ten years advanced of age) it felt as if Keiko took to her protectively fiercely; As if she wanted to keep a little girl safe from the world. It wanted to occur to Michelle why that was - the recent memory swimming out of the fog of truckbackfire-gunshots - of a small, round-faced girl laying on the floor bleeding... Tom- Tomie?... but that memory, too... dissipated, and was gone... and Michelle just wandered alone and lonely.
That gunshot.
Another memory swimming up.
"The rabbit is caught in the jaws, it's in pain. We gotta put it out of its misery..." He had steadied the little kit bolt-action in Michelle's hands again so that it was pointing right to the temple of the shivering animal. Warner's mustached lip had crinkled in a disdainful sneer, silently judging the weakness of his daughter.
"There... there'sn't any way for it to get out?" Michelle's lip pooched out, sniffling.
"Unless it chews through its own leg...," Warner said, and impatiently steadied the gun again.
And she pulls the bolt-action's trigger.
This is me.
It's gone now... the memory-flash was so quickly coming up and then... so frustrating. And why did she feel like there were connections there to someone in her past... someone else. She saw him clearly in her mind, and tried to hold him there; As-he-was, seventeen, blue eyes flashing, devil may care smile as they lay on the grass next to him, open text of a book about flowers on her crossed, bare legs... He had smiled, as she had plucked a dandelion out of the grass, and slid it into the crease behind his ear...
Another memory, glimpsed fleetingly... another one, dissolving... as he leaned down to kiss her...
The woman-and-child-wandering-in-the-fog blinked it back, as she always had done, these last few months. More important was making herself a snack, since Missus Keiko was at work, she was going to go in their kitchen herself, hoping for another sleeve of cookies to go with milk...
And that was when she saw the small, white, unmarked envelope, at one side of the apartment, as if slid, somehow, under a locked door. The queer little package waited, a tiny bulge in the middle, and something about it called her to it.
She padded on bare feet, trailing a long bedsheet behind her (part cape, part security) as her lithe legs pushed her inexorably towards the envelope, her mind wrapped in fog.
Adam-now-wants-to-kill-himself-and-make-this-audience-end groans, writhing, but Jason-loving-his-discomfort-anxiety-and-deep-seated-ego-bruising, continues, "So from there, Niishima's sister-in-law, the elderly widow Lee-Yin, saw the ring winking up at her from a candy dish in the nursing home rec center."
"A single, intricately-carved golden band, sitting there on top of those ever-present Werther's Originals that seem to spawn in spaces where old codgers congregate."
"And let me tell you, the reason that the candy always seems to spawn in those dishes is something I've - "
A sigh. Jason favors him with an indulgent smile, but concedes the points with a raised hand, as if to say fine, I'll move it along.
"Lee-Jin takes the ring here - " and brings his pointer finger to yet another spot on his 'map' in between the diamonds of the shitty, syrup-covered table, "And gifts it to her nephew, who is thinking of asking his sweetie, Rebecca Jee-Un, to escape the confines of Japantown and run away with him... This way, the ring comes, full circle... storywise, and thematic wise, as well as crossing oceans of distance, to make it's way into the hands of... well, someone close to you, actually..."
Adam looks up, surprised and shocked and finally gathering the implication. The Korean tough aching to leave Japantown and start a new life - He shifts his gaze behind him, to the silent, unsmiling Jimin. Jimin looks down at him, inscrutable through dark shades.
Adam-head-buzzing-with-useless-trivia-and-concepts-too-big-for-him, shakes his head, "So all of that way..."
"Yes. The ring found it's way into the hands of someone who is undergoing the exact same arc as Daniel did, when he was eighteen... charged with power. Charged with destiny. Charged with... magic."
Adam drains the last of his soft, safe oat-milk, wiping his mouth with his hand, wishing that it were a stiff drink instead; Or that this were the old days, and he was cutting a promo against Lion of the Beastly Squad, and the only manual labor ever asked of him was how to think up a metaphor to insult a man wearing a cat mask.
Sourly, he leans back in his wrought-iron. "I'm calling bullshit."
"Well, that's your right, I suppose," Jason says, lamenting the unimaginative. He crosses his arms, looking down, slightly sulky but also still brimming with quiet amusement.
Adam-now-finding-that-old-fire-within jabs a harsh finger in the hulk's face, "More than that, I'm calling this who fucking cares."
"I'd rather buy that Michelle just got raped and got amnesia, rather than that you've been playing some Rube Goldberg-esque long game involving sending a mind-wiped Michelle out of the world at the same time as some ring of destiny is being pooped out of a fishes' butt."
"Fuck off, Jason. You're the worst."
"You'd rather believe in something safe, convenient, and akin to some boring drama that everyone has seen before, I take it."
"I want something REAL," Adam-raging-against-every-pathetic-thing-his-life-has-become explodes, and the little spoon clinks against his plate as he slams down on the wire table. Jimin looks at Jason, who arches a brow, and shakes his head. "I'd rather have something going on that means that Daniel Fehl is trying to be. Like he's moving up in the world. It would make... fucking... SENSE."
"So you want to see Daniel playing mobster, fighting henchmen, and working his way up criminal rankings."
"That would at least make SENSE to me! Not any of this crap!" Adam-complaining-now-because-his-life-has-devolved-into-the-role-of-henchman fairly shrieks. And Jason listens, cocking a sympathetic ear, snaking a hand over to clap him on the arm. Adam rips his arm away, sullen.
Shrugging Adam-the-recalcitrant off, Jason pulls the Tower (XVI) card, considering it for just a moment, holding it up to his face with a scholarly, puckered moue. Destruction. Renovation. Unexpected changes... But he lays the card back on the pile, and begins to shuffle again, paying any watcher no mind. Jimin, now revealed as never Adam's man, or even Hinata's, so much as another, corrupted agent, watches Adam as well, and now, Adam's nervous about those eyes beating into him from behind while Jason languidly shuffles cards. Those eyes he can't see behind the mirrored shades.
Adam huffs, then, finally, vents, "I at least expected something to have happened with him. It's been. Since June. All summer, we've been waiting for the reprisal. For the rage. For the legendary wrath of Daniel Fehl to come at us... and nothing. Hinata is restless. Even though we've regrouped and recruited every kid from Daniel's classes under our fold. Even though the streets belong to Hinata again. And he hasn't come knocking on our door."
"Mmm, no, because that's not what this is to him, anymore," Jason says distantly, disinterestedly in him, examining cards. "If it was ever about usurping the crime kingpin of Japantown and taking his place, or settling an old debt with the one person who knew him when they were both trainees, then it's not anymore. The story has... changed. He, has changed, now... and it's more about what he's changed into... and where he wants to go."
Adam wants to let a fit of pique out, to rage at Jason that this is NOT a damned story, it's real god damned life. But he's exhausted, now, worn fully to the bone and willing to just submit.
"And... what does that have to do with a ring. What does that have to do with Michelle."
"Mmh. Have you considered that the ring is emblematic of his love for her, and what he was giving up by throwing it in the river? Have you considered... how much of his life and his decisions he colored by thinking of her, all of the trials he put himself through so that it would impress her? The life he built, because he was doing it for her?"
Adam waved a hand as if to say, I guess, man. "...Sure, yeh."
"Then?"
Irritably snapping, "I don't know what you want me to say to that. I don't know what the endgame is here."
Jason looks askance, into a distance, eeriely. "No, and that's the point, isn't it. It opens up for - "
"If you say, multiple choices, one more fucking time, Jason, I swear to god, I will end you. I will procure the services of a warlock who can enchant orbs and cast binding rituals and burn the flesh from your bones and I will feed you to dogs and I'll shoot you right in the head just to make sure. I am tired of your multiple choice crap. It is exhausting."
"I truly am sorry that you feel like that. Life ain't so binary black n' white, my friend."
"Just - " a growl low in his throat, Adam-going-back-to-his-squalid-little-hole-and-hating-what-his-life-has-become-after-this says "Just - tell me, as succinctly as you can... that this is your way of hurting Daniel Fehl. Of taking him off the board."
"Oh, I'll expect this is a way for him to be taken off the board... in his own time," Jason muses, still distantly. "Will it hurt him? Ohhh, yes. It'll hurt him."
And he places one, last, meaningful tarot card down on the suite. The Wheel of Fortune (X). The four elements of minor arcana. Opportunity, luck, change, destiny.
Adam... Adam-finally-at-his-end, sighs, then looks into Jason's soulless, pitiless eyes, "Jason..... what the fuck are you?"
"You could, but probably never will, accept, that I'm the devil that's been whispering to Daniel for decades. The negative aspect. The shadow on the other side of him, his terrible opposite, his Mummudrai. That I exist, because he exists. That I fuel his negative impulses, appeal to his baser nature, that I go wherever he goes and always push him to be his worst self. Or... perhaps he does that for himself, and I'm nothing."
"Perhaps it's some alchemical composition of the two."
He picks up the Wheel tarot card between two fingers, and sends it slicing through the air, heaved with just a flick, yet with enough force that it slaps into erstwhile-Warpath's chest. "I leave it entirely up to you."
"Well, thank you for nothing, crackpot," murmurs Adam-skeeved-and-needing-a-cold-shower-to-wash-the-black-out-of-his-soul, "I'll be sure to take the news back to Hinata Fugikawa that a god damned gold ring is back in town."
"Tell your handler whatever you want... tell him, even..." And Jason looks up into the sky, searching, and divining, "that an end will come for him, too... just perhaps not the one he wants. All things end. That's Daniel's point. All things die."
"I need to take a shower," says Adam glumly, as he pushes up to his chair, deadlifting the bulky spare tire that's grown up on him in the eleven years since he was last his fit, recognizable self in the ring with a grunt. He feels shame radiate off of himself, and not just for his appearance; It's the self awareness of everything they'd talked about today. "Jimin, you coming?"
Jimin crossed his arms, and said, with a tsk, "Gotta pass on this one, man, say wassup to Big H tho."
"What's Jason giving you that Hinata's organization isn't, Jimin," Adam said, gauging him, wondering if he was enough like Daniel at his age that all he was thinking of was running away and touring the world with his sweetheart on his arm. Jimin didn't give him the answer to that, gave him nothing but stubborn silence and chewing a toothpick.
Adam moves off, leaving just the large body of the master of multiple choices to sit, staring at his cards, and wonder at possibilities. Adam had wanted a black and white answer; In his infinitely boring, black and white world, it was always coming down to the circle of blood, the cycle of violence and change. Daniel hurt Hinata, so Hinata hurt him back. Daniel hurt their organization, the organization hurt them back. In his hunger... the former Warpath's need to have a new war to throw himself into, a grunt thinking he should always have been the general... Warpath had come to Jason, hoping for some insight at how to continue that cycle. Predictably. To hurt Daniel in ways he understood. Smash him bodily, leave him destroyed, possibly near death.
Jason had tried that before. Wasn't satisfying.
And, as he examined the cards, and the possibilities arrayed before him, he realized that breaking out of that cycle was where the unexpected options for real devastations lay. Real revelations. Real changes.
"You can only take a turn of the wheel so long before it breaks," whispers the enigma. "So if we do break the wheel... what then? Will it hurt? Oh, certainly, it will."
He snatches up the Wheel (X) between two forefingers, never having thrown it away at all, like a prestidigitator. In his grasp, it shimmers, and it turns into a scrip of ragged yellow leathery parchment, daubed, with a glowing, red rune.
"Show me how it ends."
As he lays the scrip of parchment down on the table, over the suite of tarot cards, it brightens emberlike; A red, inscribed ring.
As she digs her fingers into the envelope, her fingertips brush and make contact with the band of gold, and then static shock! A charge of energy passes from it, through her, and her eyes widen.
Suddenly, the world rushes in, as the fog which persisted throughout her day, eating away a perception and memory and keeping her feeling trapped and lost, evaporated, and everything began to rush in. It was akin to a dam opening, and decades entered her mind. More sensory than she could even bear, thousands, millions of tastes, smells, tiny memories entering and she felt buffeted like a leaf on a stormy sea. Birthdays, car rides, dad's funeral, the rabbit (THE RABBIT), the gun, the snowglobes, the doorway, Danny walking away from her... Danny leaning down to put his lips on hers, as she threaded a dandelion in the crease behind his ear... DANNY!
She remembered it all so fervently that she thought she going insane, until the rush began to quiet. She found she had screwed her eyes closed, and, testing, she opened them, bit by bit.
She looked around the Hasegawa's apartment, and, finally, the last six months had begun to trickle back in.
She had no idea how it had happened, or how she had found her way here, but she knew what city she was in, and she knew that just blocks away, Danny was probably training at his dojo. He would be so worried about her.
And if the last time she remembered him reaching for her face, she had flinched back, that was alright... she just couldn't see who was reaching for her. Not through the fog.
Her trembling hands reached for a cordless phone, to punch in a number that, now that she had memory and life back, she knew by heart. Would always know. Always.
The two of them are sitting, side-by-side, on a little pullout couch. They haven't spoken for... well, a while. Daniel had asked "Are you sure", once, he thought, but man... he still felt numb. And he wished there was literally anyone else in the room with them right now. Someone who could comfort Ru. Someone who would know what words a person would say. Someone human.
All she had right now was him.
Rumiko sat next to him, tears still coming down her face.
He reached a rigid, stiff hand out, unsurely, and it wavered for a moment before making tentative contact, "reassuringly" patting her lightly on her knee. Then, he withdrew it, sorry he had tried.
His phone, on the couch cushion between them, rang, unexpectedly. They were both distracted, and feeling a lengthy gulf between them due to the gasped revelation and the hard conversation that followed (the first of many, oh joy), and so neither one paid it mind at first. To shut it up, and thinking it was hers, Rumiko picked the phone up off the couch, and answered, flatly, wearily, "Hello?"
He peaked up at her, willing her to tell the caller this wasn't a good time.
Instead, Rumiko's eyebrows knit in confusion. She looked at Daniel, so slowly, that tendons on her neck creaked.
Her face was ashen. "I'm sorry... who is this?"