Katou Yue (realnicemonster) wrote in valloic, @ 2022-08-22 21:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, angel sanctuary: katou yue, emelan: briar moss |
Katou himself was wearing a black t-shirt, sleeves ripped off and leaving large holes that showed off half his ribcage, a pair of camo cargo shirts, and a pair of combat boots.
He held up a t-shirt, frowned at Briar, and put it back on the hanger, then grabbed a different shirt. This one, he tossed at Briar, followed by a pair of plaid bondage pants and a pair of shorts. “There, try these on,” he said.
Briar caught the clothes, doing his best to keep his expression level. He already had a few regrets about asking Katou to help with this particular mission. But he’d been in Vallo a few months now, he had a job and had finally moved out of the city, and the logical next step seemed to be adding something resembling the local fashion to his very narrow wardrobe. The catch was that while he had a pretty good idea of style back at home - such as, importantly, what rules to break and when - he hadn’t anywhere near as good a grip of what was considered normal in Vallo. If anything could be considered normal in Vallo. And he didn’t have so many friends that he could afford to be choosy. He’d offered to pay Katou for his services in food.
“My knees will show in these,” he said, looking at the shorts, and then, considering his audience, added; “can we keep in mind that I spend most of the time kneeling in dirt?”
Katou snorted, for a moment wondering if this was some sort of weird cultural “Oh no, showing my ankles, how scandalous kind of thing, until he went on to talk about kneeling in the dirt.
“What, afraid of getting your knees a little dirty?” he snorted, conveniently choosing to ignore the fact that he was pretty sure Briar also worked around a bunch of thorny briars himself.
Despite his complaining though, he turned back to the rack, shifting through the pants hanging there until he found what he was looking for: a pair of dark cargo pants, perhaps with a few extra zippers than necessary, but also made of a heavy enough material that it wasn’t likely to get ruined if Briar was going to go crawling around in the mud; the plaid pants were a little flimsier and weren’t likely to hold up to hard wear like that. They were also lighter, a lot more likely to get dirt stained.
“Here, try these.”
It was actually very unusual for people to go about with bare legs at home, but Briar had learned enough not to actually say that aloud unless he wanted to put up with a barrage of teasing. The things girls wore here were certainly a lot less modest than he was used to as well, but he was hardly complaining.
The trousers offered at least looked utilitarian, and a touch of power revealed that there was enough cotton in the fabric that he could use magic to manipulate them in an emergency. He bit back a comment about the eye-watering pattern on the other article and took the things into a changing room.
“You are picking things that won’t have people staring at me in the street, aren’t you?” he asked through the door as he pulled his green tunic over his head with a touch of regret. “Not that I don’t like the attention, but I’d rather it was on my face.”
Katou snorted. "You'd think you'd wanna pull attention away from your face," he drawled, finding a comfortable spot to lean while Briar changed. He frowned at Brian's question. "But no, people might take a second look but they ain't gonna stare. People got more important things to worry about than what people're wearing, y'know? No one really gives a fuck. So long as you ain't walking around in, I don't know, a pink tutu and a tiara or whatever, no one will really notice."
Briar rather doubted that this was strictly true, since he certainly noticed what people wore, but he decided to trust that at least he wasn’t being led into a prank. He put on the shirt with the trousers that had more pockets than otherwise and looked critically in the mirror for a moment before opening the door to present himself for inspection. It was not nearly as fitted as he was used to, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. He got distracted for a moment by the zips on his thighs, opening and closing them over and over, intrigued by both the ingenuity of the mechanism and the sound it made. “I could fit half my mage kit in these things,” he observed. “How’s it look?”
Katou raised a hand, covering the lower half of his face with his palm, as if he were thinking instead of trying to cover up the expression on his face. Briar, unexpectedly, looked good. Really good. It was kind of stupid, actually, since it wasn't like Briar had been exactly been hideous in the clothes he normally wore.
"Yeah, pockets are handy as hell," Katou said. He pulled his hand away and shoved it back in his pocket. "Looks better than that getup you were wearing before, at least. What d'ya think? You're the one who's gonna be wearing it."
Briar touched the shirt with uncertainty, rubbing the fabric between his fingers. “It’s… fine, I suppose.” He sighed. It was impossible to explain to someone who wasn’t one of the girls how it felt to wear something that Sandry hadn’t made. He could feel her magic, her very presence in the tunic, even though she hadn’t touched it in months. It was more than just having the charms she’d put into it to keep it clean. It was her he missed. Which was stupid bleater talk, because he’d been away from all the girls much longer than this before and been… well, not totally fine, but that wasn’t the point. “I’ll get used to it,” he added. At least he didn’t have to have his shins on display. “It’s a good start, anyway.”
“Feels weird buying clothes for me,” he observed once he’d paid for the shirt and the pocketed pants - the plaid, he had decided after some consideration, was just a throw too far. “I’ve bought stuff for Evvy while I had to look after her, but I’ve got used to having stuff made for me.” He smiled reflectively, “I’d have sneered at someone like me when I was a kid. One step away from being a Bag - a… rich bastard,” he clarified, after searching his new vocabulary for a more local translation.
Katou didn't know everything going through Brian's mind right there, but he thought he probably understood at least some of the hesitation. If he'd wound up in some world where he had to wear tunics or whatever, he'd probably feel pretty weird about it too.
"Trust me, ain't no one gonna confuse you with a bag wearing that here. I dunno what Vallo's like, really, but most people can't make their own clothes in my world, not even the real poor folks."
He didn't look at Briar as they left the clothing store. He thought he needed a minute to get used to the idea of Briar looking like an actual human being. "About all I can manage is basic mods and sewing patches. Your cross-stitch sis make that shirt for you then?"
Briar’s lips twitched with a combination of amusement and home-sickness at Katou’s nickname for Sandry. “She makes all our clothes,” he said. “She’d be offended if we wore anything else. She could make an absolute fortune making gowns for royalty, but she’d rather sit sewing charms in all our socks so they won’t ever lose each other. Course, she is a Bag, so she hardly needs the money.” The joke didn’t do much to quell the feeling of wrongness on his skin; he did his best to shrug it off. “Speaking of which, I believe I owe you dinner.”
Katou glanced sidelong at Briar, and then, grinning, moved to sling his arm across his shoulders. “Aw, ain’t that cute, you with your ickle magic socks.” Katou never claimed to be above noggies.
“Gerroff.” Briar laughed and shoved him good-naturedly. He was inexperienced in the way of male friends, and he had to admit it was fun in a different way. “That’s a charm that’s actually useful, you can keep big fancy battle magic. Warm feet are very important.”
Katou laughed as he was shoved off of Briar, and then shot him a grin. He wasn't a stranger to guy friends, though it had been a while: most of his friends in Vallo were girls. Syd, El. Hell, El was probably his best friend, and she wasn't only a girl, but also a kid.
Having a friend like Briar was a little like having Kira, or Setsuna around. He shoved his hands in his pockets.
"What do you think about going out for ramen? The Tipsy Samurai ain't too far from here."
“Sounds good to me,” said Briar, who remembered that ramen meant noodles. As much as he loved to try new foods at home, he’d found that the endless spectrum of processed and high-sugar options in Vallo a bit of a digestional minefield. They ate mostly rice and noodles in Gyonxe and Nanjing, so he thought he was safe there. And if it was cheap, all the better. He’d always been pretty self-sufficient, and he was hardly throwing money around, but he wasn’t exactly raking it in at Sutton Cottage either and there was no way of knowing how much time he would have to prepare to stay here.
“Cool,” Katou said.
The Tipsy Samurai was probably his favourite restaurant in Vallo, not just because the food reminded him a little of home, of late nights slurping ramen after a night of partying with Kira and the other guys in the gang, or because it was affordable, but also because of the cool ggraffitti-like art that decorated the walls.
It wasn’t a far walk from the mall either, and the two of them made it there in only a few minutes, Katou grabbing one of the booths away from the windows.
“What kinda food you got at home anyway?” he asked, grabbing one of the menus.
Briar hesitated over using the words ‘normal food’, since normal was a rather subjective term in a place like this. “All kinds,” he said finally. “It’s just more… I don’t know… it never comes in bags, put it that way.” His first experience in a Vallo supermarket had been overwhelming to say the least. “It either comes out of the ground or an animal. Tris and I cook now, but when I was a kid we got most of our food from the temple kitchen; Dedicate Gorse is the best cook in the whole of Emelan.” He tried not to think about the kinds of pastries Gorse had slipped him every time he’d done the food run for the cottage, unless he actually started drooling. “Things here are a lot more… complicated,” he added, looking pointedly at the menu. He thought he understood about half the words. “You better order whatever you want for both of us."
"The people in your world have the weirdest fucking names, Raspberry," Katou snorted, but he glanced at the menu anyway. "You eat meat or are you one of them veggie weirdos?"
Briar made a face at Raspberry, but since it was better than Rosie, he did not protest. “I eat meat,” he clarified. Sandry had tried to make them all vegetarian once, and it had lasted less than a day thanks to Gorse’s delicious steak and kidney pies, fresh from the oven. “And the Earth temple names are tame compared to some of the others, especially the university lot. I met a man once called Yarrun Firetamer - guess how he died horribly.”
Katou took a moment to turn to the server and order for them – a couple beers, takoyaki to start, and then a couple bowls of the spicy tonkotsu ramen.
“Was it fire?” he asked Briar, raising an eyebrow. “I hope it was fire.”
“Big fire,” Briar confirmed, grimacing a little. He hadn’t liked Yarrun much, but the memory of his dead white face was no more pleasant for it. “Thought he could put out a raging forest fire all by himself. Drained him in seconds, it was brutal.” He tapped a couple of fingers on the table to emphasise in a sing-song voice: “and that is why we don’t use more magic than we actually have, children.”
Katou frowned. “That a thing that can happen to you?” he asked, a little uneasy. “You just… use up all your magic and croak? No warning or nothing?”
He thought about Setsuna, who was enough of an idiot that he absolutely would kill himself using magic that he didn’t actually have, trying to protect Sara or Kira or some random moron he’d met an hour before. He wondered, suddenly, if Briar was the same way.
“Technically yes, but I’m not an idiot,” Briar said. “I don’t go around bragging that I can do the impossible and then kill myself trying to live up to my own ego. And even if I did, I have extra power stored in my shakkan to draw on.” If he was at home, of course, he’d have Rosethorn and the girls as well, but he’d yet to come across a situation here that required more than a touch of his power, so he doubted he was in any danger of exhausting himself. “Anyway, enough about me.” He rolled his eyes. “What about you? How’ve you been coping with the heat?”
“Good. You better not be lying or I’ll kill you myself.” Maybe the end result would be the same, but at least the process would be more satisfying.
At Briar’s question though, Katou groaned dramatically and flopped onto the table. “Dude, it’s like, so bad.” He said. “Pretty sure I spent that entire heatwave just laying underneath Seph’s sprinklers. The sun ain’t so bad, I guess, but that heat makes me feel like I’m wilting.”
Briar was privately glad that someone here cared whether he lived or died, not that he had any intention of doing any such thing. “I’m not surprised,” he said, though he was interested. “Some of the roses at the cottage had scorch marks. Do you think… does it feel the same as it did when you were, you know, human? Or is it different?”
Katou grit his teeth. He'd thought he'd accepted the fact that he wasn't human anymore: he was a monster, a corpse, dead five times over. He'd given up his humanity entirely when he'd lost his arm and had it replaced with Rivet's creation of steel and leather. It had been the only way he'd have been able to do what he thought needed doing.
But Hades had grown his arm back, and Katou didn't need to do those things anymore. And as much as he liked to crow about how he wasn't human anymore, it hit different coming from Briar.
"I'm still human," he muttered with a glance at his left hand. "But no, it's different. For one, I don't think I'd like the sun so much." He shot Briar a grin. "I was really more of a nocturnal creature when I was alive. But I think the heat bugged me less." The grin faded. "It's hard to remember exactly though. I wasn't exactly, you know, 'with it' the last few years of my life."
“Right… sorry.” Briar felt guilty, but he wasn’t exactly sure how else to put it. Pre-plantified? He couldn’t help being fascinated. “The sun’s good for you either way, I expect. Being shut up inside never did anything good for anyone - unless it’s really roasting.”
“You’re probably right about that. I usedta spend a bunch of time inside. Feels nice to have the sun on my skin once in a while now.”
He grinned when the beers were placed in front of them, and took a long swallow from his. “Guess with your brand of magic you probably wanna be out in the sun all the time, huh?”
“Well not all the time,” Briar replied, grinning back. “I’ve gotten used to things like nice soft beds and ceilings that keep the wet off. But yes - you have to be stuck inside for a while to notice it, but it does make us a bit grey after a while.” Those probably weren’t the perfect words to describe how it felt to be isolated from plants, but close enough. “That heat was about the edge of what I could stand - I did have to cheat a bit, to keep it from frying everything in the gardens, and since I was cheating anyway I did it from the shadiest spot I could find.” He sipped the beer cautiously; he’d worked out through careful experimentation that this sort of thing wasn’t nearly as potent as the liquor that had led to him and the girls destroying a barn, and he could handle it in small amounts. Tris and Sandry would probably tell him off, but they weren’t here, so there. “You should come, some time, now we’re open to the public.”
Grey probably summed it up about as well as any word. “You wanna go look at flowers with me, Raspberry?” Katou snorted, and took another sip of his beer. “There’s supposed to be some sorta maze out there too, huh? Guess there’s worse ways to spend an afternoon.”
A lot of worse ways, he thought. There was no way that Katou would’ve been caught dead in a flower garden back when he’d been alive, but… well, now that he was – dead, that was – the idea didn’t sound quite so embarrassing. It could even be a little fun, wandering around through a maze with Briar or seeing all the roses and whatever.
“There is a maze,” Briar’s eyes sparkled. “You would like it, actually.” He launched happily into an explanation of the spells the thing was grown in, as far as he understood them. He thought the idea of that kind of trap would appeal to Katou’s sensibilities as much as it did his own. “And it’s a good maze even without the magic,” he finished. “Easy to get lost in, that’s for certain.”
Katou rested his elbow on the table, resting his cheek in his hand, smiling a little as Briar launched into his explanation. It reminded him a little of Setsuna, when Setsuna got excited about something. They weren't the same: Setsuna never went into long-winded explanations that Katou only half-listened to with that kind of vigor, but he got the same look in his eyes when he talked about Sara, or how he was going to make the world a place where everyone could be happy.
"Wow, you're an even bigger nerd than I thought," Katou drawled when he came to the end, affectionately. "But sure, getting lost in killer bushes sounds like a grand old time, sign me up."
It was just in time for the takoyaki to show up, and Katou snatched up one of the balls in his chopsticks.
“All right, what do you do for fun, then?” Briar rolled his eyes while also digging enthusiastically to the food that was brought to the table. “When there aren’t any convenient… rollercoasters around?”
That... was a surprisingly good question, and Katou frowned, thinking it over. “I dunno,” Katou said, shrugging. “I go to the movies a lot. Play music, and listen to music. They’ve got a decent amount of gigs here, given how small this world is. I like to sketch a bit. I was sorta working on making a movie myself, but it turns out I’m shit at writing, so this guy, Richie – he sorta took in one of my friends – he’s working on the script for me. Other than that, I don’t know. Fuck around. This,” as in going shopping and eating dinner with Briar, “ain’t the worst way to spend an afternoon neither.”
“Well, I take that as a compliment.” Briar grinned. “Your movie…” He had seen a couple since coming to Vallo; it was a confusing medium for someone who had never experienced it before, but he found he enjoyed it once he stopped wondering how on earth it worked. Still, they tended to give him a headache; he still preferred reading. “What’s it about?”
"It's kinda dumb, but it's about this zombie. And this zombie, every time he dies, he becomes a bit more human. So after the first time he dies, he takes to following around the guy who killed him in the first place, thinking that maybe if he follows him around long enough, he'll wind up human. And then right when it's in reach, he dies protecting this guy, and the death that might've made him human just makes him dead. It's gonna be a horror comedy. You know, if it ever gets made. I don't got much follow-through, so who knows."
“It sounds more like a tragedy,” Briar observed. “But I’m sure if anyone could make that funny, you could. What sort of thing do you sketch? I do that too sometimes, but it’s… mostly plants, to be honest..”
“Yeah, the ending’s kinda sad, but getting there ain’t supposed to be. I’m not super sold on the ending though, but I can’t think of any other way to end it, so…” he shrugged. “Richie’s supposed to be a pretty funny guy. He was a comedian back in his own world. So I’m sure he’ll do a decent job at it.” He hoped so at least.
He snorted at Briar’s ‘confession.’ “Yeah, that don’t surprise me at all, man. You’re obsessed.” He grinned. “Anyway, I just sketch, you know, whatever. There’s this monkey I draw sometimes, you know, in bathroom stalls or spraypainted onto buildings. Usually I doodle whatever comes to mind though. It ain’t like, good or nothing, but…” he shrugged. It was a little embarrassing, really. He was planning on going to that arty summer camp at the Art of Expression, but he knew he wasn’t a great artist or anything like that.
“Show me,” Briar prompted, carefully balancing his chopsticks on his bowl so that he could dig in his bag for his sketchbook. At least he didn’t have to embarrass himself with the chopsticks, and the food did taste excellent in a way that didn’t feel like it would ruin his digestive system for several days afterwards. He handed the book over and leaned over the table to see better. “Go on.”
Katou frowned. “What, you just drag this sketchbook around?” he grumbled, not because that was weird, exactly – flipping through the pages filled with various annotated sketches of plants gave Katou a pretty good idea of why he carried it around – but because sketching in front of Briar was pretty fucking embarassing.
Still, he took the sketchbook, frowned when he saw Briar glancing at what he was doing, and then angled it away from him so he could sketch in peace. He drew with the speed of someone drawing something they’d drawn a hundred times before, and when he turned the sketchpad back toward Briar, there was a cartoon monkey, sitting at a table and slurping up a mouthful of ramen with a flower growing out of its furry head.
There was also about half-a-dozen dicks in various shapes, and various levels of detail, decorating the rest of the page.
Briar looked at the page and laughed. He’d been taking detailed notes in the sketchbook, partially because it was just thorough practice, but in case Rosethorn ever happened to appear sure and demanded a report on the island’s plant life. He’d have to tear this page out first, he thought, or lose both ears. “If I’m obsessed with plants, what does this say about you?” he asked, still laughing.
Katou flushed a little. “Hey man, you asked for my art, and I simply gave you what you wanted. Now you can say you’ve got a Katou original, all to yourself. You can probably get big bucks for all those dicks once my movie becomes a blockbuster hit.”
Part of him wondered what it took to become a blockbuster hit on a world as small as Vallo, but the rest of him was pretty sure B-Rated Horror-Comedy wasn’t it.
“I’ll treasure it,” Briar grinned, tucking the book back into his kit and returning to his food. It was, as promised, delicious. “This is great,” he said, once he’d worked his way through several mouthfuls. “You have good taste in food, at least.”
“Pfft, I have good taste in everything,” Katou snorted, looking pointedly at Briar’s new outfit. “You should hear my taste in music. It’d blow your mind.”
“I don’t doubt that at all,” Briar said, taking the idiom literally; he didn’t know much about music even in his own world, but he wasn’t sure it ought to be legal to define some of what he’d heard here as music at all.
Katou grinned. “Come by my place sometime. Maybe you won’t completely hate it. What sorta stuff were you into back in your own world anyway? Other than like, bushes.”
He knew enough about Briar’s world to know that there wasn’t a whole lot in terms of entertainment – at least, not like there had been in Tokyo, with television and CDs and video games.
Briar thought about this; he hadn’t realised how simple his life was until he had come here, where there were a thousand things to do every day if you could stand it. “I read, sometimes,” he said, “or go riding. Help the girls with their projects, I suppose. I don’t know, I’ve been travelling a lot the last few years so there hasn’t been much time for other things. I met a girl on the last trip, so that was fun for a while, but…” he shrugged. “Didn’t work out.”
“What, like horses?” Katou asked, raising an eyebrow. He hadn’t taken Briar as the horsey type. But then, he guessed horsey types probably looked different when that was the main mode of transportation.
“I always wanted to go travelling back home, but I never even gotta leave my home city,” Katou said, stirring his ramen absently with his chopsticks. “You know, you couldn’t even see the stars back home. Not really. There was too much light and like, pollution and shit. You had to get away from the cities to see them.” Katou’d always wanted to go see the stars. A shooting star could grant a million wishes, Kira had told him, and Katou had had a lot of wishes.
“Why didn’t you and the girl work out?” he asked. “Was it your bad fashion sense?”
Briar was uncomfortable with the concept of a city so bright you couldn’t see stars. It was like something out of a strange nightmare, but maybe that was some of the many reasons he’d never been able to feel himself in the city. “Yes, horses,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Horses or feet are your only transportation options where I’m from.” He made a face at the question about Caidy. “Ah, it was never going to work,” he shrugged. “She was a noble, for a start, and for another she was working for the Empress who tried to force us all to stay in her land and work for her.” His gaze drifted off a little for a moment as he got caught up in the memory. “She was beautiful though,” he murmured. “The Empress. You know the kind of beautiful that makes it hard to breathe?”
Unbidden, an image of Lucifer came to Katou’s mind – his Lucifer, not the one here in Vallo. Kira had been beautiful, had been the kind of attractive that could make your heart stop when he looked at you the right way. Lucifer had been something else. Lucifer’s face had been Kira’s, with all the warmth leached out of it and replaced with some sort of ethereal, otherworldly presence; even Kira’s black eyes had become the grey of a winter’s sky.
It was the kind of beauty that could snatch the air from your lungs and freeze your blood in your veins. The kind of beauty that could drive someone insane. Rociel, too, had been that kind of beautiful. The kind of beauty that would make men fall to their knees to worship at his feet. He’d paled next to Lucifer, but before Lucifer had come, Katou couldn’t have imagined anything in the universe more beautiful than Rociel.
He jerked, coming back to himself.
“Yeah, I know it,” he muttered, slurping at his noodles. “Was she insane?”
Briar considered. “I don’t think so,” he said at last. “Unless you can be so entitled that it tips over into insanity. She saw everyone as objects, like gems she could sew onto a gown. Her gardens were some of the best I’d ever seen, and I would have stayed just for them, if she’d only asked nicely instead of trying to marry my sister off to the first man who could figure out how to take her by force.” His expression twisted for a moment at the thought. “Why, are all pretty people insane where you’re from?”
“Not one of them kidnappers you mentioned before?” Katou asked, frowning. That… really didn’t seem like an auspicious start to any marriage, let alone one that was being set up by the queen.
At Briar’s question, he shrugged. “Maybe not insane,” he said, after a moment. “But yeah, seems like the prettier someone is, the more likely they are to… I don’t know, chop your arm off and stick their hand through your stomach,” Lucifer, “or like, turn you into their mind-controlled puppet so you’ll tell them they’re pretty, worship the ground they walk on, and get yourself murdered for them.” Rociel.
He took a long guzzle of his beer.
Briar stared for a moment before forcing himself to blink. “Perhaps it's the other way around,” he suggested, ignoring the sudden dryness in his throat, “and it's more that the people who do horrible things tend to be beautiful, like in nature. The Yanjing Emperor was like a Lantana flower; all bright colours and polite faces but poisonous underneath. But there are plenty of pretty people who aren’t hideous murderers - as far as I know.” He mirrored Katou’s drink in an attempt to ease the uneasy feeling. “If those things happened to you, you deserve a lot of credit for being at all sane yourself.”
Katou thought about that – beautiful plants could sometimes be deadly, but sometimes they were just beautiful. He had a habit of seeing the worst in everything – you couldn’t be disappointed if you always expected the worst, only pleasantly surprised – but it was nice, sometimes, to be reminded that maybe not everything was garbage. Maybe not everything that was beautiful was also deadly.
“Who says I am?” he asked with a wink, grinning to make it a joke, but there was a tightness around his eyes. In the end, he had lost his mind, right up until he’d landed here in Vallo and Hades and Persephone had put him back together again. Things had been fine so far, but who knew if they’d stay that way? He dropped his gaze to his noodles, and slurped loudly.
Briar watched Katou with sympathy while trying not to let too much pity show on his face. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” he said. “I don’t really know what it’s like to die, or… lose significant body parts, or be reborn out of plants.” He hesitated, “well, that last one maybe a bit,” he amended, with a slight twist to his mouth. “In a way. Anyway, I could still listen. If you wanted.”
There was a point of time when any amount of pity on someone's face would've made Katou lose it – whether it be casual cruelness or violence. As it was, he scowled and leaned back in his chair, looking anywhere but at whatever compassionate bullshit was apparently happening in Briar's face.
“Trust me, it ain’t something you wanna listen to,” he said, shrugging. “It’s just a lot of bullshit. A real sob story. And I don’t come out looking so hot in the end, so…” He rubbed the back of his head.
“None of us are the heroes of our own stories,” Briar said. He wasn’t sure where he’d heard that before, Niko, maybe, but it was good advice, anyway. “But I don’t mind. I just feel like we’re always talking about me. Like I said, feel free to tell me to… to fuck off, if you’d rather.”
Katou gave Briar a long look, face devoid of expression or emotion, and then turned back to what remained of the food. “Let’s finish up, and we can go for a walk,” he said after a moment. This wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to talk about in some restaurant with nothing to look at but Briar or the wall. He needed to get moving, maybe have a cigarette.
There wasn’t much in the way of noodles in his bowl, and he finished them off quickly, slurping down the broth when he was done and washing it all down with the last of his beer, and waited for Briar to do the same.
Briar didn’t quite finish his beer; it wasn’t worth the risk of the disaster that might arise if it went to his head too quickly. But he paid for their meals as promised and followed Katou back out into the street. He didn’t mind the city so much now he didn’t have to live there, though the occasional noise or rushing past of a fast car still made him start. He watched Katou carefully out of the corner of his eye; his expression was hard to read and he hoped he hadn’t overstepped. He knew what it was like to want to forget the nightmares of ones’ past. He let Kaotu set the pace and the direction, although he suspected they weren’t headed anywhere in particular.
Briar was right; Katou didn’t have any specific destination in mind, but just getting outside, feeling the low sun on his face and the breeze in his hair was good enough for him. The city noises were familiar, if not comforting – he’d spent his whole life in Tokyo, and Vallo was considerably less crowded than Tokyo had ever been. He didn’t start talking right away, instead fishing out a cigarette from his pocket and lighting it, inhaling the smoke deeply before he started talking, and when he did, he stared straight ahead, face devoid of emotion.
"Look, when I died…" he shrugged. "Dying was probably the best thing that could've happened to me, really. I weren't a good person, and I… I don’t know if I would’ve gotten better, not without a solid kick in the ass. I probably would’ve just died someplace, the kinda person that no one would bother mourning. I'd stopped… I don't know, my soul, it was rotting from the inside out, you know? And after I died, I was given a choice where I could be reincarnated and try the whole living thing over again, or I could share Setsuna’s curse and I could keep fighting by his side until the bitter end. I wanted to like, do better. Make it so when I died for good, I didn't just… vanish meaninglessly. When my human body died back then, I was so scared that no one would remember me, that no one would care, that… that I’d just disappear. So everything that happened once I chose to be Setsuna’s guardian and champion, that was my choice.
“My friend, Kira… When he died his last death it was…” He cleared his throat uneasily, turned his face away, his hands closing into white-knuckled fists, but when he turned forward again, his face was as emotionless as it had been. “Anyway, he came back. As Lucifer. Setsuna thought… thought maybe he’d been brainwashed or… or something, that Kira was tucked someplace deep inside and he could bring him back if he just got through to him. But Setsuna was an idiot who always thought the best of people, and that ain’t never been a failing of mine. Kira was in there, all his memories and everything else. He knew who I was, knew who Setsuna was, knew what he’d meant to us both. But he didn’t care. He was Kira, but he weren’t my Kira. And he cut off my arm, did it without blinking, without a single regret, and I… I lost my head, a bit.
“My body, it ain’t really mine, right? It couldn’t handle that kinda injury. It started rotting, and would’ve kept rotting if Persephone and Hades hadn’t given me a new arm. My soul, it started…My body couldn’t hold onto my soul, and my memories, everything that I was, it all just started slipping away. Like sand through my fingers. So I thought hell, why not, and I dumped my humanity too, and I ended the world. Literally, I mean. To kill him. I didn’t kill him, in the end – he got away and I wiped out a third of creation, and I probably should’ve died. I was supposed to die.” He’d seen Kira, his Kira, his soul, come to collect him so they could go off in death together.
Briar swallowed and tried not to let the moment of horror show on his face. A third of creation?
“I ended up here instead. The first people that ran found me dying in the street was the God of Death, who could coax my soul back, and the Goddess of Spring or plants or whatever the fuck, who could heal my body, and I think they were the only two fucking people in the entire multiverse who could’ve saved me.” And now they were gone, too. His fist’s clenched, lips tightened, and he took a deep breath and let his expression smooth out again. “That would’ve been the fifth time I died, and instead it was my sixth shot at life, and it ain’t like I’m the kinda person that deserves all these chances. I really am kinda rotten, through and through. Maybe not my body no more, ‘Seph fixed it up real nice, but my soul. So…” he shrugged again, shoving his hands back in his pocket. “I don’t really know what the fuck I’m supposed to be doin’ here, Bri.”
Briar forced himself to take a breath. It was hard to think of what to say. Somehow it wasn’t hard to imagine Katou sacrificing himself to save someone else. It was much more difficult to reconcile his sarcastic, skinny friend with someone who could wipe out life on that scale. It took him a minute or two to find his voice. “I don’t think you’re rotten,” he said finally, putting his hands in two of his many new pockets. “I’ve met plenty of rotten people. They don’t try and be better. They don’t see a reason to.” He looked sidelong at Katou as they walked. “None of us know what we’re doing here, but maybe for you it’s just the chance to… be something like the person you want to be? You’ve got friends here, people who like you just for you. That’s got to be worth something.”
Katou was pretty sure even Setsuna had been horrified by what he's done. Uriel… Uriel had fetched the Egg of Wormwood and told him how to unleash it, but once Setsuna realized what Katou'd been doing – too late – he'd tried to stop him. He was sure – or at least, he hoped – that if Setsuna managed to kill God after all, then he'd also undo what Katou'd done in his final, unhinged moments. But for all he knew, God had taken one look at Setsuna and had crushed him like an ant and let the world keep ending. He'd expected Briar to … well, he didn't really know what he'd expected Briar to do, but to keep walking along beside talking about how bad people didn't try to be better hadn't been his first guess.
For the first time since he'd left the restaurant, Katou looked at Briar, a flash of raw vulnerability in his face, but it didn't take a genius to see that Briar had been unsettled by the news. He blinked the stinging from his eyes, and one of his typical shit-eating grins slipped easily into place.
"That include you, Raspberry?" he asked, tone teasing, though his hands didn't leave his pockets and he didn't move to sling an arm around Briar's shoulders like he might usually have done – he didn't want to have to deal with Briar flinching away from his touch.
“I let you call me Raspberry.” Briar rolled his eyes. “And I let you pick out my clothes. That ought to give you some clue that I’m not sticking around for no reason. Even if you do have an unhealthy appreciation for flying around at inhuman speeds.” He nudged Katou a bit awkwardly with his elbow. “Thanks. For telling me.”
Katou’s smile didn’t change, but his eyes softened a little, and his hand came out of his pocket so he could sling it over Briar’s shoulders. “Trust me, I’ll get you enjoying inhuman speeds soon enough,” he said, sing-songy. And then, dropping his voice quiet enough that it was likely difficult for even Briar to hear – thanking people wasn’t something that came naturally to Katou – he added, “And thanks. For listening.”