Chapter Text
Ango had heard somewhere that the moment a person truly dies is when the last person who remembers them dies.
Nonsense. Because he’d also heard somewhere, from much more reliable sources, that it became pointless to remember anything the moment man created the written word. He could never quite put a finger on why he felt compelled to record all the deaths he came across in his dealings with the Port Mafia, nor why he found himself duty-bound to relate such dark crossings to the loved ones left behind, but perhaps it had something to do with this concept.
So many entries in his ledger. So many anonymous envelopes dropped in postal boxes throughout Yokohama and Tokyo. These slim physical proofs of an ex-existence, so thin that they slipped effortlessly through mail slots: they filled him with a sense of eternity. A link here and there, forward and backwards, held in the trembling fingers of the addressees with no awareness of the matching entry on the ledger somewhere on a meticulously-dusted but very crowded shelf.
Memories were nice. The written word, though, was an entirely different creature.
Some people, when they die, leave this world with literal tons of paper to their names. What of all the authors, long-dead, with all the copies of their books in circulation? Those must add up to quite a lot, Ango felt. A communal memory that will last through the centuries and beyond. Minds fade, memories retreat but what power might be held in those papers, might emanate from such proof of having been? I was. I am.
And yet other people leave this world with only a few sheets of paper to weigh them down as they go. A birth certificate. A death certificate. A letter. Were those people any less real, any less deserving?
And so he opened his ledger, turning to a fresh page and taking up his pen.
If anything, Ango felt himself a rational man. And he, being possessed of that quality, was duty-bound to perform the task he set himself to. Someone must do it, after all.
Someone must do it.
Tears filled his eyes behind his glasses and dripped down into the lenses as he tilted his head over his work, recording a date and a name before he found himself overcome.
The page blurred; the name written on it blurred. He removed his glasses in the silence of his archive and beneath the impersonal light of the fluorescent bulbs, in that windowless room he finally allowed his shoulders to tremble as he sank his face to his hands, the pen rolling away forgotten and tears tracing twin paths down his cheeks to connect at his chin and fall, splotching the ink.
Who would record his name, when he was gone?
*
Ango was not a romantic man but he could pinpoint the moment it happened: when Oda became something more to him than the figure on the barstool on the other side of Dazai’s clowning.
“Tell me she said no.” Ango rolled his eyes, raising a finger to the bartender for another whiskey.
“Of course she said no,” Oda sighed. “He’s still here, isn’t he? Drinking up our hard-earned money?”
“Hey,” Dazai protested, aggrieved. “I pay sometimes!”
“No, you don’t,” Oda mumbled. “You still owe me several curry dinners. And that fiver you borrowed. And the five before that.”
“Well.” Dazai lifted his glass, smirking at the sphere of ice inside. “Let’s not discuss that now. I’ll have you know that this time I came closer than ever. She said no, but before she did she told me that I had a certain something about me: a sadness of the soul that women go crazy for. She said for sure I’d get a woman to commit double suicide with me someday.”
“You should leave the waitresses alone, Dazai.” Ango shook his head ruefully as the bartender set his drink on the coaster in front of him. “I’m assuming she was a waitress. I’m surprised there are any left in the greater Tokyo area that don’t run when they see you coming.”
“She wasn’t a waitress,” Dazai hummed happily. “She was a meter-maid. With a little uniform and pocketbook for tickets and everything. I did get out of a ticket, though! The moment I told her how she had stolen my heart, and how I must commit double suicide with her, she put her ticket-book away!”
“Surprised she didn’t call for backup and have you put away,” Oda commented, catching Ango’s eye.
“She did not!” Dazai set his empty glass down, a little too heavily, on the counter and gestured for another. His fourth of the night. The bartender set his newspaper aside and took his sweet time reaching for a fresh glass and the bottle, setting a sphere of ice into the glass with a pair of silver tongs.
“I’m telling you: this face!” Dazai dragged his fingers down said face, displaying it in turn for Oda and Ango’s scrutiny as proof, digging into his cheekbones until the red rims of his lower eyelids protruded. “It’s irresistible! The weight of cruel existence hangs off these cheekbones and women can see it!”
“Irresistible,” Oda agreed, again catching Ango’s eye. This time Oda’s grin – like they were sharing some inside joke – hit Ango with the same disorienting surprise, the same seismic shock as a minor earthquake. It left his face numb, the sweating drink in his hand momentarily forgotten.
“I… um…” Ango looked away from Oda, blinking rapidly. “Doesn’t it seem more romantic to have somebody remember you? I mean, if you commit double suicide, then everything is gone at once.”
“That’s the beauty of it!” Dazai crowed in triumph and flung his arms around Ango, nearly climbing atop the slender, scholarly man on the barstool in his enthusiasm. “Gone! All gone! In one fell swoop! Oh it’s wonderful!”
“That’s a little bleak, Dazai.” Oda interceded, strong arms firmly peeling Dazai from Ango’s astonished lap and settling him back on his own barstool. He chuckled at Dazai’s antics. “How are you still single?”
“How are any of us still single?” Dazai concurred, petulantly taking up his drink again between Ango and Oda. “But there’s no way I’m hanging around to see anybody cry over me. Everything I’ve got, I’m taking it with me when I go. Including my love!”
Ango and Oda both laughed at Dazai’s clowning. They were well-used to his outbursts by now.
“Narcissist,” Ango finally muttered under his breath.
“I’d rather be remembered by somebody,” Oda mused, rubbing his cheek and the faint stubble there. “I mean, if I have to go. When I go.”
“I agree.” Ango glanced over at the other man, wondering how he’d never noticed how his eyelashes and facial hair were the same auburn as his hair, if only a shade darker.
“Oh how boring!” Dazai exclaimed. “Ganging up on me! Immature, unimaginative, the both of you! So…” he lined up his challenge, “…both of you would rather leave somebody to suffer on in grief, rather than taking them with you? Who’s the narcissist now?” He raised one eyebrow as if to say checkmate. “And yes, I heard that, Ango!”
“I don’t believe it’s selfish not to want somebody who cares for me to die,” Ango said, defensively.
“Even if it’s difficult,” Oda agreed. “Grief and loss are a part of life. One that can’t and shouldn’t be avoided by… well…”
“Ugh!” Dazai made a dismissive gesture with both hands. “The two of you deserve each other, you know that?” He downed the rest of his whiskey in one rapid flick of his wrist, then frowned at the empty glass. “Say… Oda: lend me five thousand yen? I’ll buy us another round.”
“Very generous,” Oda sighed, producing his wallet from his tan jacket and finding it empty.
Dazai leaned over his shoulder, a moue of disgust on his face. “Really?”
“You and the kids cleaned me out,” Oda shrugged, snapping his wallet shut and replacing it in his front pocket.
“I think that’s our signal to get you home, Dazai.” Ango stood, retrieving Dazai’s black trench coat and helping the whining man into it.
“A conspiracy,” Dazai protested, his legs wobbling beneath him as Oda and Ango helped him up the steps of Bar Lupin and out onto the street in search of a cab. Dazai shrugged them off beneath the black and red lit sign, his eyes struggling to focus through the alcohol haze as he faced them squarely. “The two of you conspiring! Don’t think I don’t see it! And I was right!” He fixed his eyes first on Oda, who held the cab door open, then on Ango who helped settle him in. “You deserve each other!”
Oda slammed the door and straightened as the cab pulled away, turning to face Ango.
For a moment there was silence.
“What’s the trick,” Oda finally asked.
“The bartender knows to give me ginger ale after my first two drinks,” Ango replied evenly.
“Nice,” Oda nodded.
“And yours?”
“I just handle it a lot better than that one.” Oda nodded in the direction the cab had taken.
“Yes, well… let’s hope the cabbie doesn’t turn around when he realizes the address I gave him is for the city dump.”
“Huh.”
Oda didn’t so much as crack a grin. Instead, the two of them stood a moment beneath the Bar Lupin sign, as if each was reluctant to be the first to disappear into the darkness beyond.
“Well,” Oda finally broke the silence, “see you next time.”
“Yes, next time,” Ango agreed.
Oda stuffed his hands into his coat pockets and left, his measured steps retreating into the black, leaving Ango alone in the harsh circle of light cast by the sign.
Oda was not a sentimental man but he could pinpoint the moment it happened: when Ango became something other than the stiff, punctilious, two-dimensional figure on the barstool to the left of Dazai, eyes hidden behind the sensible round lenses of a civil servant’s glasses.
Dazai had, as usual, been carrying on about his latest attempt to talk some poor woman (a meter-maid, this time) into a double suicide. Without any success, as proven by Dazai’s presence there in Bar Lupin that night.
They were used to Dazai’s clowning, of course. At times Oda suspected it was born out of a sincere desire to connect and be understood. Other times he wondered if it were some sort of smoke screen set up by his mysterious companion that tempted yet defied penetration. Perhaps Dazai had no wish whatsoever to be understood, while simultaneously yearning for it. An affliction Oda could sympathize with, if not relate to. Which was fine by him. Everything about Oda was simple and plain as the black and pinstriped button-down and worn tan jacket he wore like a uniform.
Whatever the reason behind Dazai’s clowning, it was always good for conversation.
At that particular moment, if memory served, they’d been discussing death and whether it was better to be remembered by somebody or if it would be more romantic to go together into that dark night. With an assassin’s instinct Oda had noticed something shift in Ango’s demeanor. He was accustomed to breaths on the air, the tightening of capillaries and dilation of pupils and something in Ango caught his predator focus. What, he couldn’t pinpoint. Very odd.
“I’d rather be remembered by somebody,” Oda mused, rubbing his chin and wondering how obvious it was he was due for a shave. “I mean, if I have to go.”
“I agree.”
Oda looked over at Ango, surprised, and for the first time noticed the small mole over the man’s lip. He wondered, with a feeling that sank warm and stirring as the alcohol into his belly, if Ango’s smooth pale skin had other similar marks to be discovered in areas usually covered by his clothes. He wondered what Ango looked like without those round glasses that sometimes reflected the light in a way that made them into white panes, turning the windows of his soul opaque.
“Oh how boring,” Dazai exclaimed, waving his hands about and breaking Oda’s line of view to Ango’s pink-tinged cheeks.
From then on Oda couldn’t be sure what Dazai said, or what his response was. He only knew that Ango had suddenly burst into three dimensions for him in a way that he could not deny. And when it was finally time to pour Dazai into a cab and he and Ango were left alone beneath the white light of the Bar Lupin sign, Oda found his head so awash in the unexpected revelation of Ango that his only response was to stuff his fists into the pockets of his jacket and walk away.
They didn’t meet at Bar Lupin regularly.
Some nights Dazai was there, but not Ango. Sometimes Oda showed up and his only companion for the evening was the rangy male calico cat that twined amongst the legs of the barstools, occasionally inserting itself on the bar itself to demand pettings and chin-scritches before being shooed away by the bartender. When this occurred, the cat would jump down and stroll towards the staircase, stopping to petulantly groom himself before leaving as if to say “you didn’t kick me out, see? I decided to leave of my own accord.”
When it was the three of them, Dazai chewed up the conversation with his latest antics and amusing conquests, leaving Oda with little space to do more than nod along and steal furtive glances at Ango.
And when it was just Ango and Oda the awkward silence between them felt heavy and oppressive as a too-hot sweater on a humid spring evening. Warm, vaguely irritating and begging to be removed. They made small talk, compared notes to be sure Dazai was simply elsewhere and not lying dead in a rain-swollen canal or sprawled at the base of a particularly-promising bridge, and checked their phones. After a couple of drinks they said their goodbyes, although always with the pregnant atmosphere of anticipation, as if one or the other had something on the tip of his tongue he wished to say but couldn’t.
And as their meetings increased temporally the physical space between them diminished. Oda’s thigh drifted closer to Ango’s on their barstools until, at some point, neither moved away when contact was made.
Ango found himself leaning in, here and there, for the damp and homely smell of Oda’s rumpled jacket. Lingering curry, books and closets. The smell was not at all unpleasant, and more noticeable on rainy evenings when he’d forgotten his umbrella.
Ango never forgot his umbrella. This amused Oda, who realized his conscientious companion must keep a scrupulous eye on the weather forecast, amongst all his other endearing habits. The way he kept his drink dead-center on the coaster, nudging it into position if the bartender set it down so much as a millimeter off. How, like clockwork, he produced a specially-made square of silky cloth from his carefully dry-cleaned brown suit to clean the lenses of his round glasses before replacing them on his nose and adjusting them with the tip of one finger.
Once Ango brought a bag from a stationery store filled with creamy thick pads of paper and fine-tipped pens, explaining to Oda that they were for the orphans who should undoubtedly move past coloring books and learn their penmanship. A terrible gift that displayed an absolute lack of understanding of the reality of five bored and rambunctious children, but one which Oda accepted with gratitude and a small bow.
And finally, one night, with the male calico sleeping on the far end of the bar, Dazai absent and the taciturn bartender sorting bottles in the back room, Oda’s hand touched Ango’s as they both mistakenly reached for the same glass. Ango did not draw his hand away, watching in wonder as the larger, stronger fingers calloused by work explored his slender, pale, ink-stained ones.
Oda took Ango’s hand in both of his, turning it over and examining his smooth palm. He traced the lifeline with a thumb, grunting admiringly.
“What is it,” Ango finally breathed, not realizing he hadn’t exhaled in some time.
“Good.” Oda said simply, leaning in for a closer look at the delicate line creased and crossed from countless hours of holding a pen or a briefcase. “It’s long.”
For what felt like an eternity they sat like two figures in a painting, the type where there are human figures but it’s more like a still-life: perhaps something by Edward Hopper.
Finally Oda released Ango’s hand and Ango stood, bewildered, his thin pale cheeks flushed pink in a way that made his mole stand out.
“I… I should go.” He patted his pocket for his slip of cloth and removed his eyeglasses, wiping them with nervous fingers.
Oda watched, wordlessly, as Ango retrieved his umbrella from where it was leaning against the bar and displayed it, commenting lamely, “It’s raining.”
“It is,” Oda agreed, lifting his drink and taking a thoughtful sip.
“Good evening, then,” Ango bowed, a little too formally, and turned towards the stairs.
The smell of Oda’s jacket and the tiny smile that smudged the auburn-haired man’s normally-impassive face pursued him up and out onto the street.
Ango bent, holding his umbrella carefully to shield him from the rain that had settled into a soaking mist as he walked home. He cursed his still-trembling fingers as he tried again and again in the darkness, squinting in the feeble light of a far-off lamppost to find the keyhole.
Home would be welcome, if lonely. With his cover as a government clerk (or a Port Mafia clerk; sometimes it became difficult to remember which) he rented something that would be commensurate with his salary: a simple but spacious and clean two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a mid-century walkup. He could afford something much nicer, but in truth this suited his nature.
He cursed again as the key slipped. The landlord really ought to install better lighting on this exposed balcony, but other tenants had complained of moths and other nighttime insects and in the end the consensus had been that the city lighting was sufficient. But not in this far corner of the balcony where Ango’s doorway was, and where he’d had to concede that the desires of the many outweighed the needs of the few.
He closed and set his umbrella aside, resigning himself to get damp for however long it took him to find the keyhole, wondering if he should pull out his phone for better light but at just that moment the key sank halfway in.
Suddenly he froze, aware of a presence in the darkness behind him.
This was always a possibility, he knew. One that he was prepared for. His one hand released the key and crept to the doorknob, reading it for memories of infiltration. There were none. His other hand slid down as if to reposition his umbrella, hovering close to the small revolver strapped to his ankle beneath his trouser leg.
As suddenly as fear overcame him it vanished as he perceived that the presence behind him was familiar – one that he didn’t need to turn his head to verify as the man emerged from the deeper shadows and came to stand behind him.
Ango swallowed thickly, eyes dropping shut and trembling fingers again finding the key. He rested his hand there, struggling to bring words to the forefront through his confused whirl of emotions.
Oda’s presence behind him was solid, warm and unmistakable.
Ango finally bowed his head in defeat.
“Nobody can know,” he whispered.
Oda took another step closer.
“It’s okay,” he replied, simply, his voice low and husky in the darkness. “I get the feeling you’re good at keeping secrets. Aren’t you, Ango?”
Ango nodded, his damp dark hair sliding forward across his forehead. He swallowed again, straightened, then pushed the key in fully and turned it.