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almondinflowerDice, in a Game of War - ch. 2
Characters: Main characters are Touya and Waya, but likely to feature the usual cast of millions that haunt my fantasy AUs.
Wordcount: 2000
Summary: Basically it is a story about Waya who works as a private investigator in a fantasy city where chaos and order are the predominant forces of magic, and Touya Akira comes to Waya to ask him to search for Sai! s-sob this fic is impossible to write summaries for.
Chapter 1 here.
Before heaven and earth take shape,
how do you delve into what’s there?
Fujisaki was as beautiful as I remembered. Dressed in a floaty, cotton, floral print dress and beribboned straw hat, her hair curled into ringlets on either side of her face, she looked like she’d stepped straight out of some oil painting of a pastoral scene. Only her lips were drawn together in a guarded line, and her smile, when I could coax it out of her, was half-hearted. We were having lemonade and ices in the tearoom at the hotel where we’d agreed to meet (I wasn’t too comfortable paying her a direct visit, and the street outside my office was no place for a lady.)
She stirred at her drink with her straw, and I took advantage of the lapse in eye contact to think of another question to ask.
“So you haven’t tried to contact Shindou since – well, two years ago?”
“I didn’t even know where to start trying. He just disappeared. You should know, you were there when it happened.”
“He was officially exiled by the Oligarchs, so I was one of the people chosen to see him off.” I still remembered standing with Shindou, that evening at the city gates, helpless for words to say. Touya Akira had been there -- Kurata Atsushi too… the Meijin… the Honinbou… the Gosei. And the flickering, spooky outline of a ghost in sunset, silent as death, motionless until Shindou turned his back on us and started walking down the highway. Then it’d begun to follow him, and I caught one of those rare ephemeral glimpses of Sai in perfect focus: brilliant eyes, a sloping, graceful profile. “But I thought he might have told you where he was going, or whether he’d write to you. Something like that.”
The shape of her mouth hardened. Her position on the matter of Sai had always been clear – or at least, her position on Shindou was clear, and that extended to Sai. “It’s not like they gave him any time to make a plan.”
“I don’t blame you,” she added a moment later, “You’ve always been Hikaru’s friend.”
Uncomfortable, I used my dessert spoon to gouge a hole in the raspberry sorbet sitting in front of me. I wasn’t sure whether I was a friend to Shindou. Or whether I’d ever been. Shindou didn’t tend to give people much chance to make up their mind about him either way. Everything about him had always been unfinished, uncertain, half in this world and half in another.
Shindou Hikaru. Spirit seer, ghost whisperer; the boy who walked among the living and the dead. No, I’d never really known him.
“Can you put me in touch with his family, at least?” I tried. “They might have some idea. Honestly, even knowing which country he’s in would help at this point.”
She thought about it. Within its decorative glass bowl, her fruit-and-muscadine ice was beginning to turn into a puddle.
“I’ll introduce you to his mother and grandmother. If you insist,” she said finally. “But please don’t bother them more than you have to. The last two years have been very difficult for them; they never really understood what happened.”
“That’s not surprising. Most days I don’t feel like I understand it too well either.”
“Hikaru didn’t do anything wrong!”
He kind of did, I wanted to say, but I could see that it was useless. I’d have to make sure she never found out that Touya Akira was the one hiring me for this case. “It’d be great if I could talk to his grandfather at least. That’s who Shindou got his abilities as a spirit medium from, right?”
She nodded. “It runs in the family. I think I can arrange for you to meet him tomorrow afternoon, if you have the time?”
“Sure.”
She started eating her dessert, finally, scooping up pieces of peach and nectarine in melted orange liquid and chewing on them delicately. “Waya, do you really think you can find Hikaru?”
Her left hand was resting on the table. I glanced at the discreet wedding band on its fourth finger, and then at her face, all hopeful-painful and lovely and feminine. “I can do it if anyone can,” I said, and inwardly wondered, but what good will it do you?
`#
Upon arrival I discovered that my office had been broken into for the second time that day. The lock was unforced, the door slightly ajar. Whoever my visitor was this time (and he had to have been a rather good burglar, since this time I'd actually locked the place properly before leaving) had thought to announce his arrival.
I went inside and found the room completely silent and dark.
Instantly I reached for the light switch, and the bulbs were just flicking on when a minor whirlwind barrelled into me and pinned me to the floor before I had time to react. The linoleum jarred painfully against my hipbones, and I winced.
Brightness flooded my vision, but the weight atop me didn't seem to be moving. I blinked and saw my own face smiling smugly down at me,
“I grew taller,” Le Ping announced.
I sighed and began shoving him off me. Fortunately he seemed happy to cooperate, now that he'd successfully startled me.
“You could have knocked,” I grumbled, clambering to my feet. He followed suit. Once I'd composed myself we went through the traditional ritual of checking each other out – height, weight, new scars, changes in complexion, anything that would make us look more or less like each other. “How old are you now, fifteen? How did you get so tall so soon?”
“I'm the exact same height as you.” Le Ping grinned. “We can switch identities for real now.” He had been nursing fantasies of pulling a switcheroo since the first time we met.
“Not unless you learn how to speak Ki dialect without a horrible accent, and not until your voice stops breaking.” I smirked at him. “But I'm glad to see you grew up so good-looking. Who taught you how to pick locks?”
“It was Yang Hai.” His eyes looked one way and then the next, as his attention darted from one corner of the office to another. He'd always been unremittingly restless. Every time I met him I thanked the forces of Chaos and Order that he was Isumi's problem and not mine. “Your place is so boring. Aren't you going to buy some new decorations soon?”
“If I had that kind of money to burn, I'd rent a fancier office.” I sat down in my armchair. “Anyway, what sort of case do you have for me?”
He took the seat opposite me and leaned forward, arms folded on the desk, face all wide and earnest and damn it, with my eyes – the kind of eyes I used to turn on Isumi or Morishita when I wanted them to do something – usually buy me food, actually.
“Isumi misses you,” he said simply.
At once I felt something hard and prickly and dried out inside me, rapidly turning into soft gooey warmth.
I attempted to say something, failed, tried and failed again, then finally managed to come up with, “I miss him too.”
Le Ping threw me a complacent grin. “So move to Wuzi.”
“Don't be an idiot; that's impossible.”
“Why not? You work for yourself, right?
“Being self-employed doesn't mean you can do whatever you like. I'd have to rebuild my client base and information network from scratch, you know.”
“You could do it. You have Isumi and Yang Hai over there. And me. I have influence.” He said it so seriously and sincerely that I wanted to laugh, before my gaze fell on the golden torque that hugged his neck. Yes, Le Ping had influence. A great deal more than I did.
“It'd still be a lot of work. Ki's my home. I love it here.”
Le Ping gave me his best stop bullshitting me already look. I frowned. So what if I had excuses? Didn't mean that I wanted to admit that I had excuses, in front of this kid. I changed the subject. “But enough about me. You're here because of the telegram, right?”
The shift in his mood was startling; I hadn't thought the brat capable of looking serious. “Lu Li's been accused of manslaughter.”
He paused, giving me time to digest the information. “Wait wait wait. You mean, like Imperial Diviner Lu Li? Who was killed?”
“Wang Shi Zhen. His body was found in one of the interior palaces, open only to palace staff and diviners.” He did not look at me as he spoke. “Yang Hai says that if I hadn't been out on a mission at the time, I'd be a suspect as well.”
An Imperial Diviner, accused of the death of another Imperial Diviner. This was big news. International news. “It sounds like an internal affair of the Yih Empire, to be honest. What does Isumi want me to do?”
“Isumi insists that you have to get involved. The evidence is feeble, and nobody has any idea how to proceed. The entire palace is in an uproar. This case could end up being as big as Sai.”
Sai. The two syllables that would haunt me my whole life.
“And that's not all, too. Some of our divinations have been failing recently.”
The pattern recognition areas in my brain were starting to flash. “You too? Since when?”
“Sometimes we can't get a reading from the boards. Other times, the readings are wrong – wait.” Le Ping has a pretty good detective's mind as well; sometimes, I felt like his talents were wasted on divination. “It's happened in Ki, too?”
“I met Touya Akira today. He told me that some of his divinations haven't been working lately.” Granted, Touya's divination attempts had been related to the search for Sai, and if Sai was involved then failure of auguries was a distinct possibility. On the other hand, my knowledge of chaos and order studies was pretty encyclopaedic, and until the Sai case had surfaced, there had only been a few records of board-divination failing in all of world history.
“Then Yang Hai was right. This is big. Waya,” he looked up at me, intent, and it was exactly the way I used to look, back when I had been with Morishita and I'd believed in goodness and the world and the authority of the State, “It's not just Isumi. I really want you to help us, too.”
“You're not giving me much of a choice, are you? All right then, I'll need you to give me a more detailed story. But first, let's get something to eat. You'll be rooming with me while you're in Ki, right?” I nodded at the small brown trunk that he'd left leaning against the bookcase. “I hope you don't mind the couch, because that's all you're getting.”
“No way!” He pulled a face. “Beauty before age.”
“Pearls before swine, you little twerp. You like sushi, right?” I sailed out the door and then stopped for a moment, considering the need to install a new lock. It wasn't as if I kept anything of sentimental (or even material) value inside my office, but at this rate my reputation as a detective was going to be ruined.
“I want bacon and eggs,” Le Ping insisted, as I headed down the front steps.
“That's a breakfast food, shrimp,” – I said, grinning upwards at him; he was standing on the step above me. “Wait until morning; I'll take you to this diner just outside my flat. It's cheap and greasy and amazing.”
But in the morning we had no time for anything like breakfast.
On to Chapter 3
Characters: Main characters are Touya and Waya, but likely to feature the usual cast of millions that haunt my fantasy AUs.
Wordcount: 2000
Summary: Basically it is a story about Waya who works as a private investigator in a fantasy city where chaos and order are the predominant forces of magic, and Touya Akira comes to Waya to ask him to search for Sai! s-sob this fic is impossible to write summaries for.
Chapter 1 here.
Before heaven and earth take shape,
how do you delve into what’s there?
Fujisaki was as beautiful as I remembered. Dressed in a floaty, cotton, floral print dress and beribboned straw hat, her hair curled into ringlets on either side of her face, she looked like she’d stepped straight out of some oil painting of a pastoral scene. Only her lips were drawn together in a guarded line, and her smile, when I could coax it out of her, was half-hearted. We were having lemonade and ices in the tearoom at the hotel where we’d agreed to meet (I wasn’t too comfortable paying her a direct visit, and the street outside my office was no place for a lady.)
She stirred at her drink with her straw, and I took advantage of the lapse in eye contact to think of another question to ask.
“So you haven’t tried to contact Shindou since – well, two years ago?”
“I didn’t even know where to start trying. He just disappeared. You should know, you were there when it happened.”
“He was officially exiled by the Oligarchs, so I was one of the people chosen to see him off.” I still remembered standing with Shindou, that evening at the city gates, helpless for words to say. Touya Akira had been there -- Kurata Atsushi too… the Meijin… the Honinbou… the Gosei. And the flickering, spooky outline of a ghost in sunset, silent as death, motionless until Shindou turned his back on us and started walking down the highway. Then it’d begun to follow him, and I caught one of those rare ephemeral glimpses of Sai in perfect focus: brilliant eyes, a sloping, graceful profile. “But I thought he might have told you where he was going, or whether he’d write to you. Something like that.”
The shape of her mouth hardened. Her position on the matter of Sai had always been clear – or at least, her position on Shindou was clear, and that extended to Sai. “It’s not like they gave him any time to make a plan.”
“I don’t blame you,” she added a moment later, “You’ve always been Hikaru’s friend.”
Uncomfortable, I used my dessert spoon to gouge a hole in the raspberry sorbet sitting in front of me. I wasn’t sure whether I was a friend to Shindou. Or whether I’d ever been. Shindou didn’t tend to give people much chance to make up their mind about him either way. Everything about him had always been unfinished, uncertain, half in this world and half in another.
Shindou Hikaru. Spirit seer, ghost whisperer; the boy who walked among the living and the dead. No, I’d never really known him.
“Can you put me in touch with his family, at least?” I tried. “They might have some idea. Honestly, even knowing which country he’s in would help at this point.”
She thought about it. Within its decorative glass bowl, her fruit-and-muscadine ice was beginning to turn into a puddle.
“I’ll introduce you to his mother and grandmother. If you insist,” she said finally. “But please don’t bother them more than you have to. The last two years have been very difficult for them; they never really understood what happened.”
“That’s not surprising. Most days I don’t feel like I understand it too well either.”
“Hikaru didn’t do anything wrong!”
He kind of did, I wanted to say, but I could see that it was useless. I’d have to make sure she never found out that Touya Akira was the one hiring me for this case. “It’d be great if I could talk to his grandfather at least. That’s who Shindou got his abilities as a spirit medium from, right?”
She nodded. “It runs in the family. I think I can arrange for you to meet him tomorrow afternoon, if you have the time?”
“Sure.”
She started eating her dessert, finally, scooping up pieces of peach and nectarine in melted orange liquid and chewing on them delicately. “Waya, do you really think you can find Hikaru?”
Her left hand was resting on the table. I glanced at the discreet wedding band on its fourth finger, and then at her face, all hopeful-painful and lovely and feminine. “I can do it if anyone can,” I said, and inwardly wondered, but what good will it do you?
`
Upon arrival I discovered that my office had been broken into for the second time that day. The lock was unforced, the door slightly ajar. Whoever my visitor was this time (and he had to have been a rather good burglar, since this time I'd actually locked the place properly before leaving) had thought to announce his arrival.
I went inside and found the room completely silent and dark.
Instantly I reached for the light switch, and the bulbs were just flicking on when a minor whirlwind barrelled into me and pinned me to the floor before I had time to react. The linoleum jarred painfully against my hipbones, and I winced.
Brightness flooded my vision, but the weight atop me didn't seem to be moving. I blinked and saw my own face smiling smugly down at me,
“I grew taller,” Le Ping announced.
I sighed and began shoving him off me. Fortunately he seemed happy to cooperate, now that he'd successfully startled me.
“You could have knocked,” I grumbled, clambering to my feet. He followed suit. Once I'd composed myself we went through the traditional ritual of checking each other out – height, weight, new scars, changes in complexion, anything that would make us look more or less like each other. “How old are you now, fifteen? How did you get so tall so soon?”
“I'm the exact same height as you.” Le Ping grinned. “We can switch identities for real now.” He had been nursing fantasies of pulling a switcheroo since the first time we met.
“Not unless you learn how to speak Ki dialect without a horrible accent, and not until your voice stops breaking.” I smirked at him. “But I'm glad to see you grew up so good-looking. Who taught you how to pick locks?”
“It was Yang Hai.” His eyes looked one way and then the next, as his attention darted from one corner of the office to another. He'd always been unremittingly restless. Every time I met him I thanked the forces of Chaos and Order that he was Isumi's problem and not mine. “Your place is so boring. Aren't you going to buy some new decorations soon?”
“If I had that kind of money to burn, I'd rent a fancier office.” I sat down in my armchair. “Anyway, what sort of case do you have for me?”
He took the seat opposite me and leaned forward, arms folded on the desk, face all wide and earnest and damn it, with my eyes – the kind of eyes I used to turn on Isumi or Morishita when I wanted them to do something – usually buy me food, actually.
“Isumi misses you,” he said simply.
At once I felt something hard and prickly and dried out inside me, rapidly turning into soft gooey warmth.
I attempted to say something, failed, tried and failed again, then finally managed to come up with, “I miss him too.”
Le Ping threw me a complacent grin. “So move to Wuzi.”
“Don't be an idiot; that's impossible.”
“Why not? You work for yourself, right?
“Being self-employed doesn't mean you can do whatever you like. I'd have to rebuild my client base and information network from scratch, you know.”
“You could do it. You have Isumi and Yang Hai over there. And me. I have influence.” He said it so seriously and sincerely that I wanted to laugh, before my gaze fell on the golden torque that hugged his neck. Yes, Le Ping had influence. A great deal more than I did.
“It'd still be a lot of work. Ki's my home. I love it here.”
Le Ping gave me his best stop bullshitting me already look. I frowned. So what if I had excuses? Didn't mean that I wanted to admit that I had excuses, in front of this kid. I changed the subject. “But enough about me. You're here because of the telegram, right?”
The shift in his mood was startling; I hadn't thought the brat capable of looking serious. “Lu Li's been accused of manslaughter.”
He paused, giving me time to digest the information. “Wait wait wait. You mean, like Imperial Diviner Lu Li? Who was killed?”
“Wang Shi Zhen. His body was found in one of the interior palaces, open only to palace staff and diviners.” He did not look at me as he spoke. “Yang Hai says that if I hadn't been out on a mission at the time, I'd be a suspect as well.”
An Imperial Diviner, accused of the death of another Imperial Diviner. This was big news. International news. “It sounds like an internal affair of the Yih Empire, to be honest. What does Isumi want me to do?”
“Isumi insists that you have to get involved. The evidence is feeble, and nobody has any idea how to proceed. The entire palace is in an uproar. This case could end up being as big as Sai.”
Sai. The two syllables that would haunt me my whole life.
“And that's not all, too. Some of our divinations have been failing recently.”
The pattern recognition areas in my brain were starting to flash. “You too? Since when?”
“Sometimes we can't get a reading from the boards. Other times, the readings are wrong – wait.” Le Ping has a pretty good detective's mind as well; sometimes, I felt like his talents were wasted on divination. “It's happened in Ki, too?”
“I met Touya Akira today. He told me that some of his divinations haven't been working lately.” Granted, Touya's divination attempts had been related to the search for Sai, and if Sai was involved then failure of auguries was a distinct possibility. On the other hand, my knowledge of chaos and order studies was pretty encyclopaedic, and until the Sai case had surfaced, there had only been a few records of board-divination failing in all of world history.
“Then Yang Hai was right. This is big. Waya,” he looked up at me, intent, and it was exactly the way I used to look, back when I had been with Morishita and I'd believed in goodness and the world and the authority of the State, “It's not just Isumi. I really want you to help us, too.”
“You're not giving me much of a choice, are you? All right then, I'll need you to give me a more detailed story. But first, let's get something to eat. You'll be rooming with me while you're in Ki, right?” I nodded at the small brown trunk that he'd left leaning against the bookcase. “I hope you don't mind the couch, because that's all you're getting.”
“No way!” He pulled a face. “Beauty before age.”
“Pearls before swine, you little twerp. You like sushi, right?” I sailed out the door and then stopped for a moment, considering the need to install a new lock. It wasn't as if I kept anything of sentimental (or even material) value inside my office, but at this rate my reputation as a detective was going to be ruined.
“I want bacon and eggs,” Le Ping insisted, as I headed down the front steps.
“That's a breakfast food, shrimp,” – I said, grinning upwards at him; he was standing on the step above me. “Wait until morning; I'll take you to this diner just outside my flat. It's cheap and greasy and amazing.”
But in the morning we had no time for anything like breakfast.
On to Chapter 3
