le déjeuner [Hazuki]

The shock was mild, but Nagisa still let it show—she certainly hadn’t been expecting a compliment from the younger girl, not given their history. It was delivered in an uncharacteristically earnest way, too: an genuine congratulation, a little stiff, perhaps, but genuine all the same. She was quick to recover, but Nagisa had been caught off-guard.

‘It does,’ she replied slowly, clearly not entirely willing to drop the subject of pointless revenge, but Hazuki’s vehemence had no doubt convinced the captain of the Second that there was little to be gained by trying to talk sense into her colleague.

‘It feels a little like inheriting the family business,’ she continued, almost a little sheepishly, and for a moment it seemed as though they were just two normal girls talking about whatever it was normal girls talked about. Hazuki immediately recognized whatever it was Nagisa had felt—she had often been regaled by tales of her parents’ time together in the Second—sterilized to a certain degree because of her age, she knew—and it was impossible to deny she felt a certain kinship to the Second herself. Her mother, father, aunt and mentor had all served in the Onmitsukidō at some point, and it had rubbed off on Hazuki a great deal despite never having been a member herself. It was no lie that she saw a lot of those traits in Nagisa, and it was almost enough to make Hazuki forget about the unfortunate reality of Nagisa’s circumstances. Almost.

In fact, it gnawed at the younger girl as she stood there face to face with arguably the most famous contemporary half-breed and one who had, ironically, struck the largest blow against her own kind. The way she had heard it told, Nagisa’s list had been presented in a moment of desperation, when her own fate had been hanging ponderously in the balance. She had caved, bought her continued freedom with the names of others just like her, selling them out—she had made the right choice. Somehow, it didn’t add up. It was almost as though Nagisa regretted what she had become, or at least had the sense to realize that she could use it to her advantage.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ said Hazuki in a way that must have seemed apropos of nothing, ‘where did that list come from? There are names on there that you can’t possibly have known about.’

Nagisa’s gaze shifted uncomfortably, something that looked a lot like guilt in her eyes. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ she murmured. It was a different kind of evasiveness than Hazuki was used to out of the half-breed: normally, Nagisa would have smirked, perhaps come up with some sort of enigmatic quip—she had done the very same just moments ago when Hazuki had asked what she had spoken with Tsukimiya about. This, however, was different.

‘Try me,’ she pressed, leaning forward ever so slightly.

She didn’t fidget, but there was something in the way she was acting that suggested she might have done, maybe even wanted to, had she not been a trained killer. ‘Things weren’t looking so good, there were a lot of accusations being thrown around and most of them were directed at me,’ she said quietly, as if ashamed. ‘I was grasping for something, anything, rifling through my papers like I was going to find something in there to save me, and then... I did.’

‘You just found it?’

‘Yes,’ she insisted, meeting Hazuki’s eyes again. ‘I just found it. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at—just a list of influential Shinigami, I thought. Then I saw the pattern. I was on it, my sister was on it. Jasper was on it. It was a list of curious absences, of people who had done great or terrible things. And I finally realized that I was looking at a list of my kind. A list that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. A list that should not have existed and hadn’t just moments before.’

Anyone else might have scoffed, written Nagisa off as a poor liar trying to cover for her source, but Hazuki had experienced the exact same thing herself. It was more or less what had precipitated her joining the Fourth in the first place. The document she had come across had been a detailed description of what the captains had discussed behind closed doors: Kiriko Chinda’s naive, nepotistic decriminalization of taboo.

‘I gave it to Fujikagi. What else was I supposed to do? Minamoto was practically howling for my blood and I didn’t have any allies in that room that counted for much. Then you showed up, like clockwork, confirming one of the names on the list without any shadow of a doubt. It was almost as if it was planned.’

If Nagisa was withholding something, Hazuki certainly didn’t notice. Her head was spinning with the implication that there was someone, somewhere, working against the half-breeds in a way she didn’t think possible. Subtly poking and prodding in order to make his pieces move across the board.

Or was it just dumb luck? List and transcript aside, nobody had influenced Hazuki to go looking for Aizawa. Nobody could have. She would have done that anyway, but nobody could possibly have known that. Nobody could have known he was on the brink already, that he would fall, that it would all coincide so perfectly.

And yet Hazuki didn’t believe in coincidence, she had said as much minutes earlier.

‘Are there more?’ she asked, trying to shake the feeling she was missing something.

‘Yes,’ breathed Nagisa, something tired in her voice. ‘Kiriko put me in the spotlight, and it attracted a lot of attention. People were very quick to open up to me. The list was kept secret, they never knew what I had done—or would do.’

It was almost funny, how Kiriko had inadvertently turned Nagisa into a trap for the very thing she had sought to normalize. It would have been, had it not been so deeply ironic.

‘Why are they not on the list?’

‘What defines a Vaizard?’ countered Nagisa, lips pressed together in a thin line. ‘If it’s just a propensity for erratic violence, then you’re just as much a Vaizard as I am. Where do you draw the line between just a nasty voice in your head and a fully-fledged hybrid? Whatever the distinction, that’s what I’d guess the list took into account. Most of the others, they’re people who are showing symptoms, attributing their flaws to an inner Hollow, as if they know what it’s like.’ Her expression was grim, something very much like distaste on her unmistakably Chinda-like features.

‘They come to me,’ she started with a bitter laugh, ‘asking for my help.’

Hazuki took a step closer to Nagisa, only the high counter between them keeping her from closing the distance entirely. She was transfixed on the other captain, an intense hunger in her flat grey eyes.

There was no need to mention how Nagisa would benefit, no need to tell her how Hazuki would make sure she was protected for as long as she remained useful. All of that, they both understood already. It came with the territory.

‘Give them to me.’


°1,217

THREAD END