Not So Far Gone I Can't Land a Blow
"Ah..."
It wasn't what he had expected. For a moment he didn't think it was Dan Miryu at all.
Wasn't he supposed to be talking me down for dear life?
He had braced to be nailed in place and made to listen to a hymn in praise of living. For all the weight on his shoulders and the height of his station, the man was light, and kind to the point of foolishness.
"Why? Is something the matter?"
Perhaps the silence had gone on too long. Dan Miryu asked it evenly.
"No. No, it's nothing. You just... you don't sound like you."
The reason he had buried lifted its head. Self-interest, crawled up out of the mire of self-hatred, pricked its ears toward the phone.
"You were in so much pain that I did a great deal of thinking myself. Whether leaving you like this was truly what was best for you. Whether holding you here by force, day after day, wasn't a meaningless thing to do."
"I... I see. You worried a lot, then."
"How could I not? We're blood, after all."
"Blood..."
Blood. A bond joined by it.
To Dan Miryong, gotten by desire and not by love, the word had never applied. The only blood he had ever acknowledged was his own.
And yet this man was calling him blood. Him—a manufactured thing, made by science.
"You are the only blood my brother left in this world. There is no world in which you aren't precious to me. The sins you've committed will take a lifetime to atone for, but I don't want to stand in the way of even the choice of how you live."
"The choice of how I live..."
"If you truly want it, I'll use everything I have and give you a gentle rest."
"Ah..."
Dan Miryong knew, bone-deep, that the moment of choosing had come.
If—if I really choose, here...
Dan Miryu would do exactly as he had said. He would lay him in a comfortable bed to stare at a white ceiling, and he would sit at the head of it with sorrow in his eyes while a doctor, face cold, lifted his arm and set a syringe to the skin. Sleep would come on in a rush. His eyes would slide shut. And then, just like that...
"No...!!!"
No. However he turned it, that was not it. It was horrifying—so horrifying that his mind melted with fear. The world spun. Blood gushed from his nose, and his throat heaved, trying to give back what he had eaten the day before.
"Hhk—kh. Hhk...!"
Tears poured out of him.
The imagining alone was enough to terrify him. Himself, dying as if he had never been worth anything. Himself, erased from the world with no one left to remember he had been there. He was afraid of never seeing tomorrow's sun, and afraid of never again drawing the fresh air of night. Afraid of staring blankly at a television while meaningless hours slipped past, and of never again hearing the sound of people talking to one another. It was terrifying beyond measure.
The track of a life he had taken for granted, simply because it was his, ending as cheaply as that. It was unfair. It hurt. It felt like a sentence being handed down: this is your fate, insect. He was angry. He was wretched.
"Hhhk—hhk. Hhk."
He tried to deny it by force. But a child's reason could not hold down the true heart that had settled in him, layer on layer. His face twisted the way a brat's does when it bawls, and his collar was a ruin of tears, snot, and nosebleed. His mouth tasted of salt. His ears were stuffed shut.
Dan Miryong warred with his own feelings. At times he cried until he was spent and his eyes fell half-shut. At times he sobbed, then strained to pretend he was all right, over and over. The thick wall of severance he had built and the true heart he had never tended crashed together without order, and the nature that had been packed full of rage and hate melted, helplessly.
How long it went on, he couldn't have said. Only when the moon hung in the sky did Dan Miryong's fight come to an end.
"Haa. Haa."
He was a misery no one could have borne to look at. When he spoke, the tears had not yet left his voice.
"Dan Miryu..."
"I'm listening."
"Am I... allowed to live?"
"If that's what you want."
A silence pressed in. The minute hand of the clock shifted twice.
"Then... me. Just—"
Save me.
"I can't let it end like this."
There are too many things I want to do. I don't want to die.
"I want... to be free."
"I'll do it."
"Those wretched shackles that have been binding you—"
"I'll cut them."
"Th-th-th—"
Haah. Damn it.
Dan Miryong dragged out a word he was not used to saying.
"...Thank you."
"Wait for me."
"I'll be there soon."
Alexei opened the humidor in the garden.
It was full of the cigars he had favored in his mercenary days.
"Been a while since I opened this."
He hadn't smoked once since coming to Korea. The reason was nothing much. He simply hadn't had the leisure to want to. No—better to say there had been no reason. His daughter had filled his head so completely that his wife never found a gap to slip through.
He flicked a finger.
The cap of the cigar sheared away clean. He broke the fallen scrap down to dust and scuffed dirt over it with the sole of his foot, covering it roughly. Then he ground sword-light against itself at a furious speed and brought the foot—the end meant to take the flame—to the savage sparks leaping in the empty air.
He held the blade-light and waited a full ten minutes. A sharp, biting aroma lanced up his nose.
He drew a long, slow pull.
Easily two or three times the smoke of a cigarette rolled up in thick curls. Alexei's lungs groaned under the nicotine crashing in like a wave, and he coughed, rubbing at his throat.
"I've changed, too."
In the old days he would have dragged it down whether it scorched his throat or not.
"A man who lives in Mother Russia, and you're going to be petty about it and smoke cigarettes? A mercenary, no less? Here. Try a cigar. The taste will ruin you for anything else."
A beauty of the West came toward him—blonde, blue-eyed, full through the hips and the chest, the very picture of the type. Solid muscle showed past the edges of her clothes. The outfit was provocative enough to stir a man's groin, and the fierceness in her eyes went unhidden.
She took the cigar she had been smoking and shoved it into his mouth.
"Hoo..."
"Oh, not bad for a first try. See? I told you I know how to pick a person."
Her breath tickled his ear. She must have been drinking hard; the smell of liquor was thick on her.
"If you're interested, how about a drink with me? Just so you know, you're paying. I introduced you to cigars, so that's fair, isn't it?"
He had met a great many women, and he could not think of one who had come on as headlong as she did. That was why he had loved her. She liked liquor and tobacco, she was more big-hearted than any half-baked mercenary, and in bed she was, unexpectedly, the fragile one. A woman who had loved a man like me...
"Hoo..."
The longer he smoked, the more familiar it became. And once it was familiar, she rose again.
"Anastasia, at least. Anastasia—you stake your life and keep her safe. You can do that, can't you?"
"I'm sorry. I couldn't."
Not the treasure you left me. Not you.
The cigar in his hand dropped all at once, as if someone had slapped his open palm.
"Honestly. I tell you to smoke a cigar and you smoke garbage. Throw that out and go to the shop I recommend. They'll make them to order there."
She fussed at him, nagging the way she always had.
"That sort of thing is for men who've already finished living. Don't wreck your palate. Use a proper one. And when you smoke, don't pour your feelings into it. It makes you look like you've got nothing."
"Not like you're a cigar sommelier."
She could have just been good at cooking...
It had been nice, remembering her after so long. And somehow all he had gotten was a thorough scolding.
"Shouldn't have lit it."
...You're supposed to smoke once it's all over.
Alexei closed the humidor. He ground the cigar out under his foot where it lay on the ground, and he did not forget to sweep a sword-flash through it and turn it to powder.
"Have you finished?"
"Dan Miryu?"
He turned his head, and Dan Miryu was there. Fatigue had darkened the skin around his eyes.
"What were you doing, just watching? You could have come in."
"Nothing, really. You seemed unlike yourself. I was curious, so I watched."
"Tch."
Alexei clicked his tongue.
"Did you used to smoke cigars?"
"I did. My wife liked them, so we smoked together."
A different light touched Dan Miryu's eyes.
"Your wife liked cigars?"
"She did. Enough to keep every kind on hand. Any day a little extra money came in, she poured all of it into cigars. Set next to gambling, it was a much healthier hobby."
"Then you must know them well."
"I don't know the first thing. I only smoked what my wife handed me."
Alexei tossed him the humidor.
"Throw it out however you like. You got free labor out of me, so you can do at least that much."
"Understood. And thank you. Because of you, Miryong made his choice."
"...I don't care."
Alexei opened the gate and went straight into the house next door, the Phantom Thief's House.
He opened the door of his room upstairs and found wooden carvings packed tight across the floor.
"I made a lot of them."
He went down to the kitchen, brought back trash bags, and shoved the carvings in as he grabbed them.
He flinched.
He said nothing.
The three carvings in the center went into the bag with the rest.
"That's all of them."
There were so many that the bags came to three.
Alexei carried them outside and flung them any which way into the trash collection area.
"Why did I even make things like that?"
It had been a meaningless thing to do.
"Dad. Did you make this? Wow, a pretty little bear..."
"It's a deer."
"Oh..."
"So it was still there."
Right. He had no time to sit around feeling sorry for himself.
Rain roared down. Beyond the wall a green light flared, bright enough to push back the dark sky the storm was falling through.
"Maybe I'm no different from that child."
He had said he would. That was all he had ever done—say it. When it came to it, he had done nothing.
"Shameful."
Alexei swung the edge of his hand up at the sky.
The clouds parted, a little.
"Hm..."
Not enough.
But.
"Not so far gone I can't land one blow."
Well. It had to be easier than a cigar.
Alexei smiled, faintly.