Chapter Text
"Where is my favourite man," Boutarou teases as he crouches beside the wreck. Without missing a beat, he grips a boot poking out from under the airship and pulls. "Ah, there you are. looks like you're in a bit of a pinch. Need help?"
"No," says Sugimoto, and pushes himself back under.
"You're not getting out of here even if your ship is seaworthy," Boutarou reminds, "especially not with your radio broken."
"I can fix it. I worked as an audio engineer in the army."
"So what?" Boutarou straightens up. His knees are sore; he should do some stretches. "I am the pirate king, and my right-hand man apprenticed as a ship-builder for eight years before becoming a ship-builder himself. And yet I am still here, sixteen years on - or was it fifteen? I'm not sure."
"Seventeen." The clanking halts for a second, before resuming. "I will get out."
This stubborn man. "Then I wish you all the best," Boutarou says, and goes off for a walk.
-
"Was Shiraishi the one who told you about me?" Boutarou asks, resting his jaw against his palm. "I remember him. Met him when he's a kid and taught him some card tricks. He's an orphan, you know that?"
Sugimoto wipes the oil stain on his cheek and picks up the wrench again. "Don't remember."
"Were you surprised when you found me?" Boutarou continues, undeterred. "When you realised I am much younger and more handsome than you thought?"
"Will you," Sugimoto says, finally turning to look at him, "stop bothering me while I work?"
"Nope." Boutarou gestures around them. "There's nothing else to do here."
"Then what were you doing before I arrived?"
He raises a finger. "I sat around." And another. "I contemplated trying to escape. Again." The third. "I dismissed that thought." And the fourth finger. "I thought about giving up, like the rest of my crew."
Sugimoto shifts his weight. "But you didn't."
"But I didn't," Boutarou echoes. "I decided that since I can't be a pirate king anymore, then I'd be the king of this little land. It's somewhat dreary and flowers can't grow, but with a little imagination -"
"This place is a wasteland."
"Yes," Boutarou allows, "and so what? We'll make it lovely."
Sugimoto wrinkles his nose. "We?"
"Oh, don't sound so dismayed - I know guys like you, I can see it in your eyes." Boutarou grins. "You’re not the type of man who will let himself die. So! That means we'll be stuck here together, stubbornly alive. You and me, babe, until the end of time."
"I'll kill you."
"That's no fun." Not that Sugimoto can, anyway. Boutarou would just drown him. "And you'll be stuck here alone, with the knowledge that I'd have brought my secret to my grave. You won't want to disappoint Asirpa - if you ever see her again."
Sugimoto clicks his tongue. He pops open a compartment door, frowns, and closes it. "Where is that radio transmitter you used to contact us?"
Boutarou shrugs. "Somewhere. Why?"
"Hand it over."
"What for? I told you, the only frequency that it can pick up is your ship." Boutarou has tinkered with it long enough in the desperate hopes of hearing some music or, or anything other than his own fucking voice.
Sugimoto holds out a palm. "I’ll figure something out," he insists, "even if you can't receive anything, I can still send out messages."
No one has ever responded to Boutarou’s message, and he tells Sugimoto so. “Except you,” he adds, “but you were trying to find me. Maybe that’s why it worked that time - our dear Gaia is a capricious mistress.”
Sugimoto is silent for a long time. “Boutarou?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you done?” He rubs at his face again. The diesel is smeared across his nose, right along his scar. Boutarou wonders what Sugimoto must have done to have gotten that. “Hand over the radio anyway. Let me try.”
“Go wild with it.” Boutarou reaches into the rucksack and pulls it out. “Maybe you'll perform miracles."
-
Sometimes, and without notice, the moon will climb her first steps into the sky, and hang low as the fog rolls in.
When that happens, time… is lost. More lost than it already is, in this desert of grey, where even the most vibrant shade of brass fades. Boutarou will stare out into the distance where the dark seas meet silver shores, and when he blinks again, the moon is gone and brings along with it another piece of this world.
That's how Boutarou lost his men. That's how Boutarou lost his ship, and his pistol, and that little wooden toy that he chiselled out of sheer boredom. This place is designed to drive him insane.
"This should be your first time," Boutarou observes aloud after the fog rolls in again and then away. He's glad Sugimoto is still here. Sugimoto, meanwhile, seems to be out of his mind with frenzy as he digs through the debris.
"Help me find it," Sugimoto commands, flipping over a metal plate.
"Find what?"
"A, a piece of cloth. Dark blue, with white patterns on it." Sugimoto paces. "Asirpa gave it to me shortly before I made her board the escape shuttle. For protection."
Oh. Boutarou softens. "There's no point," he advises, "the fog steals precious things. You won't be able to find it."
"And you didn't think to warn me?" Sugimoto snaps. "I could, I could -"
"Even if you hide it in your underwear, it'll still be able to take it," Boutarou tells him. "Everything that you're attached to, it'll take. I have to treat every item as scenery - this?" He kicks the rucksack. "Isn't mine. It belongs to this place. I mess with it, I use it, but at the end of the day, it's just… a distraction. I don't let myself rely on it."
Sugimoto kicks his ship vehemently. It wobbles, but does not fall apart. "How the fuck do you stay sane?"
"Positive thoughts!" Boutarou swings his arm across Sugimoto's shoulders. "A good attitude will get you through everything."
It is curious, but when Sugimoto stares back at him, there is something unnerving about his expression that makes Boutarou feel strangely afoot. My strong, brash companion, Boutarou thinks, and drops his hand. "Think of this as a very long, very weird dream," he continues, "it'll be easier." Then, feeling brazen, he flicks at the plate on Sugimoto's temple. "Who did this to you?"
Sugimoto shoves him away so quickly that it gives Boutarou pause. "None of your business," he hisses, and for a second, Boutarou thinks of a wounded street dog cradling its hurt.
Whoever made that wound must have hit him hard. Boutarou raises both hands. "Alright, alright. Keep your secrets." He backs away, nice and easy. "Just making conversation. I already talk so much, maybe it's your turn."
"I have nothing to say."
"Nothing? Pfft. Everyone has something to say, but some people are more boring than others." He finds a crate and, testing that it's still solid enough to support his weight, sits on it. "You don't look like a boring man."
Sugimoto turns away. He begins stacking up the metal sheets and the jumble of parts. "I'll lie."
"I don't mind. Make up stories, even." There is nothing else to do. "Show me the endless potential of the human mind."
"I," Sugimoto begins. He eyes Boutarou, and then resumes his work. Doesn't answer.
Well, Boutarou will squeeze it out of him someday. They have time - or perhaps time doesn't exist here. The moon never rises, except when the fog comes, so Boutarou never knows day from night or if there is the next day at all, except the vague sense that another day has passed.
They don't eat too - although Boutarou suspects that might be a blessing in disguise. If he has to chomp down food as grey as this place, he suspects it'll make the experience immensely more miserable.
"Do you want to know what I remember from the war?" Boutarou asks. He lies down on the ground, his ear to the sand. If he listens very closely, he thinks he can hear the thrumming of engines.
"Oh." Boutarou hears the pity in Sugimoto's voice. "Was your city bombed?"
"Invaded," he answers. "Tanks and marching soldiers. Men in gas masks, even though no one uses gas in battles anymore, although I'm sure it's only a matter of time. But that's later - that's something fit to be aired, too orderly to be lived."
"Then," Sugimoto says, "what do you remember?"
A woman's face across his, her rotten purple tongue spilling out of her mouth, the putrid scent of death. Worms, burrowing. "Asphalt. Cool against my face. Crumbling plaster." The smell, sweet, like something synthetic is burning. "Silence."
"Like now?"
"Somewhat." Silence, undeliberate. A finality rather than a pause on the field, waiting for the moment to be over and noise can file in again. "What about you?"
Sugimoto looks up at him. His eyes are golden, the only thing vibrant in this world. "How much I want to survive," he says.
-
When his ship first crashed ashore he spat out the sand in his mouth and coughed out the salt in his lungs and he learnt and he laughed and he bitterly thought, heaven is a wasteland.
Boutarou knows instantly that he'll never leave this place.
There is the black glint of the sea, more melted metal than stormy waters, beckoning him from the corner of his eyes. He'll try to reach it - many of his men did try, clambering up the dunes day-after-day until the cold and misery beat them back - but he knows that those waves are a mirage.
They have reached the end of the line. He can try, he can struggle, but he'll never get out - full-stop.
(Yet he tries anyway, until the last of his men left with the fog.)
-
He is a misfit, but he is also too well-adjusted to serve, too good in his trade to murder in someone else's name. So Boutarou slings his body over the cockpit and asks, "Tell me about fighting in the war. It has gone on for what, twenty years?"
"It won't interest you," Sugimoto says. He's fiddling with the radio now, taking it apart and refitting it with pieces of the navigator. "Especially since I was in the army."
"Try me."
"Well," Sugimoto allows, "I wait for orders, I charge, I shoot at anything in my way, and then a bullet or a few at the right spot takes me out, and I either get dragged back or I crawl to somewhere safe - as safe as it can be."
"Weren't you an audio engineer?" Boutarou presses. "Why were you on the frontlines?"
"Oh, that's later," Sugimoto replies, "after I was shot in the lungs. They say it's a miracle I survived."
Heck. "Then what about that?"
Sugimoto’s hands still. Crackling from the radio, before it resumes its vow of silence. "Well, I got shot in the head later." He hesitates. "Much, much later. And I survived that too. So if that was a miracle, then I must be running out of them."
He twists the knob, and then reaches for the screwdriver. If Boutarou doesn't know better, he'll think that Sugimoto is simply trying to keep busy by pretending to work on the radio. "Tell me something else," Boutarou commands. "Tell me something more recent."
"Recent?" Sugimoto blinks. "I used to have a cat. It's black all over, which means something good in my hometown, although out here it's apparently inauspicious. But I don't mind. It's just a cat. Its fur doesn't matter."
"Then what happened?" he questions. "Crazy cat killers got to it? You gave it away to a sad old grandpa?"
"Oh, no." Sugimoto chuckles. "It's too independent - I won't worry about it. It comes and goes as it pleases, but it's always back on the ship before we take off. Until one day it… never came back. And it had the cheek to steal the, the key that we needed for an extremely important job. Rascal."
"You sound fond of him."
"Maybe," Sugimoto admits. Then, "If I see it again, I'll skin it and make it into a fur scarf."
Boutarou snickers. "And roast its flesh over a fire?"
"Thinking of soup actually," Sugimoto replies, glancing back over his shoulder, "how does hotpot sound?"
"Ooh! Are you inviting me?"
He considers this. "I think Asirpa would like to have another person taste her cooking."
"Then you owe me dinner," Boutarou declares gleefully. "A hearty bowl of soup. Cat meat -" sounds like an innuendo, but Boutarou can vibe with that too, "- or otherwise. Here's to getting out."
"To leaving," Sugimoto agrees, "and to your soup, Mr. Pirate."
-
In a dream, he chases after the airship as it takes off, higher and higher until it reaches the clouds.
Sugimoto stares back at him from the cockpit, but Boutarou throws his head back and laughs in the dream. Laughs so hard that his guts hurt and tears are leaking from his eyes.
He's happy. He's proud of Sugimoto, for achieving the impossible when everyone else failed. A walking miracle, and he's awed.
It's been a long time since Boutarou feels anything like triumph.
-
"Oh look, my miracle man," Boutarou calls, "it's raining."
Sugimoto frowns. "Does it not rain around here?"
"Nope," Boutarou returns cheerfully, "this is the first time. Guess we might have a shot after all."
They huddle together under the wrecked body of the airship, grimacing at the way wet sand sticks to their clothes. Boutarou kicks off his boots - he prefers being barefooted anyway - and urges Sugimoto to do the same, "lest the rainwater collects and makes your feet rot."
"You fought up north, right?" Boutarou continues, wiping his feet dry with an old rag. He'll teach Sugimoto how to sterilise it with just sand and heat from the engine, later. "Which do you think is worse - cold battles or wet battles?"
Sugimoto wrinkles his nose as he pulls off his socks. They slap back wetly against his hands. Gross. "They don't have to be mutually exclusive."
"Fair, but say you can choose to eliminate one factor." Boutarou taps his fingers against his knee. "Which one?"
"I," Sugimoto temporises, "am used to battles on snowy grounds."
"So you prefer something new, or?"
"I prefer to win."
Huh. Very much in line with Boutarou's line of reasoning. "You'd prefer the homeground advantage," he declares. "Me too, although that'll lead me to picking sea battles." Yet here they are, wet but not watery enough, cold but not freezing. "If we fight now, who do you think will win?"
Sugimoto's eyes flick up. "I am not looking for a fight."
“And I am not trying to start one. It is all hypothetical.” He pushes down the cap on Sugimoto’s head, laughing at the scowl it warrants and the reciprocal swipe at him. “Although if we are to fight, there is only one rule - no hair-pulling.”
“N -” Sugimoto snorts. “If you don’t want anyone to pull on your hair, then don’t let it grow that long.”
“Hey, it’s not like your hair is that short either.” Boutarou ruffles his hair, not letting up even as Sugimoto tries to duck away. "Look at you." Cards his fingers down to the roots and pulls. "You need a trim."