No matter how late Yoshiās stayed out, it hasnāt got cold here. Itās been a while since heās been anywhere so damn humid. He'd gotten soft. Time was, heād duck through hot and cold like gunfire. He thinks about the States while pasting mosquitos ā fancy armoured cars, air con, toy weapons you'd never be able to smash a window or break a jaw with. Mostly the air con. The weight of heat here doesnāt help the pounding in his head, but if he can't deal with pain, what good is he? He grinds his teeth together and presses his eyes shut until he can force the throb of it to the back of his mind, along with everything else that belongs to the previous evening. Rage and disappointment. Everything since the call to Reykjavik feels like breaking the surface after nearly drowning. Inaction hurts, when he can't drink it into numbness. Dead ends hurt even worse.
There was a bottle earlier. He canāt quite remember what happened to it. Did he sleep out on the porch? Itās hard to tell. He might have been dozing. Or the confused mash of images in his head might have been thoughts, not dreams, after all.
Someone stirs inside, but Yoshi doesnāt look round. He knows Utseo's footsteps, guyās got nothing if not a distinctive tread. He tracks the sound as the shogun approaches, the leaden breeze picking up the corners of Utseoās loose robe and flicking them past the metal of his legs, rich red muted in the pre-dawn light. Yoshiās at the edge of the veranda and Utseo paces quietly over to join him, lowering himself to sit on the deck and dropping a pair of glasses between them with a crystal clink.
Yoshi jerks his head in greeting, feeling a dull satisfaction in ignoring his thudding hangover. He eyes the drink. Just enough dignity not to reach straight for it and rinse off the cobwebs. He doesnāt speak. After sixteen years, both men are low on small talk. Hell, after a day.
Utseoās in no hurry to break the silence, slipping a small silver case from a pocket inside his robe and flicking it open to offer a cut cigar to Yoshi before taking one for himself. He lights his comradeās, then his own, and deposits the case next to the glasses without looking. He retrieves his drink and leans forward, staring towards the rising sun for a long while.
āIt's frustrating, isn't it?ā After so long in silence the words sound loud, but theyāre no surprise to Yoshi. Heās been thinking the same thing all night. āWe get so close, only to find that he's not there, that someone else has beaten us to him." He shakes his head, exasperated. āI guess he was always like that, though.ā He exhales a loop of smoke and watches it for a moment with a faint smile on his face, then dissolves it with a wave of his hand. āLike trying to catch the wind.ā
Yoshi grunts, taking a puff on his own cigar. It certainly has a flavour to it. He guesses that means Utseo spent the annual tax of a small country on it. āHe always did have that habit of disappearing.ā His mouth twists bitterly around the words. He jams the cigar back between his lips to cover the grimace. Sometimes it feels as though heād spent most of his life searching for Josine.
Utseo takes a moment to form his reply, watching the smoke blowing from his cigar into the wind, a dark streak in the sky. "Ten years spent building a resistance, making money, gaining power and influence, laying the groundwork for when he returned. Ten long years knowing that all Iāve done, all Iāve built, he could have done in one. Ten years spent waiting, only able to guess at what his next move might be."
āIf he has a next move,ā Yoshi interrupts. Suddenly he has to voice the fear thatās dogged him for ten years. It was the fear he had plunged into the whiskey the previous evening. āIf they havenāt caught up with him.ā They werenāt words he could ever speak in front of young Tank, so full of determination, or Emily who he didnāt think had ever doubted anything in her life. But he and Utseo have surely been through enough to be honest with one another. He sucks viciously on the cigar, as though pulling poison from a wound.
Utseo doesnāt share his doubt, never has. "Even so.ā The shogun speaks. Thereās a fire in his voice now, quiet but full of conviction. āNo matter if this is a false trail, us looking for something that isnāt there. Or if heās lying in some unmarked grave in the middle of nowhere. Even if he never returns, Iād do it all over. His work was ā is ā too important for us to leave."
"Important, huh?" The rumble emerges from Yoshiās throat, shaking with a cough as he clears away the creaking in his lungs. Eyes still heavy as he watches the water.
Downing his drink in a single gulp, Utseo places his empty glass on the deck next to Yoshiās. He stands up, leaving the half smoked cigar on deck, and as he pushes it over the edge with a foot into the swampy bayou, he places a hand on his old friends shoulder. "Weāre his legacy now. He wouldnāt have wanted us to stop the fight, to disappear and rot away alone, no matter how tempting it might be to just give up.ā
Utseo might have thought Yoshi was insensible to his words, but as he speaks, a shadow of life stirs in the big guy's face. His jaw, still twisted by his newest scar, twitches. It stings. Once it stopped bleeding, he wouldn't let Qamar 'fuss' over it any more, so a good stripe of his cheek has been replaced with purple-threaded scar tissue. He scrapes a hand across his eyes and squints up at Utseo. "Floating on whiskey? Fucking spaced-out partiers?" He gestures roughly towards himself and his companion in turn. "Pretty sure this isnāt what he had in mind when he recruited us. Are you?"
For a second itās quiet except for the whirr of servos as Utseo walks away, but the shogun stops short of the door. He knows the drive to lose oneself, knows Yoshiās pain, and he speaks in a soft voice that holds the weight of that understanding. āDrink if you must. Do what you must.ā He pauses for a heartbeat, looking over his shoulder at his brother in arms. āBut know that youāre still needed, now more than ever.ā Thereās nothing more for him to say, and he slips silently back into the house.
With his old friend disappearing, Yoshi curls a steel fist around the drink Utseo had left for him. For a second, he glares at it. His fingers grind against the glass. He considers throwing it down his throat, finding another, letting it wash him out of the world. His shadow falls across the veranda as he swells up from where he was leaning, and he hurls the glass out into the lake. It floats for a second in the swampy ooze. Yoshiās eyes hold onto the glass until itās gone, submerging with a gulping bubble. Then he heads inside to find the rest of his team and discuss their next move.
