#starrystuff

From his seat beside Misaki’s office desk, Hei could see her hand resting on the window, steam etching her print onto the glass. Outside was a flurry of frigid white, beating madly against the walls; inside, Misaki’s fingers were still tensed against the pane.

“The worst snowstorm we’ve had in ten years,” Misaki said, her pause punctuated by a shiver. “None of us are getting home in this.”

Hei stood, grabbing his trench coat from where it hung useless on Misaki’s coat rack. They had done nothing but paperwork today; all of his gear sat inert in a duffel bag. “I guess not,” he said, draping the black material over Misaki’s shoulders. She started, eyes widening in the reflection of the window as her fingers roved the fabric, plucking idly at the buckle of the belt encircling the collar. But she didn’t reject it, as Hei half expected; instead, she tightened the jacket closer around her.

 “Thanks,” she said, clutching the coat in place with one hand rather than shifting her arms into the sleeves. Hei was glad it looked so misplaced on her- but it warmed her, somehow, and that was enough.

“It’s no problem.”

For a while they stood in fractalled silence, watching the snow howl through the streets like the tails of alpine wolves. A fine mist inscribed the beats of their breaths on the window; Hei could almost see the Russia of his post-war days lingering in their cold silhouettes.

“It doesn’t seem to be getting any better,” Misaki finally said. Her fingers brushed against his arm only a second longer than was necessary as she gave him back his jacket. “We should check on the others.”

“Look, if we’re stuck here, we’re eating you first,” was the first thing Hei heard Kouno say upon entering the main room of the office.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” Saitou said. “If anything, Hei should be the one to go. He’s the new guy.”

“If you have a death wish, maybe,” Matsumoto shrugged blithely. “Looks like you got the short end of the stick, Saitou. Process of elimination.”

Away from the cluster of desks on the opposite end of the room, the best and brightest of Section 4 had pushed their chairs into a makeshift triangle, nearly obstructing passage to the far side of the office. 

“Oh, hey, Chief,” Kouno said, raising his head to look at his superior, who stood in front of him with arms folded. Hei waited expressionlessly behind her. “You can be the deciding vote- if we had to eat either Hei or me for survival, which would you choose?”

“Don’t I get a say in this?” Hei said without inflection, heading noiselessly towards the break room without waiting for the answer. Knowing Kouno, it would be something smartass. He began digging through the cupboards for the coffee grounds.

Mentally, Hei reviewed his team’s usual coffee orders- black for him, a single sugar cube for Misaki, milk for Kouno, cream for Saitou, and all three for Matsumoto. Becoming Section 4’s coffee-boy had begun as an accident, in Hei’s desperation to be useful around the office between field missions. At first, Kouno and Saitou refused to drink anything Hei made; their distrust only abated when Kouno realized that asking Hei for coffee at all hours of the day proved an amusing inconvenience. Hei, for reasons unknown to himself, filled the orders anyway.

Through the open doorway, he could hear Misaki sigh between the burbles of the coffee-maker. “This is ludicrous.”

“We’re snowed in, Chief,” Kouno’s voice replied. “All our paperwork’s done, contractors just aren’t up for killing each other in this weather, and we’re off duty. There’s nothing much else to do while we’re stuck here.”

“But that would be dealing with personal information, Kouno.”

“Not all of us are mysterious sticks in the mud like some people who shall not be named,” Kouno said. “Makes it more fun. Hey, let’s up the stakes. You don’t have to confess which it was if we get it wrong. So the goal of the game becomes obvious. Call it a training exercise.”

“But there’s more than three of us playing,” Misaki went on. “Statistically, you could buck the system just by having each person choose a different truth-”

“It’ll be all right, Chief,” Saitou interjected, and Misaki sighed. “We’re all just having a little fun.”

The coffee machine groaned for the final time. Gripping five mugs between his hands in a practiced motion –he had masqueraded as too many waiters for comfort-, Hei returned back to the main room. Kouno smiled smugly as Hei doled out the drinks, fingers shifting expertly from ceramic to ceramic.

“Thanks, Hei-kun,” Matsumoto said warmly as he took a tall mug from Hei’s grasp. Even after months of the nickname, Hei found himself unable to respond beyond a soft grunt.

He handed Misaki the last one, watching her glasses fog from the steam, before turning back to the main group.

Kouno raised an eyebrow, steepling his fingers between his knees. “So, is everyone ready to play?”

“Play what?” Hei asked, taking a sip of coffee. The rationed days of South America had turned his taste mercilessly black.

“Two truths and a lie,” Misaki answered, collecting two chairs and placing them in her subordinates’ circle. There was something slightly predatory about the arch of her shoulders as she placed their seats, but Hei couldn’t peg why. At Hei’s blank look, she furrowed her eyebrows. “You’ve never heard of it?”

“Not really,” Hei said, taking the empty seat beside Matsumoto. He settled his coffee mug at his feet, looking at Misaki in an attempt to ignore everyone else. Discussing his life in a context where he wasn’t, in Kouno’s words, ‘Brooding in a dark cave waiting to intimidate people’ was not something Section 4 –or he- had quite gotten used to. “They might have done it in school, but I wasn’t paying much attention.”

Settling in the seat next to his, Misaki folded her arms. “It’s exactly as it sounds. Each person takes turns giving two facts and one lie about themselves, and the rest of us guess. At the end of the round, you’re supposed to confess which was which, but seeing as that’s unrealistic in a real-life scenario” –Hei restrained himself from rolling his eyes- “In this game, you only have to confess if you’re caught.”

“All right.”

The game progressed easily enough, beginning with Kouno (“I cried at the end of My Neighbor Totoro”, “I have an aunt named Shirley”, “I think Hei’s a jackass for not putting enough milk in my coffee”), then Saitou (“I’m trained in Judo” –stern look at Hei-, “I think Persian rap is actually kind of cool”, “I want a cat, but my landlady won’t let me”), and Matsumoto (“My wife and I have lived in the same house since we got married”, “My doctor said I’m not allowed to have caramels”, “My son’s studying to be a doctor in Korea”).

After learning that Kouno’s aunt was in fact named Emily, that Saitou was actually a dog person, and that Matsumoto’s caramel stash under his desk had instead grown to disturbing proportions, it was Misaki’s turn.

“Looks like you’re up, Chief,” Saitou said, and Hei turned to face Misaki, unable to keep the intrigue entirely off his face. 

“Now this, I have to see,” Kouno drawled. “The Chief and the Reaper, one-on-one. Like the old times. Except, without the fear of imminent death part.”

Both of them ignored the jab, but to Hei’s surprise, Misaki agreed to Kouno’s terms almost immediately. “Okay.” She raised an eyebrow at Hei.

“Fine,” Hei said, ignoring the way his pulse seemed to twinge, and set his analytical gaze on her. It was odd, visualizing her as he would any other target- testing for a baseline, looking for tells- but he had done it before, months and a lifetime ago on the rooftop garden of a nightmare hotel. He couldn’t forget that night if he wanted to.

“I’ve never been to the ocean,” Misaki said suddenly, all emotion wiped from her expression. She was looking at Hei dead-on, the glare from her glasses partially shading her eyes, voice as steady as though commanding him under arrest. “My mother’s family is from Hokkaido,” she went on. “And my mother herself was a math professor.”

Hei narrowed his eyes. He had established Misaki’s baseline long ago, when fishing her at Alice Wang’s hotel, and that baseline was Misaki’s entire being. She lied so rarely that he had only managed to find a counterpoint months later, when she had begun to in order to protect his identity. The only distinguishing features were the way she narrowed her eyes as she fibbed, the slightly harsher cant to her voice as her bluffs came out too loudly or too rehearsed.

But just now, her voice had been level, posture straight; she wasn’t tapping her left foot slightly as she often did when waiting for Hei to find her out after making a teasing remark, or even looking at Hei as though she was particularly nervous about him seeing through her.

And she had never before mentioned the ocean, or her mother, except in spurts of memories like snowflakes clinging to candlelit glass.

“Your mother’s family is from Hokkaido,” Hei finally chose as the lie, if only because he could not imagine Misaki stemming from anywhere but Tokyo. Not when her pulse rang with the Yamanote line, beat the cadence of every innocent’s footstep.

Misaki merely looked at him, face betraying nothing. “Your turn.”

That had been true? Or was Misaki just baiting him for later? He had never pegged her as much for mind games –except, he thought with a slightly heated face, when it came to attempting to trap the Black Reaper- but she had a competitive streak that put most people to shame.

He decided to ignore it for now. Two truths and a lie…

What was there to say? Beyond his life as an assassin, there was nothing terribly fascinating about him. The fact that he led an entirely unremarkable existence was what had kept his alias watertight in Tokyo. His interests were niche but normal, his childhood banal. It took a billowing coat and a ceramic white mask to transform him into any point of interest — and then, the only person with which he ever shared details of his past professional life was Misaki. He wasn’t about to give the sordid particulars to the rest of his coworkers. There was nothing to say about it- nothing he wanted to say.

“All right,” he said. Schooling his face into careful blankness, Hei looked at Misaki with practiced, deadened eyes. He could hear her breathing hitch in response, lips pursing into a determined line. “The scar on my chin is actually from when my cousin and I fell down a well when I was ten,” Hei began. Misaki had asked about it several times, but he had never told her how he got it. Maybe it had to do with how she always ran the knuckle of her thumb against the ghostly white line when she asked.

“Is that really what happened?” Misaki blurted, before biting her lip at the interruption.

Hei raised his eyebrow. “You tell me.”

“Yeah, Chief,” Kouno said, downing his coffee with a final swig. “Expecting BK-201 to confess during an interrogation?”

Misaki caught Kouno in a frosty glare, but didn’t comment. Instead, she inclined her head at Hei. “Continue.”

Hei cleared his throat. “I’ve never been to Africa, though my sister always wanted to when we were kids.” On his left, he thought he could see Matsumoto smile sadly. He was the only one whose sympathetic nods didn’t sting, as a father of two himself- someone who didn’t pity Hei, but rather felt the phantom pains as any parent for their child. “And once I was nearly kicked out of a museum for trying to play with the Qing dynasty swords.”

Misaki stared at him, tapping her finger rhythmically against her wrist for want of a pencil. She seemed to be taking him in in his entirety, cataloguing every instance of his deceptions, playing them against his current face which brooked no betrayal.

“Going to Africa,” Misaki said. “That was the lie. You shifted your weight to the left as you said it.”

How he wished she had never found that tell. He had never noticed it himself until Misaki pointed it out; a giveaway he certainly didn’t have when lying as an operative. But personal memories made him heavy, gave him substance, were the grains of dust blown in the face of the invisible, if only to give it shape and meaning for an unfair second. Only after Misaki noted his habit did he see in himself how he shifted on his heels when talking of Xing, or the stars that pluralized her.

“How do you know that move wasn’t deliberate?” he said instead.

“Now you’re just hedging. Africa. Final answer.”

Hei looked over at Kouno, who was staring at the two of them with rapt attention. “She has to get everything right for her to win, correct?” Hei said.

“Well, yeah,” Kouno said. “But if she called you out on your lie, then the other two have to be truths…”

“They weren’t,” Hei said simply. 

Misaki narrowed her eyes. “Then all three of them were lies?”

In front of him, Kouno snorted; behind his coffee, Matsumoto was hiding a grin. Saitou seemed torn between admiration and castigation, mouth hanging slightly agape.

Hei shrugged. “You said you wanted it to mimic reality. In real life, I would have had no incentive to play by the rules.” It’s only rational, he nearly said, before nipping back the thought.

“Oh, hey,” Kouno said before Misaki had a chance to respond, inclining his head towards the window. “Looks like the snow’s letting up.”

“So you said all three of your statements were lies,” Misaki said as they swept into her apartment, flurried wisps of ice biting at the doorway. Misaki closed the door with a muted whuff.

“I did,” Hei said as he stripped off his scarf and gloves, hanging them and his jacket above the door. Misaki followed suit, turning to flick on the heating before heading into the kitchen, hands hovering over the cabinets in contemplation.

“Please don’t use instant hot cocoa,” Hei said, stealing into the kitchen behind her. He tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, resting his chin on her shoulder. “I’ll make some.”

Swivelling to face him, Misaki put both hands on his shoulders, canting an eyebrow in his direction. “Only if you tell me what the true versions of those statements were.”

He kissed the furrow on her forehead. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re a cheat.”

Breaking apart, Hei began rifling through the refrigerator for the required ingredients. “What makes you think that there are true versions to what I said?” Hei asked as he began grating the chocolate, a rich, dark cacao. It was easier, still, to ask these questions when his back was facing her. “I could have made anything up.”

“But you didn’t,” Misaki said behind him. “You’re good at lying, Hei, that’s true. It’s maybe one of the only true things I first assumed about you.” Hei frowned, watching the thin peels of chocolate cascade from the grater, enveloping him in bittersweet. She was beside him now at the counter, grabbing mugs from the sink, looking at him with the frank expression he both loathed and loved to see from her. “But I’ve also noticed that you don’t often lie completely. You hide bits of truth in between, whether you meant to or not.”

Hei didn’t answer, or maybe he couldn’t, losing his hands in the motion of destruction. The chocolate bar had been decimated to dust.

“I really did get that scar from falling into a well,” Hei finally said. In his peripheral vision, Misaki looked up sharply. “And it was with my cousin. It was also his fault,” he said as an aside, nearly unable to stop himself.

Misaki bit her lip. “Of course it was.”

“But I told you that I was ten at the time. That was a lie. I was eleven.” He moved to put the milk to boil, pouring it from the carton with a flourish. “And Xing really did want to go to Africa when we were kids, to see the animals. She saved her own money for years to go; I think at the end of it she had a couple thousand yuan…” He cleared his throat. The steam from the boiling milk was stifling. “But I have been to Africa- to Egypt, after the War.”

Against his back, he could feel Misaki’s delicate tapping like a maddening spring thaw, tracing the vertebrae of his spine through his shirt. “Then you really did almost get kicked out of a museum?”

“I did get kicked out,” he said, stirring the pot. “I want to say that I was instigated by my cousin again, but I really wasn’t. I just wanted to see the swords for myself.”

“You didn’t try any moves with them, did you?”

“…I might have gone through a kata before the guard came.”

Misaki snorted.

 “What about yours?” Hei said, changing tack. He strode across the kitchen to the mound of chocolate shavings prepared beforehand, tipping them into the milk with a soft shick. “You never told me which one was a lie.”

“You’re not the only one who can play by different rules,” Misaki said, taking the ladle from him and setting it in the sink. One day, he would get her to wash the utensils as they were used, and not just leave them for later.

Pouring the cocoa into mugs, Hei handed one to Misaki, who moved into the living room. They sat together on the end piece, enveloped by Misaki’s menagerie of blankets, as Misaki nursed her cocoa between warming hands.

From his position, it was all too easy to rest his chin on her shoulder and whisper directly into her ear. “Are you saying that you lied, Chief Kirihara?” It was perhaps too guilty a pleasure to watch her subtle jump at the sound of his voice. Maybe the real pleasure was that, after hearing it, she never ran.

“The game was ‘two truths and a lie’,” Misaki said. She angled her face to look at him. “I just told three truths instead.”

Of course she had. There was nothing else to be expected of her.