Kensho

Disclaimer: Just own the words, not the folks.


Nagasaki – Chapter 2

There he was, Boma, the man who’d stolen the semblance of a stable life from him. It had taken two years and many...favors to find him, but now he could have his revenge.

The years of searching had been hell. Tsuzuki had healed physically, but he longer slept, just like when he was in the hospital. Every time he closed his eyes, he would be violated again in his dreams. Sometimes Haruna would come to life and watch.

Sometimes she would cheer.

So he’d stopped sleeping about 15 months ago. Anger flexed in his chest and he grabed the gun in his pocket. Oblivious to the quiet residential street, the man’s young children playing nearby, and the wife at his side, Tsuzuki stormed forward.

The first shot into his knee dropped the large man. The remaining five and five of the six he reloaded are administered into his prone body to inflict pain. As Boma writhed on the ground in agony, his wife and children screaming in the background, Tsuzuki removed his shades, kneeling to look into the large man’s eyes, amethysts gleaming with madness and rage.

“Remember me,” he spit.

Boma’s eyes got huge, but all he could manage was a painful gurgle as his lungs fill with blood. Pressing the gun to Boma’s forehead with a vicious sneer, Tsuzuki put the man out of his misery.

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His first steps inside were tentative, fearful, as he finally realized his surroundings and his purpose in them.

He’d murdered a man. In front of the man’s family and countless others, he’d willingly taken a life. During those long weeks he’d spent healing from the rape and the stab wounds meant to kill him and the subsequent two years he’d spent looking for his assailant, Tsuzuki hadn’t spared a moment to think about the consequences of killing Boma.

Stumbling forward amid jeers and yells, clutching his bedding materials, he suppressed the urge to run. There was nowhere to go now. True, the man whose existence had tormented him since that night was dead, but at what cost? Locked into the cell that would be his home for the next fifteen years, he fell to his knees and wept bitterly.

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They were back again, those two men from the floor below his. Every time he showered, they were there. He knew what they wanted. They’d been stalking him for at least three weeks, but he had a ‘guardian angel’ protecting him as every time he showered, so did Akira.

Akira, a mass murdering Yakuza, had taken a shine to Tsuzuki once he found out the name of the man he’d killed. Boma had been one of Akira’s bitter enemies. Finished with his shower, Akira excused himself to dry off. Comfortable in the knowledge that Akira would be only be a few steps away and that those two feared the tattooed criminal, Tsuzuki leaned back to rinse his hair.

A blade at his throat and a hand on his mouth brought a rush of panic. Lifting his head slowly, he saw Akira’s body lying near the shower drain, two other tattooed murders smirking as the blood of his ‘guardian’ flowed out with the water. Fear blanketed Tsuzuki as his eyes flicked to the side at the owner of the knife and his partner. A fist to his gut humbled him, his knees giving out and dropping him onto the damp tiles. Laughter surrounded him as he gasped for air.

What must have been two hours later, he lay bloody and bruised beside Akira’s body, a horribly familiar pain radiating from his backside, echoing in his throat. This time, there were no tears, just a barely suppressed rage. He would heal. And he would get them.

The doctor in the infirmary and some of the guards who hadn’t been paid to ‘look the other way’ tried to get him to disclose the names of his assailants, but he refused. He would handle them himself. Once released from the infirmary, he constantly showered alone, waiting for them, but they never showed up. Their refusal of his bait merely enraged him more.

If they wouldn’t come to him…

Several days later, the first man, Hiro, fell to a plastic knife filed to pointed fury and stabbed into his back at breakfast. Rather than admonishing him, the month of solitary earned helped Tsuzuki focus more on his task. Once out, he played the ‘abashed and compliant inmate’ for a month or so before taking a baseball bat to the next man’s head during a game with another cellblock. Sato had been the one with the knife and the first to take Tsuzuki. Bashing in the brutal man’s skull had been an immensely satisfying experience.

Sato’s murder earned him two months in solitary and four more of intense therapy to determine if he needed to be placed in a mental facility. Tsuzuki had been a mental patient longer than the therapist had been practicing and easily manipulated the man into believing he’d been “cured”.

The third man, Anzo, came to him, finally taking the shower bait Tsuzuki had so carefully laid out. Despite all appearances the low-level yakuza didn’t die from his head being slammed into the tiled wall. In his rage, Tsuzuki had tapped into his power, channeling it through his hand and crushing the bones in the other man’s throat. Because the man had attacked him, Tsuzuki bearing a shallow stomach wound to prove it, he avoided solitary and the prison shrink.

The forth man proved hardest to locate. Months and then a year went by, but Tsuzuki couldn’t find him. While he searched, prison life changed dramatically for him. Word spread about Tsuzuki’s murderous rampage and his status rose. Initially he didn’t care because one man still remained free of his wrath. He’d acted on the violence within his soul and gained respect.

After the killings, he never paid for cigarettes or alcohol and received offers of opiates on a regular basis. Several inmates, and one guard, even offered their bodies to curry favor, unaware that he thought of any sex act sickened him. Boma took much more from Tsuzuki than his second virginity that day. Those in the shower merely reawakened that trauma and the simmering rage behind it.

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Nine years down, six to go.

He took a slow drag on his cigarette. It was a pretty slow day. Actually, it had been a pretty slow few months since Terazuma got out.

Tsuzuki smirked to himself, still amazed that the former detective
kept his identity hidden for 15 years by transferring in and out of prisons all over Japan. That was how he got to Tsuzuki’s cellblock. Considering that the Sano brothers, who Terazuma help put away, were in the next cellblock over, being associated with ‘that crazy Tsuzuki bastard’ probably kept him safer than he would have been otherwise.

‘If he’d just left the money there,’ Tsuzuki mused about his former friend. Terazuma’s one moment of greed had landed him in the service of an opium lord. That service led to the murder of a bank official, which led Terazuma to a 20-year sentence.

After several fist fights and many accumulated weeks in solitary, he and Terazuma had become cordial acquaintances and later friends. They’d encouraged speculation that they were a couple, Tsuzuki prancing around occasionally to bolster the façade, as it kept other “suitors” at bay and allowed them to spend time together without explanation.

They talked about their lives before jail; Terazuma finding it incredulous that the innocent-looking Tsuzuki worked in a brothel, Tsuzuki sympathizing with Terazuma that his partner, Wakaba, died in a fire before he could tell her he loved her. They played chess, Terazuma, the master, teaching Tsuzuki, the clueless. They fought often for stupid reasons, sometimes sending each other to the infirmary, and sometimes to solitary.

Tsuzuki remembered that time at lunch where they nearly started a riot and laughed quietly. He and Terazuma joked about that incident often.

“The look on your face when that table almost landed on you…!” Tsuzuki would laugh.

“Yeah, well, the look on your face when I leapt over it and came at you…” Terazuma would counter, and they’d both laugh.

Several of their acquaintances repeatedly commented on Tsuzuki’s ‘deer in the headlights’ stare.

His smile faded as he remembered what else happened that day. That day he saw the forth man again, Kaito.

Five weeks passed before Tsuzuki found him again. In the meantime, he’d begun actively avoiding Terazuma, going so far as to throw him out of his cell and punch and curse at him whenever he came near during meals or free time. After three weeks of such abuse, Terazuka had leveled a healthy ‘Fuck you’ at Tsuzuki over breakfast and left him alone; or so he thought.

It had been Terazuma who prevented Tsuzuki from killing Kaito by braving his rage and pulling him off of the badly beaten man. Tsuzuki had no idea how long he spent cursing, beating and kicking the man in a secluded corner of the laundry room, as his carefully suppressed rage had overwheled him. Over four years had passed since that shower, but after seeing Kaito again he felt every grab, every thrust, every violation as if it had just occurred.

Terazuma had pulled him away from the man and held him, talking softly through his screams of rage and frustrated tears as guards alerted by Tsuzuki’s screams took care of Kaito. A grimace crossed his face as he remembered the torrents of tears that flowed those four years later, but hadn’t after the act itself. The former officer had somehow gotten him back to his cell and Tsuzuki had spilled everything; telling Terazuma what had happened at the brothel and how his murder of Boma had landed him in the Nagasaki prison. He also told him what happened in the shower and why he’d wanted Kaito dead. Terazuma had listened to him all night, letting him cry as needed.

Once Tsuzuki had been released from another two weeks in solitary, he’d expected Terazuma to avoid him. Instead he’d received his usual greeting when he arrived late for breakfast as usual.

“Damn it, you fucking fairy, can’t you ever be on time?” Terazuma had sneered.

Tsuzuki had sat down, smiling in his usual sheepish manner and their lives had returned to normal, or as normal as prison life could get.

A few weeks later, while losing another game of chess to his friend, Tsuzuki had realized his attraction to men; well, actually his attraction to Terazuma. The volatile ex-cop wasn’t particularly athletic, but stayed in pretty good shape from working out to pass the time. There were several men more handsome than Terazuma and even more with better bodies, but he’d never felt anything when looking at them. Sometimes when he spent time with Terazuma he’d wanted to…to…

He didn’t actually know what as sex had continued to be a nauseating topic for him. For the next few years, he’d made sure to keep such thoughts and feelings from Terazuma.

Though Tsuzuki understood Terazuma’s decision to cut all ties once he became a free man, he still missed his friend terribly. Grinding the butt out on the wall, he rolled over in his bunk to sleep.

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After cutting his waist-length hair to just above his ears, shaving his short, thick beard and putting on the suit provided for his release, Tsuzuki barely recognized himself. More than 10 years had passed since his hair had been so short and he couldn’t remember the last time his face had been hairless. Squinting, he looked again at his face, stunned by what he found.

No wonder the guards seeing him off looked shocked to find out how long he’d been there! He knew he was 45, but his face held the visage of the 26-year-old he’d been when he left the hospital. How was that possible? He really needed more time to think about it, but after 15 years, it was time to leave that hellhole.

‘And leave Tsuzuki Asato behind,’ he declared to himself.

Stepping out into free air again for the second time in his life, he managed a wry smile.