Call Me Tali

I'm Natalia but my friends call me Tali. I grew up at my father's elbow. He was a certain kind of businessman. No, you do not need to know his name. From him, I learned to command respect, hit a moving target, make a man disappear, and run a game like a professional. Now, I am left with a taste for fast cars, big guns, poker, whiskey, and men (and the occasional women) who make their own rules. RP blog.

[stylish-homes]

Early 20th-century cinema turned restaurant dining hall decorated with ancient Rome styled classical murals and stucco ceilings with an olive tree from Italy planted at the centre, Stockholm, Sweden

via reddit

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[natalianunziata1]

“Jesus!” Ansgar’s face would have been quite comically wide-eyed and blank if the situation had been humorous, which it most certainly was not. He rotated his head first toward Tali, and then his eyes, as he could not tear them away from the image that rest on the table before him.

It was Kenjiro Takahashi. A much younger version, but the image of the man was unmistakable. Kenjiro with dark hair as opposed to streaked white, Kenjiro with less wrinkles, Kenjiro in a snappy tan suit, leaning on a low rock wall, cigarette in hand,  nonchalant, very sophisticated indeed. A beautiful man, a sharp man, as he’d always been.

Tali picked it up slowly, reverently, almost as if she were lifting some last remaining remnant of the man himself, which in a way, she was. Ansgar watched her intently as she studied the photo, as she ran he fingers over it, as her eyes became awash in saline, as her face went white, as her hand, shaking, lifted to cover her mouth.

“That… that is him?” Asahi said tentatively. “That is your friend?” he asked Ansgar. “Your husband?” he inquired of Tali. His chest seemed puffed in anticipation, his face taut, eyes unblinking.

“That-that-that is him,” Ansgar stammered, swallowing with the effort of speech. “His-his name is… was… Kenjiro Tak-Takahashi.”

Haru blinked out of his straight-backed, hand-clenched reverie. “Takahashi as in your fine suit Ansgar-san? Takahashi as in the designer?”

Ansgar nodded. “One and the-the same.”

“And you are telling me he… he was my father?”

“There’s no mistaking him, Haru,” Tali said. “I’d know him even from a childhood photograph. He was… a remarkable, memorable man.” She breathed long through her nose, wistful and with a happy melancholy, and reached across the table to take Haru by the hand. “You remind me… us… so much of him.”

“I do?” Haru asked. “But my father… he was so handsome, so… so suave. I used to dream of him. Used to think of him as some spy, some important man in the service of the King of England or the Emperor, like… like James Bond.”

“He did have a taste for adventure,” Ansgar smiled. “But h-he also had an understanding of the universe that-that w-went beyond anything I could even th-think of. I’m more than convinced that you inherited your t-talents from him.”

“Talents?” Haru cringed. “I’ve no talent. I can’t sew or draw. I can’t act.”

“You can sing,” Asahi cut in cheerfully. “He sings like a thrush, he does, warbles like the nightingale.”

“All right, Asahi,” Haru rolled his eyes.

“That’s not what I meant,” Ansgar said.

“Then what?” Haru picked up the photograph and studied it. “I’m not… I’m not all suave like he was. I’ve no style to speak of.”

“Your ability to give, to love,” Tali said.

“Your ability to heal,” Ansgar added, wrapping his hand around his throat. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’ve managed to speak a number of full sentences without stammering n-now… oh, d-damn,” he chuckled. “Well, close en-enough.”

Tali blinked at him. “You have, Ansgar,” she said. “You’re not… doing it as much.”

“But… what does this mean?” Haru brought the conversation back to his parentage, the revelation of his paternity, the sheer coincidence, the miracle. “What does it all mean for me?”

Ansgar sniffed, his lips curling into a wry, knowing smile. “Why, you are th-the heir to quite a fortune, my friend. Not-not only a sh-share of his design house and his properties, but-but he also left you… well… left T-Tali and m-myself to f-find you and give you… an entire container full of anti-antiqui-antiq….”  He sighed. “Treasures.

Asahi gasped. “Treasures?”

Haru leaned back, patting Asahi softly on the knee.

“A wide variety of items,” said Ansgar. I... saw them. I saw the container.

Haru’s eyes widened. “Oh. I... I can’t help but feel responsible, in some way...”

“Please, don’t.” said Tali. “Ansgar and I came here of our own free will. And we had... I felt I had an obligation to Kenjiro. He did so much good for me, you know. He quite took me under his wing.

Haru smiled. “I cannot wait to hear of it, Tali,” he said. “I know Asahi would love to see the things that mister... that my father collected. He has a particular interest in antiquities, especially of things from nonwestern sources.:

“There is not enough study of such things,” Asahi said. “And translated into English, French, German? Nearly nothing.”

“Asahi is the professor.” He laughed warmly.

“No, I’ll never be a professor myself. But I do dream of being a collector, or a curator.” He turned to Tali. “An arts center, situated almost like this house, here. High up on the rocky hill, with the pine scented air, coming through. Great glass windows. Dancing, art, opera. A library. An archive.”

Tali smiled. “That sounds wonderful.”

Haru turned to Asahi. “Things might be able to turn from...dreams to reality,” he said, standing and holding a hand out to Asahi, who took it and stood with him, tears in his eyes.

Suddenly Tali felt as if she and Ansgar were terrible, rude interlopers. And despite his sometimes bullish nature, he seemed to feel it, too, and followed her when she slipped out to the back deck, overlooking the water.

“The moisture here would r-... would ruin the pieces,” he said.

Tali poked his forearm with her finger, leaning onto the railing. “It’s a dream,” she said. “You remember those, don’t you?”

He turned to look at her. “I do.”

She smiled, two tears exactly spilling from her eyes. “You’re speaking so steadily,” she said.

He held out his hands, and instinctively she slid hers into his palms. “I don’t feel steady, exactly,” he said.

“That was quite a moment,” she said. “Quite a few moments. In a row.”

“It’s n-not quite all.. all th-that,” he said.

“No?”

“I c-can’t help but feel that we got more of him than we deserved,” said Ansgar. “Like we took him from his own family.”

Tali slid her arm through his and squeezed. “Now, I know what you mean, but I don’t believe it for a second.”

Ansgar frowned.

“He knew what he faced here,” she said. “He knows this place, his family, the life he left behind better than we ever could.”

“Tali, Tali, Tali,” he said.

She was quiet, listening to the gentle sound of the surf.

“You’re right, you know,” he said, glaring.

“I know,” she said.

He leaned forward, tilting her chin tenderly up toward himself with the soft touch of a finger. He kissed her then, slowly. Warmly.

She felt something, something new even for her, even for this trip, which was one revelation after another, pushing through one veil, then the next, and then the next. She half expected to open the door to the villa and be transported to another dimension entirely, or to another time and space. She felt something deep and yearning, and yet somehow settled.

Here, in this strange place, in this unaccustomed time, alone in the entire world except for this man, gently kissing her... Here? In the shadow of his silhouette in the fading sun, in the caress of his lips on hers, she felt something she hadn’t felt in years. Decades, even.

She was... home.

[natalianunziata1]

“Here it is,” said Asahi, walking over to Ansgar. “Haru’s father.” He placed a small black and white photograph on the table beside the whiskey. Tali and Ansgar both leaned forward to take a closer look.

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction

Ansgar shuddered. He tensed his hands in hers, making to pull away, but she held him fast, her eyes widening into a look of accusation and admiration at the same time. “Ansgar?” she breathed. “Tell me.”

He squared his shoulders and let his mask drop into place. That mask he hadn’t used for quite some time, but it was still there, in his arsenal, ready to pull out at a moment’s notice. “W-what makes you think I’ve-I’ve-I’ve done s-something to Nils?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Because I see it, right now. In your eyes. I see you trying to hide it. Because I saw it,” she cocked her head back toward the cottage, “just then.”

“What ex-exactly did y-you see, my d-darling?” He smacked his lips and swallowed, his gaze not wavering from hers, his expression still calm and practically blank.

She shook her head. “I… I don’t know, just… just Nils, and he was… he was in some sort of… of danger. Faceless men. Uniforms.”

“The police, I would im-imagine.” Ansgar dropped her hands and turned away from her, wrapping his arms around himself for warmth. “No-nothing to s-suggest I’ve had any-anything to do with it.”

“God damn it, Martinsson!” she hissed. “Why are you keeping this from me? Why are you lying to me? I saw it… you wanted so desperately for me to share your mind just then, why not now?”

He whirled on her. “Because you-you-you-you’ve been-been keeping things from me, am-amica m-mia! You’ve not-not t-t-t-told me the whole t-t-truth, either!”

She blinked, shocked at his sudden ferocity, his bubble of anger. “I… I don’t know what you mean.”

“You-you know d-damn well what-what I m-mean!” he sneered, taking a step closer to her. “I s-saw y-you…,” he growled, pointing to his head. “I s-saw you k-kill Fabri-rizzi. Saw-saw you c-covered in his b-blood, dancing in it… and-and-and….”

“I told you I killed him!” she interrupted. “I told you that!”

“Y-yes, you did,” he replied, calmer. “But you-you n-never told me h-how. W-when. Where… and you n-never t-told me that when you did it, you-you thought… you thought of m-me.”

“Well,” Tali pursed her lips, breathing hard through her nose. “Now you know.”

“Y-you c-cut out his heart,” Ansgar whispered, the words clipped, brusque, tense. “Literally, d-didn’t you?”

“I did,” she lifted her chin proudly, defying him to judge her, to condemn her, to despise her.

But… he did not. His words cut deep, yes, but the tone was one of reverence, of worship, of admiration. “You f-frighten me, sometimes, T-Tali,” he said, brushing his hand gently, lovingly down her cheek, his thumb pushing away a tear.

“I’m sorry I… I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“I kn-know,” he cupped her head and pulled her closer.

“I just couldn’t,” she shook her head, “I still needed to come to terms with it, to let myself trust you again, trust you enough to tell you. It’s a terrible thing I’d done, something not to be proud of….”

He smiled. “Oh, but it is, you see,” he whispered. “A th-thing to be proud of.”

“But I killed him. Murdered him…”

“N-no. You av-aveng-avenged your f-father, your… yours-self,” he smiled, his nose flaring with renewed desire, with pride, with a swell of want so strong it was nearly overwhelming. “You c-cl-cleansed this world of a m-man who didn’t-didn’t deserve to be here, whose very p-presence was an affront to humanity. I s-saw that, saw you k-kill him, in my mind, and it brought me to fucking t-tears, T-Tali. Made-made-made me love you all the more.”

She wrapped her hands around his, pressing his palms to her face, holding him there, keeping his warmth on her skin, reassuring herself of his love, his presence, his alliance. “You scare me sometimes, too, Ansgar,” she admitted.  

He chuckled, his lip quirking up at once side. He pulled her close to him, wrapping his arms around her, his hand cradling the back of her head. He bent and pressed a long kiss into her hair, at the place that corresponded to Ansgar’s crown chakra, from whence all of the visions had stemmed under Haru’s hands. “It isn’t fear,” he said, clearly.

“No, it isn’t,” she agreed. “It’s respect.”

Ansgar sighed. “Speaking of-of.”

She lifted her face to him, expectant. “Speaking of?”

“N-Nils,” he sniffed, clearing his throat.

Tali pulled back, but stayed in his arms. “What about Nils?”

“I haven’t touched him,” he said, licking his lips. “Not p-personally, but I may have arranged for a bit of a-a-a reception for-for him.”

She blinked. “Reception?”

“I s-sent him h-home, to-to Malmo. Got him sprung from p-prison h-here. Made-made him think he was in the c-clear and g-going home, but there will be-be a w-welcoming party for-for him when he arr-arrives.”

“What sort of welcoming party?” Tali tilted her head and eyed him sideways. “What did you do?”

He shrugged nonchalantly, rolling his eyes skyward, a grin of mock innocence playing on his lips. “I may-may have s-sent my twin brother to be-be seen by-by him at-at the airfield, near his h-house, in the-the city… to b-be present when he’s arr-arrested, in the r-room when he’s interr-interrogated in Mal-Malmo. May have op-opened channels to-to inform his w-wife of his-his-his d-dalliances, his-his intentions toward y-you, to strip away, piece by piece, bit by-by bit, his-his career, his money, his p-power.”

“To ruin him,” Tali rumbled.

“Yes.”

“Destroy him.”

“Utterly.”

And Tali’s lips curled, her eyes danced with knowledge. “Without getting your hands dirty.”

“In a way. T-true, but if he should die because of m-me,” he said, a sinister tinge to his voice. “I w-won’t mourn. I will feel no re-regret.”

“Is that your goal? That he takes his own life, you mean?”

He smirked. “I d-do know how-how to drive a man to madness,” he said, evenly. “If the res-result is his own d-destruction, then that is the re-result.”

“Oh,” she said, eyes widening.

“Re-revenge, you s-see,” he declared, “is a p-plate best-best served cold.”

Her face fell and she bent her head, peering down at her hands, at the imagined bloodstains upon her skin. “But my revenge on Agostino….”

“Could not-not have been taken any-any other w-way,” he said, covering her hands with his. He pulled them up to his mouth and kissed her knuckles, his lips soft, mouth open and his tongue pillowy on her skin. “Fab-Fabrizzi was un-untouchable. There was no way you c-could have taken, could have r-ruined anything he v-valued. He was not a w-weak man. Not like N-Nils. You h-had to take the only thing you c-could, and you did. You d-did brilliantly.”

She stayed silent for a moment, sighed, and peered sadly up into Ansgar’s face. “I wanted to handle Nils,” she said, equably. “I wanted to do it for you.”

“I know,” he replied. “But I took-took care of him in-instead. I’m taking c-care of him. In my-my own way.”

“Why? If he… if he takes his own life, you’ll have his blood on your hands.”

“Then s-so b-be it,” he said, turning her hand over and brushing his fingers over her open palm. “But yours are cl-clean n-now. Why should they be-be sullied a secon-second time? Why should-should you have another life on y-your head? And w-why on my-my account?”

“Because I love you, that’s why.”

“And that’s ex-exactly why I can’t-can’t let you.”

“You mean, you won’t let me.”

“Can’t, won’t,” he shrugged, grinning. “It’s all sem-semantics.”

“Will you at least clue me in? Involve me? Tell me what’s happening? Let me help?”

“Of course. With every m-move,” he said.

“Swear it?”

“I promise,” he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulder. “Now, c-come on, I’m f-fucking freezing out here, and the sm-smell of that salmon baking is making my stomach p-protest.”

***

“Ansgar-san,” Haru set his bowl slowly down onto the low table, his chopsticks hovering over the half eaten dish of sauced noodles.

“What is it?” Ansgar cocked his head.

“May I ask you something? It’s… it’s about… about our session this afternoon. It’s been… bothering me all evening.”

“Of course,” he replied, setting his own sticks down onto his plate. He shifted his crossed legs on the floor and lifted his head, giving Haru his full attention.

“You know, sometimes, when I give Reiki, there are… there are visions. Things the mind shows through the chakras, especially the crown and the third eye, the ones we worked on today.”

Ansgar flicked his gaze to Tali, but nodded. “G-go on.”

“And sometimes those visions are… are shared.”

He frowned, opening and closing his eyes slowly, but did not reply.

Haru continued. “I saw… I saw a man today,” he said. “A Japanese man. A handsome man. I don’t know if it was from you or from Tail, but he was there, in my mind, nonetheless.”

Tali smiled. “I think he was in both of our minds, Haru.”

“T-tell me what… what you saw.” Ansgar put in.

“He was putting clothes on you, Ansgar. Kissing your face, running his hands through your hair, straightening your tie,” Haru recounted, smiling. “And he was with you, Tali, by the sea, looking out a window to the ocean, holding your hand, comforting you. He… he loved the both of you very much, and you both loved him. I felt that love. I felt it and… and strangely, I wanted it, as if… as if it… as if that love should have been mine.”

Tali peered at Ansgar, and Ansgar, knowingly, nodded at her. The time was right, they said silently to each other. The time was now.  

“Tell m-me,” Ansgar spoke first. “What d-did this m-man look like to y-you?”

Haru sighed. He hunched into himself, tucking his hands between his crossed ankles, bending over at the waist, his head bowed. “He looked like me,” he murmured, shyly. “Like me… but, with more wisdom. With more knowledge.”

“Like an older version of yourself?” Tali rest her hand on his shoulder and rubbed in small circles.

Haru’s head snapped up. “Yes!” he piped. “Exactly like that.” His eyes went soft, pleading, almost… almost begging for that wisdom, for that knowledge. “Who… who was that man? Please,” he directed his fresh tear-filled gaze toward Ansgar. “Please tell me who he was. I… I must know.”Ansgar looked at Tali and nodded, the movement short and nearly imperceptible. She stood and padded quickly down the hall.

“I apologize, Ansgar-san, did I say something wrong? Tali, she is not… She isn’t upset?”

“Not at... Not at all, Haru,” said Ansgar. “Not even a b-bit. It’s just that… Well, I’ll wait for her to return and w-we will tell you.”

“Here I am!” said Tali, her voice chirping and cheerful in a way Ansgar was not used to. She reached from behind her back, proudly depositing a stout green bottle of amber liquid in the center of the table.

Haru’s eyes went wide. “Hakushu,” he said.

“The very best whiskey,” said Ansgar.

“This is… This is too much, perhaps,” said Haru.

“It isn’t from me,” said Ansgar. “Nor from Tali.”

“No?”

Tali sat, folding her leg under herself. She looked at Ansgar.

Ansgar cleared his throat. “This dish reminds me of growing up,” he said. “Although the seasonings are somewhat different, we ate quite a bit of fish in my home.”

“Ah, yes. This we have in common.” Haru smiled, then looked at the bottle of Hakushu again. “And good taste in liquor,” he said. “Although perhaps I had a better taste for it in my youth than I do now.”

Ansgar said nothing.

“Is Asahi coming soon?” said Tali suddenly.

“Oh, yes, he’s on his way now, I’m sure,” said Haru.

“It’s funny you said that about the meal, Ansgar. Gatherings like this make me think of my… of my father,” she said.

“Your father?”

“Yes. Friends around the table. Family. That sort of thing.”

“Family was always my mother and me,” said Haru. “Until Asahi, of course.”

Suddenly a great commotion sounded on the front porch of the cabin, and a great clacking of claws. The diners heard a key in the door, and the thunderous thumping of feet as three fox-red shiba inus clattered into the room, running to Haru.

“Ichi! Ni! San!” said Haru. “You’re all here! I’ve missed you today.”

Asahi walked in, holding a paper bag, assorted greens and two long leeks sticking out of the top. “Hello!” he called.

Haru moved over, pulling another cushion to the table. “Ansgar and Tali are about to tell me a story,” he said. He looked at Ansgar. “It’s all right with you? I should have asked first.”

“Of course,” said Ansgar. “It involves you and your family.” He nodded at Asahi.

“It’s funny,” said Haru. “Ansgar and Tali were just saying our family meal makes them think of their families.”

Asahi reached over and took Haru’s hand.

“But family is a kind of blank spot to me,” he said. “I didn’t know my own father, although I do have a photograph. One, that I stole from my mother. I never told her. Apparently he was an actor. As hard as life was for us, she would never speak against him.”

“Your mother...” said Tali.

“She has died,” said Haru. “Three years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” said Tali.

There was a brief silence. The three dogs curled up beside Haru, leaning against his thigh, burrowing their faces under their white paws. Tali took a deep breath.

“Haru,” she said.

“Yes?”

“It was... not simply a coincidence, us meeting at the restaurant last weekend.”

“Oh?” said Haru.

Asahi’s eyes widened.

“No. You see, I… Well, first, Ansgar was very close friends with a man. A Japanese man.”

Haru narrowed his eyes and tilted his head. “Hmm?”

Ansgar spoke. “A tailor. An excellent man. A good man.” He cleared his throat. “Excellent taste in... whiskey. Born here, in fact.”

“In Japan?”

“...in Matsushima,” said Tali.

“Oh.”

She forged ahead. “And long after he and Ansgar became friends, he became… a close friend of mine as well. In truth, he and I were married, but it was a marriage of friendship and convenience. Not a… not a love match. Although surely we did love one another, in our own way.”

Tali looked at Ansgar, panic creeping slightly into her eyes.

“Haru, we have reason to believe this man might be your father. We don’t know, and we would need to investigate, but it seems possible and likely. Enough that we felt we had to investigate.”

“But I don’t… But how would...”

Asahi jumped up from the table and disappeared.

“We wanted a good way to tell you, and we agonized. You have opened a window to ourselves with your healing gifts,” said Tali. “And we felt we had to give you this truth as well, as full as we can tell it.”

Haru sat back, saying nothing, shaking his head, a look of surprised disbelief on his face.

“Here it is,” said Asahi, walking over to Ansgar. “Haru’s father.” He placed a small black and white photograph on the table beside the whiskey. Tali and Ansgar both leaned forward to take a closer look.

[natalianunziata1]

And as he ran she saw herself, too, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Agostino, then the last moments of that last earthly fight, captured as if in choreography on the stage of a ballet and modern dance company. A struggle, and finally he was vanquished, and she pulled from beneath his ribs a great red silk cloth. She held it in the air and it rippled in the wind; she let it go and it flew over hills and trees, and mountains, and a great dark sea, until it blew into a tiny, gritty, lit-up place in the dead of night where Ansgar sat, curled around a glass of indifferent bourbon. The silk licked the skin behind his ear and he turned as if to see someone, but no one was there.

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction

“If the father ain’t in, then I’m s’pposed to give this to the oldest son,” the boy said, hefting the shoebox-sized parcel in demonstration. “Is the oldest son here?”

Ansgar smiled proudly, pointing his finger at his chest. “I’m the oldest,” he said, and held his hands out. “Give it to me.”

“Are you sure you wan’ it?” the boy cocked his head, frowning. “I’m not sure y’do.”

“Why, issit somethin’ bad?” His younger self asked. Ansgar now seemed to be floating above the scene, watching himself as a child, an innocent boy. And for some reason, something deep inside, some knowledge made Ansgar want to reach out and snatch the package, to keep his younger self from accepting the gift of the faceless, nameless boy in the doorway.

To keep his younger self from opening it.

“Oh, is bad all right,” the boy said. “But you gotta open it. There’s nothin’ you can do but open it. Now you have’ta.”

The older Ansgar, the hovering watcher, tried to scream, tried to warn the boy, but nothing but silence came from his throat. He tried to bat the object out of his younger self’s hands, but his hand only ghosted through it - useless, ineffectual to stop it.

Unable to stop any of it.

“Don’t,” Ansgar said. “God, please don’t. Don’t open it. Don’t…. no.”

But the Ansgar that was the boy didn’t hear. Ansgar the boy opened the box. Right before Ansgar’s eyes, his child-self grew from an apparent age of twelve to one of sixteen. He knew, Ansgar did, that the boy was sixteen. He could see it in the wild shag of the hair, in the smattering of pimples on the face, in the broadness of the shoulders, in the gangling length of the arms and legs.

He also knew, because he knew exactly what was in the box. Pandora’s box. Ansgar’s box.

And when the sixteen year old Ansgar peered into the opened parcel, when the sixteen year old Ansgar absorbed the terrible knowledge that had been stored within it, the sixteen year old Ansgar changed yet again. The sixteen year old, while still in all appearance was a youthful teen, he aged in mind, in voice, in attitude by twenty years. In an instant, the innocent, open face of the boy became the serious, anger-riddled visage of a jaded, tired adult.

And the flesh of the other boy’s face sloughed away, revealing a hollow, deathly-white skull, the fingers that still held the box before the man-child Ansgar became skeletal, stark against the plain, innocuous brown of the box of knowledge.

The knowledge of death. Of the death of Ansgar and Magnus’ father. Of the death of his own innocence, of the death of his emotion, his ability to feel.

The death of his heart.

The knowledge turned to a ragged pain in his chest, a pain so strong it forced him out of his vision and back into his body. A series of pounding electrical shocks to his heart followed. A jolt to his muscles, a sharp intake of breath; and then, as he let it go with a long, loud sigh, a strange, welcoming, comforting heat poured into and suffused like smoke through his entire being.

At the same time, a bright green light flooded Ansgar’s sight. A whirling, swirling maelstrom formed before his eyes, the frigid wind whipping, stinging at his bare soul. But, as quickly as it started, it stopped. It stopped, and the storm shifted – changed direction, turning from a counterclockwise tumult to that of a languid, tropically calm clockwise.

The green settled over him, washed through him, and erased the terrible scene before him. The green didn’t take away the memory of those horrors, didn’t remove the underlying pain of it; rather, it changed it. Transformed it. Turned it from something that had once ripped and tore and destroyed Ansgar’s heart, to something that… that restored him, that healed.

Ansgar sighed, and he heard Tali’s voice from somewhere in the distance. “I heard him scream… is he okay?”

And then Haru’s voice. Closer. Tired, worn, breathy. “He…,” Haru cleared his throat and took a long breath in through his nose, “it was… his heart chakra. Anahata. I was trying to work on his… on his throat, but I was drawn, pulled like… like a magnet to… to his heart. It was as if he needed me to heal him there first.”

“What about his heart?” Ansgar heard Tali say, a twinge of concern in her voice. “Is there something wrong with it?”

“Oh, no, nothing physical,” said Haru, airily. Ansgar could feel the man’s presence, his hands hovering just above his chest, could still feel the swirling warmth pass between his body and Haru’s fingertips. The green light had faded, leaving Ansgar with only the random phosphenes seen behind his closed eyelids, and strangely enough, he found himself missing it.

“I… I think I opened it up for him. Made it flow… and…or, I’m still… trying… to…. ah. Yes. There,” Haru said. “There it is. That’s better. Much better.”

Haru pulled his hands back and rubbed them together. Ansgar moaned at the loss of peace, the absence of the warmth on his body, and flickered his eyes open. He smiled blithely at Tali, reaching his hand out for her. “Hello m-my love,” he murmured.

Tali took him between her two hands and bent over him. Unable to help herself, she chuckled at the strange, blissed-out look on Ansgar’s face. “What happened in there?”

“I saw… s-something, I don’t know w-what it-it was. It was-was… odd. Frightening, but t-then… not s-so much. Then it w-was-was g-good.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I d-don’t know what to m-make of-of it j-just yet. Ha-hallucin-hallucinations, m-maybe? M-must be some-some rational ex-explanation.”

“The explanation is simple.” Haru appeared behind Tali, the man’s handsome face swimming into view. “Tell me. How long have you lived with your heart in such turmoil, my friend?”

Ansgar shifted his gaze to Haru. “A long t-time. T-too l-long.” His eyes narrowed. “B-but… w-why am I st-still talking like t-this?”

Haru sniffed, a maudlin smile crossing his features. “I’m not anywhere near finished,” he said. “Before we can heal the body, we must heal the heart, or so you have taught me, it seems.” He once again rubbed his hands together. “I wasn’t able to finish work on your throat or even begin with your other chakras. Shall we continue?”

“T-Tali,” Ansgar queried. “Can s-she stay?”

Haru smiled. “Of course,” he said, and without another word, he stepped to the head of the table, and rest his palms just above the top of Ansgar’s head. “I will start with the crown and work my way down to the root. Hopefully, you will not have such a violent reaction as you did with your heart… your mind seems stable enough.”

“Seems is the-the op-operative w-word,” Ansgar joked. “J-just you w-wait.”

“Ssh,” Haru chided. “Close your eyes. Clear your mind.”

*****

Tali walked outside on the back deck of the cabin, walking across the boards and inhaling the fragrant pine in the air. She shivered, and only then realized that she was cold. A mist was rolling in off the water, and the sky was darkening to the west. Ansgar had pushed for another session with Haru in the afternoon after lunch, saying that he felt that things were finally beginning to come loose, and if they waited until tomorrow, he would certainly be back at the starting line again.

Tali had looked away as he clutched Haru’s sleeve, nearly begging him.

“Please, Haru… There-ah… Th-There are important things to say, and I want to get to them b-before it’s…” He took a deep breath and then spoke quite slowly: “I want to get to them.”

Haru had consented, his eyes wide, and for this second session Ansgar has insisted on holding Tali’s hand, and her sitting beside him throughout the treatment. It felt right to him, he said, and he felt he wanted to follow his instincts on this one thing. He whispered to Tali that he had not heard a command from his instincts in too long, and this was too real to ignore.

She nodded quickly and knelt beside him, taking his hand in hers.

At first, she felt only calm, the way she had at hearing Haru’s voice during the introduction to Reiki. He had a way of speaking that immediately put her at ease; she couldn’t help but draw a parallel between his calming effect and that of Takahashi, the way he would sit with her over a pot of tea and tell her he knew she would see Ansgar again, that certainly he wasn’t simply gone.

“He couldn’t be,” Ken had said. “A man like that leaves energy behind, and sooner or later he must come and collect it again.” And he smiled and patted her hand, as sure in his pronouncement as if he had said that the sun would rise again in the morning.

Tali, who believed in very little, had believed him. But then, the images changed. Tali had always felt very comfortable with a kind of vague, general spirituality. She didn’t mind hearing spirits every now and then, and feeling instinctively one way or another about a person, although she distrusted herself incredibly after what had happened in Kyoto. The images which came to her mind next, though, holding Ansgar’s hand, were incredibly specific. Too specific for her to believe, and yet…

Ansgar, or what must have been Ansgar, young and then growing older, and then suddenly, from the Baltic Sea rose up a great, wet dragon, bending down to devour him in one bite, but he fought back, and then ran, and ran, and ran. And as he ran she saw herself, too, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Agostino, then the last moments of that last earthly fight, captured as if in choreography on the stage of a ballet and modern dance company. A struggle, and finally he was vanquished, and she pulled from beneath his ribs a great red silk cloth. She held it in the air and it rippled in the wind; she let it go and it flew over hills and trees, and mountains, and a great dark sea, until it blew into a tiny, gritty, lit-up place in the dead of night where Ansgar sat, curled around a glass of indifferent bourbon. The silk licked the skin behind his ear and he turned as if to see someone, but no one was there.

“Tali,” he said, quietly, and then she saw herself, running and hiding through the faraway forest like a scared animal, then crouching by the sea, joined by Ken.

Time passed, and Tali saw the sun and the moon rise and set, and at midsummer she could see the whole world and everything in it, lit up bright as noon.

Ken’s wasted body, silent and grey in his bed. Tali sitting beside, crying quietly.

She looked up, watching out the window at the sea. “Ansgar,” she said, quietly.

The suddenly, she and Ansgar were in Japan. And something she could not quite make out: another battle ballet, but this time Nils at its center, surrounded by silent uniformed men with cloth covering their faces. They struggled, and the last thing she saw aws Nils’s terrified face as they closed in around him.

She looked down and saw blood on her hands, and then felt it being washed away by a warm salt wave. The ocean, carrying her guilt away, the diluted crimson blood running down her lifeline, off her palm, and into the water. With another rush of water all the blood was gone, and Ansgar stood beside her, smiling and holding out his hand.

And then she woke up. Suddenly. Haru had touched her shoulder, asking if she were all right. She saw Ansgar’s peaceful face resting on her hand, a trail of salted tears running from his eyes and pooling in her palm.

“Yes, ah… Just dozed off a little…” And she had come out here to the deck to gather her thoughts, and to hopefully gather a little bit of oxygen into her lungs.

Three more deep breaths and Ansgar came to the door, stepping out beside her.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I m-might have asked you the, the same,” he said. “In f-fact, that’s why I’ve come out. You look… ah..pale, Tali. Shaken.”

She turned to him, reaching up to gently touch his bearded cheek with her wet palm. “Did you… see things?”

He nodded slightly. “You?”

“Yes,” she said, then paused. She took a deep breath. “I don’t believe in that.”

“I don’t either,” he said, and then he was quiet, the only sound the wind and the distant gentle waves.

SHe laughed then, looking over at him, and he laughed, too. The sound of it was incandescent; she felt as if some very old and leaden things were breaking up and floating away, up through their throats and out of their mouths and up into the air, to be released forever.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.

She turned to him again, taking both his hands in hers. “Ansgar…”

“Wh-what is it?”

“What did you do to Nils?”

[lavinianicholai-deactivated2018]

[martinssonconstruction-deactiva]

@natalianunziata1

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction

“I-I-I agree,” said Ansgar. “W-we d-do need to tell him. T-tonight, per-perhaps.”

“After your first treatment, maybe?”

He nodded, guiding Tali to step in front of him on the narrow boardwalk. He kept his hand on her shoulder, ostensibly for affection, in reality for his own balance. “If-if-if I do it.”

Tali stopped and turned to face him. “You’ll do it.” It wasn’t a demand, or a nag, or a command, it was a mere statement of fact. “You’ll let him treat you.”

Ansgar frowned. In spite of his deep liking for the man, in spite of the near feeling of kinship, of a burgeoning trust, of brotherhood in ideas and ambition and outlook he shared with Haru, even in that short time – he was chary of the treatment. Doubtful of what he still felt was nothing more than hocus-pocus, smoke and mirrors, chants and charlatanism. Wary of the idea of something other than western medicine, something unproven by and far beyond his trusted and beloved science.

Deeper than that, he was fearful that his lifelong sense of skepticism, his deeply ingrained logic, his pride in his rationality - yet another thing that made Ansgar Ansgar would be shattered by the pure magical spirituality of Haru’s practice.

That is, if it worked.

“Yes. D-don’t w-worry. I’ll do it,” Ansgar acquiesced. But what he didn’t say was, “but only because you arranged it… because I trust you, because I love you, because I’d do anything for you simply because you ask it of me.”

Tali nodded, satisfied. She took his hand in hers and led him the rest of the way down the boardwalk, until Ansgar’s brightly polished shoes sunk in the soft, quiet sand of the beach. She sidled up beside him and wound her arm in his once again, stepping slowly toward the water’s edge. He knew she did it to steady him, to keep him from losing his equilibrium as he was so wont to do of late, to keep him from falling arse over teakettle in the uncertain footing of the sandy beach. But she’d never say so, she’d never let on, and he loved her all the more for it.

She stopped just before the sand turned from dry to tidal wet, from light, pinkish tan in the sunrise to a darker khaki. She looked up at Ansgar expectantly, yet with no sense of pushing or prodding. She simply waited for him. Waited for him to give his agreed upon offering. Waited for Ansgar to let go, to say goodbye to his friend.

Ansgar, for his own, merely watched the sunrise. He breathed calmly, letting the warmth of the newborn sun wash over his skin, envelop and stir beneath the fabric of Kenjiro’s work. He’d insisted upon wearing the suit, even out on the beach that morning. Knew he had to. Knew… in an odd way, that he could feel his friend’s strangely tight and exuberant embrace even more keenly if he’d worn the suit.

He dropped Tali’s arm and wound his arms around himself, gripping his biceps tightly beneath his fingers. Taking a deep, nasal breath, he spoke.

“I th-think I l-loved him,” he said, swallowing.

Tali rest her hand on his forearm. “Of course you did. He was your friend.”

“N-no, it w-was more than-than t-that,” Ansgar sniffed, shifting his eyes quickly to Tali and back, his teeth worrying over his bottom lip.

She cocked her head, blinking in confusion. “Tell me.”

Ansgar chuckled mirthlessly, sadly, sighed, and continued. “I n-never told another s-soul t-this, not any-anyone; and pr-probably never will ag-again.”

“It’s okay,” Tali smiled. “You don’t have to….”

“B-but I d-do, you see, because I-I need to n-now. I n-need to tell him how-how… that I-I get it… that he….”

“Then tell me,” she said, calmly. “Just tell me. Tell him.”

He breathed again. “I let him kiss me once,” he said, clearly. “Really k-kiss me. And… I l-liked it.”

Tali smiled. “Oh, is that all?” she teased.

“T-Tali,” Ansgar moaned. “P-please. It’s n-not f-funny.”

She nodded equably. “No, it isn’t. Go on. I’m sorry.”

And so Ansgar did. He recounted to her in slow, halting speech, his hands tucked protectively into his pockets. At the heightened moments, at the moments of the deepest emotion, he spoke and gestured openly, with almost perfect clarity, as if Kenjiro had somehow given him the strength he needed to speak, so say the things he needed to say.

He told Tali about the time five years prior. About the phone call Ken had received at Ansgar’s flat, postprandial; half-soused on the single malt whisky and XO brandy they’d drunk to Ken’s triumph at Milan fashion week.

About how the caller was none other than the American president, Barack Obama – not the President’s people, not his aides, but the man himself – asking for an appointment, asking Kenjiro to fly, expense-paid, to Washington. The President had asked, rather shyly for such a powerful man, for Kenjiro to make a bespoke tuxedo for him and a gown for Michelle for an upcoming state dinner to honor the Prime Minister of Japan.

About how Ansgar had leaned forward onto his knees, watching with rapt attention, a shit-eating, laughing, prideful grin on his face. He’d watched, studied his friend’s mobile, expressive countenance as Ken, fighting a starstruck, slightly tipsy, nervous fluster, fielded the request with aplomb. Ken thanked the President graciously, and, with the promise to see the man in two weeks, ended the call. He told about how Kenjiro had slowly set his phone down and stared, glassy eyed, slack-jawed, and utterly gobsmacked at Ansgar.

About how, a second later, he’d felt the icy wet of spilt whisky on his trouser leg. How there was a sudden and pleasurable weight pushing him back into the sofa cushions. How he’d tasted in his mouth the heady black truffle and warm spice flavors of the Cognac – a spirit he hadn’t even touched that evening.

“He k-kissed me. A l-long and r-rather p-passionate kiss.” Ansgar smiled wistfully. “And I l-let him. I en-encouraged him, I m-might even have held-held him by-by his h-head and-and k-kissed him b-back.”

Tali’s eyes widened.

He chuckled. “Well, I was and h-he w-was… we-we were b-both a lit-little drunk, and it was b-before I was m-married and I was-was j-just so th-thrilled for him and….”

“It didn’t go any further, though,” said Tali.

Ansgar shook his head, almost ruefully, almost – he realized with a jolt… regretfully. “No,” he said. “K-Ken was m-mortified, but-but-but I t-told him it was okay. He-he-he got up and lef-left, though. I ask-ask-asked him not to leave, pr-practically b-begged him to s-stay. I d-didn’t see h-him for a few d-days after-after that. When I-when I s-saw him again, it was as if it n-never h-happened.”

“And that… hurt you?”

He shrugged. “A little, maybe. But I th-think he k-knew I could never g-give him what he w-wanted, and he knew he could never b-be what I w-wanted.”

“And you remained friends after that?”

He nodded, reaching for Tali’s hand and winding his fingers in hers. “Our f-friendship was st-stronger after that, I th-think. I didn’t know it th-then, but I think I under-understand it b-better now.”

“What is it you understand?”

“Wh-what love is. Th-that I loved him, m-maybe not in a ro-romantic or sex-sex-sexual sense, but he was m-more than my bus-business assoc-associate. He was im-important to m-me and m-mattered to me and I would have d-done anything for h-him. I d-didn’t know what that was before, didn’t r-really f-feel it, but I d-do-do I do now.” Ansgar blinked, lifted his eyes to the sky, and chewed his upper lip against the wash of tears that threatened to overflow.

Tali curled herself around him and rest her head on his shoulder. Her hands stroked him, rubbing warm circles on the broad expanse of his back. She said nothing for a long while, but simply held him. She allowed Ansgar to mourn, let him bask in the release of his confession… his offering, the secret he’d set free.

He listened quietly to the sussurus of the sea and the voice of the dawn wind. She loved him, comforted him while he struggled with his tears, while his breaths came hard and ragged in his chest - until, at last, he quieted, until his breathing stilled, until his body relaxed.

“I’m r-ready n-now, Tali,” he said thickly, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head.

“Ready for what?”

“For Haru. For Ken’s s-son to-to h-heal me.”

“What makes you so eager all of a sudden?”

“It’s-it’s what K-Ken wants.” Ansgar smiled and stroked Tali’s dark, silky hair. “I h-heard him j-just now.. not so much d-dir-directly,” he said. “Ken… he… told m-me, in my-my mind… to t-trust the m-man. T-told me that H-Haru is… is t-truly his s-son.”

Tali grinned. “I knew you’d hear him if we came down here.”

“I st-still don’t be-believe in ghosts you-you-you know,” he groused.

“Ken’s not a ghost,” Tali said. “He’s a living part of us. That’s what you heard, not the voice of any sort of spirit or apparition, or otherworldly being.” She rest her hand on his chest. “You heard the echo of him within you, what your heart knows he’d say, right here. That’s what you heard.”

“T-take me back, p-please, T-Tali,” he whispered, gesturing to the cottages with a tip of his head. “W-walk with me, and give me o-over to H-Haru. I’m r-ready.”

Tali held Ansgar’s arm, supporting him without being too overt about it. She imagined his pride to be hurting over his lingering convalescence. For herself, she hated depending on someone when she had a one-day stomach bug, so she could only understand the frustration. And after such an opening of his soul to her, it was no wonder he felt a bit emptied out. She felt shaky, too, to be so close to his raw soul. Tali of only a few years ago would never have thought such a thing possible. She held his arm more tightly now, pressing a kiss to his lightly stubbled cheek.

The air smelled strongly of pine and the boards of the steps creaked as she and Ansgar walked up to the back deck of the cabin, overlooking the sea. Through the plate glass window Tali saw Haru, dressed simply in black t-shirt and loose-fitting pants, preparing a massage table and a stack of towels.

He looked up and smiled when they walked in.

“Good morning!” he said. “Early morning.” He motioned for Ansgar to sit in a chair beside him, and as she prepared tea in the next room Tali heard him asking questions about his range of motion, speech and energy difficulties, and circumstances leading up to his injury. She heard him ask Ansgar to prepare, removing all clothing and covering up with a towel. 

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” said Haru.

Tali came in with the hot tea. “How are you doing, champ?” she asked, warm and teasing.

“I’m well,” said Ansgar, slowly but clearly.

“Do you want me to go? Or to stay? I can do whatever you’d rather,” she said, petting his hair.

“Hand me the towel,” Ansgar said.

Tali brought it to him, and he caught her hand beneath it.

“Stay,” he said, simply.

Haru appeared. “I thought Reiki would be a good way to start. I am at level two, as I have been studying for quite some time with a teacher.” He guided Ansgar slowly to the table, where he la For this first session, we will move slowly through the steps. First I attune myself to your energy, to open the channels to healing, You can participate as well. Open your mind and body to let out the negative kinds of energy, and let in the flowing, healing energy.”

Ansgar knit his brow and took a deep breath.

Haru passed his hands over Ansgar, pausing to touch fingertip and thumb to a few key junctions: shoulder and neck, hip and waist. The place where breath turns to sound at the throat. And there, quite suddenly, Haru jumped back.

“Are y-you all...right?” said Ansgar, looking up.

“Yes, it’s just that... well, I’ve never felt a locus of stored... energy like that, before. It... it nearly burned.”

“I tth- I think I know what it w-was,” said Ansgar, nodding briefly at Tali, who nodded, and stood, and left him with Haru.

“Feel free to put words to it if you would like,” said Haru. “If such is your wish. The option is yours.”

Haru laid a warm hand gently across Ansgar’s throat. “The throat is connected with all communication,” he said.

“Oh, n-no, it’s an, an injury,” he said.

“You’ve been learning much more to listen,” said Haru. “And now you have much more to say, as well. So much that it’s bunching up here in your throat.” He lay his hands across Ansgar’s collarbone and throat, now. “Think of the ocean; the blue water. A clear, calm day. Not so cloudy as today.”

Ansgar closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.

Haru massaged the tense flesh of his shoulders and neck, encouraging him to hum along with his discomfort or relaxation. “Natural, as it happens,” he said. “Now, if an image comes, you must simply look at it, place it into a book as if it is a photograph. One after the other, until nothing else comes.”

“Hmm,” said Ansgar.

“At this point sometimes we lose track of time just a bit. Do you hear the second hand ticking, Mr. Martinsson?”

Tick...tick...tick...tick

“Mr. Martinsson?”

Tick...tick

“Mr. Martinsson?” the sound came as pleading, in a boy’s voice. Ansgar reached out his hand to open the door, to see who was calling. He opened the door and before him was the green valley outside the family’s chalet. Snow-capped mountains ringed the early spring scene, and Ansgar looked at his hands, soft and unlined. He was quite young again; eight? Or perhaps more like twelve?

The tick of his aunt’s cuckoo clock in the hallway kept time, and suddenly Ansgar felt as if he were floating free.

“Mr. Martinsson is not in right now,” he heard his child-voice say to the boy, who was delivering something wrapped in brown paper. “May I help you instead?”

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction

Ansgar watched Tali’s odd exchange with the waiter and the bartender with rapt interest. He couldn’t hear the majority of their conversation, only snippets, the odd word or two here and there, but from what he had gleaned he’d surmised that Tali somehow connected one or the other of the two young men with Ken.

And from the way the waiter moved, from the grace and strength of his shoulders, the twist of his waist, the powerful stance of his long, lean legs, he understood why. He understood exactly why, as the very sight of the man brought back a flood of memories.

“You are far too thin, Ansgar,” Kenjiro had chided, somehow able to speak clearly in spite of the constant waves of his graceful movements, in spite of the wide spray of parti-colored pins held between his lips. “You work much too hard. Around, please.” He’d pushed casually at Ansgar’s shoulder, forcing his friend to turn. He’d whipped open the measuring tape like a rhythmic dancer with a ribbon, only to quiet, to still to no movement at all as he read the number of the length of Ansgar’s arm.

“Ken, come off it. I’m fine.”

“No! You don’t eat enough. Around, please.” Turn. Whip. Place. Pause. Measure. “You exercise far far too much. Around again, please.” Turn. Whip. Measure. Hum. Clear throat. Glare. Growl. “Look. Just look at this. Your waist is a good five centimeters thinner than the last time I fitted you.” He had thrown his hands up in the air, irritated, and lowered them back to his hips, arms held at a beautifully angled akimbo. “Eat, or you will waste away to nothing.”

“Better for your business, my friend,” Ansgar had grinned, peering down at the man as he bent to measure Ansgar’s thighs. “The thinner I get, the more I’ll need you to make me new suits to fit.”

“I do not create for skeletons,” Kenjiro had said, a haughty tone to his voice. He’d stood, tipped his head back, poked Ansgar in the chest with a long, slender finger, and gave him a narrowed, minatory eye. “You keep this up, Tony Vaccarello can dress you. He goes for that manorexic look. Not me.”

Ansgar pushed himself out of the tight booth and strolled casually over to where Tali and the two men were conversing, a third man having come in. He heard the man’s name, Haru, at the same time he noticed Tali’s face. She was staring in amazement at the new man, her eyes wide, her mouth hung slightly open.

And no wonder.

The man was the absolute spit of Kenjiro, from the thick, spiky-soft hair, to the long, slender nose to the full, pouty lips. He was Kenjiro from the wide-set large dark eyes, the heavy eyebrows and the broad, flat planes of the man’s cheekbones. Like Kenjiro, Haru was almost feminine in his aspect, save for the sharp cut of his jaw and the thickness of his neck. Like Kenjiro, he was beautiful.

A beauty even Ansgar could appreciate.

But before Ansgar could speak, before he even realized that he, like Tali, was staring at the man, the man himself was staring, his expression almost… what… starstruck? at him.

“I know you,” Haru said in perfect, lightly-accented English.

Ansgar responded in kind, in English. “You d-do? I don’t think w-we’ve ever m-met before.”

Haru’s face flickered with an inscrutable expression, one of an almost blinking confusion. “You… you are Ansgar Martinsson, right? The Swedish architect?”

Tali’s gaze flicked between Haru and Ansgar. “That’s him,” she said. “How do you know him?”

Haru stepped closer to Ansgar, peering up at him with a curious expression. An expression that sent a frisson of recognition down Ansgar’s spine, as if he’d seen a ghost, as if he’d somehow traveled back in time and met a younger version of his departed friend.

“I don’t know him personally,” Haru said to Tali, but then directed his attention back to Ansgar. “I’m sorry. We’ve never met, but I have watched your TED talk on humanistic engineering a great number of times. You did that what… about three years ago?”

Ansgar’s lips quirked into a small smile. He nodded. “Almost ex-exactly three y-years ago.”

Haru tipped his head in a small bow, palming his chest. “You see, I am a student of human movement. Your talk on how buildings and spaces should be designed around the way the human body moves and behaves… well, it fascinated me. Still fascinates me. Your ideas,” Haru smiled, shaking his head. “They’re brilliant.”

Ansgar opened his mouth to speak, but Haru interrupted, holding out his hand. “Oh. How rude of me,” he said, bowing more formally. “I am Haru Agaki. It is a pleasure to meet you, Martinsson-san.”

Ansgar echoed Haru’s bow and gripped the man’s hand. “And you as-as w-well, Agaki-s-san.”

Haru straightened, but kept Ansgar’s hand firmly in his grip. Haru eyed him, cock-headed and narrow-eyed in that unsettling manner that Ansgar instantly recognized as yet another sign of Kenjiro’s stamp upon this man who could very well be his get.

“P-pardon m-me, but… you still h-have my hand.” Ansgar’s spine tingled in a flare of mingled confusion and a rising ire at the man’s increasingly impertinent stare. He pulled slightly on his hand, flaring his fingers, but Haru kept a tight hold. “Unless this is a J-Japanese c-custom of which I’m-I’m n-not aware.”

“You sound different,” Haru said, factually. There was no judgment in the man’s words, no pity, no questioning, just a flat statement. “Something’s happened to you. Your speech. It’s wrong.”

“I h-had an… an ac-accident.” Ansgar pulled his hand finally out of Haru’s grip, and curled his fingers into a fist at his side. “A-about two w-weeks ago, in K-Kyoto.”

“Kyoto?” Asahi appeared just behind Haru, resting a hand on his lover’s shoulder. He whispered something, low and quiet in rapid Japanese to Haru, his eyes flicking up to Ansgar at the end of his murmur. “That was him,” he finished in English.

“That was you,” Haru’s eyes went wide and he pointed at Ansgar. “In the news. There was an attempt on your life, yes? Another Swedish man was arrested. They said… they said you’d nearly died, that you’d suffocated. That had you been in there a moment longer it would have been murder. That was you, wasn’t it?”

Ansgar blinked, his gaze shifting rapidly between Haru and Asahi, and then over to Tali. His breath caught, and he shook with fear and a wave of rage. “That w-was in-in-in t-the… n-news? J-Jesus Christ, T-Tali, w-why didn’t you t-tell m-me?” His stammer worsened with the spike of his anger, his face contorted in his struggle to spit words out through a twisted cloud of panic. “D-do you r-realize… w-what this c-could d-do to m-me, t-to-to… my-my-my b-business if w-word is-is-is out?”

“Ansgar, I had no idea!” Tali shook her head, her palms open in a gesture of innocent ignorance. She placed her hands on his chest “I’ve been just as cloistered as you have. I haven’t seen or heard anything of it!”

“Oh, don’t worry Martinsson-san,” Haru smiled, resting a comforting hand on Ansgar’s upper arm. “You weren’t mentioned by name, and I doubt it made any news beyond the shores of Kyoto anyway. Asahi here knew it was you because he has a cousin who’s in the police service down there. All they said was that one Swedish tourist was nearly killed by another down on the docks, and Asahi just put two and two together so to speak.”

“Are y-you s-sure?” Ansgar tamped down his anger, swallowing hard, nearly exhausted with the effort of speech. He sighed at Haru’s nod of his head, at his warm, genuine smile. A smile that, once again, brought the image of Kenjiro Takahashi to Ansgar’s mind.

“Martinsson-san,” Haru lifted his hands in near supplication into the space between himself and Ansgar, curled his fingers back and pointed with relaxed index fingers at Ansgar’s throat. “May I?”

Ansgar’s own hand went to his neck. “May y-you w-what?”

Haru smiled, clasped his hands together, and gestured fluidly as he spoke. “I mentioned to you that I was a student of the human body. I teach movement. I study the martial arts. I teach dance, poise, posture to the likes of Asahi here,” he jerked his head in an endearing yet deprecating manner toward his lover. “But I am also a student and practitioner of the healing arts.”

Ansgar squinted and crossed his arms defensively over his chest. “W-what, I d-don’t… what h-healing arts?”

“Shiatsu, Reiki, Jin Shin Jyutsu, just to name a few.”

“What h-has that to d-do with m-me?”

“Your trauma has left you injured,” Haru stepped forward and wrapped his hand around Ansgar’s left wrist. With gentle pulls, he took control of Ansgar’s arm, turning the hand over. Gracefully, Haru ghosted his fingertips over the Mound of Venus just beneath Ansgar’s thumb, and then reached up and drew his index finger slowly, almost sensually down the line of Ansgar’s throat. “It left you with blockages, restrictions in the flow of energy around your body.” He closed his eyes, flattened his hand, and rest his palm, warm and soothing atop the exposed skin just at the collar, just at the base of  Ansgar’s neck. “Hm. Yes. Here, the throat chakra. I can feel it.”

“There’s n-no bl-blockages. Y-you feel n-nothing.” Ansgar tensed, stepping back away from Haru’s unsettling touch, brushing his hand brusquely away. “It’s n-not my d-damn energy or chakras or w-what-whatever. It’s b-brain damage. That’s w-what it is,” he clipped.

Haru’s eyes shot open and he regarded Ansgar with a direct stare. “Did you have an MRI?”

“Of course. I h-had t-two.” Ansgar blinked, confused. “W-why?”

“The doctors. Could they see the damage? Was there a hemorrhage evident on the film?  Reduced blood flow to Broca’s area? Any signal loss on a functional scan?”

“N-no,” Ansgar said, slowly, skeptically. “I j-just st-started talking like this after t-the… the… the acc-accident.”

“Then perhaps it is not brain damage,” Haru grinned, looking like the cat that ate the cream. “Perhaps it’s your ki. You have suffered damage, yes, but what if it is not to your brain? What if it’s the energy that comes from your brain? The control over your speech muscles, the flow of ki from your mind, through your body, and back up to your throat and tongue? That, I know how to fix.”

“What… what are you saying?” Tali stepped closer and stared intently at Haru. “Are you saying you can help him?”

“Maybe I can,” he shrugged. “I would be most honored if you would let me try.

Everything was done above board, of course: contracts, rates, days off, expectations of communication. Nice clean signatures. Two seaside cottages stuck on the slick black rock higher up in the hills. Time to… reconfigure, and time to catch one’s breath.

Tali could not believe the resemblance between this man and Kenjiro, in the smallest things even more than in the exact placement of features, although the features belied what she considered to be his very likely parentage.

Carrying sheafs of paper back and forth from the bed and breakfast to Haru’s flat, Tali felt a bit of her old self again: taking care of things. Taking care of business. She engaged Haru for a period of three months, at maximum, and for four days a week, with the understanding that new arrangements might supplant this original agreement as Ansgar’s progress became more evident, or…

Tali could barely allow herself to think it --

...or not evident.

Would she still love him the same, this quiet, stammering version of himself? And in only half a second more she knew the answer: Absolutely yes. The intensity that always burned like gas flame beneath a pot of boiling water, turning to vapor above: that intensity was still there, yes, to be sure, but… somehow even more intense. Magnified. As if his brush with death had only honed the blade of his mind to an even sharper edge.

Which was why Haru’s assistance was so desperately needed. With that much to express, Ansgar needed every faculty he could possibly access. Tali knew there were more great things to come from him. And given his recent change in perspective, who knows what uncharted waters he might set out into.

The ocean was grey-green again, a color it seemed to love, and Tali hugged herself tightly at the top of the wooden steps that wound their way to the boardwalk and down to the sand. She and Ansgar had had trouble settling on what would be the best way to honor Ken and scatter his ashes. Into the sea, here in Matsushima Bay, was all he had said. That part was easy enough.

But letting go? That was something else entirely.

Eventually they had settled on a day apiece, and then a day together. At dawn each time, they would go together to the water. First, Tali insisted, Ansgar should share his memories and put something of him to rest, whether tangible or no. Then Tali and her own token. Then together on the third day they would scatter the ashes, and finally, let him go.

Ansgar was late coming down this morning, the first morning; they had agreed on a pre-dawn time so they could watch the first glimmer of sunrise as they walked toward the sand. Tali was also hoping for a quiet moment when she could speak to Ansgar about when and whether to speak to Haru about what was becoming increasingly probable: that he was Kenjiro’s son. There were so many questions: was he, truly, Ken’s son? Might they have him submit to a test to determine genetic similarity? Would he do it?

And further, questions of Haru himself and what would be best for him. What had he been told about his father, if anything? Was his mother living, still? What were her feelings about Ken?

Tali knew very little of him. He and Ansgar had spoken late into the evening hours in the sitting room of their bed and breakfast room, gesturing and building, idea upon idea, Haru’s admiration for Ansgar’s ideas gushing forth, and Ansgar catching that energy and bending it back to animate Haru further in his own efforts. Tali watched it through the cracked bedroom door; she lay resting, worn out from the heat, and she saw Ansgar’s talent for inspiring others to be at their best. She had always felt this with him, but muddled as it was with her intense, heated physical desire for him, layered with her psychological attraction to him and bordered sometimes on obsession, she was never sure of its universality. But here is was. A normal garden-variety narcissist would have sat back, drinking in the praise like fine sake, but instead Ansgar engaged with it and held it up like a mirror, reflecting back to the giver how much more he himself could achieve.

Tali knew also that Haru seemed to attract everyone to him, and he flirted with men and women as they crossed his path: the kind of benign flirting that gets a slightly better table by the ocean view, or a complimentary upgrade if one certain clerk is working the desk that night. Tali felt it, too; a kind of reaching-out energy, taking the pulse of the nearest people, the entire room.

The city. The world.

Haru was expansive like Ansgar, and their conversation built upon itself until she could no longer keep her eyes open.

Finally Ansgar appeared. He said nothing, but walked toward her, holding his arm out for her to take his elbow, a gesture that meant more now that he was very occasionally unsteady on his feet. Tali knew better than to mention such a thing, though. She only gave him a reassuring squeeze.

Down the first set of steps, Tali drew in a breath to broach the subject of Telling Haru. Ansgar spoke first, though, as if he had heard her concern on the wind.

“He asked me about my suit,” he said, the words laden with meaning.

“You mean, your Takahashi?”

“Of course, it… y-yes,” he said, gently. “I uh, ha-had it hung up on the door, to brush it it, to b-brush it out. He stopped, and ran his finger down the lines of the jacket; spoke quietly. “No one could cut a suit like Ken.”

Ansgar cleared his throat, emotion crowding his words.

“Ha-Haru felt a connect… a connection to it. To that b-beautiful work.”

“Hmm.”

“And do you know what he said?”

“What?”

“‘This suit looks like it moves, right with you. As if it is an extension of yourself.’”

They walked for a moment in silence.

“Ken was like that,” Tali said.

“He was n-nothing short of a.. Um, he w-was a genius,” said Ansgar.

Tali laced her fingers with his. “I think he deserves to know, before we scatter the ashes,” said Tali. “I feel that we should tell Haru in case he wants to be involved, or wants a bit of time with his father.”

Ansgar nodded slowly, and opened his mouth to speak.

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction

Life.

He felt it, knew it, and it filled him. It flowed from her, from her mind down her heart, through her limbs, and into him. It radiated, like beams of light from her hands, her eyes, her open mouth. her soft flesh that pillowed, that energized and warmed his own.  

He’d nearly lost his. Nearly lost something more important than that… his ability to live, his reason to live. Yes, he was alive. Yes, he had Tali to thank for that, for rescuing him in the nick of time before a lack of oxygen, death, and Nils Lundgren could have teamed up to topple his king in an eternal and quite permanent checkmate.

But being alive and truly living are two different things, or so he’d learned.

So, yes, Tali gave him his life. But she also gave him something to live for.

And just then it wasn’t as if she were making love to him. Well, she was, but it wasn’t as simple as that. She was imbuing him with her strength, her power, her love. She resuscitated him. Breathed into him. Brought him back from the brink and filled him with life-giving pleasure, a sybaritic symbiosis.

And all these thoughts flitted through his mind, but nowhere near the forefront. Most of these ideas he only knew in the form of pure feeling, in raw emotion - not reason, for at that moment there had been no room for reason. No room for an understanding or a realization of what truly was happening.

For all of his being, for those few moments, was centered upon his cock. Upon her flesh.

“Tali!” he whisper-shouted, the noise like a seal’s bark in his throat. His throat which constricted, not painfully, but tight. Tight as the rest of his body, so overwhelmed and overtaken as it was in Tali, in her softness, in her breasts, in her mouth on his.

With a massive splash that echoed through the small chamber, Ansgar lifted his hips and stood in the water, rising from it like the phoenix out of the fire. He took Tali with him as he erupted, his flame burning inside of her. He cried out again, the sound guttural, choked and desperate. He clutched at her, his arms clamping her tight to him, fingers digging into her soft flesh as he pulsed, grunted, pulsed, moaned, pulsed again, sighed, and finally, finally, lowered himself, with Tali, back into the welcoming, warm water.

His hands loosened, and he could feel her suck in a breath, heavy and fast against him. “I held you t-too roughly,” he said. “Didn’t mean to h-hurt you.”

Tali sighed, melting over him, unsure of where she ended and he began or where they ended and the water began. “You didn’t hurt me,” she said.

He palmed the sides of her head, lifting her to face him. His eyes roved over her face, glistening as it was with sweat and water, flushed with sex, loose and sated as it was. He worked his hands over her, framing her face, pushing her hair back, unable to stop touching her. “Christ, T-Tali,” he whispered, “I love you.”

She pushed forward and brushed her lips against his. “And I love you,” she said. “I think I always have.”

He gave her a sad smile. “So much w-wasted time,” he said. “So much time we were apart, so much t-time I wasted in my marriage, if only we’d… if we had… I only w-wish….”

She rest her fingers on his lips, silencing him. “Ssh,” she said. “There’s no sense lamenting the past, Ansgar. Not when there’s so much future to look forward to.”

He huffed a laugh, his smile becoming more genuine. “I can’t b-believe we’re talking about the f-future and that future with us t-together,” he said. “I’d have… never thought it would be possible.”

“Why not?” She cocked her head.

He rolled over, turning her on to her back and tenting his body over hers, his hands resting on the ledge just on the inside of the pool. “Because of who you w-were and who I w-was. You, an assass-ss-ss… f-fuck!”

“An assassin,” she chuckled. “I was an assassin. Don’t worry. We’ll work on that word, but I’m not sure if you’ll ever need to use it again.”

He growled playfully. “Well, a woman who sold f-fine automobiles and killed people for a living, and who also happened to be in p-possession of one wicked vendetta,” he poked her in the side. “And a man, cold as brass balls, who sh-shunned emotion, hated the w-world, and despised the very idea of love.”

“And here we are now,” Tali said triumphantly, her eyes shining, nose haughtily in the air.

“J-just look at us. You’re such a different w-woman than that frightened child you once were, all under my thumb; and I’m n-not at all the man I once….” His face fell, all happiness, all glee sloughed away as if he’d been splashed in the face with a bucket of cold, slimy gruel. “I’m not the m-man I once was.”

Tali shook her head, her eyes gone soft. She palmed his cheek, running the ball of her thumb over the ridge of his beard. “No, you’re not,” she said. “You’re a better man.”

* * * * *

Ansgar had finally relented, admitted that he might be better in his present incarnation than he was in his last. The humility of thinking he was in some way insufficient, somehow not quite good enough -- that was reason enough to believe he was no longer that old version of himself, haughty and cold. Tali teased him and tried to convince him of this, and he only wrapped his arm around her wet neck and kissed her, smiling as he did so.

They walked together up the tiled stairs from the baths, each one trying to encourage the other to be careful, don’t slip and then laughing at their clucking, motherly manner toward each other.

In the morning the sun rose and cast a hot, orange glow over the shore. Ansgar and Tali walked arm in arm along the sand at the water’s edge, cold and wet.

“Y-you may have been right,” he said.

“Oh? I’m surprised you would admit it. Of course I was right.”

Ansgar smiled.

“About what?” Tali said.

“That I’m a better man now,” he said. “Or at least I might be.”

“What do you mean?” She held his arm more tightly.

“It has... has...h-has to do with loss,” he said. “L-losing something that mattered to me.

“So maybe that time wasn’t wasted, then? That time in a marriage?”

His brow darkened. “T-Tali, did you ever deeply love? Before, I mean? Did you ever think, this is the en...end of the line form... for me? Did you ever think you had met t-the person who was... it for you?”

She stopped, looking at him, the wind blowing her hair, still dyed dark black, over her face slightly. “I honestly don’t know, Ansgar. Which probably means no.” She turned and began walking again. "Why do you ask?”

“I loved like a... prodigal,” he said savagely, though with a slow and deliberate meter. “I thought I could take... take it all and it would never b-be lost to me, Ta-Tali. I loved her like someone who does not bel-believe he will ever be alone-ah alone again.”

“Hmm.” Tali squeezed his arm.

“When she disa-disappeared, I...”

The beach fell into a hush, the cawing pair of crows flown high into the scrubby pines and out of earshot.

“I discovered I was m-mortal.”

He held his hand out in front of him, gripping and stretching his fingers out, touching the bandage with the tip of his finger.

“Mere m-mortal flesh.”

“What makes you think of this?” said Tali.

“Taka... Tak... Ken’s son,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. I... T-Tali, I believe I have a kind of con-conviction about this, which I may never have have hav- which I may never have had before. A conviction, I mean.”

She smiled. ‘What is it?”

“We have to find him,” Ansgar said, his speech strangely clear for just a moment. “I be-believe Ken left me the collector goods so that I c-could make it right. He knew I w-would have no real use for the items, and that th-the limitations of customs and inter... national auctions might cause me to hesi... hesitate, and so...”

“The only thing to do is find him, and restore Takahashi’s collection to his heir?”

Ansgar placed his warm hand on hers. “Exa..That is it, ex-exactly. Tali, you understand.”

*  *  *  *  *

Saturday was warm, and luridly bright. The tourist area of the beach was crowded, and Tali held her hat to her head as she looked around in despair for a place to sit. She had cajoled Ansgar to the public seaside for a chance to catch the ferry, and walk the small red bridge to the little island, Fukuurajima.

“This is terrible,” she said allowed, frowning and pushing a fist to her hip.

“You look like Sophia Lo-Loren when you do that, my Tali,” said Ansgar. “Wild and I-Italian.” He grinned.

“Like a wild Italian Stallion?” Tali teased, pulling the hood of Ansgar’s jacket up over his head.

He frowned, raising his fists to shadowbox at her, the gauze over his knuckles completing the picture.

“You are perfect,” she said lazily, reaching inside his hood to ruffle his hair.

Away-Away from here, then, my d-darling Tali,” he said. “Away and up to the city, and le-let’s eat a bit and then come back to... to the seasigh... sea... back. down. here. later?”

“Agreed,” she said.

“You’re so se-sexy when you’re angry, Ms. Loren,” said Ansgar.

Tali glared. “I’m about to get sexier if I don’t get something to eat, and very soon.”

* * * * *

The tea house was small, and while the grouping of the tables was intimate, with almost no sight line to any other table while a patron was seated at their own table, it still felt bright and airy, without the dank claustrophobic feeling that some of the tiny restaurants had.

Tea and bowls of soup that they sipped straight from the earthenware. A spread of sushi a bit too large for their appetites, but there were no regrets. The menu was mainly for tourists, it looked like, but the food was good. Tali was feeling good. Sated, finally, after the repast and three nights in a row of the most athletic fucking a girl could desire. He was somehow even more magnetic in his broken state, the strength upwelling in him and bursting forward, galloping like horses in a romance novel. He left her blank, in the best way, but this morning the old twist in her gut was back. The feeling of having something that needed doing.

“Enough idle time,” said Tali, half to herself, fanning herself with the laminated list of sake.

“What?”

“Sorry, was just thinking I think I need something to do. I’ve had enough idle time.” She sat back, sipping from the tiny ceramic wine cup.

He nodded. “Me, t-too,” he said. “Wh-What is there, here?”

“Well, we could always get ourselves fighting fit again,” she said, grinning.

“Or go to the sh-shooting range,” he said. “Might ah... might take a little doing to fi-find a good one, here.”

Tali glanced toward the bar as two waiters passed one another, dishes balanced on their hands. One turned summarily to the side while the other spun, nearly twirled, so gracefully, it caught Tali’s eye.

Just like Ken, she said, recalling the singular grace with which the tailor had moved about his own apartments, workshop, and studio, quiet and deliberate and yet with a weightless quality that never let go, not even at the very end.

But this... this could not be Ken’s own son, this close to Matsushima, this coincidentally present at this exact restaurant.

She saw the waiter laugh, joking with the bartender and flipping two sets of chopsticks in the air, catching them in his apron pocket.

Still, there was something about this man...

“Tali!” Ansgar’s voice broke through her reverie. “Are you... are you still here with me, Tali?”

“I’ll be right back,” she said, dropping her purse to the seat beside her and striding to the bar, her eyes trained on the graceful waiter.

“Excuse me,” said Tali. “Do you by any chance speak English?”

“Of course,” he said, his voice smooth. “Do you speak Japanese?”

Tali’s face grew hot. “Not really,” she said. “I hadn’t... I didn’t have time to learn. I’m here unexpectedly. In a way.”

His eyebrows danced upwards and the bartender laughed.

“A campari for you, miss?” said the bartender, deftly pouring a glass and pushing it across the bar to you. “You are Italian, I am right?”

“Sora, you are not always right,” said the man. “You must forgive our dreadful manners. I am Asahi.” He held out his hand. Tali shook it. “Can we help you?”

“I’m not sure,” said Tali. “In fact, I’m not sure at all what I was going to say to you if I came over... that is, if I...” Tali suddenly felt that this impulse had been a terrible one.

“Aww,” said Sora. “Don’t feel bad, miss. The ladies all love Asahi, but his heart is with another man.”

Asahi grinned.

“Look at him,” said Sora. “Together three years with Haru and still smiling in this way. Better luck next time, eh?”

“I’m looking for an orphan,” she blurted.

“An orphan?” both Asahi and Sora said at once.

“Yes. Well, he’s recently an orphan, but he may not know he is one. In fact he probably doesn’t know. He’s the son of my... associate, who has recently passed away, and we’re at loose ends just a bit, you see, trying to find the trail. Trying to find where to look for him. And I saw you, Asahi, I saw you spin around the other servers, just there, and something in it reminded me of... of his father. But he was taken from his father much too early, lost track of him. His father tried to find him, but no dice.”

“What was it about him?” said Sora, wiping the smooth varnished pine of the bar.

“About whom?”

“About Asahi,” he said. “Why did he catch your eye, do you think?”

“A centered grace,’ said Tali. “A quiet kind of carefulness, but with joy in life as well.”

Asahi laughed. “Well, I’m not an orphan, by a long shot,” he said. “I’ve got two sets of parents, thanks to breakup when I was just a baby, and two remarriages, and half siblings from here to the moon.”

‘Ah,” said Tali. “Ah, no, I understand. I apologize. I... maybe it’s the heat. Could be that I am losing my mind a bit. Have a lovely--”

“But what you say about quiet carefulness, that reminds me so much of my dancing teacher.”

“Here we go,” said Sora.

“What? I’m sorry,” said Tali. "What was that?”

Sora rolled his eyes and smiled, teasing Asahi. “His dancing teacher,” he said. “His movement teacher. The love of his lift, et cetera and so on.”

“Funny enough, he never knew his father, either,” said Asahi, untying his apron and throwing it over his shoulder. “But I don’t think his father is dead.”

A gust of wind blew gently through the small restaurant as the front door opened.

“Love of your life come to take you home,” said Sora. “Have a good afternoon.”

“I will, and you do the same as well, Miss...”

“Nunziata,” said Tali.

“Miss Nunziata, meet Haru,” said Asahi, gesturing over Tali’s shoulder.

She wheeled around and found herself looking directly into the eyes of Kenjiro Takahashi.

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction

She came closer.

He’d watched her, tipping his head and resting his palm against the cool glass. He followed her with his gaze, the outline and shape of her, until she disappeared altogether beneath the curved tiled portico.

And then he sat back. He moaned with the thought of her. The anticipation of her. It’d been so long, it seemed. Two weeks only, yes. But two weeks with the knowledge of her presence beside him.

Two weeks with the patchouli scent of her hair in his nose when she curled beside him in his hospital bed, the curve of her breasts against his chest, the glow in her eyes when she spoke to him – her sad, yet propitious smile when he stammered feebly back.

Two weeks.

Two weeks and he was ready for her. Healthy enough for her.

Groaning, he pressed the heel of his hand into his sex. He breathed raggedly. His eyes slid shut and his head lolled back. He waited. Waited for the key in the door, the click of the latch, her footfalls, the touch of her lips on his….

But instead, his phone buzzed. He flickered his eyes open, lifted his head slowly, and reached across the small expanse from the window seat to the bed, scooping up his phone.

Hot baths in the basement.

Yes, he texted back. Exactly what I need. Down in 5.

***

Her hair was damp, some stuck to her skin, the rest was tied in a messy knot on the top of her head. He could see her through the small oval window in the teak door. Her back was to him, and the sight of her, wet and naked, made his throat constrict, made his already hard cock twitch beneath the red satin robe. She was beautiful. Pure grace and sensuality from the glow of her skin to the line and curve of her long neck; the cut of her jawline, her strong shoulders, to her long arms stretched out on the cobbled, dark, steaming stones that bordered the indoor natural hot spring.

He pushed open the door and stepped quietly through, stopping only to pull the shade closed, to lock the latch, thankful that he and Tali were the only guests in the house that night.

Still silent, he set the royal blue, white-flowered yukata he’d brought for Tali on a slatted teak table. Tali, hearing him, turned in the pale Alice-blue water and leaned on the edge. Like the cat that would eat the cream, she grinned at him, comely and inviting as she rest on the wet cobbles, her head cocked upon her folded arms.

“Brought you a robe,” he said, indicating. His speech remained flat and torpid, but was surprisingly smooth - dark and gravelly in tone.

“Thank you,” she replied. “Did you get some rest?”

“I did,” he nodded, tugging one-handed at the knot in his robe. “You? Did you speak with Ken?”

Tali laughed. “That’s a loaded question, my love, seeing how I know full well you don’t believe in such a thing. Besides, you only suggested it so you could get rid of me for a while.”

“Bite your tongue, woman,” he chortled, his brow knit in mock consternation. “I’d never do that.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “You needed some time to yourself. I get that about you.”

“I really did think you c-could maybe talk to him, Tali. After all, it’s K-Ken,” he shrugged, cringing at the return of the slight stammer. “He always defied logic, no matter how steadf-fastly I t-tried to apply it.”

“Then, yes,” she smiled. “I did speak with him. You’re right. He’s not only quite magical, but he’s wise.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“He told me,” she paused, swallowing, her expression morphing from one of mild amusement to a fierce hunger, “that you, Ansgar, are my heart and my soul; and that I am yours.”

Ansgar’s eyes narrowed to happy slits, lighting up his smile - a slow, knowing grin. “You s-see? That’s another thing about K-Kenjiro Takahashi,” he said. “The man always spoke the truth.”

They both went silent in the knowledge of their mutual understanding, their truth. Their forever and immediate desires. Ansgar moved first. Keeping his eyes on her, he slowly, deliberately shucked his covering, exposing himself to her, giving himself to her. He held his robe reverently, turned and rest the cascade of red satin beside and slightly atop her shimmering blue one, as if in a symbolic prelude to their own bodies, soon to be similarly entwined.

“Come here,” Tali commanded, gesturing to a place beside her in the calm, warm, briny water. “Join me. Sato-san told me the water has healing powers. Maybe it’ll be good for your hand. You should be able to soak it now.”

“He t-told me it’s powers were more along the lines of an-an aphrodisiac,” Ansgar smirked, stepping across the flat, gray flagstones toward her.

“Maybe they’re both. Come in and find out.” She stood up, the water cascading from her breasts and down her flat stomach. Holding her hands out to him, she guided him into the square pool. She turned herself over, floating down beside him as he submerged himself up to his neck.

“Oh, C-Christ, that’s wonderful,” he moaned wantonly. “Feels like the inside of a womb.” He closed his eyes and rest his head back, sighing with relief, with comfort, with the knowledge of safety, security with her in his arms.

“Ansgar,” Tali whispered, her voice sensually raspy. She floated atop him, her flesh, warm and wet, pressed against the length of his, one hand at his chest, the other cupped at edge of his jaw.

“Yes, d-darling?” He opened his eyes, lifted his head, and regarded her. His tongue snaked out to whet his lips, his teeth scraped along the sensitive skin.

“Kiss me.”

“Oh, believe me,” Ansgar rumbled, wrapping his arm tight around her, clutching her closer to him, his good hand clasped around her slick, round arse. “I’ll d-do more than just kiss you.”

With his teasing promise, the angst of their recent travel and of the terror in Kyoto fell away and Tali felt the electricity in Ansgar’s fingertips as he grazed them lightly on her waist under the water.

She pressed a kiss to his warm, wet neck, droplets falling from the ends of his curls onto her nose and cheeks. She wanted to call out to him, to say something to him. Words, which usually fell easily in the first few forms of seduction, were frozen on her lips, and all she could think of was the same simple mantra over and over:

I... want... you...

She craved him, the warmth of his flesh and his smooth touch, his rough touch.

She reached down, palming his hardened length, shuddering slightly at the feel of it, thick and full, pulsing slightly beneath her hand. He gasped slightly and smiled, purring a low, leonine sound into her throat as he crushed his lips to her neck, scraping rough stubble down to her collarbone, which he dropped light kisses to, right on the water’s level.

She hooked a leg around his waist and in that moment he pulled her closely to him, sliding two fingers inside her and curling them slightly, pressing slow circles with his thumb. She laughed out loud, a peal of desire, met and answered, and her hips jerked and thrust into him as he worked carefully and quickly. he gripped his arms, her head falling forward onto his shoulder, her breath fast and heavy.

“Let go for me, darling Tali,” he said, and the tender sound of his warm voice sent a spasm through Tali’s belly, sharpening her craving for him. He stroked more softly now, and she guided his hand deeper into her, kissing him now, full and beautiful, opening herself to him completely.

He sped his hand subtly and she rolled her hips to meet him.

“Love… your… rhythm…” she said, her eyes closed. She leaned back, resting her elbows on the warm stone beneath her on the inner ledge of the pool, letting a low, steady moan from her throat as she thrust harder against his quick touch.

And suddenly she slipped just over the edge of her pleasure, gasping as it opened out beneath her, dark blue and gaping, and she fell into it, pulses beating through her entire body. Ansgar came forward, resting his body on hers, and Tali reached down, quickly guiding him into her and waiting a moment, luxuriating in the feel of him sliding all the way in, her own pleasure still tensing tightly around him. She gripped him carefully then, with ankle and one hand gently beneath his head and flipped him over, riding him slowly, winding her fingers into his wet hair.

“T-Tali…” he said, smiling. “Mmm… what are...wh-what are you doing now…”

She leaned close to his ear. “I’m fucking you, like you just fucked me,” she said, pronouncing every sound slowly, teasing his ear with her tongue and gripping handfuls of his hair more tightly as she moved suddenly, sliding up and down his length quickly, gripping his back, laughing as her breasts bounced in his face. “Is this all right, then?”

He opened his mouth to speak but only moaned, digging his fingertips into the soft flesh at her waist.

“I want you to come fast and hard,” she said, kissing him forcefully. “I want you to come… inside me… god, I want you… want you to...” And his own movements met hers until there was nothing in the world but the slide of her skin on his, the pleasurable pinch of his fingernails digging into her skin, the swollen, dark red of his lips,painted with arousal, so warm and vital.

I’ll fuck you back to life, she thought, but did not say, unwilling to call up an unwelcome image or thought in Ansgar’s mind, but she rode the crescendo, gasping, feeling again as if she were pulling him bodily from death, wrestling him away from the jaws of the monster that… dear god, that damn dear got him.

“I… love…. Oh… ahhhh…” she lost articulation of her words as another wave of orgasm hit her, and she looked down at him, his eyes dark, his mouth loose, on the very edge of letting go.

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction

Tali had done all the talking.

She’d quietly given the cab driver the address of their B&B, and handed the woman her credit card, taking care of the payment at the end of the short ride.

She’d deftly handled all of the communication with the owner of the seaside rooming house, from the selection of their room to the business of checking in, to the obtaining of the keys, to the ordering of breakfast, to the seeking of advice about where to find the most picturesque views of the Bay.

She’d exchanged all of the small talk with the bellman. She’d been the one who thanked him, who’d smiled, bowed and shut the door to their room.

And all the while Ansgar had remained uncharacteristically, and painfully – silent.

The stress of those last few hours of travel, the throbbing pain in his right hand, the muzzy dizziness from the pain medication he’d finally given in and taken, and his lingering brain injury had all mixed up in a shaker and decanted themselves down his throat. It was a bitter decoction, coating his mind to smother out his fire, to exhaust him utterly.

It had all left him disgustingly weak, spent, blank. It had, in his mind, wrenched from him all of his greatest, most trusted weapons, those things that made Ansgar Ansgar – his crisp articulation, his outward wit, his authority, his gravitas.

And he despised it. Despised himself, despised what he’d become - fragile as a kitten, a sleepy, stammering idiot, a shade of what he had been.

And for all that, he despised Nils Lundgren most of all.

Tali had pressed her hand to his face, rubbing her thumb along the edge of his beard, her eyes soft, loving, as she gazed up at him. And yet, there was that unmistakable brushstroke of pity painted upon her expression.

Pity. Sorrow. Regret.

Loathsome, all of it.

And while he’d appeared outwardly tame, while he’d closed his eyes and smiled and tilted his head into her touch, while he’d said, haltingly, to her, “Go… on, love. I’ll be… be fine,” his heart had hardened with thoughts of revenge; his mind had become a churning, black ocean, needing a bastion, a sea wall to buffet, splash, and beat against….

… and to destroy.

And so, he watched out the window as Tali strode across the walkway down to the rocky beach, as she stopped, her hand lifted to her brow to shade her eyes from the brightness of the setting sun, as she peered to the north and then to the south, finally deciding upon a direction. He kept his eyes on her for a moment longer before peering down at his phone, pressing a number on speed dial and lifting the device to his ear.

“Jonas,” Ansgar said. “It’s m-me.”

“Sir? Is that you?”

“Yes,” he replied tersely. “Who else would… call you on… this line?”

“Of course, sir. What can I do for you, sir?”

“N-Nils Lundgren.” Ansgar lowered himself slowly to sit on the edge of the window seat, his eyes still on Tali. Tali, who had perched herself on a massive, flat rock, curled her legs in a lotus position beneath her.  She sat facing the quiet ocean, her back straight, her hands in a serene jnana mudra, one on each knee.

Finding Kenjiro. At peace.

He wished he was. At peace.

Wished he could talk to his friend just one more time.

It took Ansgar a frustratingly long time to instruct his man on what he’d wanted – to ensure that Nils Lundgren would be released from the Kyoto prison, that he would be given an all-expense paid, first-class, private-jet trip back to his family home in Malmo. That he would be given every comfort, every need, every want, during his journey.

To make Lundgren believe that someone had helped him escape prosecution in a foreign prison, someone had helped him get away with attempted murder…

… and that the someone was a generous, anonymous benefactor. Someone who, it would be communicated to him, had similar inclinations of contempt towards one Ansgar Martinsson.

Which, at that time, was quite true.

“I will get right on it, sir,” Jonas said. “And sir?”

“Y-yes,” Ansgar clipped, eyes closed, leaning his throbbing head against the cool glass of the window, lifting his bandaged hand to apply pressure to the spot between his eyes.

“It’s very good to hear your voice. Very good to hear that you’re… alive. We’d heard about your close shave. We hope you recover soon.”

Ansgar smiled, too exhausted to ask just exactly how Jonas and the rest of his security staff had heard about the attempt on his life, his near-miss, his current condition, but then… they were the best in the business. The very best. They were the best and they were his. “T-thank you, Jonas,” he said, sighing. “Just do as I… as I say. Do it n-now.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else, Herr Martinsson?”

“Yes. I’ll send you t-those orders via our s-secure server.”

“Very good, sir.”

Ansgar hung up the phone and let it, along with his hand, fall limply to his lap. He sat there, back against the narrow window wall and breathed, fighting the vertigo, fighting the pull of sleep, the temptation to take the few steps across the small room and collapse down onto the simple bed, to submit to another bout of darkness, of nightmares of drowning.

And he’d won that round, groaning as he opened his eyes, lifted his phone, and once again, dialed, leaving the phone on speaker.

“M-Magnus,” Ansgar said, his voice choked, the fatigue making him hoarse, worsening his hesitancy, amplifying the deplorable, unpredictable stammer.

“Yes. This is Detektiv Magnus Martinsson,” his brother said. “Who’s calling?”

Ansgar cringed. Not once in their lives, not once did Magnus not recognize Ansgar’s voice down the phone line. Not once.

Until then.

“It’s… your… brother, you idiot,” Ansgar enunciated carefully, trying desperately to hold back the damnable stutter. “Calling you from… from beautiful… J-Japan.”

“Sgar?” Ansgar could hear the concern in his brother’s voice, and rightly so, he thought. “What’s wrong? You don’t sound right. You drunk or something?”

Ansgar laughed, bending forward, leaning his elbows on his knees. “Not… drunk, just t-tired. Hell I… I wish I was drunk, then I’d know this sh-shit would pass.”

“What would pass?” Magnus’ voice took on a dark tone, near to anger, a tone Ansgar knew all too well. “What happened, Sgar? Talk to me. You don’t sound right.”

“I’ll be fine… just some temporary damage, I’m –”

“Damage? What sort of damage? Sgar… you’d better tell me. Don’t hold anything back for fuck’s sake. What happened to you?”

“B-brain damage,” Ansgar hated saying the words, hated even admitting it to anyone, let alone his brother. “Was deprived of oxygen for –”

“Shit! Oxygen?! What?!” Magnus nearly bellowed down the phone. “What… wait, hold on, I’m going to close my door and… wait, don’t hang up. Just….” There was the noise of a phone being put down, the sound of a scuffle of steps, the slam of a door, and then Magnus was back on the line. “The fuck happened, Sgar?”

And so, Ansgar told him. Told him everything… about finding Tali again, about Kenjiro’s death, about the will. About accompanying Tali to Kyoto, about realizing his feelings for her, about losing her, about finding her in the rock garden. He told Magnus about nearly suffocating to death inside of a sealed, air-tight container, sans oxygen. He told Magnus about the hospital, about his hand, about the surgery, and finally… about the remnant motor-neuronic effects of his near-death experience.

“I can… barely speak, Mags,” Ansgar felt his anger rise. His irritation with his condition, his burbling fury at the man who’d caused it made speech all that more difficult, his rhythm more halting. “My thoughts c-come f-faster than I can say them now. I c-can’t seem to talk for long without the inter-interruption of a fucking s-stutter, and I’m sleeping almost con-constantly.”

“Will you get better though?”

“I’m g-getting better already. It was worse before. They say… I’ll improve,” he sighed. “With time.”

“Who did it?” Magnus said, menacingly. “What’s the name? ‘Tell me.”

“Now you get to the heart of my call, b-brother,” Ansgar stood, ran his uninjured hand through his hair, and crossed to the bed, sitting down on the edge of it, cradling his bandaged right hand against his chest.

“Who. Tell me.”

“Nils Lundgren.” Ansgar seemed to have no difficulty in saying that name, ingrained as it was in his mind, in his psyche. “I’m flying him home to Malmo. He’ll arrive in about t-t-two d-days.”

“Say the word, Sgar, and I’ll pick him up at the airport. I’ll take care of him from this end.”

“D-don’t get yourself in… in trouble,” Ansgar said, half-heartedly, knowing full well it would have no impact whatsoever on Magnus’ next course of action. “No blood. Leave no marks. Don’t kill him.”

“I wouldn’t kill him anyway. Could lose my job for that.”

“That’s why I said d-don’t kill him. Besides, d-death is t-t-too easy for him.”

“You want a more lasting sort of pain, eh, man? That sort of pain?”

Ansgar stood again and paced the small room like a caged lion, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, pounding out his increasing agitation, his excitement, his near-sexual desire for revenge. His voice broke, rising in pitch and volume, completely outside the bounds of his usual, regulated control.

Raving.

“I want him in agony. I w-want him s-scared out of his fucking wits! I want t-torture. Haunt him. I want him to - to - to fear for his f-fucking life. I want him never t-t-to relax again. I want him to-to see me in his m-mind every waking m-moment, I –.”

“Is there one of your Takahashi suits in your place down here?” Magnus interrupted.

Ansgar grinned. Magnus, as always, had read his mind. Even thousands of miles away, the man just knew. Knew exactly what he needed.

“Yes,” he breathed.

“You still have your beard?”

“Y-yes. You?”

“I do. Good. I’ll be you, then. Or at least I’ll let him see my face in different places a few times before I swoop in and arrest him.”

“Don’t just… arrest him, ja? I have other things in m-mind… will h-handle on my end. I’ll ruin him… d-d-destroy him. I want s-slow pain… to last l-long. I’ll… lay waste to - to his c-career, his f-family, his entire f-fucking… fucking life!”

There was a stunned, yet expectant silence on the other end of the line. The only sounds were that of Ansgar’s own heavy, desperate breathing, his chest heaving from the increasing struggle to speak, his mad ranting, his surging rage, accompanied by a ringing in his ears, the thrum of his blood through his veins.

“He… tried to k-kill me,” Ansgar said quieter, finding his calm, a modicum of restraint. “He m-murdered me, Mags. Took away my… my voice. He f-fucked with me. Me… of all p-people. Fucked with.. m-me!”

“I’ve got it, Sgar,” Magnus said quietly. “Consider it done.”

“Thank you,” Ansgar sighed.

“Don’t thank me,” Magnus replied evenly, dangerously. “There’s nothing to thank me for. It’s a given, man. Nobody fucks with the Martinssons and gets away with it. This bastard, this Lundgren? He most definitely will not get away with it.”

“No, he won’t.” Ansgar sat back on the bed, and collapsed backwards, lying on the mattress, his legs dangling over the edge. “Keep me… in the loop. Jonas will be in contact w-with you. I want to know… every-everything.”

“You going to be okay, man?” Magnus asked. “I’m worried about you. When will you come home?”

“Ja, I w-will. Need to take care of something f-first.”

“Come to my place. You and Tali. Fly into Malmo,” Magnus instructed. “We’ll take care of you, Bec and me, until you’re better.”

Ansgar inhaled hard through his nose, fighting the urge to snap, to chide, to rail at his brother, to outright reject the prospect of his and his wife’s concern, their fawning, their doting, their… pity. “I’ll be fine, Mags, I s-swear. It’s not as b-bad when I’m n-not so fucking tired. Been traveling. I just… need some s-sleep, that’s-s-s all,” he assured his brother. “But I thank you for… the offer.”

“Well,” Magnus said. “Just come home soon.”

“Ja.” Ansgar turned his head and peered out the window. It had gone darker outside. A yellowish red-blue white glow glimmered off the surface of the bay, illuminating the silhouette of Tali as she navigated the rocks and the stone path back toward their bed and breakfast.

He smiled, suddenly aroused, suddenly wanting her, energized anew by the very thought of her, by the very thought of a plan in place… the workings of his revenge. “I will. I p-promise.”

@natalianunziata1 @detektivmartinsson

@martinssonconstruction

Meeting Kenjiro on the beach was like meeting with him in person again, so tangible was he on the humid, pine-soaked air, blowing in from the water. The glow of the moon shone on the water in patches, slopping back and forth with the waves.

Tali didn’t believe in hearing from the great beyond, no, nothing like that, but she heard Kenjiro in an internal way, the way she heard people speaking in dreams, the way she knew what Ken would say before he even drew breath to say it.

My Tali, you’re so smart.

And he would pat the back of her hand, and she would feel the odd sensation of approval -- a distinctly male approval, with no strings attached.

Kind of like him, said Ken.

Who, Ansgar?

Yes, Tali. I’ve been pushing you together for months. And now you can see that I was right.

And then he laughed in that boyish way.

Hush, said Tali, and then she looked down, crying and laughing at the same time. Why did you love me so much? Why did you come to me with your proposal? You could have secured your inheritance with anyone. You could have married a man you loved, Ken. You could have made a watertight will with anyone. Why me?

You’re an orphan, Tali. And in a way you have always been. Do you feel the truth in this?

Hmm.

The wind whipped up. Tali stood from her resting position and walked to the water’s edge, pushing her toes in. Cool and salty, the briny water curled around her cold, damp feet, and her dark hair blew over her face.

What was I to you, Kenjiro?

What are you to him, Tali?

She dove into the waves, clean and straight as a knife. The word around her ears with the little salty bubbles:

Family.

***

Out of the water and back up on the shore, warmer breeze now. She saw the glow of the room window up above, an outline of Ansgar. Not resting but watching the water.

A wish, warm and snaking up from the tender spot just above her navel, sliding down, flickering upwards, lighting up her tits like shorting, sparking Christmas lights, the sudden thrum and flow of her desire for him, damming up behind her skin, now, all this time apart from his warm body, spare and built, lean and thick at the same time. Away from the beat beat beat of his fucking heart, racing with the rush of her fucking him, the wide eyes. The moment as he lets go, just before he pounds and spills inside her, gasping, his fine, sharp cheekbones between her flat palms.

Hot baths in the basement, she texted. Sliding into the hot salt pool, she waited, stretching legs and arms wide, watching the dancing reflections of backlit water on the plastered ceiling of the B&B basement. She closed her eyes, her senses focusing only on him, floors above her.

Him, closer.

[martinssonconstruction-deactiva]

@natalianunziata1

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction 

Water.

He was swimming in it, or rather, floating within it, beneath it, for he couldn’t move. It was warm, comforting, and he knew this… this delicious nothingness to his body. He was cradled, held, and yet, there was something wrong about it.

He couldn’t see, the water was dark. Couldn’t taste, his mouth was sealed shut. Couldn’t hear anything but the quiet sussurus of the water around him, washing back and forth to the beat of his heart, to the rise and fall of his chest, to his breath –

– his breath.

That was it. He was under water, deep in the sea, and yet, he breathed. But the breaths weren’t right. He wasn’t taking air into his lungs, rather, he drew water deep into his chest, and expelled as if natural it back into the saline sea.

And the knowledge of it, the strangeness of it, the sheer lack of logic of it shattered Ansgar’s calm. Panic set in. He thrashed his arms and legs, desperate to find the surface, to push himself back into the air, to right what he knew was wrong.

And as he swam upwards, as he reached what he finally saw was the sky above the sea, he heard voices. He heard voices, unfamiliar ones and one voice… one voice… and that voice drew him towards it… drew him up up up!

Tali’s voice.

“When will we know?” Tali’s voice cut through the shallow water, the words barely discernible to his ears.

“When he wakes,” another voice came, the words clearer. “We don’t know how long he went without oxygen, and we don’t know the extent of damage to his brain.”

Damage to my brain… what the hell? My brain’s not damaged.

Ansgar tread just below the water line, feeling the cool air above as, in his movements, his fingers momentarily breached the surface.

“Doctor!” Tali shouted. “Come back! I… I think he’s coming around. His hand - he moved his fingers!”

Ansgar reached up, that time with purpose, and once again his fingers broke the surface. And that time, when he did so, he felt a hand grasp his. A familiar hand. A woman’s hand.

Tali’s hand.

He moaned, feeling the water burble within his throat.

“Ansgar?”

Another hand cupped the back of his head, lifting him out of the protection, out of the embrace of the water. He turned his head and coughed violently, but no water came from his lungs. Only air.

And it was then that he realized that he’d not been swimming at all. That he’d not been buried beneath leagues and leagues of water after all. He realized that, in truth, he’d been dreaming. He’d been sleeping.

Not sleeping. In a coma.

Christ. What the hell happened?

“Ansgar Gregor Martinsson,” Tali’s accent thickened, as did her voice in her concern, in her desperation. “Ansgar, wake up. Wake up.”

“Martinsson-san,” the male voice spoke softly on his other side, less demanding than Tali’s, but irritating, like a mosquito buzzing in his ear. He felt a sharp rap on his chest and a rubbing - painful, the skin and muscle being pinched sharply between knuckle and sternum. “Martinsson-san, open your eyes, please.”

He’d forgotten he’d had eyes. Forgotten that he could see. And when the doctor, or whoever it was, reminded him of it, those eyes of his suddenly flickered to life in his brain, in his awareness – a bright, white heat seeped through his closed lids, painful in and of itself.

Ah… hell. I’d rather have the darkness, thank you very much.

“Open your eyes, Martinsson-san.”

What? Are you insane? Turn off the fucking light first.

Ansgar moaned, lifting his hand weakly to push the offending knuckle away. “S-stop that. N-n-no,” he murmured. “Too…too b-bright.”

“Turn that damn light off,” Tali commanded, and then turned back to Ansgar, pressing her hand to the side of his face. “Ansgar? Can you hear me?”

He nodded weakly, sighing in a modicum of relief as the room dimmed around him. “Y-yes,” he whispered.

“Ask him who you are,” the doctor said. “Ask him your name.”

“Ansgar, who am I?” Tali’s voice trembled, as did her hand on his face. “Can you say my name?”

“I… can,” Ansgar murmured. “Are you… asking me… t-to do so?”

Tali laughed, and the sound of it was a balm to his scattered, frightened mind. He felt her hand brush over the curve of his head, her fingers coursing through his hair. “Say my name. Please.”

He inhaled deeply, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth, working up enough saliva to speak. “N-Natalia Maria Antonina Gius-Guiseppa N-Nunziata.”

“Very good, Martinsson-san. That’s very good,” the doctor praised, but Ansgar didn’t hear it. His entire focus was upon his lips. His lips which Tali had captured with hers. He felt her laughter, her relief; he could feel the silent words “I love you,” against his lips, and, poking his tongue up, he tasted the warm saline of her tears.

“Is… that right?” Ansgar smiled. “Y-you don’t… go by… T-Takahashi.”

“That is so right,” Tali breathed, her thumb stroking the edge of his beard, just beneath the plastic cannula. She paused her movement, gripping his head tighter. “Can you…,” she chuckled, “would you please open your eyes. Look at me?”

He turned his head toward her, smiled, and flickered his eyelids.

“Do you see me?”

“B-Blurry,” Ansgar said, swallowing hard. “But… yes. Beautiful.”

The doctor’s face swam into his view - a long, tan oval topped with a blob of black above a rectangle of white bisected by a triangle of blue. And then there was a nitrile-gloved thumb pressing his eyelid back, not gently, mind, and a bright light in his eye.

“Aah! F-fuck!” Ansgar whined.

“It will only be a moment, Martinsson-san,” the doctor said soothingly, repeating the process with his other eye. “Just need to check your pupils…and… there. Done.”

The doctor, a young man by the name of Dr. Yashimoto, Ansgar had come to learn, gave Ansgar a few sips of water and proceeded through a thorough physical exam, under Ansgar’s near constant complaints.

Through it, Ansgar learned that he’d all but flayed his right hand open, that the damage would require surgery – and that they still were not sure if he’d caused any damage to his brain.

“Time will tell,” Yashimoto had told him.

“But I d-don’t feel… at all… brain damaged,” Ansgar protested.

“We haven’t gotten you up and walking yet,” Yashimoto countered. “And we’ll need to run some tests as soon as you’re more awake.”

“But you pricked…th-the hell out of m-my legs and I felt those just fine. Moved when you s-said to move.”

The doctor pat Ansgar genially on the knee, and flashed a wary smile toward Tali. “Don’t celebrate your recovery yet, Martinsson-san. You suffered from a prolonged anoxia, went for a long time without any oxygen to your brain. You were cyanotic and near death when you were brought in. I don’t mean to frighten you or cause you any anxiety, but you need to know the truth.”

Ansgar nodded.

“Rest, now,” Dr. Yashimoto said, mildly, resting his hand on the door jamb. “I’ll be back to check on you in the morning.”

“Morning?” Ansgar queried. “How long was-was-was I –?”

Tali’s lips quirked back in a grimace. “Two days,” she said, gathering her hair into a ponytail. She sat back down in the seat beside Ansgar’s bed. “It’s been two days.”

“What…?” He squeezed his eyes shut and flashed them open, blinking wildly as he struggled to bring her face into focus. “H-how….”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Tali cooed, taking his hand in hers.

He was too tired to argue. “Mmkay,” he said, agreeably. “Tali?”

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m s-sorry.”

“For what?”

“Not… waiting f-for you. I should never have… g-gone without you.”

She smiled wanly, letting her breath out her nose as she lifted his hand to her cheek, pressing herself against his skin. “So, you do remember?”

He nodded, cringing, a small moan rumbling in his throat. “Unf-f-fortunately, yes.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“No,” he shook his head. “Not yet. I…I can’t.” He turned his head to her, his eyes fixed upon hers. “T-Tell me… tell me this, though,” he whispered.

“Anything.”

“Did you… did you f-find me?”

She smiled, blinking, her nose flaring in an attempt to keep her tears at bay. “I did.”

“I knew you would.” He sighed. “My… m-mind tried to tell me otherwise, tried to trick me…. but I knew, you see, m-my heart. It… it knew… it felt you. Knew you’d c-come.”

“And I did.”

“Of course, m-my love… you did.

Green plains stretched out, broad and wet, dotted with clustered houses. The Haruka train from Kyoto through Japan and up to Matsushima slipped quietly through the midmorning, through 9am and 10am. Tali sat up straight, feeling her back settle into the first class seat, relishing the weight of Ansgar’s sleeping head on her shoulder.

He slept a lot now, or had been for the past week and a half. Now he spent longer and longer periods in wakefulness, though often just a bit slower than before. His brain was just as quick as before, if not quicker, sharpened as it was now against the whetstone of his frustration, but he tired easily and would fall quickly asleep like a toddler. Ansgar hated it, but Tali found it secretly endearing, and relished times like these when he dozed in the daylight, leaning on her. Needing her.

Tali could have bought tickets for the Shinkansen, but opted instead, obtusely, for the slower option, feeling somehow by instinct that she would need the time and space to throw off the madness of Kyoto.

Ansgar shifted and sighed, his shoulder twitching. He still had not told her all the details of how he came to be trapped in the shipping container, although Nils had raved on about enough of it that she had been able to piece it together. A trap was laid, and Ansgar slowly -- so slowly, walked into it, and one small error had almost cost him his life.

A quick hush fell over the train car as the windows darkened. The train rushed through a shaded forest for a few kilometers. She thought of last night, when she had finally told Ansgar all about what Nils had done, at his razor-sharp insistence that she finally tell him, god damn it, and so she lay next to him in the flat, crunchy bed in the rehab wing of the hospital and stared up at the dotted ceiling tiles, recounting the bizarre encounter outside the hotel, and everything else since then.

“You helped me figure him out,” she said. “I would have eventually known he was insane, but the unlocked phone gave me the upper hand in the conversation. I knew almost instantly that something was very, very wrong.”

“You have good instincts,” he said, slowly, pronouncing every word. “You’d have figured him out without me.”

“Ansgar, I don’t want to do anything else here without you.”

He was silent.

“You get discharged tomorrow,” she said.

He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m so tired of hospitals,” he said. “I’m so tired of this town.”

She laughed. “It’s hardly a town.”

“We’ve still to settle about the contents of the container, and contact both my lawyers in Stockholm and see if their partners can come up from Tokyo, and--”

Tali laid her hand on his arm. “Can the container wait?” she said. “I’ve locked it securely and referred the issue to Ken’s team. I don’t doubt the integrity of the rest of them. I truly do think Nils was acting alone. Of course if you have any reservations, I’ll change my course.”

“That sounds wise, Tali, although I’d like to look into things a little more deeply when we return.”

“My thoughts exactly,” she said.

Ansgar grinned.

“What?” asked Tali.

“Are you angry that I’d never suffocate a man to death in a Cave of Wonders just to get you to notice me?” He laughed a low giggle.

“Cave of Wonders?” she said, giggling now herself the tension of the past days melting and flowing out in improbable laughter.

“Did he think you would forget all about me? That you could be bought for a vodka tonic at the hotel bar? Who is this man? Had you even talked to him before, except over a conference table?”

“Once or twice,” Tali had said, feeling Ansgar’s body tense beside her. His lips were thin and drawn, pressed together. A deep line wrinkled his forehead between his eyebrows, always the sign of heavy and often unpleasant thought.

But he said nothing more.

In the morning, he had acquiesced with relief to her suggestion that they go to Matsushima, say their goodbyes to Ken, and see if they could find a trail to Ken’s son, or an old family member who might be kindly disposed toward them. They would of course say nothing about any money or inheritance, but to tie up loose ends.

Tali thought Ansgar hated loose ends even more than she did, although he could tolerate them easily for the sake of a deal, waiting for the right moment to wrap things up. Even stranger that he had gone out impulsively that night, alone. What was driving him forward, she wondered.

What happened that night, she wondered even more.

In Tokyo, they had to switch trains. They left their car and walked up and down the platform a bit, Tali taking Ansgar’s arm.

“I feel like he’s here,” she said.

“Ken?” said Ansgar.

“Well, yes, in a way,” she said. “I feel sometimes that he is always around. In the breeze or something. But I mean his son. I feel that we will find him, somehow. I feel there is a resolution waiting.”

“Hmm,” said Ansgar. “Maybe you should go,” he said.

“What?”

“Tonight, when we get to the B&B. You should go down to the bay and see if you can hear him. Ken. In the breeze.”

Tali narrowed her eyes. “Are you making fun of me, Ansgar Martinsson? Because if you are, I have a few things that I can te--”

“No,” he said. “Not at all, Tali.” He stopped, cradling her forearms lightly in his palms.

“We’re going together,” she said. “We’re scattering the ashes together. I won’t do that alone. In a weird way I feel that Ken brought us back into each other’s orbit again, and we should both be there to say goodbye to him. You knew him much longer than I did.”

“And I will be there, for that,” said Ansgar. “But you were his wife. Such as it was. You had a bond with him. You should have that time with him.”

Tali thought of Ken’s orders, in his will. His refusal of a wake. No time to sit and let it sink in that he was gone. Turned to dust and ash right away, it seemed.

Ansgar’s idea wasn’t bad.

She agreed, taking his arm again, and they strolled to the train to Matsushima. He paused at the stairs up into their car, guiding Tali by the small of her back up the steps. As soon as she had agreed to leave him alone for an hour or two to pay her respects, a spring came back in his step. A kind of purpose in his motion.

Tali knew he needed to do something he could only do alone, and she knew better than to press him for details. She let Ansgar be Ansgar, and he always gave her full latitude to be everything she was: chaotic, messy, passionate. And sometimes as cold as steel.

She slipped her hand into his and laced her fingers together with his own. He pressed his warm palm to hers, squeezing.

I’m here, the gesture seemed to say. And I’m not going anywhere.

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction 

It’s a right difficult thing to strategize, to apply logic to a problem, when you can’t even breathe.

Ansgar found himself on hands and knees, his face pressed up against the bulkhead of the container, his hand dripping blood, the pain shooting up his arm to meet with the agony in his chest. Christ, but it it hurt. Burned. Felt as if his body were going to burst wide open under the pressure, or the lack thereof.

But then, it was soon over.

***

He’d managed to think straight enough in those first few panicked moments to shed his coat, ball it up and wad it hard against the rear of the filter’s output fan in an attempt to block its ability to process the air, to suck the life-sustaining oxygen from his air supply.

But the thin wool, quite sadly, had been terribly permeable to the air. It had stalled the process, but did not stop it altogether. The fan still drew air, still weeded out the oxygen, still fed carbon dioxide back in.

Slowly, slowly… killing him.

Ansgar had thought about death while he worked. He’d wondered exactly what he’d feel as his body succumbed to the poisonous gas, to the lack of the one atmospheric element his fragile brain needed to survive.

Would he know it if he’d died? Would he feel it? Would it hurt?

Would Tali mourn?

He’d seen films, read books, where characters were caught in such a situation as he was now in. His very own oubliette, to to speak. He’d called to mind Radames in Aida; Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum; Game of Thrones – Xaro, the King of Qarth – Khaleesi entombing him alive in his own empty vault; and Robert Langdon, the erudite hero who had toppled over an entire roomful of Vatican archive racks to escape in that crap DaVinci book.

Christ, he thought. I’m going to die in this box and all I can think of is Dan fucking Brown.

He’d tried to think of Tali, whispering her name upon gasping breaths as the air thinned, as time passed. He’d worn out his phone battery using the flashlight to scour every inch of the outer seams, shoving treasures aside, knocking them over as if they were trash. Gold and silver and jade and glass and encased carved cork and enamelware and porcelain had clanged and crashed, echoing to the floor like so much dross as he’d scrabbled, panting, grunting and growling to dig his way to the outer walls of the container.

Finally resorting to just using his fingers, he’d felt along the bottom edge where wall met floor. Numb as his hands were he’d still been able to tell differences in texture - he’d been looking for an imperfection, a dip in the metal or a dent, some spot where the container had once been carelessly lifted or dropped, damaged somewhere where the…

… rubber.

He’d felt the small strip, the give of exposed rubber and let out a whoop of triumph, followed quickly by a wracking pain and a fit of agonizing coughs. He’d thrown his head back involuntarily - his jaw dropped wide open in a desperate, heaving grab for air. He’d wheezed and gasped, tears streaming from his eyes. His whole body had seized in a panicked paroxysm. His heart had thrummed in his chest rapid fire, and his muscles had tremored, shivered and clenched.

Not now, come on, Ansgar, not now… keep it together….

For Tali. She’s coming. Tali’s coming.

He’d held his breath, his throat closing with a loud click as he fought to re-regulate the pressure inside his body. He’d continued to hold it as he bent back forward again and fell to his hands and knees, his face smashed sidelong against the cool steel. He’d reinserted his finger into the divot he’d found. It was definitely rubber, a thick layer of it, and hard – like that of a tyre.

But at least it wasn’t steel.

It could be cut.

He’d shook his head, loosening the heavy, stifling, clouding grip on his mind as he palmed his shirt, his trouser pockets. “Knife, no knife,” he’d muttered. “Damn.” Rising up on his haunches, he’d held his hands out in the dark, seeking…. and finding. He’d found the small, intricate vase he’d seen moments before his phone went dead. He grasped it, held it high over his head, and with a growl and a silent apology to his deceased friend, he smashed it down onto the steel floor below, sending shards of porcelain flying around his knees.

Scrambling, he’d patted the floor, finally wrapping his hand around a large fragment, paying no heed to the fact that the sharp edge of it had bit hard and deep into the flesh of his palm.

This, he now gripped for dear life as he scratched over and over and over again at the small strip of exposed rubber, grunting, struggling to breathe with each attempted cut. The sweat poured from his forehead and into his eyes, stinging, the salt burning. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t see, dark as it was.

You probably can’t see anymore anyway, even if there was light.

It felt as if he’d be scratching forever. As if… oh Christ, as if the more he scratched, the more he gouged, the more the rubber simply – grew back. Filled itself in.

In his exhausted, oxygen-starved and mindless state, he fabricated the mad, insane image of a giant, living, breathing, latex membrane around him, sealing him in. It was a shifting, roaring, undulating monster in itself, one that covered, consumed, had eaten the entire outside of the box. That the more he cut the flesh away, the more he slashed at it, the more he injured the beast, the stronger it got as the thing simply healed itself.

And the thing laughed at him. Laughed at him as he whined and whimpered; cried, panted and begged.

Laughed at him… as he died.

“Not… going to… fucking… die!”

But then his mind told him something completely different. Yes you are going to die, mate. Face it. You’re in a box. You’re in a box with no more oxygen and too much CO2 and you’re going to die in here. No one will find you. Tali’s not coming. No one is coming, and you’ll die in here. You may as well give up.

No! Tali’s coming!

Tali’s not coming, you dolt. Just give up.

Ansgar felt suddenly despondent, depressed, dizzy. Nauseated. His head  throbbed, and he noticed that he’d lost all feeling in his hands. He touched his fingertips together, opening and closing them, fascinated by the odd pins and needles sensation. He absently touched his face, smearing blood from his dripping hand on to his beard, his cheeks, his neck, but he didn’t notice. He couldn’t exactly feel his face, or his body for that matter. He could barely hold on to his lifeline - the sharp porcelain triangle -  anymore. It fell from his weakened hand to the steel floor with a delicate clink, but Ansgar didn’t hear it.

The pain, suddenly and mercifully, left him.

A strange and delightful euphoria settled in like a rosy, summer sunset around his head. A blissful high blanketed him, comforting his mind… a limpid, irenic peace.

His chest stopped heaving, stopped the desperate opening and closing of its bellows, the snapping bow and bend of his diaphragm. He relaxed.

Oh, my… so this is what it feels like….

He lost the ability to kneel, to sit upright; and he collapsed in a spasmodic heap, eyes rolling back into his head, face-down on the steel floor. His mind washed blank, for the most part, yet he wondered, musingly, why, exactly, he’d been doing what he’d been doing.

Why he was so… so very tired.

What was it that I was doing? It’s not comfortable, not at all comfortable to lie here. But, I’ll just lie here, I think. Right here. Can’t move anyway, can I? Why am I here? Where am…?

Who… who am I?

And, in that very moment, the damaged layer of sealant gave way beneath the pressure differential, the wind outside boring a minuscule sliver into the weakened material.  A tiny beam of harbor light punctured the darkness. A pencil tip-sized stream of air, sweet oxygen-rich sea air trickled in, ruffling the curls at Ansgar’s nape.

But Ansgar didn’t see it. Didn’t feel it. Didn’t know it.

He knew, in fact, nothing at all

Tali almost felt sorry for Nils as he whimpered and ran through the gravel between the hulking steel containers. He was mumbling things half to himself and half to god at this point: he was sorry, he had no idea it would go this far, he should have thought this through.

Tali was silent, affording him no terror in addition to the tip of her blade pushed against the tender skin of his neck, but relieving him of nothing, either.

He stopped at one container, thicker-hulled than the rest.

Insulated.

Tali kicked at the door soundly with her booted heel.

“If you’ll just… I’ll…” Nils crept closer to the door, hesitantly.

“Well, do it if you’re going to do it,” said Tali. She held her phone out, taking video of the operation. Nils slid open a small console, inserted a keycard, and typed in a code. With a great chunk sound, the lock opened and the door swung open.

“Well done, Nils,” said Tali, swinging him around and pinning his arms behind him with the thin strap of her purse. She secured his ankles, as well, and shoved him, sputtering and screaming, into a seated position in the corner.

“Ansgar!” she shouted, stepping into the darkness. “Ansgar!”

The silence was sickly, settling in the pit of Tali’s stomach.

And then she saw it: light from the open doorway fell upon the pale leather sole of Ansgar’s finely cobbled shoe.

Still. Motionless.

Caring for nothing now but him, she rushed forward, calling his name. She turned back, pushing the doors wider, exposing dowers of lurid treasure, like something from a pirate movie, to whomever might be strolling by outside. pushed the doors open wide and then rushed to him.

“Oh, Oh, God, no!” she screamed, seeing the mottled blue tinge of his lips, the burst blood vessels beneath the fine, smooth skin of his face. “Ansgar, no! Wake! Up!” She fell to his side and slapped his cheek, rubbed his face wildly and strangely beneath her palms, as if he were laying still and motionless from frostbite, and she had to warm him up.

Warm.

She couldn’t see his chest rising or falling, but the skin of his cheeks and chin was still... warm.

She flew into action ten, embarrassed at her moment of shock.She quickly reached up to loosen his collar, but saw that he had already done so himself. She pulled his long legs, heavy and thick, up to her shoulders, raising them well above his heart, and leaned in, ascertaining finally a faint rise and fall of his chest, and the steady thump thump of a heart still pumping.

In a crisis, time often slowed for Tali, giving her the time to make decisions, the liminal space in which she could disconnect her emotions from the world around her. It was something that had served her well in her military training, and in moments of intrigue and danger, out in the cold, mean world on her own. The world would move around her like a slow-motion car crash, and she would carefully step this way to avoid the screeching, sliding tires, and duck that way to miss a fall of shattering glass. She had always been unscathed.

But tonight was different. This was something else entirely. She vaguely recalled pulling out her phone and dialing with the little emergency icon on her phone’s easy access dashboard. With a few blinks of the eye, the ambulance arrived, doctors and EMTs speaking in low and rapid tones she could not distinguish. She placed a call to the remaining partners in Ken’s law firm, wondering at the sound of her own confident voice when she felt so shaken in reality. Elias, Jon, and Melker were audibly relieved when they spoke with her, having followed Nils’s breadcrumbs but having also been unable to reach Tali no matter how much they tried for the past eight hours. She heard herself telling them that regretfully, she would need to turn Nils over to the authorities, and would need to complete her own investigation after her trip through Japan was over, to determine if she would ever trust any member of their firm again.

She blinked her eyes and Nils was being arrested, and Tali was handed a half dozen little white cards with detectives’ names on them in the unfamiliar typeface, but with tiny roman letters beneath spelling out their names.

And the night was like a minute, and a minute was like the breath between ticks from the old wind-up clock, as she stood by the stretcher, watching the doctors pump oxygen into a plastic mask over Ansgar’s noble face, his wild hair poking out in every direction.

The hair made her cry, and an hour went by, and she rode beside him to the hospital, swaying over unfamiliar streets, gripping the walls of the unwieldy vehicle, thankful for the sureness of the doctors.

At the hospital they changed him to a larger oxygen machine, whatever it was called, and as Tali sat nervously bouncing her leg, he turned suddenly, twisting and stretching his neck, making an irritated face, his eyes still closed.

She sat, the steady beeping of the machines beside him seeming to slow, though they kept a steady pace according to the glowing displays. She felt herself come back to the present time, slowly leaving that dream state in which she had floated from the shipping container -- locked tightly again, with the keycards safe in her own pocket -- to this bleached white bedside.

A thousand thoughts at her lips, a hundred confessions on the tip of her tongue.

I missed you.

I found you.

You found me.

I love you.

She took his hand in hers, feeling that she were the patient, blanched and exhausted, lying flat against the sheets like paper.

I’m so sorry.

I’m so sorry.

I’m so sorry.

“I love you,” she said out loud, before leaning down, her forehead resting lightly on his knuckles, by her ear the familiar steady thrum of his heart. The heartbeat on which so much, now, seemed to depend. The heart she cared for more than she would have thought possible even just a few days before.

[vagabondedlife]

[natalianunziata1]

@martinssonconstruction The phone, thank Christ, was an Android.

Hunched over in his seat on the bus, he perused it, the phone, the phone that Tali had handed him, that she had asked him to… somehow… unlock, tap in, and break into.

To glean information from.

Information on her captor. Information on whoever is doing.. what? Ansgar lifted his head, staring down at the bus floor tiles, his eyes hidden beneath the brim of his ball cap. What are they doing, exactly? Were they pursuing her? Him? The both of them, and why? To what end?

What was their endgame? Their… checkmate? He tried to see the chessboard before him, to picture it, floating there in the space between the two shining steel grab bars – but he couldn’t.

And it frustrated him, the not being able to see five moves ahead. Blindness, for that was what it was. Blindness, and it made him feel inadequate, stupid. Incapable. “All right, then, arseholes,” he murmured to himself. “We’ll play this your way.”

And his grousing earned him a quiet “hmph” from the white-haired woman in the seat beside him, her large purse perched fastidiously on her lap. Ansgar peered quickly up at her, smiled, shrugging as he flashed her a glimpse of the phone. “Watashi no tsuma,” he said. “Just my wife.”

“If you argue, she will win,” the woman replied, her English halting and broken.

“Kanojo wa itsumo katsu,” he replied, his Japanese equally as rudimentary.

She always wins.

***

He held the phone, angled to the light from the hotel room window. “Damn,” he hissed. “Wiped clean.”

He’d hoped to find streaks, fingerprints, a pattern - some physical trace, evidence of the unlock screen pattern. Hardest to crack, those, but not impossible. Not that Ansgar was any expert on unlocking secured phones - because he wasn’t.

He was just a very, very good troubleshooter.

“No fingerprints, okay,” he said. “Plan B.”

Stepping to the desk, he opened his MacBook, and, finding the USB cable from Tali’s Android phone - yes, thank God it was there - he plugged the mystery man’s phone into his computer.

It popped up as a device straight away. Opened a window and showed a Samsung splash screen, identifying the phone as “RSF-10″ with no other designations.

RSF. Ansgar ran that set of letters around in his head, trying to make an association. “Rhodesian Security Forces,” he mused, immediately shaking that off. “Royal Scots Fusliers, Road Safety Foundation, Republican Sinn Fein, Religious Society of Friends… no, Ansgar, it’s not the fucking Quakers.” He ran his hands through his hair, tugging roughly at the ends. “It’s not the fucking Republican Security Forces unless Doctor Who and the Brigadier are about.”

And what’s more, the phone access panel required… of course, a password.

“Fuck,” he groused. “Of course.”

He sat heavily down in the desk chair, and leaned back, the leather of it creaking in protest under his weight. Cradling his hands behind his head, he swiveled back and forth, peering up at the ceiling, but not seeing anything in particular.

And then, it came to him. He chuckled, smiled, and said, “Why the hell not?”

A Google search, the watching of a YouTube video, and the perusal of an anonymous webpage and he knew what he had to do… at least try. This was followed by an opening of the terminal panel on his computer and the cut and paste of a string of commands – and it yielded success. “Yes!” he pumped his fist. “Leave it to the internet!”

Quickly he changed the security locks on the phone, changed the password, and, with shaking hands, he picked up the unit. A quick entry of the new code, and the Samsung Galaxy sprang wide open.

“Hell yeah!” Ansgar crowed. “Add hacker to my list of many achievements, you bastard!”

But then he noticed it. The screen - it was nearly bereft of apps. An empty splash screen. Not even the apps that typically came with such a phone were present. No email, no twitter, no Facebook, no clock, no calculator, calendar, drive, Google, Google Play, Connect, Pay…. nothing. There were three icons, and three icons only. The first, settings. Second, phone, and third, messaging.

He tapped the phone icon, and it was blank. No calls made or taken, at least that showed in the call log. “Hm,” Ansgar hummed, and pressed the messaging icon.

That, in contrast, had been busy. Quite busy. There was a veritable cornucopia of information in those texts. All from one number. A Kyoto number, so no help there. But the texts - they were long, appearing to be instructive - a mass of bulleted lists and directions and directives from the looks of it.

Problem was – Ansgar couldn’t read any of it. In fact, he couldn’t even recognize the language. If it even was a language. What it was was a mish mash of nonsense words, some even with numbers in the midst of the letters. “God damn it,” he said. “It’s in fucking code. And I’ll bet… you need some other phone, some other device to read it. Of course. Of… course.”

He squeezed the phone hard, roaring down at it in frustration, his teeth bared, lips curled back. He lifted it over his head and stared at it, ready to throw it against the wall, when something in one of the texts caught his eye.

One word, in one text. He’d dismissed it as jibberish, mixed in as it was with the rest of the nonsense.

But it wasn’t nonsense.

It was: Maizuru.

“Maizuru,” Ansgar whispered, pulling the phone back down. “The port.”

***

He hunched into his jacket, pulling the collar up around his ears. Against the ocean wind, yes, but moreso against anyone who could be watching for him… who could recognize him.

But it was night. And it was dark. And the lights of the dockside were not bright enough to illuminate his face, or so he’d thought.

He knew the warehouse - Kenjiro’s warehouse - was down on the Maizuru docks. But what Fabrizi knew about it, or he should say, Fabrizi’s family, as Fabrizi was quite dead, he didn’t know. And the fact of the direction to the port in the coded text, in the recesses of his mind, led him to believe that the enemy, in fact, may not have been Fabrizi’s family after all.

Fine, he thought. Then who?

He curled his hand around the RSA token in his pocket. He’d memorized the printed tag on the back of it, the one designating the number and location of the warehouse.

And when Ansgar arrived at the designated spot, he did not find a warehouse. Rather he found a shipping container. A rather large one, but a shipping container nonetheless.

And the container was not simply an average container. It was heavily insulated, he could see, thick with steel and sealer and foam and another layer of steel, coated with a heavy enamel on top of that.

Some serious shit.

Peering over his shoulder and carefully up and down the aisle, he ensured that he had not been followed. That no one had seen him approach. Satisfied, he pulled the RSA token from his pocket, lifted the lock, and entered the code that appeared on the token before the numbers changed. 66700919889.

The lock gave way, and the door opened with a loud hiss. Cool air rushed from the inside of the container, splitting the heat of the Kyoto night and swirling around Ansgar like tendrils of ice. He shivered, and took his phone from his pocket. 11:27 the time said. Perfect. Plenty of time.

Plenty of time to get back to Tali.

He clicked on his phone’s flashlight, and pulled on the door. It opened slowly, laboriously, heavily, smooth upon it’s massive hinges. He lifted the light, and stepped in.

“Jesus fuck.” The thin stream of light from Ansgar’s phone lit up the place as he walked through it. Gold, silver… every sort of precious metal gleamed, diamonds shimmered, enamel shone, bouncing the beam from place to place. Ansgar was shocked that the treasures - for that was what they were - weren’t packed away, weren’t laid to rest in straw or batting and crated up.

It was like walking into Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders. It was like nothing Ansgar had ever seen before. The items were set out as if on display, as if meant to draw the eye, as if inviting wonder and study and ogling and coveting and craving and want and…

As if meant to distract.

Shit.

As soon as Ansgar realized, as soon as he turned and jogged back down the center aisle of the container, the door – the heavy, massive, thick steel door closed.

The door closed and the lock, he could hear it - the lock engaged.

Gripped with sudden panic, he yanked and pulled on the latch, turning his body to the side, digging his feet in, and heaving against it. “Fuck! Fuck!” he shouted, knowing - knowing - knowing…

… it was a trap. A trap and he fell for it. Fell into it.

Screaming, he pounded on the door, the impact sending shockwaves of pain through his arm, sending loud, booming echoes through his ears. He kicked at it, shoved his shoulder at it, and scrabbled his fingers in between the edges of the doors. “Let me out!” He bellowed. “Fucking bastard! Let me out! Do you know who I am? Let me out or I’ll tear you fucking limb from limb!”

His tirade was met with nothing but silence. “Shit,” he hissed. He pulled his phone from his pocket, and with frantic fingers, opened the phone app and dialed Tali’s number.

And again, silence. The line didn’t even connect. He tore the phone away from his ear and glared down at it. At the top left corner.

No bars. No service. “What the… no. No!” He shook his iPhone as if doing so would break loose whatever was preventing him from calling Tali. “Breathe, Sgar. It’s fine… it’s….” He opened the GPS app, and it too, didn’t function without the signal. All he saw was the blue flower circle of death and it circled around and around and around until he got an error message and the error message made him want to scream and rail and throw the phone against the wall and shatter it into a million pieces… and….

The other phone.

He palmed his pockets - jacket, jeans - and nothing. Nothing.

“Left it in the room, damn it.” He muttered to himself. “Good, though. Good.” Good because Tali would find it. Good because he’d disabled the locks on it. Good… because maybe Tali would see it. She’d find it and open it and she’d follow the same breadcrumbs he followed…

… and she would come.

… and she would come.

He sat down against the door, sinking to the floor, his knees bent up against his chest, arms draped over, hands held loosely.

“She’ll come.”

A glance at his phone told him it was 11:33 pm.

He had a half hour, maybe more to wait. He could wait.

“She’ll come.”

He tipped his head back, groaning at his own stupidity, at his pride, at his hubris, at his sheer inability to… oh.

He heard it.

A quiet hiss, just above his head. Craning his neck, he glanced up, narrowing his eyes as he realized the source of the sound. And as soon as he realized the source, the louder it became. He scrambled to his feet and clutched at the thing, digging his fingers frantically into the metal box of the instrument, yanking at the rear side of the panel just in front of him.

The air control.

And not air control as in the storage container’s heating and cooling and humidity.

No. Oh no.

Air control as in the wholesale removal of anything in the air tight container’s atmosphere that could tarnish, stain… oxidize… the precious metals within.

As in the removal of the atmosphere itself. The removal… of oxygen.

And the controls, and the pump, and the fan… were all on the outside.

Ansgar’s chest felt suddenly tight, his lungs burned, his belly muscles clenched. His vision blurred and he felt as if his guts and his brains and his heart alike were being squeezed by some massive, unseen and vicious hand.

“Son… of a… bitch!”

She’d better come

Tali began to feel nervous, standing and waiting at the door. She couldn’t hear the shower, but maybe he’s standing under the hot water, losing himself as she had done only a few days before. She looked up and down the hall: still empty.

“Ansgar. Darling. Open up,” she said, her voice liquid.

She dug through her bag, wondering if she could still have her keycard. She found it and stuck it quickly into the lock.

Nothing.

She tried it again, with no more luck.

“Oh damn it,” she said to herself, realizing this was her own room key. A few more fumbles through her wallet, flipping past Ansgar’s cool and perfect bank card, and she found it.

The lock flashed green and she pushed quickly in, slamming the door and locking the deadbolt behind her.

“Ansgar?”

Several lights were on, and a glow came from outside the gauzy curtains to the balcony.

“Ansg--”

And she saw it. Sitting on the table by the window, half leaning over the edge. Haphazard. Not at all like him.

Anonimo’s phone.

Had Ansgar even tried to unlock it? Had he just ditched it here and gone out to… do what? He had made a date with her at midnight, and she had thought he was as ready as she was to be alone, to make up for the hours of loneliness in the strange little capsule bed, stacked on top of a half dozen other wanderers…

She picked it up, and tapped the screen idly. It sprang to life, and she almost dropped it from surprise. The glowing characters on the screen: A pile of words, swirling as if to confuse. To entrap.

She looked for names, days, times. The words she did know. And then, at the bottom of the glowing screen: Maizuru.

Tali had seen it printed on several signs during her wanderings over the past few days. She pulled out her own phone and searched, found a bright red dot down by the water. It was as good a clue as she was likely to get.

Looking out through a thin gap in the curtain, Tali saw the lights of the river. Puzzle pieces moved and twisted and twirled in her head. This spot by the water, it might be a trap. Or it might have answers. Then all of a sudden, from the confused whirlwind in her mind, she was back in the cool, light leather of her seat of on the jet.

“...most likely near the port,” said Ansgar. “Given the address. The shipping tag has the code printed on it. We’ll find whomever we need to meet. Do you know who that is?”

“Someone, Nils will send the information, I’m sure, if he hasn’t yet,” Tali had said, and leaned against his arm, falling asleep.

It seemed a million miles away now, the solid steadiness of his thick arm beneath her chin, his sureness.

The warehouse, then. It must be near the port somehow.

She did a quick inventory to be sure she was following the right trail of breadcrumbs. His personal items, his pocket items, were all gone. Phone, wallet, keys.

She saw the hook where his thick jacket had hung: empty.

She knew then that he had gone down to the shore.

She erased all signs of herself from the hotel room, slid the phone into her pocket alongside her own, and pushed out the door, wrapping a scarf up and over her face, slipping down the back stairs, and walking quickly from the hotel’s side entrance, planning to run several blocks before catching a cab to somewhere near.

She had just gotten past the grand, brightly lit hotel driveway when a hand touched her elbow.

“Natalia.”

She whirled around, her breath caught in her throat.

Nils.

“Are you in a rush, Ms. Nunziata?” he said, stepping from the shadows.

Her heart pounded. She pondered the wisdom of pretending she didn’t know him, of trying to slip away, but--

She realized this man was the best chance she had of finding exactly where Ansgar might be. With a sickening certainty she knew, now, that Ansgar’s absence had been no accident. He wasn’t wrapped up in inventorying the warehouse, losing track of time as he would lose track of himself in his designs late at night, by lamplight in the old apartments in Stockholm. Nils had something to do with it.

One steadying breath.

Use what you’ve got, said Nonna’s voice in her mind.

“Nils,” she said brightly. Warmly. She unwound the scarf from her face and leaned forward, taking his shoulders in her hands. “So nice to see a familiar face! I’ve had the strangest few days.”

He squinted at her. “Have you…”

“Nils, what are you doing here? You didn’t say you were making the trip! I’ve only just arr--”

Nils held her elbow tightly and pulled her into the shadows beside a potted juniper, the scent of it like gin, filling her lungs, nearly crowding out the panic.

Nearly.

“I’m here to save you, Tali,” he said, then turned abruptly, pulling her along the sidewalk with him.

If only he knew what I could do to him, right now, she thought. The rusty Krav Maga alone would be enough to lay him flat…

“Well, that’s a… that’s a relief, Mr. Lundgren,” she said.

“Nils,” he said.

“Nils. I’m sorry, I’m just used to seeing you in the office is all. So what is it? Is there something more for me to sign? Are you here to help us--- to help me with the estate representatives?”

“I’ll make this plain, Natalia,” he said, staring straight ahead, the faint blue glow from the moon bouncing off his features, rendering them sharper and more gaunt than they appeared in the daylight. “I know you traveled here with Martinsson, and I know you’re here to help him… collect his prize.”

“Well, I…”

‘And I know that scattering Takahashi’s ashes is just a pretense. I know this is what he told you.”

“He? No, Nils, Mr. Martinss-- Ansgar and I decided on our course of action together, you see, and--”

“He’s a conniving bastard!” said Nils, nearly screaming. Several passersby craned their neck to see the exchange, quickly turning their faces back around when they saw Nils’s white-hot rage. “Natalia, he’s using you.”

“Using me? For what? Kenjiro named him in the will.”

“And don’t think Takahashi wasn’t under the sinister spell of this man as well,” Nils said. “Don’t think Ansgar didn’t toy with Kenjiro’s affections, leading him on. Ken wanted Ansgar just like every woman he ever met wanted him.” Nils glared. “Just like you wanted him.”

“I don’t---” Tali was so baffled by this sudden about-face that she found herself almost speechless, deciding that silence was the best course of action as Nils’s story continued to spill from his lips. Most unhinged men really want to be heard; this she knew.

“But you can leave him, Natalia. We can… You and I can start over. With the proceeds from the sale of the warehouse, we can go anywhere you want. We can start over in Tahiti, or the Himalayas, or even in Canada. You’d love Toronto,” he said.

“I do love it,” she said. “What’s your point?”

“Natalia, you’re brilliant. You have a mind for business like almost no one I’ve ever seen. With your brains for the business, and mine for the law, we can… Natalia, we can build the empire Takahashi would have wanted. He wanted us together. I know this. It was his wish; I am certain of it. We can even name it after him if we want. Any kind of business you want, it’s yours. Now, I wrote the will, so it’s fairly watertight, but I can testify that I wrote it under coercion by Mr. Martinsson. That he took advantage of the affections of his terminally ill friend to weasel his way into the fortune that should, by rights, be all yours.”

“Nils, I…”

“Ours,” said Nils, stepping toward Tali. He brushed a finger down her cheek; she shivered slightly, the touch of him after his wild speech striking a kind of slimy disgust in the pit of her belly.

“Are you saying you have feelings for me, Nils?” she said.

He stared at her, the familiar blazing intensity in his eyes piercing her.

She gulped. “Because I’ve been hiding my feelings for you all this time,” she said, looking down with acted modesty. “Have you felt it? Could you feel it, though I was too scared to tell you?”

His nostrils flared, and he leaned forward, kissing her protectively on the top of her head. “I have felt that this was right for a long time,” he said. “I knew we would someday be together.”

Tali leaned forward, threading her arms around his thin torso. “Nils, where is Ansgar?”

He rested his chin atop her head. “Oh, I’ve got him held up,” he said. “He’s safely away, where he won’t get to either of us.” Nils brought Tali’s hand to his lips, lingering too long in a courtly kiss.

“Is he safe, at least?” she said. “I don’t want any trouble with his… people back home.”

Nils waved his hand. “Oh, he’s fine. Worst case, he’ll be passed out for a few hours. We’ll let him know what he is to do, to release the ownership of the warehouse to you, and if he doesn’t comply, then you can decide, Natalia. We can coax him to agree, or we can simply let him go, and take matters to the court.”

He faced her, pressing a kiss suddenly and forcefully on her lips. “Either way, we win,” he said.

Tali fought the grimace from her face. “Nils,” she said, softening her voice and sliding her fingertips down his lapels.

“Anything, Ms. Nunziata,” he said.

“Who was that, the other night? Who came to pick me up?”

Nils smiled proudly. “My friend. He was to take you to me.” He peered down at her. “He failed. So I had to come myself. I realized I would have to show my face eventually, anyway. So that you would know how much I love you.” He bowed slightly.

“Ohh, I like it,” she said.

He smiled, his chest puffed up slightly. 

“Nils,” she purred.

“Hmm?”

“Take me to dinner,” she said.

“Dinner? This late?”

“Take me for a drink, then. But first let me put on something… better.”

*****

Nils paced the hotel room, and Tali called from the walk-in closet. “I’ll be ready in a minute,” she said, sliding the critical items from her pocket to her purse, and pulling on a long, thin gown of printed silk. It hugged her curves, revealing her shapely shoulders and neck, and her feet, pushed into a pair of strappy heels. She pulled on her shrug and reached down, adjusting her garter. Saying a prayer to whatever gods there might be here in Kyoto.

“Thank you for waiting,” she said. She walked to him. “I wanted to put on something that you might enjoy taking off later.” She turned around, facing her back to him, dipping the shrug down slightly. “You just pull the silk strings right behind my neck,” she said. She turned around to face him. “Are you ready?”

His eyes were wide, and she could see his pulse jumping quickly beneath the skin of his neck. “Yes, yes, I do believe that we will, that you, that we will have a very, a very good evening,” he sputtered. “A stellar evening.”

Right where I want you.

She hooked her arm through his and suggested the name of a tiny bar just around the corner from Maizuru.

*****

She slid into the seat beside him in his black Infiniti, glossy inside and out. It was a right-hand drive, reminding Tali of her time in London, and she enjoyed sitting in what felt like the driver’s seat. Fully in control.

Nils draped a warm hand on her knee, snaking it slightly higher as the trip went on. She crossed her legs, fumbling slightly beneath her skirt. When he pulled up to the red light, just as the traffic thinned out, she moved with lightning quickness.

The blade of her stiletto pushed to his throbbing throat, Tali spat her orders into his ear. “You’re to drive me exactly to where you have him,” she said.

He nodded, moaning nervously and blinking rapidly.

“Do it now,” she said.

“But the light’s red, Ms. Nunzia--”

“I see the light,” she screamed, pressing the blade further, millimeters from piercing the skin. “DO AS I SAY!”

He ran the light, pressing down on the accelerator. Tali felt the old thrill of lawlessness in her veins. She laughed and reached over, scratching a curlicue lightly into the skin of Lundgren’s neck with her knifepoint. “You know what, Nils,” she said, grinning widely, pressing a slow kiss to his cheek, “I do believe we are going to have a... stellar evening.”