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Escaping Tanigaki from the bear cage earns him some level of grace, and Ogata is uneasy with it. Sugimoto’s suspicious attention is at an all-time low, and Asirpa is generous with her explanation of the dinner spread before them at the kotan, an admittedly more pleasant rattle than whatever Kirawus is discussing with Tanigaki.
“It’s good, right?” she asks. Her eyes are big and blue; Ogata can see why her grandmother would miss her so much. “It’s hinna, right, Ogata?”
He feels Sugimoto’s gaze now, always too expectant. He says nothing; Asirpa deflates for just a moment between one bite and the next. She’s so easy to cheer up. Ogata doesn’t know if all children are like that or if they’re lucky with the one traveling with them. He mainly ignores the other one with how closely he orbits Tanigaki, which isn’t a place Ogata wants to be no matter what the truth is about what happened to their Seventh Division comrades. He may be short on loyalty but he’s long on divvying out earned punishment, and he hasn’t quite let his grudge on that front go yet. It will pass.
“Asirpa, wipe your face.” Sugimoto isn’t even gruff with it, passing over a rag from his belt that looks like it will overall make the situation worse — disgusting, Ogata thinks, though he watches the interaction closely. Sugimoto’s eyes are soft, weak and imprecise as he watches the girl go the extra mile and blow her nose. No wonder he couldn’t shoot the side of a fucking barn. “You’re not sick, are you?”
She shakes her head, returns the cloth to him and he folds it back into one of his pouches without seemingly any qualm against its condition. Sugimoto’s expression turns satisfied, watching her scoot closer to the fire between the lines of their group now that her dinner is finished.
//
He asks Sugimoto about it later, when they’ve been sequestered away from the people in their group interested in continuing increasingly noisy conversation with Kirawus. Asirpa is snoring in the shelter behind theirs, audible enough that Ogata is certain it will reassure Sugimoto, put him in a receptive mood even if only subconsciously.
“Why do you act like that with her?” No lead in, quick and clean. Just the way he likes it.
“What?” He isn’t looking at Sugimoto but he can hear him shifting around, close and in the dark. “Who?”
Fucking idiot. “Asirpa.”
“…what the fuck do you mean by that?”
He’s touched a nerve, then; for once, not what he intended. Maybe the truce between them had gotten to Ogata more than he’d understood. “How you act,” he repeats, struggling after all to put it into words. “Like… you’re the one taking care of her.”
The tension ebbs, quick as it had come. Ogata waits, pictures a deer with its neck relaxing, vulnerable again. “Oh,” he says, quiet and with a little too much emotion. “I… she’s the one teaching me.”
“I know.” Ogata can’t completely snuff the impatience in his voice. “That’s what makes it so confusing. You being the way you are.”
“She’s a kid.” Sugimoto makes it sound like the simplest explanation in the world. “That’s how you act with a kid. Go the fuck to sleep.”
There’s an early start ahead of him; still, Ogata listens to far more of Sugimoto’s unconscious breathing than he expects before he follows him down.
//
They’re visiting some relative of Asirpa’s, everyone but Ogata somehow seems to be in agreement. Why not, he thinks, there’s no hurry. It isn’t like the most dangerous man in the country and a few others on the list rounding out the top ten are after them, after their goal.
Maybe it’s because of the irritation at his back about it that Ogata sits himself on the far side of their fire, watching Sugimoto and Asirpa performing their usual clownery. Tanigaki had split from them in the morning to fetch Shiraishi and the unfortunate woman he’s dragging around with them to meet up with them at their destination, so there’s no longer any barrier between them, no buffer for his irritation, his confusion, his… whatever this is.
“You look tired,” Sugimoto tells her, eventually. Asirpa doesn’t even argue, just nods. Sugimoto looks his way, eyes draining of that warmth but not quickly enough to stop Ogata pretending, for a moment, that they don’t. “Make sure everything looks fine outside.”
Everything looks fine is code for no bears are about to jump down our throats and Ogata doesn’t fight him on it. Anything is better than watching whatever their nighttime routine is.
While he sweeps around their shelter in the most reasonable circumference he can draw while still saying he’s done his job, he considers it more. Like water breathed in it stays with him, wringing his chest, Sugimoto and Asirpa, Asirpa and Sugimoto.
Her motivations couldn’t be clearer, more natural; for all his many flaws, Sugimoto is handsome and strong and attached to her in his own way. Of course she would love him, childishly and completely. Ogata had known that feeling himself, watching his mother as a very young boy before the sickness had taken her beyond his reach. Maybe he’d even loved her the way Asirpa loves Sugimoto. It’s too late to tell, poison choking his chance to find out.
Sugimoto. He steps carefully over a dry-looking fallen branch, considering. Ogata doesn’t think he wants to fuck her, doesn’t think he’d ever act on it even if he did. He’s too hung up on his idiotic woman he loves, some widow somewhere too caught up in her own life to spare a thought for the man who’s foolishly made her happiness his purpose.
The idea snags, a bramble in fabric. Sugimoto. Asirpa. The woman. It’s familiar enough a vision, though Ogata has never known it himself. A nuclear family, loving daughter, loving parents, Sugimoto doting on them — on Asirpa — to the stripping away of the war-layer, the man who’d killed in the village, on the hill.
Here, in the woods, the woman in his mind feels more real than he does. Ogata moves more quickly back to the shelter, crouches at the entrance to find Asirpa asleep and Sugimoto watching the embers of the fire with a pathetic look in his eyes and Ogata doesn’t want his attention as much as he needs it.
“Come outside,” he says, before he knows why he does, and Sugimoto looks up, confused, but his military reflexes are already moving his body to follow the order.
“What the hell is wrong with—”
“You act like her father.” There’s no point in obfuscating now that he has it in hand. “Why?”
“Wha— is this still about Asirpa?”
“You are painfully dense.”
“Why are you such an asshole?” Sugimoto shakes his head like a dog emerging from a lake; fitting, Ogata thinks. Appropriate. “I’m not her father. We’re partners.”
“You and a child.”
“Why are you so fucking bent out of shape about this?”
“I’m not—”
“Are you jealous?” Sugimoto’s eyes don’t light up, the way Ogata’s sure his own do when he finds a weak spot in an enemy formation, in someone he wants a leg up on, but his heartbeat hitches anyhow. Prey spotted. He doesn’t know what his expression does but he watches Sugimoto catch it. “You’re kidding.”
Ogata stays silent. If it comes down to it his rifle is still over his shoulder and he knows that’s a fight Sugimoto will never win.
“Is it just that you can’t stand someone else having what you can’t?” Sugimoto is brutal, unhesitating driving the point home. “What, your daddy never loved you?”
And it shaped my life, Ogata thinks. He thinks too that Sugimoto doesn’t mean to be cruel; if he did he could make much more of this than he does.
Instead he sighs. “As usual, I don’t know what the hell your problem is. But I don’t think I’m anything like Asirpa’s father. If you have a problem with me, just leave her out of it. It’s got nothing to do with her.”
Ogata still says nothing, leaving Sugimoto to roll his eyes and return to their shelter, making the smarter decision to get some sleep and forget all the things that keep Ogata from peace. It keeps him enough, in fact, that some distance away and some time later finds him humping his cock into submission in his fist, thinking about Sugimoto and his father and everything swirled together in that psychological mire.
Sugimoto is so violent, Ogata thinks, cock twitching, so vicious with his enemies. Ogata had felt it himself on the edge of that river, feels it every day in his jaw clicking and whining at being used too roughly. Yet he’s so unfailingly kind to Asirpa, even when at least some level of his brutality is in the service of her will and her safety. It’s all blended into one man, one person Ogata can look at and look at and never understand, never surmount.
This could have been how father was with Yuusaku. It pops like a bubble in Ogata’s mind and he spills, confusing and intense, right onto the forest floor.
//
Besides the easy excuse not to speak to anyone, which Ogata will take no less than full advantage of, the only real upside to staying in yet another Ainu settlement is the relative plenty of space. It’s nice not being on top of each other, sometimes literally, in a lean-to formed from a fallen tree or whatever else Asirpa dreams up for them.
That’s how it usually feels, at least. Tonight, in the kotan of someone somehow connected to Asirpa’s grandmother in a way Ogata hasn’t troubled to uncover, he squirms, thinks of Sugimoto and Asirpa in the carcass of the deer. How tight he must have held her, how warm. She couldn’t have had the freedom of movement Ogata has now, Shiraishi snoring somewhere not far enough away.
Ogata pictures it before he can help it, the wet heat of the deer, Sugimoto pressed around him. The smell of blood, the rush of the wind on the other side of the skin and sinew. Sugimoto’s weight. Sugimoto’s face, so tied up in his own history. He’s getting hard.
That won’t do, no matter how friendly these Ainu villages are, no matter how many unmarried women and lonely men on the hunt.
He rises quietly; it’s inconvenient and out of the ordinary to need it two nights in a row but Ogata is still no more than a man. Sometimes less, even, slings his rifle over his shoulder and gets out of the light.
There’s a stretch of woods just west of the village; anywhere past the firelight is wild, but this has the most coverage, and Ogata makes for it quickly, quietly. It’s cold but not cold enough to slow him, to stop his body from heating. The deer. The blood. Sugimoto, arms around him, stroking his hair the way he does Asirpa’s sometimes when she’s sleeping and he thinks no one is watching.
Ogata grits his teeth; he’s always watching. Always listening, which is why he catches the snap of a twig, somewhere ahead of him and to his left. He ducks for a moment, orienting himself to the footsteps; it’s a man, incautious, unworried. Not Shiraishi, he’d had enough to drink to leave him vulnerable as the dead. Not Tanigaki, fat fucking chance he’d even look up from that woman now that they’re together again.
That leaves one.
“You lurk too much.” It’s to cover the startle Ogata knows he gave Sugimoto when he stepped into the pool of moonlight past the edge of the forest. Maybe he’d been taking a piss, maybe he’d been restless after all the food and company, Ogata doesn’t really care. It’s too good, finding him alone out here, catching him off guard. Maybe they won’t know what to expect from each other like this, out of context; Sugimoto looks almost fond, at least familiar with Ogata’s strange habits and animal behaviors.
“Can’t help it.”
“Why this time?”
Ogata considers it. “I had to take care of something,” he decides on, and Sugimoto frowns. It’s like his head is a glass case, revealing the whirring click of cogs behind it as he deciphers Ogata’s not particularly hidden meaning. “You’d better go… unless you want to give me a hand.” The leer is out before he can help it; intimidation, fear, familiarity.
Sugimoto’s expression softens again, just a little. His voice when he speaks is quiet. “Tanigaki told me,” he says, and Ogata feels embers of rage and, worse, humiliation fanned within him, “what they used to call you in the Seventh Division.”
There’s a pause. “Well?” Ogata snaps, impatient, cool exterior cracking. “Say it.”
“I wouldn’t.” He’s watching Sugimoto work through something in his mind, a problem unsolvable by violence and yet Ogata finds some part of him thrumming for Sugimoto’s fingers around his throat, his bullet in his brain, his blade in his gut. “And you want that, don’t you? That’s why you’ve been hung up on how I treat Asirpa.”
“What is it you think I want?” Ogata spits. He’s clutching his rifle. He’s still painfully hard. Humiliatingly. All this time talking to Sugimoto and his voice hasn’t brought his blood down from the ledge.
“You want someone to stand up for you. Look out for your interests.” Sugimoto’s close, close enough that Ogata can feel the heat of his body against the chill of the night. He holds still, like he’s watching Sugimoto down sights. “You want someone to be your fucking father.”
Ogata waits, impatient in the moment, for the snap, the splintering of the taut string inside him. He waits to laugh, to shove at Sugimoto with just a little too much bitterness to pass it off as a joke, not that he’d want to. He waits for the poison to rise in his throat.
“I’m right.” Sugimoto sounds as surprised as Ogata increasingly is, frozen in place. “Holy shit, Ogata, this is the first thing I figure out about you?”
“Shut up,” Ogata murmurs, but his heart isn’t in it, more even than usual. It feels like it’s somewhere in his throat, sending a vicious pulse right where his voice rises, right down his spine and the line of his gut to every seam forming his groin.
“Fucking hell.” This sounds like an angrier version of Hanazawa, gurgling with a sword piercing the core of him. Messier than a bullet, closer. Sugimoto, too, is closer, less than arms’ length away. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
“That would have gone well.” Ogata can muster just enough sarcasm to cloud his tone to hold, white-knuckled, to his dignity. “‘Sugimoto, be my daddy.’” The reaction to this feels good, Sugimoto’s pupils dilating in the dark, swallowing and spitting back up more of the stars shared over their heads. No more room for error, for assumptions. Now they both know.
“Not like I know what I’m doing,” he says, unnecessarily; Ogata has never met anyone who’s known less about what they’re doing, generally, as Sugimoto Saichi, including the literal child he’s partnered himself up with who probably right now, even in sleep dozens of meters away in the kotan, would be able to more cogently comprehend what’s happening between the two men than Sugimoto were she called upon for such knowledge, “but if it means you’ll stop being so… well, if it’ll help. I can try.”
Ogata is still hard. Somehow. Some way. It’s this, he supposes, or Tanigaki, who seems actually a little too realistically, uncomplicatedly paternal to that boy he’s with, too protective of Inkarmat even before they started fucking, and who knows what kind of filth he’d rub off on him from her. “Whatever.” He lets the rifle drop, gentle, within reach. “If it goes badly I’ll kill you.”
//
It starts badly. After Ogata’s initial sortie of motion, of transitioning the situation, there’s an awkward silence, a freeze. Sugimoto clearly hadn’t thought he’d ever get farther than the conclusion he’d somehow reached moments before. Ogata can’t claim he’d felt differently but he’s evidently and as always quicker on his feet, adaptable, not prone to looking a gift horse in the mouth. It’s so rare for him to get a gift at all. He’d never dream of examining the teeth if they aren't even the important part.
“Backing out already?” he asks, and Sugimoto frowns.
“Not before you do.” It’s silly and masculine, which works just fine for Ogata, pushing hair out of his face. Maybe the regulation cut had been more practical, after all. “Come over here.”
There’s not much in the way of over here; Sugimoto is close to him already but Ogata will go, leaves the rifle where it lies in a show of submission. He'll still be close enough to pick it up, he reasons with himself, could always tug the bolt from Sugimoto’s gun — if he even has it with him — and slow him down on his way to the trigger.
“Stop thinking about killing me,” Sugimoto says, breaking his train of thought.
Ogata leers; defensive reaction, he supposes. “And here I thought we were going to fuck.”
“You’re so…” He stops himself. Ogata still hasn’t moved. “Ogata, I said come over here.”
His tone of voice shifts, just a little, maybe just enough that Ogata doesn’t think this will be a complete waste of his time, maybe just enough to make it worth the humiliation of opening himself like this. He steps forward, lines up their hips but doesn’t make contact. He can feel his own pulse in his neck. “Here I am.”
“Good boy.” It should sound ludicrous in that voice, the one Ogata mostly hears discussing different meat preparation techniques and whether excrement is edible, but it doesn’t because it’s also the voice he’s heard screaming as he brings death ahead of schedule to soldiers and citizens alike, the one he’s heard cursing at his problems like he could simply destroy them. A hot pulse of blood hits Ogata’s cock unceremoniously; he thinks his breathing hitches. “Come on, sit down with daddy.”
Well, it would be impossible for things to go perfectly. Ogata bites back a laugh, watches Sugimoto settle his back against a tree and spread his legs, but then he pats the lap they form invitingly, palms on strong thighs, and the urge fades. Ogata drops near seiza between Sugimoto’s knees.
Sugimoto watches him, that same tight-browed look like he’s trying to unwind Ogata, peel something back and learn something new, something that might not be a lie or a twisted piece of armor. He doesn’t say anything, reaches out and touches Ogata’s face with the whole of his hand. His fingers are long enough to brush his ear, hook behind that jaw; the tip of one lingers over the suture on the left. “Hurt, didn’t it?” he asks, half compassion and a touch of smug, and Ogata grits his teeth. That had hurt at first, hurt so much it had been impossible, constant rictus inescapable. Sugimoto had put them there, changed his face, marked him permanently. Even his real father had never managed to do that, not in any way that could be seen. Not without his family registry paperwork.
“It did.”
“Poor baby.” Sugimoto’s eyes aren’t seeing Ogata anymore, and that won’t fucking do. He doesn’t even want to know what he’s thinking about if it isn’t him. If it isn’t him, if this is just another man that will take him without returning enough, then what’s the point?
Ogata twists his head, tips it back on his neck until he can get his mouth around the tip of Sugimoto’s ring finger. He watches him come back to the present as he sucks it down. “Better,” he says, works his tongue around it. He already knows he’s going to be better than anything Sugimoto has ever had, assuming he’s had anything at all, going to mark him right back, inside first before he gets him on the outside. With the collision course they’re on, Ogata has to assume he’ll eventually put a bullet or a bayonet through Sugimoto.
“Mmm.” The noise is from Sugimoto’s throat, Ogata feels it rumble through him where Sugimoto’s finger presses into the wet meat of his cheek. He doesn’t even bite down, so hard, so happy. Center of attention. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you Ogata? You know exactly what I want.”
It’s been a while since Ogata’s been anything like a good boy, but he was once. Before his brother, before his mother. When he’d never even seen his father. If Sugimoto had lived in his town, as he is now all kind to children and to Ainu grandmothers, he would never have let Ogata poison her, would never have let them live like that. Ogata’s mind is dropping; he sucks harder, seizing Sugimoto’s wrist in his hands to keep him there though he’d shown no signs of wanting to back away.
“Come here, baby,” Sugimoto says, left arm around Ogata’s waist, pulling him over his lap, forcing his legs to unbend and reposition, lock around Sugimoto. They could meld like this; Ogata could consume him, or Sugimoto could swallow him whole. Will upon will. His groin, still swollen and heavy, brushes against Sugimoto’s, and he moans around his finger. “You like that?”
Fucking obviously. The thought is faint. Ogata almost smiles, nods in answer and bucks his hips to press them together again, more intentional. Sugimoto is hard too.
“Let daddy touch you,” Sugimoto says, then winces. “Fuck, Ogata, you really want it like this?”
Stop it, Ogata thinks, pulling at Sugimoto’s wrist, hollowing his cheeks around his finger in lieu of verbally making his point. Stop fighting.
“Fine.” Sugimoto is breathing heavily now, hips rolling against Ogata’s with surprising dexterity and even more surprising restraint. “Fine, I get it.” He reaches down with his left hand, clumsier than but equally capable of killing as the right that Ogata has in his hands, in his mouth. Ogata has his belt on still and Sugimoto fumbles with it, swears. “Here,” he says, pulls at that lonely, empty ring finger and Ogata bites down. “Fuck, okay.”
It’s a dance, Sugimoto teasing his mouth back open with the thumb of his left hand — and this is smart because it’s better; Ogata lets the right hand go, moans around the new shape and sucks hard. Sugimoto wipes the spit on his own pants, one more stupid, selfless thing, before he goes back for Ogata’s belt.
“Did that a lot when you were a kid, huh?” Sugimoto asks it like he’s making conversation, like he’s not smudged red along the skin around his scar with the heat between them, undoing Ogata’s buckle without trouble this time. “It’s okay, look at you now. Feels good, Ogata. Wanna put my dick in next.”
Good, he’s getting honest. The idea isn’t unpalatable but right now Ogata is enjoying his position too much, wrapped around Sugimoto, facing him like they don’t naturally push apart at every other opportunity. He could kiss him, if he wanted. If his mouth wasn’t so full, if his eyes weren’t drifting shut.
Sugimoto gets him out of his pants; he lingers, for a moment, under the loose ends of Ogata’s shirt. It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before but Ogata supposes feeling for yourself is a different animal altogether. Doesn't last long, though; there’s the sound of another belt buckle, a hiss at the cold air, and the sound of spitting. Ogata’s eyelids snap open.
“Let me.” It brings Sugimoto’s gaze back to him, the move of Ogata’s lips and tongue against his thumb, the loosening of suction. Ogata tugs that same wrist again back to his mouth where he empties it, leaving his tongue free to slick a sloppy stripe across his right palm, the hand that pulls the trigger, that cradles the grip, that lowers with the exhale and the shoulder to take a life. He drools on it a little, spreading his tongue across Sugimoto’s life line, his fate line, a few more times. Sugimoto’s eyes warm him, warn him, hot and heavy like a weight below his brows. His left hand lingers in inertia at Ogata’s cheek, wet enough to freeze if it weren’t for the heat of his spit. “Better.”
“Good, Ogata.” Sugimoto gets that damp hand around both their cocks, adjusts his grip while he mindlessly thumbs back into Ogata’s waiting mouth. “Fuck, it’s good.”
It is good; he’s right, even with the certainty that neither of them have what they need to take it further. Ogata wouldn’t be opposed to being his own lubricant, to it hurting a little or more, but Sugimoto surely won’t handle that well. Go too far, or not far enough. His hand though, his cock against Ogata’s, is hot and wet with his spit, with their precome. Ogata’s mouth is too full to snark, to snap, and his mind is too busy to fight, to push away.
When Sugimoto figures out a rhythm and a grip that works for both of them, Ogata lets it lull him, lets the heel of Sugimoto’s left hand cup his chin and bear its weight, and maybe he’s let too much with his eyelids shut because suddenly Sugimoto’s mouth is against his, his finger between them.
He doesn’t try to slip his tongue in alongside his thumb; maybe it would be bearable if he did. Ogata’s inclination says to pull back but something deeper, some brainstem instinct, says daddy loves me and instead he fucking moans.
“Fuck, you really like this,” Sugimoto says, dragging his thumb up the side of Ogata’s cock. He’s deft at this, the way half the men who survived the war are by virtue of it being the only option, the only warmth in trench or lonesome tent between brothel visits. Even the Matagi had told some innocent sob story about shared rations with his friend that Ogata’s sure hadn’t really ended with cocks unstroked.
It’s neither here nor there; Sugimoto feels good, skin rough with scars for friction eased by spit. None of them likely to be fatal, none of them ones that have ever raised Ogata’s curiosity. He tightens the curl of his tongue around Sugimoto’s thumb; their faces are still close, and Sugimoto dips to kiss his neck above the collar of his cloak.
“Good,” he murmurs against Ogata’s skin, grips tighter, pants. He hasn’t pushed further into Ogata’s mouth, hasn’t done more than stroke his tongue, brush his soft palate. He’s gentle suddenly with those hands that have strangled the life out of men. Dizzying, spiking arousal melts Ogata down, winds his arms around Sugimoto’s shoulders and his hands into his hair, the nape of his neck. “Ogata, good, closer. You want to come for daddy, don’t you?”
Ogata knows he’s gone, pupils blown behind his eyelids, because he just nods, lets Sugimoto have his repetitive blathering in return for the snug, hot sheathe of his palm, his fingers, the way his mouth moves against Ogata’s skin. No one else could give him this, and no one else could pull it from Sugimoto. Ogata bucks his hips.
“Next time,” Sugimoto says, gravel and gunpowder, and the hairs on the back of Ogata’s neck rise and the skin on his scrotum pulls tight, “I want you to suck me off. You’d be good at it, wouldn’t you?” The loose fingers of his left hand stroke over those sutures, what Sugimoto had left him with, changed him into. “My good little boy.”
It’s stupid. It’s over. Ogata’s jaw finally goes slack around Sugimoto’s thumb, mouth hanging as he comes over Sugimoto’s hand while he works him through it. Works him through a few things, maybe.
//
Sugimoto finishes, at some point unknown; his hand had continued its path, uncaring for or perhaps in delight of Ogata’s post-orgasmic sensitivity, the gasps he hadn’t quite been able to stifle as his consciousness slowly rose again to breach the surface.
He knows Sugimoto has come, though, because his face hardens into something that looks like embarrassment. Ogata’s seen it before, tens of times, the was it really the self that I know who did that. The is this something new I must reckon with.
Still, Sugimoto hasn’t changed unrecognizably; he puts his right hand to Ogata’s mouth, fingers insistent. Murmurs, “Suck.” And Ogata does. It’s the least he can do, really, in case it’s the last time. He’s been so lenient, so giving to Sugimoto though, that he allows the pride of doubting it.
Sugimoto again relegates his clothing to drying spit, swiping that same hand up and down with muted ferocity. It’s almost sweet when he does up Ogata’s pants, cinches his belt. Ogata sits back and lets him, head tipped back to stare down at him over the ridge of his own cheekbones.
“What?” he asks, gruff. They’re still pressed together at the hips, Ogata’s ankles loosely crossed at the base of Sugimoto’s spine. He could tighten his thighs, twist, have him at his mercy. “You asked for this, don’t forget.”
“I don’t remember asking for anything,” says Ogata. He’s in no hurry to rise; it’s warmer like this, why they sleep in tight lines or curled around each other in their group when they travel. “I remember you offering.”
“You made me,” he argues, fruitless. Ogata will never let him have it, lets him know with a look. Sugimoto sighs and leans forward, hands hanging in the empty space comprising his lap. “Why me?”
There’s a dozen answers to this, and Ogata sorts through them, fingertips brushing the butt of his rifle, back in reach. “Sugimoto,” he says, “why did you join the army?”
“To eat.”
A pedestrian, unsurprising answer. Everything in this small life comes back to eating, and avoiding being eaten. “Just like you.” Sugimoto reads the disdain, frowns at him; Ogata presses on. “I joined for what was off inside of me. There were other reasons, though: family, for instance.”
Sugimoto winces.
“Back then,” Ogata continues, unhurried though their chance to rest is slipping through their fingers, fading with the fog of his breath in the air, “I had knowledge of a half-brother, born of my father and his lawful wife, though I had never seen him. When I first had a chance to, it was in quite a strange way.” He pauses, pushes his hair back from his forehead and excuses the long look he gives Sugimoto; awareness is dawning on his come-addled face, colored with dread. “I didn’t know yet then how small a matter a military faction might want to intervene in. There was some disagreement over my half-brother’s courtship and marriage. At that time I cared little for sides, for right and wrong. I wanted to meet my half-brother, see the person who had taken everything from me and was loved and admired for it.” He smiles; Sugimoto’s expression is close to horror now. When he snakes a hand up to rest atop the tender, firm inner flesh of Sugimoto’s thigh he can tell he’s holding himself back from flinching. It’s cold, and they cling together, predator and prey and a blurring line between which is which. “Maybe that’s why you, Sugimoto.”