threading | modern au

[secretconfiding]

an AU.

G

uilt is a moral emotion that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation. Guilt is closely related to the concepts of remorse, regret, and shame.

MODERN AU INFO ✦ ACTOR 1 ✦ ACTOR 2

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[secretconfiding]

[ No one knows Harunori Toin to be a particularly festive man by nature. However, his family is one of the oldest and most prestiguous in the country and they have not raised their children, least of all their third son, the hope of the family, to not understand his responsibilities. As a general in the Japanese Armed Forces, the youngest of his kind since the days of the Shogunate - so it is said, Satoko not convinced it isn't some gross exaggeration, though she has never gone to the lengths it would require to be sure - her husband, if anything, understands the figurehead he is regarded as by society, and thus throwing an admirable celebration is in no way beyond him. Especially not when he has a just as well-bred wife of good pedigree, if not reputation, to arrange matters for him.

The same reason that Satoko hates his work-related parties with a vengeance. These people share little with her, aside from an awareness of her name, and even that she can't always pay them back in equal measure. This or that senior officer. This or that wife of a senior officer. If she were supposed to make heads and tails of who was who in the Japanese Self-Defense, she would have to start listening to Harunori more over dinner and with some things, once you stop, you can't come back from it, she's learned, five years into their marriage.

Still, the party has been arranged to perfection, all the relevant rooms of the huge traditional Japanese house at the edge of Azabu, Tokyo, that has been in the Toin family's possession since before the first World War, though it has naturally been renovated since and undergoes regular maintainance and expansions, atmospherically lit to blend into the nightfall outside. It's mid-summer, terribly hot and not fully dark until near midnight.

Midnight is not far off, now.

Recently, their butler went to close the sliding doors to the garden to avoid bugs from being attracted by the indoor lamps. Satoko misses the breeeze that would at least lift the temperature a bit. The wives' corner, as it is called, the place she has just now managed to escape, was an oven. Everyone trying to feign that they were comfortable. That they couldn't think of a thousand other places they'd rather be.

Having excused herself, Satoko crosses the room, heading for the doors. She doesn't need a thousand, she needs one. ]

[insuperiorstrength]

[ He's been around humans enough at this point to understand that the loose-limbed, loose-lipped approach to socialisation can be just another tool in the hands of powerful men, to juxtapose their own egos against the weaknesses of their rivals. Apes, banging their chests in the jungle, trying desperately to be more than the empty echoes of their primitivity. If, for some, unfathomable reason, he'd been craving a trip to the zoo, he would have treated himself.

As it stands, Khan - John Harrison - takes the first opportunity he sees to escape his hosts of the evening and slip outside. Naturally, he's chosen the correct time to do so; this late into the evening, they've all drunk enough that the mingling conversations have degraded into pointless chatter and no one's truly listening to him anyway, the foreigner with the foreign ideas. He's here to learn, of course. Khan's been nodding his head so often over the past weeks that he's developing a crick somewhere between his sixth and ninth vertebrae. An accomplishment of some sort, surely, for a man with his biology.

At the moment, his dislike for Japan and the Japanese cannot be overstated. He hasn't had the means to contact home base for days and meanwhile, his people are grieving one of their own without him. He hasn't bothered trying to request a transfer, of course. He was chosen for this job and that means no one else could do it better. Regardless, if only he'd had the chance to make a phone call - a simple text message, even...

It's not that he couldn't try to get around his restrictions, to contact Rachita through one of their (many) encrypted channels. It's only that he has to be economical about the secrets he means to keep on this trip and in that respect, other things must take precedence. Rationally, it's just logic.

Emotionally, it's torturous.

As he steps outside, the evening air pleasantly cool against his skin, he begins a slow, languid walk around the premises. He follows a narrow garden path towards the back of the west wing, passing through the meticulously-kept stone gardens whilst checking the exits and vantage points of the house. The intel had better hold up. If he has to bother with clean-up tonight as well, Command will regret they ever forwarded him anything at all.

Thus, he takes his time, gaze narrowed in the dark. The house is fairly big but not particularly complicated. He'll be in and out with the data quickly enough, once the time comes. ]

[secretconfiding]

[ If she was heading outside for company, she might as well have stayed inside, where it is lavished upon her - like speaking to women her own age about the children she hasn't given Harunori yet were some gift that she should be grateful for, Satoko thinks to herself and only ever to herself, sliding one of the double doors open, then shut behind herself, before even the butler can notice the faint transition from light to darkness. From presence to thin air. It shouldn't matter to anyone, truly, even when Satoko is present, she rarely takes up more space than what it requires for her lungs to expand as she breathes. She wrote a poem about it once, in one of the creative writing classes she's attended, but she lacks the talent, the teacher told her. She can't write it as long as she lives it.

Things must be farther away for her to see them clearly, as if she were actually far-sighted like that. She writes e-mails to Kiyoaki that are pages long, not that she sends them anymore. He stopped responding years ago. Move on, Satoko, he'd said in their last correspondence. Don't get so emotionally invested in something that belongs to the past.

She knows from friends, he's seeing others now. English girls.

Quietly changing into a pair of the outdoor sandals left near the edge of the engawa, Satoko lets her eyes take a few moments to adjust to the night before she makes her way through the landscaped garden and along the faintly lit pathways, more shadow than light, as she lets the loud singing of the cicadas fill the silence. The gravel beneath her shoes. Her own slow, too slow breathing, in and out. Maybe if she had been thinking about other things, other men, some of her ballet dancers, no one of importance, she would have noticed the guest who's stopped up ahead, but she's too engulfed in the only company she really keeps anymore, which is her own. She should have noticed him sooner, however, he is tall and not even ranking among the senior officers whose names she can't tell apart. This man's name she remembers. Harunori introduced them earlier in the evening. Harrison. John. Part of a British exchange project. Harunori has both praised him and insulted him by saying little else that what is to be expected.

Satoko stops dead, as if caught red-handed doing something forbidden. As if this isn't her house. As if she isn't allowed to walk its gardens. When she knows it's not and she shouldn't, not now.

Remaining quiet, simply watching him, his features, for a long moment, she looks for something to say that could explain away what she's doing here and avoid asking him what he is, in turn. Eventually she settles with a warm-hued, amused, though it's mostly pretense, ]

You're lucky I don't care too much about propriety or you would have been insulting me gravely like this, Harrison-san.

[insuperiorstrength]

[ Though he must have surprised her somewhat, judging by the way her footprints abruptly come to a halt, Khan has been aware of the woman's presence on the garden path for close to a minute. She isn't trying to mask herself, for one. For another, he'll never be incompetent enough not to pay attention to his surroundings - even if they hadn't taught him how to act in the field so throughly that he couldn't possibly forget, it's in his nature to be alert. Turning around, hands clasped behind him and stance straight if not too rigid, he meets the amused gaze of Toin Satoko - the wife of his host - across the small distance between them.

They say that she's one of the most beautiful women in all of Tokyo and that she keeps company with many men other than her husband, that she's a pretty little bird in a golden cage and that she keeps her own secrets. Though she's far down his list of priorities, he remembers clearly enough; the intel pertaining to her reads like a fairy tale. Humans have such odd customs. Political marriages he can, to some extent, understand. A man like Toin, however, with his nobility and, for his age, unusually prolific military rank, wouldn't have to settle for anything in such an arrangement. This woman, clearly, he married for love. The woman, in turn, well.

One wonders, or so the gossip mill proclaims.

He tilts his head a little to the side at her words. It's a riddle of a sort, isn't it, and if nothing else, it's a tiny little spark of intrigue on an otherwise boring, frustrating night. He'll take it. His Japanese, when he speaks, is fluent, nearly untouched by his mother tongue: ]

Regardless of what I did - [ He steps a little closer, meeting her eyes directly. ] - I can assure you that I would do it again without hesitation.

[ He looks down at the ground, his lips quirking upwards the tiniest bit. ]

Imagine all the apologies I'll owe before the night is out.

[secretconfiding]

[ In a lot of ways, Harrison reminds her of her husband - it's the stance, the rigidity to his back, the way he carries himself and asks no one else to carry anything for him, then it's the self-assuredness of military training and possibly rank, though Satoko doesn't remember where he features in the system, aside from being from abroad, and therefore a foreigner in Japan which has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. They may, for all she knows, do senority differently in the UK. She's heard they do many things differently there.

Her features tighten for a moment, then she bows her head to him at his words, acknowedging that he didn't drop the ball she threw him, but is rather playing with it in the same way. That is where he differs from Harunori, he wouldn't have known she had tossed a ball his way until it hit him squarely in the head, and Satoko, being of a good family, if not a rich one, would never be so uncouth, of course.

Imagine all the apologies I'll owe before the night is out, he says, his Japanese flawless and not the least stilted or strained. She admires people who speak more than one tongue, her own English is passable but untrained, whereas she imagines at this point Kiyoaki must speak it the way Harrison masters Japanese. After all these years.

Imagine all the apologies we owe before our lives are, she wants to say to him, but it feels too intimate, too private, they are words she rarely even allows herself, so why him? Satoko hasn't been in the company of anyone that inspired confidentiality in her for a long time. It's a new feeling, innocent in a way.

Unlike him, she doesn't avert her gaze, but instead stares through the dark, the flickering shadows, at the shape of his chin, jawline, high cheekbones. Proud. He looks like he survives on pride and little else. She wonders if her own stubbornness reads the same way in her face. Part of her wants it to. ]

Everyone is too absorbed in themselves to care about what we might have to apologise for. [ She uses everyone as a marker both for the people inside the house and for people in the more general sense, to take the sting out of her words. There's no real reason that the man can see for her to be ruder than that. In the same way, she uses we about herself as well as him, to denote that he's not the only one who should be apologising.

For all that they don't share, they can share that much. ] I feel like we should consider it an opportunity.

[ It's said quietly, the teasing gone, the affectedness. Satoko, if nothing else, lives from opportunity to opportunity these days. It's the only selfish thing she can have, so she'll take it. Most likely John Harrison has his own agenda as well, for being out here, for playing along with her little games. Satoko isn't going to question it. ]

[insuperiorstrength]

[ She keeps her gaze locked on him, stubbornly, he thinks, in a way that speaks to her status as well as how little it must truly afford her. He's seen them together earlier in the evening, her husband and her. Though she does a fine job pretending to be exactly what she's supposed to be - aloof, untouchable and priviledged - her husband is not so adept. More than once, Khan has caught him glancing in her direction longingly, receiving nothing in return for his efforts. It's not so unusual in these layers of society, of course. All the same, it looks pitiful to him. A sad waste of emotion.

On her part, she seems to waste very little.

Deciding that he has enough time to explore this opening now that it's literally walked right into his grasp, Khan holds out his arm in offer, stepping closer once more. Like this, she's a handful of feet away at best. He can smell her perfume clearly, mixed with all the scents of the outside world around them - the gardens, for the most part, along with whatever traces the wind carries of the multiple, residential ponds. Her scent is flowery, first, but fresh. Light. It's at odds with the expression on her face, somewhat, but then again, this is a lady of contrasts. ]

How fittingly self-absorbed of you.

[ Said with a slight twist of his lips, the hints of a smile. She's not being played and she knows it - ironically, considering the focus of their conversation, they've both skipped all pretense, all social niceties. Consequently, if there's any rudeness between them, it's got nothing to do with manners or strategy. Right now, they're just two people, jumping past the layers of polite conversation.

He likes it. It's been a while. ]

What kind of opportunities are you looking for, I wonder?

[ As opposed to many of his closest crew members, Khan doesn't particularly hate or abhor humanity. He doesn't spend much time contemplating them, really, in general. He's long since decided that it's all a matter of fit. Some animals are beautifully suited for the existence they lead, in harmony with land or sky or water, perfectly balanced with everything else. Humanity, too, could be like that.

Could be, but isn't.

Doesn't mean that some of them can't be useful players in their own way. With how many they are and with how much power they're amassed over the years, it's a mistake to underestimate them and truthfully, he's not in the habit of making mistakes. Particularly not the kind that could cost his people the future they're owed. ]

[secretconfiding]

You're going to allow me.

[ She concludes this with a naturalness that's beyond conceited or self-assured, it's pure observation mixed with a tiny string of hope. The way he holds out his arm to her, in that distinct way Western men do - where they are used to women whose sleeves are not trains that hang from their arms, weighing them down. It's not a snub of him, she is simply telling him what she sees, hears. He is letting her know that he finds her self-absorbed, but he also wants to know more about her even so. How entirely un-Japanese of him.

She likes it.

In her slightly angled okobo shoes, she crosses over to him, her long kimono sleeves slapping lightly against her sides, even when she moves with the perfect stillness bred into her. Not to be seen. Not to make a spectacle of oneself. Yet, Harrison-san has seen her and is watching her come closer, until she can reach out and carefully grasp hold of his elbow, just a few fingers, more a brush than a hold.

Part of her wants to know how much he's seen tonight. And part of her wants him to have seen all of it, or if he hasn't yet, then to show him the rest. Her husband's prized life, his home and his work and his wife. Her fingers tighten just a little more in his sleeve. ]

Would you say engineering is an art, Harrison-san? Would you say you're artistically inclined? [ To many, her husband included, it would no doubt sound like she's avoiding the question, what kind of opportunity she's looking for, but someone like John Harrison, he is going to recognise that this is the answer to the question. This is the opportunity she is looking for, walking with someone who wants to know what she desires and even if he won't or can't give it to her, will at least give her a moment to feel free in that. Satoko smiles, glancing up at him sideways, only slowly turning her head.

She remembers him being introduced as a part of Harunori's engineering team. She wonders what his kanji look like, when he makes notes. Like that, even code can be a kind of art, right?

Whether he thinks so or not isn't the point. He asked about her. He asked. ] Be honest if you wish.

[insuperiorstrength]

[ She takes his arm, adjusting her grip slightly to account for her sleeves and Khan, in turn, shifts his elbow a fraction to the left to complete her motion. Like that, he leads her down the garden path, following his original route because certainly, he can survey the perimeter even if he's not focusing all his attention on his surroundings. To her first statement - and it is a statement, little else - he offers silence and the soft sound of their footfalls, merging and falling in and out of sync as they walk. Even before she asks him about himself, he understands - that what she wants, he allows her, implying that she isn't automatically allowed. Of course not. If she had a husband she actually wanted to talk to, she wouldn't need or require any permission to indulge herself but the opposite, unfortunately, is also true.

She can leave the party freely but in truth, on her own, she's just traversing different types of empty spaces. In that, perhaps, they might even be somewhat alike.

Working alone can be one way to ensure that you get precisely the type of company that you actually want.

He catches the way her smile seemingly lights up her features. It's a sharp contrast to the neutral, flat set of her expression that she seemed to carry as her default inside the house, whenever she was between interactions. ]

Sometimes, the result of engineering is art. The calculations, too, when you strike the perfect balance.

[ He takes them to the left when the path forks into two, heading for the gardens aligned with the private wings of the house. He's not going to get much closer to that area, of course, not by his own choice. It's odd enough, for him to be walking the grounds by himself when the party is ongoing. Just to give them both an excuse, he searches his pocket for his pack of smokes, slipping one free and pulling it out in the open. He doesn't light it, not immediately. Instead, he glances sideways at her in an unspoken question - would you mind - fully prepared to put it away if she gives even the slightest hint of disapproval.

Khan doesn't smoke. But Harrison does, when it suits. ]

I'm not so certain that it makes me an artist.