Note: Begins after Return of Kings, so has spoilers throughout.

What We May Be

Of course they had no idea the kings were here. It was a secret meeting, after all. In this, Munakata Reisi was in agreement with Adolf K. Weismann, knowing that the Silver king needed time and space to breathe while he worked out what they had become, what their clans were now, whether the Dresden Slate had left significant vestiges of power in the rubble, and how much of the slate's effects remained in various Strains.

Of their clansmen, only Kusanagi Izumo and Awashima Seri had been informed about this gathering. Kusanagi was the most objective and mature Homra member, the one who could be relied on to escort Kushina Anna quietly to and from the meeting. Awashima, as Munakata's long-suffering second-in-command, deserved to at least know about it. Besides, if Munakata didn't inform her this time, then her not-so-secret beau Kusanagi would say something at some later point. Ah, the perils of subordinates' pillow talk.

No one else knew. Weismann had simply given Yatogami Kuroh and Neko the slip. Munakata had purposely requested a date that would coincide with Fushimi Saruhiko's day off. And Kusanagi had confirmed that once Yata Misaki had learnt Fushimi was free, the skateboarding Red had also taken himself off to hang out with his old best friend turned enemy turned best friend again.

So it was pure coincidence that those very two young men were strolling along the street below, across the road from the building the kings had met in. They were horsing around in a uniquely Fushimi-and-Yata way, as Munakata observed from behind a curtain over this second-floor window. Yata, his entire face lit up by a huge grin and his whole body angled towards his companion, said something to Fushimi, whose initial response was to scowl while rolling his eyes behind his black-framed glasses, keeping his hands in his close-fitting trouser pockets and continuing to slouch his way along the pavement.

Then Fushimi's mouth moved lazily around words Munakata couldn't make out, and the reaction from the other kid was immediate. It was as if Fushimi had lit a fuse on a smallish red firework. Yata went right off, freezing momentarily before exploding in a display of dramatic gesticulation and plenty of yelling, accentuated by the skateboard twitching furiously beneath one sneakered foot. Munakata could hear the redhead's yells through the double-glazed panes, but couldn't hear specific words.

Fushimi had stopped walking to watch the dramatics with an expression of superior amusement. But Yata began to wind down at last, and his ranting eased several gears into what appeared to be mumbling, while the heightened colour on his face was starting to appear more like embarrassment and less like the usual effects of his short-fused outbursts. Munakata looked on with no small degree of interest as Fushimi visibly softened, that sardonic smile metamorphosing into one gentle enough to reach his eyes – eyes which gradually lost their half-shuttered, heavy-lidded mask to gaze at his friend with… ahh… was that heartfelt affection Munakata was seeing?

Fushimi's mouth moved again, and this time, with his body being front-on to the building, Munakata could lip-read what the young man was saying: "Wakatta."

I understand.

Yata's body language eased down another few gears at that. He looked awkwardly bashful as he lowered his head, angling his face away from Fushimi, and raising a hand to rub the back of his neck between the base of his beanie and the collar of his baggy sweater. Standard shorthand for not quite knowing what to say. Except that he apparently did manage to say something, judging by what little Munakata could see of his jawline and lips.

The Sceptre 4 captain felt his own eyes widen a shade as Yata, still not looking fully at his friend, reached out with his right hand to curl his fingers around one end of the dark fur collar on Fushimi's jacket and pull Fushimi towards him. It was a firm, steady pull that didn't jerk Fushimi, only made the taller man lean in his direction. Yata met him halfway in the movement he himself had initiated, scooting the skateboard three inches closer to where the pavement met the wall they were alongside, and lifting his head at last to speak into Fushimi's right ear. Fushimi listened, his face framed on one side and under his chin by Yata's head and right shoulder, and on the other side by the collar of his own jacket, gripped and raised by Yata's hand.

Fushimi heard him out, eyes still wearing that fond look Munakata had never once seen him bestow on a single soul in or out of Sceptre 4. It seemed impossible, but the kid's expression – and Munakata was sure he wasn't imagining this – really did grow even warmer as Yata finished speaking. Fushimi turned his face slightly towards his friend's right ear, making it harder for Munakata to see his mouth, but it was still fairly easy to lip-read his single-word response – a simple "Hai", spoken with the merest hint of a smile.

Yes.

Or – depending on what Yata had said to him before – did it signify "I agree", or "I'd like that", or "Let's do that"?

Whatever it was, it seemed completely to Yata's satisfaction, for the beanie-capped kid straightened up with a blinding smile and transferred his grip to the sleeve of Fushimi's jacket, like a child readying to tug his playmate towards the place they had decided to go to next. Then he pulled, heedless of the stiff resistance and initial halting steps of the other, and Munakata's brow furrowed infinitesimally. But after the first few difficult steps, Fushimi yielded to Yata's relentless momentum, in an agreeable fashion that Munakata had figured he would never see him display in the course of his interactions with his colleagues. Munakata suddenly found himself struck by two thoughts that swam into his mind simultaneously: If Suoh could only have listened and gone along with me, and Why doesn't Fushimi-kun ever show that side of himself to…

"Ohhhh, was that a confession we just witnessed?"

The bright voice came from Munakata's right – from beside the other window just a few feet away, and the Blue king (or was he in fact the former Blue king now?) had to admit to himself that it took him utterly by surprise.

"Weismann-san," he acknowledged the Silver king's presence with perfect outward calmness, although he was embarrassed to note that internally, his pulse had jumped, his whole being startled by the unfamiliar experience of not having realised that another king was so close by. "I thought you left with Kushina-san after the meeting."

"Ah – I walked Anna-chan and Kusanagi-san to the back of the building where he had parked his van, then I came back here, as I sensed you hadn't left yet," Weismann said, strolling over to join Munakata at his window.

"Did you now?" Munakata asked thoughtfully when the other man came to a stop two feet from him. "To be frank, I didn't sense you at all. I'm not sure what I can sense any more. But we discussed that earlier."

"Surely some of it, at least, had to do with your absorption in those two," the other man said lightly, nodding towards the figures of Fushimi and Yata moving away down the street. A playful note danced through Weismann's speech, an aural complement to the ends of his long silver hair swaying in tempo with the gestures that engaged his whole lithe frame – he was always so animated, whether in this original adult physique of his, or in the previous teenage body he had temporarily occupied as Isana Yashiro.

"Perhaps you are right," Munakata said politely, letting the corners of his mouth curve upwards marginally. "Still, I must recalibrate and pay better attention to the feedback my senses give me – getting caught off-guard too often would be a poor habit for the captain of a special-forces team to cultivate."

"We're all feeling our way around the changes right now – especially you, Anna-chan and me. And yes, I know this is particularly important for you, thanks to what your country's prime minister has decided."

The prime minister – either out of guilt or a desire to butter him up in the hope that he wouldn't say too much about how the politician and his cronies had effectively laid out the red carpet for Jungle to unleash global chaos – had insisted on keeping Sceptre 4 intact, with Munakata fully reinstated as its head. At least for now. They were to deal with Strains whose powers had not dissipated yet, and perhaps never fully would, but also operate in an expanded capacity as a highly skilled combat and anti-terrorism team vital to domestic peacekeeping.

"It is probably second-most important to Anna-chan, as she has to determine what the Red clan will be from here on, and it won't be easy, as Homra is a well-known group," Weismann continued. "Whereas I am quite off the hook in terms of any public role, since I'm doing little more at the moment than masquerading as a schoolteacher."

The Silver king sighed ruefully and pointed an elegant hand at himself as he delivered that last line.

Munakata added: "A schoolteacher with the mind of a genius who is using all his spare time to gather information that will determine the future of our clans. Perhaps you are under no public pressure like Kushina-san and I are, but yours is the heaviest private burden."

"Oh, I'll survive it," Weismann said breezily. "I've survived a great deal. More than I wanted to, sometimes."

"You didn't confirm during the meeting whether you were still immortal."

"I don't know. If I was vague about it earlier, it's because I still seem to heal from cuts and bruises at an alarmingly quick rate compared with other humans. But I need time to study whether that rate will slow or speed up as the days pass. I'm not so foolhardy as to give myself a fatal stab just for the sake of seeing whether I'll recover – poor Kuroh and Neko would probably go into convulsions from their hysterics if I tried that. But something in my gut tells me all this, all these powers we were given, aren't entirely over yet. Although I do hope, actually, that I'm no longer immortal – it's painful to live on and on while everyone around me fades."

"You told us you could sense hints of power beyond the physical existence of the slate," Munakata prompted, to bring him back on track.

"Indeed! The Dresden Slate itself was imbued with power from something else out there, something bigger, as we agreed. Whether it is of a religious-spiritual nature as was first believed when the slate was initially discovered, or a power without a specific source of intelligence behind it, or something else, we still don't know. But that power chose certain people and animals to express itself through, and I have a suspicion that if it chooses to show itself in our corporeal world again, even without the slate, it may well return to those it selected before."

"I'm not so sure that it would choose us again, as we were responsible for destroying the slate it channelled itself through for so long."

"That's assuming it bears grudges," Weismann giggled. "Or that it isn't, in fact, grateful to be no longer rooted in the physical constraints of a slab of rock."

"If so, let's see if it can bestow its powers upon its chosen vessels this time without the threat of eventual execution hanging over our heads whenever we need to exert ourselves beyond a certain limit," Munakata remarked a little grimly.

Weismann smiled again, but sadly this time, no doubt thinking that while he himself had survived his Damocles Down, Kagutsu Genji, Habari Jin and Suoh Mikoto hadn't been so fortunate, and Munakata himself had been teetering right on the edge before the slate's destruction. Either by the massive supernatural sword itself, or indirectly – by the blade of another person determined to prevent the holocaust of a Sword of Damocles smashing to earth with all the force of an asteroid – the kingship bestowed by the slate had also been a terminal sentence for those three men, and very nearly for the fourth too.

"Well, we shall have to be patient as we search for answers, won't we, Munakata-san?" Weismann asked, the cheerful note back in his voice. "There is little we can do about determining what we have become until we learn more about whether all the power that was overflowing from the Dresden Slate still exists. In the meantime, just… be yourself!"

"That, at least, I think I can do," Munakata smiled wryly.

"Yes, for now, we can only be ourselves, and live, and take care of the ones who are important to us! Which brings me back to those two – I wonder if it really was a confession we saw there…" Weismann mused mischievously, all but pressing his face against the glass of the window for a glimpse of the figures of Fushimi and Yata, now far away at the end of the road.

"I wonder too."

"They're exceptionally important to each other, aren't they? Yata-san was so very, very tense on the Schattenreich that day – all of us were calm during the ride and panicking only when we realised we were literally going to smash into the heart of Jungle territory, but Yata-san was the opposite – he was absolutely still and silent with anxiety for Fushimi-san throughout the journey, but all blazing to go as we crash-landed. I had the feeling we couldn't crash soon enough for him! Especially once it was clear that Fushimi-san had put himself in immediate danger by opening the Yomito Gate, giving us access to Jungle's headquarters."

"Yata and Fushimi go a long way back."

"Their friendship must have evolved through several cycles. I wonder what they have become to each other now."

"It doesn't matter what they are to each other, as long as Fushimi is even a little less unhappy than he has been for so long." Munakata stated this in what he thought would be his usual measured speech with the optimistic lilt he naturally adopted around the majority of people, only to have his own ears discover, as he spoke, that his tone of voice had an edge he hadn't consciously intended.

"Hmmmmm…" Weismann turned back to Munakata with a calculating gleam in his eyes that was slightly disconcerting in its sheer childlike naughtiness, considering that it was coming from a man who had existed for almost a century. "So that's why I got all that gossip from various sources about how – long after we nullified the slate, and even after you received what I hear was an impressive cross punch from your beautiful lieutenant for putting her through hell, and definitely way after you should have been packed off to hospital for a good deal of medical attention – you continued to linger at the site, staring into the rubble. My sources speculated that you were mourning the end of the Dresden Slate. But I think you were really waiting for Fushimi-san. You relaxed and left only after he returned in one piece."

"By 'sources' I suppose you mean Kushina-san and Neko-san sitting down over dessert pancakes to chatter about everything they in turn had heard via Kusanagi-san, from Yata and Awashima-kun," Munakata commented dryly.

Ah, the perils of girl talk.

"The information was accurate, though, was it not?" Weismann pressed, his youthful, strikingly beautiful face alight with amusement.

"I put his life in tremendous danger by asking more of him than perhaps I ought to have."

"Duty before sentiment, as befitting the Blue king – or maybe, as befitting what the Blue king was before. But even then, you did everything you could to stack the odds in favour of his safe return by roping in Yata-san and paying a fortune to Hirasaka Douhan to extract him if Yata-san couldn't."

"Yata Misaki did reach him in time, but then he left him again."

"And wasn't that also all about duty before sentiment?" Weismann asked. "You would understand that better than anyone – as you're so incredibly good at it."

The ghost of Suoh Mikoto suddenly loomed, and for a second, Munakata wished it wasn't terribly against protocol for the Fourth king to punch the First. Especially when he couldn't be certain that Weismann had even meant to allude to the act that haunted too many of his nightmares and waking moments – driving his blade, with his very own hand, through the heart of the man he still thought of as the one person he could actually have loved above any other.

If things had been different.

If Suoh's heart hadn't been irrevocably lost to Totsuka Tatara somewhere in years past.

If that same heart hadn't as good as died along with Totsuka on that rooftop.

If.

What a pointless word.

"It was a little easier to let him go when you thought that you, too, were going to die, am I right?" Weismann asked with a greater measure of seriousness, and it took a few seconds for Munakata to snap into the present and realise that the Silver king was referring to Fushimi, not Suoh.

"Nothing about it was easy." Munakata wasn't sure if he himself was talking about Suoh or Fushimi now. It flashed in his mind that Fushimi had once taken a deliberate dig at him for killing Suoh in an apparent attempt to anger him, and Munakata had not been angered; whereas now, even with Weismann's comment probably not being intentionally provocative, he was roused, mainly because Weismann of all people ought to…

"But then the slate was destroyed and it dawned on you that you were actually going to live, and that was when it became unbearable to think that Fushimi-san might not," the Silver king continued to speak.

"Weismann-san seems to know more about me than I do," Munakata said with a cool smile, adjusting his glasses by a millimetre.

It occurred to the Silver king now that he might have caused offence, and that the Blue king might have been thinking of Suoh, and that it was Weismann himself whose strategy for destroying the Colourless king had tipped Suoh's power over the edge into a Damocles Down. Weismann began waving his hands rapidly in a gesture of denial, exclaiming with nervous laughter: "Ah – hahahaha – oh dear no, Munakata-san, please pardon me – I never quite know the right way to say things at important moments – if my sister were still alive, she'd have twisted my ear right off by now! How presumptuous of this old man to try to tell you things about yourself…"

Munakata eased back on his coolness and let the edges of his mouth tilt up a little more, remarking: "It is interesting that Weismann-san thinks he has been presumptuous." Spoken, of course, in the sort of neutral manner that could imply it was anything but interesting.

Weismann sighed and went on to say, at a less manic pace and in conciliatory fashion: "All I hoped, really, was to express that although many distressing things have happened and we continue to grapple with unsettling changes, we must allow all the emotions we felt during those upsetting times to point us towards what is truly important in the here and now, and to let that direct our choices so that what we eventually become is not what we will regret becoming. For me, I stay grounded in the realisation that Neko helped me to grasp in the seconds before we defeated Hisui Nagare – that what matters most deeply to me is a life in which I can spend happy moments with the people I care about, even if those moments are made up simply of sitting down together for tasty meals around a small table."

"I am happy to know that Weismann-san had such a positive epiphany, and I can only hope that one as good will dawn on me in time," Munakata said politely.

"I hope so too, Munakata-san. It is important to seek happiness in your present days and in the years to come. Truly. Please take it from someone who spent far, far too much time literally living with the dead and forgetting that the very dearest ones who have passed on would never want to hold us back from moving forward with happiness into the future."

"Thank you, Hakugin no O."

"I'll take my leave now – Kuroh and Neko must be turning the whole school upside down in search of me, haha! I'll update you about my findings and observations, and I look forward to receiving the same from you and Anna-chan. See you soon!"

With a degree of haste – whether from residual nervousness over having upset a man at least two inches taller and a good deal more solidly built than himself, or for fear that his clansmen would really upend the high school that had become their home – the Silver king beat a retreat.

After a few minutes, Munakata stepped out of the meeting room Weismann had booked for them in this commercial building. He walked across the corridor to enter another, unoccupied meeting area whose windows looked out from the rear rather than the front. From there, he watched to make certain that Weismann was really leaving this time. Indeed he did – from the back exit, as the kings had agreed on, to minimise the chances that their clansmen or associates would spot them coming and going.

When Munakata was sure that Weismann had walked far enough from this spot not to run into him again if he left now, the Blue king entered the stairwell and walked the two flights down to the ground floor, then likewise exited by the back door. But unlike Anna and Weismann, Munakata circled round to the front, to the street along which Fushimi and Yata had strolled together. He looked down the road in the direction they had gone, and saw no sign of them. They were out of sight by now.

Against the nudging of his instincts, the Blue king turned and walked the other way, back towards Sceptre 4 headquarters.