I watched Baccano! recently and it's simply way too good. I love it so much, so here's a little something to the Baccano! and Saiyuki fandom.

Thanks Aori for introducing me to Baccano! and for beta-ing the fic!

It isn't until a week after they all became immortals - and how strange is that that thought isn't as strange and inconceivable as it probably should have been - that Luck begins to absentmindedly think in mirages, a sense of déjà vu almost like that Firo described experiencing after consuming Szilard Quates, but fainter, somehow even more distant.

It is in the way the new five-shot Smith & Wesson revolver feels like an old friend in his hand, despite Luck never having handled one prior to recently, or how he finds himself thinking, I'm not nearly so short-tempered these days, despite never having much of a temper to begin with. It is in the way he looks at Maiza - a distant mutually-understood respected figure that Firo looks up to - and instinctively understand the cost of his quiet strength to have chosen to have faith in humanity, despite having his only family snatched from him yet again. It is in the way an echo of a double has appeared before Luck's eyes when Firo placed his right hand on Quates's head -except this time, it was Firo who was on the ground, and a woman that Luck doesn't recognize but knows standing above him- and Luck quietly lamenting Firo once again shouldering the weight of hundreds of years of pain and experiences, yet smiling through it all anyway. It is in the way Luck finds himself thinking Ennis seems almost too quiet, but then sees her with Isaac and Miria, and knows with the quiet beat of his heart that she would never stop saving strays and being saved by them in turn.

It is in the sharp bitter taste of irony that slices through him, leaving him reeling, because Luck has never experienced - never had to, this time around - the world in such extremes, in a world where he has almost everyone he needs beside him right from the start; the kindness of the gods, one might say, and which Luck would have scoffed at in another time.

It is in the way that as he contemplates mortality with a single glass of whisky on ice in the darkness of his office that the mantra comes unbidden, the words spilling from the tip of his tongue as though they have been waiting for his call.

"To hold nothing…" he says, and his lips form strangely around those unfamiliar words, but his voice was clear and smooth as he continues as though reciting Edgar Allan Poe's poem recalled from a not-so-distant memory, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha, if you meet your father, kill your father." The echo of a voice - his voice, at one point - that joins him as he finishes, "Free of everything, not bound by anything, live your life just as it is."

The words echo, then dissipate in the empty room, yet their effect remains as though a spell - a sutra - has been cast. The moon shines over them in the dark, its moonlight slipping through the window panes uninvited, strolling its segmented light across the room as though paving its way to an answer.

Immortality, he thinks, in the lower world.

When death is no longer a possibility, what happens then?

The answer pierces through his mind, as graceful as any bullet spun out from the barrel of a gun regardless of time, its way paved way by a demon - an interfering goddess - and the sharp intelligence and resolution of an once-mortal friend.

Luck tilts his hat forward, the beginning of a smile on his face. "Then hold on and don't let go," he says, looking up, "I suppose."

The ice in his glass clinks.

He leaves the whisky on the windowsill, an offering of some sort, in full moonlight.