GethN7
New member
Hello. First time poster here, wanted to share a fanfic I wrote based on the Like A Dragon series. Be advised it has some strong language and mentions of violence, as well as spoilers for Yakuza 3 and Infinite Wealth, was wanting an opinion on my story from any interested fans.
"Second Chances"
A Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth fanfic
By GethN7
Note: Spoilers for the third game and the early game of Infinite Wealth
First off, I have no idea why I'm writing this. In a former life where I was known as Andre Richardson, I never would have left something like this to be found, I was too careful then. In fact, then I would have spit at what I am now, but then I was a fool who never thought he'd have to face death on terms he never anticipated.
Way back earlier in my life, I won't mince words. I was a piece of shit. A terrorist who ran guns and whored off conflict to keep violence and mayhem going to the highest bidder. Even was the leader of a group called "Black Monday". As the name implies, yes, I had something to do with making stock markets go to hell. How that happened is a story for another time, and frankly is not nearly as important as what came after.
Up until I made the decision to join hands with the Japanese criminal element, specifically Yoshitaka Mine, acting head of the Tojo Clan of their yakuza, I had been selling my services in other parts of the world, helping arrange gun deals to all sorts of shitbags. Drug lords, rebel factions in third world nations, every paramilitary of every shade of legality, the list went on. When I decided to help out Mine, all I saw was dollar signs, because the deal I was going to help him with was going to be my biggest score yet, or so I thought.
Japan was, as I thought at the time, working a deal with the United States for a military base for ballistic missile defense. My role was to make sure certain land deeds for the deal fell through and wound up in Tojo hands. In exchange, I was to be cut a huge under the table fee for my services that could let me retire twenty times over. I already had salted away enough to do just that prior, but I was a much greedier and shortsighted man then, only concerned with the next wad of blood money I could make.
Of course, the deal was not as simple as it sounded. The CIA really wanted my ass, which was funny, because I was actually a member of them, but while I had done some deals at their behest, what they didn't know was my alterego selling guns and the means to get them off the books in my other life. The reason I kept up the charade was to stay one step ahead of them, which, for the most part, I managed to do.
It was what I never expected during that chapter of my life that led me to the much more lawful, quiet role I live now.
During the time I was helping the CIA, I was assigned to help Joji Kazama, who on paper was supposed to secure the land deeds I was after and deliver them to the handpicked Japanese officials cooperating with the US. What he didn't know, or so I believed, is that he was secretly helping myself and Mine, who had suborned many of those same officials. While I was simply to be extra muscle, I was simply letting him do my job for me while making sure nothing unexpected happened.
In reality, I wasn't as smart as I thought. The CIA had caught on to my double agent act, and the whole base deal was a sham. In fact, the whole thing was just to get me to tip my hand so they could put me behind bars. The whole thing was as prearranged as kabuki theater, but stupidly never realized it then.
Of course, the whole thing seems to be playing out as Mine and I planned, at least, until I met the man who would change my life in a dark alley.
That man has gone under aliases like me, currently uses one now in fact, but he will always be Kazuma Kiryu, the Dragon of Dojima. We were enemies when we first met. In fact, our first meeting was me seeing him in an alley in Kamurocho as a third wheel who needed taken out because he was obviously realizing something was up. He obviously didn't have all the pieces together when we first met, but I and the CIA (or rather, the fellow associates of mine who like me pretended alliegance) decided to take him out.
Kiryu-san turned out to be far tougher than any of us thought then. The CIA actually had a file on him in their files on the Japanese underworld, noting despite no longer being a senior officer his name carried great weight and he was feared as a capable fighter. I had merely glossed that file over then prior, a mistake I now ruefully shake my head at. The brief fracas in that alley attracted police attention, and instead of trying to shoot the man when melee combat failed, I decided to wait till I had a better chance of not getting caught.
Of course, that all backfired later. Kiryu later turned out to be aware of the plan to smoke me out, and Joji was no fool either. Despite my best efforts, Kiryu kicked my ass and Joji almost killed me with a lucky shot atop a Tokyo hospital. Most of what happened then has become a bit fuzzy in places, but I do remember I was too cocky for my own good despite my blown cover and the deal being revealed as a trap, and for reasons I now shake my head at, I turned on Mine (who Kiryu had worked over prior), saying I could always do without him and find a new deal to do since he was superfluous.
What happened not long after will be seared in my mind till I die for good. Mine, showing more strength than his scrawny if surprisingly muscular frame indicated, decided he'd make up for being the piece of shit he had become beside me, and the last thing I remember was screaming desperately as the man decided to end his life by taking me with him.
As I found my body inverted as Mine grabbed me in a suplex, I saw my own mortality as the both of us when flying off the side of that roof, me still not over being shot earlier, and I was sure I was going to die that night.
Before I go on, I never thought I'd be scared of death, at least not then. I had long chosen a bloody business where I had killed more than a few men by my own hand, and I had long accepted my luck might run out and I'd wind up dead of deal gone bad. Of course, I was a cocky shithead who thought I was too good to to let that happen too. And I never thought someone would be crazy enough to suplex me off a thirty story hospital building.
Most of the way down I do not remember. Long ago Sunday School classes flashed before my eyes, and despite my contempt of faith for most of my life, I was begging God to spare me, fully expecting to hit the ground and wake up in Hell.
But God must have decided to let me live, because I survived that fall, and it was two things that did it.
One, despite Mine's death grip on me on the way down, I somehow managed briefly catch hold of a window or some sort of ledge on the side of the building at one point. Didn't last long, but it about halfway down, and despite Mine being hellbent on taking me to the grave and my falling resuming, that's when the second piece of divine grace happened.
Just a couple stories before the ground, I again managed to grab something, a power line of some sort. And Mine's grip slipped then, leaving him to continue to the ground, making a sickening crunching thud beneath me on the pavement. What happened after that is still something of a blur, but I let go of the line that still miraculously had held my weight, and somehow, despite that earlier gunshot wound, managed to make it to the rest of the ground and hauled ass through several alleyways, adrenaline doing an amazing job of dampening the pain from my earlier wounds.
As it started to wear off, though, I realized I was seriously wounded, and I barely managed to call one of the few associates of mine who had not been caught (and had been my emergency escape planner) to pick me up. I apparently passed out not long after the call, but the guy managed to find me anyway and I woke up later in the backroom of a storage building that had been arranged as a panic room/safehouse.
I woke up to find I felt like absolute shit, my chest still felt like it had taken a sledgehammer (to this day, I still have fragments of the bullets that hit me there that feel painful whenever the weather gets really humid) to it, but that, somehow, God had decided a cold blooded bastard like me was worth not letting die.
Before I continue this little confession of mine, I remembered then those panicky promises to God made as I was being pulled to my doom off that roof, and that's when I decided to die to my old life. Apparently, there was nothing on the news about my body (nor much about Mine's corpse either), and whether the CIA knew I had cheated death was an open question. However, as I kept remembering how I survived being suplexed to my almost doom I knew God, who I had rejected till then, was expecting me to reciprocate the mercy he showed me somehow. As I made arrangements to get out of the country soon after, managing to get passage to Hawaii under an alias on a tanker ship from Yokohama to Hawaii, I had already planned how to use my second chance. In fact, just before I left Japan for the last time, I left a little care package for the FBI office in Tokyo.
A couple weeks later, I got wind a lot of my former associates were hauled in by the Japanese and US federals, so apparently they got the package as I intended.
As for me, I made it to Hawaii, and for next two years after my survival, I mostly did two things. One, I decided to make sure all my old connections were cut, and two, I decided to find something quieter to do with my life. As I got to the point I quit looking over my shoulder, most of that blood money I salted away I started anonymously donating away. Since I settled in Honolulu, a lot of it went to a charitable organization there called Palekana, which often did food drives, ran an orphanage, and overall did the world a far better service than I did selling guns and death.
That said, as for me, I decided to not only retire, but also to find a way to use my formerly wasted talents for brokering deals to sell death and wound up opening a karaoke bar called Revolve. I had always liked to sing, especially Japanese enka songs despite my then imperfect grasp of the language, and I was fortunate enough to find a cheap place in the Little Asia section of Honolulu to spruce up and turn into the local watering hole. Over the years, as I found myself enjoying the peace and quiet, I worked on improving my Japanese to better serve most of my local customer base as well as Japanese tourists wanting a little flavor of home.
Of course, violence hadn't entirely departed from my life. A few years before I decided to write this, I decided to drive my car over to a little hole in the wall where I ran a car repair business on the side for maintenance, and found some drunk ass hood threatening the girl who worked there with some cheap ass shiv. Despite being serious about not wanting to spill blood anymore since that fateful night at that hospital, I still carried a piece or two around on me at all times since Honolulu had some criminal assholes like every other city I had ever been in, and that stupid thug sobered up pretty quick when I told him to leave or I'd drain his drunk ass via an extra hole in his gourd.
He didn't call my bluff and ran off, and I discovered the girl whose life I just saved wasn't just an employee, she was the one who had rented the place for car repair work from the guy who oversaw my real estate portfolio. Her name was Julie, and apparently she had run out of a broken home where she had been forced to provide for her family since her dad was a chronic drunk with a garage that would have failed had she not stepped up to do part time what his worthless ass wouldn't. Her mother had run out on her long before, and she had had to leave after her alcoholic dad's liver croaked of cirrohsis. Julie had then decided to move to Honolulu after that, using what was left from selling off the remnants of her dead dad's business to purchase some space I owned to fix cars since she needed to pay the bills and it was all she knew how to do since she was also a high school dropout with few other prospects.
Again, need to pause to say my life wasn't that broken or fucked up when I was her age, but my changed perspective on life made me realize I could make up for being a shithead in some small way by making her life easier. So I basically made her rent peanuts and even taught her a few tricks I knew about being a mechanic. Turned out she was as fascinated by weapons as much as she was cars, and since I never had kids of my own, I guess I saw something of a surrogate daughter in her and decided to teach her some of my former tricks, though I told her not to share it with anyone save people I trusted, no sense leading her down my former path.
Of course, there were a few people I did know in the neighborhood who did me some good turns I did trust, and whenever they needed their piece serviced, I had Julie help them out, mostly locals who had to worry about street crime due to some gangbangers who tried to squeeze them for money in protection rackets.
Aside from that, my life was otherwise a quite one of semi-retirement, or it was, until late in 2023, on a quiet night at Revolve.
I had hired a girl named Kei to help me tend the bar, but she was off duty that night. It was a slow business night, and didn't have a lot of business then. I was almost ready to just leave early, and go back home after an early closure. Of course, as I heard the door open a second later, I realized I had a customer to serve from where I had almost fallen asleep standing up.
As I looked up at the man approaching the bar, I saw my past looking back.
He was grayer and thinner than I last saw him, age hadn't been kind to him like it had not spared me, but as our eyes met, the same fire that had been in them back when I almost died was still as bright as ever, and the two of us just stopped like time itself ceased.
"Welcome", I managed to get out after a second, my mouth working faster than my brain as I added, "It's been a long time."
The man I knew had to be Kazuma Kiryu looked at me a few more seconds, eyes as hard as flint, but they softened as he nodded back, and without words I realized those eyes had just looked at my soul, and thankfully, he didn't see the same blackness that led him to beat me black and blue way back during my terrorist days. If anything, as he sat at the bar, his body language visibly relaxed, and it was clear all he expected from me was a drink.
Of course, I obliged, and when he went to pay for it, I saw how I almost died on that roof again, and told him,
"Consider that drink free. Let me pay you back for how you saved my life back then."
Kiryu's eyebrows raised, a hint of a relieved smile on his face, and I forgot how late it was as found myself admitting who I used to be and how I had changed and how I didn't hold anything against him. Honestly, it was just me spilling like a faucet to a man whose last meeting with me had been when he had every reason to beat me to death for reasons I would have deserved it. Thankfully, he just quitely and patiently listened, and replied quietly to my gut spilling,
"Far as I'm concerned, I'll take your word. I go by Taichi Suzuki, though."
I had to smile. That name HAD to be an alias, it was so obvious it was amusing, but the urge to laugh died as a serious cast fell over his gaunter than I remembered face. I knew then I was not the only man who died to an old person and now lived as another.
"Well, you are always welcome here at Revolve. Feel free to come back."
To that, he quietely finished the drink I had prepared for him, then rose to leave. Just before he opened the door to leave, he turned back for a second, expression both gentle and stern as he looked at me again with that soul gazing expression, then smiled as he left with,
"I'd like that."
"Second Chances"
A Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth fanfic
By GethN7
Note: Spoilers for the third game and the early game of Infinite Wealth
First off, I have no idea why I'm writing this. In a former life where I was known as Andre Richardson, I never would have left something like this to be found, I was too careful then. In fact, then I would have spit at what I am now, but then I was a fool who never thought he'd have to face death on terms he never anticipated.
Way back earlier in my life, I won't mince words. I was a piece of shit. A terrorist who ran guns and whored off conflict to keep violence and mayhem going to the highest bidder. Even was the leader of a group called "Black Monday". As the name implies, yes, I had something to do with making stock markets go to hell. How that happened is a story for another time, and frankly is not nearly as important as what came after.
Up until I made the decision to join hands with the Japanese criminal element, specifically Yoshitaka Mine, acting head of the Tojo Clan of their yakuza, I had been selling my services in other parts of the world, helping arrange gun deals to all sorts of shitbags. Drug lords, rebel factions in third world nations, every paramilitary of every shade of legality, the list went on. When I decided to help out Mine, all I saw was dollar signs, because the deal I was going to help him with was going to be my biggest score yet, or so I thought.
Japan was, as I thought at the time, working a deal with the United States for a military base for ballistic missile defense. My role was to make sure certain land deeds for the deal fell through and wound up in Tojo hands. In exchange, I was to be cut a huge under the table fee for my services that could let me retire twenty times over. I already had salted away enough to do just that prior, but I was a much greedier and shortsighted man then, only concerned with the next wad of blood money I could make.
Of course, the deal was not as simple as it sounded. The CIA really wanted my ass, which was funny, because I was actually a member of them, but while I had done some deals at their behest, what they didn't know was my alterego selling guns and the means to get them off the books in my other life. The reason I kept up the charade was to stay one step ahead of them, which, for the most part, I managed to do.
It was what I never expected during that chapter of my life that led me to the much more lawful, quiet role I live now.
During the time I was helping the CIA, I was assigned to help Joji Kazama, who on paper was supposed to secure the land deeds I was after and deliver them to the handpicked Japanese officials cooperating with the US. What he didn't know, or so I believed, is that he was secretly helping myself and Mine, who had suborned many of those same officials. While I was simply to be extra muscle, I was simply letting him do my job for me while making sure nothing unexpected happened.
In reality, I wasn't as smart as I thought. The CIA had caught on to my double agent act, and the whole base deal was a sham. In fact, the whole thing was just to get me to tip my hand so they could put me behind bars. The whole thing was as prearranged as kabuki theater, but stupidly never realized it then.
Of course, the whole thing seems to be playing out as Mine and I planned, at least, until I met the man who would change my life in a dark alley.
That man has gone under aliases like me, currently uses one now in fact, but he will always be Kazuma Kiryu, the Dragon of Dojima. We were enemies when we first met. In fact, our first meeting was me seeing him in an alley in Kamurocho as a third wheel who needed taken out because he was obviously realizing something was up. He obviously didn't have all the pieces together when we first met, but I and the CIA (or rather, the fellow associates of mine who like me pretended alliegance) decided to take him out.
Kiryu-san turned out to be far tougher than any of us thought then. The CIA actually had a file on him in their files on the Japanese underworld, noting despite no longer being a senior officer his name carried great weight and he was feared as a capable fighter. I had merely glossed that file over then prior, a mistake I now ruefully shake my head at. The brief fracas in that alley attracted police attention, and instead of trying to shoot the man when melee combat failed, I decided to wait till I had a better chance of not getting caught.
Of course, that all backfired later. Kiryu later turned out to be aware of the plan to smoke me out, and Joji was no fool either. Despite my best efforts, Kiryu kicked my ass and Joji almost killed me with a lucky shot atop a Tokyo hospital. Most of what happened then has become a bit fuzzy in places, but I do remember I was too cocky for my own good despite my blown cover and the deal being revealed as a trap, and for reasons I now shake my head at, I turned on Mine (who Kiryu had worked over prior), saying I could always do without him and find a new deal to do since he was superfluous.
What happened not long after will be seared in my mind till I die for good. Mine, showing more strength than his scrawny if surprisingly muscular frame indicated, decided he'd make up for being the piece of shit he had become beside me, and the last thing I remember was screaming desperately as the man decided to end his life by taking me with him.
As I found my body inverted as Mine grabbed me in a suplex, I saw my own mortality as the both of us when flying off the side of that roof, me still not over being shot earlier, and I was sure I was going to die that night.
Before I go on, I never thought I'd be scared of death, at least not then. I had long chosen a bloody business where I had killed more than a few men by my own hand, and I had long accepted my luck might run out and I'd wind up dead of deal gone bad. Of course, I was a cocky shithead who thought I was too good to to let that happen too. And I never thought someone would be crazy enough to suplex me off a thirty story hospital building.
Most of the way down I do not remember. Long ago Sunday School classes flashed before my eyes, and despite my contempt of faith for most of my life, I was begging God to spare me, fully expecting to hit the ground and wake up in Hell.
But God must have decided to let me live, because I survived that fall, and it was two things that did it.
One, despite Mine's death grip on me on the way down, I somehow managed briefly catch hold of a window or some sort of ledge on the side of the building at one point. Didn't last long, but it about halfway down, and despite Mine being hellbent on taking me to the grave and my falling resuming, that's when the second piece of divine grace happened.
Just a couple stories before the ground, I again managed to grab something, a power line of some sort. And Mine's grip slipped then, leaving him to continue to the ground, making a sickening crunching thud beneath me on the pavement. What happened after that is still something of a blur, but I let go of the line that still miraculously had held my weight, and somehow, despite that earlier gunshot wound, managed to make it to the rest of the ground and hauled ass through several alleyways, adrenaline doing an amazing job of dampening the pain from my earlier wounds.
As it started to wear off, though, I realized I was seriously wounded, and I barely managed to call one of the few associates of mine who had not been caught (and had been my emergency escape planner) to pick me up. I apparently passed out not long after the call, but the guy managed to find me anyway and I woke up later in the backroom of a storage building that had been arranged as a panic room/safehouse.
I woke up to find I felt like absolute shit, my chest still felt like it had taken a sledgehammer (to this day, I still have fragments of the bullets that hit me there that feel painful whenever the weather gets really humid) to it, but that, somehow, God had decided a cold blooded bastard like me was worth not letting die.
Before I continue this little confession of mine, I remembered then those panicky promises to God made as I was being pulled to my doom off that roof, and that's when I decided to die to my old life. Apparently, there was nothing on the news about my body (nor much about Mine's corpse either), and whether the CIA knew I had cheated death was an open question. However, as I kept remembering how I survived being suplexed to my almost doom I knew God, who I had rejected till then, was expecting me to reciprocate the mercy he showed me somehow. As I made arrangements to get out of the country soon after, managing to get passage to Hawaii under an alias on a tanker ship from Yokohama to Hawaii, I had already planned how to use my second chance. In fact, just before I left Japan for the last time, I left a little care package for the FBI office in Tokyo.
A couple weeks later, I got wind a lot of my former associates were hauled in by the Japanese and US federals, so apparently they got the package as I intended.
As for me, I made it to Hawaii, and for next two years after my survival, I mostly did two things. One, I decided to make sure all my old connections were cut, and two, I decided to find something quieter to do with my life. As I got to the point I quit looking over my shoulder, most of that blood money I salted away I started anonymously donating away. Since I settled in Honolulu, a lot of it went to a charitable organization there called Palekana, which often did food drives, ran an orphanage, and overall did the world a far better service than I did selling guns and death.
That said, as for me, I decided to not only retire, but also to find a way to use my formerly wasted talents for brokering deals to sell death and wound up opening a karaoke bar called Revolve. I had always liked to sing, especially Japanese enka songs despite my then imperfect grasp of the language, and I was fortunate enough to find a cheap place in the Little Asia section of Honolulu to spruce up and turn into the local watering hole. Over the years, as I found myself enjoying the peace and quiet, I worked on improving my Japanese to better serve most of my local customer base as well as Japanese tourists wanting a little flavor of home.
Of course, violence hadn't entirely departed from my life. A few years before I decided to write this, I decided to drive my car over to a little hole in the wall where I ran a car repair business on the side for maintenance, and found some drunk ass hood threatening the girl who worked there with some cheap ass shiv. Despite being serious about not wanting to spill blood anymore since that fateful night at that hospital, I still carried a piece or two around on me at all times since Honolulu had some criminal assholes like every other city I had ever been in, and that stupid thug sobered up pretty quick when I told him to leave or I'd drain his drunk ass via an extra hole in his gourd.
He didn't call my bluff and ran off, and I discovered the girl whose life I just saved wasn't just an employee, she was the one who had rented the place for car repair work from the guy who oversaw my real estate portfolio. Her name was Julie, and apparently she had run out of a broken home where she had been forced to provide for her family since her dad was a chronic drunk with a garage that would have failed had she not stepped up to do part time what his worthless ass wouldn't. Her mother had run out on her long before, and she had had to leave after her alcoholic dad's liver croaked of cirrohsis. Julie had then decided to move to Honolulu after that, using what was left from selling off the remnants of her dead dad's business to purchase some space I owned to fix cars since she needed to pay the bills and it was all she knew how to do since she was also a high school dropout with few other prospects.
Again, need to pause to say my life wasn't that broken or fucked up when I was her age, but my changed perspective on life made me realize I could make up for being a shithead in some small way by making her life easier. So I basically made her rent peanuts and even taught her a few tricks I knew about being a mechanic. Turned out she was as fascinated by weapons as much as she was cars, and since I never had kids of my own, I guess I saw something of a surrogate daughter in her and decided to teach her some of my former tricks, though I told her not to share it with anyone save people I trusted, no sense leading her down my former path.
Of course, there were a few people I did know in the neighborhood who did me some good turns I did trust, and whenever they needed their piece serviced, I had Julie help them out, mostly locals who had to worry about street crime due to some gangbangers who tried to squeeze them for money in protection rackets.
Aside from that, my life was otherwise a quite one of semi-retirement, or it was, until late in 2023, on a quiet night at Revolve.
I had hired a girl named Kei to help me tend the bar, but she was off duty that night. It was a slow business night, and didn't have a lot of business then. I was almost ready to just leave early, and go back home after an early closure. Of course, as I heard the door open a second later, I realized I had a customer to serve from where I had almost fallen asleep standing up.
As I looked up at the man approaching the bar, I saw my past looking back.
He was grayer and thinner than I last saw him, age hadn't been kind to him like it had not spared me, but as our eyes met, the same fire that had been in them back when I almost died was still as bright as ever, and the two of us just stopped like time itself ceased.
"Welcome", I managed to get out after a second, my mouth working faster than my brain as I added, "It's been a long time."
The man I knew had to be Kazuma Kiryu looked at me a few more seconds, eyes as hard as flint, but they softened as he nodded back, and without words I realized those eyes had just looked at my soul, and thankfully, he didn't see the same blackness that led him to beat me black and blue way back during my terrorist days. If anything, as he sat at the bar, his body language visibly relaxed, and it was clear all he expected from me was a drink.
Of course, I obliged, and when he went to pay for it, I saw how I almost died on that roof again, and told him,
"Consider that drink free. Let me pay you back for how you saved my life back then."
Kiryu's eyebrows raised, a hint of a relieved smile on his face, and I forgot how late it was as found myself admitting who I used to be and how I had changed and how I didn't hold anything against him. Honestly, it was just me spilling like a faucet to a man whose last meeting with me had been when he had every reason to beat me to death for reasons I would have deserved it. Thankfully, he just quitely and patiently listened, and replied quietly to my gut spilling,
"Far as I'm concerned, I'll take your word. I go by Taichi Suzuki, though."
I had to smile. That name HAD to be an alias, it was so obvious it was amusing, but the urge to laugh died as a serious cast fell over his gaunter than I remembered face. I knew then I was not the only man who died to an old person and now lived as another.
"Well, you are always welcome here at Revolve. Feel free to come back."
To that, he quietely finished the drink I had prepared for him, then rose to leave. Just before he opened the door to leave, he turned back for a second, expression both gentle and stern as he looked at me again with that soul gazing expression, then smiled as he left with,
"I'd like that."