Notes: This is for Sephy and Kira, who got into the Ken/Sena pairing months ago and pimped it at me like mad. At the time I wasn't really as into Weiss as I could have been so their efforts went largely unrewarded, but now that the American release is out and we're watching it again the plobunnies have hit me hard. One More Murder A Weiss Kreuz Gluhen fanfiction by Amet "Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war."      --Oscar W. Firkins It was the hospital smell that woke him, an antiseptic stench he remembered less than fondly from his days at the Koneko, where Omi had been so prone to over-sterilize wounds when he was frazzled that the scent of rubbing alcohol had burned itself into the molding of the downstairs bathroom, sickly sweet and strong enough to make his palms sweaty and his heart race, half-formed remembrances of scrubbing blood and other noxious fluids from the floorboards rising to the surface as he fought to find consciousness if only to push himself away. Hidaka Ken sneezed, jerking gracelessly as awareness returned in a rush, an unpoetic way to return to the land of the living, by any standards. But then his entire pathetic history pretty much added up to a morbid comedy of errors, anyway. The prickling in his arms came second, a strange itchy discomfort and his eyes fluttered open to focus on the webbing of tubes and wiring twisting outward from his exposed forearms, two IVs and countless electrodes tethered to a plethora of machines that beeped and whirred a constant flutter of white noise against the startling silence of the hospital. He hated that, the silence that went with hospital smell, hated hospitals in general, white washed buildings with over-waxed floors that echoed the smallest noise into infinity just because their halls were so damn empty there was nothing to catch the sound. An assassin never liked to be noisy, as a general rule, and Ken had seen one too many tragedies end in colorless, lifeless buildings just like this one to trust that anything approaching good could come from them. He should have seen it coming, really. Asking Aya to run his skinny ass through had seemed like a good idea at the time, with Wonder kin the Super Boy thrashing the hell out of everything in sight and the building all but falling down around them, but passing out in front of Omi/Mamoru/whatever they were supposed to call him now was just asking to end up doped up and jacked in to every medical machine on the market. All with the best intentions, of course, and despite all his half-assed attempts at laughing it off, having a katana shoved through his gut had hurt enough that he'd all but kissed that little blonde kid from the Crashers team when he'd kindly supplied Persia with a convenient dose of morphine, but that didn't make the general claustrophobia go away when he looked down at his arms and found himself tied down by half a dozen little tethers, half of which were actually in his veins. He wondered for a muzzy instant where everybody'd wandered off to after they'd shipped him here, whether Aya'd managed to extricate whatever was left of Yohji from the runs of Koua Academy after all and whether Omi had gone back to playing Boss Man full time yet or if there was time enough for one more decent conversation before his friend's massive martyr complex got in the way of his personality again. He wondered where the hell Sena'd wandered off to, when he was usually so eager to fret and fuss and call Ken six kinds of idiot every time he pulled one of his 'stunts'. Watching Junior League pull a hissy fit on him for being so reckless had to be better than the horrible, oppressive silence of this place. At least with Sena railing at him he knew someone gave a damn, wanted him to stop taking his chances not because of the mission or some overtaxed sense of fraternity, but because they wanted him alive and well and whining about cold feet and blanket theft in the morning, misguided though that affection really was. It was strange--for the first time since he'd so unceremoniously put his blades through Kase, Ken felt like somebody might actually care about him for his sake and not their own, and even with all the bitching and demanding and general fit throwing he was finding came along with sleeping with Izumi Sena, somewhere along the line the kid had become a necessity, the thing that kept what little of his addled psyche was still tethered to sanity from free floating. That was all kinds of frightening just as much as it was comforting, and none of the guys seemed to have any real answers for how to deal with it beyond some noncommittal suggestions from Aya that involved more subtle threats about what would happen to Ken if he fucked with the kid's head than they did real advice, and some cheesy ass jokes from Yohji about the irony of someone so bitchy having the ability to 'soothe the savage beast' that'd nearly gotten the smartass decked for his trouble. He'd had drugs that were less addictive than Izumi Sena, and that scared him, made him even more wary and defensive, high strung in ways that were so far off the normal meter he doubted he'd be finding his way back to anything approaching sanity anytime soon. "Ken?" It took a moment for him to focus on where the voice was coming from, gaze settling sluggishly on a lanky figure half-slumped against the window frame, and for one crazy moment he thought Sena had sprouted a few inches and really started to freak about how long he'd been unconscious. Then the sandy blonde of the figure's hair registered along with the wrinkled designer suit (an appropriately somber shade of gray, of course) that probably cost more than Ken made in a damn year, the familiar lines of self-deprecation that Sena had never quite learned to impose on himself worked into the figure's posture. "Omi?" he asked, appalled at how faint his voice sounded through the haze of morphine-induced sluggishness. First chance he got he was ripping the damn IVs out so he could think clearly. Or as clearly as someone as crazy as him was technically capable of, but whatever. "For now," Omi replied, smiling faintly and crossing his arms over his chest, almost hugging himself. "Do you know where you are?" "Hospital," Ken croaked, shifting towards a pitcher of water on one of those freaky little wheely trays by the bed. "Why'd you bring me here, man? You know I hate these places." Omi was at the tray before he'd even begun to figure out how to disentangle himself and reach for it, pouring him a glass of water and helping him sit up enough to drink it. "Aya wasn't pulling his punches, Ken. You needed about five hours of surgery to repair the damage to your intestinal tract and that's not really covered in the field dressings and first aid manual." He paused, dropping into a chair by the bedside. "You were right about one thing though, you did lose a kidney." Ken blinked at that, watching Omi fold himself into a comfortable position, somehow absurdly graceful despite the obvious fatigue he was feeling and for a moment it was like old times, waking in the Koneko after some stupid injury to find his comrade frazzled and fretting, sitting up in charmingly wrinkled clothes like he couldn't quite convince himself to sleep until he knew things were going to be alright. Things weren't alright this time, he could tell, and there was nothing charming about the starched suit that had always seemed to wear Omi a hell of a lot more comfortably than he wore it, the backwards baseball caps and childish cargo shorts that he'd all but considered synonymous with his friend replaced by something that looked like it belonged on Persia, as though the office itself had a personality all its own. Maybe it did, creepy as that thought was. It'd driven enough of the Takatori off the deep end, nearly wiped the suckers out until the old man had finally grown ballsy enough to approach Mamoru-san and suggest he take over. Ken had been afraid in the beginning, watching the outward change overtake Omi as he stepped into Mamoru's shoes, as that deep seeded and patently ridiculous need to find some semblance of a family cemented into place with Ouka's passing seemed to override all reason in Omi even as they discovered things about the Takatori family that made Ken look calm and rational in comparison, and he damn well knew he was crazy. He'd killed a whole lot of people, but he drew the line at playing with corpses, thanks. But this was Omi, and Ken had a lot of faith that his friend was better than that. More importantly, Aya was better than that, and the Abyssinian was too big of a bitch to let someone he cared about go down that road without a good slap upside the head. (Or worse, because somehow ol' Ran tended to get more violent the closer he was to the person in question, and this was Omi.) Ken wasn't stupid, there was nothing subtle about Aya's less than gentle rebukes whenever 'Persia' seemed to lose sight of their purpose, those barely checked anger management moments that spoke volumes on a general theme of 'You're disappointing me again' with just a tense moment of silence and a hard stare at the shitty TV monitor in the break room. He was sure there were some seriously pissy status reports being sent Kritiker's way these days, the hard, strangely tired look in Aya's eyes telling him more than any interrogation would that his teammates' often stormy relationship was about to hit another 'off again' stage if Mamoru-san didn't get his shit together. Then there was Sena, who was stuck right smack in the middle of the argument, the wayward child of the same Kisaragi Fumie they were investigating let loose into a situation Omi had damn well known would set him off in the hopes that the fumbling amateur hour to follow would be obvious enough to flush out the enemy. Ken hadn't had much patience for that, coming back to find that not only had the kid turned the entire Academy onto his cover in less than a month, but that he'd gotten Kyo killed in the process, half ready to email Persia himself and demand an explanation as to how it was possible to think it was a good idea to let him loose after that spectacular a fuck up without so much as a slap on the wrists. He'd noticed Aya's weird behavior towards the kid, the guilty, pained calm that settled over him whenever Sena really started angsting, but it hadn't really occurred to him to ask when everyone around him was already flailing at Kritiker's bureaucracy as though that was a deeper concern. He still hadn't decided what he thought of Omi's intentions towards the kid, really. Finding out that Sena not only had pretty hefty trauma backing up his erratic behavior but was all but marked expendable went a long way towards upping his opinion of the kid, all that bluster seeming something more transient, less weighty and more the defensiveness of someone who couldn't afford to think too hard about what he was doing unless he wanted to crash, and Ken could relate to that, at least. He was going to crash if things kept up, Ken could see it as surely as he could where his own stupidity was leading, clinging that much tighter as their investigation neared its climax and the danger increased, so close to blowing Aya's trust and warning the kid off that he could hardly stand it. The whole relationship thing, confusing and fucked up though it was, was all he had to cling to these days and while he couldn't have really said when he'd realized things had changed between then they had long since crossed the point of no return and he didn't want it to end. Didn't want to bury another body because he was too damn stupid to spit out that extra intelligence to spare himself one of Aya's mood swings. It wasn’t the mood swings that had stayed his hand, in the end. If Ken knew anything these days it was that Aya, in between all that self-obsessed angsting of his own, had gotten attached to Sena, another pseudo-sibling to fuss over in place of obsessing over other more dangerous things. More than that, Aya knew the kid meant something to him where very little had since they'd shunted Omi off to Kritiker, since what little stability he'd clung to with their little band of buggered had been dissolved for good. Somewhere between all the less than subtle threatening and gruff needling the Abyssinian had started consulting Ken when it came time to calculate just how much of the truth Sena needed to hear, wary of Ken's temper and the inevitable explosion should he decide that Sena's best interests weren't being taken into account, and that more than anything assured Ken that Aya would do his best to see Sena through this. This was the guy who could walk point blank up to a woman firing bullets at him and survive. If he set his sights on keeping someone alive, they stayed alive. At least the Koua mess was over, the building demolished with all the sweeping efficiency rumor suggested of the Crashers team, a pile of still flaming rubble when the Kritiker boys had shown up for evac and probably little more than dust in the wind now. "And all it cost was a kidney." Omi was blinking at him, hands tightening perceptively on the guardrail attached to the bed. "What?" "Nothing," Ken said, gulping down the rest of the water in his little Styrofoam cup -- complete with tacky hospital flower motif -- and grinned. "Like I said before, it's no biggie. I've got a spare." He patted his side gingerly, the bulk of a bandage settling against his midsection underneath a flimsy hospital gown, and grinned. Omi looked less than amused, and Ken watched him draw his composure back around him like a cloak, back stiffening painfully as he sat up and crossed his hands demurely over his knees, uncomfortable and strained. "Ken, there's something I need to tell you--" "What?" he interrupted, head lolling against the pillow as another wave of dizziness rolled over him, and really the morphine was great, but it was inconvenient as hell when he tried to concentrate. "Yohji not make it out?" Some part of him was surprised at his own glibness, but really it wasn't like Yohji hadn't been cruising for an opportunity to go out with a bang for months now. Ken'd been hauling his ass out of the fire (literally, that last time in Europe) for about as long as they'd been working on this case and given the eager thrashing their in depth look at Koua and the worldwide institutions like it had given the Takatori account balance that was one long freaking time. There was just no talking to Yohji when he went off anyway, the guy was crazier than he was most days, entirely convinced that his own insanity was just another sign that he knew better than the rest of the plebes inhabiting the planet and making his judgment that much more warped whenever they headed into the fray. They were lucky he hadn't bought it back when that Schelle chick went off. Sucked he went out like that, though. Ken was going to miss having someone to point to whenever he was asked if there was anyone crazier than him around. "No," Omi answered, making a thorough study of the pattern of Formica on the floor as his gaze shifted away. "He'd somehow dragged himself out of the worst of the rubble by the time Aya made it back. He's just... not himself right now." "The hell does that mean?" "Yohji doesn't remember us, Ken. Or anything else about his life before he woke up in the hospital." "Well, shit." It was a better end than Ken had imagined for their teammate, almost exactly what Yohji had wanted, in fact, but there was something unfair in the fact that it'd happened not ten minutes after (from what he'd caught in snippets of conversation over the mic) Aya'd finally talked some sense into Yohji about the whole memory thing. The idea of losing his memories, everything that he was just erased... it was so much like death Ken couldn't imagine why the hell anyone would want to mess around with it. Really, what was the point of living if you didn't have a past to hold onto, even if it hurt? Didn't that just devalue the sacrifices of everyone who had suffered with you, for you? "That's freaky," he replied, crushing the cup in his hands and free throwing it in the general direction of a wastebasket in the corner, missing it by more than a meter in his morphine-induced laxity. "So Yohji's there, but nobody's home?" "His doctors were hoping that it was just some sort of posttraumatic fugue state, but he's barely remembering anything and there was enough of a blow to the head that they're thinking it may be retrograde amnesia." Omi paused, hands tightening into fists, white-knuckled and tense. "From what they're saying now, he'll likely never remember more than a few seconds leading up to the building falling on his head. He's gone." And that was it. Case closed, end of chapter on one Kudo Yohji and somehow the end didn't seem to do the story justice. Omi looked like he was fighting not to cry, face pinched and haggard as he dug his fingers tighter into the palms of his hands and Ken couldn't quite bring himself to let things lay like that, reaching out a shaky hand to pry his friend's fingers apart, squeezing in something attempting to be reassurance. "Hey. It's what he wanted, yeah?" Omi only looked more miserable at that, snatching his hands away like he'd been burned and hunching farther into his seat, breath hitching. It was enough to set off every warning bell in Ken's addled head, struggling into something resembling more of a sitting position against his pillows and dodging his head around in a sad attempt to maintain eye contact with the man next to him. "Omi," he demanded, "What else? Did something happen to Aya?" "No," Omi answered, scrubbing the heel of his hand against his eyes and running nervous fingers through his hair. "We're not exactly okay, but he's not injured." "Not... okay?" Ken asked, trying not to fidget, the cloud of pain medication finally clearing enough that he was beginning to get a feel for his injury at last and damn but that incision hurt. "The fuck does that mean?" And then it hit him, some perverse epiphany at just the right moment and every muscle in his body clenched painfully as the realization sunk in, tensing in anticipation of the blow he knew would follow as Omi finally raised his eyes enough for their gazes to lock -- resignation, sorrow, and most of all guilt washing over those mobile features. If Yohji was alive and Aya was unhurt, if Omi was here without his lover and ready to take off on another one of his extended guilt trips, if no one was bitching Ken out for the stupidest stunt he'd pulled all year after he'd worked so damn hard to find a new level of crazy to drive his own lover up the wall with, then-- "Omi," said Ken, surprised at the icy calm laced into his own voice, cutting through the slur of the drugs. "Where's my boy?" ------- 'There are no flowers, no not this time There'll be no angels gracing the line Just these stark words I find'      -AFI, This Time Imperfect Sena was gone. Affirmation of his suspicions made it real, and the reality sent a flash burn of awareness through Ken's system, shocking him into motion even before it registered that the buzz from the painkillers was gone, adrenaline eating away at their affects as his endocrine system kicked in on overdrive. He'd ripped his IVs out before he'd even realized he was moving, ignoring Omi's shocked cry as he dragged himself up over the banister in the hospital bed, yanked Takatori-san out of the cheap faux leather visitor's chair by the lapels of his too-expensive dress shirt and informed him that if he did not check Ken out of that godforsaken hospital that minute, someone innocent was going to pay for it. He fucking well needed to kill something. Of course he'd never gotten to say goodbye. Those were for real people, with lives and boring desk jobs and heath insurance policies tight enough to insure that they had the money to die in their beds at home surrounded by half a dozen grandkids. Assassins didn't get time for flowery goodbyes, even when they were the ones driving the blades through the heart of that most special person and goddamnit, he'd wanted it this time -- those last few moments to hold his lover and tell him that everything was alright in the end because he was loved and that was more than most people got when they lived to be fucking eighty. It didn't matter now, because Sena had apparently spent those last few minutes with Aya, bleeding out all over the floor of that stupid school as his mother looked on, oblivious to the great gaping hole she'd just punched in her own universe until just before Abyssinian drove his blade through her gut, waking up just in time to recognize her dear Takeru-kun and beg Aya to kill her like he wasn't hell bent on doing it already. She was lucky, by all accounts (or at least what he'd managed to wrangle out of Omi on the way back to Aya's apartment) Aya'd been damn near gentle with the woman, as gentle as it was possible to be when eviscerating someone anyway, which was a damn sight more than Ken would have allowed her if anyone had bothered to tell him what was going on before they shipped him off to the hospital. He was trying not to be bitter that the woman who'd put a fucking bullet in Sena on two separate occasions got to die holding him, when all he had left was whatever of his lover Aya'd managed to dredge up from the ruins of the academy before the med evac team arrived on the scene for Yohji. He'd probably get a personal effect or two and a promise from Persia that a neat little placard would be placed somewhere on the new school site (because of course they were rebuilding the school, successful institution that it was) with Kisaragi Takeru sketched out in flowery script, maybe an inspirational phrase below it, some cheap ass variation on a theme of 'Whoops, this one died kinda young' that'd make new students wonder what the story behind it all was. A stranger's name sketched out on enemy territory made a crappy memorial to a White Hunter, not that anyone gave a damn what he thought. It was surreal. He'd woken up that morning intending to strip the kid bare and make sure neither of them remembered there even was a mission, spent the afternoon convincing Sena that no, there really wasn't anything else so pressing that they needed to be wasting precious time on it before they both headed off to risk life and limb on one of the most poorly executed missions Ken had seen in his time at Kritiker, and that was saying something. He'd spent the rest of the time praying that the hollow feeling in his gut was indigestion, that life was not about to kick him upside the head and rearrange his universe again by yet another careful leveling of everything he cared about. Most of him hadn't really believed the worst would happen, and that was stupid because the worst always did. He kept coming back to the part where Sena was seriously, permanently gone, and something inside him ached, clawing to get out, needing release and he really was going to have to find something to kill soon or he was going to turn on Omi and he really did not want to find out which one of them would win that fight. More than that, he didn't want to be the one standing over the corpse when Aya came home and he sure as hell didn't want to make Aya take him out so soon after everyone else had abandoned them. Not that he might not have to anyway. Ken had a horrible feeling he was about to pull a Yohji and sink right on into the crazier-than-thou deep end. Still, he could hold it in for a bit longer, at least until Aya came home as Omi assured Ken he would and soon, each time Ken started to shift his attention towards the door. He was currently forcing his attention to stay on the patterns in Aya's carpet, the ugliest shade of olive green he'd ever seen flecked with half a dozen shades of bright orange and brown speckles, wondering how he'd never noticed the horrendousness of it with all the times that he'd been here. Omi was fidgeting in the kitchen, bustling around preparing tea like either of them had any intention of drinking it, and Ken suspected that last promise to seriously harm Omi if he didn't shut the fuck up had hit its mark a little more firmly than he'd intended. He was trying not to blame the entire thing on Omi. It wasn't really the other man's fault anyway, Sena knew most of what he was getting himself into even if they'd all been utterly convinced the kid hadn't a clue how to actually execute Kritiker protocol long enough to keep himself out of trouble, and they'd all failed him letting him run off after Kisaragi Fumie like that. Persia had orchestrated the entire thing, but he'd expected them to smack him if he crossed the line and not one of them had bothered to address the fact that they'd already gotten one of their cohorts killed using the guy as bait and maybe trying it a second time wasn't going to turn out so well as they'd hoped. Didn't change the fact that Omi'd crossed that big black line in the sand that separated righteousness from the dark side of the force, but they'd been stupid to think that anyone could survive in the house of the Takatori zaibatsu and not take that last great leap into moral ambiguity. Didn't change the fact that Ran was probably horrified and about to Lysistrata him over it either, and Omi knew it. He'd apologized dozens of times since they'd left the hospital, cried and railed and begged Ken's forgiveness, offered his life in exchange for the debt and in the end Ken had had to threaten to take him up on the offer just to get him to stop talking because the man just didn't seem to understand that this wasn't about him. It didn't really matter if he'd known how important Sena was to Ken (which he hadn't, apparently, as those bitchy reports Aya'd been sending to Kritiker hadn't said anything about the change in their relationship), because it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference in the way things went down and in the end it didn't save Omi from whatever abyss he was falling into or Sena from the fate he'd so cheerfully sent the kid to face. It didn't save any of them. He was still staring at the carpet when Aya finally ambled in, didn't even bother looking up when the door clicked quietly shut, or during the round of furious whispers exchanged as Omi went to greet his lover. Carpet was good, carpet was... shaggy? Ken blinked for a moment, reaching out to pet the fibers at his feet and trying to wrap his mind around the fact that not only was Aya's sense of interior decorating apparently colorblind it was also strangely retro. In the more conventional, completely unattractive way of homes owned by people with far too busy lives to bother updating their horribly out of date styles and wow did he need to stop hanging out in flower shops with gay guys or he was never going to be able to speak in public again with that kind of thought process. He started when the couch dipped next to him, the weight of his teammate's body as the older man all but threw himself down with a tired sigh slanting him sideways for a moment before the momentum from Aya's little controlled fall dispersed. Ken blinked, turning to find Aya hunched over next to him, ridiculously close for someone who usually insisted on a decent amount of personal space, pale hands fisted over his knees as he leaned heavily against them. Aya was watching him, shimmers of indigo and violet visible between the shorn fringe of his hair where it fell into his eyes, serious as always but without that extra layer of ice, of unflappability Ken usually associated with Aya, less remote and more simply... tired. "I'm sorry," Aya said finally, after he'd stared long enough to make Ken start to fidget embarrassingly in his seat. "About the way it went down. It's my fault they didn't tell you, I didn't think you'd let us treat your wounds if you knew." "Damn straight, I wouldn't have," he replied automatically, but there wasn't much bite behind the retort. It was one thing to rail and rage at Omi, who despite the newly budding addition to his collection of guilt complexes had no real connection to the tragedy he'd caused, hadn't known Sena well enough to care beyond the most oblique sense that the boy had died. It was another to take it out on Aya, who for all his attempts at keeping a distance had cared about Sena almost as much as Ken had, looked haggard and reluctant in a way he hadn't seen Ran since the day they'd walked away from the car where Manx was tending to his suddenly very conscious sister. Aya was grieving too, he realized with a start, watching the older man's back stiffen at a particularly loud noise from the kitchen, attention wavering for a moment as Omi prattled about doing God only knew what in an effort to be unobtrusive. Worse than Sena's loss, Aya was facing the prospect of losing Omi for good as well, the pressures of remaining inside the Takatori household and still maintaining some semblance of morality taking its toll on the younger man and they all knew what would happen if he ever really betrayed their purpose, what Omi had made Aya promise to do before he'd gone and gotten himself so entangled. "Don’t make me bitch you out in his place, Ken," Aya replied, gaze considering. "He wouldn't have wanted you to die back there just to be near a corpse." And he probably would have died, given the extent of the damage to his gut, the heavy wrappings constricting his breathing where they bunched around his midsection. At the very least going to the hospital saved Aya the guilt of having killed him on top of everything else. He found himself grateful for that, if nothing else, watching Aya almost flinch at another clang from the kitchen, attention shifting helplessly for a moment before he seemed to give up altogether and turned to throw Ken a sardonic look. "Want to go for a drink?" "Oh fuck yes." ------- 'There are three kinds of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder, "What happened?"'      --Anonymous If anyone had asked, Ken would have said that there was no way his night could get any more scarring than it already was. That was before he'd been treated to the surreal sight of Aya marching up to Omi just before they left and planting one on him, the kind of overly involved, deep kiss that made anyone watching either turned on or horribly uncomfortable and Ken was left feeling like he'd walked in on his parents making out, fidgeting in his place on the couch until they finally broke it off. They stood together for a moment, foreheads touching and Ken could practically see the angst roiling off them before Aya pushed himself gruffly away and made a grab for his jacket, ushering Ken out the door and pausing long enough to tell Omi they were going out and to wait up. He realized as they crammed themselves into Aya's beat up little car that he'd never actually seen the two of them kiss before. Or hold hands, or touch more than necessary, or well... anything. They barely seemed to acknowledge the fact that they were together outside of a few oblique endearments these days, and there was something really off about that, that his friends were so repressed that even in front of Ken and Yohji they'd always maintained some level of propriety. He'd always assumed that was just Aya being skittish about the whole human contact thing, but while that may have been true in the past, seeing his sister conscious and living her life again had done a lot to mellow Aya out -- as well as someone like Aya could really be mellow anyway, and now that he had a moment to unravel himself from the tangle of his own sex life and really look at the both of them he was getting the sense that it wasn't Aya holding his lover at arm's length anymore. Sucked for him, then. And how fucked was it that Ken only realized all this now that he'd sunk far enough into the quagmire of his own grief to change his perspective? There wasn't really anything Ken could do about it now, not with the way things were panning out. Everyone knew Aya was always a hair's breadth from leaving Omi each time the Takatori mess kicked up, and with the way the old man was riding Mamoru-san these days to put the family first it was warping the whole saga to new levels of urgency. It was hard to think of Omi that way, as a possible Shuuichi or worse yet, Reiji knockoff, but whoever his friend was becoming these days Ken was damn sure he didn't like the guy. Normally they left this shit to Aya, to that bark and bluster that could curb Persia's moods with little more than a well timed glare, but there was something broken in the way he was moving, posture stiff and brittle, defensive in a way he hadn't seen the man in years and that more than anything told him how close Aya was to giving up entirely, to hauling off like he'd been threatening to and quitting the business or worse, pulling a Yohji and finding some way to clock out permanently. Aya was a lot more efficient about these things, it wouldn't take him long if that was what he really wanted. Ken had no idea what would become of Omi if that happened. Hell, he had no idea what would become of him if that last link to sanity and fraternity was severed. It just... didn't seem to matter in the face of things. A weird sort of calm settled over him as they left the apartment, focus narrowed to brittle edges and cutting truths, grief and rage and despair so familiar they were almost welcome. It was over, he could rest now that the worst had happened and what was there to worry at anymore? It wasn't much of a surprise to find that the bar Aya decided on was something of a dive, the kind of dingy, outdated flophouse with décor that made you want to get drunk off your ass just to stand it. It was nearly empty, a few sad lifers hunched over a corner of the bar watching the evening news on a battered, snowy TV between bouts of drunken whining, a salary man drinking alone, watching Ken and Aya in the cracked, smoky mirror behind the bar with enough interest to make Ken's fingers itch. He figured it was probably a good thing that Omi had confiscated his weapons, flashing a grin as Aya threw him a look, obnoxiously perceptive for all that he still looked tired as hell. Aya ordered them each a beer, Ken ordered a second before the waitress had even turned around to fetch the first and he watched Aya collect their bottles with a little eye roll, making his way towards the relative seclusion of a table at the back. "What's the tradition for moments like this?" he asked, as they settled in and hunched over their respective bottles, "Is there a platitude for 'sorry your boyfriend just got shot by his mommy but really it gets better with time'?" "I think that counts as one," said Aya, adding after a lengthy considering pause, "I'm not here to hand you platitudes, Ken." Ken took a careful swig of his beer. "What? Don't tell me you're actually here to get drunk." It was an absurd thought, kicking up a hysterical bubble of laughter at the mental image of Aya getting smashed and silly. Ken's never had the privilege of seeing Aya at anything less than perfect decorum... the guy never once dropped the hard ass image, even when Esset was trucking around with his comatose sister. Fujimiya Ran did not get upset, he got angry and came down like the hammer of fucking God on anyone who messed with him. Getting drunk would involve letting go long enough to admit to all those things he spent so much time stuffing down just to get the job done. "Of course not." Ken was almost relieved that the script was still the same, they were still behaving as they always had and he could still call Aya's weird ass moods long before they shifted. He'd made an art form of it, they all had. Learning what set the Abyssinian off before it could trigger a bitch fit on the sad supposition that if they could just see it coming they could brace themselves for impact. It was comforting, that regularity, knowing that despite the way the world changed there would always be some small constant at hand. Aya would always be a frigid pain in the ass, Omi still their mother hen somewhere deep down where the Takatori mess hadn't touched him, and Ken would still be the screw up in the corner leeching strength from the both of them, from knowing that if worst came to worst he could lean back and let them take care of the hard stuff for just a little while until he could get his shit together and face the world again. He didn't get a chance this time. "I came to tell you that I'm leaving," Aya announced, unceremoniously blunt as always, "Without the audience." Ken froze. "What?" "I need you to give me a ride to the airport tomorrow," Aya continued, ignoring the question as he took a sip of his drink, picking at the label in an uncharacteristic show of nervousness, "You can keep the car if you want, I don’t need it anymore." A million questions fought to come out first, but the only thing that made it out of his mouth when he recovered the ability to speak is, "Does Omi know?" Because that was going to get messy fast. "No," said Aya. "I think he suspects, but I haven't told him." "Then what the hell are you doing here?" Ken snapped. "Taking a moment." "What? But--" "What do you want me to say?" Aya demanded, slamming his drink down hard enough that for a moment Ken thought he'd cracked the bottle, "That I'll wait? Think about it and see what happens? What do you think I've been doing all this time while we were planning this insane mission? I can't fix this, Ken, there's too much that's broken and he thinks so long as he apologizes it'll all be okay in the end no matter what he does. I know I promised to see him through, and if it comes to that I will, but I will not stand by and pat him on the head while he willfully drowns in this." Ken couldn't quite bring himself to make an argument in Omi's defense. He could see it coming, the slip, the inevitable fall and after the hospital... he wasn't sure there was an argument in existence to excuse the bald faced evidence waving its arms around in front of their faces. There weren't excuses enough to cover what happened to Kyou, to Yohji, to Sena. It should've hurt, should've cut more to realize that he was starting to think of his buddy Omi as one of Them, the crazy ass Takatori who murdered families and slit each other's throats at any small provocation because they couldn't stand to lose their little Esset v. Kritiker global pissing contest. But there it was, the writing on the wall artfully sketched out in one Kisaragi Takeru's blood, and as much as Ken wanted to believe that if he just shut his eyes and turned away everything would be okay... it would never be okay again. The fall wasn't coming, they were halfway there, watching and waiting to clean up the mess. Omi didn't see it coming anymore, didn't know how deep in it he was and didn't care to look lest he not like what he saw, and that more than anything made the whole crash and burn scenario pretty much inevitable. And Aya, Ken's last ally in all this mess, their fucking rock who always knew what to do when things went down the shitter was just... leaving? Fuck that. "You have to talk to him," he insisted, "I'm not happy with him either, but you have to. There's nothing left but us, and he needs someone to call him on it when he's slipping, when he's wrong. Taking that away -- Aya, I feel sick. I keep thinking if I go back to the shop Sena'll be there and then I have to wake up and realize that he'll never come home again. I'll never get to even say goodbye to him because just in case I wanted a little insult added to injury he's buried in the rubble of that goddamn school! I don't know what I'm doing anymore without that, and now Yohji's gone and everything's falling apart and this is a really bad time to just jump ship!" His voice sounded hysterical even to his own ears, and he thought he might have been shamed by that if he'd had the wherewithal to care. As it was, he just wanted to screech louder, watching Aya shifting in his seat, pursing his lips as though searching for the right thing to say. "I was planning to talk to him when we got home," Aya said, looking away to study a crack in the table beneath his clenched fists as though it was the most fascinating thing in the world, "I'll talk, he'll shutter off and nod a lot and then we'll go to bed and pretend he didn't just effectively lead half his team to their deaths without flinching," He looked up, and his eyes were cold, resigned and defeated and Ken had nothing to say to that, nothing to make the truth more bearable in the face of everything that'd happened. He'd been hoping Aya could do that for him. He hadn't counted on watching Aya fall apart instead. Aya obliviously continued, face pinching and he suddenly looked older, sick and world weary and Ken wondered how he'd managed to miss that before. "He doesn't even react anymore, he just looks at me like he doesn't know who I am. I can't. Can't do this anymore, can't pretend that everything will just be fine if I hold on just a little longer. Sena is dead. I sat and watched Mamoru-san feed a sixteen year old kid to the wolves for the sake of information we would've stumbled onto in another ten minutes anyway and I didn't say anything because I kept hoping... I don't know what for. I don't have any faith left. He sighed. "I can't be here anymore." Aya had that look he got whenever he was gearing up to do something noxious, the I-have-no-choice-and-I-don't-care-anyway expression that usually made Ken want to slap him just to see if he'd react, and that more than anything told him there wasn't a flying snowball's chance in hell of his changing Aya's mind now that it was made up. He'd been an idiot to think that the debris would stop falling after he'd finally pried the truth about Sena out of Mamoru-san, let his guard down and again and it was fucking ridiculous that it still hurt to hear this. That he still gave a damn after the mountainous wreckage already piled in his wake that one more person he depended on was about to be utterly beyond his reach. Why couldn't he just not care? "Everything's still falling apart," he murmured, absently nursing his drink, "It just won't fucking stop. I keep thinking, 'this is as bad as it gets, I can rest now, it's over', but you know what? It's never over. Life is shit and it just keeps coming and there's nothing you can do about it because it's never enough. We're never enough." He paused, took another swig of beer and shook his head. "So where you headed?" "New York. I know some people there." Aya looked like he wanted to say something else, but thought better of it, concentrating on finishing off the remains of his own drink. "Great," Ken said, managing to sound cheery and he was almost proud of himself, letting his fists clench and the anger advance, wanting very badly to be away from Aya the same way he'd wanted to be away from Omi, from the half-formed expression of regret that still made him feel a pang of sympathetic grief and it was too much, too much to handle on top of everything else. With the dingy bar and the stupid salary man still staring at them in the cracked mirror behind the pudgy barkeep, with the hole in his life that just keept getting bigger and bigger the more he talked, the more he lived and why couldn't it ever just stop? Why couldn't he ever hold on to anything? "You have fun with that," he snapped, pasting a cheerful smile on his face as he slapped his empty bottle down on the table, and when had he finished the second? It didn't matter, none of it mattered but gathering his jacket and starting for the door because there had been a definite time to bail on all this excess baggage and that had been about ten minutes ago. "Ken!" He knew Aya wanted him to wait, ignored the impulse to do just that now that he knew full well the Abyssinian wouldn't be the boss of him anymore. "I'll give you a ride in the morning," he said, refusing to look back, "Just wake me up, I'll probably sleep through the alarm. Been stabbed and all. S'kinda hard on the body." He could almost feel Aya's flinch, and damned if he hadn't wanted it. "Where are you going?" Aya barks, and he was demanding now, full imperious bitch mode and on any other day that might have made a difference. But this was not any other day. The sky was falling and no one seemed to care but Ken, and all he wanted to do was go home and curl up in Sena's lap, tell the little doofus that he did good out there and fall asleep listening to his lover's admonitions about the stupid risks he took. That would never happen again. They'd never share a silly joke or have a stupid fight or have sex in the living room just because Yohji kept telling them not to like he didn't do it all the goddamn time himself. Just like he'd never have another decent conversation with Omi without seeing the shadow of the loss in his eyes, the asking for forgiveness that would never come because where would Ken scrape together the necessary caring to let it go. He'd never disobey another of Aya's stupid stickler rules, never tell Yohji off for leaving his girlfriends' crap all over the common room, never do all those little things that were so important and he never even realized before they were gone. All the little tethers binding him to the world, to sanity were already cut away like they were nothing. And all in the same fucking night. "I'm going out," he said, turning to glare for all that it's worth absolutely nothing, "Somewhere. Anywhere that isn't here, hearing this. To work off my frustration at the general theme of death and abandonment that's pretty much characterized the past several months of my life. That a good enough excuse for you, Fujimiya-sensei?" Aya doesn't answer, and Ken wanted to be proud that he'd finally managed to render the Abyssinian speechless, but it mattered about as much as the bar tab right now. "Maybe you're right," he continued, "Maybe there's nothing to be done. We're all shit out of luck, headed towards an inevitable downward spiral and I'm just being stupid hoping for more when there's nothing left to cling to anyway. So you know what? You win." He turned away, stepping into the open doorway and pausing to let the cool night air numb his face. "I give the fuck up." --End One More Murder-- return to splash page