Digimon Fan Fiction ❯ Lies, Crimes, and Punishments ❯ Pain ( Chapter 6 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Why the 'blessed are's in the last chapter? It's just my strange little theme. I'm working my way through the 10 Beatitudes.
We'll see where I end up.
Notes: Ameratsu is the Shinto goddess of the sun, ancestor to the first Japanese emperor. Good stuff - wikipedia it.
Warnings for this chapter? Gosh, if you're still reading, you know there's quite a bit of sex.
This chapter will also have a bit of gore.
Please let me know if I'm way off base on something, I will really appreciate the info.
Enjoy.

Ugh. Shinseki couldn't let his eyes wander where they wanted to. Some strange sadistic pull wanted to drag his eyes to the slightly decomposed body even though he knew he'd be guaranteed to lose what he was able to get down of his lunch.
Consequently, he couldn't actually look at the blade, the scalpel running over the dead man's skin, parting it with no more than a sigh, letting all the dead dark blood see sunlight.
Sunlight wasn't accurate, no. Fluorescent bulbs hung overhead, giving the pea-soup green walls an unearthly color that spoke of sickness and decay. He couldn't look at those either. The good detective simply stood next to the metal exam table, fingers hooked over the edge to support himself; eyes gazing at the chrome finish and fixtures or - more often - the backs of his eyelids.
He did not want to be here.
The blade continued to make little whispers - the ones that promise the cutting of flesh and the turning of all things internal, external. It wasn't right, it wasn't natural - but it had to be done.
The odor in the room - the one that the exhaust fans couldn't get rid of so quickly - was malpresent, hanging like mist and crawling into his clothes, his skin. Death. Stale, powdery; old death. He said a silent thanks to the God of this unfortunate Jesuit that the smell - the one element he couldn't escape - didn't set off new alarms in his mind's receptors, vulgar and painful and nauseating. Abe was used to the smell of death. Homicide offered many chances to invite malodorous air into his nostrils. Every murder shared the smell. Few - thankfully - held true brutal violence and gore so he wasn't used to viewing people's insides. Perhaps not... Perhaps he'd be better off if this was a common sight, pushing evisceration into the mundane. But that wasn't the case yet in this city of 120 thousand souls, so he stood as still as he could, his eyes shut, putrid gore drifting around him.
"Can you hand me a hemostat?" The clear, precise voice of the medical examiner brought him back to the visual world, opening his eyes to the many lines of seeping red written across the priest's chest.
"What's that?"
"They're next to the retractors." The woman was looking back down at her handiwork, oblivious to his question. Her hair was kempt and coiffed, tucked into itself in a perfect blonde bun. Everything about her screamed of the professionalism that she exuded and held. It was her, she was it, and Abe could imagine her grey eyes squinting now at the penetrated flesh though he could not see them, hidden behind her angled glasses.
"No, not where, what." Like a startled little bird, she glanced up, scalpel grasped firmly, non-threateningly, in her hand.
"Oh! The scissors-styled instruments, with the little crook in them - yeah," she nodded her acknowledgment as his hand hovered over the correct assortment of steel. "I need them to hold back the skin."
His mind couldn't help but picture it and he swallowed his disgust, placing the mutated scissors in her gloved hand. Morbid fascination - perhaps a testing of his courage and masculinity - kept his eyes trained on the body as she worked, peeling back layers of flesh - more like tearing the tiny fibers, splitting them - exposing the blood-saturated muscles underneath.
"I have a hunch," she continued, mostly to herself, "that his cardiovascular system may be to blame." Shinseki's eyes finally caught hold of something hanging from the ceiling, something she seemed to be conversing with. A microphone. Had she been taping this whole time? Ire coiled around his spine, his ribs. He hated being caught unaware. It wasn't as if she'd done it on purpose: catching his self-depreciating blunders - the ones he magnified for the delight of self-torture... She hadn't done it to spite him; just standard procedure. The irritation, however, was still there.
"Huh? What does that mean? And why?"
"Um, because, like I said earlier," one now-bloody latex finger motioned to the microphone, "the bruising around his neck isn't consistent. The ones made from the front, while the assailant gripped from the front - show signs of clotted blood. The color is darker and stands out from the surrounding skin: this is typical of an antemortem bruise or wound." He watched her head nod back and forth, motioning through pages of text and lectures of long ago. "But the ones produced while the thumbs gripped from the back - while his head was forced underwater - were made postmortem. The blood couldn't clot at the bruise because after death blood pressure drops swiftly. The heart's no longer in charge, it's all up to gravity."
Abe shook his head, not trying to take it all in but trying to find where she was going. Blasted woman was going to screw up his investigation!
"And this means...?"
"That strangulation wasn't the cause of death - his larynx is intact - and that his head was held in the water only after he was dead. I'd even bet that there isn't any fluid in his lungs... The fatal blow still alludes us." Melodramatic bitch.
Well, shit. All of the scenarios the crime-scene evidence directed them to were completely wrong. But it was still murder, right?
"But his assailant still killed him, right?" Her face was unreadable and his anger was instant and omnipresent. Say something! Tell me I can still make this son of a bitch fry!
"I don't know. My hunch: cardiovascular failure. ...But we still have to see." Instruments sharp and blunt moved in the small hands of her small frame like clockwork. He looked away when she donned safety goggles, rotary blade whirring to life, small bone fragments sailing in a shower. It was like a bad horror movie until she shut it off, room going quiet, blood pounding in his ears.
One strain, her shoulders bending with struggle, and the tools she held cracked the breastbone apart, spreading white ribs like pickets in a fence.
She proceeded to poke and feel around the exposed heart, a little mass of smooth dark tissue. He could see her eyebrows wrinkle, a conversation with herself, but had to turn away violently as she wrapped her fingers around the organ, deforming it, twisting it in its fleshy home for inspection.
The bile was not going to win. Was not.
"The heart shows signs of severe fibrillation, striations are present throughout both atriums and ventricles." She sighed, her crisp voice beginning to show signs of mental fatigue. "It's pretty advanced. There's no doubt in my mind that this was a heart attack."
"What?" WHAT?! "How can you be so sure?" He was a detective specializing in psychology, not medicine. To him a heart was a heart was a heart.
Again, a sigh from her - longer, deeper, heavier this time.
"The heart is a muscle, right?" She was speaking to him, not the microphone, so he nodded. "And when a muscle grows or gets used, tiny microscopic tears occur. Usually these tears heal themselves and the muscle gets stronger." He was still with her, nodding his aggravated head to encourage. "And when a muscle is overused, many of these tears occur. ...To my eyes, at least," she waved vaguely over the putrefying tissue, "this kind of wear speaks of a massive heart attack."
Abe couldn't feel the tips of his fingers. Gone. Was it even murder anymore? Would anyone care? Dear God, what was he going to tell sweet, naive Koushiro? What was he going to do with the prime suspect? The one they arrested? The one who confessed?!
He turned back around to face the body, anger pushing all notions of nausea away. The scalpel was out again, severing the plasticity of the main bronchial tubes and opening the cottage cheese of the lungs for everyone to see. Her fingers again, pushing the tissue aside, eyes peering at the manufactured gore. The smell was now more real, more permeating. From the dead man's lungs to his own. The thought made him close his eyes. God, who would've thought that a human body could smell like that? Outhouses and slaughterhouses... Somewhere he'd heard the comparison, and it was all too vivid and true. He was used to the smell of death, but not the smell of internal organs and their fluids, of broad violence; torn intestines and spine.
And he was altogether too glad she had no intention of spilling the priest's stomach or bowels. Thank you, Ameratsu.
"Yep, yep, I knew it." He opened his eyes, glancing at the spilled, rotting mess covering the pale-bluish chest. "No liquid. He was perfectly dead when his head hit the water. Whatever the suspect did to him, however he attacked him... he didn't kill him."
There were no words for his frustrated rage. There was nothing to do, no way to oppose the facts that were oozing onto the metal table.
"What about sexual assault? We can still prove he raped him, right?" He saw her face twitch ever so slightly at those words, that request. Her thin jaw tight, the muscles around her ears pulling them once, her gaze raising to his eyes, his determination. His request. Her job.
"Sure. Help me roll him over." She dug in the cardboard dispensing box for another pair of gloves, helping Shinseki peel them on when he only proved himself inept. At least the microphone didn't catch that, she offering a small coquettish smile and slipping them on for him.
"Thanks." The hemostats and rib spreader came off, and he pulled an arm and shoulder towards him while she pushed from the other side. A dull thud, sickening if you stopped to think about it, and the sliced meat was gone, the face gone. The closed eyes and pursed lips that seemed at any second capable of re-animation - able to make small talk about the weather or reach up and scream the flesh off your bones.
All that remained now was the dead man's back, much more appealing to look at and less to smell. The white medical cloth was still gathered about his waist, demureness and modesty even in death. No more. The medical examiner pulled it off, exposing the site of the holy man's deepest shame. There was nothing beautiful about his rounded form, pale and dead - laid waste in life.
There were no outside signs of rape, no bruises, no blood. Of course appearances weren't everything. A tired cliche about books and their covers popped into his head, tied to an image of the minor priest. The one with the red hair. The one that could descend through this space, this obscenity, and wash his mind free. Books and their jackets, yes? He was sure there was more to Koushiro, more under the surface. Seeing the elder priest uncovered, face down, was putting scenes and sounds into his mind.
It shouldn't have, but it did. He wanted to nibble on Koushiro's earlobes and taste that pure white skin.
Heaven help him.

Off in the distance, someone was speaking and he realized like being shaken awake that the doctor was still there, the two of them still in the exam room, the dead body still lying before them.
At least the microphone was listening to her.
He knew what must come next, so when she produced yet another metal instrument, he didn't bother asking. He didn't bother looking either, wishing he could simply avert his nostrils as well. Soft, slippery sounds came from the body. Wet sounds, wet and cottony and somehow so... wrong.
"Detective?"
"Yes?" He turned for her voice, saw her face, saw that she was nearly as eager to finish as he was. Saw something else. Concern? Worry? He focused on her eyes, blocking out the images in his peripheral vision.
"I'm eight inches in and there's no semen or signs of penetration." Confusion. That's what her grey eyes contained. It was leaking out, into his eyes and into his brain. "The muscles: the internal and external anal sphincter - they're perfectly fine."
"Meaning?" Don't say it. Don't ruin everything.
"If he was raped, which I sincerely doubt, it was done very delicately. And by a boy less than 12 years old." Damn it.
"Damn it." He stripped the gloves off, casting them on the table, not caring where they landed. His right hand reached for the bridge of his nose reflexively, pinching and squeezing the ten tons of trouble away.
"I'm sorry, but isn't this good news, Detective?" He wanted to look at her to give her an answer, but she was still poised over Hiromiya's ass, instruments still ministering.
"No." He didn't mean to be curt. Okay, yes he did. Goddamn it... "This might be good news for the victim, but bad news for all of us still living." Shinseki couldn't help but raise his voice. What was going on? He couldn't understand this! Was this all just to make him look like a fool?! "It means I've got a suspect in custody - confessed, no less - that is perfectly innocent. It means the true killer is still out there! Hiding under our noses, stalking in daylight... He could be anywhere, anyone! And it's starting to look like he's just going to get away with this! Nothing! No sentence, no prison!" He stopped, realizing his hands were gripping the table - realizing the microphone was still on.
"And now he's not a killer, either." Oh, yeah.
"No. No, Doctor, he's not."

It was like a homecoming - no it was better than that. It was like all his birthdays, good grades, and lazy Saturdays rolled into a 5000 yen bill and shoved up his open nostril.
It was beautiful. He'd always liked to think he was stronger than the drug, more of a mind, a will and he could shove away the cravings and pangs for sometimes as long as a week. But only sometimes.
And when he let go and gave in, reached into his mattress, or popped up the third floor board from the window, or from behind the inoperable outlet faceplate in the wall, or one of many other clandestine, rainy-day stashes...
They were his only true net worth in the world, one whose value ran opposite to the stock market and parallel to cloudy, dismal days. Then - yes, then - bliss, bliss and glory for fifteen minutes!
His skin became warm and tingly-fuzzy from his toes up. His pulse raced as his heart turned on a fabulous jazz rhythm. Bada-bump, bada-bump, bada-bump! Beautiful, his tongue felt thick and heavy and his mouth dry and before his eyes the room redecorated itself in a thousand shades of red and sunsets. And then he was floating! Yes, hovering above the pond of silken, amber water that he could've sworn was his mattress a minute ago. His fully dilated eyes rolled back into his head, and he enjoyed the rest of his cineplex prostrate and twitching ever so slightly on the bottom of a pool filled with ginger ale and mermaids.

Later, he realized, he'd wished they'd been mer-men.
But that was only later, a later when he didn't want to think, or breathe, or be touched by the rays of sun that pierced through his window shades and his skin just like lasers in a James Bond flick. That was later, a later that included someone's heavy footfalls echoing up the stairs and into his head, reverberating in the empty space that lay therein. The footfalls connected to a body, which held two arms, one that then opened his door unbidden. His beautiful sanctuary! Bastard! But this was still later, and he couldn't shout at the lowlife, much less pick up his baseball bat and beat the living piss out of the fuck. All he could do was gurgle and moan venomously from the floor where he'd collapsed.
"Who-who's there?" came the tremoring voice of the other man. That was his line! Who did this trespasser think he was?!
"Get out. This room's mine." Ha! He could still form sentences. The adrenaline was helping to raise his mental awareness and metabolizing the leftover cocaine in his blood.
"Oh. ...Um - I..." The hesitant voice was familiar and in a flash of clarity he recognized it.
"Koushiro?" No fucking way. He was still hallucinating, had to be, and here was the sultry, finned, aqua-man he'd hoped for.
"Ken?!" Izzy crossed the room as quickly as he could in the near darkness. It was as cold in here as it was outside, but the snow and blaring sun of mid-afternoon was a total polar opposite to the soft and oppressive shadows here. "Ken, are you okay?"
"Don't speak so loud, love. You're firing bullets at my head." He watched as the priest, in all his vestments, attempted to cross the crackhouse room, eyes not adjusted to the dim light, soul not adjusted to the dank and decrepit. He was too perfect and as his long coat brushed the floor, his fingers reached the edge of the mattress. Ken put up his arms, holding him out at length. "No love, don't come here. This is filth. You... aren't."
Izzy wasn't listening, pushing his doped up limbs back down, lying his thin frame back on the old Sealy and brushing his sweaty hair from his face. He couldn't believe how frail and vulnerable Ken was at that moment, lips parted and gasping for air but slightly. Anthracite hair stuck to his skin where it could, sweat holding it possessively. A pang of jealousy ran through Koushiro's blood, making him cold from the inside out. Obviously his lover was crashing, coming off of some drug. Izzy wasn't too familiar with hard drugs, or marijuana, or even nicotine. Alcohol was another matter, but, another day... He wasn't sure which drug Ken was finishing with but that wasn't the point. The point was the drug had seen him like this, made him like this. Put him in ecstasy.
It was almost as if he'd caught him in bed with some shapely, muscle-bound cabana boy who had made him gasp, made him sweat, made him his pleasure slave. The thought made his eyebrows crease further than they were already. The drug had taken an intimate piece of his Ken.
"Ken, are you okay?"
"My head feels like Imperialdramon sat on it, but, otherwise..." He stared up into Izzy's black eyes, pupil and iris mixing, making love within the white orbs. "I feel perfect. Pain can't touch me: I'm in love."
This drew a chiding frown from Koushiro, smirk struggling to free one corner of his mouth.
"I know what you mean." A full-fledged smile trickled out, pulling his face down to the other's eager, pliant lips. The only pain that could touch him was that of seeing Ken here, living here, knowing he could be so much more.

Abe sat in his metal, precinct-standard desk chair. It wasn't pneumatic, but it let him lean back and it swiveled. Close enough.
But the chair and its lack of lower lumbar support wasn't on his mind.
A profile. The division chief had asked him to come up with some kind of pattern, age group and style that fit the murderer- ahem, assailant.
Shinseki had nearly begged and pleaded to be kept on the case. And they'd given in; after all, he was the officer with the most knowledge about the case. Why take him off just because his division didn't have jurisdiction over it anymore? Wry sarcasm flowed from his mouth but the chief took it in good stride, maturity overriding his desire to shake Shinseki silent.
Just because it wasn't Homicide's case anymore didn't mean THAT much, right?
So his job now was to create a profile.
Ah, anything to see his Koushiro again. ...Wait. Why was he so given to calling him 'his'? They'd only met twice, but he was flooding his mind, his every waking thought.
No, the redhead shouldn't - couldn't - cloud his mind right now.
The profile.

Intimacy was once again theirs. Bodies touching, albeit fully clothed, fingers coiling and smoothing over skin where they could find a space to slip in under shirts, mozzettas.
They were men, supposedly boiling pockets of hormonal unrest, and yet inside his own mind, each was rediscovering happiness and security as they'd never known, perhaps forgotten. Izzy's long felt coat this time covered them lying side by side, draped not as wings but as a blanket to another reality where only they existed.
"Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God."
"I love it when you talk dirty to me." A small smile set itself on Ken's ever-sobering face. Like an infection, addiction, drug or virus, it spread to Koushiro's lips as well. He didn't even care if the raven-haired man was poking fun at him anymore. Not as long as his fingers kept tracing designs around his spine.
"Clean of heart, right?" Koushiro nodded at Ken's question. "I haven't got a chance, do I?" Auburn eyebrows creased.
"What do you mean?" Ken let a sigh of more than a dozen years escape his stubble-crusted mouth.
"You know, my stint as tyrant... ruining my parent's dreams of at least one successful son... selling powdered crystalline happiness to those who least need it... etc, etc. I haven't been the perfect citizen, Koush." He took his hand away from Ken's warm stomach, placing it on his cheek, rubbing back and forth with his thumb, attempting to erase all the pain.
"I haven't been perfect either." Under his breath he added, "Not by a long shot."
Ken saw the averted eyes. Body against body, he could feel Izzy tense up. Nearly imperceptible. Were his eyes more liquid?
"Koushiro?" Ken saw it then, plain as day. His eyes jerked back up, startled, pulled out of a personal reverie to new horror. Scared to look at Ken, scared to show Ken what was behind his eyes, scared to show it again to himself. "Koush? ...What's wrong?"
"...N-nothing." He shook as he corrected himself. "Nothing I want to share."
Maybe he shouldn't have been hurt, but he was. What was he keeping locked inside? Why couldn't he share it? More importantly, couldn't he trust him?
"Koush?" The pitiful-me, small, shy voice wasn't an act. "Why?"
"No one needs to know. I-I don't want to go over that again. I'm sick of it, okay?" Izzy blinked, somehow finally seeing Ken's pain. His insecurity and hurt. "Not you, love, not you. I just can't think about it, not again, okay?"

Dark clouds of frustration built in Detective Abe's mind.

Male. Definitely. That was a given.
Was he a serial killer? Was this part of a string that he'd perpetuated since youth? An obsession grown and born into violence?
No, not a serial killer. Not yet. There hadn't been another recent murder that looked anything like this. And yet...
Why else? Nothing was taken, no money stolen, no items broken and smashed in a destructive and interrupted theft.
No motive. Unless the father had enemies, a secret life of deceit. Mob loans, perhaps? A jealous ex-wife come for retribution on a clandestine lover?
Okay, enough of that. Shinseki kept forgetting that everyone wasn't as libidinous as he.
Pity.

Alright, forget the motive for now. Maybe it was simply some psychopathic desire. Many things made it stand out from other murders. Yes, he KNEW it wasn't a murder... It was just to easy to label it as such. No pussy-footing around proper titles and political correctness. This sick son of a bitch didn't deserve euphemisms and pleasantries.

The killer walks in, sees the father, wraps his hands around his neck and starts strangling. Before he could scream.
Abe fiddled with the swizzle stick in his coffee. One cream, one sugar. Not too much so it wasn't coffee anymore. Just a little tiny bit of everything.
Chokes him. The father collapses - heart attack. Does the killer know this? He took a sip as if it was still scalding. It wasn't - but still - coffee didn't deserve to be gulped. Smelled it, then sipped and sloshed around in your mouth and enjoyed. Oenophile, coffee style.
So if the killer didn't know it was a heart attack, and simply watched the father go limp, why carry him over to the font? To drown him?
Why? Why would someone who was limp, already choked, need to be drowned? He had an innate ability to get inside a criminal's mind, his actions, and sometimes it scared him. Why? Was the killer in a blind, violent rage and couldn't tell the man was limp and indefensible? Or did he know the true length that it took for someone to die of asphyxiation, got startled, scared, and dumped the body in the water to ensure he didn't regain consciousness?
Either a bout of temporary insanity, or someone with a greater than average knowledge of death. Would it be an obsession? Could it be a power thing, a hobby? 'Hi, my name is Hiroshi and I frequent funerals and pick up roadkill because death fascinates me.' No. Not that easy.

Not a serial killer.
And what about the sexual assault? Not rape. Pity. It would be nice to have a solid, nasty charge to hit him with. Ah, bygones.
What about it? Obviously, the priest was still alive when it happened. Would he have screamed? Would he have struggled? Would he have given in? And WHY? Was the attacker homosexual? Or did he just want to humiliate the bishop?
More coffee went down. No, he decided, looking back on personal experience, there had to be some attraction or fascination. Bisexual. Homosexual. ...Very curious.
But not purely to humiliate and desecrate.

So the perp busts in, starts strangling him, proceeds to jerk him off; the priest has a heart attack and - thinking quickly - shoves his head underwater, ensuring death and enabling a quick escape just in case someone sneaks up on him.

Male.
Early 20's to early 40's.
Above average intelligence.
Obvious irreverence for religion.
Homosexual.

A slight smile crept onto Abe's face. The rainclouds disappeared.

Izzy was hurting inside and Ken knew it. He closed off, but wrapped his arms tighter around Ken and fell asleep. Asleep. Bliss, bliss, and glory! In HIS arms.
He watched him as he slept and a wonderful peace fell over his mind, wiping away the last of the cocaine. Peace in watching him breathe, peace in watching him twitch with dreams.
Comfort and... anger?
He could feel it simmering away, somewhere deep and wounded with years. Why did Izzy think himself so bad? Here he was, poster child for purity and goodness, where did he get off feeling this way? Ken was the one to complain - Ken was the evil one.
Didn't he remember his darkness? Was the most traumatic period in his life so easy for Izzy to forget?
What if the redhead heard something that would spin his mind sick? How would he handle true evil again? If Ken remembered clearly - which, thank you Dark Seed, who really knew - Koushiro had never faced the emperor. It was Davis, it was Taichi and Yamato and Takeru and Yolei. Not Koushiro.
And that made him slightly more angry.

The priest shook again, dreaming of something vivid, jerking his lower lip, swallowing in large, sleepy but strained gulps. Ken reached down and kissed over his eyelids. Nothing. A sleepy smile crossed his mouth, half there, responding to the real world, but barely. Dark hair dove off his shoulders and onto Koushiro's as he bent over his face, tongue dipping out to run along his lips.
Wake. Up.
Nothing... yet. He bent his head downward, capturing one unattended earlobe in his mouth, sucking and gliding his teeth on the sensitive skin. There. Wakey-wakey.

Koushiro woke in - what seemed to him - a rush. He felt something electric running around his ear, begging his hazy desire to coalesce in his crotch. He could feel Ken next to him, that he knew, body heat separate from the room and spilling through their combined layers of clothes. Ken's hand flowing into his cassock, still a layer or two away from bare skin, cradling his emergent erection. The cotton made it hyper-sensitive in some odd way, doubly slithering along his length. He didn't dare open his eyes, didn't want to spoil it. He simply moaned when he couldn't contain it anymore.
"...Ken"
It was a beautiful moment, the whole of his world contained in a few square inches of space, his shut eyelids preventing escape to the realm of visual stimuli. He could hear his love mumbling next to him, closer to his eyes than ears. So he opened them.
The pull of his lapis eyes was immediate. Koushiro couldn't tell what he was saying but his gaze hung on tight, intense and boring and slightly peeved.
What!? Why? ...
"Hmmm?" His brows implored: 'speak up.' Like turning up the volume on a radio, words came gradually, structure piling into one sentence repeated over and over. It was a statement, not a question.
"What if it was I who killed Hiromiya."