Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Chains ❯ Gauge Me ( Chapter 69 )

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

Chapter Sixty-Nine: Gauge Me



Yohji put out his cigarette as Aya walked back into the room. Fresh from the shower, his pale skin was lightly flushed with pink as he stood near the closet wearing only a white towel around his thin hips.

After taking a moment to stand and stretch, Yohji walked over to consider the wardrobe that occupied half his closet. There were at least three things he would like to put Aya in, but his early morning considerations gave him pause. He thought, for what had to be the hundredth time, he might have been going about certain things a little wrong. Okay, more like going at a lot of things ass backwards.

But he could fix that.

“You chose your own clothes yesterday?”

“Yes, Yohji. I’m—”

“Don’t apologize,” he interrupted. “You looked good. I think you can do that for now on. Right?”

Aya hesitated, had clutching at the towel.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

~*~

Nagi picked up his satchel from the small table in the kitchen. Opening it up, he made sure he enough money for the day, then placed it over his shoulder as he got ready to leave the hotel suite. He got no farther than the entranceway.

Crawford stood there, polishing his glasses, his shoes already on and his black briefcase beside his feet.

“Today?” Nagi questioned, careful to keep any emotion out of his voice.

Placing his glasses back on, Crawford nodded.

Nagi placed his satchel on the floor and went to change. It wouldn’t do to meet Takatori in a pair of jeans and a sweater.

He had been annoyed at first that the man was making them wait so long, putting off their meeting for weeks as they shouldered the bills of living in a strange city. But then Crawford had sent him out to see it. It hadn’t taken long for Nagi to realize that he loved much of Paris. Not all of it, because he hated the crowds that lingered in popular restaurants and packed themselves onto the metro, but he liked the quiet spots, the old buildings, the catacombs. Easily he had bypassed security and spent hours wandering around under the city or reading old documents or sitting at out of the way cafes just watching the normals.

Schuldig would call him silly, or something more cruel, but Nagi liked pretending, every once in a while, that he was someone else entirely.

But Crawford was waiting.

~*~

Yohji had come into the kitchen quite pleased with himself. Despite the quiet misgivings in the back of his mind, he had embarked on using his monumental fuck up as a springboard to giving Aya another degree of independence, stepping a little more out of the way to give the boy a more sure footing in the house. In theory, if Aya had more control over his own life, he wouldn’t feel so confused and unsure about what Yohji wanted.

Of course, theory liked to bite Yohji in the ass.

He was convinced that it would work at seven-thirty.

By eight, not so much. A major kink had been thrown into this plan when they started talking about breakfast. The subject itself had been innocuous enough, but after a particularly loud grumble from Aya’s stomach and more than a few prying questions, the blonde discovered that his charge hadn’t eaten much of anything in the last two days. A few bites of noodles did not count as a meal. How could Aya be trusted to take care of himself if he didn’t take enough initiative to get food when he was hungry? A five year old knew how to do that!

“Sit down,” he pulled out a chair, ordering Aya to sit before he even thought it through. Too frustrated to find the right words, Yohji let it go when Aya did what he asked and took a seat in the chair. Though the boy’s confused expression changed quickly to impassivity, purple eyes continued to follow him around the kitchen, obviously trying to figure out what he was worked up about; it was all too clear that Aya didn’t have much of a notion what had upset him, and that did not bode well at all for the boy’s ability to manage his own affairs.

Expending his frustration by pulling vegetables and eggs out of the fridge with more force than necessary, Yohji brought them to the counter and paused to take a deep breath. If he fixed this by himself, he wasn’t going to do Aya much good, but if he helped Aya fix it, maybe he could. Teach a man to fish and all that shit.

“Here,” he sat a cutting board on the table in front of the redhead. Aya’s gaze immediately shifted to it. Yohji quickly deposited two peppers and a knife there. “Can you slice those up?”

“Yes, Yohji.”

Well, the response wasn’t ideal, but Aya was carefully rolling up the sleeves of his black shirt which had to indicate some kind of personal forethought. Or some memorized rule, his mind put in rather unhelpfully. Yohji huffed at it and went to get a bowl. Positioning himself so he could watch as he beat the eggs, Yohji was surprised to see Aya efficiently and quickly dice the peppers, neatly scraping the meager leftover to one side of the board.

Yohji had half expected him to cut his fingers with the knife.

Not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, he sat down his eggs and put the other vegetables in front of Aya, not even bothering with a cover as he watched the boy deal with the tomatoes and mushrooms just as easily. It seemed Aya’s affinity for sharp things did not end with his sword.

“You ever cook before?” Yohji asked. Aya nodded yes but wasn’t forthcoming with any details. “Can you make an omelet?”

Aya stared at him for a few seconds, then, “Maybe. It’s been…”

Here he shook his head. Yohji would be glad when the boy could make it through whole thoughts, let alone conversations, without his lack of confidence getting the better of him.

“Want to try it?”

~*~

Fifteen minutes later, Yohji found himself pleasantly surprised. He took the fork out of mouth only long enough to chew, quickly shoving in another bite. He had been more than a little leery when Aya had starting eying their meager spice rack, but he had taken a leap of faith and left the redhead to it, sitting at the table and vowing to eat whatever it was that arrived in front of him.

Seriously, it could have been fruit loops with fish sauce and he would have got it down somehow. Fortunately, it wasn’t an issue. Aya, it seemed, was a good cook. Better than Yohji, maybe, especially if his unknown repertoire extended beyond omelets and spaghetti.

“It’s good,” he confirmed, seeing Aya watching him cautiously from across the table, his own food untouched. Refusing to tell him to eat—that was a bridge they had crossed and burnt, hopefully—Yohji attended to his own plate. Eventually Aya seemed to decide and picked up his fork

“Thank you,” he said, quietly.

Surprised at the unexpected addition to the conversation, Yohji took the opportunity it presented and launched in to what he had to say.

“What do you like to have for breakfast?”

Had they really made it a month without that question coming up? Not for the first time, Yohji marveled at how little he knew about the other.

Then, as always, he realized why; talking to Aya was like pulling teeth, a slow, nearly painful process.

It was no great surprise that Aya clammed up at the question. Any hint that the boy actually had opinions, likes, or dislikes met with rather stony silence. Now, though, Yohji was learning (albeit slowly) to get around it, mostly by bearing with it. So he sat, just looking at Aya who in turn looked at his plate.

“Rice,” the boy finally said, as if he had spent the silent time sorting through his own thoughts.

“Okay, we can do that,” Yohji agreed with a smile. It was a little forced, he knew; patience was not Yohji’s virtue of choice, and putting it to work so early in the morning wasn’t easy. “There’s a rice cooker in the bottom cabinet; it’s pretty simple, add water and push the button. And there’s always rice in the one over there. Omi’s got this little plastic thing that can microwave it too.”

If he hadn’t been paying attention, Yohji would have missed it, but with the boy’s every reaction currently under his scrutiny, he caught the slight wrinkling of Aya’s nose at this last comment, like he had briefly thought of something distinctly unappealing. It seemed microwave rice did not suit.

“What do you like with it?”

Again silence fell over the kitchen. Yohji huffed a little and lit a cigarette; Omi wasn’t around, and it wasn’t like Aya was going to bitch at him about it.

“Soup, maybe,” Aya said, glancing up like he was checking his answer in Yohji’s eyes.

“There’s some instant stuff around here someplace, but if you want anything fancier, we’ll have to go shopping. The point is, there’s always food here. Remember the money we gave Omi from your check?”

“Yes.”

“Well, part of that pays for food. We all buy our own special stuff, but most of the basics are fair game. As long as you don’t eat Omi’s marshmallows or drink Ken’s sports drinks—the disgusting blue things in the bottom of the fridge—you’ll be fine. Stove, microwave—use whatever you want.”

Aya was listening, but whether or not he was making the inferences Yohji wanted was a mystery.

“Get it, Aya?”

The boy thought about it for a second, then shook his head, no. He looked down at his lap as he worried the bandaged wrist of his left hand.

“When you’re hungry, come get something. You don’t have to wait if I’m not up or something. We all kind of eat supper together, but everything else is a self-serve kind of deal, so it’s best to get used to it.”

That seemed to push Aya even deeper into thought, and Yohji wasn’t sure if anything else got through at all.

~*~

His life was seriously fucked up.

This was not a new conclusion, but Aya couldn’t help realizing it over and over again.

He had spent a surreal morning with Yohji whose attitude towards him had taken another turn. Previously content to dress and feed Aya, he had set about letting the redhead do it for himself. While grateful for the opportunity, Aya was shocked at the blonde’s doubts of his most basic skills.

Of course, he could dress himself. Of course, he could slice a damn pepper.

And what was that ridiculous discussion of how the kitchen worked?

But it wasn’t Yohji he was really mad at. What infuriated Aya was that the man’s doubts had every basis in fact. Hadn’t he struggled to find something to wear? And hadn’t he been afraid to touch the food that hadn’t been specifically okayed?

That wasn’t normal.

If the horrid scene in the bedroom with Yohji had done anything (besides utterly humiliating him and setting on some kind of breakdown), it had taught him that Yohji did want him to be somewhat normal.

And he failed.

Normal was one of many concepts that continued to crystallize in his thoughts. It was as if the many ideas he had previously held had been crushed into fine powder by his time…there. Now, as his body continued to recover, as he was given food and rest and an opportunity to think of something besides pain, things were slowly becoming clearer.

Not that it was simple. There were many fragments, and he could only start to put them together when his emotions were calm enough to allow it.

Aya hadn’t always been like that, with his feelings shifting from one extreme to the other, strong enough to put him off balance as he failed to process what was going on around him. He had been calm, collected, maybe a little cool, but he remembered laughing and having a good time with close friends. Though flashes of temper had not been unusual, being honestly inherited from his mother, there had been no overwhelming despair, and certainly not so much of this confusion.

He had been decisive, whether right or wrong.

It was frustrating, to be tangled in knots over the smallest thing. What to wear. When to speak. Whether or not to tell Yohji that he liked miso soup for breakfast.

But, despite the fact that he accepted that Yohji wasn’t going to hurt him—and he did accept this—his emotions did not respond to this logic, leaping instead at the shadows of remembered punishments, forcing a hundred painful what-ifs into his mind and incapacitating him.

And always there was the thought of Schuldig coming back. Aya knew better than to think the passage of several quiet weeks meant the man had gone away. Life, especially his, did not work that way. Schuldig would come back, of that he had no doubt. What he couldn’t fathom now was what would happen.

Aya couldn’t fight him. First because of what he was, that strange ability to read thoughts and induce a pain beyond any headache he had ever experienced. Aya had tried to resist, but it had all been useless, hadn’t it? Crawford had gotten what he wanted, and Schuldig as well. Beyond any powers, they had his sister.

Despite his recent doubts, he couldn’t let her go. She was all he had, the last vestige of his old life.

The more he thought about it, the more Aya desired some kind of plan. It was dangerous and risky and probably impossible, but he wondered if he couldn’t free her somehow. Yohji thought they could find her, but, then again, he didn’t know exactly who he would be facing.

Aya would do anything to have her back, but he didn’t know if he could do anything at all.

~tbc~

Notes: There’s lots of plot next chapter (finally!). I hope you’re all still enjoying this, and thank you so much for reading!
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